Can We Thrive in Tumultuous Times?

This sense of crisis prompted us to write an update to Forces for Good. We were deeply curious to learn how these enormous economic, social, and political changes were playing out in the social sector: How were they impacting the original twelve organizations we studied? How had these trends affected smaller nonprofits struggling to do more with less in local communities? And closer to home and the point of this book, Do the six practices we uncovered still hold up in a dramatically different context?

Nothing we found caused us to reject the six practices as described in the first edition. In fact, as we have toured the country these past few years speaking to nonprofits and philanthropic groups, leading workshops, and advising organizations in the sector, our belief in the fundamental effectiveness of the six practices for scaling social impact has been reinforced. Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve seen examples of nonprofits large and small deploying some or all of the practices to increase their impact. Most important, our findings were reinforced by feedback from our readers, who told us they’d found a new language and framework to describe what some of them had been doing all along.

When we embarked on our initial research for Forces for Good, we did so with the investigative lens of organizational effectiveness and nonprofit management. We were writing in the genre of business management books like Good to Great and Built to Last, and we therefore anticipated uncovering internal management practices that caused these twelve nonprofits to be great. The counterintuitive insight we uncovered and presented in the first edition was that building a good organization was necessary, but not sufficient. In fact, the twelve high-impact nonprofits we studied were all managed quite differently and had varying cultures, wide-ranging budgets and brands, extremely diverse boards, and very few patterns around their internal operations.

What was the same across them all—and what ultimately led us to uncover the six practices—was that they focused very clearly on the outside world, on engaging all the sectors, and on influencing others to become advocates for their cause. As we expressed it then, they spent as much time focused externally on changing systems—by influencing government policies, shaping markets, building fields of practice, and nurturing social and organizational networks—as they did on their own operations. They cared less about management practices per se than they did about their ability to influence others and to build entire movements to create more lasting change.

It was a fresh way of looking at the work of nonprofits—and this framework seemed to resonate in the field. Over the past five years, we’ve observed a change in the language and mind-set of many of the nonprofits we’ve met—not just because of our work, but because others have begun to write and talk about these ideas as well. There has been a shift from the previous two decades, which were more focused on the role of individuals (social entrepreneurs) and organizations; now the focus is on larger networks, ecosystems, and collective impact. We didn’t invent the six practices—after all, advocacy, corporate partnerships, movement building, grassroots organizing, and innovation are all concepts that have been around for years—but they had perhaps not been getting as much attention. What we did was shine a spotlight on these practices and put them in context, with clear examples of how they were being used by twelve nonprofits as different pathways for scaling impact.

Many readers intuitively understood that the six practices weren’t actually about nonprofit management as much as a different approach to increasing an organization’s impact on the world, using the power of influence and movement building. They welcomed a framework that would help them shift from an organizational mind-set to a relational mind-set; from a more industrial-era model of production, where the nonprofit produces goods and services for customers, to a network model, where the nonprofit’s raison d’être is to catalyze social change by inspiring action in others. Although this model is most relevant for social change organizations that aspire to lasting impact, rather than pure charities such as schools, hospitals, or churches, it speaks to many nonprofits in our sector.

The difference is subtle, but important. And it has real implications for how we define success in the social sector: Is success about building an efficient and effective organization to meet immediate short-term needs—or it is about achieving the mission and sustaining significant impact over the long term? Most nonprofits say it is about the latter, but many of them primarily act in pursuit of the former. Ultimately it’s “both-and”: it is important to have effective and efficient nonprofits, not as ends in themselves, but as means to achieving social impact; and it’s important to meet short-term needs, even as we aspire to longer-term social change. And that view is becoming more widespread in our sector. It’s as if the best thinking about social movements and advocacy from the 1960s and 1970s is being combined with what we’ve learned in the 1980s and 1990s about building strong organizations—and now taken to a new level with the addition of systems thinking, online tools, and new understanding about networks and collective action.

Nonprofit leaders increasingly realize that their real power lies in the ability to build platforms for connections; to share ideas and information; to influence others to spread innovative models; to connect the dots across issues, industries, and sectors even as they provide services for their clients and help meet immediate needs. This is the power of what the Monitor Institute (where Heather now works) refers to as working with and through networks—or networked approaches to social change. To achieve the highest levels of impact, the best nonprofits and funders realize they can’t act unilaterally, but instead must collaborate and leverage the power of individual and organizational networks. They can enhance relationships with their nonprofit peers as well as with other actors—engaging private and governmental entities, and mobilizing individual citizens—so that they can align action to solve at the scale of the problem.

To put it another way, success is found when nonprofits strive to create collective impact rather than work in isolation focused only on shoring up their own organizations—a concept that Leslie and her FSG colleagues John Kania and Mark Kramer wrote about in their book, Do More Than Give: The Six Practices of Donors Who Change the World (which builds on the best practices articulated in Forces for Good and draws on Kania and Kramer’s Stanford Social Innovation Review article).³ Collective impact requires organizations to adopt a systemic approach to social change, one in which nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public come together around a common agenda and use shared metrics to track progress. The focus of collective impact is on the relationships between the organizations and their progress toward shared objectives. The point is that organizations aiming to solve some of the complex problems facing our world shouldn’t dwell only on scaling up or spreading any single social innovation; the best organizations are networked nonprofits that drive collective impact and thus are able to achieve greater results than any one player could achieve alone.

Indeed, in our more recent work as advisers and consultants in the social sector, both of us have focused on this theme, exploring what it means for nonprofit and philanthropic leaders to collaborate more effectively to achieve results. What does it take to fundamentally change systems? What does it mean to focus on scaling impact rather than just on scaling a program or an organization? And perhaps most important, how can smaller, local nonprofits maximize their effectiveness in this networked world, given that they receive the lion’s share of resources and collectively touch more lives than any single national nonprofit?

After all, according to a study by the Urban Institute, more than 80 percent of all American charities operate on less than $1 million annually.⁴ For every one of the large nonprofits featured in our initial research, there are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations that are serving local communities and aspiring to have outsized impact with fewer resources. Although our initial research looked at how nonprofits can scale their social impact, by the time we studied the twelve high-impact groups, most were between twenty and thirty years old and operating on very substantial budgets, averaging around $40 million. (One of our selection criteria was that they had to have national or international scale of impact.) This was a far cry from the reality facing many local organizations trying to have deep impact in one place. In sum, as we prepared to write this revised and updated edition, what we wanted to know was, How are the six practices applied in a different economic context, and how are they being applied by smaller nonprofits?

We followed two parallel tracks to answer these questions. First, we contacted each of the original twelve high-impact nonprofits, interviewed all but one of their CEOs, and spoke with other senior leaders in select cases, to understand what had changed, how these groups had adapted to the new economic reality, and what, if anything, they were doing differently in applying the six practices. Second, we searched for leading examples of local or smaller nonprofits that were using one or more of the practices to deepen their community impact, and we studied them as well. What we found might surprise you—as it did us.

What’s New in This Edition

This edition includes three completely new chapters based on new research, and a diagnostic tool to help leaders of organizations of all types, sizes, and ages understand their starting point and strengthen their application of the six practices. In addition, we have restructured the book to clarify the purposes of the different parts.

Part One includes this new Introduction, which reflects the more recent context for our work—a time of economic austerity. It also includes the original Introduction from 2007, which has been updated for accuracy, but still reflects the context at the time of our initial research—a period of economic growth and expansion for nonprofits and philanthropy.

Part Two describes our original findings in detail, exploring each of the six practices of high-impact nonprofits. (These chapters reflect our initial research, which concluded in 2006.) It also includes the two original chapters focused on how to implement and sustain the six practices.

Part Three includes several completely new chapters, in which we present our most recent research to show how the six practices have been employed by the original twelve high-impact nonprofits to both widen and deepen impact in the social sector; we also examine how local and smaller organizations use the six practices to achieve greater impact in one geographical region or issue area. Part Four includes all our appendixes and research data—details about our methodology for the original research as well as this updated edition—and original “front matter” to the first edition; it also includes our author bios and acknowledgments. If you’re already familiar with Forces for Good, you may want to turn immediately to Part Three after reading this new Introduction.

Chapter Ten tackles our first new research question: How did our original twelve high-impact nonprofits survive the Great Recession? The most striking and surprising trend we uncovered when we reached out to these twelve groups was that most of them had grown in the past five years, even as they continued to scale their impact. The news was heartening. It affirmed that these were truly extraordinary organizations, not just groups that got lucky during a boom time. In this chapter, you’ll learn just how these nonprofits managed to thrive during a downturn, and additional lessons you can apply to your organization.

Chapter Eleven revisits the original twelve nonprofits through the lens of the six practices we uncovered in the first edition. How have these groups continued to apply the six practices as levers for increasing impact—and what else have they learned along the way? Are all the practices relevant during a downturn, or are some more important than others? We share new stories and examples of how the original twelve nonprofits have continued to apply the six practices with remarkable success.

Then in Chapter Twelve we reveal what we learned from our recent research on local and smaller nonprofits. After all, the nonprofits we examined for the first edition were national in scale and scope, but they represent a very small percentage of the whole sector. Our big finding was that local and smaller groups can use some or all of the practices to great effect, and we share their lessons here.

In Chapter Thirteen, we offer a simple diagnostic tool to help nonprofits of all sizes and stripes understand their current organizational capabilities and how they can begin to apply the six practices. This tool was developed in collaboration with leaders of nonprofits large and small, as we prepared materials for workshops and conferences.

In Part Four, Appendixes A through D give more detail on our research methods and sources for the first edition. Appendix E provides updated profiles of the original twelve nonprofits, reflecting current data as a supplement to the moment-in-time data presented in the original chapters on the six practices. Appendix F describes our research methodology and sources for the new material. We’ve also moved the original Preface from the first edition back here (Appendix G); it felt more specific to the moment in time when we first wrote this book.

We Can’t Afford to Wait

Ultimately, we hope this new edition will help nonprofits cross the chasm between the current scale of our solutions and the increasing complexity of social and environmental problems. At times it feels as though these problems are growing faster than our ability to solve them—and, in fact, sometimes they are. Issues of global population explosion, extreme poverty, climate change, failing or nonexistent health care, pandemics, archaic K–12 education, volatile economies that create greater rich-poor divides—all are increasingly interconnected, complex, and systemic. And we are realizing that attempting to solve these problems through the efforts of any single organization or social entrepreneur acting alone is a fool’s errand. Although we need innovative models, entrepreneurial individuals, and courageous leadership—and although we rely on strong and healthy organizations to provide critical services—we also need these isolated actors to work in more aligned ways and influence larger systems in order to make lasting collective impact.⁵

So what are you waiting for? Once again, we hope this book will serve both as a rallying cry and as a map into this unknown territory. Whether you’re picking it up for the first time and just discovering the six practices, or revisiting them through new stories; or whether you’re working globally, locally, or somewhere in between—we hope you find something in here to inspire you to become a greater force for good.