Creating High-Impact Nonprofits

by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, authors of Forces for Good

Adapted, with permission, from an article by the authors featured in the Fall 2007 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. To buy Forces for Good, click here.

What we discovered after closely examining these 12 high-impact nonprofits came as a bit of a surprise. We had assumed that there was something inherent in these organizations that helped them have great impact -- and that their success was directly tied to their growth or management approach.

Instead, we learned that becoming a high-impact nonprofit is not just about building a great organization and then expanding it to reach more people. Rather, high-impact nonprofits work with and through organizations and individuals outside themselves to create more impact than they ever could have achieved alone. They build social movements and fields; they transform business, government, other nonprofits, and individuals; and they change the world around them.

We first examined the 12 organizations through the lens of traditional nonprofit management, studying their leadership, governance, strategies, programs, fundraising, and marketing. We thought we would find that their success was due to time-tested management habits like brilliant marketing, well-tuned operations, or rigorously developed strategic plans.

But instead what we found flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Achieving high impact is not just about building a great organization and then scaling it up site by site, or dollar by dollar. As we got further into our research, we saw that many commonly held beliefs about what makes nonprofits successful were falling by the wayside.

The secret to their success lies in how high-impact nonprofits mobilize every sector of society -- government, business, nonprofits, and the public -- to be a force for good. In other words, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than with how they manage their own internal operations. The high-impact nonprofits we studied are satisfied with building a "good enough" organization and then focusing their energy externally to catalyze large-scale change.

After a long process of studying these 12 nonprofits, we began to see patterns in the ways they work. In the end, six patterns crystallized into the form presented here -- the six practices that high-impact nonprofits use to achieve extraordinary impact:

• Work with government and advocate for policy change
• Harness market forces and see business as a powerful partner
• Convert individual supporters into evangelists for the cause
• Build and nurture nonprofit networks, treating other groups as allies
• Adapt to the changing environment
• Share leadership, empowering others to be forces for good
  (source: http://www.forcesforgood.net)

In addition to employing these six practices, these 12 high-impact nonprofits have also mastered several basic management principles that are necessary to sustain their impact. They have all developed enduring, somewhat diversified sources of financial support, including large individual donor bases, government contracts, corporate donations, and foundation grants. Typically, they have aligned their fundraising strategy with their impact strategy. Those that are the savviest about inspiring evangelists are also able to build a broad individual donor base.

Why do these nonprofits harness multiple external forces, when it would be easier to focus only on growing their own organizations? It's because of their unwavering commitment to creating real impact. These organizations and the people who lead them want to solve many of the biggest problems plaguing our world: hunger, poverty, failing education, climate change. They aspire to change the world. They don't want to apply social Band-Aids. They seek to attack and eliminate the root causes of social ills.