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Building Better Nonprofit Programs

The core of most nonprofit work is the program of some sort. Conservation, education, and emergency assistance seem to be the most popular program goals. When a program exists there may be room for improvement. Heck, there is almost certainly room for some improvement. If you have an idea for a nonprofit you will want to develop your core program, or refine your program idea.

You already know how to brainstorm ideas, or research them. The next twenty or so posts will help you do a better job of finding program ideas.

I'll help by describing a bunch of brainstorming tools you can use. The tools I cover here will be the same ones you may have read about in my long and rambling posts on better fundraising. If you are tuning in late, that's fine. The techniques I want to show you are simple to learn and will come with actual program design examples.

I'll get into a few techniques that did not come up in the fundraising section. When I was skimming through Michael Michalko's brainstorming guide Thinkertoys, I was reminded of different ways to explore the nature of a challenge.

Once you get an idea, you need to be able to evaluate and improve it. Would this program possibly work better? Can we actually get people to do this? How could we get people to sign on to this? Those sorts of questions, and many others, will come up. You are prepared to handle those questions I think. A bit more preparation can't hurt. That's where this next series of posts can help.

When thinking about designing or improving a program you also need to know what counts as a good idea. This is something you can figure out based on education and work experience, sort of. It might help to have an easy, structured way to walk through an evaluation of the ideas you (I hope) get by applying one of the brainstorming techniques you read about earlier in the series.

I also want to say a few things about brainstorming software, another subject that didn't make it into my fundraising posts.

I'll post again on Monday, June 20. The subject is gathering new program ideas.
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