The Creative Activist

Complexity is the subject of the day. You know your organization operates in a complex social environment. Lots of things are happening with the economy, local government, other nonprofits and other elements of the community. This time around I want to make one more visit to that table showing the seven dimensions of a nonprofits environment. To review, the seven dimensions are cultural, demographic, ecological, economic, legal, political, and technological. Each dimension has an element of complexity, or the number of elements and their interactions. A town with many different religious and ethnic groups mixing has lots of demographic complexity relative to a community that’s mainly white and Christian. That’s information that you might be able to use in planning, both to look for potential problems and potential opportunities. Complexity in each of those seven dimensions should raise some questions about your organization’s future. Some of those questions may lead to unpleasant answe...

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts. Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity. I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy. To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time: CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM CULTURE ECOLOGY ? ECONOMIC ? DEMOGRAPHIC LEGAL POLITICAL ? TECHNOLOGICAL ? Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements. From the polit...