The Creative Activist

I'll skip the how and why of brainstorming and lateral thinking because I've posted my other entries on those subjects. You are creative, or at least you have the potential to be creative. So, where do you apply that creativity? The right places to apply creativity vary from time to time and organization to organizations. Still, there are some common elements. 1. Fundraising - How can we raise more money? How can we afford to launch this nonprofit? To turn those questions on their head: How do you do more with the resources that you have? 2. Goals and objectives - What goals and objectives should you pursue? Some dedicated thinking time might lead to the conclusion that your goals and objectives need to be changed. 3. Strategy - Are you solving a social problem or simply dealing with the symptoms? Does that focus need to be changed? Would brainstorming lead you to a strategy for attacking the problem? If dealing with symptoms is more realistic, how can you produce the m...

Crowdsourcing is the practice of submitting challenges or problems to an online group for their input. Have you ever used crowdsourcing for anything? If not, you might be missing out on a powerful tool. Nonprofits could do lots of things with crowdsourcing: 1. Fundraising - This should be obvious. Your organization could use a crowdsourcing site like Kickstarter.com to raise money for general operations, or for a specific purpose. 2. Marketing - You can also crowdsource advertising, branding, and marketing challenges. There are sites for those things, including Crowspring, Kluster, 99Designs, and PopTent. 3. Naming Things - Stumped trying to come up with a name for a campaign, program, or project? I guess this can happen. Why not use crowdsourcing to solicit ideas? 4. Program Design - Designing a program that will do a great job of meeting a certain need, say mental health assistance for homeless people, might not be tough all of the time. Sometimes you might want a whole cro...

Random thoughts on starting and funding new programs or projects. A poster to a LinkedIn forum described a plan to re-forest a mountain in AZ. He was asking for advice on how to finance a nursery to grow the trees that would go on the mountain later. I asked a few questions that I want to repeat here, in generic form: Do you have a registered nonprofit organization? Do you have a track record of success with fund raising and/or programs? If you can answer 'yes" to both questions, then grant money might be available. That's one funding option. If you are really new, your fundraising options are a bit more limited. There might not be any point in pursuing grant money, or using snail mail to ask for money, or using the Web to raise some money. You have to network first, and raise money from locals. The old-fashioned tactics for raising money are still available to you. Be original though. Everyone holds car washes and sells candy. What else can you sell, or do for ...

This is a post about asking good questions whenever you think you have a good idea for a program or program improvement. You probably knew that great ideas still need to be examined, questioned if you please. That's what this post is about, sort of. Mostly, I want to offer a few comments on Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas by Kevin and Shawn Coyne. Brainsteering offers a disciplined approach to asking, and answering, questions about product ideas and business ideas. The process also works just fine for program ideas. The book starts by describing some generic questions to ask about a challenge then goes into creating logic trees. A logic tree works by stating a question and breaking it down into subquestions. Simply asking and answering questions might lead to some valuable new ideas. Brainsteering And that's as far as I have gone in the book. I can say that there is a chapter on making your own brainstorming efforts more effective. Other chapter...

This post is about another creative thinking tool, this time applied to designing programs for nonprofits. I want to walk you through a few ways that NGOs can design or improve programs with a bit of applied creativity. Edward De Bono (yes, him again) developed the use of “provocations” or “provocative operations” to help people break away from normal patterns of thinking. De Bono also invented the word “po” to introduce provocations. I’ll use po here as if it were a word people use every day so bear with me a moment. De Bono created several types of provocations, the “stepping stone” being the one I want to focus on today. A stepping stone provocation helps us move from our current thinking to a radically different way of thinking, by way of an interim step. The interim step is a provocation is a forced switch to a different way of thinking. The end point is, we hope, a creative new way of doing whatever the program does. The first stepping stone provocation is called a reversal b...