The Creative Activist

Genership 1.0 Beyond Leadership, Toward Liberating the Creative Soul  by David Castro describes a number of tools that social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders can use to improve their organization's performance. This post is the first of several to address some of those tools or strategies in more detail. This week the subject is CoVisioning strategies. CoVisioning is thinking with others about desired changes to reality. Castro presents three specific CoVisioning strategies that nonprofit staff and entrepreneurs can use to think about the future: reframing, construction and recombination, iteration and variation. Reframing: Think of a frame as a perspective. One frame might be that poverty comes from the inherent unfairness of our economic system, then solutions that occur are likely to be different from a frame that emphasizes limited access to resources, for mental health counseling or training in basic job skills. The inherent unfairness frame might make one...

This post is really about program design questions, again. Whether you are designing a new program or trying to improve an existing program certain questions need to be asked. There may a be a few types of questions that you haven't really considered; efficiency, effectiveness, and impact are the topics of the day then. Think about the best possible use of your resources. The program that will have the biggest impact matters, of course. How do you get the most benefit from a certain investment? You are thinking of your programs and projects as investments aren't you? Effectiveness and efficiency are worth asking questions about. This is even more true in a cash-strapped nonprofit than in a large business with vast financial resources. Thinking about efficiency and effectiveness as criteria for designing or improving a program will only make your organization more effective. For example, I want to start a program that educates people about how and why to recycle, and how ...

I’ll return to the subject of strategic planning for nonprofits later. For now, I want to introduce another technique for generating ideas, for fundraising, planning, program design, advocacy, and other things. The Filament Technique was created by Edward De Bono, guru of creative thinking, and described in Serious Creativity . The technique is pretty easy to understand so I will just jump into demonstrating it with a nonprofit example. We start by defining a creative focus. In this case I want to focus to securing donations. You could also focus on fundraising generally or on another aspect of fundraising. The process is exactly the same. Having decided on the creative focus of “securing donations” I next need to list some of the normal requirements of securing donations. Here is my list: Potential donors Compelling case for donations Printed materials Objectives Note that those requirements are kept pretty broad. That was done on purpose. The list above is meant to be an illustrati...

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...