How Charities Should Pursue Innovation

By Derek Lieu

Seth Godin, the author and marketing expert, is tired of hearing why charities should be more like businesses.

Instead, he argues, nonprofits should be working hard to avoid the corporate mindset if they really want to produce change.

In this video interview, Mr. Godin—author of the popular Seth's Blog and the recent bestseller Linchpin—discusses why nonprofits need to be more artistic and less businesslike.

Comments

1. traceyamorris - December 13, 2010 at 02:07 pm

One of my favorite thinkers, thank you!

2. docfil - December 13, 2010 at 03:53 pm

Here's an instructive example of a nonprofit who threw away many of the normal conventions. It enabled them to raise over 3 million dollars in half the expected time, AND engage with the community like never before.

http://www.501videos.com/mm2010/12/mm_2_parks.html

3. maryrivet - December 13, 2010 at 04:53 pm

I'd love to know more of Seth's thoughts about how being artistic will help nonprofits achieve their mission. I understand that being very business- and/or metrics-driven can focus an organization's attention on the wrong things, but how does a more artistic approach focus it on the right things?

4. philapa - December 13, 2010 at 05:12 pm

I suppose that this was compelling right up until the point that he stated that his view of current business is that it's full of "Mad Men" types and practices. No one reads *The Organization Man* anymore, and no one runs their businesses like that. The quintessential grey flannel shop back then was IBM, which is now changed beyond recognition. There are plenty of businesses today that treat their customers more personally than many nonprofits are doing - which just might be what some people are saying when they state that nonprofits should act more like businesses.

A better argument would have been that nonprofits shouldn't act like businesses because they have different missions, values, short / long range objectives, and measures of success than most businesses have. Not that nonprofits shouldn't act like businesses because of a cartoonish notion of how businesses operate that's based on fifty year old ideas as illustrated in a fictional TV show.

5. peteaidg - December 13, 2010 at 06:02 pm

I'd actually argue there is plenty of failure in the NGO world, it is just the people funding it don't get to hear about it. The two customer problem, the seperation of the recipients who recieve aid from the donors that pay for it, means there is no customer feedback and there is fight of funding when NGOs produce a crap product. I can't tell you how many crap broken projects I've seen from big NGOs internationally. There is not a fear of failure or less risk taking, there is just less transparancy and accountability for failure in the NGO world driving turnover and change.

That said I do feel the donor and foundation community is far more risk averse than they'd like to admit. If they really learned about the level of failure out there, at least for international NGOs, they'd pull back from most of the big actors.
I'm agreed experimentation and failure is great if you learn from it, it'd be fantastic if foundations abandoned the "waterfall" grant planning style they adopt and embraced "agile" granting. But failure without accountability or change is the core of why the aid industry has never and in its current form will never solve probles in global poverty. Until you fix the accountability I'd be terrified to see the mega NGOs embracing failure, they do a bad enough job as it is.