The nonprofit world has never lacked new ideas to address problems. In fact, you could argue that nonprofits are innately entrepreneurial, being borne out of a recognized market failing and a new idea to remedy it.

The need, then, is not more new ideas. Rather, true innovation lies in reinventing a field built on social change.

Here are some ways that is starting to happen:

New support mechanisms. The avenues for sending money to social-change efforts are increasing significantly. What started 10 years ago with venture philanthropy has now expanded into nonprofit campaigns to raise growth capital, foundation loans and other investments in organizations, social-impact bonds, and investments that seek both financial and social returns. And that creates an opportunity for social-change efforts to be much more flexible and (we hope) successful, because access to enough and the right kind of money can often make or break a great idea.

A converging economy. We used to suffer from pretty strict delineations among the public (government), private (business), and nonprofit sectors, but that is changing. True innovation is happening where those lines blur—like businesses that make a profit solving social problems. Or governments developing new mechanisms to finance and evaluate nonprofit efforts, such as the Department of Justice’s Pay for Success program.

Proof of social change. Nonprofits used to be viewed as benevolent charities that received donations to support their good work. That’s not enough anymore. Nonprofit donors and social investors are increasingly demanding a social return on investment—proof that the organization is making a difference—in exchange for their money. And nonprofits are now competing not only with other nonprofits but also with for-profit social entrepreneurs. So nonprofits can no longer focus on how many children they’ve read to, meals they’ve served, or animals they’ve saved. They must track and prove how they have changed lives, changed systems, or changed communities.

Although these innovations are encouraging, there is room for so much more. What if:

• The best and the brightest of Generation Y worked to remake existing organizations from the inside out instead of just starting their own social-change groups?

• The social-capital market that’s emerging to provide financial vehicles for budding social businesses also included support for social entrepreneurs in the nonprofit world?

• Venture-philanthropy funds (growth capital for nonprofits) shared investor prospects with social-venture funds (growth capital for social businesses) and vice versa?

• All nonprofits interested in growth and with a proven model for success had access to enough capital and management expertise to expand?

• A nonprofit that solves social problems received as many resources and as much respect and attention as a business that solves a consumer need?

These things require sweeping, fundamental changes to the current structures of the nonprofit, government, and private sectors. To me, that’s real innovation.

Nell Edgington is president of Social Velocity, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits embrace innovation, expand programs, and achieve financial sustainability.

The organization’s education department had a map on the wall with pins that marked the schools where the charity had made fire-safety presentations. One day a disaster-response colleague came by and asked about the map. He looked puzzled for a moment, and then he started to mark the locations of recent house fires.

The pushpins marking the fire-safety presentations and the X’s marking the location of the house fires were in different parts of town. Seeing the discrepancy, the organization realized it needed to reach out to schools in neighborhoods with a high incidence of fires, instead of just responding to schools that requested fire-safety presentations, says Ms. Ross.

She suggests that social-service and education charities could do a similar check by plotting their clients’ home addresses on a map and then overlaying census data on poverty rates: “We could really use our data to help us understand if we’re serving the right people at the right time.”

Dig Deeper: Learn more about how charities are using infographics and interactive data tools to attract new donors, raise awareness about their causes, spark activism, and improve their programs. Need inspiration? Check out The Chronicle’s gallery of nonprofit data visualizations.

Could your nonprofit work the same way?

Any organization can, said Rebecca Suehle, a writer and editor at the open-source software company Red Hat, in a session Saturday at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

“Just be open, that’s the lesson here, but it sounds scary,” she said, because many organizations are built to keep their work to themselves and out of the hands of competitors.

Nonprofits, though, may be the most qualified type of institution to adopt an open business style.

The principles of open business are community, transparency, meritocracy, rapid prototyping, and sharing, similar to the ideas that guide many nonprofits already.

Ms. Suehle said organizations that want to be more open should start by working with the people they serve early in a project, allowing them to contribute ideas as it gets under way, and showing them how the end result will work.

“Think about how much better it would be if you made it with your customers, instead of just for them,” she said.

That process encourages organizations to make mistakes, improving the end product quickly. Then, when that project or program is public, share everything that works with anyone who wants to know.

Dig deeper: See a list of successful projects that have used an open process.

Participants at the DC Datadive (Photo by Craig Barowsky)

More than 100 data scientists, nonprofit employees, and others gathered in Washington this month to put their skills to use with three charities that want to do a better job of harnessing the information they collect.

The problems participants tackled:

• How to create data visualizations that show the many ways that growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods influences children.

• Whether the financial data on charities’ informational tax returns can be used to create an early-warning system to alert nonprofits when they’re headed for trouble.

• What information to collect to measure an organization’s progress toward a big environmental goal.

The DC Datadive, which was organized by Data Without Borders with help from the American Express NGen Fellows Program at Independent Sector, follows gatherings in New York and San Francisco in the fall that each drew several dozen data professionals.

Extracurricular Projects

It’s an exciting time to be a data scientist, says Jake Porway, who started Data Without Borders last year: “Data is the thrumming, electrical beat that is starting to drive everything.”

Mr. Porway says he always wanted to use his expertise to advance social causes, but when he finished graduate school, he was disappointed that the jobs in his field were almost all on Wall Street or in computer programming. Yet at the same time he was energized by the vibrant data-science scene where everyone seemed to be working nights and weekends on “extracurricular” projects.

He remembers thinking, “Well, wait a second, what if we got all these people who were working with data but can only work on banking and software jobs, and got them together with these organizations that have lots of data or could benefit from data but don’t really have anyone to look at it.”

Fellowship Programs

In time, Data Without Borders wants to expand beyond the weekend gatherings and match data professionals with charities for longer-term projects. The group’s ultimate goal, says Mr. Porway, is a fellowship program, not unlike Teach for America, in which data scientists could work in a nonprofit organization full time for a year.

“We want to live in a world where every organization thinks about data,” he says. “Because inherently one of the questions is going to be, How did you know the project was a success? And how are you going to be able to answer that question unless you have data?”

Watch here as Mr. Porway talks about Data Without Borders at PopTech, an annual ideas conference that brings together social entrepreneurs, scientists, technology experts, and others dedicated to social change.

Dig deeper: Learn how charities are using infographics and interactive data tools to attract new donors, raise awareness about their causes, spark activism, and improve their programs. Need inspiration to get your organization thinking? Check out The Chronicle’s gallery of nonprofit data visualizations.

PerformWell, a Web site more than two years in the making, is designed to help social-service groups collect and analyze real-time data to help them improve programs and measure their impact. The site provides a detailed introduction to performance management and offers performance indicators, questionnaires, and other tools charities can use in their measurement efforts.

The site is a project of Child Trends, a nonprofit research organization; Social Solutions, a company that provides assessment software; and the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy

“When you think about the people who are providing programs for children, families, adults, they get up in the morning to help people,” says Kristin Anderson Moore, a senior scholar at Child Trends. “They do not get up in the morning to do data collection.”

Making Tools Available

The site aims to make the management of performance evaluation easier by employing useful tools, in many cases developed by scholars, that until now have not been easily available.

Research on mentoring programs, for example, has found that a factor important to overall results is that young people feel they have a good relationship with their mentors. PerformWell offers questionnaires that can be used to assess the quality of such relationships.

“It’s about driving people to the tools that they can put in practice,” says Stephen Butz, chief executive of Social Solutions.

While the most important reason for charities to focus on performance management is to improve programs, organizations are also under increasing pressure from foundations, donors, and government agencies to document their outcomes, says Mary K. Winkler, senior research associate at the Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy.

“People want to weed out who are the high performers and who are not,” says Ms. Winkler. “Those groups that cannot produce information that’s credible may not survive five to 10 years from now.”

Learn more: Data-rich graphics are transforming how nonprofits reach the public and helping them improve the way the serve others.

WILL Interactive creates training movies designed to help people make better decisions. The company created this simulation on diversity and resolving conflicts for the Anti-Defamation League. (Image provided by WILL Interactive)

A Maryland company that develops interactive training simulations is holding a competition to put its technology to work for social change.

In the training movies that WILL Interactive creates, the viewer becomes one of the characters, and how the story progresses depends on the answers people give to frequent questions. The goal is to help viewers make better decisions when confronted with similar problems in real life.

Among the projects the company has worked on: a simulation that the U.S. Army uses in its effort to prevent suicide.

The first step in creating a simulation is research, looking at the scientific information in the field, conducting interviews, and holding focus groups, says Sharon Sloane, chief executive of WILL Interactive. “Everything in our simulations actually happened,” she says. “We don’t just make stuff up.”

The company is soliciting ideas for a new simulation to address an important problem through its Simulate a Better World Challenge. The winner will get to help guide the creation of the simulation as well as have the right to use it. Both nonprofit and for-profit entities are eligible to submit ideas. Deadline for entries is April 20.

A key criterion in the judging will be the organization’s plan and ability to distribute the video simulation the group proposes, says Ms. Sloane: “We don’t want to build a better mousetrap and then not have it available to the people who could benefit from it.”

• Peter Sims, author of Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries

• Pete York, chief research and learning officer at TCC Group

• Laura Weiss, vice president for service innovation at Taproot

Aaron Hurst, Taproot’s founder, promises it will be a thought-provoking, grounded discussion. He says of the speakers: “Unlike many innovation peddlers, they each bring a pragmatism and humility to their work that is refreshing.”

A Saint Louis Zoo employee at the Children's Zoo. (Photo by R. Winkleman/Saint Louis Zoo)

To help employees better understand how their colleagues think and make decisions, the Saint Louis Zoo uses a program that distills academic research on personality types into four easy-to-remember colors: blue, gold, green, and orange.

“When you understand the personalities, you have more of an understanding of why and how people make decisions,” says Wyndel E. Hill, a vice president at the zoo. “Even if it’s in opposition to what you would do, you’re more comfortable because you recognize the situation and you recognize the personality type.”

Understanding Motivation

The program helps make disagreements less about a conflict between individuals and more a clash between the work styles that grow out of different personality types, says Mr. Hill. For example, he says, a “gold” cares very deeply about following the rules and is likely to be upset by a decision that appears to break or even skirt organization rules.

“So before you break a rule, have a conversation with the gold to say, ‘You know what, this is probably not the best way to do this, but I think we should do it in this case because … ‘” says Mr. Hill. “Now the gold understands why you’re breaking the rule, and they also understand that you know you’re breaking the rule.”

He says that when the zoo puts together cross-departmental task forces, it makes sure that all four personality types are represented.

‘Too Orange’

The zoo has been using the program for eight years, and the colors have become part of everyday conversation, says Mr. Hill, who is an “orange,” a personality type that is action-oriented and likes to take charge. It’s not uncommon for colleagues to tell him they’ve already figured out he’s an orange.

“That’s good, because they’re not concentrating on me being difficult or pushy, they’re focusing on the personality,” says Mr. Hill. “And you know what that causes me to do: immediately recognize that I’m being too orange, so I can ease up. I can be more flexible.”

Learn more about how the Saint Louis Zoo is fostering communication among its employees.

A New York nonprofit that helps arts organizations rethink how they operate and develop new ideas, has created a new site that it hopes will become a hub for arts and cultural groups to talk about innovation.

The site, ArtsFwd, was created by the group EmcArts. It features video profiles of arts groups that are experimenting with bold new approaches to their work. In one profile, officials from the Denver Center Theatre Company describe how they developed Off-Center @ The Jones, a nontraditional series designed to attract new and younger patrons with greater audience participation.

Before starting the series in earnest, the organization held three events to test some of its ideas. One of the events, a reading of a play called “An Extraordinary Demonstration of Nikola Tesla’s Most Recent Discoveries,” taught the organization the dangers of incorporating too many technologies into a single performance.

During the reading, the character of Nikola Tesla didn’t appear onstage; audience members instead heard him through headphones. Throughout the performance, the audience also was asked to answer a series of questions via text message, and a tally of the answers appear on a large screen onstage.

“It really taxed our resources,” says Kent Thompson, the theater’s artistic director, in the ArtsFwd video. “We realized that using that many technologies in one performance was maybe financially and human-resource-wise too difficult.”

Recent posts on the ArtsFwd blog include a story about a blog run by teenagers at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, a profile of the technology lab at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and a review of the new book, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

The site also features a monthly podcast on the ways arts groups are dealing with changing audience demographics, the struggle to appeal to younger patrons, and the competition posed by new technology.