Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results by Leah Kral (2024)
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This book delivers practical advice for nonprofits to maximise their impact for social change. Using design thinking, the author helps nonprofit professionals to think creatively and strategically to address the important problems of society. Importantly, it is not a book on what to think, but on how to think about nonprofit work and how to elevate any nonprofit’s strategies, evaluations, outreach, and collaboration to new levels. By asking ‘What could be better?’ the author inspires the reader to re-examine what they have always done and look for ways to innovate through ideas, action, within organisations, and within ourselves. The author uses six reinforcing principles gleaned from years of working in the sector, interviewing those on the frontlines, and consulting nonprofit professionals engaged in social change, to divide the book into four instructive parts. The first part of the book encourages the reader to ideate. If we want to solve problems, we must go through the questions of what is desirable, feasible, and scalable for our nonprofit, and then work to design small experiments to test out these ideas. The author adapts these design-thinking principles for nonprofit scenarios from the field. In part one, common organisational tools are referenced, but are thoughtfully catered for nonprofits and presented in a logical order to help experienced and novice nonprofit professionals or students to figure out ways to solve complex issues. Using concepts such as Asset Mapping, Landscape Analysis, SWOT analysis, and others, the author pushes individuals or organisations to get out their best thinking. The second part focuses on how social innovators can turn those ideas into action through experimentation. Using concepts familiar to most nonprofit professionals, the author breaks down theory-of-change models through two specific case studies, Habitat for Humanity and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, discussing how both were able to address systemic problems and raise to the level of social change for their target populations. Going hand-in-hand with the theory of change, this section also addresses the difficulty of evaluation and how nonprofits can best capture their impact. The author discusses the pitfalls with many evaluations in the sector, and distills a pragmatic approach to evaluation where it serves the goal of organisations learning and adjusting based on the data they collect. From a standpoint of practicality and of academic concern, this book hits accountability to stakeholders effectively and demonstrates how our evaluation systems can be logical, evidence-based, and encourage organisational learning. Part three of the book shifts to how to encourage innovation by examining internal and external collaborative issues, ensuring that a nonprofit’s workplace culture, organisational design, and partnerships allow for creativity and unleash the full potential of organisations. Leadership, structural problems, decision making, empowerment, risk taking, and negotiating are all touched on, with the author providing a crash course on deep managerial insights gained from expertise, stories, and cases in the private and nonprofit sector. Finally, part four of the book is about looking within to bring out social innovation. Although these chapters encourage the reader to be reflective, the author manages to stay above the line of too much sentimentality, giving the reader relevant questions to explore our passions, talents, and motivations. The author also brings out a helpful term of ‘curious contrarians’, encouraging nonprofit professionals to challenge the status quo but simultaneously embrace humility, build trust, and have courage. The last chapter provides practical steps in how to be persuasive and win others to the cause, such as focusing on outcomes, logic, and value. In terms of adding value to the nonprofit sector, this book is a useful read for a variety of individuals in the sector. From a CEO desiring for their nonprofit to reach to the level of social change, to a nonprofit student wanting to gain practical advice and knowledge, this book is appropriate as it layers in decades of useful thought exercises and best practices from both private and nonprofit work. It utilises engaging visuals and understandable language, and shows good unity of ideas. The book has great practicality, but at the same time delves into deep issues of accountability, social change, empowerment, and true leadership. The author’s own experience, interviews with change makers, and organisational research, bring great perspective to the book. Yet, the book could benefit from exploring strategies in advocacy, as advocacy works to approach the systems-level changes that are necessary for social transformation. Social change, at the root, must get to systemic causes and environmental conditions that perpetuate inequities. The book does discuss these ideas when providing theories of change and stories of success of different nonprofits and movements, however, as division, crises, and failure of institutions abound in our current times, efforts to bring about systems-level change is a crucial aspect of social innovation.
