Scaling Impact - SoundSage

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In this episode, Community Engagement Officers from DreamSpring, Shaundra, and Meghan, share insights on the importance and impact of community engagement in small business growth. They discuss strategies for effective outreach, trust-building, and partner stewardship. The hosts also highlight the benefits of partnerships and the significance of investing in relationships for long-lasting success. Additionally, they touch on measuring impact and taking care of oneself and their ecosystem while growing a business.

Join Shaundra Jacobs and Meghan Rauker on this episode as they share their remarkable career journeys. Shaundra's experience spans roles at AT&T, Lyft, and BakerRipley, leading to her current position as a Community Engagement Officer at DreamSpring, where she fosters relationships to support entrepreneurs. Meghan's expertise lies in strategic communications, program management, and business development, showcased through her roles at PeopleFund and as a Business Development Lead at TÁPI Story. Together, they offer invaluable insights into community engagement, nonprofit organizations, and business growth strategies. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

Community engagement is about long-term and sustainable outcomes, building relationships, and meeting the needs of priority populations such as minority entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, and veterans.
Engaging effectively with communities involves asking why and offering services of value, being location-based, and using technology effectively. Consistency and genuineness are also essential.
Building sustainable partnerships involves asking directly, “What do you need?”
Regular touchpoints and checking in with partners can pay off down the line.
Partnerships can help solve similar challenges and complement each other's roles.
Community engagement is a vital part of small business growth.
The company is rapidly expanding and offers a monthly entrepreneurial resource newsletter called Springboard.

Resources:

DreamSpring
DreamSpring News
Spring Board Newsletters
Business Resource Blog
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Shaundra Jacobs and Meghan Rauker:

Shaundra Jacobs
Meghan Rauker

Connecting with Sean Boyce:

Quotables:

03:33 - “Money is not always the answer. It is more to educate and empower people to be able to start a small business, be entrepreneurs and sustain themselves and their family, create generational wealth. That is our goal with this engagement role.”
17:36 - “I just love to see it in a chart form and say, oh look at all these people I've connected with and let me see exactly where my, you know, how I've interacted and engaged with people. So that's how HubSpot does help us. That's our little way. And then we do have other things like Domo that'll show exactly the impact, and it pulls it into charting and shows you how many people you've impacted and all of that.”
08:28 - “That's the other trick I'd also add to organizations, if you can find other people who have titles like community engagement or community manager in their role, they're much more likely to respond to you. And it's also really great to have like a peer in that space if that's your job. And you're just kind of starting to navigate that space.”
24:12 - “So kindness goes a really long way in connecting with people even after they've left the organization. Especially if you get along, and you're passionate about the same things goes a super long way. Again, it's a long game, a super, super long game, it's a marathon for sure. You have to make sure you take care of yourself and the people in your ecosystem while you're doing it.”
24:36 - “You want to invest in these relationships and the more you invest in them, the more likely you're to get out of it as well too. As such, the community benefits as well. So I love the partnership angle for a whole bunch of reasons. Just great to be able to kind of grow together, find folks who are trying to solve also similar challenges, and maybe they play a complimentary role to what it is that you may be doing as such. You can grow together, right? Rising tide raises all ships kind of thing”

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

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In this episode of Scaling Impact, Sean Boyce hosts Anne Haynes and Marisa Barrera from DreamSpring to discuss their mission of supporting entrepreneurs and driving economic and social change. They explore the meaning of impact and the importance of equitable access to capital. Additionally, they delve into the role of nonprofit boards in fundraising, building a partnership with CEOs, and maximizing positive change.

Marisa Barrera is the Chief Impact Officer at DreamSpring, bringing over 27 years of experience to her role. With a background in public and international affairs, Marisa is dedicated to driving economic equity and inclusion through her work. Anne Haines, the CEO and President of DreamSpring, is a recognized leader known for her commitment to ethics and excellence. Under her guidance, DreamSpring has become one of the top-performing nonprofit microfinance institutions in the United States, providing funding and support to small businesses across 27 states. Anne's vision and impact have earned her numerous awards and accolades, making her a respected figure in the industry. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

Equitable access to capital is essential in empowering entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds.
Regular communication, exposure to the organization's work, and in-person meetings keep the board engaged.
Dream Springing transitioned from a larger board of directors to a smaller one to enhance governance and leadership excellence.
The composition of the board is carefully developed to best support the organization's short term and long term strategic goals.
Technology expertise has been brought onto the board to support the development of Dream Springing's in-house software.
The board's role is to align its membership with the organization's strategic goals and ensure impactful outcomes.
The episode provides valuable advice and insights for other organizations looking to achieve similar success.

Resources:

DreamSpring
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Marisa Barrera:

Connecting with Anne Haines:

DreamSpring

Connecting with Sean Boyce:

Quotables:

05:08 - “So as a nonprofit community development organization, we're very committed to putting capital into the hands of underserved entrepreneurs and historically underserved communities. For us to make the broadest space economic and social impact, we believe that combining passion and heart and technology to support the scaling of impact are all critical inputs into some of the desired outcomes.”
13:52 - “Nonprofit boards are also responsible for being advocates for the organization for ensuring sufficient financial resources for an organization, which means nonprofit board of directors mostly do need to get involved in fundraising. I think there are very few nonprofit boards where there isn't, you know, some kind of fundraising responsibility that is actually a core part of a nonprofit board role.”
25:57 - “And so we do find that it is important to cultivate through the board's nominating and governance process, really mindful identification of board members who bring the experience, the networks, the background that are needed for a nonprofit's mission fulfillment.”
06:32 - “And when we are working with small businesses, it's so important that every entrepreneur around the country, no matter what their background is, men, women, entrepreneurs of color, individuals with a disability, whoever that person is, if they're dreaming of starting a business and have the tenacity and grit to launch it, we wanna make sure that they're championed and have access to capital to start that business or to grow the business.”
16:19 Sean: “So how do you keep the board engaged in the work that's ongoing so that they can also maximize their impact and track progress?” .. Anne: “Certainly it begins before somebody becomes a board member with a series of really thoughtful conversations. There should be a committee of the board of directors or if it's a very small board to start with, it could be the full board that evaluate who might be potential candidates that would be great for the organization, where the organization would be great for who they are and the passion they have.”

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In this episode, Amber Kaney, Head of Stakeholder Engagement at Dream Springing, talks about their approach to using technology to overcome challenges in scaling impact for underrepresented communities. She emphasizes the importance of analyzing donor journeys and addressing pain points through technology while staying open to changes. Dream Springing also adapts to pandemic challenges by providing self-paced options for donor engagement.

Amber Kani is an experienced professional in the field of stakeholder engagement and philanthropy. She currently serves as the Head of Stakeholder Engagement at DreamSpring, where she has successfully implemented comprehensive business development and stewardship strategies to advance the organization's mission. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

Dream Springing is a nonprofit that provides small business owners and entrepreneurs underrepresented in traditional banking access to capital, education, and resources.
Technology is key to scaling impact by reducing friction points for clients and donors alike, enabling Dream Springing to capture data to improve outreach for clients and fundraise more effectively beyond traditional networks.
Map out the existing workflows to identify challenges and select appropriate technology
Unstick stakeholders by adding a touchpoint into the process and identifying needs to hire appropriate staff
Know your process and deploy your team intentionally.
Crafting innovative solutions using the resources available.
Technology enables stakeholder engagement to be more impactful.

Resources:

DreamSpring
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Amber Kani:

Connecting with Sean Boyce:

Quotables:

09:12 - “And by leveraging technology we're able to take our digital assets, client features, videos, things that tell our story better than I ever could face-to-face or in a letter and get them in front of people that go beyond the networks of anyone on your fundraising staff. You know, capacity is always a challenge for nonprofits, and leveraging technology can let your fundraisers and your partnership builders and your executive teams do what they do best. And it also enables your clients to have a voice in the process.”
11:24 - “I mean, the great thing about technology is you're constantly getting data on what is working and what isn't, and it enables you to pivot and change as you need. And it would take a long time to figure that out with face-to-face and meetings, certainly at the scale that we're trying to do it.”
11:45 - “Because in terms of cost-effectiveness, I've seen a lot unfortunately of nonprofit organizations that have developed amazing local programs but then they kind of collapse, or they stall under the weight of the growth that they want to try to achieve as they're trying to scale because they haven't taken into account just how expensive time-consuming, how much effort is going to be involved and what it's going to be like trying to manage that at scale.”
19:36 - “Because you're expecting the process that worked yesterday to work for the process of tomorrow's world. That's unlikely to be the case, even if it does, it's going to be significantly less effective. So you're going to need processes to improve those as well too. It isn't like they're going to have to adapt, they're going to have to evolve, and your tools should evolve with you as well too.”
13:27 - “Sean: You'd alluded too as well to the data that you've used to kind of better understand where to apply technology, software, any of these other tools that can help you with scaling more efficiently. What does that look like? What is DreamSprings' process for that? Like how do you know where to apply it next that would also be good for, you know, other nonprofit leaders to learn from in terms of what you've done successfully?

Amber: Yeah, I think the first thing is you need to put your head down before you can put your head out. And you know, we really looked internally at who are our donors and partners, and aspirationally who are we trying to attract? Because like you said, the folks who are supporting you in your backyard and your community are absolutely essential.”

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In this episode, Senior Executive Director of GreenLight Fund, Melissa Luna, discusses the organization's mission to remove barriers to inclusive prosperity by launching and scaling proven programs that address community-identified needs, GreenLight Fund's approach of investing financial resources and providing long-term sustainability support to partner organizations, and the significance of community engagement and learning from past data and trends within the GreenLight Fund portfolio.

Melissa Luna is an experienced Managing Director with a demonstrated history of working in the philanthropy and nonprofit industry, who is skilled in Nonprofit Management, Program Design, Politics, Policy Analysis, Event Planning, and Evaluation. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

The programs that the organization launches and scales that meet community-identified needs.
The multi-year funds and on-ground support that Greenlight Fund invests and provides for portfolio organizations.
The KPIs are outlined to determine reasonable and high growth for organizations over four years.
How brand visibility, partnerships, and unlocking investments are important for growth and expansion.
Why successful scaling requires a step-by-step approach and managing risk with the unexpected that may come along.
How Greenlight Fund helps nonprofits to scale up in the Greater Boston region.

Resources:

GreenLight Fund
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Melissa Luna:

Connecting with Sean Boyce:

Quotables:

15:20 – “I'd love to talk a little bit more about that too because obviously the theme of this show is figuring out how to help people that are making amazing change, but maybe it's just hyper-local at the moment, but it's something that, you know, the needs that you described, the mental health challenges, the disproportionate level of access for people of color, those types of things, those are not hyperlocal problems, right? Like they may be varying levels of degree of severity, but those are ubiquitous. These problems exist everywhere. So obviously we want to see what we can't do about taking those to programs that have been successful in local communities and making them as accessible as possible so that people that are experiencing them everywhere can get access to the same level of help. That was really the inspiration behind the creation of this podcast interviewing professionals like you who have done this successfully over and over again”
17:38 – “So from the very beginning it is about setting it up for success. Part of what we do also with the organizations when we do select them is we outline KPIs. So key performance indicators over those four years to determine what is reasonable growth and what is high growth. Because we want for there obviously to be reasonable growth, but we also want to shoot for the stars and make sure that we're going for high growth.”
19:54 – “And so our job at Greenlight is to ensure that they're learning the right lessons in those first two years that they're pivoting, that they're applying what we're learning and then helping them to figure out, now that we know what works in our market, how do we grow that? What are the partnerships, what are the public funding sources and what ways can we continue to elevate the local leader so that we are bringing in these opportunities to continue to grow the program.”
20:58 – “Building their solution to be sustainable is probably one of the biggest challenges facing the future success for nonprofits and impact-related organizations that have even some track record of success, a fact that their programs work. I've read countless stories in their, they're such a rollercoaster because they're amazing to learn about problem that they wanted to solve, the improvement they wanted to make in their community”
25:38 – “And I think that when we talk about our community, it's really centering on what they need and what they want. And I think those are two very different things. And so I think in particular as we think about the dignity of people who are using our programs, if we really center what they both need and want, we can deliver really infected programs with a transformative change.”

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What I talk about in this episode:

Why overhead is vilified
Why it really shouldn’t be
Why a higher overhead is a sign of progress
Where the focus really should be
How to position your performance to avoid this trap

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is why overhead is consistently vilified, or why it shouldn't be because it matters when it comes to scaling impact.

Now, overhead is everyone's favorite line item on the balance sheet to pick on, especially when it comes to nonprofits. The public and other people seem to have this impression that if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing or you're making the most of the dollars that are contributed towards you, and your overhead should be extremely low or near zero. For a whole multitude of reasons. This is just wildly impractical, and in my opinion, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what overhead represents.

Now, while we might not all love the fact that we have to have and manage overhead, it doesn't mean it isn't important. Your overhead is a key element of making sure that you have a strong team. If your overhead is being kept ridiculously low deliberately so then that is going to impact the strength of your team and what your team is capable of. I love the saying that goes if you want to go fast go alone and if you want to go far go together. The reason why I like that is because it really highlights the fact that you can't do this alone, and you can't remain ridiculously lean to the extent where it affects your performance. You need a strong team if you're going to have a strong team. That means your overhead is not going to be ridiculously low or near zero and people need to understand that.

But what I would recommend doing instead of focusing on overhead especially if people are trying to beat you up over that is to readjust their focus and reposition the conversation around impact. Right because I've heard these heartbreaking stories about nonprofit organizations who overhead has grown. And people have just kind of run with that as a story and then made them out to look like they were doing something they weren't supposed to be doing. When in reality their overhead was growing because their impact was scaling. And they were making significantly greater contributions over time. So the overhead played a key element in that but it was correlated to what was most important and that was the impact that they were generating. So if people are taking a closer look at your overhead and they really want to know why that number is growing or getting bigger, then I would encourage you to refocus them around where the performance really should be and why that overhead is going up because your impact is going up, ideally even faster. So that's what matters more than most and that should help you avoid this as a trap.

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What I talk about on this episode:

What jobs to be done is all about
How it works in practice
Why it’s important to drive innovation
The mistakes you make if you skip it
How your organization should use it
Read the book - Competing Against Luck

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a framework referred to as jobs to be done, and how learning more about it can help you with scaling impact.

Now the jobs to be done framework comes from an author by the name of Clayton Christensen and it's talked about in detail in his book that's called Competing Against Luck. Now, in this book, they talk quite a bit about how people ultimately decide to or not to make the kind of progress that they want to in their lives. That's kind of what you could consider to be a high level description of the jobs to be done framework is all about. It tries to put the emphasis on figuring out how people are determining whether to use or not use certain products in their lives. And it puts it in this context of what job are you hiring that product to do. And if you think about it from this perspective, I think it immediately might seem a little bit confusing but in reality, when you think about the products you use in your lives or whatever it is your laptop, your car, you may or may not have had pair of headphones, I'm just looking around at some of the stuff that I have on my desk here I'm holding a pen, right the two different products that we use, we use them for specific purposes. And that's the point of this framework is to figure out why people ultimately decide to use certain products and also put into context any of the other products they have decided not to use instead of that product. And that's what jobs to be done is all about.

So this framework can be particularly helpful for you to get a better understanding in who it is you're looking to learn more about so that you can figure out which problems they have that you can help them with right and if we put this through the context of what your organization is likely trying to do in scaling impact. If you're, for example, nonprofit organization, you can think of this, you can leverage the jobs to be done framework to figure out how to best scale impact by first getting a better understanding and who you want to help. That's the place to start. Once we know who that is, right? Maybe that's your nonprofit program client. Maybe that's the members of your organization, whomever it is, we need to be specific about that. Right? Because we need to be talking to the same type of person, as we're figuring out how to leverage this framework to figure out how to scale impact now if we're focused on your nonprofit program, clients might be figuring out how to help them more with whatever the mission is of your organization, like ending asset poverty or helping cure education problems and things like that. If we're focused on your team, it might be around how to enable them to increase their leverage so that they can help more of your clients, right? Maybe we're talking about getting them time back, or enabling them to do more with less, whatever it is, right? Those might be some of your high level objectives. But once you figure it out who you want to help, now you start leveraging this as a framework. By spending time with those individuals and focus on something called storyboarding. That's where you learn all the things of unrelated to what it is is going on at the moment in this individual's life as it pertains to the particular topic or problem that you ultimately want to help them with and that problem is either going to be a major issue or minor issue or somewhere in between for them. But you're only going to get the context that you need by interviewing them, and better understanding the kind of impact that problem may be having on their life. Then once you're talking to them about that you can learn more about how they're trying to solve that problem today. Is to help them improve, right and there's a lot more about this framework that helps you understand how to leverage it in order to continue to pursue investing in some of these innovative strategies.

And in particular, because it's what we talk about on this show different ways to help your organization with scaling impact. This is a more advanced product concept, or strategy, but I want to share it with you because if you want to dive in further and learn more about it, I've got resources to share with you there as well too. It can be particularly helpful in establishing the right mindset, which will help your organization think through how to leverage different tools and resources for scaling impact more effectively. It really prevents a number of different problems which might arise if you don't have a framework like this to guide you. Like for example, building a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. We see that a lot in the product world. So if you just start with whatever it is your idea to try to solve because you think that problem may be out there if you're not in the target market and you haven't done this discovery work and you haven't done the storyboarding, then you're probably likely to miss and if you miss, you might invest a lot of time and money into a project which ultimately doesn't deliver the results that you're looking for, as an organization. So if you want to learn more about the jobs to be done framework, and I'd highly encourage that you do so if you're trying to scale impact your nonprofit organization, get a copy of Clayton Christensen's book called Competing Against Luck.

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What I talk about in this episode:

What storyboarding is all about
The purpose of storyboarding
Why you need to know this level of detail
How to get started at your organization
When you’ll know you’ve found an opportunity

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey Everyone, Sean here and today, what I want to talk to you more about is a concept called storyboarding and why it's so important to do well, in order to give your organization the best opportunity to scale impact.

Now the concept of storyboarding, for me comes up when I'm thinking about a topic related to what's called jobs theory, which is another concept you can use. That is helpful for figuring out how to leverage products and particular software products. In order to scale impact. Jobs theory focuses on this concept of better understanding what job the person that you're trying to help is trying to solve, in order for their problem to be resolved. Now storyboarding plays an important element in leveraging jobs theory to achieve success by using different types of products. And that product can be virtual. It can be software and technology in this case, as as is often a lot of the work that I do to help nonprofit organizations with scaling impact. And storyboarding is a concept of really getting to understand that person very well, and what's going on in their life, to better understand anything that might be standing in the way of them leveraging a new product or a solution in order to help solve their problem, which should be related to the impact that your organization is trying to drive.

Storyboarding is a concept is really figuring out everything that's going on in said individual's life, so that you have a better understanding and what might be standing in their way of leveraging certain solutions. And you can also figure out where there are genuine opportunities for you to take advantage of by helping them in a way that they may not be actively searching for a solution themselves. Some of those instances they have problems where they don't have solutions. Other instances they have problems where they do have solutions, but those solutions are falling short. And you need to know as much as you can about this in order to figure out how to best help them and how to scale impact. So storyboarding is concept of figuring out how to be able to tell from start to finish, everything that's going on in the individual's life that you need to know in order to figure out what they're doing before, during and after. When they're experiencing whatever problem is you're intending to help them solve. That's because there might be something standing in the way of them ultimately leveraging a solution you may want to provide. And if you don't have that context, they'll be prevented from being able to leverage your solution and benefit from the value you're trying to provide for them.

I'll give you an example. If you'd like to provide some form of tech solution to let's say, some of your nonprofit program clients, and it's only available on a workstation or a laptop or a desktop computer. But your nonprofit clients don't have access to a desktop or a laptop computer they're never going to be able to use your solution. So that's a barrier to them to be able to leverage your product and get the value out of it. Regardless of how well it might ultimately solve their problem. If they can't access it, then that's going to prevent them from being able to use it. That's why in a lot of work that we do, were quite a bit of our nonprofit program clients that don't have access to workstations. We leverage mobile solutions because many of them do have access to cell phones or smartphone technology. As such, we can make products work on that platform. To be able to ensure that more of our clients are able to access that as a digital solution. So this is something that would come up if you were performing storyboarding, where you're asking them all these questions about what they're doing before, during and after, whenever they're experiencing a certain problem. So that you know everything you need to know about what type of experience that you're trying to create for them. And that word experience is very important when leveraged in this context, because it's thought of as something that's comprehensive, right? And it's all encompassing. It's not just a product that I flip on like a switch and I use for a period of time and then you flip it off. That might be how your nonprofit program client ultimately uses your product. But what happens before that and after that is very important. And storyboarding helps you capture that.

So I want you to dive a little bit deeper into this as a concept and learn it really well because it's going to be very important for figuring out how to scale impact if you only have a piece of the story, then you may be missing a lot of context, which is going to prevent you from having the success that you want and being able to reach the kind of scale and impact that's going to be important for your organization to be successful in helping your clients or your team or whomever it is you'd like to help with what you're trying to solve.

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Lindajoy Jackson is the Director of Business at Hopeworks and has a demonstrated history of working in the government administration industry.

LindaJoy is skilled in Coaching, Management, Leadership, Risk Management, Strategic Planning, and Business Development. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

What an antipoverty organization does.
The opportunities having tech knowledge gives you.
How to measurably drive the impact an organization is having.
What it means to scale impact.
The implications of scaling impact.
How to leverage technology and software to reach a wider audience.
What being trauma-informed means and why it’s important.

Resources:

Hopeworks
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connect with Lindajoy Jackson:

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables

2:36 - “If you’re between the ages of 17 and 26 those are our only parameters for joining the program 99 percent are unemployed and making 400 dollars or less a year the goal is to get them into a stable living wage or above job so for us on average people are making 43 thousand dollars a year when they come out.”
4:39 - “You don’t necessarily need a postsecondary degree or anything like that to get into the field so that’s a great place that entry-level tech space we know that people can make a good salary and then with some soft skills as well as actual some actual tech skills that can really open up a door for them where not only can they get in at a really great place there’s also a tremendous amount of growth that they can have in their careers as well.”
12:02 - “For impact I think a huge piece is being able to serve more people when we talk about scaling so that means our physical facilities have to be different we have to have more space.”
23:42 - “It’s so easy to keep moving a million miles an hour sometimes we can forget how important it is to just take a step back and take a breath and hear somebody out in terms of how’s everything going, everybody's so focused on pushing and moving forward but if you don't take that time and take those necessary precautions then that can set up some form of failure or setback at a later date which you could have prevented.”
24:42 - If you had had a brief conversation and someone just said I need two days off to deal with this you could have avoided turnover or whatever that might be and what we have found is that it has made us more successful not less successful, our numbers are getting better and better as we turn into a trauma-informed organization impact, success, KPIs went up.”

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On this episode I talk about:

What product management is
How nonprofit organizations can leverage product management
The skills that make a good product manager
How to upskill your team into the role
What to have them work on to maximize impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you more about his the work that I do and how you can leverage it and your organization to scale impact and what I mean by that is product management.

Now, you may have heard this phrase before, you may be somewhat familiar with this role, or you may have never heard of anything even somewhat related to it and that's okay. This episode is intended to explain to you more about what product management is and how at your nonprofit organization you can leverage the skills of a product manager, both from any of the team members you already have or someone you can potentially add to the team at a future date in order to greater scale impact at your organization.

So if you're unfamiliar with product management, it often gets confused with more common terminology like project management or a project manager. And it's slightly different than that, but I usually try to explain things whenever I can in the context of another familiar concept that people are aware of like project management, for example. So I'll start there. If you've heard of Project Management before, you're probably somewhat familiar with what goes into managing a project, right? There might be timelines and might be people that might be setting the goals and measuring progress against them that might include managing budgets as well also, everything of and related to that project and the project can really include anything. It doesn't really matter what it is from building anything somewhat tech related to building houses or working on a project at your organization, right, whatever that is. A project manager can oftentimes help you with keeping everything organized and making that progress that you would like to now the way that I like to kind of describe what product management is, is I'm going to I'm going to compare it to your project manager.

Now whereas a project manager is keeping track of all those things that I mentioned before, the difference between that and a product manager that I would say as a product manager is often doing so exclusively with some type of physical or virtual product. Now in my world, it's mainly these virtual and digital products. So that means software and technology. So when I say that that might be a website, that might be an application, that application can be web based, that application can be mobile, whatever it is, most of the work done in product management is affiliated with managing an application. So a digital product that is either accessible via a web browser or a mobile device that has a specific purpose.

Now these products you can consider to be essentially almost anything like an app on your phone, like Gmail, for example that you might use to access email to a website application that you might use as well to like Google Documents. For example. Any of these examples these are all considered, quote unquote products. Even though they are digital, they're not physical. They're considered products and product managers organize the efforts related to some of the project management responsibilities, but specifically for these products, as in, they will be managing, basically what features and capabilities to these digital products have today? And what should they have in the future in order to be better for whomever uses them, right? And that's usually the target market customer or the user. In this case, product managers are going out and they're interacting with his target market user to better understand what the needs are that they have that are currently unmet. Then they figure out how do we get functionality built into those products to better address those needs, and solve any of those problems or challenges that those users have.

So product management and how it relates to your world, which is likely related to running a nonprofit organization. Scaling impact, or having some type of mission driven or social impact objective. Product Management can help in all of these areas by figuring out how your organization can leverage technology and software in order to greater drive impact at scale. Because technology and software are so good at figuring out how to do what you want to do faster, more cost effectively. All of those types of things. What a product manager can likely help you do is figure out how to leverage those tools and resources to make even greater impact in a shorter period of time. So that's what I want you to walk away with from this perspective in terms of really being inspired and thinking about how a product manager or someone with product management skills can help your organization greater drive and scale impact.

Now, last thing I'll say before I wrap up this episode is that oftentimes you don't necessarily need to go looking externally for this kind of stuff. This is the help that I provide to nonprofit organizations. And if you have any questions, you're more than welcome to always reach out to me and just ask them because I love interacting with folks that want to know more about this topic because I'm very passionate about it myself. But chances are you've had members of your organization that have some maybe even all of these skills already. They just aren't really doing this work or they aren't being referred to in this way. That is an area of opportunity I look for on a regular basis. When I work with nonprofit organizations. I try to figure out who has the capability and or the desire to want to complete this role as a function and is interested in getting better at that moving forward. Then we work on training, and I provide customized training for set individuals so they can kind of step up into that role. Whereas in the beginning, I might. I might do most of the work for me and my team at most of the work, but they're learning along the way. And the idea is for them to ultimately replace us stand up into that product management role. We might do more of a product strategy role, which is something I'll talk about in a future episode.

So for now, I just want you to get comfortable and familiar with that as a role. That being product management and thinking through the exciting ways in which someone on your team with those skills can help you better drive and create impact at scale.

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On this episode I talk about:

How to generate revenue by solving your own problem
Performing discovery with future customers
Figuring out what to actually build
How to iterate quickly and cost effectively
Continuing to make the product better from there

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone Sean here and on today's episode, what I want to walk you through is a real world example of generating revenue by building a product that solves the problem that you or your organization has.

Now, I've talked about this in a previous episode on I want to walk you through as a real world example. So one of my clients they had a need to want to scale impact by first enrolling as many clients as they could into their process, many more than they had before. Probably a multiple, which is usually what I recommend when we're talking about setting scaling impact level goals. We want to aim for doubling or more as opposed to increasing by something conservatively like 10 or 20%. That helps us think differently, and leverage different resources and strategy to try to reach a much more aggressive goal, which in turn should really help you with scaling impact.

So in this one example, what we did was we built an enrollment portal to help them move their enrollment process from offline running in person events to online which was much more cost effective, required a lot less time and removed any restrictions, any geographical boundaries that they had in place before. Now they could enroll clients from anywhere as long as they could reach them. Now the results of that were pretty dramatic. What we're able to do was increase their enrollment by greater than 300% in less than half the time. So their team was over the moon about these results, and I was too that was the objective. That's what we were trying to do and we did it which was very exciting.

Now what I want to talk about is in this instance, now they experienced that dramatic improvement, which is fantastic. But and sometimes when you invest in a project like this or you build a product to solve your own problem, more than likely, other organizations like you have the same problem and can't find that solution anywhere or are trying to cobble together something to provide a better solution than what they have available today. But it's still not great. as such. If you've built something that solves that problem for them, they're going to want to have access to it as well too. So as opposed to thinking through building something like this to help you with improving operational efficiency or scaling impact, like I just described, it can do even more than that. And what I mean by that is if you provide this solution to these other organizations like you, they're more than likely to want to use it and also pay for it because it solves an important problem that they have. And that's how this turns out to generate revenue. And that's what we're doing right now. We're taking that enrollment portal, my client and we're moving it from just them using it to making it available for the rest of the world to use as well too. So we are building it so that other organizations like them can have access to it. And they're ultimately going to be paying for using it because it's going to be solving an important problem for them.

Now this opens up another entire world of possibilities, because this product is going to be able to be revenue generating now that what we're seeing potentially as maybe an operational efficiency improvement and treated somewhat as an expense is now much more so of an investment. Right? It's helping them scale impact dramatically. And now it's going to start generating revenue for them as well, which is going to become a funding source that they're going to have control over which is going to enable them to continue to even scale impacted even greater levels, which is super exciting. So now this will continue to pay dividends over time as this becomes a funding source of in itself.

So I want to talk about some of the technical things you can do if you find yourself wanting to invest in a project like this or if you have a product and other organizations are asking you questions about whether or not they can get access to it. You want to perform discovery with these organizations as well to to better understand the context and everything around the problems and challenges they have, which are probably related to yours but might have some slight differences. And that might impact what you build into this product when it's ready for the rest of the world to use as well to you're gonna figure out which tools you might need to integrate, which workflows that are going to be important to capture and more importantly, where to start so that you can start small and don't have to build something big and complicated and expensive. That takes a lot of time in order to get it in their hands as quickly as possible, so that you can start generating revenue sooner rather than later. And then after you've made it to and through this phase, you can continue to make that product experience better by performing discovery with the users better understanding how well it's solving the problems currently, and what other problems they can solve next.

Because remember, the bottleneck doesn't disappear. It just moves so as you help them alleviate one part of their process. They're going to want to help with you helping them solve the next part of that process.

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On this episode I talk about:

Focusing on impact
Performing your own discovery
Bringing a solution to market
Measuring the results
Sellng it to others like you

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is the advantages of focusing on solving your own problem when it comes to scaling impact and leveraging technology and software in order to do it.

Now it can be tricky to achieve product success and I talk a lot about that on this show. But leveraged appropriately software and technology can really help you scale impact at an entirely different level than you may have before. If you've been leveraging people or mainly services.

In order to take full advantage of what software and digital products are capable of. You really need to have a tight value proposition as you need to know what specific problem you're solving or which specific target market and how that solution is better than however they were trying to solve those problems today. I talk a lot about that, but in this particular instance, I'm referring to this as a sort of design pattern, which is common terminology you'll hear about if you're ever reading up on much in terms of product development or software engineering. It's essentially a pattern in which to follow where you're trying to solve a particular common problem. There oftentimes becomes a pattern that becomes developed that many can use and replicate in their own projects in order to prevent themselves from having to kind of reinvent the wheel when they have to solve a similar problem so it can speed up the progress terms of what it is you're trying to accomplish.

This case I want to talk about the advantages of solving your own problem. Now if you want to leverage this strategy the way you should do it is you should first figure out how you can do so in order to maximize your impact, right, because that's the number one objective.

Once you know that, you can perform the discovery that I've been talking about, but you can perform it within your own organization as opposed to needing to get access to anyone external to your organization. You could perform it with your own team and figure out what is slowing them down what are the biggest problems and challenges they are having in order to try to provide the kind of impact that you would like to to your clients, your nonprofit program clients.

The results of this discovery should yield an opportunity for you to bring a better or an improved solution to market when compared with however your team is going about solving those problems today. So you may be able to find where they're losing most of their time or what challenge is standing in the way of them making even more progress presenting to you the opportunity in this case.

Now, after you have identified how you would like to solve that problem in a better way with a form of a software or a digital product. You can build and bring that solution to market and then measure the results. Did it ultimately achieve what you had set out to achieve? If so, that's fantastic. And now you can look for other areas where you can expand the reach of this value proposition to others that might need it. One great example of that is other organizations like yours, more than likely, if you found a problem within your own organization, chances are high that in other organizations like yours, they have the same problem. They also are more than likely leveraging a similar existing solution, meaning that there's an opportunity to sell to them as well. So this means that what might initially feel like an expense because you're investing in building something, but for your own team, in terms of helping you become what you might consider to be only operationally more efficient, which is still most of the time a worthwhile investment depending on the numbers and how big of a benefit you're going to get. What you ultimately find out is if you stumble upon something that is also a problem for others, like you as well, too. You can take what you built, turn it around and start selling it to other organizations like yours, giving you the opportunity to turn what you might have thought of as an expense into more of an investment because now you can start generating revenue from it as you are selling that solution to others as well to so you can get a even more significant return than just the operational efficiency improvement. You can also bring in revenue and create an entire revenue stream from this. That revenue can then be reinvested back into your program as a funding source. to again help you greater scale impact.

So there's a lot of benefits to solving your own problem. I wanted to kind of reiterate that process. And in a future episode potentially. Tomorrow I'm going to talk more about an example of where I've leveraged this design pattern in order to help a nonprofit client of mine better scale impact and go from operational efficiency improvement to start generating revenue for their organization, giving them the opportunity to reinvest it back into the programs and continue scaling impact.

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On this episode I talk about:

What the 'problem worth solving' framework is all about
How I followed the process to find a real problem worth solving
The target market we selected for discovery (and why)
What the results of each step look like in practice
What to do after you find a problem worth solving

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here. Today what I want to talk to you about is a real world example of the episode I've recorded and shared yesterday, called problems worth solving. And in that episode, I walked you through how to identify a problem worth solving. Today I'm going to talk you through a real world example where I've used that framework in order to identify one.

So if you haven't listened to that previous episode, and you don't know what I mean, when I refer to problem solving, go back and listen to that episode first, because this one will make a lot more sense. Okay, so we talked about the framework Right? Which is starting with a target market, talking to them about their problems and challenges, better understanding how they're solving those problems and challenges today are what I refer to as the existing solution, and then getting a better handle for the impact of that problem or challenge in terms of what is it costing said individual? And as such, having context around all of the answers to those questions, gives us a better idea to be able to understand whether or not there's enough opportunity there. It makes sense for us to invest in a solution to improve the value that the target market customer or user or client is ultimately going to get, meaning that we can move the needle and scale impact with a solution like that before we invest big time and money building something. So that's an overview of the process.

This example that I'm gonna share with you comes from the nonprofit client that I worked with to help scale impact. Ultimately, we built a software application to specifically address the challenge that we found with a specific target market. In this case, it was their non profit program clients, it was the clients that were enrolling in their program and the value or a specific challenge that they clients were experiencing. When they were trying to get the value out of the program.

Now in this case, the program was to help them build essentially financial assets and wealth to help pull themselves out of poverty and help an underrepresented population that struggles with challenges related to the clients in the program. When people are enrolled into the program and do well in it and they graduate from it, they've been able to make pretty dramatic transformation. So the value is definitely there. However, there are issues related to under utilization and people getting to and through the program in particular. So then my nonprofit client wanted to specifically see what they could do about understanding the challenges that the clients themselves were having, so that we could figure out what we may be able to do to scale impact for them. So I invested in performing discovery with the nonprofit program clients, which translated to one on one conversations with them so I can better understand the challenges and I could go through the discovery process with them.

Ultimately, what I found out when doing so was that one of their biggest challenges was related to not having enough time with their coaches. Now this program that they're enrolled in, it requires them to meet with and spend time with financial coaches so they can learn more about how they can build a better financial future for themselves by improving their credit, paying down debt. Learning about all these things, to the time with the coaches was very valuable to them. The problem was they weren't getting enough of it. And that started to lead me down a path of understanding what the impact of this challenge was related to them sometimes losing focus and losing progress in the program and sometimes becoming disengaged, ultimately leading to clients dropping out of the program, which is the worst case scenario, when we're talking about this particular program. So this problem had real negative impact associated with it.

The next thing to do was to talk more about the existing solution, how are they solving this problem today? Well as it turns out, the clients were simply waiting for their next touch point with their coaches. However, the problem here was that the coaches were overwhelmed, and they were unable to spend a lot of time with each client. So the meetings were happening rather infrequently. So the meetings may only happen every three months or so, which meant that there was a lot of time in between the meetings between the clients and coaches. So the clients would have these situations where they could really use the guidance of the coaches or they wanted to ask a quick question of the coach, because they might be, you know, signing up for a loan on bad terms or putting something on credit, purchasing something that maybe more like an impulse purchase that they didn't really need but wanted in the moment, but they, you know, had those moments that we all do and they ultimately made a financial decision without the guidance of their coach which set them back in their program. So this also spoke to the impact but ultimately, the existing solution gave me a better idea for what the level of performance was for how they were trying to solve that problem today, and they were just waiting for the next meeting, which was not catching all these instances in between where they could lose progress. They can become demotivated, they can forget about all the positive momentum that they had already made. And that would ultimately lead to them becoming disengaged, and for some of them dropping out the program.

So plenty of negative impact here, and plenty of opportunity to improve so that I wanted to share that with you because that's a real world example of ultimately what we invested in from a discovery perspective, in order to better understand whether or not there was a problem worth solving here, and we believe that there was so ultimately we moved forward to building a product to solve this problem. And I'm gonna talk about what that was in a future episode probably tomorrow. So stay tuned if you want to listen to the next installment in this series where I'll walk you through, ultimately what we did and the product that we brought to market to help these clients with this problem and provide them with a better solution.

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On this episode I share:

What is a 'Problem Worth Solving'
How to identify problems worth solving
Why validating the problem is so important
The process to build to get these answers
The questions to ask to validate your problem

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a concept that I've mentioned on the show before that I refer to as identifying problems worth solving.

Now, when I say problems worth solving, what I mean is looking for the best area of opportunity for which it makes sense for your organization to invest in a product solution. And if you found what I refer to is a problem worth solving, then it will make sense to make this investment, otherwise you might not be able to achieve the results that you're ultimately looking for.

So why is it so important to find what I refer to as problems worth solving? Well, I'm going to start start by defining essentially what it is and to me it's something that is going to give you the kind of potential to achieve the product success that you're looking for. And it's so important to identify one before you start building solutions because if you haven't already done this, then your product solution or however you're trying to innovate is unlikely to offer to your clients, or whomever you're building that solution for the kind of value that you think it will. And it's instead probably not going to be very successful. There's a lot of that out in the product world. Many organizations that have invested in technology and software, especially from a customer perspective, have struggled to gain the kind of traction that they would like to because they underestimated this step in the process. So this is a really important element of figuring out how to get a product off the ground.

So how do you identify a problem worth solving? Well, I've developed a process over a series of years of investing further and researching in pretty great detail, product strategy, product research, product management, all of these concepts. I've read all the books, and I've done a lot of the testing in building product companies of my own. That's how I know in terms of what I've done, what works and what doesn't work, so I can kind of shortcut the process for you and instead share my system that has worked pretty consistently as I've done this for other nonprofit organizations potentially like yours. And the first step of the process to identify who we're looking to help. You need to have a pretty specific, as I refer to it, target market in terms of who you want to interview. That's because different groups of people or different users are likely to have different problems. So the more consistent you can make that the better. And I'm going to share a mini example in this episode, but a more detailed, thorough example for how I followed this process to identify an area of opportunity for which we've built a successful product for a nonprofit client of mine that is helping them scale impact.

In this case, let's assume you want to help your clients or clients that are the members of your nonprofit program. So if you have access to a number of them, that are interested in meeting with you, what you can do is you can interview them and invest in the part of the process that I refer to as customer discovery, which is a one on one conversation to better understand what a day in the life is like for them so that you can better understand their problems and challenges and look for areas of opportunity to potentially invest in a future product and help scale impact by solving some of their top problems and challenges. And that's the first step in the process as you're interviewing them. You want to understand what are their current challenges, what is slowing down the kind of progress that they would like to make what's standing in the way of them being more successful in whatever it is they'd like to do. That's a great place to begin the conversation and then as you identify areas that you believe you may be able to help them because some you may be able to help them some maybe not yet. You really want to focus on the ones that you think are closest to the type of value you're attempting to provide for them or where you're looking to help them the most.

As you understand that the next series of questions and the next section of this conversation should focus on. What I've talked about on the show before is the existing solutions. And when I say that what I mean is, how are they going about solving whatever that problem is they just mentioned to you today. That's very important, because that's what's going to be that's what you will be compared against if you're thinking of proposing a unique solution different than however they're solving that problem currently. And that's also what you're going to need to be able to be as it needs to be faster, cheaper, easier to use whatever it is, you need to figure out how to be better than however they're doing it today. Otherwise, they're not going to use your solution. That's another mistake. That's often made by nonprofit organizations trying to scale impact with products you need to understand that very well. So that's the second series of questions and related to that section of the conversation.

The third is what is the level of performance. So if they have a form of an existing solution to try to solve whatever it is their top problem or the one that you'd like to help solve for them, how well is however they're solving that today working for them. And then try to break this down as much as you can into something tangible that you can measure. So whatever that problem is, out of 10 times in which they experience it. How many times does the existing solution or however they're solving that today? How many times out of that 10 doesn't solve the problem, right? Is it solving it? Seven or eight times out of 10? Or is it solving it two or three times out of 10? This gives you a great perspective for how effective that current solution is that existing solution is. And again, that's another great baseline for you to compare your solution to terms of if you are deciding whether or not to build a solution to this problem in particular.

From there, it's all about better understanding the area of opportunity to innovate, as I refer to it at times as well too. And some of this data will provide you with some of that insight if the existing solution is rather ineffective. And those numbers are on the lower end than the strength or the area of opportunity to innovate. Here's probably going to be higher, as will your clients interest in trying to solve that problem in a different more unique way. And this is what we've done it for a nonprofit organization in terms of building them an application to help them with what is a financial coaching program. And I'm gonna talk about that in greater detail in a future episode, but you can for now focus on this as a system and consider running a series of interviews that I refer to as customer discovery with whomever it is you'd like to build a potential solution for. In this case, let's assume that your nonprofit clients to better understand the problems and challenges they have today, how they're solving them today, and how effective that current is so that you can get a better understanding before you invest. Too much in any form of a solution. What the area of opportunity is and what that looks like in terms of what type of potential you can expect from a potential solution that you might offer your clients to solve this problem.

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On this episode I talk about:

What the 'existing solution' is all about
Why it's so important for you to understand it well
How to uncover the existing solution in discovery
An example of a non-obvious existing solution
How to get started with discovery

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I'm going to talk to you about is a concept that I refer to as the existing solution and why it's important for you to beat that in order to figure out how to be successful with products when it comes to scaling impact.

Now, over time, I've developed a framework for figuring out how to go from zero all the way to and through a successfully implemented product that helps you scale impact. There's a number of steps along the way, but the important part of the process, when you're starting there, is to make sure you're investing in what I refer to as customer discovery. Now, when you're investing in customer discovery, that's when you're meeting with your clients or your team members or other organizations like yours, or whomever it is you would like to solve a problem when you're meeting with them. You need to learn more about what their problems are, how those problems are impacting their current daily lives and routine, what's the pain, what is the impact of those problems for your target market users.

The next step goes into what I refer to is the existing solution. Now the existing solution in this case is whatever they're doing today to currently solve that problem, regardless of how effective that solution may be, and that is a really key element to this as well, too. So as you're doing this discovery you're gonna get to this point where you stumbled upon a problem that's causing a certain amount of pain or causing a certain amount of impact, negative impact, and you're going to be considering proposing a solution to resolve some of that impact, ideally, as much of it as possible. But in terms of figuring out what type of potential the solution that you're proposing is ultimately going to have you need to better understand that the existing solution or how they are trying to solve that problem today.

I'll give you an example to make it easier to understand. Most of us are probably familiar with the tax preparation software called TurboTax. It was built by a company called Intuit who makes a number of different software products related to finance and accounting, but I'm going to focus on TurboTax in this case. Now, you may have seen or heard of this story before, but when the folks that were involved with building TurboTax in the beginning, are telling the story from a product management perspective, in terms of how they came up with the solution and ultimately why the feel the product has been so successful. They credited to what they were comparing it against in terms of the existing solution for their users at the time and inevitably when they're telling this story. They ask the question to an audience or whomever they're presenting it to. And they ask, essentially, the simple question of what was TurboTax competing against at the time to kind of see what kind of answers they get. Inevitably the answers they usually get or some other type of defunct software product e-file this and e-file that which is usually some obscure reference to what is now a defunct software product that didn't go the distance. And the punchline here, seemingly, almost underwhelming is that it was pen and paper. What TurboTax was competing against at the time was pen and paper. The reason why they were competing against that was because the vast majority of people at the time, were filling out returns by hand.

So TurboTax didn't need to compete against anyone else trying to either solve the same problems or try to solve this problem with software. They knew that they were competing against people filling out returns manually by hand. And that's what they needed to be better than and that perspective was really important. And it's often lost on people trying to scale impact with products or software. Because what they're not understanding is the hoops that folks are going to have to jump through or the habits that they're going to need to form in order to be able to pick up their solution and use it consistently to get that kind of value that you think it can provide.

So I wanted to talk about this as a concept. It is a very important one. When you're investing in discovery when you're trying to find what I call problems worth solving. You really need to be laser focused and better understand everything about whoever it is you're building for what is going on in their life in terms of how are they currently solving that problem today, and that could be for your clients. That could be for people that work on your team that could be for other organizations, whomever it is, you're building for it you need to really understand very well how it is they're trying to solve that problem today, in order to evaluate the kind of potential and opportunity your proposed solution may have as well as what is the likelihood that it is ultimately going to succeed because you'll be able to measure the difference between how significantly different they doing it today is between how you are proposing they may do it in the future by leveraging your product solution.

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What I talk about in this episode:

When services make sense
How they help you build great products
Finding new opportunities to offer services
Designing them to complement one another
How can you beat the existing solution

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is, when and why the service model makes sense, when you're intending to offer a solution to your market in order to help you scale impact.

Now, when I say service model, I'm talking about that as opposed to a product model where you'll find a lot of tech and software. People have a tendency to get very excited about the potential of leveraging technology and software in order to build a product that scales significantly in terms of what it is they're trying to do. The challenge with that is that unless you have a very proven model, it's very difficult to get the product model to work. So that's where a service has a lot of potential advantages and can even help you with the process of designing and building a successful product. So I want to talk about where it makes sense to offer a service. If you find what you think to be an opportunity to offer a solution to your market. A service is a great way to test it. Because if you're not sure, again, the rigidity of investing in more of a product until these things are well known is too high of a risk, and it can be very expensive rabbit hole in which to get lost.

The reason why the service model can be so attractive for this is because it's flexible. You can make changes to it even on the fly as you're figuring out how to get that value proposition right. So if you find an opportunity and you want to evaluate whether or not the there's potential there to create and offer value, and then to drive revenue, that you can reinvest in other ways to help scale impact service models is a great place to start.

Now I mentioned as well, that services can help you with the process of building successful products and what I mean by that is exactly what I just said that services can help you test value propositions on the earlier stage so that you can figure out which components of that can be built to scale in product format. So once you have a service that you know works, say it's delivered by the members of your team by following SOPs or standard operating procedures that you've built while you've been testing, how to offer the most value for your clients. As you figure out which components of that or perhaps the whole standard operating procedure that you built, are consistent and repeatable. Now you can make them scalable by investing in a product. So you're essentially doing some early stage validation by offering your solution as a service, in which you may ultimately then turn to a product to make it more scalable and to reach more people. So that's a great way to leverage services to help you build great products.

Now, if you're trying to figure out where can I take advantage of the service model how do I get started? Start looking for areas of opportunity of pain or challenges or frustration for your clients or other organizations like yours, and also perhaps even at your organization. If you have a problem or challenge internally that can be solved by developing a procedure. There's a there's a good to fair chance that other organizations like yours are going to have that challenge as well and need that as a solution. So as you're doing some discovery, you may find opportunities to offer services that provide value for what your organization has solved. I'll give you a quick example. So as we were building the enrollment portal for a nonprofit client of mine, which helped them enroll 300% more clients in less than half the time. Part of what we figured out that other organizations needed help with enrollment, and they were very interested in the enrollment portal. They also needed help marketing and advertising their program as in finding people to connect to their enrollment portal. Now this is something that wasn't built into the scope of the enrollment portal product, but we uncovered it as part of the discovery that we did. As such, we were able to develop a service to then offer that as a solution to the same market because they had that need, or we didn't build it in the product, because we weren't sure whether or not you're going to be able to get the value proposition right in terms of what we may be able to charge, how expensive it was for us to offer it the value that they ultimately get out of that as a service. So that's a great example of finding an opportunity that you can further explore with a service that at a later date. Once you figure some of these things out can also be built into the product experience.

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On this episode I discuss:

Pros and cons of services
Pros and cons of products
How do leverage the strengths of each
How to make them work together
How to get started

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is leveraging the strengths of both products and services in order to scale impact.

Now, I talk a lot about software and technology, but I don't want to underscore the importance of leveraging a service appropriately. That can also help you scale impact. Now, if you consider products and services, they have their respective strengths and weaknesses and what I want to talk about today is what each of those are and when it is appropriate to use the right one, in order for you to most effectively scale impact, because it's really not all one or the other. It's like anything that offers two primary options in a market. Oftentimes, one is going to be more appropriate than the other. I think the tricky thing to figure out is when to use each. So that's what I want to talk about.

People have a tendency to glorify the products that they can build, especially with software and tech, because they get very excited about their scalability potential and if you've ever built a service based business or run a service oriented nonprofit, that probably sounds very attractive to you because you know just how much effort, time, capital is required to run a service based business. However, on the other side, the attractive thing about software products and leveraging technology is they paint this picture of a world where you don't have to do all of that work, and you have to spend all of that money, but you can still get great results, potentially infinitely scalable results and that's a that is true to an extent, but it oftentimes doesn't play out like that much like a lot of things that we get excited about in theory vs practice, the reality is often different.

I want to talk about the pros and cons of each so that you can think through which one is appropriate for the problem that you want to solve. Now, let's start with services, and we're talking about services, they're great if the process isn't completely well understood, and very, very consistent. So if you need some flexibility in the execution of whatever it is you'd like to offer, services are going to be a more appropriate approach to that because there it's much more cost effective to be able to change or modify a service on the fly. That's why they're great for leveraging upfront when you don't know exactly the steps that can be repeated at scale with very little if any deviation, that will still be delivering a consistent experience from start to finish, or whoever you're creating it for. So that's where you want to leverage the strengths of a service. And you can offer service just like a product and you can bring in revenue to provide value. You can do all the kinds of things you can with a product, but it gives you the ability to start beginning what is that discovery effort to test what you might ultimately build into a product.

So lets talk about the pros and cons of the product approach. Now like I've already mentioned, products can be a lot more scalable, but they're very rigid and inflexible. When you build or invest in software or technology, it's actually quite difficult in order to change how they work from where you start. And people don't really take that into consideration when they're thinking through building software or technology products. So if you don't have a very consistent experience that has already been tested, and that you know will continue to be successful at scale, then you're not ready for a product. But once you have accomplished that, and one of the best ways to test that is by starting with the service. Now you can start leveraging the real strengths and power that a product can provide for you by investing more in software and technology to scale that solution even further.

So that's also how I want you to think of where to start and how to move forward from it in order to reach more people and scale impact. Ideally, in most instances, especially if you're starting with something new. I want you to start with a service leverage its strengths to really refine the process, measure the impact of the whole experience. Then you can leverage the product strengths in order to reach more success at scale.

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On this episode I talk about:

What your organization needs to own
What your product development partner should own
Owning the client relationship
Prioritizing what to build
How you work together to scale impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is how to develop an effective relationship with your development partner.

Now, when I say development in this case, what I mean is product development or software development and the understanding is, at this point, you've decided that in order for your organization to better scale impact, you're going to invest in software and technology and you're planning to build something which is great. The question is, what precisely is it that your development partner is going to own? And then what are you going to own in terms of making this relationship work so that you can scale impact for your clients and customers?

I'm going to break it down into a couple of different categories. And this is very relevant or timely because I'm going through this right now with a client of mine. They are trying to upgrade a product that they have and make it offer even more value for their clients and customers. Their product is a little bit dated, so there's quite a bit that needs to be done and it serves quite a large population of clients. So it's a pretty significant undertaking and as such, they need a development partner, and I'm helping them figure out how to effectively establish that relationship so that they can successfully accomplish their goals. and make progress towards their ultimate vision, and better understand who's expected to own what in order to make that relationship work.

The conversations that we're having relate to questions like and topics like the what, the why the how and the when, in terms of what it is we want to do. Now the what you can really think of in terms of what it is we want to build. What do we want to add to the product or fix in the product from its previous version? The why is the validation criteria to better understand which of the category of the what in terms of the things we're considering building really should be built? Because we've got validation that says that those are going to offer value if we prioritize them. The how and the when is more related to how are we actually going to build it, who's going to put the technical pieces together to bring it to life? And the when is another priority component terms of if that will happen now or is that going to happen in the future? Right? How do we prioritize from there?

So a good way to think about this is that you as an organization, are going to need to own the what and the why. The development partner on the other hand, is expected to own the how especially and will help you put together the picture of the when. Now, the what is something that you should be owning in terms of having conversations internally with your team and gathering this data from your clients and customers. If you have strong relationships with them and you're better understanding what they need help with, and combine that with your vision for scaling impact, then that should materialize into the what components in terms of what it is we want to build.

Now in order to validate the what and make sure that we're not just picking things that may or may not offer our clients value. You need the why component and you should be owning that as well. The why comes from those relationships with your clients and customers. You need a process that I call customer discovery but you need a process for getting this data from your clients and customers to validate the what in terms of basically what should we prioritize out of this list? How do we order this and get a better understanding of how much value it's going to offer to our clients.

Now on the other hand, once you've done that work, you're ready to establish the relationship and potentially move forward with the development partner, someone who can bring this product to life for you. They are going to provide expertise which will help you better understand how they're going to be able to do it and what's required there from a technical perspective, but they'll also help you better understand the when. Because you may have multiple things you're considering building and you're trying to determine which one to build and when the why component will help you validate what's going to offer the most value to your clients and that additional input that your development partner can provide you with in terms of basically how heavy of a lift is it going to be to build any one of those things? What's that going to cost? How much time is going to take? They can help you get that kind of data which can help you better understand what type of project are you looking for and as such, what should you prioritize now, so I wanted to share that with you because they're working through figuring that out and I've helped a number of different organizations, try to figure out this right balance. That's what it should be at your organization.

You should own the what and the why. Relationships with your clients, protecting their interest, and making sure that what's being prioritized is getting you closer to realizing your vision. Your product development partner, when operating in optimal fashion and being a good partner will help you with the how and the when.

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What I talk about in this episode:

Measuring impact vs output
A great example from CEO of Philabundance Loree Jones Brown
The difference between measuring tea bags and potatoes
Focusing on what really matters
How to know whether or not you're really measuring impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is are you measuring what matters now when I say that what I mean is, are you actually measuring impact? Or are you measuring something more closely related to output?

Now I was at an event last night, which was a panel and on it hosted Loree Jones Brown who is the CEO of a nonprofit organization called Philabundance and one of the questions I was asked was related to this topic, and it was, essentially how to make sure you're measuring what matters and Loree gave what I think is an excellent answer on the topic and I'll paraphrase for you, but she gave an example in terms of what their organization does, which is works diligently to try to cure the hunger challenges facing the world over especially from underrepresented populations. They've done incredible work as they've grown. They're local to my area in terms of their headquarters, which is in the Philadelphia area that they serve over 135,000 people per week, and they moved more than 52 million pounds of food in the year 2021, which is just remarkable. That's so impressive in terms of the results that she phrased her answer related to measuring in relation to weight. As in when she was talking with one of her directors about this problem in particular in terms of what are they measuring what's important. They were on the topic of the weight between the different things that they might measure that they could provide, you know, a lot more tea bags was the example she gave, as opposed to potatoes or canned vegetables, because canned vegetables and potatoes are a lot heavier. If we're focusing on the weight of the products, then that is there's a disparity there. Right as in, we can reach a heavier weight with less potatoes or canned vegetables, then we can with other food products, which might be lighter, but we can ship more of those so to speak.

So when she talked about this, she really underscored the fact that if you're not focused on the right metric here, it can blur the lines between measuring output and versus measuring impact. Right. So she really highlighted and underscored the importance of making sure that you are measuring impact and relative to how it is impacting and affecting your clients or the beneficiaries of your program and that's what I want to kind of leave you with is to make sure you're always measuring the impact but make sure you're measuring it through the lens of your client and what matters most to them. Because that's ultimately what your mission is right? So if you're measuring something somewhat unrelated, or indirectly related to what ultimately matters most to them, then you're probably not measuring the right thing. You're probably not measuring impact. At least you're not measuring it as best as you could. Right.

So try to refocus and reshape that conversation like Loree did. Around well wait a minute. We shouldn't be as concerned so much, so about the differences in weight of different types of food products. What we should really should be focused on is are we curing or solving hunger? And if so, for how many families and how many people? Right? That's much closer to ultimately what their organization wants to measure because that's what their mission is.

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In this episode I talk about:

A real-world example of solving your own problem to scale impact
Why the organization focused on this problem
What we did to solve the problem with software and technology
The level of results and return on investment for the organization
How other organizations expressed interest in it for themselves
What my client did to expand the ROI of this project

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is sharing an example from the episode that I recorded and shared yesterday regarding solving your own problems and leveraging software to build solutions around solving those problems in order to scale impact.

Now, the example that I'm going to share is a real world scenario and an application that I helped build with an organization that had a need that they wanted to solve and in particular, again, this was a problem of their own at the organization in terms of something standing in the way of them scaling impact. Now, at this organization, they provide financial services to underrepresented populations of people and helping them essentially with things like financial literacy, asset building, repairing and improving their credit, saving to purchase a home, any number of wonderful things that way too many people need a significant amount of help with so their program is critically important.

One of the challenges they were having is they were ready to scale and they wanted to expand the program beyond the kind of local and regional areas that they were in. They wanted to go beyond regional they wanted to go national and the challenge with that was they knew how long it was going to take to do with the mechanisms that they were previously the strategies they were using to enroll people into their program, which was largely offline and by that I mean in person. They were running in person events, usually a form of a workshop. Usually after hours, you're trying to connect with members of the community that were a fit for their program. Now, while this was arguably effective in enrolling people into the program, it was time consuming and expensive, which meant obviously that at scale, those costs were only going to go up potentially exponentially depending on how aggressively they wanted to grow. So seeing as how that was relatively unattractive, they had a different idea in mind. Could they figure out how to scale more efficiently in order to reach a wider audience without increasing their expenses dramatically and that's where the conversation of technology entered the fold.

When you hear things like this, and I want you to take this away from this episode, as well, you're trying to do something faster, cheaper, easier, more cost effectively, if talking about scale, any of these kinds of buzzwords come up in conversation, where these key words come up in conversation, technology and software, have strengths in all of those areas, and when leveraged appropriately, can help you solve these problems and that's exactly what was done here. So we figured out a way to build essentially an online enrollment portal that enabled the clients that they were previously enrolling offline to do so now online, which meant that didn't need to run these expensive and time consuming in person events which required a lot of coordination. A lot of people needed to be involved in order to set those up, make sure those went well. They could still do those, but they could do those relative to the capacity that they had and they can instead rely on the online enrollment portal to reach clients essentially anywhere because it's digital. As long as we can connect with the right audience virtually. We can advertise the program. We can help educate them in terms of what it can do for them and we can complete the process of enrolling them by getting some information from them and verifying whether or not they might be a fit for the program. So that's what this project was all about and we leverage software and technology in order to do it.

Now, before I talk a little bit more about some of the more recent results. I want to talk to you about the performance that this online enrollment portal was capable of achieving so we've done a round of interviews relatively recently and to get an idea from the coordinators that were managing the process in terms of what the difference was between having the online enrollment portal and not and the results are surprising even to me in terms of how striking a level of performance was. But the online version, having the opportunity to solve and tackle this problem for them. They've been able to enroll up to 300% more clients in less than half the time that it took them before. So if you're keeping score, and we're talking about impact, whenever we're talking about impact, we're obviously always aiming for something that's ideally exponential, right? Because then we're doubling or more the amount of impact that we can deliver. And if we're enrolling up to three times as many clients and in half the time, we've essentially increased impact anywhere from 300% to 600% depending upon how you combine any of those numbers, which is obviously dramatic. And everyone that's been involved in this process has been pretty profusely complimentary about its level of performance. And that makes me incredibly happy and helps me realize just how powerful software and technology can be when you leverage it in these ways.

So moving beyond what that organization that I've been helping has been capable of doing with this help. And by leveraging those tools to solve this problem. Other organizations started to take note as they were sharing these insights in terms of what they were doing with this project that enabled other organizations to start inquiring about whether or not something like that was available for them as well too, because they also have those problems and challenges. So long story short here. This turned into an opportunity for the organization to build the product they had built for themselves, and then now provide it and sell it externally to other organizations as an opportunity to help them solve their enrollment problems and challenges and expand their program. Plus the revenue that the organization is going to be able to generate from selling access to this software product. They're now going to be able to reinvest back into scaling impact even further. So this investment has paid off many times over for this organization, not just based on the dramatic improvement in performance they've been capable of but the fact that it's now going to be able to generate revenue for them that they're also going to be able to reinvest back into scaling impact even further.

So, I wanted to share with you a real world example in terms of how well this stuff works. When done right. It's pretty dramatic. I've recently come out of a conference that they've held, and I sat in the room myself as they were presenting this product, this enrollment portal, and when it's going to be ready and when everyone can start using it. And it was met with an overwhelming amount of excitement and interest. So it's very exciting time for a project like this and I'll keep you posted as it further develops and obviously have any questions about how to do something like this at your organization, feel free to just reach out to me at sean@nxtstep.io.

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What I talk about in this episode:

Investing in solving your own problem with software
Turn it into a solution for others
Generating revenue through it
Reinvesting that revenue to scale impact
The story of Basecamp

Resources

Read the book Rework by Jason Fried

Episode Transcript

Hey Everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is how investing in software to try to scale impact can go from an expense to a form of a fundraising machine for you at your nonprofit, helping you with scaling impact.

Now, I want to tell it through in the form of a story in terms of where this has been done as an example, out in the industry. The company is called Basecamp. And it's a project management software that was built by the founders of a essentially a software development shop that was called 37 signals. The founders of that organization, they were essentially selling services that were related to software development and when they encountered a problem where they needed a better project management software system because they didn't find one that they liked what they ultimately did was they built their own. They had the skills so they further invested in it themselves and it turned out that ultimately what they built, which was Basecamp was so much better than the other options out there for their needs.

Then other people were essentially letting them know of the same thing that they also wanted a better project management system. That is ultimately what Basecamp became. So they started wanting to buy it from them or license it from them. So what the 37 signals team ultimately did was they started selling it to the people that needed it and then over time Basecamp became so successful and generated so much revenue, that it became the company that they focused on themselves and they ultimately essentially, let go of the underlying service business they had before called 37 signals to focus exclusively on Basecamp.

So they kind of did this leapfrog and transformation, but what they ultimately did here was they solved their own problem, which is a key strategy when trying to figure out how to leverage products or software and in terms of scaling impact, that's the way you should be thinking of it as well - do you have opportunities to solve your own problems if you do software can help you with that as well.

So if you focus in on the problem, whatever it is that you need help with, if you ultimately figure out that the options that are out there and available on the market, are inadequate, for whatever reason, then you always have the opportunity to invest in building one yourself and if it turns out that what you've built is better than the options out there for people like you. Maybe other nonprofit organizations, there is a decent probability that they, as in other nonprofit organizations may need that solution as well. So ultimately, what you have the ability to do is take what was originally an expense and investing in building this product then it can become not just an investment but almost essentially a fundraising machine for you because providing access to that product for these other organizations is an opportunity for you to generate revenue and what can you do with that revenue? You can use it to fund scaling impact at your organization and reinvest it back into the expansion of your programs. So this is a excellent strategy in terms of figuring out how to leverage software to scale impact.

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What I talk about on this episode:

What social entrepreneurship is all about
Why it has become a movement
How to define social entrepreneurship
Why this should get you excited for the future
The importance of being passionate about your work
How to leverage the movement at your organization

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is social entrepreneurship, namely what it is because it's becoming more and more popular, which is very exciting.

So if I go to and find some form of a definition for social entrepreneurship what I find is generally something that tries to describe it from the perspective of entrepreneurs that want to build solutions to social issues, which has obviously a lot of overlap with the impact world with the work that nonprofits do. But some of these entities I believe, are also still private companies, but the focus of those companies is to drive change and positive impact as it pertains to social issues, which makes me very excited. It's a very exciting prospect and makes me encouraged and excited for the future as well too.

I believe at the core of social entrepreneurship is really wanting to make a greater impact, which is obviously a great fit to talk about on this show. And despite the kind of textbook definition that I provided for you, the best way that I think I've understood this as a movement is hearing about a description from an entrepreneur in terms of what they wanted to do as part of their mission and part of their vision. And the description that they gave, essentially said that they didn't just want to build a company to make money. They wanted to build something that made a difference and I think that's a really key distinction and an exciting vision as well too for a company.

You don't just need to be successful in business through generating as much money as possible, right, your mission and your vision matters. Very much so and there's absolutely no reason why your mission and vision cannot overlap or be directly focused on delivering impact through social issues. That's why I'm so excited about this concept of social entrepreneurship. And I believe it fits pretty well in terms of what inspires me and how I'm focusing on what it is I'd like to do at my company NxtStep.

I've worked with both for profit and nonprofit organizations, with the skills and expertise that I have, which is largely around technology and software. And when I've done that work in certain capacities, or simply just sold those services to the highest bidder an enable an organization that may already be wealthy, become even more wealthy, and that not really having any kind of a direct impact on what I would consider to be making the world a better place or in the worst case scenario we see examples of companies out there who are almost actively contributing to the opposite. In those instances, I couldn't help but feel at a minimum complicit in terms of almost feeling like I'm contributing to something that I shouldn't be.

What matters more than anything is that it just didn't really inspire me. It didn't get me excited about what it was that I was driving progress for and that's what encourages me and excites me so much about social entrepreneurship, is because now with the work that I'm doing, I'm focusing on how I can help organizations drive and scale impact and I believe that overlaps very well with this as a movement and so I wanted to share more about it because you're probably hearing a lot more about it. It's becoming more popular, more common, and I believe it's gaining momentum as a movement, which is very exciting.

What I would encourage you to do is to leverage this as a movement to do some experimentation at your own organization. Chances are the members of your organization, even if you are nonprofit, and even if your focus is already on impact, they want to do more innovation, they want to do more experimentation. So leverage this movement to be able to do it within your organization. I've heard this referred to previously as almost intrapreneurship where you think about how you can become more entrepreneurial how you can be more innovative, but do so within your own organization with the team you have.

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What I talk about on this episode

How to negotiate with donors
Why they are (still) focused on output
How to refocus the conversation around impact
A negotiation tactic for managing this conversation
Great books to help with this effort

Resources

Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang
Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is negotiating with donors.

That might sound somewhat surprising because usually in the nonprofit world, we're trying to figure out where we can receive funding from and when we can receive it. We usually accept it. Right? But what I'm here to share with you today is that if that funding is coming with what you believe to be arbitrary strings attached, or any type of limitations that are gonna hold you back from achieving your mission, that you should consider negotiating upfront, so that it can be more well aligned with how you want to drive impact at your organization.

Now, this can be funding from private sources, all the way to grants and quite a bit of the time some of that money comes with the strings attached that are tied to output as opposed to achieving successful outcomes. Now, as a nonprofit leader, you probably know better in that achieving more output isn't necessarily going to drive more successful outcomes or impact for your beneficiaries and your clients which means that it's probably worthy of a conversation.

If you've been on the nonprofit scene for a while now, I'm sure you're very familiar with this challenge and I'm also sure that you've probably seen that landscape shifting at least a little bit, in that people are more aware of this as a problem nowadays. So they're more open to a conversation about focusing on outcomes as opposed to output. So if you are if you find yourself in a situation like this, what should you do as a nonprofit leader? I would recommend negotiating any of those limiting factors upfront as much as you can, pushing back and refocusing that conversation around driving successful outcomes, which are ultimately going to lead to real impact.

Now, if you are having a conversation with them, you may need to provide them with examples, as in whatever strings that might be attached to the funding source. In this case, it might be certain amount of output produced like meetings held or some kind of time element or whatever. But at the end of the day, what you might be trying to do is cure childhood literacy or pull people out of poverty, right? So give them examples to compare something like those two together, for them to better understand what the real mission is here. We're not trying to have as many meetings as possible. We're trying to cure childhood literacy or we're trying to save people from poverty, right? They should get excited about that latter example much more so than the former. As such, you'll start to inspire them and get a better understanding of where you're coming from and what the real mission of your organization is, then you can help them better understand how, however that is written to access that funding is limiting you in that way. A lot of this detail is laid out in the book Lean Impact written by Ann Mei Chang so if you don't have a copy of that book, I'd highly recommend you get one and read it because there's a lot of really powerful information in it to help you with this process.

I'm gonna recommend another book as well too. This is another tip that I use and a strategy when it comes to negotiating something like this and that comes from a book called Never Split The Difference which I'm another huge fan of. I think it's a fantastic book about negotiating, and it can realistically be for anything, but I'm going to leverage one of the tactics recommended in that book in this episode and share with you because I feel it applies in this situation. If you're having a conversation with someone who may be a particular funding source, or grant or private donor or whatever, and you're getting pushback in terms of trying to refocus the effort from output to driving successful outcomes. One of the tactics that's recommended in that book Never Split The Difference is to simply ask them to describe for you how you can be expected to achieve both of those objectives simultaneously. So the question essentially just goes something like this. If they're saying that you really need to focus on the number of meetings and those other things are somewhat less important or are as important as having a number of meetings. You can ask them how you can be expected to do that, right? How can I be expected to focus on two or three things at the same time and make as much progress as if I were just focusing on the one that ultimately delivers successful outcomes and drives impact.

So I recommend both of those books and I hope this information was helpful in terms of helping you understand that this process can be a negotiation, and whenever it can be leveraged some of these tactics in order to refocus efforts on driving successful outcomes as opposed to output so that you can focus more on scaling impact.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good

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What I discuss in this episode:

The output vs outcome problem
Why money is tied to measuring output
How to refocus the conversations around outcomes
The questions to ask to gracefully push back
The lessons you can learn from Ann Mei Chang's book Lean Impact (https://www.annmei.com/)

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:37
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is combating this common challenge in the nonprofit world which is focusing on measuring output versus focusing on measuring successful outcomes.

1:37
And what you can do to start making progress against this so that your organization can get closer to measuring and scaling output as frequently as possible. Now, this is a common problem that's existed in the nonprofit world for quite some time, where a lot of the funding has strings attached, which are pretty directly linked to requiring you to measure output which might be only somewhat related to impact sometimes it's not related at all.

2:09
I'll give you an example. Now, in the work that I've done helping nonprofits a lot of that has been about helping secure a better financial future for underrepresented populations of people, which might mean helping them improve their credit scores pull themselves out of debt, which is obviously very closely related impact for those individuals for the clients that that program serves. At the same time, there's other things that are happening related to helping them with that, like meetings for example, or how long those meetings go, or however many forms they fill out, right, whatever insert a bunch of work that goes into trying to deliver those successful outcomes, but the meeting related stuff that is all output, and that's only somewhat related to driving and scaling impact.

2:59
Now, donor money depending on where it may come from, but that could be from private sources that could be from grants. A lot of that can be linked to measuring output more specifically as opposed to measuring the outcome. So what I want to talk about is what you can start doing to push back against that and start refocusing that conversation around impact.

3:23
Now, a key part of this is going to be helping them understand why it's so important to focus on it, successful outcomes as opposed to just output and you have to, you have to try to interrupt that process or start that conversation as early as possible to get them to understand one matters more than the other in terms of what it is you're trying to do. Now, if you give them those kinds of examples, like I just mentioned before, that should make it a lot easier for them to be able to understand why outcome matters so much more than output. And if you don't, you can't necessarily know, if measuring output isn't directly linked to what the mission and the vision is for the organization, exactly what it is you're trying to do, and why would you measure it? Right?

4:16
It's okay to ask these questions and start getting feedback. See what they say see if they agree or see what other reservations they have about switching from one to the other they may welcome the opportunity and just may not have thought about that previously. But if we don't ask the questions, then a conversation may never happen. So I want you to do that. I want you to do that as early as possible. Whenever someone asks, having been part of some of those conversations before, I believe you're more than likely to be met or you're more than likely to receive some positive feedback after you go through helping the individuals involved in the process understand the key differences between them and why they can go likely more direct towards what the overall mission and objective is because we should all be aligned in this and that is ultimately what we're driving for. Now, if you want to know a little bit more about the history here, what's been done here, other great strategies, there's a ton of really valuable information in and one of my favorite books, which is in Ann Mei Chang's Lean Impact. So if you want give yourself a copy of that if you if you don't have a copy of it, and read that because there's a ton of really valuable information in Ann Mei's book.

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On this episode I talk about:

What a no-code ecosystem is all about
Why you should explore Bubble.io
The resources Bubble provides to build custom applications
The platforms (web, mobile) that you can build for using Bubble
Learning how to get started with Bubble through their academy
An example of a Bubble application I built for a nonprofit to scale impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:11
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a no code ecosystem called bubble.

0:35
Now you can find this tool at bubble.io. So on that website it will walk you through explaining more about what bubble is and reason why I describe it as an ecosystem is because it's way more than just a low code or no code tool. Now on the show, I talk quite a bit about how you can leverage tech and software in order to scale impact and I believe bubble is one of the best examples of the most powerful tools available today in terms of what you can do to leverage tech and software without needing to know any elements of really intense software engineering or programming. You don't necessarily need to have those skills and you can really build something fairly comprehensive when it comes to applications that run either on a computer or a phone using an ecosystem like bubble without needing to write any code, which is really convenient and it helps you build prototypes much more quickly and much more easily because you don't need those skills in order to do it.

1:36
Now, with bubble, you can build just about anything. I've talked about other tools like Typeform which enable which is more of a survey tool and enable you to get data from somewhere and connect to something that's a key part of probably what you might build into your application. But with bubble, you can actually build pretty much anything so not just what Typeform is capable of. You can build whatever you would like whatever kind of system you need, in order to better scale impact your organization for your clients or your internal team members. Whatever the intended purpose of what you need, you can essentially do it with bubble it really gives you the ability to create something custom without having to write actual code.

2:17
Now, I've used bubble in order to create all kinds of great products. To help my nonprofit clients with scaling impact and we've done so across platforms and when I say that what I mean is how you're accessing the internet, right it can be via laptop can be a desktop or it can be a smartphone device, your mobile phone, regardless of what it is you are using. You can create an application with a bubble to run on any of those platforms and make it look great at the same time which is really powerful. So again, using bubble gives you the ability to build something that's very comprehensive, and it's a great tool that you can use if you want kind of an all in one solution where you don't need to be connecting a lot of things together, which is really common these days with the no code and low code systems out there is oftentimes you have to pull a number of different systems together and then connect them in order to create the experience.

3:15
I would say that one of the biggest differences and advantages of a system like bubble is it enables you to do all of that right from within the bubble tool. So they provide you with a lot of out of the box tools that you can just kind of drag and drop into the application that you're building and are different widgets to do whatever it is you need. You need to capture text you need to add buttons you need to display information, you need to have a little map, whatever it is you need in your application in order to create the experience that you're looking for. You can do it right from within bubble. You can kind of think of the system, almost like a Website Builder, but for applications instead. So if you've ever used or have become familiar with things like WordPress and Squarespace, those are seemingly no code systems as well too, but those are tools to help you build websites. Bubble is essentially the equivalent to help you build applications. So that's how you can kind of think of the bubble tool and how it relates to something else. That's probably fairly common. That you know as well.

4:14
Now a recommendation I would have, if you're going to consider using bubble and building prototype apps or applications, whether it is to make sure you invest some time into the design element. Bubble makes it a lot easier to do the building, but it won't necessarily influence you all that much when it comes to how to design the look and feel. And in the tech world we refer to this as UI and UX for designing out the user interface, which is essentially what it looks like and creating the user experience. That's the UX component. That's essentially how it behaves and what it does. So the experience that you ultimately wind up with putting some time and effort into the design element will make it a lot easier for you or whoever is going to be building it to know what to put where that makes that will make sense and that will help you speed the project up and ultimately leave you with something that creates the kind of experience you're more than likely looking for. However, regardless of what it is you plan to do, I'd recommend you start small and kind of grow from there. So don't plan to make it too complicated in the beginning. Start with start with a basic functionality. Build that first and then you can build onto it from there as soon as you get people using it because then you could start getting feedback with it, which is great.

5:25
So just to give you an idea of what I built with it for one of my nonprofit clients, one of my nonprofits helps the underrepresented populations with securing a better financial future. And as part of this program, they work with financial coaches. In order to learn how to do that. One of the challenges that that was preventing that program from scaling better was that the clients wanted more access to their coaches. The problem was that the coaches were a constrained resource they didn't have more time and were already essentially over capacity with how much they were helping clients so they couldn't give more time we needed to figure out a way to enable them to create better leverage so that their clients could have some form of access to them in a way that made it easier for more coaches to work with more clients because the program is growing.

6:19
So we created a companion financial coaching application that enabled the clients to have their coach essentially right in their pocket, because it could be on their phone and a lot of clients again, didn't have access to laptops or desktops, but most of them did have access to a phone or a smartphone device. As such, we made sure that the financial coaching application we built with the bubble ecosystem, was able to run great on a phone for the client and because the coaches were primarily using their laptops or desktops for work, that it looked great on those devices as well too as we designed out kind of the coach interface.

7:00
So in this application, what it could do is it enabled the client and the coach to be able to message one another so that the client and coach had direct access to each other and enable them to schedule and organize and manage their meetings that they would have occasionally as they were working together through that throughout the program, and it enabled the client to both track their progress in terms of what the coach was asking them to work on and monitoring the progress in terms of how well that process was growing. So they were able to kind of better reinforce for the client all the progress that they had made, and for them to see, you know, the rewards of the work that they had invested thus far as well to in order to further reinforce helping them stay on the track that they were on to make it a ultimately a better experience and drive more successful outcomes for those clients as well too.

7:53
So I wanted to introduce the bubble tool to you in this episode. And I would encourage you to go to their website bubble.io And they also have a great resource they call it the bubble Academy. It's essentially a bunch of resources available to you for free where you can see all the cool things that you can do with bubble so they provide a lot of training material here as well too. And that's available at bubble.io forward slash academy. So if you go there you can see a ton of great free resources about getting started with bubble and all the cool things you could do with it. I encourage you to take a closer look at this because as an ecosystem without needing to write any code you can build essentially any kind of application which should help you and your organization better scale impact through technology and software.

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What I talk about in this episode:

History of Habitat for Humanity
The difference between an organization and a movement
How many people they've inspired since 1976
What it means to turn hammers into votes
Why building relationships matters
How to find your movement
How to scale impact at the highest level

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:00
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is Habitat for Humanity.

1:18
Now, this organization was founded by Millard Fuller back in 1976 and the original vision that Fuller had was to rid the world of homelessness. He wanted to provide adequate housing solutions for the needy the world over. So he had a big aggressive goal, and they've made quite a tremendous amount of progress towards that goal, which I'm going to talk about today.

1:43
Now, if you're unfamiliar with Habitat for Humanity, how that organization works and how it provides the impact that it drives, is it looks to provide housing solutions for the needy, but they typically do is they get those that need homes or housing solutions involved in the process of improving or building a home then ultimately, they are also able to pay for that home and they provide an access to be able to do that through a zero interest loan, which is a really cool solution and I can speak specifically from my own experience because I've been involved as a volunteer for numerous Habitat for Humanity events where we're literally swinging hammers, we're building the homes, we're putting them together, and we know who we're building them for, which like I've talked about before on the show, is an unbelievably inspiring experience. Being able to be immersed in what the organization actually does, and do the work has been really a really great experience and left quite an impression on me.

2:52
Information regarding the level of progress that Habitat for Humanity has made over the period of time since they've been founded - they have inspired and had involved in at least one of their projects, more than 13 million volunteers worldwide, which is incredible, just an unbelievable amount of impact provided by this organization. In fulfilling that mission of ending homelessness the world over and provide housing solutions for people that need it. In particular, those that are from low income families. So not only did I attend multiple volunteer events where I was swinging hammers myself for a while I also served on the board at Habitat for Humanity, which was a great experience as well also, I got to leverage my skills and expertise in software and technology to help them figure out how to continue advancing their mission with scaling impact.

3:50
Now, other there's so much to talk about when it comes to Habitat for Humanity, incredible work that they've done, the progress they've made since inception, but I want to specifically focus in an area related to how their influence evolved over time and how they continue to scale impact at different levels, despite the fact that I've already talked about some ridiculously impressive numbers. Now I want to talk to you about the original inspiration from the founder. So in forces for good Leslie Crutchfield talks about how Fuller didn't set out to build an organization he set out to start a movement and inspire everyone to get involved, which is a pretty compelling statement. When you think about it in terms of who's planning on doing what as it pertains to scaling impact. That's super interesting to think about it from that perspective, because it levels up everything that they're doing, and has a also a greater level of influence in terms of inspiring others around that mission to get involved and to help.

5:00
But even more impressively, after they had achieved all of the progress and success that they've had with through through the organization. They looked to turn essentially hammers into votes, where they evolve their level of influence over the course of Habitat for Humanity's success. They've definitely continued to get recognition from high level or high ranking political officials, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, over a over the period of time that they've been doing the work that they've been doing. They've used those relationships that they've built, and they've used the success that they've had upon scaling impact to leverage that to create influence over policymakers and politicians to change policies, which can enable and them make even greater progress and scale their impact at an entirely different level than they had been before. Which is super impressive as well. Also, it's not for the faint of heart. Obviously, there's a tremendous amount of work time and effort that goes into that, but that's Habitat for Humanity doing what they need to do. To inspire people at an even greater level, to get involved as it pertains to making policy and then implementing it.

6:26
So there's so much to talk about when it comes to the impressive results of the organization Habitat for Humanity and what they've done. I wanted to share with you some of the more interesting elements over the course of their history, so that you can figure out how to learn from what they've done so well inspire you to make these positive changes at your organization.

6:45
But if I were to leave you with anything or challenging with something today, it would be what is not just your mission, but what is your movement? How do you want to create a movement and inspire others to get involved and get behind that movement? And then how can you leverage the progress that you have made that you've used to scale impact before or perhaps that's what you're doing now? How can you leverage that to have a greater influence at a different level as well to like for example, influencing policymakers and politicians.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Crystal Evans is a Former Business Banker and the President at Money Talks Edu, an NGO focused on providing educational platforms that “Combat Generational Poverty," and empower youths and adults through Financial Literacy.

Over the past decade Crystal has partnered with several Career-Link Centers, the New Jersey District Courts New Re-Entry Program, and social service agencies; securing job opportunities through private multimillion-dollar contracting opportunities and non-profit projects. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

The importance of having financial literacy.
How to improve your financial literacy.
Ways financial literacy is being made affordable and accessible.
How Crystal is maximizing the impact she has on children.
The benefits of using an app to complement other resources.
How to measure the impact you’re having.
Ways to leverage technology to scale impact.

Resources:

Money Talks Edu
Road to Riches
Zoom
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connect with Crystal Evans:

LinkedIn
Email
Instagram

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
Sean Boyce by Email

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In this episode, I talk about:

The origin of Teach for America
The vision of Founder Wendy Kopp
Teach for America by the numbers
How Wendy made teaching in a public school "cool"
How Teach for America recruiting results compare to investment banking
What Wendy is up to now (solving the problem globally)
The BIG goal you need to set to scale impact at your organization

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:00
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is the case study that is Teach for America

1:14
Originally founded by Wendy Kopp and Wendy had set out to solve one of the largest problems our country has ever faced in education reform and her organization has arguably made the biggest impact ever of any organization that trying to tackle this problem. If you're unfamiliar with Teach for America and what the concept is, how it works is the organization matches college seniors with some of the most challenging public schools in the United States in order to spend a year or two teaching the students there and making a pretty considerable impression in a school typically without the kind of resources it really needs in order to help students.

2:01
This organization Teach For America that Wendy founded, started with extremely humble beginnings. She started when she was a senior at Princeton, she was studying at university and this was 1989. And she did so on a very tight budget and it borrowed office, but then it grew rapidly from there, due to her dedication and all of her hard work and the results are dramatic. In terms of what it accomplished. We talk about scaling impact. This is a excellent case study, in impact that was delivered pretty dramatically. So I mentioned she started in 89. By 1995. They had grown so fast that at the time, they were already at 10 million. And then by 2011, same organization was now at 240 million. So if you're keeping track of those numbers, that's obviously exponential and pretty aggressive growth in a relatively short period of time.

3:01
Now, even beyond the numbers in terms of what Teach for America has accomplished, one of the things I find most impressive and this is when this story had resonated so dramatically with me was kind of the changing of as you may hear Wendy say this if you ever listen to her speak, she said the changing of like almost a consciousness of the country and that they made such a dramatic impression on how the country thinks about school. What I mean by this is, their organization shifted the landscape to make it cool to teach at a public school in America, which is remarkable, just remarkable, such a mindset shift from what it had been previously the impression that they made on that, for so many people and there's a lot more in terms of tangible results of their efforts as well too.

3:58
The the way the story goes is that on Ivy League college campuses, when it came to recruiting some of their graduates or undergraduates to come work at the various organizations that do their recruiting at that level. Eventually Teach For America was in a position where they were beating out some of the most prestigious firms that people wanted to work at in investment banking and finance, management consulting as well. Whereas the Teach For America booths would be the most crowded and which received the most applicants when compared with some of those other extremely popular but you know, in industry type options that the students had available to them. So pretty dramatic results there as well also to give you an idea in terms of what the results kind of are now in terms of where Teach for America is.

4:54
Wendy was being interviewed sometime last year. I've watched that video recently and they talked about how, at the moment Teach For America receives I think it's more than 10 applicants for every position they have available. So essentially a greater than 10x in terms of how many applicants they get for every available position, and they have over 30,000 alumni, which is also just amazing.

5:21
I can speak to my own personal experience. I didn't fulfill this role myself but I was contacted I think by one of the recruiters back when I was at the university level and they were asking me about my level of interest in teaching at a public school in New York. I think it was I went to University in Philadelphia I studied engineering, but they were asking me about teaching math, which personally for myself was always something I had kind of wanted to do because it was a subject I really enjoyed, especially in high school. But I remember thinking how cool that would be to do that and subconsciously, I didn't even realize the transformation I was making even though it was something that I was interested in, I'm going to credit some if not all of my reaction there to what Teach for America did. I probably didn't even recognize it or realize it but the all of the tremendous work that they've done has likely had an impact on what my reaction was that and this is crazy number of years ago.

6:24
So unbelievable amount of progress and scaling impact that Teach for America was capable of in terms of making all of this positive change which is incredible. Now if you want to know more about what Wendy is up to lately, the Teach for America organization has been so successful that other countries have reached out to her about wanting to do the same thing in their own country. So as such, she's now running an organization called Teach for All where she's trying to take that same model and apply it globally. Even more impressive so trying to solve this problem now the world over since she's already made a dramatic impact on it in this country. Pretty ridiculously impressive, and again, Wendy started this program from very humble beginnings, right, in 1989 on a extremely tight budget and a shared office to you know, fast forward to the early 2010s and they were approaching a quarter of a billion dollars in annual annual revenue, which is just unbelievably impressive 30,000 alumni now and a 10 to 1 application rate to fulfill the roles that they have available. So pretty dramatic results.

7:40
I hope you got value out of this story. I know I love reading case studies like this because I try to extract lessons from people like Wendy and Teach for America in terms of the incredible things that they've done so you can learn from it and apply it at your own organization. So my challenge for you as part of this episode is what is your big aggressive goal. What is the transformation you would like to see happen in your industry, similar to how Teach For America made it cool to teach in a public school? What does that look like for you? How would you define it? How would you articulate it and how would you make progress against it in order to scale impact at your organization?

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What I talk about in this episode:

Problems are growing faster than we can solve them
Incremental change won't help us catch up
How to think BIGGER
Why your new goal should make you uneasy
How to think differently to achieve this new goal
Leveraging the power of your team to innovate solutions

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:00
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about with is putting yourself in the mindset of scaling impact.

0:35
Now, the reality of the situation that we're facing today is that the problems that leaders and nonprofit organizations and their teams are attempting to solve are growing faster than we can solve them, which means we're going to need different solutions in order to be able to meet that growing demand. So this show is all about figuring out how to scale impact. So I want to share with you a thought process that you can use with your team to put you put yourself and your team in the right mindset and prepare yourselves as best as possible to put you in a position to be able to in fact scale impact.

1:12
So let me talk to you a little bit more about what I mean by that. So because these problems are growing so fast, the previous way that we've been attempting to solve them, which is typically some form of an incremental change, isn't going to cut right and so because of that, we need to think differently. We need to be thinking on a significantly larger scale and that alone will help us with the process of scaling impact. What I need you to to do is think about what your previous growth goals were before and better understand how much you were expecting those to grow over your previous baseline or the benchmark that might be 10% or 20%, or something like that. Now, if you truly want to scale impact, it's not going to be able to be done 10% at a time, you really need to do something that is an exponential step change. So I'm thinking somewhere between 2 and 4x, like 200% and 400%. As in how can you help more than double the amount of people that you're helping right now? Right and when you're setting these goals, you're already scaling up impact.

2:26
These goals should make you feel somewhat uneasy, because there will be more uncertainty when you're thinking about your growth goals that are this much larger than they have been previously and the reason why they should make you uneasy is because the solution should not be obvious and that is the whole point of this exercise. If the solution is not obvious, and you know what you've done before, is unlikely to work to solve these problems or challenges or help you reach these goals and it's going to challenge you and your team to think differently and that's exactly what we want.

3:02
That's the point, right? Think differently in order to scale impact. So if you set these aggressive goals and you need to think differently, in order to scale it you're going to have to consider any and all possibilities in order to help you get there. Now what this turns into and what I'll leave you with today is this will turn into a great opportunity to meet with your team and do some brainstorming to lay out the problem and the challenge that you have in front of you to talk about the kind of results that you're looking for. To get everybody on the same page with a goal of scaling impact. And to think through how you might actually be able to get there after everyone is on the same page and understands that what you've done before isn't going to help you get to where you need to go now.

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What I cover in this episode:

Why you shouldn't consider the for-profit sector the enemy
How to think about the situation differently
How partnership can lead to inspiration
Examples of what you can do with more resources
Examples from the Environmental Defense Fund

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:04
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is that you shouldn't consider the for profit sector as the enemy.

0:36
A lot of people that are scaling impact and doing wonderful things in the nonprofit or mission driven world might see what's going on in the for profit sector as the exact opposite, that kind of epic good versus evil battle and I understand why you might, there's oftentimes a lot of bad press that comes from for profit organizations, doing largely what they shouldn't be doing and taking shortcuts that we've just a wake of bad decisions and massive impact to the environment or humanity.

1:17
However, having said that, in my opinion, there's a better way to think about this and combine efforts, which will also help scale impact and oftentimes at an even more significant level. I want to explain a little bit more about what I mean by that, instead of putting yourself in a kind of opposed stance to the for profit sector. What I might recommend or consider instead is to think about different ways that you may be able to partner with them or get involved to help interrupt what may be happening there that you know can happen better with some changes, which will dramatically reduce or significantly improve the overall results. There is a possibility of a win win scenario here.

2:02
I also don't want you to necessarily always consider the fact that the for profit sector is always looking for ways to take shortcuts, regardless of who it will affect. I would like you to at least consider the fact that there's certainly the possibility that in the for profit sector, there are some instances where they're simply moving too fast and making decisions too quickly, to really realize or recognize what all of the effects of that might be in every instance.

2:30
Now I'm not saying that organizations haven't deliberately made poor choices, and that hasn't led to catastrophe. It has time and time again and that's obviously horrible and that should never be the case, but I don't want to discourage you from getting involved and helping improve this situation because you are exactly who can make this better and I want to keep you motivated to want to be able to do that. As opposed to trying to ignore it or just kind of go your own way to make impact with the organization and resources that you have. If instead you consider the alternative of looking to potential partnerships or getting involved with them, instead of only fighting them. You might be able to make significantly more impact than you ever thought you could and I've got some examples that I can share with you as well also.

3:24
Now, again, you are the perfect person for this project. And when I say project, this is kind of what I mean. There's a ton of examples out there, but I'll just focus on one or two in this case. So the EDF are the Environmental Defense Fund, which for decades now under the leadership of Fred Krupp has been focused on looking for ways to protect the environment and reverse any of the damage that's been done in a multitude of areas and they've done some pretty incredible work. In this case, I'm going to focus on two examples where the EDF again led by Fred Krupp they took a different approach to this scenario and instead were willing to partner with for profit organizations and two in particular led to some pretty dramatic results. The one was that they partnered with FedEx, which is kind of the packaging distribution shipping and logistics company. They partnered with them and the ultimate result of that partnership was that they were able to enable them to convert all of their midsize trucks to hybrid instead of gas powered vehicles, which ultimately led to a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, which is significantly better for the environment, right? We're talking about unbelievable amount of trucks are being driven essentially constantly, right? So pretty dramatic impact being scaled there.

4:54
In another instance, (the EDF) partnered with the McDonald's Corporation to help them eliminate essentially 150,000 tons of packaging waste which again, is amazing. Like, that's incredible. Both of those are pretty dramatic results. And without those partnerships, we wouldn't have seen those results. So regardless of the motivation, right, your mission, ultimately is highly likely to be aligned with the outcomes related to scaling impact. I imagine that's why you're probably consuming this content. But I want you to consider the possibilities of what you might be able to do if you were to instead, get involved.

5:36
So the kind of the reaction that I would be looking for or how I would encourage you to respond to these situations instead of seeing any of these examples that may be out there of people doing the wrong thing. Instead of getting angry and fighting it in a different way. I would say instead of getting angry, get involved and help change it.

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What I talk about in this episode:

The importance of collecting data
Why user experience (UX) is so important
Why your tool needs to be super flexible
Why your tool needs to work great on a phone
The power of connecting your tool to anything
Leveraging a long list of integrations
A real-world example of scaling impact with Typeform

If you would like to learn how to scale impact by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact

Episode Transcript
0:18 - Hey everyone Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is one of my favorite, no code or low code tools of all time, and that is called Typeform.

0:28 - Now I'm going to explain more about what this tool is, but before I get into that, what I want to share with you is that most of the time when organizations are looking to get data from someone, a key part of what they want to do in terms of scaling impact, if they're looking to leverage software and technology, I've talked about the importance of considering what's become this vast and diverse world of really flexible, powerful tools that you can use without writing any code or knowing a lot or really anything about software engineering and Typeform is one of the best examples of that, in my opinion, and it serves one of the most important needs when it comes to what it is you may be trying to do using software technology and that's get data from someone.

1:12 - Now in this case, we may be talking about your clients, the beneficiaries of your nonprofit programs and if you're truly trying to scale impact, chances are you're probably trying to reach a wider audience, software and technology can help you do that. And as part of that process, oftentimes you need data from them. So how are you going to get it? Chances are you've considered trying to do so from a survey tool. Now, there's plenty of them out there. But my favorite is Typeform. I'm going to going to talk more about why. But key is you're trying to get data from them. So a survey tool makes a lot of sense. Something that can be done online, from a phone from a computer from a laptop, whatever.

1:56 - Some of the important elements here to consider is how important what's considered the user experience or UX in this case, the more intuitive it is to use which essentially is a better way of saying how easy the tool may be, the better, right? We may have users or clients that have vastly different levels of familiarity with technology and so the easier it is to use, the more successful you're going to be able to get that data or for it to serve whatever purpose it is that you need.

2:25 - Now, another key element here and this is particularly important when we're talking about the nonprofit world is it needs to be flexible across platforms. Now when I say platforms, what I mean is different types of devices, internet connected devices, someone might use to access your form, in this case, and what's most typically considered is either a laptop or a desktop or a mobile phone or a smartphone device. Now, the reason why this is obviously so important is because there are many clients, the terms of who's going to be benefiting from your program or what it is you're trying to do to scale impact that may only have access to a phone they may not have a laptop or a computer. We've seen this before and the work that I do with a nonprofit organizations that I help scale impact through software as we have to handle for these considerations. So being able to work on a phone is critically important if you want to reach many clients that do not have access to a laptop or a desktop. So the ability to operate on a phone and look good on a phone is really important and not all tools do that. Some tools claim that they do that but they don't do it particularly well. So that's critically important when we're considering this and Typeform in my opinion does it better than most. It is a very intuitive, very user friendly tool to use and it looks great on a mobile device. It gives you a similar experience of using a native app or a native application on the phone. But it isn't it's still web based, which is even more convenient for you. So having said that, like I mentioned there's a lot of tools out there that claim to do a lot when it comes to surveys and forms like Google Forms for example, but I find that the one that provides the most value and best features is Typeform.

4:14 - So obviously for the first part of it, it's about getting the data from your clients and we want to use the tool to be able to do that, but then it quickly becomes what are we going to do with this data? What are we connecting this to next? So that's the other side of this equation and that's another reason why I'm a big fan of Typeform because it integrates with so many systems and platforms and it is one of the most flexible and versatile tools for connecting it and the data that you're getting with another system. They've got a ton of native integrations supported right through the tool and even if you don't have a native integration that you can connect to directly from Typeform, that list is growing and expanding every day. It natively integrates with Zapier, which I've talked about another episode as well too, which you can kind of think of is this universal connector and another no code tool. So you can use Zapier to connect anything to anything and they have an even bigger inventory because that's their specific purpose. They're designed to take system A and connect to the System B. So Typeform has a bunch of their native integrations but it also connects to Zapier. So if it what you're trying to connect to you don't see it natively supported directly through Typeform. Chances are you could find a way to connect through Zapier so that basically just explodes the amount of the list and in terms of the number and the volume of other systems that you can connect to which is makes the tool that much more valuable for you and what you're trying to do in scaling impact.

5:48 - So I talked about a couple of things that I think are really important when considering a tool like this. It serves a very important purpose. It's got great usability, and it's super versatile in terms of what it integrates with. I want to share with you an example of how I used a similar tool type form in order to dramatically scale impact. A client of mine wanted to take essentially the enrollment process in terms of how they were enrolling clients into their nonprofit program from offline to online. We ended up using a tool like this in order to be able to do that and Typeform provides a great example in order to give you the ability to achieve something like this for all the reasons that I previously mentioned and long story short, the results that we were able to achieve in a very short period of time we were able to get a tool like Typeform up and online in a matter of days to weeks. So we're not talking about months or years. We're talking about a very short period of time. Ultimately, after we review the results in terms of what we were able to do, it resulted in us being able to enroll 200 to 300% more clients in less than half the time. So if you're keeping track of the multiples there, that's anywhere from four to six times or 400% 600% improvement when you consider both the volume, the multiple of clients that were able to enroll and the dramatic time savings and that we were able to give them more than half of their time back which is just unbelievable. So that's that's kind of the idea here, right? And that's the idea that you may be trying to achieve or something related to that terms of scaling impact at your nonprofit organization. And that's how a tool like Typeform can help you do it without needing to know how to or need to write any code.

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What I talk about in this episode:

Why you should be ruthless in your focus
Execution should exclusively be about impact
Why nothing else really matters
Why people will be uncomfortable at first
How to make them feel more comfortable
What to do when the results start rolling in
The question to ask to know exactly what to do

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

0:02 - Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is why I want you to be ruthless in protecting your execution related to impact if you truly and successfully want to be able to scale it.

0:27 - Now, the reason why I say this is because nonprofit leaders get busy and become burdened by so many things that they're expected to manage at any given point in time. But if what you're doing and investing time and resources into isn't going to help you drive or successfully scale impact, then why are you investing time in it?

0:50 - This is a pretty radical mindset shift that nonprofit leaders might have to undergo in order to be able to shift to this type of strategy, but it can be one that can be done very successfully and we've seen many examples of that in books like Forces for Good where they follow the leaders of a dozen large nonprofit organizations that started small and rapidly scaled impact over a relatively short period of time. It was strategies like these that enabled them to be able to do that, where they were very protective over their time being invested and focused on execution. Everything that they were focused on being related to helping them successfully achieve a greater level of impact. At that point, none of the other things that you're potentially investing time into, if they don't drive impact are really all that important, by comparison, but again, this is a big mindset shift.

1:48 - In the beginning, when you try to do something like this or you try to nudge any of the members of your team in this as a direction it'll be relatively uncomfortable for them. So you might get some resistance and pushback through questions. People may appear to be experiencing a little bit of discomfort because it's a shift potentially in terms of the way they've always been doing things. It's at the very foundation or the core of what it is, other members on the team in terms of how they've done work before. Maybe shifting under them ever so slightly. And that is a scary feeling or scary proposition for someone who has always held that as constant it's always been a consistent, foundational kind of element for them.

2:27 - Now, the work that I do as a consultant, as a soloist at NxtStep, where I'm helping nonprofit organizations with scaling impact through software, I am able to kind of reduce how significant the forest through the trees problem can be for someone like me, because I'm often an outsider, especially when I first start working with a nonprofit organization. So I have the benefit of having the perspective of the outside looking in and this is why I'm protective over that type of arrangement between myself and my clients. It's because that perspective is healthy and valuable. For the period of time in which I am not considered kind of an internal team member or I'm not within the walls. I'm not going through the nine to five I'm not doing the day to day kind of stuff. I'm able to kind of have that outsider perspective and see with relatively unbiased or take an objective approach and ask questions like that and it's not as jarring for an organization because I'm an outsider, right? So they might just be thinking, well, he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand how things work here. That's probably not necessarily the case in almost every instance it isn't, but they're more open to that kind of feedback under that type of an arrangement. So I've been there plenty. Actually I'm there constantly, and it's one of the things I enjoy most about the work that I do.

3:51 - What I'm trying to share with you is that you can achieve the same mindset and you can do so as a leader in a nonprofit organization, anywhere from if you're just starting with the organization all the way to and through if you've been with the organization and you want to shift your mindset because you really want to help your organization make greater progress and scale impact this is a strategy that can work very effectively, but it's got to be one that is done confidently and you have to be able to explain to the members of your team, why this is so important and why you're doing it now, despite all of that, what might become discomfort for the team in this kind of more of an aggressive or direct shift in the beginning.

4:31 - Ultimately when the results materialize and your efforts pay off. That will speak volumes and it will connect the dots for everyone that might have been cautiously optimistic all the way to and through skeptical that this new direction or this push is ultimately going to lead to results. That's why it's also very important for you to share those results with your team and you can also go back and you could say hey, remember when we were deciding whether or not to go left and go or go right and we had always traditionally gone left and this time we went right and there was some skepticism or some uncertainty from people when we were deciding to do that? Well, here's why we did that. And here are the results. Right? This is what we're actually trying to do, right? We're not trying to hold as many meetings as possible, right? We're trying to cure childhood illiteracy or trying to pull people out of poverty. Right? That's the mission of the organization. Your results may vary depending upon what your mission is, but there's a lot of organizations that get bogged down by some of the output related stuff and aren't focusing as intensely as they should on the successful outcome component.

5:41 - So this leads me to a question I think will be helpful for you if you're excited by the potential of this strategy, but you're unsure in terms of how to kind of get started or how to determine whether or not something you are doing today or your team is doing today whether or not that's driving impact or you know, which which should you drop in favor of focusing ruthlessly on scaling impact at the execution level. Ask yourself this question. Whatever it is, you're considering X, Y, and Z. Do these things drive impact? Does focusing on and investing time and resources on these drive impact? If the answer to that question is no, or uncertain, then chances are you should probably stop doing it. If it's uncertain. You try to validate it and if you can't, the answer is no then it's rather simple from there. It's stop doing it and focus on the things that do drive impact.

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What I share with you in this episode:

Why you shouldn't only network within your industry
Why different industries makes different levels of progress
Why you need to build relationships outside your industry
What you can expect to learn from other nonprofit leaders
How you can apply them to your industry

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:39 - Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a strategy that you can use to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by partnering with and building relationships with other nonprofit organizations leaders that compete in an industry that's different than yours. I'm going to give you a little bit of background here.

1:35 - Now the key to this strategy is that different industries move at different levels of pace, in terms of their development, and the strategies and tactics they're using to scale impact and to grow. So because different industries move at different paces, that means that if you spent most of your time in industry A and someone else's spend most of their time in industry B then chances are you may or may not be aware of the strategies and tactics that are working successfully for each of you independently. You may only be familiar with the ones that have been talked about more regularly in your industry.

2:11 - So whereas a lot of nonprofit leaders are building relationships with other nonprofit leaders, but within their industry, which is good as well, too. It's somewhat limiting for you in terms of what you can learn from outside your industry. Because what you're probably only hearing is how you're building relationships today for the most part, which is fairly common, then you're only likely hearing about what people are doing within your industry.

2:38 - The reason why you want to get exposure outside of your industry is again because that key that I mentioned before, which is different industries move at different paces, meaning that there are other industries that may be trying things or have tried things, and they've worked successfully for them to see greater impact that you can take and then you can apply to yours.

2:59 - So the strategy here is to start building relationships with other nonprofit leaders, but in different industries than the one of your nonprofit organization. For example, if we compared the finance and the healthcare industries together because of how much regulation there is around healthcare it has a tendency to essentially just make that industry move at a different pace when it comes to innovation. So if someone from healthcare is learning from someone from finance, who may not have as much regulation as healthcare does, or they may be moving at a faster pace, someone in healthcare could probably learn something and what they learned from them is something that they may very well be able to apply to their own industry, their nonprofit organization in order to scale impact in terms of what they're doing.

3:59 - So there's a lot you can learn, if you kind of step outside of the relationships perhaps you currently have at nonprofit organizations, but in different industries than the one that you're currently operating. So that's the strategy here that I wanted to share with you an opportunity to scale and that can come from you partnering with and networking with and building relationships with other nonprofit leaders, executive directors, people that work in strategy or innovation, but nonprofit organizations that are different than the industry that which you are currently in. Leverage that whenever you can, in order to greater scale impact at your organization.

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Brent Hutchinson is a successful executive with 26 years of experience in cross-sector leadership, coaching, training, team development, vision casting, program implementation, frontline fundraising, and relationship management experience in local, national, and international settings.

Brent earned a PhD in Leadership Studies, the Excellence in Nonprofit Leadership Certificate from Duke University, and was named an Obama Fellow by the Barack Obama Foundation, one of twenty civic innovators from around the globe, in 2019.

His main focus now is social sector impact, community development and organizing, issues around rurality in this age, team leadership, networking for good, and transformational change management. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

How to drive impact through your organization.
The best ways to invest in your team.
How nonprofit organizations can advocate for their teams.
How to build morale and prevent burnout.
The problems with work environments classing themselves as a ‘family’.
The challenging aspects of growth.
Tools designed specifically for nonprofits.

Resources:

Davis House Child Advocacy Center
Taproot
Salesforce
The Bridgespan Group
The Obama Foundation
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connect with Brent Hutchinson:

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
Sean Boyce by Email

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What I share with you in this episode:

What no code tools are
How you can leverage them to scale impact
An example of one I built for a nonprofit
How it helped them scale impact
How even I was fooled by the sophistication of these tools
How your nonprofit can scale impact without any tech or software experience

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A great way to encourage people to get more involved with helping your nonprofit scale impact is by inspiring them. Allow me to share the strategy and my own personal experience.

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Overhead ratios are sometimes used to measure effectiveness of a nonprofit, but in reality do they help or hurt?

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It's not easier than ever to leverage software to scale impact. Find out more about what it can do for your nonprofit organization.

If you'd like to learn how to double impact in half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/

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Aggressive goals will help your organization think differently when it comes to scaling impact.

If you want to learn how to double impact in half the time at your organization, sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact

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If your nonprofit is focused on measuring output, I'd like to explain why I think you should shift that focus to measuring successful outcomes instead. Successful outcomes drive impact.

If you'd like to double the impact in half the time at your organization, sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact

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Too many nonprofits falter when trying to scale. Here's how to make sure you can grow sustainably by leveraging software and technology.

Learn how to double your impact in half the time with my free 5 day email course. Sign up at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

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Running your nonprofit like a for profit means you'll be less dependent on alternative funding sources which will make driving impact more sustainable.

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Esperanza was a mission-driven organization from South America that had successfully accomplished their mission of helping gang members leave that life behind and instead become productive member of society. However, the organization ran into trouble when they tried to scale. Hear their story.

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Wade Munday is the Executive Director of The Addis Clinic and is a non-profit executive and civic leader, who grows startup organizations and manages them to optimize their essential services for the public good.

Wade is an innovative thinker and strategic planner with a track record of success in transforming enterprises to better achieve high-impact returns. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

How Wade started his work at The Addis Clinic.
The inconsistency in public health systems around the world.
How to measure the scale of impact an organization is having.
The challenge of raising money in the public health service.
The 5-year strategic plan The Addis Clinic is following.
The influence government and politics have in driving impact.
How to exponentially increase the impact your organization is having.

Resources:

The Addis Clinic
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connect with Wade Munday:

LinkedIn
Email
Twitter
Instagram
Facebook
TikTok

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
Sean Boyce by Email

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Francisco Lopez has over 20 years of experience in financial institutions and is the Chief Operations and Innovation Officer at DreamSpring and is a Board Member at EBA Fund.

Amber Kani is the Director Of Communications at DreamSpring and has diverse experience in marketing, fundraising, corporate social responsibility, operations, employee engagement, project management, impact measurement, and strategic growth. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

The products and services DreamSpring offers and how they help fund businesses.
The small businesses and entrepreneurs that DreamSpring tends to work with.
How DreamSpring was able to scale up and reach more clients.
The value of investing in your own technology and platforms.
How DreamSpring sources new clients.
What DreamSpring’s future goals are and how they determined these.

Resources:

DreamSpring
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Francisco Lopez:

Connecting with Amber Kani:

LinkedIn
Website

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn

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Evan Linhardt is a former nonprofit leader and public service executive and is now the Vice President and Financial Advisor for Bernstein Private Wealth Management. He now serves non-profits, foundations, and families to design investment strategies that align and allow them to fulfill their missions to maximize impact.

Evan is a Board Member and Treasurer at LiveWell Foundation, a Board Member at Sow Good Now, an Advisory Board Member at Community Foundation of South Jersey, and an Advisory Board Member at the Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia, as well as holding Corporate Responsibility at AllianceBernstein. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

How Evan went from working in nonprofits and charities to being VP in a Private Wealth Management firm.
How Evan helps individuals build investment portfolios that align with their goals and beliefs.
The challenges in growing and scaling nonprofits fundraising campaigns.
How nonprofits can combat the power imbalance they have with their key donors.
How donors and fundraisers can build strong trusting relationships with each other.
How investors can invest for impact as well as profit.

Resources:

Philadelphia School Partnership
Bernstein Private Wealth Management
Lean Impact
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Evan Linhardt:

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn

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Rebecca Block is an experienced leader focused on continuous learning and innovation grounded in meaningful measures of success, data-informed decision making, and appreciative inquiry practices.

Rebecca has built departments from scratch, managed small and large teams, and navigated a variety of environments from established institutions to the innovative chaos of social entrepreneurship.

Rebecca served as the VP of Research and Evaluation at The Future Project, founding their R&E department and launching new impact evaluation tools, before joining Springboard Collaborative as their Assistant Vice President of Innovation and Improvement. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:

Who Springboard Collaborative is and how they help children.
The innovative strategies Rebecca uses to scale Springboard's impact.
The role of software and technology in scaling accessibility.
The ways funding can limit innovation and how to reduce this.
How to present future forecasts while still leaving room for future innovation.

Resources:

The Future Project
Springboard Collaborative
Strategyzer
Lean Impact
The Lean Startup
Equity Meets Design
Daniel Stillman
NxtStep
Podcast Chef

Connecting with Rebecca Block:

Connecting with the host:

Sean Boyce on LinkedIn

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Welcome to the Scaling Impact with Sean Boyce podcast. I’m the host Sean Boyce and I’ve scaled my own consulting business NxtStep, I’ll be speaking with leaders of mission-driven organizations, to discuss how their organizations have scaled impact of their client programs.

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