8 Steps for Creating a Nonprofit Innovation Culture

Embracing innovation can transform your nonprofit. But for innovation to thrive, you must embrace a culture where the entire nonprofit is committed to enhancing processes or strategies by transforming ideas into actionable improvements. In a culture that supports innovation, everyone feels encouraged and confident to brainstorm, introduce new ideas, ask questions, and start conversations in order to identify opportunities for enhanced impact.

Our recent eBook, Nonprofit Expert Insights: Culture of Innovation, shared tips, tricks, and experiences from 11 industry experts across the global nonprofit space. Based on these essays, we could determine how nonprofits are faring in the culture of innovation, and the steps you can take to harness such a culture.

Let’s start by understanding ‘culture of innovation’ and why it matters.

Culture of Innovation: Characteristics and Benefits

As you may have experienced, nonprofits often struggle with innovation or are slower at adopting more modern approaches and tools. However, our recent Status of Fundraising research found an interesting link between income performance and innovating and trying new or different kinds of fundraising activity – it was one of the main drivers of income growth.

While an innovation culture looks different depending on the nonprofit, there are some key characteristics of a culture that leaves room for innovation:

• Strong Leadership: Leadership plays a key role in any company culture, but it becomes even more important when fostering innovation. Showcase attitudes, actions, and qualities you want your team to mirror.
• Collaboration: Working collaboratively is the only way to combine ideas and perspectives. By brainstorming and working together, your team is more likely to spot opportunities for innovation.
• Creativity and curiosity: Curiosity can lead to creativity, which, in turn, will help your nonprofit to innovate. Encourage your team to spend time getting creative, learning, or simply brainstorming.
• Trust: A trusting environment ensures your team feels comfortable sharing their ideas and asking questions. You can do so with open and transparent communication.
• Room for failure: Failure is part of innovation. First ideas are always a good starting point, but often need work to become an actionable. By encouraging a positive outlook on failure, you can help your employees embrace it rather than fear it.

By creating a culture that leaves room for innovation, you will be able to improve how your nonprofit operates and makes decisions, benefitting both your internal and external audiences. As such, a successful innovation culture can bring vast benefits to your nonprofit – ones that reach far beyond income growth. By building on your abilities, you can enhance efficiency, improve your donor relationships, attract prospects, scale your operations, and much more. Ultimately, you will be able to strengthen the impact your mission has on the people and communities you serve.

8 Steps for Creating a Culture of Innovation

Not sure how to get started? In the Culture of Innovation eBook, our industry experts discussed the topic from various angles – helping us determine 8 steps you can take to start creating your innovation culture.

1. Determine Your Approach to Innovation

To get started, establish what kind of innovator your nonprofit will be. Some are naturally early adopters while some may lack enthusiasm, know-how or resources to even get started, and the rest fall somewhere in between. This will determine how you approach creating an innovation culture.

2. Overcome Inertia

Innovation can be stifled by thorough approval cycles, long hierarchical structures, and outdated attitudes, often prevalent in nonprofits. If you are looking to launch a lean and agile innovation culture, you must change your mindset to overcome inertia.

3. Take Risks with Pragmatism

Depending on the type of innovation, the risk of failure is high. This, in turn, can carry significant costs to your nonprofit. When planning your innovation strategy, think about your approach from a portfolio perspective and create a profile for your risk tolerance that feels comfortable and appropriate.

4. Encourage a Failure-friendly Culture

Considering how risk averse nonprofits are, failure is a natural part of your innovation journey. In fact, most innovation projects fail. That’s why creating a failure-friendly culture–one that leaves room for trial and error–is essential for sustained growth. If failure is treated as a mistake rather than a lesson, your team won’t feel comfortable to innovate.

5. Use Modern Tools and Data to Enhance Decision-making

The path to innovation can be improved by implementing the right tools and taking advantage of data. Modern tools, data management, robust reporting and thoughtful analytics can give you much better idea of donor behaviour, previously undetermined opportunities, current challenges and more. As such, you can use your data to make better decisions, enhancing effectiveness and fostering innovation.

6. Focus on Your Metrics

Metrics will help you translate your data into action. You will be able to set goals and measure outcomes more effectively, propelling your nonprofit towards impactful innovation. Once your innovation culture is flourishing and you have got started with exciting innovation projects, you need to measure they are bringing in results.

7. Communicate Transparently

Transparent communication plays a key role in innovation and subsequent change management. It’s essential for building trust and demonstrating openness – both necessary for promoting a culture that leaves room for introducing new ideas, asking questions, or starting conversations.

8. Manage Change

This brings us to the last step. Innovation typically brings change with it, whether that’s new tools, approaches, or priorities. In fact, creating a true culture of innovation often means that you will have to abandon at least some of your old ways of working to leave room for innovative thinking. This highlights the need for effective change management processes to support your team embrace innovation.

To learn more from the leading industry experts across the global nonprofit space, download the Culture of Innovation eBook today: