In this week’s reading, “Force for good”, Chapter six, Crutchfield and Grant talked about the story of the nonprofit “Share Our Strength” to demonstrate the importance of a nonprofit’s ability to adapt. They pointed out that while it is important for a nonprofit to be able to continuously innovate, nonprofits shouldn’t abandon stifling system totally.
I think this theory is important for both start-up nonprofits that are determined to succeed, and big nonprofits that want to expand, but also for organizations that are set up to measure the effectiveness of other nonprofits, such as the Charity Navigator. A nonprofit’s ability to adapt to the environment can be a criteria to assess if the nonprofit is accountable or not.
However, I also got one question about this chapter. Of course for those big nonprofits that have already existed for a long time and can afford to lose some money to experiment, innovation and adaption are very necessary for them to stay competitive in this area. However, for those start-ups that have big fund issues, is it worthwhile to take the risk? Is it more practical for them to start doing something more traditional and less risk, accumulate their assets to a certain degree that a few exploration losses don’t hurt, and then to do some combination of innovation and adaptation? It’s always easy to say that we can make the decision by looking at the environment. What do you guys think?
I agree that newer organizations should focus on becoming stable and effective at carrying out their missions at first. Too much experimentation and innovative ideas are risky when there are very limited funds (and loyalty) for an organization, although the organization must have something new or an improvement on something old to bring to the table in order to be competitive.
ReplyDeleteI think the most important point was that organizations must learn to recognize when their same old programs/policies/tactics aren't doing as well as they used to. They should then work to adapt in order to improve. These could be newer organizations who realize that their original plans were not as successful as they had hoped. In this case, I think organizations have to take those bigger risks in order to remain viable.