Nonprofits Need to Develop Their Missions Like Products for Customers, Says Author

Charities could better serve needy people if they approached their missions in the same way businesses develop products, writes business consultant Sandra M. Bates in her new book, The Social Innovation Imperative: Create Winning Products, Services, and Programs That Solve Society’s Most Pressing Challenges. Ms. Bates discusses her ideas and what projects she finds promising in an interview with The Chronicle.

You note that Bill Gates says corporations are in the best position to bring about social good. Do you agree with him?

The ideal scenario is when you can get corporations to work with nonprofits, government agencies, and [nongovernmental organizations] because you’ve got expertise from the business world that is going to be providing some of the goods and services working in tandem with these other organizations that are more on the delivery side.

Companies realize they have got to be responsible for fixing the gap that has come between society and business and to fix that reputation that business has as being into nothing but money.

What prevents these collaborations from occurring more often?

The lack of a common language—a common language that will enable them to communicate better about what they’re trying to accomplish.

What are nonprofits not doing?

What’s missing is a structured approach to understanding the problem and then using that information to start generating ideas just the way a corporation would by creating product road maps. It’s a matter of taking the bigger picture and talking to all these different constituents, getting an understanding of their needs, and then creating a strategy. You’re now seeing chief innovation officers and people whose role it is to innovate. The nonprofit side could benefit from that type of a highly focused position, someone who’s going to pay attention to thinking, What do our customers really want? What do the people that we serve really want?

And grant makers?

This is a movement that has been around for quite some time but is very slow on the uptake. Grant makers need a clear understanding of what the issues are, in priority order—what are the needs of donors, what are the needs of targeted groups getting funding, how is that going to help. All of that needs to happen before the investment’s made.

What is an example of a nonprofit successfully taking a businesslike approach?

There’s starting to be a lot of creativity coming out of different organizations. There’s a water trust fund that the Nature Conservancy created that is a financial vehicle being used to manage water-conservation programs in Colombia. Their CEO is formerly an investment banker; he’s taking some of these ideas from the business world and applying them to the social sector.

Should nonprofits look to hire people who come from the business world?

There’s a fine line there. You don’t want to kill the culture of the nonprofit. More than anything, it’s the idea transference more so than the people transference.