| Charity Leaders’ Exchange |
Is it just me, or is everyone in the sector talking about innovation at the moment? As charities budgets’ continue to be squeezed, many nonprofits are exploring new ways to generate income and deliver services. Forward thinking organisations are also taking the opportunity to explore different ways of doing things, driven by the need to be more efficient and to match the increasingly sophisticated demands of donors and other stakeholders. There are some brilliant examples of innovative work by charities. Macmillan have just launched a new social media fundraising initiative focused on online dating, named My Mate Your Date .
I’ve recently discovered the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s project, Markets for Good, which helps nonprofits generate and share data more effectively to change the world. And I’m sure there are lots of small charities out there doing exciting new things too. And for every case study that gets talked about in the charity press or blogosphere, I bet there are hundreds of other examples. I’m sure we all know fantastic people who doing innovative things in charities every day.
Yet for all the buzz about innovation in the charity world, it feels a bit like the start of a house party where lots of amazing people are having interesting conversations in separate rooms. No-one has yet tried to take the temperature of the sector to see how it views innovation, what its hopes are for the future and to assess where the potential is.
That’s exactly why I and innovation consultant Lucy Gower have created the Charity Innovation Survey. We hope that the results will help charities build strong business cases for more innovative approaches to their boards, and gain insights into how other organisations are doing things differently. I think that the research is an opportunity to bring together charities of all shapes and sizes to learn from each other. We are delighted to be undertaking the research in partnership with Guess2Give, the innovative online fundraising platform
What do you think about innovation? It would be great to hear your views in the Charity Innovation Survey. It should take no more than 5-10 minutes and as a little thank you for your time, we will email you the results and enter you into a prize draw for Amazon vouchers. The deadline for responses is midnight on Friday 11 April.
We’ll be launching the results of the survey at a special event with Charity Leaders Exchange on 10 June, ‘Charities - Innovate or Die? ,’ in central London at Clubworkspace Screenworks . At the event we’ll present on how the charities uses innovation, how important it is to the future of the sector and what organisations think it could help them achieve. We’ll also be looking at case studies of innovative charities and discussing how charity leaders can be more innovative.
If you could help your charity become more innovative, what could your organisation do? Or rather, what couldn’t it do? I hope our research will help you answer those questions. We’d love it if you could get involved in this exciting project by sharing your views and spreading the word about our research. That way we can all help the sector unlock the potential to be more innovative.
Take the Charity Innovation Survey and book your place at the Charity Leaders Exchange evening event, Charities - Innovate or Die?
