Forces for Good

The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits

Leslie R. Crutchfield, Heather McLeod Grant

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118118801
• eBook ISBN: 9781118237939
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

An updated edition of a groundbreaking book on best practices for nonprofits

What makes great nonprofits great? In the original book, authors Crutchfield and McLeod Grant employed a rigorous research methodology derived from for-profit books like Built to Last. They studied 12 nonprofits that have achieved extraordinary levels of impact—from Habitat for Humanity to the Heritage Foundation—and distilled six counterintuitive practices that these organizations use to change the world.

• Features a new introduction that explores the new context in which nonprofits operate and the consequences for these organizations
• Includes a new chapter on applying the Six Practices to small, local nonprofits, including some examples of these organizations
• Contains an update on the 12 organizations featured in the original book—how they have fared, what they've learned, and where they are now in their growth trajectory

This book has lessons for all readers interested in creating significant social change, including nonprofit managers, donors, and volunteers.

Part One
Introduction

Introduction to the Revised and Updated Edition

What makes great nonprofits great?

That was driving question we attempted to answer as we wrote the original edition of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. Since then, the entire world has changed.

When we set out to study the twelve high-impact nonprofits featured in the first edition, it was the mid-2000s. The U.S. economy had recovered from the dot-com bust of 2001 and was humming along, fueled by consumer demand, housing price inflation, and rampant technological and social innovation. At that exuberant moment in time, the social sector was obsessed with growth, scale, and organizational effectiveness. As they ramped up their private foundations and shifted their energy to the business of catalyzing social change, new “philanthrocapitalists,” such as Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Pierre Omidyar, and Steve Case, were channeling funding to enterprising nonprofits.¹ And more individual donors than ever were giving at record levels, fueling rapid growth in the number of nonprofits.

In short, it was a boom time for the nonprofit world. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.

About a year after Forces for Good was released in fall 2007, the global economy ground to a halt. Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008; the housing bubble burst; financial markets melted down; unemployment spiked; and the U.S. economy fell into recession. Billions of dollars were ploughed into the financial sector, but nonprofits were left unmoored. In the social sector, the collapse not only affected individual people and organizations but also impacted us collectively as well. The fear is that this might be the “new normal.”

Many individuals—including the wealthy and the simply generous—have cut back on their philanthropy. Overall U.S. giving declined in 2008 for the first time in more than two decades; toward the end of 2011, a majority of U.S. nonprofits had reported decreased or flat levels of charitable gifts, and researchers were predicting mixed fundraising prospects for most nonprofits in 2012, given the unpredictable economy and rising demand for critical nonprofit programs and services.² As foundation endowments have dropped, some funders have refocused on pressing social needs, leaving “nice to haves,” such as arts groups, to fend for themselves. Many businesses have cut back on their charitable giving, despite record corporate profits for some. Everywhere, local, state, and federal governments today are struggling to balance budgets and reduce deficits by any means necessary—and social spending is usually first on the chopping block. In short, it has been a perfect storm for nonprofits these past five years: greater needs, fewer resources. Talk about having to do more with less.

So as we approached the fifth anniversary of the first edition of Forces for Good, we were acutely aware that the last few years have been challenging for the nonprofit sector. It was against this backdrop that we decided to revisit our initial work and update it to reflect a new, more austere reality—and once again see what we might learn from some of the best nonprofits about how to survive, and even thrive, in difficult times.

Can We Thrive in Tumultuous Times?

This sense of crisis prompted us to write an update to Forces for Good. We were deeply curious to learn how these enormous economic, social, and political changes were playing out in the social sector: How were they impacting the original twelve organizations we studied? How had these trends affected smaller nonprofits struggling to do more with less in local communities? And closer to home and the point of this book, Do the six practices we uncovered still hold up in a dramatically different context?

Nothing we found caused us to reject the six practices as described in the first edition. In fact, as we have toured the country these past few years speaking to nonprofits and philanthropic groups, leading workshops, and advising organizations in the sector, our belief in the fundamental effectiveness of the six practices for scaling social impact has been reinforced. Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve seen examples of nonprofits large and small deploying some or all of the practices to increase their impact. Most important, our findings were reinforced by feedback from our readers, who told us they’d found a new language and framework to describe what some of them had been doing all along.

When we embarked on our initial research for Forces for Good, we did so with the investigative lens of organizational effectiveness and nonprofit management. We were writing in the genre of business management books like Good to Great and Built to Last, and we therefore anticipated uncovering internal management practices that caused these twelve nonprofits to be great. The counterintuitive insight we uncovered and presented in the first edition was that building a good organization was necessary, but not sufficient. In fact, the twelve high-impact nonprofits we studied were all managed quite differently and had varying cultures, wide-ranging budgets and brands, extremely diverse boards, and very few patterns around their internal operations.

What was the same across them all—and what ultimately led us to uncover the six practices—was that they focused very clearly on the outside world, on engaging all the sectors, and on influencing others to become advocates for their cause. As we expressed it then, they spent as much time focused externally on changing systems—by influencing government policies, shaping markets, building fields of practice, and nurturing social and organizational networks—as they did on their own operations. They cared less about management practices per se than they did about their ability to influence others and to build entire movements to create more lasting change.

It was a fresh way of looking at the work of nonprofits—and this framework seemed to resonate in the field. Over the past five years, we’ve observed a change in the language and mind-set of many of the nonprofits we’ve met—not just because of our work, but because others have begun to write and talk about these ideas as well. There has been a shift from the previous two decades, which were more focused on the role of individuals (social entrepreneurs) and organizations; now the focus is on larger networks, ecosystems, and collective impact. We didn’t invent the six practices—after all, advocacy, corporate partnerships, movement building, grassroots organizing, and innovation are all concepts that have been around for years—but they had perhaps not been getting as much attention. What we did was shine a spotlight on these practices and put them in context, with clear examples of how they were being used by twelve nonprofits as different pathways for scaling impact.

Many readers intuitively understood that the six practices weren’t actually about nonprofit management as much as a different approach to increasing an organization’s impact on the world, using the power of influence and movement building. They welcomed a framework that would help them shift from an organizational mind-set to a relational mind-set; from a more industrial-era model of production, where the nonprofit produces goods and services for customers, to a network model, where the nonprofit’s raison d’être is to catalyze social change by inspiring action in others. Although this model is most relevant for social change organizations that aspire to lasting impact, rather than pure charities such as schools, hospitals, or churches, it speaks to many nonprofits in our sector.

The difference is subtle, but important. And it has real implications for how we define success in the social sector: Is success about building an efficient and effective organization to meet immediate short-term needs—or it is about achieving the mission and sustaining significant impact over the long term? Most nonprofits say it is about the latter, but many of them primarily act in pursuit of the former. Ultimately it’s “both-and”: it is important to have effective and efficient nonprofits, not as ends in themselves, but as means to achieving social impact; and it’s important to meet short-term needs, even as we aspire to longer-term social change. And that view is becoming more widespread in our sector. It’s as if the best thinking about social movements and advocacy from the 1960s and 1970s is being combined with what we’ve learned in the 1980s and 1990s about building strong organizations—and now taken to a new level with the addition of systems thinking, online tools, and new understanding about networks and collective action.

Nonprofit leaders increasingly realize that their real power lies in the ability to build platforms for connections; to share ideas and information; to influence others to spread innovative models; to connect the dots across issues, industries, and sectors even as they provide services for their clients and help meet immediate needs. This is the power of what the Monitor Institute (where Heather now works) refers to as working with and through networks—or networked approaches to social change. To achieve the highest levels of impact, the best nonprofits and funders realize they can’t act unilaterally, but instead must collaborate and leverage the power of individual and organizational networks. They can enhance r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword to the Revised and Updated Edition
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Achieving Impact
• Part Three: New Lessons for New Times
• Part Four: Appendixes and Resources
• Additional Resources
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement