How Non-Profits Can Think Like Startups | Hacker News Reader

How Non-Profits Can Think Like Startups

themacro.com

45 pointssalmonet13 comments

"new nonprofit organizations should not think all that much differently than their for-profit peers when it comes to growth. [...] Even if you are a solving a big problem, you must find a way to measure it in real time"

finding a cure for leukemia is not the same as writing a chat app.

solving truly big problems -- such as the example the article mentions: curing a disease -- requires large swaths of time, deep thought, reflection, curiosity, imagination, hard work, more had work, and then even more hard work . . . and it also means giving people room for that hard work to consist of exploring rabbit trails, failing, and hitting dead ends. such endeavours cannot properly proceed and unfold as they should in the kind of growth-and-metrics-obsessed, MBA-ideology-driven, strait-jacketed environment such as that which this article is proposing.

The "self-imposed fundraising deadline" doesn't make much sense to me. I've never seen a nonprofit that didn't have a dedicated fundraising team that was always building and maintaining relationships with donors. Saying "we're only going to raise until date X this year" is like saying "we're only going to sell product until date X this year". Unless your product is entirely seasonal, there's no sane reason to do that.

You need to have annual fund raising goals to meet your annual budget/expenditures.... Income must be greater than expenses just like a normal business.

In an early stage startup, building the product is just as important as fundraising. In a non profit, the product is not the good feelings they give donors, it's the impact they have on whomever their mission fulfills. If they spend all their time fundraising their product is the good feelings they give donors, which will dry up really quick without accomplishing their mission. Full time fundraising is appropriate at a scale that is not < 10 people, for sure.

Are you bringing some professional background to this assertion?

I worked for 7 years on NGOs, then the last three on startups. I made the transition exactly because of that. And I plan to go back, with a lot of useful things learned.

But I was not thinking about these general guidelines. It is more about how to achieve growth. Make something people want/love is a great moto for non profits. Only in this case, the people are not customers or users, but the beneficiaries. Well intentioned people building things not knowing if they are solving a real problem or if their approach is the right way to solve it, it is even more common than with tech startups.

The same thing with "get out of the building". Just so many social problems are "solved" at air conditioned rooms. People don't talk (or don't listen) to the people they are trying to help.

And the growth mentality, through iterations, is a much better for a lot of problems. Specially social ones, the ones fighting poverty, urban problems, advocacy.

Following this principles, a lot of good advice on how to grow, how to impact more people, how to do product development can be used by non profits with not much adaptation.

Sure, as much as in the for profit world, not all problems can be solved by the startup=growth model. Medical research is a good example. But medicine distribution could. Some issues (lots of them) demand public sector participation. But advocacy, public awareness, could benefit from startups practice.

Also, I must say that most non profit would benefit better from the "bootstrapping startup" model than from "VC startup get huge or die fast" model.

There is a problem for NGOs. You have a user (beneficiaries) that is is different from you paying customers (donors). That is one of the many reasons of why it is easy to get derailed in the way.

What we really needs is the other way around: How startups can start thinking like non-profits (i.e. having a true net-positive impact on the world and public-interest values rather than focusing on "capturing", "monetizing", and "exit")

Like a start-up? More like a normal business plan.

I read in the last few days that 'innovation' and 'think like startup' has become exhausted, overused cliche in the non-profit world.

Also, the vast majority of startups fail. Do I want non-profits providing essential social services to fail at a rate of 90%?

I think so.

I'm sure that many nonprofits are very non-introspective (like most companies I know). But some nonprofits totally blow away any company I know, like listing their mistakes and how they'll improve: http://www.givewell.org/about/shortcomings

a great way to start thinking like start ups is to find ways to circumnavigate pesky laws that may be inconvenient for you and to lie about the effectiveness of your product/efforts. I think there will be a great case study published by Zenefits about this.

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