Social Startup Success Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

Non-profit organizations cannot function like private organizations. Everyone involved needs to understand the bigger purpose and how that makes a difference. Funding is extremely important, and with the right strategy you can do really well. It is all about aligning your KPIs, tracking data, making informed decisions and keeping it human-centred.

About the Author

Kathleen Kelly Janus is a social entrepreneur and a lecturer at Stanford University. She is the co-founder of Spark, a non-profit that supports gender equality. Janus is the Senior Advisor on social innovation to Governor Gavin Newsom.

Topics

Entrepreneurship

Social Startup Success Book Summary Preview

Key Insights

As a social startup, you must always test your ideas. It will help you avoid costly mistakes.

Learn from your failure and share the lessons learned.

Track your program activities. Just like private organizations, data is important. It will help you make informed decisions.

Incorporate donations and earned income into your funding model.

Offer complimentary services when collaborating with other nonprofits.

Empower your staff. Design and implement a governance structure.

Believe in the power of story-telling. It will help you connect with the donors.

Kathleen Kelly Janus, a philanthropy expert and the founder of Spark, illustrates how social service organizations and nonprofits can thrive. According to Janus, creative leadership and innovation is the need of the hour. She bases her study on different funding models of innovators in the tech sector. Her expertise in helping small non-profits beyond the initial funding stage has helped many leaders bring about a change. Social Startup Success is an inspirational book for social entrepreneurs, or for anyone who is interested in social service.

Use a human-centered design to maximize funding and control costs.

Nonprofits rely on the government, activists, beneficiaries, and other similar organizations for funds. Money is always scarce. Like private organizations, there are no angel investors to take care of costs. Therefore, it becomes all the more important for nonprofits to craft ways to maximize their funding.

This is where human-centered design comes in. It is a creative approach to problem-solving. It helps you understand the people you are designing for, generate ideas, build low-fidelity prototypes, and test. The entire process is extremely cost-effective.

The approach is very useful when developing prototypes. Janus highlights the example of Aspire Public School, a non-profit organization providing education to children from low-income groups. The school made a prototype of its Preschool Bus using the human-centered design. With just carpet, Ikea furniture, and some tape, they successfully tested their idea. They understood the granularity of their design and its feasibility without spending money on expensive models made of industrial material. Such an approach also ensures low capital and operational expense.

Therefore, wherever possible, go back to using a human-centered approach to design your products and services.

Learn from your failures. Share the lessons learned.

Innovation doesn’t come without taking risks. It means that you may fail. Non-profit leaders are so committed to their ideas that they find it hard to admit failure. They keep the lessons to themselves and avoid taking risks. The team often commits the same mistakes because the real information was never shared with them.

Many Silicon Valley firms are successful because they focus on failing fast and learning faster. Therefore, nonprofits must learn to embrace failure and develop a tolerance for risk.

The best way to do this is to test your services in the field. If you succeed, great. If you fail, the lesson would yield valuable information that could be used in the future. To experiment is to learn, and innovative organizations know this truth. This means you can test more ideas, get faster feedback, fail fast, move quickly, and learn better.

Therefore, as a non-profit...