On this episode I talk about:

• What the 'problem worth solving' framework is all about
• How I followed the process to find a real problem worth solving
• The target market we selected for discovery (and why)
• What the results of each step look like in practice
• What to do after you find a problem worth solving

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here. Today what I want to talk to you about is a real world example of the episode I've recorded and shared yesterday, called problems worth solving. And in that episode, I walked you through how to identify a problem worth solving. Today I'm going to talk you through a real world example where I've used that framework in order to identify one. 

So if you haven't listened to that previous episode, and you don't know what I mean, when I refer to problem solving, go back and listen to that episode first, because this one will make a lot more sense. Okay, so we talked about the framework Right? Which is starting with a target market, talking to them about their problems and challenges, better understanding how they're solving those problems and challenges today are what I refer to as the existing solution, and then getting a better handle for the impact of that problem or challenge in terms of what is it costing said individual? And as such, having context around all of the answers to those questions, gives us a better idea to be able to understand whether or not there's enough opportunity there. It makes sense for us to invest in a solution to improve the value that the target market customer or user or client is ultimately going to get, meaning that we can move the needle and scale impact with a solution like that before we invest big time and money building something. So that's an overview of the process. 

This example that I'm gonna share with you comes from the nonprofit client that I worked with to help scale impact. Ultimately, we built a software application to specifically address the challenge that we found with a specific target market. In this case, it was their non profit program clients, it was the clients that were enrolling in their program and the value or a specific challenge that they clients were experiencing. When they were trying to get the value out of the program. 

Now in this case, the program was to help them build essentially financial assets and wealth to help pull themselves out of poverty and help an underrepresented population that struggles with challenges related to the clients in the program. When people are enrolled into the program and do well in it and they graduate from it, they've been able to make pretty dramatic transformation. So the value is definitely there. However, there are issues related to under utilization and people getting to and through the program in particular. So then my nonprofit client wanted to specifically see what they could do about understanding the challenges that the clients themselves were having, so that we could figure out what we may be able to do to scale impact for them. So I invested in performing discovery with the nonprofit program clients, which translated to one on one conversations with them so I can better understand the challenges and I could go through the discovery process with them. 

Ultimately, what I found out when doing so was that one of their biggest challenges was related to not having enough time with their coaches. Now this program that they're enrolled in, it requires them to meet with and spend time with financial coaches so they can learn more about how they can build a better financial future for themselves by improving their credit, paying down debt. Learning about all these things, to the time with the coaches was very valuable to them. The problem was they weren't getting enough of it. And that started to lead me down a path of understanding what the impact of this challenge was related to them sometimes losing focus and losing progress in the program and sometimes becoming disengaged, ultimately leading to clients dropping out of the program, which is the worst case scenario, when we're talking about this particular program. So this problem had real negative impact associated with it. 

The next thing to do was to talk more about the existing solution, how are they solving this problem today? Well as it turns out, the clients were simply waiting for their next touch point with their coaches. However, the problem here was that the coaches were overwhelmed, and they were unable to spend a lot of time with each client. So the meetings were happening rather infrequently. So the meetings may only happen every three months or so, which meant that there was a lot of time in between the meetings between the clients and coaches. So the clients would have these situations where they could really use the guidance of the coaches or they wanted to ask a quick question of the coach, because they might be, you know, signing up for a loan on bad terms or putting something on credit, purchasing something that maybe more like an impulse purchase that they didn't really need but wanted in the moment, but they, you know, had those moments that we all do and they ultimately made a financial decision without the guidance of their coach which set them back in their program. So this also spoke to the impact but ultimately, the existing solution gave me a better idea for what the level of performance was for how they were trying to solve that problem today, and they were just waiting for the next meeting, which was not catching all these instances in between where they could lose progress. They can become demotivated, they can forget about all the positive momentum that they had already made. And that would ultimately lead to them becoming disengaged, and for some of them dropping out the program. 

So plenty of negative impact here, and plenty of opportunity to improve so that I wanted to share that with you because that's a real world example of ultimately what we invested in from a discovery perspective, in order to better understand whether or not there was a problem worth solving here, and we believe that there was so ultimately we moved forward to building a product to solve this problem. And I'm gonna talk about what that was in a future episode probably tomorrow. So stay tuned if you want to listen to the next installment in this series where I'll walk you through, ultimately what we did and the product that we brought to market to help these clients with this problem and provide them with a better solution.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I share:

• What is a 'Problem Worth Solving'
• How to identify problems worth solving
• Why validating the problem is so important
• The process to build to get these answers
• The questions to ask to validate your problem

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a concept that I've mentioned on the show before that I refer to as identifying problems worth solving. 

Now, when I say problems worth solving, what I mean is looking for the best area of opportunity for which it makes sense for your organization to invest in a product solution. And if you found what I refer to is a problem worth solving, then it will make sense to make this investment, otherwise you might not be able to achieve the results that you're ultimately looking for. 

So why is it so important to find what I refer to as problems worth solving? Well, I'm going to start start by defining essentially what it is and to me it's something that is going to give you the kind of potential to achieve the product success that you're looking for. And it's so important to identify one before you start building solutions because if you haven't already done this, then your product solution or however you're trying to innovate is unlikely to offer to your clients, or whomever you're building that solution for the kind of value that you think it will. And it's instead probably not going to be very successful. There's a lot of that out in the product world. Many organizations that have invested in technology and software, especially from a customer perspective, have struggled to gain the kind of traction that they would like to because they underestimated this step in the process. So this is a really important element of figuring out how to get a product off the ground. 

So how do you identify a problem worth solving? Well, I've developed a process over a series of years of investing further and researching in pretty great detail, product strategy, product research, product management, all of these concepts. I've read all the books, and I've done a lot of the testing in building product companies of my own. That's how I know in terms of what I've done, what works and what doesn't work, so I can kind of shortcut the process for you and instead share my system that has worked pretty consistently as I've done this for other nonprofit organizations potentially like yours. And the first step of the process to identify who we're looking to help. You need to have a pretty specific, as I refer to it, target market in terms of who you want to interview. That's because different groups of people or different users are likely to have different problems. So the more consistent you can make that the better. And I'm going to share a mini example in this episode, but a more detailed, thorough example for how I followed this process to identify an area of opportunity for which we've built a successful product for a nonprofit client of mine that is helping them scale impact. 

In this case, let's assume you want to help your clients or clients that are the members of your nonprofit program. So if you have access to a number of them, that are interested in meeting with you, what you can do is you can interview them and invest in the part of the process that I refer to as customer discovery, which is a one on one conversation to better understand what a day in the life is like for them so that you can better understand their problems and challenges and look for areas of opportunity to potentially invest in a future product and help scale impact by solving some of their top problems and challenges. And that's the first step in the process as you're interviewing them. You want to understand what are their current challenges, what is slowing down the kind of progress that they would like to make what's standing in the way of them being more successful in whatever it is they'd like to do. That's a great place to begin the conversation and then as you identify areas that you believe you may be able to help them because some you may be able to help them some maybe not yet. You really want to focus on the ones that you think are closest to the type of value you're attempting to provide for them or where you're looking to help them the most. 

As you understand that the next series of questions and the next section of this conversation should focus on. What I've talked about on the show before is the existing solutions. And when I say that what I mean is, how are they going about solving whatever that problem is they just mentioned to you today. That's very important, because that's what's going to be that's what you will be compared against if you're thinking of proposing a unique solution different than however they're solving that problem currently. And that's also what you're going to need to be able to be as it needs to be faster, cheaper, easier to use whatever it is, you need to figure out how to be better than however they're doing it today. Otherwise, they're not going to use your solution. That's another mistake. That's often made by nonprofit organizations trying to scale impact with products you need to understand that very well. So that's the second series of questions and related to that section of the conversation. 

The third is what is the level of performance. So if they have a form of an existing solution to try to solve whatever it is their top problem or the one that you'd like to help solve for them, how well is however they're solving that today working for them. And then try to break this down as much as you can into something tangible that you can measure. So whatever that problem is, out of 10 times in which they experience it. How many times does the existing solution or however they're solving that today? How many times out of that 10 doesn't solve the problem, right? Is it solving it? Seven or eight times out of 10? Or is it solving it two or three times out of 10? This gives you a great perspective for how effective that current solution is that existing solution is. And again, that's another great baseline for you to compare your solution to terms of if you are deciding whether or not to build a solution to this problem in particular. 

From there, it's all about better understanding the area of opportunity to innovate, as I refer to it at times as well too. And some of this data will provide you with some of that insight if the existing solution is rather ineffective. And those numbers are on the lower end than the strength or the area of opportunity to innovate. Here's probably going to be higher, as will your clients interest in trying to solve that problem in a different more unique way. And this is what we've done it for a nonprofit organization in terms of building them an application to help them with what is a financial coaching program. And I'm gonna talk about that in greater detail in a future episode, but you can for now focus on this as a system and consider running a series of interviews that I refer to as customer discovery with whomever it is you'd like to build a potential solution for. In this case, let's assume that your nonprofit clients to better understand the problems and challenges they have today, how they're solving them today, and how effective that current is so that you can get a better understanding before you invest. Too much in any form of a solution. What the area of opportunity is and what that looks like in terms of what type of potential you can expect from a potential solution that you might offer your clients to solve this ...

On this episode I talk about:

• What the 'existing solution' is all about
• Why it's so important for you to understand it well
• How to uncover the existing solution in discovery
• An example of a non-obvious existing solution
• How to get started with discovery

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I'm going to talk to you about is a concept that I refer to as the existing solution and why it's important for you to beat that in order to figure out how to be successful with products when it comes to scaling impact. 

Now, over time, I've developed a framework for figuring out how to go from zero all the way to and through a successfully implemented product that helps you scale impact. There's a number of steps along the way, but the important part of the process, when you're starting there, is to make sure you're investing in what I refer to as customer discovery. Now, when you're investing in customer discovery, that's when you're meeting with your clients or your team members or other organizations like yours, or whomever it is you would like to solve a problem when you're meeting with them. You need to learn more about what their problems are, how those problems are impacting their current daily lives and routine, what's the pain, what is the impact of those problems for your target market users. 

The next step goes into what I refer to is the existing solution. Now the existing solution in this case is whatever they're doing today to currently solve that problem, regardless of how effective that solution may be, and that is a really key element to this as well, too. So as you're doing this discovery you're gonna get to this point where you stumbled upon a problem that's causing a certain amount of pain or causing a certain amount of impact, negative impact, and you're going to be considering proposing a solution to resolve some of that impact, ideally, as much of it as possible. But in terms of figuring out what type of potential the solution that you're proposing is ultimately going to have you need to better understand that the existing solution or how they are trying to solve that problem today. 

I'll give you an example to make it easier to understand. Most of us are probably familiar with the tax preparation software called TurboTax. It was built by a company called Intuit who makes a number of different software products related to finance and accounting, but I'm going to focus on TurboTax in this case. Now, you may have seen or heard of this story before, but when the folks that were involved with building TurboTax in the beginning, are telling the story from a product management perspective, in terms of how they came up with the solution and ultimately why the feel the product has been so successful. They credited to what they were comparing it against in terms of the existing solution for their users at the time and inevitably when they're telling this story. They ask the question to an audience or whomever they're presenting it to. And they ask, essentially, the simple question of what was TurboTax competing against at the time to kind of see what kind of answers they get. Inevitably the answers they usually get or some other type of defunct software product e-file this and e-file that which is usually some obscure reference to what is now a defunct software product that didn't go the distance. And the punchline here, seemingly, almost underwhelming is that it was pen and paper. What TurboTax was competing against at the time was pen and paper. The reason why they were competing against that was because the vast majority of people at the time, were filling out returns by hand. 

So TurboTax didn't need to compete against anyone else trying to either solve the same problems or try to solve this problem with software. They knew that they were competing against people filling out returns manually by hand. And that's what they needed to be better than and that perspective was really important. And it's often lost on people trying to scale impact with products or software. Because what they're not understanding is the hoops that folks are going to have to jump through or the habits that they're going to need to form in order to be able to pick up their solution and use it consistently to get that kind of value that you think it can provide. 

So I wanted to talk about this as a concept. It is a very important one. When you're investing in discovery when you're trying to find what I call problems worth solving. You really need to be laser focused and better understand everything about whoever it is you're building for what is going on in their life in terms of how are they currently solving that problem today, and that could be for your clients. That could be for people that work on your team that could be for other organizations, whomever it is, you're building for it you need to really understand very well how it is they're trying to solve that problem today, in order to evaluate the kind of potential and opportunity your proposed solution may have as well as what is the likelihood that it is ultimately going to succeed because you'll be able to measure the difference between how significantly different they doing it today is between how you are proposing they may do it in the future by leveraging your product solution.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

What I talk about in this episode:

• When services make sense
• How they help you build great products
• Finding new opportunities to offer services
• Designing them to complement one another
• How can you beat the existing solution

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is, when and why the service model makes sense, when you're intending to offer a solution to your market in order to help you scale impact.

Now, when I say service model, I'm talking about that as opposed to a product model where you'll find a lot of tech and software. People have a tendency to get very excited about the potential of leveraging technology and software in order to build a product that scales significantly in terms of what it is they're trying to do. The challenge with that is that unless you have a very proven model, it's very difficult to get the product model to work. So that's where a service has a lot of potential advantages and can even help you with the process of designing and building a successful product. So I want to talk about where it makes sense to offer a service. If you find what you think to be an opportunity to offer a solution to your market. A service is a great way to test it. Because if you're not sure, again, the rigidity of investing in more of a product until these things are well known is too high of a risk, and it can be very expensive rabbit hole in which to get lost. 

The reason why the service model can be so attractive for this is because it's flexible. You can make changes to it even on the fly as you're figuring out how to get that value proposition right. So if you find an opportunity and you want to evaluate whether or not the there's potential there to create and offer value, and then to drive revenue, that you can reinvest in other ways to help scale impact service models is a great place to start.

Now I mentioned as well, that services can help you with the process of building successful products and what I mean by that is exactly what I just said that services can help you test value propositions on the earlier stage so that you can figure out which components of that can be built to scale in product format. So once you have a service that you know works, say it's delivered by the members of your team by following SOPs or standard operating procedures that you've built while you've been testing, how to offer the most value for your clients.  As you figure out which components of that or perhaps the whole standard operating procedure that you built, are consistent and repeatable. Now you can make them scalable by investing in a product. So you're essentially doing some early stage validation by offering your solution as a service, in which you may ultimately then turn to a product to make it more scalable and to reach more people. So that's a great way to leverage services to help you build great products.

Now, if you're trying to figure out where can I take advantage of the service model how do I get started? Start looking for areas of opportunity of pain or challenges or frustration for your clients or other organizations like yours, and also perhaps even at your organization. If you have a problem or challenge internally that can be solved by developing a procedure. There's a there's a good to fair chance that other organizations like yours are going to have that challenge as well and need that as a solution. So as you're doing some discovery, you may find opportunities to offer services that provide value for what your organization has solved. I'll give you a quick example. So as we were building the enrollment portal for a nonprofit client of mine, which helped them enroll 300% more clients in less than half the time. Part of what we figured out that other organizations needed help with enrollment, and they were very interested in the enrollment portal. They also needed help marketing and advertising their program as in finding people to connect to their enrollment portal. Now this is something that wasn't built into the scope of the enrollment portal product, but we uncovered it as part of the discovery that we did. As such, we were able to develop a service to then offer that as a solution to the same market because they had that need, or we didn't build it in the product, because we weren't sure whether or not you're going to be able to get the value proposition right in terms of what we may be able to charge, how expensive it was for us to offer it the value that they ultimately get out of that as a service. So that's a great example of finding an opportunity that you can further explore with a service that at a later date. Once you figure some of these things out can also be built into the product experience.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I discuss:

• Pros and cons of services
• Pros and cons of products
• How do leverage the strengths of each
• How to make them work together
• How to get started

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is leveraging the strengths of both products and services in order to scale impact. 

Now, I talk a lot about software and technology, but I don't want to underscore the importance of leveraging a service appropriately. That can also help you scale impact. Now, if you consider products and services, they have their respective strengths and weaknesses and what I want to talk about today is what each of those are and when it is appropriate to use the right one, in order for you to most effectively scale impact, because it's really not all one or the other. It's like anything that offers two primary options in a market. Oftentimes, one is going to be more appropriate than the other. I think the tricky thing to figure out is when to use each. So that's what I want to talk about. 

People have a tendency to glorify the products that they can build, especially with software and tech, because they get very excited about their scalability potential and if you've ever built a service based business or run a service oriented nonprofit, that probably sounds very attractive to you because you know just how much effort, time, capital is required to run a service based business. However, on the other side, the attractive thing about software products and leveraging technology is they paint this picture of a world where you don't have to do all of that work, and you have to spend all of that money, but you can still get great results, potentially infinitely scalable results and that's a that is true to an extent, but it oftentimes doesn't play out like that much like a lot of things that we get excited about in theory vs practice, the reality is often different. 

I want to talk about the pros and cons of each so that you can think through which one is appropriate for the problem that you want to solve. Now, let's start with services, and we're talking about services, they're great if the process isn't completely well understood, and very, very consistent. So if you need some flexibility in the execution of whatever it is you'd like to offer, services are going to be a more appropriate approach to that because there it's much more cost effective to be able to change or modify a service on the fly. That's why they're great for leveraging upfront when you don't know exactly the steps that can be repeated at scale with very little if any deviation, that will still be delivering a consistent experience from start to finish, or whoever you're creating it for. So that's where you want to leverage the strengths of a service. And you can offer service just like a product and you can bring in revenue to provide value. You can do all the kinds of things you can with a product, but it gives you the ability to start beginning what is that discovery effort to test what you might ultimately build into a product. 

So lets talk about the pros and cons of the product approach. Now like I've already mentioned, products can be a lot more scalable, but they're very rigid and inflexible. When you build or invest in software or technology, it's actually quite difficult in order to change how they work from where you start. And people don't really take that into consideration when they're thinking through building software or technology products. So if you don't have a very consistent experience that has already been tested, and that you know will continue to be successful at scale, then you're not ready for a product. But once you have accomplished that, and one of the best ways to test that is by starting with the service. Now you can start leveraging the real strengths and power that a product can provide for you by investing more in software and technology to scale that solution even further. 

So that's also how I want you to think of where to start and how to move forward from it in order to reach more people and scale impact. Ideally, in most instances, especially if you're starting with something new. I want you to start with a service leverage its strengths to really refine the process, measure the impact of the whole experience. Then you can leverage the product strengths in order to reach more success at scale.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I talk about:

• What your organization needs to own
• What your product development partner should own
• Owning the client relationship
• Prioritizing what to build
• How you work together to scale impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is how to develop an effective relationship with your development partner. 

Now, when I say development in this case, what I mean is product development or software development and the understanding is, at this point, you've decided that in order for your organization to better scale impact, you're going to invest in software and technology and you're planning to build something which is great. The question is, what precisely is it that your development partner is going to own? And then what are you going to own in terms of making this relationship work so that you can scale impact for your clients and customers? 

I'm going to break it down into a couple of different categories. And this is very relevant or timely because I'm going through this right now with a client of mine. They are trying to upgrade a product that they have and make it offer even more value for their clients and customers. Their product is a little bit dated, so there's quite a bit that needs to be done and it serves quite a large population of clients. So it's a pretty significant undertaking and as such, they need a development partner, and I'm helping them figure out how to effectively establish that relationship so that they can successfully accomplish their goals. and make progress towards their ultimate vision, and better understand who's expected to own what in order to make that relationship work. 

The conversations that we're having relate to questions like and topics like the what, the why the how and the when, in terms of what it is we want to do. Now the what you can really think of in terms of what it is we want to build. What do we want to add to the product or fix in the product from its previous version? The why is the validation criteria to better understand which of the category of the what in terms of the things we're considering building really should be built? Because we've got validation that says that those are going to offer value if we prioritize them. The how and the when is more related to how are we actually going to build it, who's going to put the technical pieces together to bring it to life? And the when is another priority component terms of if that will happen now or is that going to happen in the future? Right? How do we prioritize from there? 

So a good way to think about this is that you as an organization, are going to need to own the what and the why. The development partner on the other hand, is expected to own the how especially and will help you put together the picture of the when. Now, the what is something that you should be owning in terms of having conversations internally with your team and gathering this data from your clients and customers. If you have strong relationships with them and you're better understanding what they need help with, and combine that with your vision for scaling impact, then that should materialize into the what components in terms of what it is we want to build. 

Now in order to validate the what and make sure that we're not just picking things that may or may not offer our clients value. You need the why component and you should be owning that as well. The why comes from those relationships with your clients and customers. You need a process that I call customer discovery but you need a process for getting this data from your clients and customers to validate the what in terms of basically what should we prioritize out of this list? How do we order this and get a better understanding of how much value it's going to offer to our clients. 

Now on the other hand, once you've done that work, you're ready to establish the relationship and potentially move forward with the development partner, someone who can bring this product to life for you. They are going to provide expertise which will help you better understand how they're going to be able to do it and what's required there from a technical perspective, but they'll also help you better understand the when. Because you may have multiple things you're considering building and you're trying to determine which one to build and when the why component will help you validate what's going to offer the most value to your clients and that additional input that your development partner can provide you with in terms of basically how heavy of a lift is it going to be to build any one of those things? What's that going to cost? How much time is going to take? They can help you get that kind of data which can help you better understand what type of project are you looking for and as such, what should you prioritize now, so I wanted to share that with you because they're working through figuring that out and I've helped a number of different organizations, try to figure out this right balance. That's what it should be at your organization. 

You should own the what and the why. Relationships with your clients, protecting their interest, and making sure that what's being prioritized is getting you closer to realizing your vision. Your product development partner, when operating in optimal fashion and being a good partner will help you with the how and the when.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

What I talk about in this episode:

• Measuring impact vs output
• A great example from CEO of Philabundance Loree Jones Brown
• The difference between measuring tea bags and potatoes
• Focusing on what really matters
• How to know whether or not you're really measuring impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is are you measuring what matters now when I say that what I mean is, are you actually measuring impact? Or are you measuring something more closely related to output? 

Now I was at an event last night, which was a panel and on it hosted Loree Jones Brown who is the CEO of a nonprofit organization called Philabundance and one of the questions I was asked was related to this topic, and it was, essentially how to make sure you're measuring what matters and Loree gave what I think is an excellent answer on the topic and I'll paraphrase for you, but she gave an example in terms of what their organization does, which is works diligently to try to cure the hunger challenges facing the world over especially from underrepresented populations. They've done incredible work as they've grown. They're local to my area in terms of their headquarters, which is in the Philadelphia area that they serve over 135,000 people per week, and they moved more than 52 million pounds of food in the year 2021, which is just remarkable. That's so impressive in terms of the results that she phrased her answer related to measuring in relation to weight. As in when she was talking with one of her directors about this problem in particular in terms of what are they measuring what's important. They were on the topic of the weight between the different things that they might measure that they could provide, you know, a lot more tea bags was the example she gave, as opposed to potatoes or canned vegetables, because canned vegetables and potatoes are a lot heavier. If we're focusing on the weight of the products, then that is there's a disparity there. Right as in, we can reach a heavier weight with less potatoes or canned vegetables, then we can with other food products, which might be lighter, but we can ship more of those so to speak. 

So when she talked about this, she really underscored the fact that if you're not focused on the right metric here, it can blur the lines between measuring output and versus measuring impact. Right. So she really highlighted and underscored the importance of making sure that you are measuring impact and relative to how it is impacting and affecting your clients or the beneficiaries of your program and that's what I want to kind of leave you with is to make sure you're always measuring the impact but make sure you're measuring it through the lens of your client and what matters most to them. Because that's ultimately what your mission is right? So if you're measuring something somewhat unrelated, or indirectly related to what ultimately matters most to them, then you're probably not measuring the right thing. You're probably not measuring impact. At least you're not measuring it as best as you could. Right. 

So try to refocus and reshape that conversation like Loree did. Around well wait a minute. We shouldn't be as concerned so much, so about the differences in weight of different types of food products. What we should really should be focused on is are we curing or solving hunger? And if so, for how many families and how many people? Right? That's much closer to ultimately what their organization wants to measure because that's what their mission is.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

In this episode I talk about:

• A real-world example of solving your own problem to scale impact
• Why the organization focused on this problem
• What we did to solve the problem with software and technology
• The level of results and return on investment for the organization
• How other organizations expressed interest in it for themselves
• What my client did to expand the ROI of this project

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is sharing an example from the episode that I recorded and shared yesterday regarding solving your own problems and leveraging software to build solutions around solving those problems in order to scale impact. 

Now, the example that I'm going to share is a real world scenario and an application that I helped build with an organization that had a need that they wanted to solve and in particular, again, this was a problem of their own at the organization in terms of something standing in the way of them scaling impact. Now, at this organization, they provide financial services to underrepresented populations of people and helping them essentially with things like financial literacy, asset building, repairing and improving their credit, saving to purchase a home, any number of wonderful things that way too many people need a significant amount of help with so their program is critically important. 

One of the challenges they were having is they were ready to scale and they wanted to expand the program beyond the kind of local and regional areas that they were in. They wanted to go beyond regional they wanted to go national and the challenge with that was they knew how long it was going to take to do with the mechanisms that they were previously the strategies they were using to enroll people into their program, which was largely offline and by that I mean in person. They were running in person events, usually a form of a workshop. Usually after hours, you're trying to connect with members of the community that were a fit for their program. Now, while this was arguably effective in enrolling people into the program, it was time consuming and expensive, which meant obviously that at scale, those costs were only going to go up potentially exponentially depending on how aggressively they wanted to grow. So seeing as how that was relatively unattractive, they had a different idea in mind. Could they figure out how to scale more efficiently in order to reach a wider audience without increasing their expenses dramatically and that's where the conversation of technology entered the fold. 

When you hear things like this, and I want you to take this away from this episode, as well, you're trying to do something faster, cheaper, easier, more cost effectively, if talking about scale, any of these kinds of buzzwords come up in conversation, where these key words come up in conversation, technology and software, have strengths in all of those areas, and when leveraged appropriately, can help you solve these problems and that's exactly what was done here. So we figured out a way to build essentially an online enrollment portal that enabled the clients that they were previously enrolling offline to do so now online, which meant that didn't need to run these expensive and time consuming in person events which required a lot of coordination. A lot of people needed to be involved in order to set those up, make sure those went well. They could still do those, but they could do those relative to the capacity that they had and they can instead rely on the online enrollment portal to reach clients essentially anywhere because it's digital. As long as we can connect with the right audience virtually. We can advertise the program. We can help educate them in terms of what it can do for them and we can complete the process of enrolling them by getting some information from them and verifying whether or not they might be a fit for the program. So that's what this project was all about and we leverage software and technology in order to do it. 

Now, before I talk a little bit more about some of the more recent results. I want to talk to you about the performance that this online enrollment portal was capable of achieving so we've done a round of interviews relatively recently and to get an idea from the coordinators that were managing the process in terms of what the difference was between having the online enrollment portal and not and the results are surprising even to me in terms of how striking a level of performance was. But the online version, having the opportunity to solve and tackle this problem for them. They've been able to enroll up to 300% more clients in less than half the time that it took them before. So if you're keeping score, and we're talking about impact, whenever we're talking about impact, we're obviously always aiming for something that's ideally exponential, right? Because then we're doubling or more the amount of impact that we can deliver. And if we're enrolling up to three times as many clients and in half the time, we've essentially increased impact anywhere from 300% to 600% depending upon how you combine any of those numbers, which is obviously dramatic. And everyone that's been involved in this process has been pretty profusely complimentary about its level of performance. And that makes me incredibly happy and helps me realize just how powerful software and technology can be when you leverage it in these ways. 

So moving beyond what that organization that I've been helping has been capable of doing with this help. And by leveraging those tools to solve this problem. Other organizations started to take note as they were sharing these insights in terms of what they were doing with this project that enabled other organizations to start inquiring about whether or not something like that was available for them as well too, because they also have those problems and challenges. So long story short here. This turned into an opportunity for the organization to build the product they had built for themselves, and then now provide it and sell it externally to other organizations as an opportunity to help them solve their enrollment problems and challenges and expand their program. Plus the revenue that the organization is going to be able to generate from selling access to this software product. They're now going to be able to reinvest back into scaling impact even further. So this investment has paid off many times over for this organization, not just based on the dramatic improvement in performance they've been capable of but the fact that it's now going to be able to generate revenue for them that they're also going to be able to reinvest back into scaling impact even further. 

So, I wanted to share with you a real world example in terms of how well this stuff works. When done right. It's pretty dramatic. I've recently come out of a conference that they've held, and I sat in the room myself as they were presenting this product, this enrollment portal, and when it's going to be ready and when everyone can start using it. And it was met with an overwhelming amount of excitement and interest. So it's very exciting time for a project like this and I'll keep you posted as it further develops and obviously have any questions about how to do something like this at your organization, feel free to just reach out to me at [email protected].

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io...

What I talk about in this episode:

• Investing in solving your own problem with software
• Turn it into a solution for others
• Generating revenue through it
• Reinvesting that revenue to scale impact
• The story of Basecamp

Resources

• Read the book Rework by Jason Fried

Episode Transcript

Hey Everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is how investing in software to try to scale impact can go from an expense to a form of a fundraising machine for you at your nonprofit, helping you with scaling impact. 

Now, I want to tell it through in the form of a story in terms of where this has been done as an example, out in the industry. The company is called Basecamp. And it's a project management software that was built by the founders of a essentially a software development shop that was called 37 signals. The founders of that organization, they were essentially selling services that were related to software development and when they encountered a problem where they needed a better project management software system because they didn't find one that they liked what they ultimately did was they built their own. They had the skills so they further invested in it themselves and it turned out that ultimately what they built, which was Basecamp was so much better than the other options out there for their needs. 

Then other people were essentially letting them know of the same thing that they also wanted a better project management system. That is ultimately what Basecamp became. So they started wanting to buy it from them or license it from them. So what the 37 signals team ultimately did was they started selling it to the people that needed it and then over time Basecamp became so successful and generated so much revenue, that it became the company that they focused on themselves and they ultimately essentially, let go of the underlying service business they had before called 37 signals to focus exclusively on Basecamp. 

So they kind of did this leapfrog and transformation, but what they ultimately did here was they solved their own problem, which is a key strategy when trying to figure out how to leverage products or software and in terms of scaling impact, that's the way you should be thinking of it as well - do you have opportunities to solve your own problems if you do software can help you with that as well. 

So if you focus in on the problem, whatever it is that you need help with, if you ultimately figure out that the options that are out there and available on the market, are inadequate, for whatever reason, then you always have the opportunity to invest in building one yourself and if it turns out that what you've built is better than the options out there for people like you. Maybe other nonprofit organizations, there is a decent probability that they, as in other nonprofit organizations may need that solution as well. So ultimately, what you have the ability to do is take what was originally an expense and investing in building this product then it can become not just an investment but almost essentially a fundraising machine for you because providing access to that product for these other organizations is an opportunity for you to generate revenue and what can you do with that revenue? You can use it to fund scaling impact at your organization and reinvest it back into the expansion of your programs. So this is a excellent strategy in terms of figuring out how to leverage software to scale impact.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

What I talk about on this episode:

• What social entrepreneurship is all about
• Why it has become a movement
• How to define social entrepreneurship
• Why this should get you excited for the future
• The importance of being passionate about your work
• How to leverage the movement at your organization

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is social entrepreneurship, namely what it is because it's becoming more and more popular, which is very exciting. 

So if I go to and find some form of a definition for social entrepreneurship what I find is generally something that tries to describe it from the perspective of entrepreneurs that want to build solutions to social issues, which has obviously a lot of overlap with the impact world with the work that nonprofits do. But some of these entities I believe, are also still private companies, but the focus of those companies is to drive change and positive impact as it pertains to social issues, which makes me very excited. It's a very exciting prospect and makes me encouraged and excited for the future as well too. 

I believe at the core of social entrepreneurship is really wanting to make a greater impact, which is obviously a great fit to talk about on this show. And despite the kind of textbook definition that I provided for you, the best way that I think I've understood this as a movement is hearing about a description from an entrepreneur in terms of what they wanted to do as part of their mission and part of their vision. And the description that they gave, essentially said that they didn't just want to build a company to make money. They wanted to build something that made a difference and I think that's a really key distinction and an exciting vision as well too for a company. 

You don't just need to be successful in business through generating as much money as possible, right, your mission and your vision matters. Very much so and there's absolutely no reason why your mission and vision cannot overlap or be directly focused on delivering impact through social issues. That's why I'm so excited about this concept of social entrepreneurship. And I believe it fits pretty well in terms of what inspires me and how I'm focusing on what it is I'd like to do at my company NxtStep. 

I've worked with both for profit and nonprofit organizations, with the skills and expertise that I have, which is largely around technology and software. And when I've done that work in certain capacities, or simply just sold those services to the highest bidder an enable an organization that may already be wealthy, become even more wealthy, and that not really having any kind of a direct impact on what I would consider to be making the world a better place or in the worst case scenario we see examples of companies out there who are almost actively contributing to the opposite. In those instances, I couldn't help but feel at a minimum complicit in terms of almost feeling like I'm contributing to something that I shouldn't be. 

What matters more than anything is that it just didn't really inspire me. It didn't get me excited about what it was that I was driving progress for and that's what encourages me and excites me so much about social entrepreneurship, is because now with the work that I'm doing, I'm focusing on how I can help organizations drive and scale impact and I believe that overlaps very well with this as a movement and so I wanted to share more about it because you're probably hearing a lot more about it. It's becoming more popular, more common, and I believe it's gaining momentum as a movement, which is very exciting. 

What I would encourage you to do is to leverage this as a movement to do some experimentation at your own organization. Chances are the members of your organization, even if you are nonprofit, and even if your focus is already on impact, they want to do more innovation, they want to do more experimentation. So leverage this movement to be able to do it within your organization. I've heard this referred to previously as almost intrapreneurship where you think about how you can become more entrepreneurial how you can be more innovative, but do so within your own organization with the team you have.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.