Scaling 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/.

What I talk about on this episode

• How to negotiate with donors
• Why they are (still) focused on output
• How to refocus the conversation around impact
• A negotiation tactic for managing this conversation
• Great books to help with this effort

Resources

• Lean Impact by Ann Mei Chang
• Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is negotiating with donors. 

That might sound somewhat surprising because usually in the nonprofit world, we're trying to figure out where we can receive funding from and when we can receive it. We usually accept it. Right? But what I'm here to share with you today is that if that funding is coming with what you believe to be arbitrary strings attached, or any type of limitations that are gonna hold you back from achieving your mission, that you should consider negotiating upfront, so that it can be more well aligned with how you want to drive impact at your organization. 

Now, this can be funding from private sources, all the way to grants and quite a bit of the time some of that money comes with the strings attached that are tied to output as opposed to achieving successful outcomes. Now, as a nonprofit leader, you probably know better in that achieving more output isn't necessarily going to drive more successful outcomes or impact for your beneficiaries and your clients which means that it's probably worthy of a conversation. 

If you've been on the nonprofit scene for a while now, I'm sure you're very familiar with this challenge and I'm also sure that you've probably seen that landscape shifting at least a little bit, in that people are more aware of this as a problem nowadays. So they're more open to a conversation about focusing on outcomes as opposed to output. So if you are if you find yourself in a situation like this, what should you do as a nonprofit leader? I would recommend negotiating any of those limiting factors upfront as much as you can, pushing back and refocusing that conversation around driving successful outcomes, which are ultimately going to lead to real impact. 

Now, if you are having a conversation with them, you may need to provide them with examples, as in whatever strings that might be attached to the funding source. In this case, it might be certain amount of output produced like meetings held or some kind of time element or whatever. But at the end of the day, what you might be trying to do is cure childhood literacy or pull people out of poverty, right? So give them examples to compare something like those two together, for them to better understand what the real mission is here. We're not trying to have as many meetings as possible. We're trying to cure childhood literacy or we're trying to save people from poverty, right? They should get excited about that latter example much more so than the former. As such, you'll start to inspire them and get a better understanding of where you're coming from and what the real mission of your organization is, then you can help them better understand how, however that is written to access that funding is limiting you in that way. A lot of this detail is laid out in the book Lean Impact written by Ann Mei Chang so if you don't have a copy of that book, I'd highly recommend you get one and read it because there's a lot of really powerful information in it to help you with this process. 

I'm gonna recommend another book as well too. This is another tip that I use and a strategy when it comes to negotiating something like this and that comes from a book called Never Split The Difference which I'm another huge fan of. I think it's a fantastic book about negotiating, and it can realistically be for anything, but I'm going to leverage one of the tactics recommended in that book in this episode and share with you because I feel it applies in this situation. If you're having a conversation with someone who may be a particular funding source, or grant or private donor or whatever, and you're getting pushback in terms of trying to refocus the effort from output to driving successful outcomes. One of the tactics that's recommended in that book Never Split The Difference is to simply ask them to describe for you how you can be expected to achieve both of those objectives simultaneously. So the question essentially just goes something like this. If they're saying that you really need to focus on the number of meetings and those other things are somewhat less important or are as important as having a number of meetings. You can ask them how you can be expected to do that, right? How can I be expected to focus on two or three things at the same time and make as much progress as if I were just focusing on the one that ultimately delivers successful outcomes and drives impact. 

So I recommend both of those books and I hope this information was helpful in terms of helping you understand that this process can be a negotiation, and whenever it can be leveraged some of these tactics in order to refocus efforts on driving successful outcomes as opposed to output so that you can focus more on scaling 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 discuss in this episode:

• The output vs outcome problem
• Why money is tied to measuring output
• How to refocus the conversations around outcomes
• The questions to ask to gracefully push back
• The lessons you can learn from Ann Mei Chang's book Lean Impact (https://www.annmei.com/)

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
0:37  
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is combating this common challenge in the nonprofit world which is focusing on measuring output versus focusing on measuring successful outcomes. 

1:37  
And what you can do to start making progress against this so that your organization can get closer to measuring and scaling output as frequently as possible. Now, this is a common problem that's existed in the nonprofit world for quite some time, where a lot of the funding has strings attached, which are pretty directly linked to requiring you to measure output which might be only somewhat related to impact sometimes it's not related at all. 

2:09  
I'll give you an example. Now, in the work that I've done helping nonprofits a lot of that has been about helping secure a better financial future for underrepresented populations of people, which might mean helping them improve their credit scores pull themselves out of debt, which is obviously very closely related impact for those individuals for the clients that that program serves. At the same time, there's other things that are happening related to helping them with that, like meetings for example, or how long those meetings go, or however many forms they fill out, right, whatever insert a bunch of work that goes into trying to deliver those successful outcomes, but the meeting related stuff that is all output, and that's only somewhat related to driving and scaling impact. 

2:59  
Now, donor money depending on where it may come from, but that could be from private sources that could be from grants. A lot of that can be linked to measuring output more specifically as opposed to measuring the outcome. So what I want to talk about is what you can start doing to push back against that and start refocusing that conversation around impact. 

3:23  
Now, a key part of this is going to be helping them understand why it's so important to focus on it, successful outcomes as opposed to just output and you have to, you have to try to interrupt that process or start that conversation as early as possible to get them to understand one matters more than the other in terms of what it is you're trying to do. Now, if you give them those kinds of examples, like I just mentioned before, that should make it a lot easier for them to be able to understand why outcome matters so much more than output. And if you don't, you can't necessarily know, if measuring output isn't directly linked to what the mission and the vision is for the organization, exactly what it is you're trying to do, and why would you measure it? Right? 

4:16  
It's okay to ask these questions and start getting feedback. See what they say see if they agree or see what other reservations they have about switching from one to the other they may welcome the opportunity and just may not have thought about that previously. But if we don't ask the questions, then a conversation may never happen. So I want you to do that. I want you to do that as early as possible. Whenever someone asks, having been part of some of those conversations before, I believe you're more than likely to be met or you're more than likely to receive some positive feedback after you go through helping the individuals involved in the process understand the key differences between them and why they can go likely more direct towards what the overall mission and objective is because we should all be aligned in this and that is ultimately what we're driving for. Now, if you want to know a little bit more about the history here, what's been done here, other great strategies, there's a ton of really valuable information in and one of my favorite books, which is in Ann Mei Chang's Lean Impact. So if you want give yourself a copy of that if you if you don't have a copy of it, and read that because there's a ton of really valuable information in Ann Mei's book.

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 a no-code ecosystem is all about
• Why you should explore Bubble.io
• The resources Bubble provides to build custom applications
• The platforms (web, mobile) that you can build for using Bubble
• Learning how to get started with Bubble through their academy
• An example of a Bubble application I built for a nonprofit 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
0:11  
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a no code ecosystem called bubble. 

0:35  
Now you can find this tool at bubble.io. So on that website it will walk you through explaining more about what bubble is and reason why I describe it as an ecosystem is because it's way more than just a low code or no code tool. Now on the show, I talk quite a bit about how you can leverage tech and software in order to scale impact and I believe bubble is one of the best examples of the most powerful tools available today in terms of what you can do to leverage tech and software without needing to know any elements of really intense software engineering or programming. You don't necessarily need to have those skills and you can really build something fairly comprehensive when it comes to applications that run either on a computer or a phone using an ecosystem like bubble without needing to write any code, which is really convenient and it helps you build prototypes much more quickly and much more easily because you don't need those skills in order to do it. 

1:36  
Now, with bubble, you can build just about anything. I've talked about other tools like Typeform which enable which is more of a survey tool and enable you to get data from somewhere and connect to something that's a key part of probably what you might build into your application. But with bubble, you can actually build pretty much anything so not just what Typeform is capable of. You can build whatever you would like whatever kind of system you need, in order to better scale impact your organization for your clients or your internal team members. Whatever the intended purpose of what you need, you can essentially do it with bubble it really gives you the ability to create something custom without having to write actual code. 

2:17  
Now, I've used bubble in order to create all kinds of great products. To help my nonprofit clients with scaling impact and we've done so across platforms and when I say that what I mean is how you're accessing the internet, right it can be via laptop can be a desktop or it can be a smartphone device, your mobile phone, regardless of what it is you are using. You can create an application with a bubble to run on any of those platforms and make it look great at the same time which is really powerful. So again, using bubble gives you the ability to build something that's very comprehensive, and it's a great tool that you can use if you want kind of an all in one solution where you don't need to be connecting a lot of things together, which is really common these days with the no code and low code systems out there is oftentimes you have to pull a number of different systems together and then connect them in order to create the experience. 

3:15  
I would say that one of the biggest differences and advantages of a system like bubble is it enables you to do all of that right from within the bubble tool. So they provide you with a lot of out of the box tools that you can just kind of drag and drop into the application that you're building and are different widgets to do whatever it is you need. You need to capture text you need to add buttons you need to display information, you need to have a little map, whatever it is you need in your application in order to create the experience that you're looking for. You can do it right from within bubble. You can kind of think of the system, almost like a Website Builder, but for applications instead. So if you've ever used or have become familiar with things like WordPress and Squarespace, those are seemingly no code systems as well too, but those are tools to help you build websites. Bubble is essentially the equivalent to help you build applications. So that's how you can kind of think of the bubble tool and how it relates to something else. That's probably fairly common. That you know as well. 

4:14  
Now a recommendation I would have, if you're going to consider using bubble and building prototype apps or applications, whether it is to make sure you invest some time into the design element. Bubble makes it a lot easier to do the building, but it won't necessarily influence you all that much when it comes to how to design the look and feel. And in the tech world we refer to this as UI and UX for designing out the user interface, which is essentially what it looks like and creating the user experience. That's the UX component. That's essentially how it behaves and what it does. So the experience that you ultimately wind up with putting some time and effort into the design element will make it a lot easier for you or whoever is going to be building it to know what to put where that makes that will make sense and that will help you speed the project up and ultimately leave you with something that creates the kind of experience you're more than likely looking for. However, regardless of what it is you plan to do, I'd recommend you start small and kind of grow from there. So don't plan to make it too complicated in the beginning. Start with start with a basic functionality. Build that first and then you can build onto it from there as soon as you get people using it because then you could start getting feedback with it, which is great.

5:25  
So just to give you an idea of what I built with it for one of my nonprofit clients, one of my nonprofits helps the underrepresented populations with securing a better financial future. And as part of this program, they work with financial coaches. In order to learn how to do that. One of the challenges that that was preventing that program from scaling better was that the clients wanted more access to their coaches. The problem was that the coaches were a constrained resource they didn't have more time and were already essentially over capacity with how much they were helping clients so they couldn't give more time we needed to figure out a way to enable them to create better leverage so that their clients could have some form of access to them in a way that made it easier for more coaches to work with more clients because the program is growing. 

6:19  
So we created a companion financial coaching application that enabled the clients to have their coach essentially right in their pocket, because it could be on their phone and a lot of clients again, didn't have access to laptops or desktops, but most of them did have access to a phone or a smartphone device. As such, we made sure that the financial coaching application we built with the bubble ecosystem, was able to run great on a phone for the client and because the coaches were primarily using their laptops or desktops for work, that it looked great on those devices as well too as we designed out kind of the coach interface. 

7:00  
So in this application, what it could do is it enabled the client and the coach to be able to message one another so that the client and coach had direct access to each other and enable them to schedule and organize and manage their meetings that they would have occasionally as they were working together through that throughout the program, and it enabled the client to both track their p...