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Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Rethinking Innovation in Nonprofits
What does innovation really look like in the nonprofit world? In this enlightening conversation, nonprofit consultant and author Leah Kral challenges the notion that innovation requires massive resources or technical expertise.
Drawing from her extensive research and twenty years of experience in the sector, Leah explains that innovation can be as simple as switching from paper forms to iPads at a legal aid clinic or as complex as revolutionizing healthcare delivery for the poor. The key is being willing to question the status quo and experiment with new approaches.
For nonprofit leaders feeling overwhelmed by day-to-day operations or limited by resources, this episode offers practical wisdom on fostering innovation within any organization. As Leah beautifully puts it, "The nonprofit sector isn't the withered branch – we are the root system of democracy," solving crucial social problems that deserve our most creative and courageous thinking.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, joined today by author and nonprofit consultant, leah Krall. We're going to be digging in to one of those buzzwords that I feel like a lot of people talk about but nobody really understands. So I'm excited for this conversation. I think it's really going to level set some things for a lot of nonprofit leaders. So, leah, welcome in. Thanks for being here. Thank you, it's an honor to be here, megan. I'm so excited, absolutely. So before we dig into the topic, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your kind of nonprofit journey that brought us to where we are having this conversation today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got kind of attracted to the nonprofit sector from an experience 20 years ago. So I was in the Peace Corps. I was living in Jamaica, in Kingston, jamaica, for about two years as typical Peace Corps service and just experiencing extreme poverty unlike anything I had seen in the United States before. I mean, of course we had poverty in the US, but it was shocking People living in huts that they built by hand, dirt floors, living in danger of hurricanes and bulldozing, and just kind of children scavenging in trash heaps. And I, you know, I worked at a teacher's college and it was a wonderful experience. But I remember getting a tour on the first day and seeing what they called the library and it was all I could do not to cry, you know it was just so.
Speaker 2:Those things really affected me. So I know I just painted kind of a dark picture. But then all these amazing nonprofit heroes who were there like rising to the occasion and just doing amazing things, and it, it just really pulled my heartstrings. And prior to the Peace Corps I'd spent about eight years in the business world and so I thought, you know, if there's some way that I can reshape my career to take the great things that I learned from the business world but help these nonprofit heroes, that's what I want to do, and so that's really what I've been doing for these last 20 years and it's been my privilege.
Speaker 1:That's so great, I love it. So the conversation today we're going to kick off around the idea of innovation and I think you know that's it's kind of become a buzzword. Everyone wants to be innovative and we want to to innovate and we want all sorts of conferences or talking about innovation. But I think sometimes for the average nonprofit leader especially, you know, kind of in the trenches running the show from day to day, just the idea of innovation can be really overwhelming to even think about. We don't tend to think of ourselves in that way. So let's start with a very baseline level set everybody, so we're from the same place in the conversation what is innovation and what can it look like in a nonprofit context?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I think most people when they hear that word innovation, they automatically think of the non or the for-profit world and cool inventions we all love, like the iPad or you know, like now you go to the dentist's office and they could just print out. You know, use a 3D printer and print out your crown right there on the spot, and all these like cool inventions, right, and that is innovation. But I think you're right In the nonprofit sector, we don't call ourselves innovators, but we really should, because we're innovating all the time. You know, I think about innovation simply as just finding new and better ways of doing things, and of course, we're doing that all the time.
Speaker 2:We're wrestling with really hard problems and to me, innovation in our sector can be big or it can be small. You know, some big examples would be the American civil rights movement. Big examples would be the American Civil Rights Movement. I wrote a lot about them in my book, how they were super strategic, super creative, you know, coming up with new ways of solving really difficult problems. Or the invention of the 911 emergency phone system, which is a really cool story too, and that came about with philanthropy, nonprofits and first responders all putting their heads together to come up with this. Or you know, the XPRIZE Foundation working on the global water crisis. Those are big, right, big breakthroughs that they're trying to do. But, you know, innovation can be really small too. If we're just talking finding new and better ways of doing things.
Speaker 2:Um, I think of a small example being like um, say, you're working at a legal aid clinic and you're, you know, you've got a lot of people coming into the reception area taking in a lot of information, and maybe they all have clipboards and lots of pieces of paper and handwriting things. And maybe, as a person at the front desk, you come up with the idea of well, what if we just switch to an iPad where people are just entering their information directly? And that might seem small and humble, but you probably just shaved off five minutes per person every single day, and now those are resources that can be put to better use elsewhere. You don't have to have someone double-inchering, right, it's just going. So that's small right, but that matters too, and we want both. So I just think it's. But then the question is well, how do we encourage that in our everyday practices and nonprofits? And that's really what my book is all about.
Speaker 1:So something that struck me as you were explaining that, and I was thinking about how a conversation that I have heard a lot in these, in nonprofit circles in general, but just in the greater space of the business world even is around the idea of AI and everyone's like again sounds good, Don't know what to do with it, Not sure how to get started.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the things that innovation takes, whether that's around AI or using the example that you just had from the legal clinic, is an openness to rethink what people are capable of, Because I was working with an organization not too long ago in a very similar thing to what you described and they said but that's Kathy's job. Kathy's job is to take the forms and input all of the data into the computer, and that is Kathy's job. But what could Kathy do? Right, If people were using an iPad like that to put it in, what could Kathy do? And so just even having the willingness to be open to say I want to think about it and think what could be instead of what we've always done, can be a really hard shift.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, my yoga instructor talks about being comfortable isn't always the right thing. That may not be all that fun sometimes, you know. Maybe the status quo can be comfortable, but I think in the nonprofit world, the people we're serving are counting on us to be asking hard questions, and you know our donors who are very generously donating to causes and that they care deeply about. You know it's just not good to be too comfortable with the status quo if we can constantly be finding better ways of doing things and I share a lot of those examples and stories in my book. Just to show like this is what it looks like and it happens all the time I just I really don't think we give ourselves enough credit for being innovative in our sector about innovation.
Speaker 1:That can be as easy as what you said moving to an iPad instead of paper forms. Are there other areas? Obviously, when it comes to a nonprofit, you've got program, you've got fundraising, you've got all of the different administrative pieces. You've got new challenges that could arise, that could need new programs. But what are the? Some of the ways where you feel like we miss thinking about it? Is there an area of nonprofit where we really miss it the most and kind of get stuck in the? That's the way we've always done it.
Speaker 2:That's a great question.
Speaker 2:I really, since my background is mostly focused on social impact and the program side of things, and so that was, you know, that's mostly where I focus. And, yeah, I think, yeah, maybe other people think of tech or something more than they think of program interventions, you know. So, yeah, I think it happens all the time and as I was doing research for my book, I gathered just so many stories, story after story, from across the board different nonprofits, you know, finding new ways of breaking through, whether it was, you know, mayo Clinic or the Civil Rights Movement or Habitat for Humanity, like some of these really big nonprofits we've all heard of, like Habitat all have these humble origin stories. Right, and I think that's exciting that, you know, if you're a small nonprofit with a small budget and hearing the word innovation maybe freaks you out a little bit, you know, I think these stories are really encouraging. No, this is something we all can do with. Maybe just a wild idea and a few volunteers and maybe a non-existent budget. These are things that any of us can do.
Speaker 1:As you were talking to folks and gathering these stories for your book, is there one that really stood out to you as the most inspiring or the most encouraging? Let's see, yeah.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of favorites, but I think one really important. Let me see, I just I want to make sure that I tell the story well. So I think of experimentation being really important, and I love the story of World Reader. So World Reader was you know. So why is experimentation important? You know, when we think of innovation, finding, you know, trial and error and even failure is really important for innovating, and so I have a chapter on what does experimentation look like in the nonprofit sector.
Speaker 2:I think people hear experimentation, they think, oh, science lab beakers, you know, they don't think of maybe a nonprofit program, right? So when we have a good idea and we have to find out, will that idea work? So one of my favorite examples is World Reader. It's a nonprofit with a mission to bring digital books to disadvantaged children and their families, and when they launched in 2010, they started several experiments at the same time. So in one experiment, they gave these Amazon Kindle e-reader machines or tablets to elementary students in Ghana.
Speaker 2:But what they found? And they were so excited they thought this was going to work but what they found was that when children were playing during recess, the devices kept breaking. So they were surprised by that, but because they were doing experiments at the same time they were running a separate experiment with a mobile app, which they learned from observation that the young users actually much preferred. And so today, almost 200,000 users a month are reading books on the mobile platform, and I think there's really good lessons in this story.
Speaker 2:They spread their bets. They were really smart about experimenting. If they would have gone all in on those Kindle e-reader machines that they were so excited about, they never would have discovered the far better solution of the mobile app. So to me, that lesson from World Reader is it's far better to fail fast and fail small before investing too big, and experimentation can really help us learn and innovate. But a key part of that is we have to be able to have some tolerance for risk and failure, and that can be kind of hard for us in the nonprofit world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we actually just had Matt Lombardi from Share Media on the podcast not too long ago and he was talking about some of the examples that we can learn from in the for-profit world, from startups, specifically about failing fast, like test small, fail fast and regroup and move forward. But to your point, we are, I think, a little scared of it because of some of the pressures from donors. Right, the idea that we might not hit the mark on the head or that people are going to view us as not being good stewards of their resources. There's so many pieces that go into that. So how do we get over the fear?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think some of this does really need to come from the top, from our boards and from our executive directors, and hopefully they're having some of these conversations with donors. But you know, it's so important to have that right attitude toward risk and failure and a really quick story that I love. So the Hewlett Foundation they do this cool thing it's a fun thing where they offer kind of a silly door prize to their grants officers and it's what they call the worst grant from which you learned the most, and so they get together as a team. They, you know, are just encouraging each other to be really honest about their flops and failures and just, you know, share with each other and laugh about it a little bit and that takes the pressure off. I think that's brilliant, you know, because then you are going to surface those stories of learning. And I know one of my clients has a really great board of directors where they set the expectation you know, when you come in with your annual board report and you're ready to tell us your stories, you better be bringing stories of failure. We expect it, and if you come in and just give us a glossy, everything's great, we're going to have problems with that right. So they set that tone right from the top that we expect innovation and experimentation and some, you know, smart risk-taking, and that's going to include some failure and we want to hear about it, you know. So I think it really helps to come from the top like that.
Speaker 2:And then another quick thing. I'll say I could talk about this all day. So, yeah, that was great. One last quick thing so I think part of it too can just be treating things you'd normally do as an experiment. So quick story on that a nonprofit client I work with. So one of the staff members proposed a new podcast to the executive director and the executive director had seen a lot of their podcasts kind of fail, so he was kind of skeptical. When this person was all enthusiastic, I want to launch this. But rather than micromanaging, he heard him out and he's like okay, well, what if we treat this as an experiment? You know we have some parameters, we set some guardrails, set some metrics of what we're going to monitor and at the three-month point, six-month point, we're going to be checking in. So by treating it kind of not as a forever project, but a lot of nonprofits might have just treated it that way by just calling it an experiment. You know, and having that mindset, that's something anyone can do. I think that can be really smart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great. I think you're right, I think we can. I've seen so many organizations that have programs that worked well 20, 30, 40 years ago but maybe have not kept up with the times, and even just being willing to say nothing we do is forever. It's okay to change that, but that takes some humility and some vulnerability that I think, as leaders, we struggle with.
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's some mindset shifts that need to happen as part of having an innovation culture, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so okay. So let's talk about that, because I'm sure that there were some traits that you saw as you were kind of working on the book and listening to all of these stories. I'm sure that there were some traits of leaders that emerged as common traits for folks who are being innovative. What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when I finished putting the book together, it took me about two years, two and a half years of research. And so when I finally finished the manuscript as a whole and I was thinking how do I kind of sum this up, what I found were there were kind of six key principles, that sort of bubbled up of what innovators look like in the nonprofit sector. So I'll just share those really briefly. The first is like a detective, be a fearless problem solver, because it's all about uncovering hidden needs. And you know, I think of that Henry Ford quote if I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, you know. So it takes some digging to really figure out what is this problem we're trying to solve and that we don't accept how things are and that we challenge the status quo. And I think of Aravind Eye Clinic in India, where cataract surgery was out of reach for most of India's poor and they really wanted to revolutionize eye care for the poor and they found a way to do it. They kind of McDonaldized the process and made it really affordable. But it was by asking those questions and doing a little detective work.
Speaker 2:The second ask courageous questions, ideate. We can start small but dream big. And I think you know, as I mentioned in good news for us, so many successful nonprofits or movements started so small and humble. You know just the seed of an idea, so lack of resources is not necessarily an obstacle to achieving impact. The third is that when people on the front lines are empowered to speak up and collaborate, breakthroughs will happen.
Speaker 2:A great story in my book is about how the night staff at Mayo Clinic found ways for patients to get a better night's sleep. The fourth is to, as we talked about with World Reader, leave room for experiments, play risk-taking and even that big, scary word failure. The fifth is to embrace continuous learning by asking ourselves hard questions, and so I have a chapter on metrics, and I know that can be kind of a pain point in nonprofits because it can be done very poorly, but when done right it can be very powerful and really support innovation. And I share a story in my book from LifeWorks, a youth foster care nonprofit that began asking themselves those hard questions and transformed their metrics and then really transformed their services in a great way. And then the last is be persuasive.
Speaker 2:We have to be really good at this, and as I was looking for stories and examples, I kind of laughed when I discovered that both Mother Teresa and Fred Rogers of Mr Rogers' Neighborhood had doors closed on their faces all the time and people telling them no when they first started out. And you know it happens to the best of us. And you know, even the most successful social entrepreneurs have to knock on those closed doors and field tough questions from skeptics and kind of brace themselves for hearing no, but then still, you know, make our argument better, right? So to me all those things work together as traits and in good news, you know, we don't have to be born with any of it. These things we can learn and get better at. I love that.
Speaker 1:As a as a Pittsburgh girl, I am all for any Mr Rogers reference. I appreciate that call out. It's great, but it's interesting I it's interesting to think about Mr Rogers and Mother Teresa in the same vein as hearing no, because I think you just automatically assume that people at that level are going to get whatever they want. Whatever I ask for is going to happen and whatever I want to do. But they in and of themselves were innovative in their time for how they were going about doing their work and caring for people Very much.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I laughed so much, because at some point like Mr Rogers wasn't always the famous Mr Rogers, at the beginning he was just starting out with an idea of I want to change children's television, correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, super innovative. I write more about him in my book and different ways that he's innovative with finding breakthroughs for just how we talk with children. You know he kind of invented this language that folks in his expertise area call speaking frettish. So I write about how he kind of innovated that. And, yeah, I laugh so much at the Mother Teresa and her story. You know, can you imagine being the person getting to the pearly gates and saying, oh yeah, that's me. I'm the one who told Mother Teresa her ideas were bad? Yeah, but it's true, and that's going to happen to all of us because, you know, challenging the status quo, coming up with some kind of creative off the wall, you know idea for doing something better in the nonprofit sector, you're going to absolutely going to run into obstacles and skeptics and we have to be ready for that.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think, too, you have to not compare yourself to the end of Mr Rogers and the end of Mother Teresa, right? I think we tend to look at these people who we would say have been successful, whether that's as a nonprofit leader or in their space or serving the way that those two did, and we tend to compare our current situation to their highlight reel, right? Because I think we'd all argue, at the end of their lives they had achieved a lot of success, but that didn't come overnight, and so I think sometimes, at least for myself, I can get paralyzed in the well, I'm never going to be that good, but they started where we started. That's right.
Speaker 2:I think we have to keep that comparison out of our brains, yeah 100% and let me see if I can tell this story very, very quickly. So yeah, alcoholics Anonymous same sort of story, you know it kind of formed accidentally. The two founders were both alcoholics. I think this was in the 1930s or so, where there just were not any good treatments. I mean they did lobotomies right or lock people away.
Speaker 2:These were two professional men one in New York, one in Ohio, I think one was a doctor, one was a salesman who were both struggling. It was affecting their lives. They randomly met and just had this. You know, they were kind of hitting these rock bottom moments in their lives. They had this very honest conversation with each other that ended up being very healing. And so just through accident, they realized the power of one alcoholic talking to one another and they're like oh gee, you know, maybe we're on to something, maybe we should gather a few other folks and just see if we can help them too.
Speaker 2:And so it was kind of trial and error, experimental. They learned things the hard way, like they didn't know right away that members should be anonymous. So to your point, yeah, we all very well know Alcoholics Anonymous today and their 12-step model and there's copycats all over the nonprofit sector, kind of taking that 12-step model. So wildly successful today, but didn't start that way. So yeah, I love what you're saying about don't hold ourselves to that standard, especially if you're a startup. Think about it. I think those origin stories can be really inspiring. That's so good.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious in the book process full disclosure I also have a book out. It has nothing to do with the nonprofit sector, but something I learned about myself in the writing and editing and publishing process was how much I really enjoyed that work. And I'm wondering for you what was your biggest learning moment in that process of the book, either about the topic or about you as an author yourself?
Speaker 2:I would say, you know, I'm kind of an introvert and writing the book was just a joy to me, I would say. Once I realized I had to be out marketing the book as an introvert, that was far more stressful, but I learned. But yeah, there were things that surprised me, some chapters that I ended up rewriting. You know probably the I just posted about this this morning on LinkedIn the question of scaling. Should every nonprofit scale? So when I started writing that chapter, my assumption was well, yes, don't all nonprofits want to scale? But the more I thought about it, the more I looked at examples. I'm like wait a minute, you know it depends on your strategy. It depends, you know you may be hyper local. It just there's a lot of nuance there, right? So so yeah, there was a lot of learning in the process of researching and right challenge, challenging my own assumptions, and a lot of learning and growth in a really good way.
Speaker 1:I love that. So when we talk about especially innovation that leads us to scale, I also would have said yes, but it's interesting to think about. I just read a story or an article not too long ago about two organizations here in pittsburgh who do very similar things. One is over on the north side of the city and one is over on the east side. On the east end and if you've ever been to pittsburgh you know like we don't those two communities have nothing to do with each other.
Speaker 1:This bird does not like. Just because they're maybe 10-15 minutes away does not mean they have any connection to each other, because if you have to go over more than two bridges or through a tunnel, we're not going right. It's just how we are. But the the article was about how these two organizations, in an effort to scale their impact, are combining. Instead of saying I'm going to keep doing my thing over here, you keep doing your thing over here, they are combining their efforts, merging into one group and then launching another location over in the south side of the city to be able to grow and scale that way. And so even in that, I think there's some innovation around scaling that says I don't have to compete with you. We don't have to compete with each other. If there are people who are doing what we're doing, we can all do it to a better extent if we work together, and so even that is innovative in the nonprofit space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's. I mean, so much is in the nuance. You know like, maybe it I don't know their situation, but it could be like hey, we're all replicating our back end services, why don't we pull our resources together? And now? We can put more money into our program delivery and that's smart. You know, I don't know if that's their situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a huge thing with me if I could, you know, change one thing about our sector. It's silo thinking. You know, when you run into silos and I see it a lot I think it's just human nature, because we can be really good at our one thing and just start thinking that we have to accomplish everything within our four walls. But I have a lot of stories about kind of related to what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:You know, one example that comes to mind is a group called Strive Together in Cincinnati. So they're all working at a lot of many nonprofits, many organizations in Cincinnati who are kind of tangentially working on helping at risk young people solve problems and achieve upward mobility. And so somebody brilliant brought all those disparate groups together and said let's kind of work as a coalition here. We may each have our different specialization areas, but let's put our heads together. We each have our unique way of approaching this, but maybe we can come up with some shared metrics, shared goals, and so they're doing that really effectively, working together instead of working separately, and that can be very smart. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:So Leah real quick as we wrap up, if somebody wanted to find you and connect with you, learn more about the work you're doing or find your book. How do we do that learn more about the work you're doing or find your book?
Speaker 2:How do we do that? Yeah, feel free to visit my website. It's just my name, leahkrallcom, so it's L-E-A-H-K-R-A-Lcom, and from there you can see information about my book, my consulting services, speaking events and so on, and I'm super active on social media. There's a great nonprofit community on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:You can find me there as well. So thank you, community. On LinkedIn. You can find me there as well. So thank you Fantastic. One question that I've been asking everybody as we wrap up the session each time is if you give one piece of advice or wisdom or encouragement to nonprofit leaders who, admittedly, have had a rough year so far not that any year in nonprofit is easy, but I feel like we've just taken a lot of hits as a sector. What would that piece of wisdom, encouragement or advice be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. You know there's a lot of kind of mischaracterizations of our sector out there. So I was thinking of kind of a tree you know a massive tree with a huge root system and I was just thinking that you know the nonprofit sector, we're not the withered branch, we are that root system, you know, and that's the root system of democracy and what we're doing is so important and I just hope we see ourselves that way. Our work, you know we're solving really difficult social problems and it's so important and, you know, don't be discouraged. I hope we think of ourselves that way and stand strong.
Speaker 1:I love it. Leah, thank you so much. That was really. That was a beautiful picture to think about. I love that encouragement so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you again for your time. It was an honor to be here today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Again, my guest has been Leah Kral, who's an author and nonprofit consultant. You can check her out on LinkedIn or check out her book on her website. Leah, thanks so much for being here. We really appreciate all the wisdom that you had to share. Thanks again. This has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. No-transcript.