Forces for Good: Making Markets Work and Sharing Leadership
By: Madeline Dunham
The standard for evaluating the effectiveness of Nonprofits is by using Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High Impact Nonprofits by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod. The six practices that the most effective nonprofits utilize are making markets work, sharing leadership, mastering the art of adaptation, advocating and serving, inspiring evangelists, and nurturing nonprofit networks. The most highly regarded nonprofits are successful at these six practices. Fast Company published an article about these six practices in action. I want to analyze how Mission Generation is putting these strategies into practice and how the organization can improve in a three part series.
The first two forces for good are making markets work and sharing leadership.
Making Markets Work
When nonprofits make markets work, they attempt to use for-profit practices in some aspects of a nonprofit’s operations. Additionally, nonprofits might partner with businesses for brand awareness to make markets work. Mission Generation hopes to continue growing, so we can make markets work successfully. Right now, we are working on growing the awareness of our organization by making our social media, blog and newsletter use more consistent. Once we have achieved these goals, we can transition into some for-profit marketing tactics continue growing the awareness of Mission Generation and make markets work more effectively as an organization. One of the for-profit marketing tactics we will be implementing soon is an online store to sell our workbooks and start selling t-shirts.
Sharing Leadership
Sharing leadership within the nonprofit sector means that there are several people within an organization that have leadership. Essentially, the CEO or the founder should not have all the power. Mission Generation does a great job at sharing leadership. Rocky Malloy is our CEO, but he does a fantastic job of delegating leadership and responsibility to all the employees based on their strengths and passions within the organization. For example, our employee Ziza knows a lot about graphic design, so Rocky gives her most of the reigns when it comes to creative media content on our infographics, newsletters, pamphlets, etc. Mission Generation will have a chance at lasting longer because leadership is shared within the organization.
Stay tuned for part two next week!