The people who make nonprofits work are generous, committed and compassionate. They bring a wide range of talents to their mission, including an incredible amount of creativity and vision. Today, those skills are more important than ever when spreading the message of a nonprofit, seeking recruits and forging alliances.
In social media, that means finding innovative ways to not only communicate – but to go viral with an organization’s story. Achieving this often requires thinking outside the box, coloring outside the lines.
Below are the stories of three nonprofits whose creativity, innovation and long-range thinking helped them maximize their effectiveness in helping the people and communities they serve.
Kiva
The process behind Kiva is deceptively simple. Every business requires investment to get off the ground and make it successful. With Kiva, they facilitate that process – but they do it in countries of need. A donor isn’t just a donor, they’re an investor helping a small business get off the ground.
For as little as $25, a small business can buy the inventory they need in order to set up their shop, buy the machinery they need for construction of a new enterprise, or pay their employees the initial salary required in order to help get their services running. You get to choose exactly which business you want to invest in, from women’s rights to even those in need in the United States.
The best part of this system is that Kiva has a repayment term of 98.8%, meaning that there is no downside to becoming an investor. Getting updates on the business makes the donor feel less like they’re just donating and more like they’re helping to build something bigger than themselves. They are – Kiva affects more than just the person in need, they help change the entire local economy.
Charity: Water
The more difficult side of a nonprofit is financials, and sometimes even the most developed and creative of organizations can have difficulties where it concerns them.
Charity: Water has revolutionized the financial sector of nonprofits. Not only are they incredibly transparent with their accounts and offer amazing benefits in their careers, but the workers themselves benefit just as much as the donors that help fund them. They use a model called the “pool” which gives nonprofit workers equity.
This change in the traditional nonprofit model incentivizes the onboarding of employees, which broadens the scope of the business and attracts even more attention. While the usual model of nonprofits involves the bare minimum of funding, this system finds a way to make nonprofit work an actual career choice, giving many the chance they may not have thought possible before.
GiveDirectly
In 2009, GiveDirectly began an initiative that directly flew against the way that other nonprofits were organized. Instead of allocating donations to their own projects, they sought to give agency back to the people that they were trying to help. GiveDirectly’s system has now given $550M+ in cash directly to those in need in Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, DRC, Uganda, the United States, and Yemen.
While simple, many questions may arise. GiveDirectly has a tongue-in-cheek method of dealing with them because they’ve heard it all before. “And no, people don’t just blow it on booze,” their website proclaims. “It’s ok. Many people think that at first.”
In reality, overwhelming evidence from over 300 studies suggests that giving aid in cash directly drastically transforms the lives of local poverty-stricken communities. While change can never be guaranteed in any program, third party research has confirmed there is a link between direct giving and significant improvement in HIV rates, child mortality, school attendance, stress, and depression, and even deforestation.With GiveDirectly, it’s more than just giving money, it’s empowering the local community who knows what is needed for themselves.
The answer to a question doesn’t always have to be an overly complicated one, but sometimes taking a step back and reevaluating the way that nonprofits work can lead to amazing results. It’s these results that help us do what we do best – helping make the world a better place.