There is growing concern that everything social sector organizations do gets seen through the lens of “business.” I highly recommend reading a short essay Jim Collins wrote and self published as a follow up to his hugely bestselling, Good to Great, called “Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great” (it was previously available through Amazon.com) Collins wrote this after learning that close to 50% of readers of Good to Great, came from the social sector. His book examined the notion of best practices and concluded, “many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?” So, he continues, “We must reject the idea – well-intentioned, but dead wrong – that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business’…We need to reject the naïve imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors.”
So how do social sector organizations that may aspire to be great actually meet that goal? High aspirations, he tells us, are often undermined when people obsess on system constraints: there is a prevailing belief they can’t move ahead until the system is fixed. He recognizes that the whole purpose of the social sectors as organizations aimed at meeting social objectives, human needs, and national priorities that cannot be priced at a profit. So what? Collins challenges nonprofits to ask themselves “What are you going to do in the meantime? What can you do today to create a pocket of greatness, despite the brutal facts of your environment?” If you want to “develop a sustainable resource engine to deliver superior performance relative to our mission,” focus on developing content – “publishing” – so people widely understand and appreciate your expertise.
Building great organizations involves patient, substantive communication, knowledge products that establish and extend identity. With the “right” brand in-hand, you’ve given people an easy way to support your cause. Or, another way to look at it, to paraphrase Collins: anyone seeking to cut funding must contend with the brand.
