Innovation isn't just the preserve of large charities; charities of all sizes can, with the right approach, embed a culture of innovation throughout their organisation. Jenny Ramage reports.
What do you think when you hear the word ‘innovation’? Lucy Gower, innovation director at Revolutionise, thinks many charities perceive it wrongly. “It’s often just seen as wacky ideas sessions", she says.
Indeed, this used to be the case for Terrence Higgins Trust’s fundraising director, Sonya Trivedy. “My perception of innovation was sitting around in a meeting room with lots of post-it notes and getting people to brainstorm ideas.”
But as income from their fundraising activities began to decline, Sonya called in the experts at innovation consultancy Good Innovation. “What we came to realise when we started working with them was that creativity is only a small slice of innovation. It’s really about following a very robust process.”
So what is this process? Lucy says it begins with asking what the biggest problem is you’ve got to solve. “If you have an idea, it has to be more than just be a nice idea. It has to speak to the problem.”
Getting leadership buy-in
Before you can really get started on innovation, you need organisational buy-in - and this starts at the top. As Ben Welch, head of fundraising development at Macmillan Cancer Support says: “Leading from the front is crucial. Senior management need to own the decisions from beginning to end, regardless of the outcomes.”
This can be a real challenge for charities with very risk-averse trustees. “The thing about innovation is that it’s not guaranteed to work, so there’s a great amount of fear”, says Lucy. “Your trustees might say: ‘This is how we’ve always done it, so let’s keep doing it like this’, or ‘why would we invest money in something when we don’t know what the return is?’”
"But my response would be that if you keep doing the same things you’ve always done, at best you’ll keep getting the same results. And as a fundraiser, you should always be striving for better results.
“Go back to why the founders set up your charity in the first place. Your charity was set up to change something. And innovation is all about driving change. So it’s about connecting your leadership back to the very reason they’re doing their important jobs."
Taking a risk
Just over a year ago David Pastor, chief executive at Claire House Children’s Hospice, picked up the The Great Fundraising Report. It helped him come to the realisation that in order for the charity to achieve its goal of helping every child with a life-threatening illness, it needed to start doing things differently. But his idea was a risky one: “I wanted to take 20 people away from across the organisation away, including two trustees, to Alan Clayton’s fundraising retreat in Scotland to talk about what great fundraising looks like.”
It was a tough sell for his trustees. “They want to know the tangibles that are coming out of something, if you’re going to invest time and money in it. I had to go to them and say, I want to do this slightly intangible thing, it’s going to cost us some money, and it may not have any impact at all.”
Luckily, he says, the Claire House trustees recognise the value of thinking differently. “They were really supportive. They acknowledged that three days out with 20 senior people in the organisation would, if nothing else, help build better working relationships.”
More commonly in the charity world, trustees are very risk-averse. “But it should be about managing risk, rather than not taking any”, says Lucy.
It will help to persuade them, she says, if you can show you have a strong business plan. “Show your trustees that a really good process, such as introducing and testing new activities on a small scale and in stages, helps manage the risk of some of the things they are scared of.
“For example, if my charity wanted to launch a coffee morning, it wouldn’t invest hundreds of thousands in a nationwide coffee morning right off; it would start off by carrying out some audience insight work and testing it with a group of target audience, then would launch it in a small area to begin with.
"It might take a while for your project to go to scale. But a good innovation process, in its essence, manages risk.”
All aboard
While it’s true that innovation has to be driven from the top, if you want to truly embed it into your organisation's culture, you'll need to get every staff member on board.
“There’s something important about bringing people along with you the whole way through, and not launching this great big thing that’s the first time anyone’s heard of it”, says Lucy. “Involve other people from the beginning. Make innovation a collaborative process, and that in itself will help get buy-in.”
It’s crucial, however, that everyone in the organisation is clear in the first place about why innovation is so important. “It can be difficult to drive innovation when it's seen as something that’s a bit amorphous. So to achieve organisational buy-in, you have to properly define what innovation is for, and how it helps you achieve your mission.”
Ben agrees. “In my experience, a clear focus is the best way to drive effective innovation which delivers results. If you don’t understand what you are innovating to achieve, you will become bewildered by the choice and end up doing very little.
“At Macmillan, we know that we cannot just do the same things with the same people if we want to continue to grow in the short or long term. There are currently 2.5 million people living with cancer in the UK, with this figure set to rise to 4 million by 2030. We are aware that we need to continue to increase income in order to be there for these people – and that innovation is vital for this growth.
“It is this simple fact being well understood which has been the most effective catalyst for innovation across the organisation.”
Enlightening analysis
At Terrence Higgins Trust, a thorough portfolio analysis helped the leadership team to identify the need for innovation - but Sonya knew they needed everyone in the organisation on board. “So we made a presentation to the whole organisation around the findings of the portfolio analysis, and it was quite stark when they saw those results. It was really obvious that we needed to be doing new things.
“It was such an enlightening process, realising we needed to make that big step change. And it’s been a real journey, but along the way there have been some fantastic results”.
Taking an innovation approach can - indeed, should - engender a big change in your organisation’s culture. As Lucy says, “it is about incremental innovation and a culture of innovation that aspires to change. It’s about you becoming more questioning in your approach to things. You’re asking: Is there a better or quicker way we can do this? And acknowledging that just because this is the way this has always been done, it might not necessarily continue to be the best way.”
It’s also about creating a culture which recognises that failures are the key to ultimate success. “Obviously you’re going to do things that might fail, but you need to educate everyone that failure in terms of innovation is good, because it means you are trying new things”, says Sonya.
“There’s something about being prepared to fail, but making that culture okay’ echoes David. “You have to have the confidence to say: ‘Hey, this might go really wrong’, or to ask: ‘Okay, what is the worst that can happen here’? Acknowledge the worst, but know that whatever happens, you’re going to learn something important from it.”
Tomorrow, The Fundraiser blog will take a closer look at how Claire House has embraced risk in order to engender a culture of innovation throughout the entire organisation, from fundraising through to service delivery.
Budget and capacity issues
If innovation is a process, how on earth can small, under-resourced charities find the time to do it? If you’ve got a small team working to capacity, where can you find room for them to take a bit of time out to think strategically about ideas?
Lucy suggests you look carefully at your staff’s priorities. “Are the activities that your teams currently prioritise the ones that are going to help them achieve their goals the fastest? We can all spend time on activities that we should stop in order to free up time for the really urgent and important tasks".
Budget is also a consideration, of course. But it need not be a barrier to innovation, says Sonya. “Terrence Higgins Trust is a medium-sized organisation, and we don’t have the budgets for innovation that Cancer Research UK or Macmillan have, for example. So we simply had to work out what we could do, which would have the most impact for us.” It was decided that appointing an 'innovation champion' within each of the charity's fundraising teams was the key - and next week in The Fundraiser, we will explore this in more depth.
“You don’t need big budgets to innovate”, says Lucy. “Innovation is about how people think, and how they act. There’s a lot of scope to make changes without having a pot of money to invest.”
Trying something different
David thinks that as an organisation, all you really need to get started with innovation is a willingness to try something different. “That’s the point. If you never try anything different, you’ll never get anything different.”
To see it through, however, you do need a great deal of patience and perseverance. “People tend to look to innovation and ask ‘well is this going to change the world?’ - and they want it to change the world overnight; but actually it’s something that requires enormous amounts of staying power.”
An exemplary innovator, Macmillan Cancer Support has launched 10 new products over the past 2 years which have raised millions of pounds to help the 2.5 million people in the UK currently living with cancer. “We believe that it is OK to take risks and try new things”, says Ben. "We know that we cannot just do the same things with the same people if we want to continue to grow in the short or long term."
His number one tip for charities struggling to innovate? “Just keep going”.
Jenny Ramage is editor of The Fundraiser
