The fall, 07 Stanford Social Innovation Review features a great article by Heather McCleod Grant and Leslie Crutchfield on “Creating High-Impact Nonprofits.” I had an immediate affinity to the article because the “six practices” they recommend have a strong affinity to both an activist philosophy and to the strategic use of technology. The latter may be the more controversial of the two points since the authors barely mention technology. Reading it with a “web 2.0” eye, an appropriate and strategic use of new technology jumps right out.

Grant and Crutchfield set aside six popular conventional measures of high impact-- perfect management, brand-name awareness, big ideas, strong mission statements, great conventional program effectiveness evaluations and large budgets. They look to new measures for what will support the “scaling [of] social innovation.”

For the most part, the organizations they profile in the article fall into what I would consider the medium to large range by budget. The smallest had a budget of $13 Million a year, and the two largest were over a half billion a year. Even without the two largest, the average budget size was 39.5 Million, much larger than our typical audience.

That said, an activist philosophy plus an activist technology profile could bring many of these practices within the reach of small to medium sized organizations. In fact, many of the points correspond to the kind of lessons we have been emphasizing this year in our “networked nonprofit” seminar series.

Grant and Crutchfield argue that, “…high-impact nonprofits work with and through organizations and individuals outside themselves to create more impact than they ever could have achieved alone. They build social movements and fields; they transform business, government, other nonprofits, and individuals; and they change the world around them.”

And,

“…greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than with how they manage their own internal operations. The high-impact nonprofits we studied are satisfied with building a ‘good enough’ organization and then focusing their energy externally to catalyze large scale change.”

In our view, while large organizations have many choices, for smaller light-footed organizations can make up for smaller resource bases by using the Web effectively to mix constituency, service and engagement and building a collaborative mechanisms for knowledge sharing and volunteerism.

The authors argue that high impact nonprofits “bridge the divide between service and advocacy.”

Likewise, the authors say that “not all of the high-impact nonprofits we studied had an organizational model that makes involving supporters easy. Yet almost all of them found creative ways to convert core supporters to evangelists and to mobilize super-evangelists.”

In our own work, we have seen that smaller organizations using traditional methods often have a hard time using volunteers effectively. Social networking and on-line engagement can make it possible for volunteers and supporters to self-organize with minimal oversight.

And the authors also strike a blow for collaboration and open content: “Regardless of whether they have formal or informal affiliates, all of these nonprofits help build their respective fields through collaboration rather than competition. They share financial resources and help other nonprofits succeed at fundraising. They give away their model and proprietary information in an open-source approach.”

Two more themes also suggest effective use of Web 2.0 technologies to provide feedback within the organization and broaden the leadership base: “But unlike many nonprofits, they have also mastered the ability to listen, learn, and modify their approach on the basis of external cues.” “They distribute leadership within their organizations and throughout their external nonprofit networks, empowering others to lead.”

Whether you have been taking part in our exploration of these themes this year, this article is highly worth a read. Our workshop this week focuses on the impact of new technology on Constituency Relationship Management (CRM), and will likely up in some of the themes we illustrate.