Laura Weiss is the vice president of service innovation at the Taproot Foundation, an organization leading the pro bono movement and making business talent available to nonprofits working to improve society.
In her recent piece, Why We're All Designers, she suggests:
Today design tools and methodologies have begun to find their way to the social sector, and this is no surprise. Nonprofits are inherently innovative enterprises because most were formed by a social entrepreneur with a vision to change the world. Yet as they grow, they become exclusively focused on the challenges of daily operations. The kinds of continuous innovation activities that are critical to organizational growth and program renewal give way to more basic functional needs. To avoid the threat of stagnant maturity and potential decline, nonprofits must actively develop techniques for better understanding their communities, for taking those insights and refining their programs through iterative prototyping, and for telling their story through creative communications. We cannot afford to rely solely on costly design resources or consultants and do not typically have the means to manage a dedicated innovation project. Social sector organizations must develop the most basic of these skills if for no other reason than to make better decisions about how to proactively direct the use of limited resources for maximum impact.
So, how do we educate the leaders who manage the budgets that directly influence the design of everything we depend upon in our economics, sociologies, and technologies? How do we raise the design literacy of decision makers who would otherwise keep their communities and organizations quagmired in futile faith in business as usual?
