Change the World with a Framework for Successful Activism
How do activists and their nonprofit jobs get better results out of their advocacy, fundraising, social marketing, and strategic planning? If you are reading this, you probably want to change the world in some small way. And you are always on the lookout for new ideas. This article is part of a series about social change strategies and techniques.
It seems like everything is better when it gets organized properly. Kitchens work better. Office work gets done more efficiently. Getting the kids ready for school is a little easier. Why would changing the world be any different?
With that thought in mind, the rest of this article introduces a simple system for organizing social change work. Whether you need a new fundraising strategy or you just want to do something about a small problem in your community, these steps can help.
Step One — Define Your Challenge
What exactly is the problem you want to tackle? Write it down in simple and concrete terms. Don’t worry about adding all kinds of detail and explanation.
Goal setting should come in here or at the next step. What are you trying to do? Be concrete if you can. Define what success looks like, summarizing it with a number if you can. Learn how to set SMART goals.
Step Two — Explore Your Challenge
Now, describe your challenge in more detail. Ask questions about why the problem exists, where it exists, what might cause it, where things are the worst. The point here is to come up with an idea that addresses your challenge. How do you know what counts as a good idea? Take a few minutes to make notes on this. Consider cost, risk, resources, time, and anything else that seems relevant to your situation.
Step Three — Look for Ideas
Here you take some time to scan your experience or do a little Google research. Can you come up with an idea to use? Can you find something you could adapt or combine with another idea to make a workable solution to the challenge?
Step Four — Brainstorm
If step three doesn’t bear fruit, you move on to pure creative thinking. You have several options here when it comes to devising an approaching to your challenge. If Step Three gave you an idea that has potential, this is where you play with the idea and brainstorm ways to make it exactly suited to your challenge.
Step Five — Create
Combine the results of Steps One through Four and develop a response to your challenge. You will have the beginnings of a new social marketing campaign or whatever. Work with it to refine any problems or make any strengths even stronger.
Step Five — Implement
Like the other steps, this one looks different depending on what your original challenge was. Whatever the idea, put it into action. Take the first step. If you are working on something huge, like getting a new law passed, break down the process into logical steps. You’ve got this great new idea for a law, but you are LONG way from getting the law passed. What is the best next step? Take it.
Social Innovation Tools:
At each step, you are brainstorming, problem-solving, evaluating, and improving. How do you do all of those things? Common sense and a simple desire to be more creative will suffice in some cases. In other situations, you want to have some specific tools available. At each step, you can draw on one or more tools for brainstorming, decision analysis or problem-solving to improve your thinking. Learning how to use those tools could almost be Step Zero in the process.
So, there you have the outline of a simple and generic process for social innovation. If you like this outline, please Follow me and share this article. In the coming months, I’ll be diving more deeply into those five steps, sharing some abstract social innovation principles you might not have used before, and…of course sharing some of those tools you just read about.
