Next Stage - Social Impact Services

Social good strategy to amplify your impact

Planning & Implementation

The Data Won’t Save Us: Human Insights for Social Change

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The Data Won’t Save Us

I’m a self-professed data nerd. But there are long-held data points that have been repeated so many times that they have become conventional wisdom – or even tropes.

We plan for future prison capacity based on third grade reading rates. Source
Only 3% of youth exiting the foster care system will graduate college. One in five will experience homelessness. Source
One-third of children who grow up poor in the U.S. will experience poverty as an adult. Source
If your city has low economic mobility, it is nearly impossible to escape poverty.

If you’re plugged into any conversation about social innovation, you’ve heard these numbers, and many others like them. They are breathtakingly, shockingly awful – a stark report on the reality that many nonprofits, activists and community leaders live every day.

I think most of us like data – even if it is hard to look at – because we can make sense of it. Numbers can be studied and improved. We perceive that the ‘answers’ can be found in those numbers. And while data is driven by a desire to know more and do better, I wonder if it sometimes stunts our collective curiosity.

When I pause to consider what’s behind the data, I start to wonder: 

  • At what point does data become a self-fulfilling prophecy? How do we use these numbers to guide us rather than allowing ourselves to fall into resigned acceptance? 
  • In using data to make sense of complex issues – do we also use it to distance ourselves from the complexities of being in relationship with people?
  • How can data inspire us to imagine something new – instead of simply to predict an inevitable future?

Quantitative data is critical to the work of social good. We need it to shed light on issues, to help evaluate the effectiveness of programs and to galvanize us to action. But the temptation exists to bury ourselves in that data, to seek the answers in clean numbers and next steps.

The data won’t save us – but it can point us in the right direction.

Let it guide us towards relationships.

Data is a great starting point, but it’s no substitute for lived experience. This is one reason that Next Stage so strongly advocates for qualitative data. The data often tells us where to look – but how and why are most often rooted in conversations with people most proximate to the issue at hand. These relationships are where trust is built. And trust is where long-lasting social innovation starts.

In our report, Inside Out: The Case for Community Voice, we shared a story about a nonprofit’s mobile health unit. The unit nestled in a few locations before centering itself at a local community center. They saw very little traffic, even though the numbers suggested that this would be best supported by a mobile unit. But when the driver of the mobile unit walked into the local 7-11 and struck up a conversation with the owner, they found that the convenience store was a trusted ‘third space’ for that community and saw a lot of daily traffic. The manager offered the parking lot for the mobile unit once a week, the team accepted and use of that unit increased significantly – all because of a partnership rooted in a simple conversation.

Let’s embrace the tension.

Working on any social issue is messy and rife with competing viewpoints. It can be tempting to lean on data that feels straightforward and ‘clean,’ when conversation feels messy. The reality is that every data point represents a real, complex human with a specific viewpoint. 

Our team learned this firsthand when we did work for TreesCharlotte. Charged with developing campaign messaging, we pulled from data and our own common beliefs to develop a message we thought was obvious – ‘Everyone loves trees.” When we workshopped this with our focus groups and stakeholders, the dissent was immediate and overwhelmingly more complex. It turns out that not everyone loves trees. They sometimes fall on houses, are expensive to maintain and have impacts that are out of our control. We changed the message to a more nuanced expression, “Everyone has a tree story,” but if we hadn’t been willing to engage the tension – and the disagreement – our data would have led us far astray.

Let it inspire us to imagine something different.

Rather than self-fulfilling prophecy, let’s allow those sobering numbers to help us get curious. The temptation to bury ourselves in the research is real, but so is the risk. It’s easy to forget that the data isn’t inevitable, and that we have the ability to imagine something different for ourselves.

Our team recently collaborated on a documentary about Southside Homes that featured highly proximate organizations, including ParentChild+.  In the documentary, NC State Director Angela Drakeford speaks to the need for imagination and action when she states, “We have all the data we need. We don’t need to waste ten, twenty, thirty more years on data – then the ten, twenty, thirty years of people that contributed to that data, it’s too late to save them. I think we have enough now to think outside of the box. Let’s kick those boxes over and let’s make a difference in this community.”

A Decade of Good: Looking Back and Looking Ahead as Next Stage Marks Year 10

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This month, Next Stage turns 10 years old! What began at my kitchen table has grown into something far more ambitious. As we launch the second decade of our company, I’m excited to share that ambition with you today.

Last month, we formally approved a three-year strategic plan – a first for our company. That may be surprising if you know how many plans we have developed for clients over the last decade. What’s the saying about the cobbler’s children walking barefoot through the world? Suffice it to say, this is the most robust expression of our aspirations ever committed to print.

We have never had a more clear North Star for where Next Stage desires to go. Over the last 18 months, our team has developed a new mission and theory of change for our work that creates cohesion across a number of concepts. What we once thought were disparate ideas are now being harnessed in service to a new organizational horizon.

Building Belonging at the Intersection of Social Good

Our new purpose statement is building belonging at the intersection of social good. The tenets of this include:

  • Building more cohesive infrastructure and collaboration between six primary sectors (nonprofits, the private sector, municipalities, philanthropic institutions, faith institutions and community-based organizations), channeling more resources to address pressing social causes;
  • Developing a more equitable ‘supply chain of social good’ that ensures decision-making and resources are invested in those who are most proximate to people being served, where trust can be fostered as an asset.

We feel best positioned to support initiatives focused on breaking down walls that contribute to systemic barriers. This work leads us to more community-and-neighborhood-based frameworks that shift power to where trust is most authentically residing. We believe trust capital is the most important asset to overcoming the failure of systems.

It’s a big concept, we know. So what does that mean in practice?

We are called to build a new methodology for collaboration. The pandemic made undeniable what we have all known for decades — that the silos of service delivery are inefficient and ineffective. Greater cohesion and collective effort are needed if we are ever to make inroads on the toughest social issues.

To make that happen, we believe institutions and their leaders must build belonging at that intersection. And not just performative engagement but authentic, hands-on collaboration that is recognized as just as important as the work these institutions individually lead.

In other words, we desperately need each other and must spend more time creating infrastructure and trusted relationships at those intersections.

We’ve explored this in several ways. Our Profit & Purpose series of community reports outlined what we believe is an important bridge between the private sector and nonprofits – one of mutual benefit that has the potential to transform social outcomes. Our recent Inside Out report, making the case for community voice, suggests a need for strengthening between nonprofits and the people they serve.

These are important intersections, but hardly the only ones needed to generate the outcomes we desire. Our next horizon aims to link the six sectors listed above and create new ways of working together for the greater good.

Our Three-Year Strategic Goals

Our plan has three primary goals:

1. Begin the transformation from a Charlotte-based management consulting firm into a national social innovation company.

The language here is important. We are proud in recent years to have been working with clients throughout the country. Where we once considered these as infrequent interruptions to our primarily Carolinas-focused work, we are now realizing a larger geographic frame.

We are also finally using the terminology that best suits us. We dropped Consulting from our name a few years ago and have taken to calling ourselves a “social impact company.” But going forward, we want to own what we truly believe we are — a social innovation company. We have sought to help institutions navigate change by onboarding fresh ways of working. This is the main idea of our work in an increasingly more national context.

What does that mean for our work in the Carolinas, and especially the Charlotte community we’re proud to call home? We will never abandon our commitment to local and regional partners. This work serves as both an opportunity to improve outcomes for people where we live and a chance to learn by working at the frontlines of social good.

Over the next three years, that research will inform the development of new service lines including two new offerings in 2024: Community Voice and Collaboration Management. We are also conducting new pilots on our digital community of practice platform – Cultivate Impact™ – toward formalizing it as a part of our solutioning process.

2. Evolve our operational infrastructure and workplace culture to be more optimized, team-based and sustainable.

The biggest difference between the Next Stage of today and the modest consulting firm that declared its existence in 2014 is the collection of talent we have assembled. Our company now comprises seven full-time staff members and a diverse team of contractors and subject matter experts. We are a collective of passionate do-gooders (who we call ‘Next Stagers’) working together to live our shared values.

Our growth led us to establish a base of operations in an office on Central Avenue in the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood of Charlotte. We are so proud of our space and of the mural that greets visitors. Through ArtPop’s Inspiration Projects program, we commissioned artist Darion Fleming to transform our office entryway with a mural depicting his take on our theory of change. It now also adorns the top of our weekly newsletter, appropriately renamed The Intersection.

The onboarding of an office was needed in part as a result of a team-based shift in our work. We are now facilitating more long-term, multi-year engagements with clients that bring our entire team forward to advance positive outcomes. This shift has led to a far healthier and more sustainable approach to working.

Our new strategic plan calls for continued development of our internal operations to support this new way of working. We will leverage technology and project management tools to strengthen workflows and foster cross-team collaboration as we grow our staff team. We are also deeply committed to developing a workplace culture to encourage personal and professional growth while prioritizing both individual and team health and well-being.

3. Grow awareness, engagement and buy-in, realizing the resources needed to fuel the company‘s mission of social change.

From the very beginning, we have always described Next Stage as a social enterprise. We are shaped by our values and guiding principles, working with and through our clients to make the world we want to see. Every investment in our services sustains a commitment to a social mission that manifests in a variety of ways.

We were proud to launch Charlotte’s first incubator for emerging nonprofit organizations in 2018. In recent years we have produced a number of thought leadership reports and have produced roundtable discussions highlighting what’s next for innovative partnerships. Going above and beyond to deliver value to the community has always been central to our work.

With increased ambition comes the need for larger platforms of engagement. We desire to foster collaborative networks that bridge people across distance, creating peer learning opportunities that lead to deeper understanding across difference.

The next three years will include new thought leadership deliverables, increasing our focus and reach. We are creating new ways to bridge our brand marketing efforts to client services that make access to learning more equitable and achievable for all. We know that will lead to a growing base of client work that will fuel our continued focus on social innovation.

Our Commitment to You

If you’ve read this far, you are very likely a person we are proud to call a partner, colleague and friend. We have only arrived at this point in our evolution through the collaboration and buy-in of countless social good professionals. We thank you for your belief in us.

As we work to realize our ambitious vision, we aim to stay rooted in what got us here — hard work, determination and passionate belief in the power of humans caring for other humans. We will continue to provide high-quality services to clients in the local, regional and national context. We are the friendly neighborhood Next Stage we’ve always been, only now with a new calling and language describing our organizational purpose.

We look forward to seeing you on February 8 for our anniversary event where we will announce the selected organization for the UnFundable Project grant. If you didn’t receive an invitation and want to attend, we’re sorry, it was just an oversight on our part – drop us a line here.

Planning like a Founder: Lessons from the CULTIVATE Cohort

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If you are anything like us, your last few weeks have been a little bit hectic. The beginning of the new year brings with it new opportunities, fresh ideas, and the start of some truly exciting projects. But seeing the dates on the calendar reset can also be a reminder – of where we have been, where we are going and the barriers or roadblocks that are impeding our progress.

Between launching new client engagements and implementing our updated annual plans, we are also in my favorite season of the year — the hectic transition between CULTIVATE Cohorts. Right now, last year’s Cohort is busy putting the final touches on their three-year strategic business plans, while the incoming Cohort is participating in their very first coaching sessions and group workshops.

Some background: CULTIVATE, our virtual learning community, and incubator for emerging nonprofits in the Charlotte region was designed to create more accessible organizational planning support. We built the program and curriculum with a singular goal – to help our cohort members build strong nonprofits capable of meaningful, lasting impact from day one.

While CULTIVATE was founded to support founders as they navigate the challenges of early-stage growth, our work at Next Stage spans a wide range of organizations and leaders from both the nonprofit and corporate sectors. After reflecting on the experience of our Cohort members at the start and end of their CULTIVATE journey, we identified three things that organizations of any size and stage could learn about planning from founder-led organizations.

Impact starts and ends with vision.

Seriously. Our first activity with our CULTIVATE cohort each year is to define what we call a time-limited vision (three-, five- or ten-years, depending on ambition) for their growth and impact – and our last activity is, you guessed it, redefining that same time-limited vision. That vision is the north start of future growth and impact, even as how we plan to get there may shift year-to-year. One of the magic moments of CULTIVATE every single year is witnessing how a founder’s compelling and measurable time-limited vision transforms boards, activates volunteers and energizes donors. As you consider your own path forward, what is the “big idea” that motivates you?

Implementation eats strategy for breakfast.

You’ve probably heard Peter Drucker’s famous line, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Our take is that implementation is the real predator here. If strategic business planning is not tied directly to tactical implementation and actionable next steps, we’ve wasted our time. While strategy can be great marketing, implementation is where founders know to focus their time. Can you relate, that ‘talk is cheap’ unless we are putting in the time to move things forward?

Prioritize building the army – not winning the war. 

With a strong, time-limited vision and detailed implementation plan in place, you’d think any nonprofit is ready to execute on its mission. But priority #1 for founders of growing nonprofits isn’t expanding programming or measuring impact – it’s constituency building. So often, we get wrapped up in the execution of our plans. It is unlikely that you’ll achieve your goals through sheer willpower and determination alone. You don’t have to run an early-stage nonprofit to appreciate that it takes a lot of people to make a big dream come true.

We are inspired by all of our CULTIVATE organizations, and they are informing how we move our own firm forward. This year, we’re taking these three lessons and using them to guide our planning for the future of CULTIVATE. What does that future look like, you ask?

We’re still building out the details, but we’ll tell you this: everyone benefits from planning like a founder. Ultimately, we don’t think that providing six emerging nonprofits each year with CULTIVATE support is enough. We’re looking for our own multiplier effect – the ability to create sector-wide impact by creating more accessible learning and community-building opportunities for nonprofits of all shapes and sizes.

Over the next few months, we’ll be bringing CULTIVATE back under the Next Stage brand to prepare for the expansion of the program to more than just emerging organizations. Sign up for the Next Stage newsletter and follow along on social media to be the first to know more.

4 Questions to Guide Your Crisis Fundraising Plan

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From a social good perspective, one of the most disruptive aspects of the COVID-19 crisis has been the impact on spring fundraising. Not only has the pandemic cancelled key events, it has increased the demand for services and shifted the case for funds. Several organizations responded to these changes by the quick development of crisis response or critical need funds.

This isn’t the right answer for everyone and is heavily dependent on the needs of your community, demand for your services and changes to your fundraising strategy. Messaging and goals will be significantly different for everyone, but one thing is very clear – the plans you carefully crafted months ago will have to evolve and change with the changing landscape.

On Friday, May 8, Next Stage hosted a roundtable discussion on Starting a Crisis Response Fund on The New Normal – you can find the recording of that conversation here. The discussion featured three nonprofit leaders sharing the experience of launching a critical needs fund and what is working for them.

Friday’s panelists – Katy Ryan, Executive Director of 24 Foundation; Randall Hitt, Chief Engagement Officer at Men’s Shelter of Charlotte; and Sam Smith, Director of External Affairs at United Way of Central Carolinas – each shared key points and questions that guided their thinking as they made quick decisions about their crisis fundraising strategies.

Whether you opt to develop a crisis fund, or are simply adapting your existing plan, these four questions and tips will help guide your decision-making process:

1 – Is it true to your mission?

Remember who you are and what is most important to your constituents. The temptation to shift your messaging and focus during a crisis can be very real. “You can leverage a crisis, but don’t shift what is at your core,” said Randall Hitt, Chief Engagement Officer at the Men’s Shelter of Charlotte.

The most powerful thing you can do is to be authentic and explain how the crisis is impacting the people you serve. If you’re raising money in relation to the crisis, make sure it stays true to your core services.

2 – Is your plan clear?

Sam Smith, Director of External Affairs for the United Way Central Carolinas identifies this as a key driver of success for organizations receiving United Way funding. “Be clear about the work you want to do and very specific about how you’re going to execute that plan,” he advised.

This can be challenging. Both demand for services and the way organizations deliver those services look drastically different than they did just months ago. Funders – both individuals and foundations – are looking for leaders who have clear visions and plans for how to manage this crisis. The most successful organizations will be the ones that can think fast, then clearly articulate and make those ideas happen.

 3 – Can you execute it quickly?

Now is not the time for complicated plans that require you to build new resources. “Focus on what you can do right now,” said Katy Ryan, Executive Director of 24 Foundation. “Fundraising is going to look different this year,” she continued. “It’s probably going to be a tough year, but a lot of that is out of my control. What I can do is focus everything we have on serving the needs of the cancer community that exist right now. If it feels right and your stakeholders support it, then now is the time to move.”

Trust your gut. You know what your organization is capable of and what you have the ability to execute, so make a plan and go for it.

4 – Do your stakeholders back it?  

As you adapt plans, make sure you’re bringing along your supporters and stakeholders.  Many will appreciate the opportunity to be included in conversations and will be supportive of efforts to continue providing services and keeping your organization on track.

Learn more about our panelists and how they are generating revenue throughout this crisis by listening to the full conversation here.

3 Lessons from the Great Recession

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Hello Charlotte, how is everyone doing? No, I mean it. Are you doing okay? I hope you are.

This post is meant to make you feel better, so I’m going to state that on the front end. All of us at Next Stage remain bullish on where our community is going long-term and want to shed some light on what is happening right now.

The downward trend of the stock market in recent weeks gave me a funny feeling in my stomach that reminded me of another time in my life. I moved to the Charlotte area and found myself working for a local consulting firm for nonprofits in my fourth month on the job when February 2009 hit. The stock market crash that month sent our community hurtling. By April of that year Wachvoia was acquired by Wells Fargo and it felt like the end of the Charlotte world. It was the start of the Great Recession, and it was my introduction to crisis management for nonprofits. My current career really started then.

The next few months were sort of crazy. Nonprofit organizations went into full-on freak out mode. Most organizations ceased any sort of strategic planning or capital campaign activity. Some moved quickly to lay off employees deemed non-essential. Others took a “wait-and-see” approach that included dramatically curtailing programming, operations and fundraising activities. As the Great Recession dragged on, many of us in the consulting space learned the basics of nonprofit mergers and integrations. I remember a local leader at the time predicting that fully one-third of nonprofits would need to merge with a stronger organization in order to survive.

Fast forward a few years and… what? Did nonprofits fold in record numbers? Did the Great Recession set Charlotte back from a social good perspective by a decade or more? Was it the bloodbath that was predicted?

No. None of those things happened. In fact, Charlotte’s system of nonprofits largely rebounded and quickly. And yet, there were still nonprofit leaders in 2011 and 2012 blaming the Great Recession for their organization’s lack of recent success. It became a convenient excuse years after the worst of the Recession had ended.

Working for another firm at the time, I wanted to understand how we had survived such a rocky time in history. It was clear some organizations had fared better than others and my assumption was that innovation must have played a role. I called it the Charlotte Nonprofit Innovation Study, a grandiose completely unfunded and under-resourced investigation into WTF happened. We got some graduate students from UNCC Charlotte to help us and I enlisted my colleague Ally Yusuf to dig through the 990 forms of a representative sample of 150 local nonprofits. We studied 60 data points across five years of 990s (2007-2011) to identify organizations that fared best during the Great Recession and those that underperformed.

Here are the key takeaways:

  • Charlotte kept giving. One of the bigger findings was that charitable giving in Charlotte did not take a very big hit in 2009. There was a modest dip in giving (less than .5%) in 2009 over 2008. But in 2010, there was more giving than in 2007, a year that was considered by most the gold standard for giving in our community. And by 2011, our representative sampling of organizations was raising millions more than they had in 2007.This was a particularly interesting data point as we deliberately included the United Way of Central Carolinas (UWCC) in our data set. For those who were not around then, UWCC had fared the worst as the Great Recession set in, raising 50% less than they had in their largest years. Having taken a $20 million loss into our assessment, it was amazing to see the generosity exhibited by our community.
  • The organizations that fared best were those with strong marketing and fundraising engines. The organizations that cut back on their resource development teams fared worst. The organizations that were still complaining about the Great Recession in 2012 tended to be the organizations that had temporarily laid off the only staff members focused on constituency growth and revenue development. And that trend included safety net and other organizations alike.
  • Best practices work. We hoped to find a smoking gun of innovation that suggested survivability was linked to fresh, new ideas that would lead to a set of dramatic new learnings for our community. I mean, we called it the Innovation Study for gosh sakes. And instead? Boring old best practices. The organizations that thrived invested in marketing and relational fundraising when others pulled back, fearful of being out-of-step with the community.

The data suggests that the organizations that thrived essentially took market share from the organizations that did not. While there was more charitable support put forward in the years after the Great Recession hit, the organizations that thrived grew substantially. It became a very clear “haves” and “have-nots” situation. The data was sort of stunning.

It is said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

So here we are in 2020 facing a similar and yet quite different event. Unlike the Great Recession, which took months to slowly reveal itself, we have all been dramatically introduced to the new normal in spectacular fashion. We are having a moment. Pundits suggest that the stock market will roar back to life once we tame this virus, and I certainly want to fan the flames of that sort of thinking. But while we hunker down in our homes, I see people struggling and in need. I’m observing people trying to figure out how this disruption will play out in real time. Main Street is struggling as Wall Street yo-yos. It’s that funny feeling in my stomach again.

As a firm, we have jumped in the deep end on community response because we feel it is our duty to do so. We want to be a stabilizing force, sharing our insights and working shoulder-to-shoulder with our partner organizations who were mid-stroke on moving forward ambitious agendas. We also understand the crisis leaders are struggling with and aim to make sense of the chaos with them.

Looking back to the Great Recession, we think there are some important learnings there. I hope we can learn from our past mistakes.

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Deepening, Expanding and Evolving: The Nonprofit Growth Mandate

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On Tuesday, February 19, I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop for the Arts & Science Council on a provocative topic – “Deepening, Expanding and Evolving: The Nonprofit Growth Mandate.” So what was it about?

Organizations are apt to find themselves in a conundrum. Grantmakers tell them they want to primarily fund new initiatives and programming, with the goal of increasing mission impact. But they are unwilling to fund that growth entirely themselves, or else want to realign their giving to focus on growth instead of core operations and programming. We call the expectation of area funders “the nonprofit growth mandate,” with the idea that nonprofits are not able to stay in place for too long before they are encouraged to grow impact.

While this is typically a complaint directed at funders, it is also an expectation of plenty of boards, volunteers and other types of donors that “need drives response,” and with increased need comes the expectation of increasing programming to meet that need. In effect, nonprofits are meant to grow. As one participant said the other night, “if you aren’t growing, you’re dying.”

But what does that look like for different types of organizations? Not every organization is going to have a linear growth strategy that suggests increasingly higher budgets, larger staffs and increased impact through more programming. That may be appropriate for some, but for others, growth may look somewhat different.

This was the goal of the workshop – to explore growth through three lenses:

  • Deepening – Programmatic growth for an organization may not mean serving more people, but rather increasing impact for individuals already being served. The workshop explored methods of increasing impact by augmenting or extending the experience of engagement, elevating the understanding of program participants, challenging thought and action, and encouraging response. This is an ideal growth strategy for organizations that may be limited by space or human resources to continually increase the number of people served, and can be a cost-effective way to demonstrate increased impact through growth.
  • Expanding – We also covered the classic definition of growth, with an increased number of participants in programming as a goal. Methods we explored included increasing capacity to grow participants, planting a seed of engagement, aligning offerings to target audiences, and marketing to activate growth. For many workshop participants, it was clear barriers to expansion centered on facility, human resources and financial resources, which can be challenging issues to work through.
  • Evolving – This workshop also looked at a number of trends impacting nonprofits in the Charlotte area, with factors such as the overall growth of the nonprofit sector, the mix of how revenue is allocated and the impacts of generational change suggesting that current business models may not be sufficient in the future. The final topic of the workshop focused on evolving to shift delivery of mission and how evolution may be a different form of growth. We discussed redefining what success looks like, how new tools may be needed, and the importance of collaboration and sustainability.

In the end, workshop participants left feeling (I hope) Inspired by the possibilities but also grounded with tools and how-to supports to aid them as they engaged their boards and other key stakeholders in the topic of growth.

As a new topic for us, the “Nonprofit Growth Mandate” is a compelling frame for discussing the best practices all organizations should be engaged in – regular needs assessments and asset inventories to explore opportunities to deepen, expand and evolve mission delivery.