ARC Best Of: Five Ways to Help Your Nonprofit Find its Creative Mojo

  

You don't need to be Einstein in order to come up with great ideas. When it comes to your nonprofit, the best way to generate great ideas in your organization is to get ideas...and lots of them!  

In addition to your members, donors and other external stakeholders, your staff are a gold mine of creative ideas, give the opportunity and the right environment.

Your staff are the people in the trenches carrying out your mandate and interacting with your external stakeholders on a daily basis. Because of this and because (hopefully) of the passion they bring as employees in your nonprofit environment, they really are one of your most valuable assets.  

Here are a few ways to unleash and harness the creative energy that you know exists in the people that make your organization tick from day to day.

1.  Ask and Ye Shall Receive

It may sound obvious, but if you want creativity from your staff, you have to ask for it.

Encourage your staff to always be thinking about ways to do things more effectively or to come up with new ideas and approaches altogether. The key here is to create an environment that encourages risk taking and discourages punishing or ridiculing failure. This short video posted on Beth Kanter's blog talks about how Mom's Rising uses 'joyful funerals' to encourage innovation while diminishing the fear of failure in their organization.

2. Brain Retreats

Consider putting together an annual brain retreat for your staff.  Take them for a day or two to somewhere that is completely outside the traditional office setting.   Do some activities together that are a fun and maybe a little out of peoples’ comfort zones (one organization I know takes their staff surfing). Mix up the fun, social time by putting them to work coming up with creative ideas targeted at a specific issue or challenge being faced by your organization.

3.  Write it Down!

Some of the best ideas come when people are away from their desk or away from their work environment altogether.  Make it easy for staff to record and submit ideas at all hours.

This can be as basic as providing them with a small notepad and pen...and encouraging them to use it; or as involved as having an internal online forum where ideas can be posted from a home computer or mobile device. 

Note that whatever method you choose, giving staff the authority to decide whether or not they share their ideas and with whom should be paramount.

4.  Time Out

I get my best ideas and am most productive in the morning and when I’m out for a run.  For other people it’s when they’re in the shower, late at night or during their morning commute.  I know I’m not alone here: 

Many people do their best thinking outside of ‘office hours’ and when they are away from work.  Changes of scenery and time away from daily tasks, email etc. are important for creativity. With this in mind, consider the following:

• Encourage your staff to exercise, even if it means taking some time out of their work day. A lot of research over the past 10-15 years suggests that creativity is boosted by regular exercise.  In addition to the benefits of having increased focus and creativity following exercise, I find that my brain often also gets a work-related workout while I’m exercising. As my mind wanders, I often find it mulling over different ways to tackle a problem I’m facing at work.
• Encourage regular time off.  A couple of days away from the daily grind, particularly if you are able to move to a different setting can be really effective at helping staff to gain perspective or think creatively about their work.
• Consider following companies like 3M and Google which allow employees to spend some of their work time on projects they are passionate about.  Many of Google’s most innovative applications and 3M’s inventions have come out of allowing staff the space to work on what they love.

5.  Creativ-ize Your Workplace

Creativity doesn’t thrive in a cubicle.  Work space that allows for people to concentrate but that also has space for staff to talk to and interact with others allows ideas to feed off each other and grow. 

While it makes sense in some cases to put people in the same function or who are working on the same projects together, there is also a case for cross-pollination: 

 By putting people working on separate areas of the organization together, you get the regular interaction of previously unrelated concepts, issues and areas of focus. Combining unrelated ideas has been the beginning of many amazing ideas and inventions in the past (think the Post-It Note, and even social networking).

Have a look at the Centre for Social Innovation’s shared workspace concept to see how people in the social sector are coming together in an environment to breed innovations related to social change.

Does your nonprofit incorporate any of the above ideas? In what other ways do you foster creativity and innovation?

Photo of Albert Einstein thanks to wikimedia commons

(Originally posted in December 2010)