Stanford Social Innovation Review

Key social innovators have succeeded against all odds –– and with little financial muscle.

Greenlight is a nonprofit catalyst: It identifes a local need, scours the country for the best program to meet it, and then establishes a chapter in its hometown.

Common sense advice for how to survive the launch into a new leadership role.

Cross-sector collaboration is the key to community revitalization.

Are elite boards getting out of touch with their organizations’ true purpose?

How middle managers can walk tall.

Much public affairs lingo, such as “capacity,” signifies nothing in particular. The nonprofit and public sectors have more than their share of this vocabulary. There are a handful of toxic words and phrases that have a way of polluting any stream of consciousness, muddying the concepts and making it impossible to see what facts and arguments (if any) lie below the surface.

Organizations need to get better at talking about feelings.

Baumgarten offers strategies for creating team success.

The authors offer advice on how to spot and move on bright ideas.

The answers to a motivated workforce may lie in ancient Greece.

Guidelines for how to affordably find out what your customers want.

The fate of new nonprofits is often linked to public funding.

Since 1970, more than 200,000 nonprofits have opened in the U.S., but only 144 have reached $50 million in annual revenue. They got big by doing two things: They raised the bulk of their money from a single type of funder. And just as importantly, these nonprofits created professional organizations that were tailored to the needs of their primary funding sources.

Grantees of foundations have little control over which program officer takes their case. Yet program officers make or break grantees’ experiences with foundations. To trigger social change, foundations must give program officers better training, clearer expectations, and regular performance feedback.