We need to go beyond ideas to solve the planet's biggest problems
I bloomin' love ideas: I love daydreaming about them, I love bouncing them around with other people, I love the buzz when you think you’ve hit upon a winning one. But because I love them so much I know how seductive they can be. Unfortunately, ideas alone are not enough to change the world; we need to be able to put the right ones into action.
Have you ever been in a brainstorming session that dived straight into coming up with ideas and didn’t have a plan to pick and action the best ones? I’m sure it’s not just me... I’ve long held the opinion that coming up with ideas is pretty easy, it’s the implementation that hard. But they're so shiny and fun we can all get drawn in... Sadly, I think fundraising teams can focus too much time and energy trying to come up with the next big thing and not enough time understanding the pain points of their existing supporters and trying to solve them.
It’s certainly not just fundraisers who fall foul of the fallacy of big ideas: many business people, entrepreneurs, and would-be entrepreneurs are equally paralysed from taking action because they are waiting for the thing that’s going to take them to the big time.
...the Coffee Morning Fallacy...I’ve fallen foul to this trap myself many times in the past because it’s so prevalent in our sector’s culture. In community fundraising this manifests itself in the “we just need to find our version of Macmillan Coffee Morning” mantra that crops up with alarming frequency. Maybe we should start to call this the Coffee Morning Fallacy.
Coffee Morning is amazing, the team at Macmillan do an incredible job at keeping it fresh and reaching new hosts every year. But it’s taken them nearly thirty years to get to this point. They call it their “heritage” event, which I think is a perfect description and heritage isn’t something that you can just magic up, however great your ideas. Maintaining a legacy product and developing a brand new one are two quite different tasks. And this approach of over-focusing on what others are doing doesn’t even take in to account what sort of community initiative is a good fit for your audience - many charities will never have the mass appeal of a cancer support charity and may need a more niche offering.
Even if we were operating in a business as usual environment it would be risky to build your whole strategy around one yet-to-exist product, but that’s before you even considering the ever-changing tech landscape and the evidence that product lifecycles are getting shorter in community fundraising. I’d venture that waiting for inspiration to strike and the concept for your Race for Life or your Red Nose Day to pop into your head probably isn’t the best use of your mental energy, however nice it is to fantasise that one of our ideas will one day be a household name like that!
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been focussed on figuring out how to recalibrate the way I and my teams work with ideas to de-emphasise the ideation stage and set it in a broader context of a problem-solving framework.
...we're going to need a pretty steady stream of amazing ideas...If we're going to beat cancer, if we're going to avert a climate catastrophe, if we're going to make the world a more equitable and just place, then we're going to need a pretty steady stream of amazing ideas. Generating new ideas is vitally important, but we can approach it in a way that reduces risks - the risks of not being able to come up with perfect ideas or wasting time and resource developing the wrong ones. How do we do this? For me, the richest source of inspiration and tools has been design thinking.
Not only does the design thinking process create space to make sure you’re solving the right problem and to understand it before you jump into the ideation stage, but it also helps you select the highest potential ideas and prototype them quickly and cheaply before investing in them.
As well as giving us a framework to generate better ideas and bring them to life, exploring and adopting the techniques of design thinking can also help us to truly put supporters at the centre of our fundraising - an aspiration that many of us hold but struggle to put in to practice.
Already using some of this practice in your work? I'd love to hear about it!