How to Get Your Social Impact Flywheel Turning

Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact

Do you ever feel like you’re just STUCK?

Like no matter what you try or how hard you work you just can’t seem to get traction?

We’ve all been there before, and it’s NOT a fun space to be in.

Here’s the thing: there are going to be sticking points in your social impact journey. That’s pretty much guaranteed.

What worked on day 1 — or year 1 — won’t necessarily work for year 3, or year 5.

What worked when you were brand new and had a $500k annual operating budget won’t work to get you from $5m/yr to $50m/yr.

But there’s a powerful way to overcome these sticking points: Learn to build a social impact flywheel.

A flywheel takes some initial effort to start and spin up, but then it builds momentum and continues to propel your work forward with minimal effort once it’s going.
You can’t just build one big impact flywheel. You need to build a bunch of them that all work together.

Jonathan and Eric go into this in detail in our latest episode of Designing Tomorrow. If you’re feeling stuck right now, you don’t want to miss this one.

Episode Highlights

• [01:11] - Flywheel concept from Good to Great and its relevance to social impact
• [05:27] - Positive feedback loops and their application in social impact organizations
• [06:16] - Creating positive feedback loops and examples of effective stakeholder engagement
• [09:38] - Importance of showing the impact of financial contributions
• [12:05] - Providing immediate feedback for donors and participants
• [14:06] - Immediate feedback to help maintain donor and participant engagement
• [20:21] - The idea of multi-threaded value to enhance retention and momentum

Quotes

• "I think the idea and the concept of a flywheel is very alluring, right? Because it's like, okay, if we can get this flywheel built and we do all this effort at some point it starts to build its own momentum and then we can, you know, reduce the effort." - Eric Ressler [03:25]
• "One of the mistakes that we make most commonly, and I think one that if we correct it would get that positive feedback loop going, get that flywheel turning is to make this feedback more immediate." - Jonathan Hicken [14:06]

Resources:

• Article - How To Power Up Your Content Strategy When You’re Short on Time and Staff
• Article - How to Increase Supporter and Donor Action Using an Engagement Pyramid
• Article - Nonprofits, Master the 3 Pillars of Digital Engagement for Maximum Social Impact
• Article - How to Build a Next-level Content Strategy
• Good to Great - by James C. Collins
• AllBirds

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Kapitler

1. Building Social Impact Flywheels (00:00:00)

2. Effective Impact Storytelling and Multi-Threaded Value (00:14:47)