Social Innovation Forum
Last month, the Social Innovation Forum (SIF) officially celebrated the graduation of the 2020 cohort of Social Innovators. As the eight organizations complete the two-year accelerator and join SIF’s alumni community, we would like to reflect back on the experience and learnings, beginning with SIF’s own.
Check out the rest of the Progress Reports here:
The 2020 cohort is the first one that has participated in the Accelerator program since SIF developed our theory of change in 2019. During this months-long process, the SIF team worked with Julia Gittleman, a consultant focusing on program evaluation, and identified the following outcomes for the Innovators: improved communication skills, increased access to new funding resources, increased confidence as a representative of the organization, improved leadership skills, personal and professional growth, and increased understanding of how to articulate and measure social impact.
As we began using our newly developed tools to evaluate, shift, and improve programming, we saw a common theme: in addition to the outcomes, we had identified, the Innovators consistently reflected on the benefits of belonging to a cohort of other nonprofit leaders. Our team ultimately used this feedback to adjust our theory of change, adding a new outcome - having awareness of a nonprofit network to turn to for support.
After joining the Social Innovator Accelerator in January of 2020, the cohort’s experience was quickly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The eight organizations in this cohort transitioned with the SIF team to a virtual showcase format while also navigating the impact of the pandemic on their fundraising and programming. After delivering their pitches remotely at SIF’s first-ever virtual showcase, they continued their work on leadership development, organizational capacity building, and network expansion.
In early summer, SIF matched 16 leaders from these organizations with Executive Coaches to focus on their individual professional goals. Innovators were also connected with SIF’s in-kind partners for support with data analysis, fundraising, communications, human resources, and more. Additionally, SIF hosted eight separate events to highlight the social issue areas of each of the 2020 Innovators.
In past years, graduating Innovators completed Progress Reports at the conclusion of their 24 months in the Accelerator program, which SIF compiled and published. As SIF is addressing our own responsibility in shifting the power dynamics between funders and nonprofits, we decided to pilot a new approach this year and collected input from recent Innovator graduates and track partners.
We recognize that our old reporting format put a burden on Innovators to spend time creating the reports and had a fixed format that often did not allow Innovators to share the reflections they wanted to. This year, instead of requesting written reports, we scheduled a phone conversation with each graduating Innovator and asked them a series of open-ended reflection questions. Over the next several weeks, we will highlight some of the themes that emerged. Stay tuned!
