How to Get Your Social Impact Flywheel Turning

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 07. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.
 

One of our all time favorite business books is titled Good to Great by Jim Collins. In the book, he goes over a number of concepts that differentiate a business that is destined to succeed versus one that's destined to fail.

One of our favorite concepts in the book is the idea of a flywheel. Now a flywheel in the real world — as you can imagine — is like a merry-go-round at a playground. The ones where the kids all grab on to it, one of the parents spin it as fast as they can, and the kids hold on tight. If you've ever spun one of those things, you know that it takes a lot of effort initially to get that thing moving, but once it's moving, it just takes these regular, consistent soft taps to keep that wheel spinning.

In Good to Great, Collins talks about how businesses need to adopt a similar mindset of consistent effort, gradual momentum and simple concepts over a long period of time. 

Build. That. Flywheel.

The same thing can exist in the social impact space. But how do we get there? How do we get these flywheels turning for the social impact sector?

Push Hard to Get Going

The concept of a flywheel is very alluring. Because 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 reduce the effort. It won't be such a big push each time. We're just doing these small pushes. And that can be true.

What is the difference between social impact organizations that thrive and those that fail to get traction and can't make a meaningful impact? A lot of the latter organizations just never got to the point where that flywheel was spinning enough. They didn't ever get through the really hard parts of being an early stage organization and grow to become a slightly later stage organization, reaching that threshold where there's a certain amount of momentum. 

If you look at some of the largest companies in the world, when they get to a certain size as an organization, they have more resiliency. They can take bigger bets and fail and pick themselves back up more easily. You see this all the time in tech companies where they're pivoting and their pivots go wrong and they pivot again. The sheer natural force of them keeps them afloat and keeps them moving.

What we’ve seen building Cosmic, helping early stage organizations grow, and working with organizations that have a huge legacy — some of our clients have been around for 150 years — there is an ability to build this flywheel.

This is a real thing. This is not a mythological false promise. But if you think about it like, “If we just build the flywheel, then everything will be easy.” This is also not true. It becomes an impossible thing to chase. 

The fundamental concept of this flywheel is once you get this thing spinning, it's just small efforts that keep it spinning. It's the daily activities that keep it spinning. 

But how do you get to that place to begin with?

Build Positive Feedback Loops

One way to get it going is by creating positive feedback loops where one stakeholder is creating a positive effect for another stakeholder group and vice versa. So it becomes the audience itself that is essentially keeping this flywheel turning.

For example, as a social impact leader, when you talk about donors seeing the impact of their investment, you want to provide a positive feedback loop for donors, members, or customers, so that they're getting that positive reinforcement — what they're doing means something and they may want to do it again. 

From a branding and marketing standpoint, this is also true. There can be some positive feedback loops there. It's almost like there's these mini-flywheels that are powering the larger flywheel. If we take the example of really elevating your branding and marketing work, there's that initial inertia of a rebrand or a big website overhaul, or rethinking your brand strategy and your social strategy. 

Overcoming that initial inertia is hard. It's difficult work. It takes a lot of input and deep thought. And then when you're done, you're not done. But now you're nurturing the foundation that you've built. You're realizing the impact of that early investment that you've made. We've definitely seen it on the branding and marketing side. 

Infuse the Positive Feedback Loop into Your Internal Culture

Reflecting on what we've experienced observing hundreds of different social impact organizations running their teams, is that there's like an internal team culture that has its own positive feedback loop. When done well — where core values are driving the work — there's clear delineation of responsibility and a shared clarity of purpose. And when these cultural strategic elements are built properly, that can become a positive feedback loop, getting the right people in the right seats, doing good work, seeing impact, and being proud of that. 

Being energized and not burnt out gives your organization resiliency to be able to afford to pay people what they're worth. You can give them a living wage and not fall into the scarcity trap of the nonprofit sector — underpaying people and maybe even, frankly, exploiting them intentionally or unintentionally. This powers the flywheel from inside your organization.

Build Internal Flywheels to Power the Greater Effort

Different organizations could come up with these mini-flywheels or small positive feedback loops that are all pushing the overall momentum of the organization in a positive direction.

For example, if your organization has a physical space that the public comes through, to what degree do you show visitors the impact of the admission ticket that they just bought? What impact is that $12 having on the community where the center exists? Do they care? And if you started demonstrating that more, would that contribute to helping your flywheel start to turn? Can you bridge the commerciality and impact divide where anytime there's a financial transaction, you’re demonstrating the impact of that transaction in the moment.

Involve Your Community

But on the opposite side of that, how do you show the people that are experiencing the impact most intimately the contributions of the community that made the impact for them possible? In what other ways can you bridge the commerciality and impact divide to create a positive feedback loop that might get your flywheel spinning?

Doing a good job connecting donations or volunteer work or price of admission to the impact is one of the most fundamental best practices of social impact organizations. But we’ve seen so many examples where this isn’t done well. And let’s not put the blame on social impact leaders or organizations because it's not easy to do well. But there's often a gap between expecting our audiences and our community to connect the dots on their own. And no one's doing that.

No one is thinking about how their price of admission is going to help cover a living wage for an employee at a public-facing nonprofit. They're there for their own personal reasons. And it's not to say that people don't care about supporting organizations. Sometimes people will make those more subconscious choices where they're like, you know what, this feels kind of expensive, but I know it's going to a good cause. Or, I feel compelled to donate because I believe in the work that they're doing, and I don't need any numbers to back that up. That is also true. 

Some of the best examples of social impact marketing and social impact communications do a really good job of telling interesting, compelling stories about how individual personal contributions have led to meaningful, measurable impact.

Include Your Beneficiaries

In the social impact sector, we talk about the transactors understanding the impact of their transaction, but do we show the impactees where that impact came from? And does that matter to getting the flywheel spinning?

It's a delicate balance because how do you do that in a way that doesn't get into a savior syndrome? Where we're coming in to save you because you are underserved or you can't do this on your own. Obviously, this is very context dependent. Are you serving an underserved population? That terminology feels kind of icky to use. But this is a conversation that is being broadly held in the space. 

Let's put a hypothetical together. If you connected donors to the people that their donation ultimately helped as a way to connect the community — not to make donors feel good about themselves or not to make the people who have been helped feel like they owe something to the donors — in a respectful, ethical way, then it could be a really powerful way to build community around different stakeholders within your organization. It's a tricky one. But in its best version, it really could get that flywheel spinning.

Accelerate Your Impact Reporting

It's not a surprise that we need to demonstrate our impact to the people who support us. But one of the mistakes that are made most commonly — and if we correct it would get that positive feedback loop going, that flywheel turning — is to make this feedback more immediate. Particularly in the world we live in, we need to show these impacts almost instantly at the moment the transactions are made. And that's easier said than done. 

In the nonprofit world, we are accustomed to annual reports and at best, a quarterly directors update. And those are great. There's a lot of value in going through that process. But some of your donors may wait an entire year before they're hearing the impact of their contribution in any meaningful way. So one important thing to get that flywheel turning is the immediacy of the feedback, especially towards the transactor.

Consider the Power of Immediacy in the Attention Economy

It’s very surprising to see the discrepancy between some organizations and others around their impact storytelling. We’re not going to name any names but we’ve been very surprised just by how lackluster the storytelling in the connection to impact is. In some cases a donation is followed, two weeks later, by another appeal for further donation and with no impact storytelling in between.

On the flip side, some of the best organizations are not afraid to tell stories immediately. It’s like a Thank You for your contribution. Because of people like you and your support, we're able to help people like this achieve these outcomes. And the donor gets that message immediately. And that reinforcement makes a donor think that their donation was a good choice. They’re supporting an organization that is making a meaningful difference. They're going to make sure a donor knows that. It’s important in holding that donor’s attention.

That feedback isn’t the only return on your investment as a donor or a supporter, but it's an important one. You want to know that your donation didn't just go into some random bucket, even if it did go into, let's say, an overhead bucket.

And we’re not suggesting that we need to go to the 100% program work funded line of messaging. Because that’s a bad long-term strategy for the sector. But a donor wants to know that when they dedicate time, energy, or money into supporting an organization that it’s doing something. This is so basic, but so many organizations don't get this part right. Or if they are getting it right, there's always room for improvement. 

Flywheels for Social Enterprises

Now, on the social enterprise side — if we think about a customer, there's a couple different ways that you get a return on your investment and a positive feedback loop. Let's take an example of supporting an ethical shoe company — Allbirds. They're one of our favorite social enterprises. Why support Allbirds? Because they make shoes that are comfortable. They make shoes that last a long time. They make shoes that are built out of sustainable materials. And they are authentically inventing better ways to make sustainable shoes that do not add to the landfill and do not have a negative impact on our climate.

Allbirds does a really good job of telling customers how they are moving that mission forward all the time. And yes, they send a lot of sales emails and marketing emails, too, because they're a social enterprise. They need to sell products because that's what powers their mission. But they do that in such a good, immediate way, and they reinforce the belief that customers should feel good about buying these shoes not just because they're comfortable and because they work well, that's kind of a prerequisite.

If their shoes were sustainable but fell apart right away, are they even sustainable at that point? But I know through their storytelling — their constant positive reinforcement — that I've made a good choice by supporting this brand. So I just think there's so many of these little micro-feedback cycles that if you think about how to create these, they add up to be greater than the sum of their parts.

As soon as you buy a pair of shoes from Allbirds, you have an email validating the impact you've made in your inbox. And that's the power of immediacy we’ve talked about before. Speed and immediacy is one of the ways that the social impact sector is falling behind — that instant feedback towards an action that someone's taken, whether that's a financial transaction or otherwise.

Start Simple and Use Available Tools

Getting your flywheel going and gaining momentum doesn't need to be super sophisticated. Sending a thank you email after receiving a donation, or even just a confirmation email, is the lowest bar to hit. You can get more sophisticated than that, but even just a simple: ‘because of people like you, we are able to achieve results like this’ message should be doable. If you can't do that, you have much bigger problems. Are you even making an impact now? Can you get more sophisticated than that and do some calculations around something like: Every dollar you donate leads to this exact kind of impact? People love that. That really super tangible, immediate understanding is great.

There's a little bit more work to get that going and it takes a little bit more historical data to be able to tell those kinds of stories — to include that kind of statistical data accurately and authentically. But these are the kind of ideas that you should be exploring. And I think the idea of immediacy is one that we under index in the social impact space.

And, you're probably leading to donor churn and customer churn if your donors or customers have to wait a year for the annual report to come out to know that their purchase or donation made a meaningful impact. That is probably too long.

Build Multi-thread Relationships

Another idea about getting your flywheel spinning and keeping it spinning is eliminating single threaded value. What does that mean? Someone that's interacting with your organization may be receiving multiple points of value from you at any given time. And people in their immediate circles might be receiving value as well. A single threaded value situation is one where there's a single individual that gets one kind of value from your organization. Nobody else in their immediate circle is getting value. It's just them. And there's one way they're getting value that is a recipe for churn.

If that one thread is snapped, you're going to lose that individual and they're no longer going to be contributing to the momentum of your flywheel. But if you think about a multi-threaded value situation where, for example, parents and their kids are coming in and they're both getting value at the same time in the same place. That's a dual threaded value scenario. If one gets snapped, it makes it harder to retain the participation of that family, but it's not impossible to get them back. So think about whether or not the people interacting with your organization are connected by a single thread or multiple threads.

This is about deepening relationships with your community of supporters. People will come in with initial brand touchpoints and start to build a relationship. But if you do a good job as a social impact organization, that relationship will deepen and nurture over time. They may have come in initially because they support your mission and feel compelled and generous and they want to do a one time donation. But then they start to see, “Wow, this organization is really making an impact, making a difference. They're credible. I feel good about supporting them. You know what? I'm going to become a monthly donor or I'm going to join the Giving Circle and give a bigger amount if I can afford to.”

That's maybe what began for them. But as they deepen their relationship with your organization, they have a sense of identity associated with your brand and a sense of community associated with your brand and your organization. And that’s not just another thread, but a stronger thread — a thread of pure altruism and generosity. 

Social impact leaders should be thinking about how they can create multiple threads of connection, support, and relationship with their different stakeholders. Because, as the world changes and as situations change, if you're relying on just one thread and it could snap, then you start to churn and lose people.

Develop a Plan for Creating Multiple Connections with Your Donors 

We talk about deepening relationships in the sector a lot. But what does that really mean? What does it mean to build a deeper relationship, offering different kinds of value, offering value to other people in your immediate world and their families, friends, colleagues, or whomever? How do you make sure that for every individual you engage with, you have a plan, or a journey set out to make sure that they're finding multiple points of value in interacting with you?

That could be transactional. It could be emotional, it can be a number of different things. But as soon as you have multiple threads to an individual, the more likely that they are to stick with you for the long haul. This is another way of getting a flywheel spinning.

Create Value

We talk a lot with our clients about value creation. The core question boils down to: How do we create value as organizations?

Often the thinking goes intuitively to the impact that’s being created. And of course that should be front and center in a social impact leader’s thinking. But there are a lot of other ways you can create value as an organization that might not feel as intuitive. We recommend that social impact leaders think about how they can create value and how the organization they lead is uniquely positioned to create value for different stakeholders. That can help guide and drive some of the decision making on where you invest your time and energy when building and maintaining your flywheel.

Get Started with a Holistic Approach

So, how do you actually get a flywheel spinning? The concept from Good to Great is based on consistent effort and gradual momentum over a long period of time. It's a strategy that a lot of social impact organizations can execute and many already do.

How that looks differs from organization to organization. One of the most important things that we do for our clients is to help them get the flywheel spinning and then work with them over time to keep it going and to add momentum. We typically do this as part of a larger rebrand, messaging, and visual identity update. This allows us to find out how best to get the flywheel moving and how to create a strategy for turning the flywheel into a generator for awareness, fundraising, and moving your mission forward faster.

It takes effort to get it all going. And you have to be sure you have a plan to keep it spinning over time before you get going. But going back to the merry-go-round metaphor from earlier, once you get it going and maintain it, kids in your ecosystem — aka supporters, funders, community members, and advocates — are going to want to join the ride.