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Can the idea of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) from startup culture, be repurposed for the social impact sector? Yes it can. This idea is called MVS or Minimum Viable Strategy. And it’s a new spin on your dusty strategic plan.
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This article is a summary of Episode 28 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.
You've probably heard of MVP from the startup world — Minimum Viable Product.
The idea is an alternative to large, arduous, long, very entangled processes of doing research, then building a product, planning to market it, and releasing it and hoping that your audience actually cares about what you're building.
Instead, the MVP approach is a little bit more of an iterative prototype approach where you're prototyping something, getting that prototype in front of your audience as quickly as you possibly can, getting real world user feedback, and that helps you plan and prioritize features, understand what the actual needs and goals and pain points of your audience are, and make sure you have product market fit.
In the tech world, companies ship minimum viable products regularly. The experience with it involves hearing from customers about their reaction to these minimum viable products as they come down the pipe, sometimes working great, sometimes not working great, which is the intent. A lot of the assumption of a minimum viable product approach is that you have a lot of assumptions when you're building something new or ideating something new, and maybe the best way to test those assumptions is getting in front of real people.
The main inspiration or tie-in to the MVP is the naming approach of MVS for minimal viable strategy. Where this really comes from is two things. One is a little bit more personal and one is a little bit more reflective of the work that we do with social impact organizations.
On the personal side of things, there are a lot of ideas all the time about new things to do with running the business, working with clients, doing media work like podcasts. What we've found over the years, especially as our organization has grown and there are more and more responsibilities as founders, is that there are a lot of ideas that don't ever get to see the light of day.
Maybe that's good because a lot of ideas probably suck. But also we don't know if they suck or not if we don't ever test them out. This comes at some level from a bit of a frustration and a reflection of work where we're realizing there's this huge backlog of ideas and not executing on enough of them, and getting into a place sometimes of almost over analysis or analysis paralysis. So recently, instead of overthinking things — because it's easy to overthink things and just continue to spin and spin and spin – of developing more of a bias towards action over contemplation. And it's been working really well. We've been having a lot of fun taking this approach into our work.
This got us thinking about some of the similar issues that we see our social impact clients and leaders struggle with. As you are well aware, strategic work in the social impact space happens largely through strategic planning processes and these processes can be long and arduous. They kind of remind us a little bit of the traditional approach to building products before the MVP framework really started to take off in Silicon Valley.
What we've seen in terms of some of the downsides of strategic planning processes is that by the time they are decided, built, and put into action — if they ever are — the world has changed a lot and the strategies might not be right anymore or maybe the strategies were never right in the first place.
The MVS framework is comprised of four key steps:
This is pretty obvious. You have to understand:
In your goal setting, you need to define what you are hoping to learn. You're going into an MVS process knowing that you're going in to learn something. So define exactly what it is that you want to learn.
Rather than just trying to create one theory around how you're going to reach this goal and getting consensus around that, embody more of a design thinking, divergent approach to thinking. Do this if you're doing this on your own.
If you're doing it as a group, have everyone time box an hour or a day at the most, and come up with as many ideas and as many theories around how you might reach that goal as possible and do that in a way that is open. Don't be judgmental. The goal here is to get as many ideas as possible. So it's really about quantity over quality at this point.
Then you have a huge list you can work off of and as a group or as an individual, you can then reflect, maybe you take a day to reflect on those or a week, depending on how urgent this is for you. You go through and figure out the top three or top five theories or ideas that you bet are the most likely ones to pay off. So winnow it down and converge into the highest probable ideas that you think are going to work.
Probably the most important step of this entire framework is to act and to act swiftly and decisively. The real beauty of this is that we are not talking about years or months to get to this point of action. This approach works because of your ability to act quickly and to get real world reactions to your ideas as quickly as possible. If you don't act quickly, then you're basically just doing a half-assed strategic plan at this point. So that's not helpful either.
So act swiftly. Get your ideas into the world, test them, get them into the market, get customer feedback or client feedback or supporter feedback depending on the type of idea it is.
If you're testing those ideas, you have to have some kind of way to tell if the idea is working, if it's working to the extent that you hoped it would, to even score these different ideas amongst each other or against each other to figure out: should we continue three of these five ideas? Are none of them good? Is one obviously the best? These are all outcomes that can happen.
In your evaluation and iteration, define one of three outcomes of your experiment:
You need to define those boundaries for yourself. How do you know you're going to kill that thing? Or how do you know you're going to pour more fuel on it?
So goal setting, forming theories, acting, evaluating, and iterating based on that data. That's a pretty simple framework, but the power of it is in its simplicity and in its ability to get you into action as quickly as possible.
We don't think this approach is right for everything. Although we do think it can be used for a lot of things.
Let's talk about another Silicon Valley adage: Move fast and break things. This comes out of Zuckerberg and Facebook. That is not an appropriate culture for a lot of social impact work.
Let's just be clear — especially when we're talking about causes and issues where people's lives might literally be on the line — you don't want to move fast and break things when the things that are breaking are people's lives. And we would never suggest using this approach for something like critical support or infrastructure. But it could be used for a new communications plan or an iterative improvement to one of your programs or a new section that you want to build into your overall marketing strategy.
We want to acknowledge that an organization has to be careful about this MVS framework or applying just more broadly Silicon Valley, startup, or lean startup methodology to social impact in general or even design thinking to social impact.
When the move fast, break things mantra was introduced, the internet was a different place. Especially as early adopters of the internet and social media, we were ready. We were hungry to work with products and use products that weren't perfect, and we were ready and willing to give feedback on what we liked and what we didn't like.
It's different now, even in the tech space. You may have noticed that for all these, for your iPhone and for different software you use, there are beta programs. But they're always opt-in: do you want to be a participant in this version of our product? It's not done yet. It's still buggy. And you're basically signing up, saying you're willing to give you feedback. We think that exists for a reason because you can't just ship unfinished products to the masses anymore.
If you put an app on the App Store tomorrow that's not complete, you're going to get crushed with bad reviews and your product, your service, or your company is dead. So it needs to be ready and be valuable when you launch it.
In some cases, the same thing goes for a minimum viable strategy. You need to know if the audience you're testing this with is ready to work with an unfinished strategy. Maybe you're shopping this with stakeholders who know you really well or understand where you're trying to go, but are willing to think creatively with you and operate with this less than perfect outcome or this less than perfect product.
You really do need to be honest with yourself if you are employing the minimum viable strategy. Who is actually seeing this and are they ready for it?
Let's apply the MVS framework to a communications or a marketing application.
Let's say one of your goals is to increase engagement on your social media posts. You might start an MVS framework and identify that goal, come up with a huge variety of options around how you might do that. And one of your ideas might be that you’re going to test more polarizing hooks in your content. Or maybe not polarizing hooks, but more just enticing curiosity-driven hooks in your content.
You don’t need to tell people you're doing that in this case because — what's the downside? If a post flops, the implications are so minimal, there's no need. You're likely not going to create any bad taste in your user's mouth or your supporter's mouth by doing this. You have to right size this and determine the implications if it doesn't go well.
What if your organization decides that there's a strategy here? Let’s say you want to become content producers as part of your marketing strategy. Part of our outreach strategy is going to be producing high quality content. How do you test the production of a unique piece of content that you're distributing via email in a way that doesn't set the expectation with your audience that this is what you're doing now?
Maybe you release this piece of content to a subset of our audience who you know is willing to consume it with an open mind and give you feedback on it. They are going to validate whether or not a content production role is the right strategy for your organization as opposed to AB testing on an email campaign, which is also valuable, but it's a much smaller, more tactical, tightly scoped, low downside, that kind of thing.
Let's talk about other caveats to this framework and maybe some near enemies or traps to avoid. There’s something we can speak about from experience — shiny object syndrome.
We’ve seen a lot of founders and especially executives have this. It's common to people who get really excited by new things and new programs and new ideas — sometimes to the detriment of other really important activities and attention that time should be spent on.
This is something that has to be kept in check, and it almost sounds a little contradictory to the MVS framework because there can be this shiny object syndrome that can come into play, and then not testing a lot of shiny object ideas out.
This is something to keep in check and be careful about with this framework. When you see MVS in use and see what the potential power of it can be, you might be tempted to just start to apply it to everything. Then all of a sudden you're losing track of what you really should be focusing on — some of your core responsibilities as a leader or even as an organization.
Some potential pitfalls for social impact leaders who are considering something like this include:
Not communicating clearly enough to the whole team things like the learning outcomes or the decision-making triggers. There may be a little bit of an inability for your team to communicate what these new initiatives are to your audiences in a way that is positive and uplifting. There needs to be more communicating about the reason for this experiment.
Not evaluating well enough the team's ability to do the iterating and the capacity to actually do the iterating once they were up. If you're going to take this approach, you have to be sure that you have the team capacity to do the iterating that you've promised to do.
Step four in the MVS framework is: Evaluate and Iterate. Not just evaluate.
The first experiment is not the last. It's the first of potentially many. And this does start to become a shift in culture at some point — ideally about how you run programs and how you do strategic planning.
MVS isn’t an “instead of” strategic plan approach. This is a complimentary approach to planning. We do wonder though, if your strategic plans can be simpler, then the MVS framework can be how you action those strategic plans. Because what we've seen is that sometimes we've literally watched clients invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years of planning into strategic plans, and they don't always have the ROI.
We think sometimes the team doesn't feel energized by their strategic plan because by the time the plan's done, they're just like, “God, we're so glad the plan's done.”, and they don't have the energy to actually execute it.
We think there's plenty of people out there doing this. By the way, we think the big institutional strategic plan approach is not the only way, and not even the most common way to do this at this point. But we do think there is some synergy between broader strategic planning, quarterly yearly planning, and then using an MVS framework to action that plan or opportunistic ideas that come in outside of the plan. This happens all the time and shouldn't be just ignored.
MVS is a great tool when you don't know what you don't know when you're developing your niche or your strategy or your position. You just don't know enough to put years into creating a strategic plan. You need to go out and figure out what you don't know yet.
There is a time and a place for a traditional strategic plan. That’s a best fit when you are sure of your impact and your tactics and your team and your funding model. You're going to put the pieces in place and you're going to execute. That's a great time to go through a formal strategic planning process.
What we see when people hand us a strategic plan is that they think the plan is going to help them solve those problems. We think a plan can do that. But the scenario just described, we haven’t seen once. There's two sides to this coin. If you have a clear sense of where you're going and what your strategy is and what your tactics are, why are you going to go do a big old strategic plan?
By necessity, if you’re working towards some kind of growth or some kind of pivot, why are you doing such a big plan? Sometimes it just becomes muscle memory. Oh, the three year plan's up. Time to do the new three-year plan. In the worst cases even we've seen 10 year plans before, which is crazy to us. But there's a balance here. At Cosmic, we have a vision for where we want the organization to go. And we do think about that in different timeframes — where we'd like to be in 10 years, in five years, in three years. But we're not going to do a super-arduous, super-expensive, super-time consuming three-year plan when we know that we have shorter term goals that are also really important. We’re always trying to figure out how to reconcile all of that.
You could say this is just a lack of leadership. That’s possibly true. This could work for some people, but we've found that as soon as it starts to get so big, it needs a report. That's where it starts to collect digital dust, in our experience.
If your board is recommending another strategic plan, it might be time to implement MVS. Every social impact leader is going to have the opportunity to make a decision on that. You're going to need to do strategic planning of some kind. The question is, what kind are you going to do?
We think that the MVS framework is a really exciting tool that can energize your team and motivate your team to just do things in a more active and participatory way.
Let's go back through the four points of the MVS framework:
Step 1: Goal Setting - Define a clear end state and what you're hoping to learn
Step 2: Form Your Theories - Develop multiple rough strategies and winnow down to the top 3-5 most promising ones
Step 3: Act Swiftly and Decisively - Get your ideas out quickly to gather real-world feedback
Step 4: Evaluate and Iterate - Assess results and determine whether to kill it, scale it, or shelve it for later
That's the MVS framework - a tool to help social impact leaders move from strategic planning to meaningful action, creating the momentum you need to drive real change.
Strategic plans that sit on shelves gathering dust don’t change the world. By embracing Minimum Viable Strategy, you give your team permission to act, experiment, iterate, and adapt in real time. MVS is not just a tool — it’s a mindset. It turns your strategic plan from a static document into a living process that evolves as conditions in your issue area change.
By applying the MVS framework to a specific challenge or opportunity within your organization, you can start small and demonstrate a new path to greater impact. It's time to stop overthinking and start doing.
There’s a concept in philanthropy where you don't want to position yourself to a donor as being between the donor and the impact. You want to position yourself as a partner that brings something unique to the table, that — when combined with the donor's generosity or philanthropy — can create that impact. And it's only when you team up can that impact occur. This is something that we think about frequently in our work.
Another thing that we think is a really important exercise for being in touch with your community or customers is to start to define your own success in terms of how your community defines success for themselves.
We think you're really unlocking true value when you understand someone tells you that they're using this product or this service because it delivers them X — whether that's a tangible outcome or an emotional outcome or whatever.
Sometimes, social impact organizations are measuring success for themselves this way. And it's something we do in a different kind of way, help our clients see from that vantage point. One of the things we do is help define audience segments. And the way that we think about that is really looking at this community as a big pie and determining what makes up those slices.
And for each of those slices, one of the exercises that we go through is trying to deeply understand that in several ways:
Ultimately, we think any social impact organization that stays in touch with their customer or stays in touch with their community is setting themselves up for really important outcomes. That's the "so what" behind this discussion and why it matters that we're staying in touch with our community.
We think the biggest reason is that it deepens relationships and reduces churn of those relationships. Whether that's a philanthropic churn, or a participation churn, or a buyer churn, how much we're in touch with community members has a profound impact on keeping people engaged with an organization for a longer period of time.
We'd also say that of course, it's helping develop deeper, more meaningful relationships. It could be increasing revenues, and ultimately it's going to help you build a better product or service.
In the business world, there's this concept around market feedback. You have these ideas, you're building a product or a service or you're selling something.
How does the market actually respond to how you are positioning yourself and how you're building a product and how that product is received? And that's something that we think should be translated to the social impact space. The difference is that you're not always selling a product. If you're a social enterprise, you might be, and if you're a nonprofit, you might be too.
But for most nonprofits, let's just say it’s your value. So let's call it your value feedback. How does the market actually respond to the value that you are attempting to create through your impact and through other approaches as well?
Listening and being responsive to that feedback is absolutely critical to doing your work well. And sometimes social impact leaders get so focused that we have blinders around this is our mission. This is our vision. We're on track to do that.
But sometimes, we're focusing so much on our mission and vision, that we lose sight of how everyone’s feeling about how that's going — especially the people that we care about. It can be easy to lose sight of that. Pay attention to signals that you're losing touch with your community and how you might do better at staying in touch. Because it will ultimately improve your impact and your ability to move your mission forward.
So if you're just sending out surveys, or you're just throwing some testimonials from customers up in an email campaign here, or they are on the walls in your office, you're probably not doing the right work to stay in touch. But the good news is getting in touch with your community can start today in very simple ways.
Staying in touch with your community isn't a "nice-to-have" — it's an essential part of driving impact. You have the opportunity to drive your mission forward by doing something radically simple: listening deeply and responding authentically to your community.
No consultant, survey, or complex strategy can replace the insights you'll gain from sitting across from someone whose life your work touches and simply asking, "How are things really going?" These conversations aren't just data collection — they're the lifeblood of authentic impact. When you prioritize staying connected to your community, you're tapping into a renewable source of innovation and motivation that will fuel your mission for years to come.
Every conversation you have, every genuine question you ask, and every moment you spend truly listening creates ripples that extend far beyond what you can see. The power to create deeper, more meaningful change is in your hands — and it starts simple — with a single conversation.
Let’s look at how this approach translates to social impact work. This idea is called MVS or Minimum Viable Strategy.
If your goal is too vague, then this will never work for an MVS framework.
You have to embody and plan for this being an iterative process.
So can we find a more nimble way to do strategic planning?
Beyond that, there's no coherence between this natural organic discussion and relationships that should be built.
If you can start to measure your own organization's success by how your community defines success for themselves, you've reached the mountaintop of being in touch with your community.
The true test of your success is market feedback.
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