Experience Innovation

As people interact with your organization, they have experiences. These can run from your service or product delivery to communications. We’re going to discuss a couple of experience types and break the first one down even further. Thinking through experiences intentionally can help find innovative methods for improving how they work for a particular target audience.

Acquisition and Retention

Every organization is trying to acquire and retain others in some manner. While this is often discussed more in the for profit, commercial space, this is also true for the mission-driven sector as well. Let’s look at a few  –

• ‘Customers’ – You may not call them customers, but there are people you serve. How do they know about your services or products? How do you interact with them when they seek you out and how do you deliver to them? What follow-up do you have with them?
• Talent/Staff – Much like those you serve, you also hire talent to help in this delivery. How do you let them know you want them? What is your hiring process like? What does their experience look like as they work on your mission?
• Volunteers – The same is true for volunteers you may get. What motivates them to devote time on your behalf? What does their experience look like as they assist you? What follow-up do you have with them when their engagement is completed?
• Donors/Sponsors – Many mission-driven organizations get their financial support from Donors or Sponsors. What does the journey for them look like from learning that you exist to committing to help you? What does plans to retain their support look like? How do you follow-up with them regardless of whether they continue support or not?
• Suppliers – And the vendors that provide services to you also have experiences. What do you do to make this a positive experience? How do you select between different vendors? Would they recommend others to provide you services? How do you follow-up with them?

As you go through the above, you may think of other ways to further segment them or even other categories of experiences.

Digital Experiences (aka User Experiences)

Many organizations are creating interactions with others online, either as part of the experiences above (e.g. volunteer sign-up) or as separate and distinct experiences (e.g. finding and downloading your annual statement). Innovating in this space is more than simply just ‘going digital’.

What will you create in this environment that helps meet the needs of the particular audience you are trying to reach?

One large nonprofit determined to apply augmented reality to the museum experience they ran to share their knowledge and assets with the public. Since much of their support for the research and educational nature of their mission was funded by sales of physical and digital materials, they would link to books, videos, or other media that people could learn more. In this manner their combined physical and digital experience could inspire those more interested to purchase materials and support their work.

Productization

Productization is a method of transforming services that are delivered into packaged products that can be delivered. The book Productize by Eisha Tierney Armstrong goes through this approach in detail. To summarize you have four stages:

1. Custom services you provide.
2. A standard, productized service that you develop from one or more custom services; these could still deliver a custom outcome but are intended to be provided in a standard manner.
3. One or more products based on the productized services. The standardization allows greater ability to make this something that can be purchased. Many ‘toolkits’ are exactly this kind of productization.
4. And lastly products delivered on a subscription service. 

As you can probably imagine, each one is more scalable than the next. At Innovaya, we have taken what some would provide as custom services and packaged them into standard packages to help our customers.

Linking Innovations Together

While each type of innovation that we have covered in these three posts could be done independently, real innovation starts occurring when you link across these. Here’s a simple example: you decide that assembly cells is how you will approach your process of building disaster kits for floods; you do this as a pull process as well as depending on where they occur certain items may be different. You determine that impacts several organizational structures, predominantly the actual teams that assemble the kits, but also the group that procures the items for the kit. The assembly is done by volunteers, so there are things you change to get new volunteers in place on these teams quickly. You also decide to change your approach to source your suppliers so that the needed materials are delivered to you for assembly.

When linking these together, these become part of your DNA and the more this differentiates you from other organizations trying to accomplish similar missions, the more this can make you more resilient to displacement, provided you tested that this set of linked approaches was the most desirable, feasible, and viable to your mission.

What Matters: Context

If you are nodding your head after reading all of these types of innovations and thinking some of these examples provide a good formula for your organization, remember, it is your context that matters. We’ll simply define context here as your current environment, organizational climate, and mission all rolled together. To determine what innovations will work requires testing them. Only the obvious continuous improvements are likely to succeed without some amount of testing. For example, rolling out something that dramatically changes your staff’s experience could be detrimental even if it appears to be something that simply improve performance. Also, be careful of misattributing co-creation with a subset of who will adopting the innovation with the entire number of people that will be adopting it. The last thing you want to do is alienate a large number of people with something they don’t want. Learning how to create tests that you can use to validate ideas will save you many a headache.

How to Come Up With These

So how do you come up with innovations in these types? Essentially you want to co-create and then co-test them. The co-creation portion can utilize exercises with a representative set of stakeholders. Using exercises such as the Eco-cycle Planning from Liberating Structures, Remember the Future or Give Them a Hot Tub from Innovation Games, or collaboratively developing an Impact Map (developed by Gojko Adzic) can help in understanding what possibilities can be done. You can also start with our Mission-Driven Organization Canvas looking across the various parts of it for ideas to change.

Once you have some ideas, you can prioritize these around what sounds like an approach to a solution and begin testing them using Lean Startup techniques. Keep the co-creation team together and track the testing using a Validation Board so you can make informed decisions on when your solution, target audience (customer), or even the problem at hand may change. Your team may determine that the idea and any possible offshoots of it has no real chance of delivering a desirable solution. Wouldn’t it be great to figure that out before you invested too much time and money building a solution?

We hope this series has given you some insights to approaching innovation within your organization. Let us know how it helped!