Giving Compass' Take:

• A survey by Bridgespan reports that a high percentage of the top nonprofits believe that they should change their practices, but only a small percentage believe they have the capacity to do so. 

• What are the steps nonprofit management leaders can take to adjust their practices using an incremental system? 

• Read about how nonprofits can start to embrace more innovative thinking. 

Nonprofits are suffering from what’s been dubbed an “innovation-aspiration” problem: While 80% of the top 145 nonprofit leaders say the sector needs to change practices in order to make greater societal gains, only 40% believe they have the capacity to do that, according to a survey by Bridgespan, a nonprofit consultancy, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The results of that survey appear a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review report entitled “Is Your Nonprofit Built For Sustained Innovation?” The answer to the question posed in the headline, of course, is “obviously not” for most organizations. “This gap worries us because most respondents say that if they don’t come up with fresh solutions to the sector’s myriad challenges… they won’t achieve the large-scale impact they seek,” writes Nidhi Sahni, a Bridgespan partner and co-author in a memo accompanying the report’s release. Many cash-strapped groups are trapped in a cycle of business as usual, which amounts to plodding gains instead of the large (and ultimately cost-efficient) impacts necessary to close educational, nutritional, or health care gaps.

For groups that still need help diagnosing how best to get ahead, Bridgespan and Rockefeller have created an Innovation Capacity Diagnostic For Nonprofits. It’s another survey to grade exactly how innovative an organization may be currently, and what it might do next to move forward faster.

Read the full article about nonprofit innovation by Ben Paynter at FastCompany