Funding for Lean Impact by Christie George

@christiegeorge

We Can Do BetterImproving the Funding of #LeanImpact

I was raised with one very clear message: if you can do better, you should.

There are huge opportunities for Lean Startup to be applied to the social sector.

It’s already happening ...

But ...there a bunch of challenges that we don’t talk about.

When we fail, we fail real people.

Social change takes a long time.

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Identifying the ‘customer’ is complicated.

Who pays for social change?

Funders have a hard time taking risks.

We need to change the way that we fund people to solve big problems.

Encourage experimentation and incentivize risk, in a way that doesn’t penalize social innovators when things don’t go as planned.(things never go as planned)

Funding innovations

Rapidly Deploy Seed Funding

Innovation Fund

Knight Foundation Prototype Fund

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Create a culture where the truth is incentivized.

Worst Grant Contest for Program Officers

Share information obsessively.

Complement Crowdfunding

$20k match

Most impact funding is low risk.

Traditional Funding

Risk Funding

What if we could convince 10 foundations to put $1m each into their own ‘risk’ funds?

@christiegeorge

Let’s Do Better

Thank You