Kathleen Kelly Janus
Social Startup Success is the playbook that I wish I had when I co-founded Spark, a small nonprofit in San Francisco that engages millennials to support gender equality. When we founded Spark we had a ton of buzz, lines around the block for our events, and our revenue was doubling monthly. Just as we got off the ground, we hit a wall at $500,000 in revenue. We knew that we were having an impact on our members and wanted to grow the organization, but we couldn’t raise the revenue we needed to expand. Wearing my research cap at Stanford, I started to study nonprofit scale, and I realized that we were not alone. The funding wall is real: in fact two-thirds of nonprofits in the U.S. are $500K in revenue in below. I became really curious, who are these organizations all around us that were breaking through that wall and why were they more successful? Over the past five years I have surveyed hundreds of top-performing organizations, traveling the world to meet with one hundred social entrepreneurs, their staff, funders and board members trying to figure out the secret to scale. Social Startup Success outlines the five strategies that set these organizations apart – testing ideas, measuring impact, funding experimentation, leading collectively and storytelling purposefully. I’m excited to share these findings with the world so that other nonprofits can learn from the best of breed organizations to launch their own social startup success.
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