Reprps is a publication about accelerating mission expertise in purpose-driven organizations.
The way Reprps approaches this topic is two fold: it is interested in a) a particular model of nonprofit expertise and b) methods to accelerate the acquisition of that expertise. Reprps draws from the best impact research, but is fundamentally interested in what works, which means the bar for truth in this site is often practice.
You may read an overview of these two topics below:
Purpose-Driven Leadership→ Reprps’s approach to nonprofit expertise is built on an extracted mental model of mission-driven leadership. Read on to learn what that means.
Impact Operations→ Articles related to running your nonprofit better. This broadly covers org design, better management, operational rigor, becoming data-driven and related topics.
Community Engagement→ Articles related to stakeholder strategy, understanding your beneficiaries, and creating meaningful partnerships.
Sustainable Funding→ Articles related to funding models, cash flow sustainability, impact metrics and other financial essentials.
Mission Acceleration→ Reprps’s approach to mission acceleration is to look at the best research methods known to us today, and then to test these methods through practice.
You may also read some general information about the blog’s philosophy here.
What follows are some of Reprps’s best ideas.
Purpose Moats
My main approach to social impact careers is to identify a purpose moat, and then use that as a first position from which to build out the rest of one’s mission-driven career.
Purpose Moats 101 — A brief primer of nearly everything I’ve written on purpose moats.
A Personal History of the Purpose Moat — How I got so obsessed with mission-driven careers.
Do a Sector Impact Audit — What to do when your moat is under threat.
The Parable of the Nonprofit Promotion and the Mission
All That is Rare and Valuable — What non skills-based purpose moats look like.
A Fourth Purpose Moat Pattern — Skills that don’t normally appear in the same change-maker.
Social Impact Careers
Useful mental tools for your nonprofit career.
Compensation: How Does Purpose Affect Retention? — An excerpt from my book on staff retention in nonprofits.
Desire for Impact is Not a Career Limiting Belief
What’s Your Impact Preference? — Most careers last 40 years. The interesting bits tend to happen in the last two decades. Adjust expectations accordingly.
You Can’t Ignore Funding Models In Your Social Impact Career
Using Funding Models to Evaluate Nonprofits
Using Authentic Questions to Achieve Your Mission Goals — How to ask questions to potential employers so that they can’t misrepresent their impact.
Contra ‘Passion is Overrated’ — Maybe passion counts for something in social change.
What Muhammad Yunus Saw — Some careers can be made on the back on a single, powerful idea.
Only The Socially Conscious Survive — A summary of a legendary book from a nonprofit pioneer.
Impact Thinking
A recurring theme in the blog is how to get more effective at creating change. Often that goes beyond classical notions of nonprofit management.
Beware What Sounds Impactful — Social sector writers optimize for attention, not impact.
Reality Without Impact Frameworks — Don’t let frameworks blinker your thinking.
Seek Solutions at the Right Level of Community — We think we’re smart when we look at global trends. We often are not.
The Base Rate is a Hell of a Thing — Non-obvious implications of base rate thinking for nonprofits.
How First Principles Thinking Fails, is exactly what it says on the tin, and the follow-up is a post that went viral: The Games People Play With Grant Money.
The Four Theories of Truth as a Method for Critical Impact Thinking
‘Strong Missions, Weakly Held’ Doesn’t Work That Well
Yunus’s Two Track Analysis — Look at what’s rational, and then look at how psychology might distort those incentives in social programs.
The Purpose Sequence [Series] — A series on a book that changed my life in the social sector.
Optimize For Social Usefulness — An early articulation of learning what is most useful from nonprofit experiences.
Systems Change Models Are Mostly a Fad
You’ve probably heard of systems change models. I investigated them over a period of five years, and didn’t find them particularly useful. I’ve mostly concluded that they are a fad — a way of saying ‘framework’ without actually using the word ‘framework’.
The Systems Model Fallacy
A Framework for Putting Systems Models to Practice [Series] — originally published in the Social Impact Learning Community, this series serves as constructive criticism of the whole systems models approach.
The Systems Model FAQ — A summary of everything I’ve ever written about systems models; read this if you don’t have the time to go through the full series.
Navigating Uncertainty in Social Sectors
At the start of the 2020 pandemic I realized that forecasting the near future was too difficult, and began investigating the idea of fast adaptation under uncertainty for nonprofits. These are the results of that investigation.
This is What Sector Uncertainty Feels Like
Much Ado About the Adaptive Cycle and the follow up: Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Social Sensemaking
There is No Normal in Social Change — There is only what is happening now.
The Five Sources of Nonprofit Uncertainty
To be read in order: A Narrative About Social Enterprise, What I Learnt from Social Complexity, and Against Single Narratives in Social Innovation.
Impact Measurement
A comprehensive summary of The Social Impact Measurement Project, and what it tells us about our ability to predict social outcomes.
The Impact Forecasting Series [Series] — Everything we know about the limits of nonprofit impact prediction.
Impact Measurement in the Time of the Coronavirus
Reduce Noise, Not Cognitive Biases in Program Design — An interesting result that falls out of impact evaluation is that cognitive bias reduction isn’t as effective as noise reduction. Here’s what that means, along with same caveats.
How To Reduce Decision Noise in Nonprofit Leadership — A handful of methods to tamp down on decision noise.
Learning for Change
It’s very difficult to advance in your social impact career if you do not get good at getting good.
The Tacit Knowledge Series [Series] — Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be described by words alone. The dirty secret of deliberate practice is that you can’t do it in a field with little pedagogical development — which means that you can’t do it for things like nonprofit management and program strategy and community engagement … basically, most of the skills that matter in our social impact careers. So what do you do? You look for techniques to help you learn what’s already in other people’s heads. This is a series about that.
The Problems with Deliberate Practice in Nonprofits, to be read together with my summary of Peak (K. Anders Ericsson’s 2016 book on DP).
To Create Impact, Go After the Metagame — The metagame — where the experts play — is probably where the frontier is; use that as a map of the social change domain.
Get Numb Before You Get Good at Social Change —Don’t bother getting good until you’ve gotten over the fear of starting.
Action Produces Social Information — Writing this blog post changed my life.
Practice as the Bar for Impact Truth — The rigor of this entire blog may be captured in a single sentence: use practice as the bar for truth. Here are some implications.
Mission Expertise is Just Pattern Matching
Everything You Need To Know About Social Impact Memory Retention
How I Do Nonprofit Experiments — Some notes from a few years of experimentation.
Paying Attention to Stories for Mission Extraction — Why it’s a good idea to ask more experienced change-makers for stories, as a way to get to their skills.
The Expertise of Evaluating Social Impact
A Map of Mission Research for the Purpose-Minded
Tacit Skill in Complex Social Domains and the follow-ups: A Loose Impact Feedback Loop, and Hold The Lessons of Social History Loosely
On Experiential Learning
I gave experiential learning a shot, but ultimately concluded that deliberate practice was better for domains with good pedagogical development, and pursuing tacit knowledge (using naturalistic decision-making methods) was better for domains without. You may follow this investigation here:
Community Sensing and Experiential Learning as a Path to Mission Expertise Putting Experiential Learning to Nonprofit Practice An Update on Experiential Exposure as Learning Technique
Mission Expertise
In the late 2000s, Naturalistic Decision Making researcher Lia DiBello started studying the expertise of social impact leaders. She found something remarkable: every great nonprofit leader shares a common mental model of mission work. The mental model captures a fundamental set of principles in the domain, is stable across sectors and organizations, and seems resistant to change. This is a series of posts about her work.
Expertise in Nonprofits [series] — We start with the triad mental model of mission work, and then look at cognitive agility, both major contributors to the expertise of social change.
Every Great Nonprofit Leader Has the Same Mental Model of Social Impact — A free preview that outlines the triad mental model of mission expertise.
Lia DiBello on the Mental Model of Nonprofit Expertise — Podcast interview with Lia.
Better Nonprofit Thinking
An undercurrent that runs through my writing is my desire to get a deeper understanding of social impact. This was motivated by my experiences as a nonprofit operator, where I didn’t understand some of the things I saw.
The Global Changemaker Paradox [Series] — I helped build a nonprofit from 0 to ~$4.5 million dollars in annual funding from the end of 2014 to the end of 2017, and in the process dealt with a lot of traditional social entrepreneurs. They were savvy, surprisingly innovative, and mostly grassroots-oriented. This is a series of posts that attempts to make sense of the changemakers I dealt with.
The Social Enterprise Model — It turns out you can evaluate a social enterprise based on the structure of the organization itself.
Good Synthesis is the Start of Good Social Sensemaking — This is ostensibly about adaptation in the face of uncertainty, but also contains an explanation of process power as a competitive advantage for nonprofits.
Breaking Out of the NGO Loop, a Story
Don’t Take Generic Impact Advice from Donors
Program Development as Iterated Empathy — What we can learn from Partners in Health’s community-centered program development process, and what that means when compared to traditional models. Follow up: Impact Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Empathy
Mission Sustainability is King — Why sustainable impact is the metric traditional social entrepreneurs intuitively focus on. May be read in combination with The Games People Play With Grant Money.
What the Social Sector Leader Wants You To Know — A summary of a mission principles book.
A Land & Expand Reading Program for Nonprofit Development — A post that works at two levels: gives you a reading program for nonprofit development, and teaches you to construct a reading program + pick tree vs branch books, from scratch.
Impact Arbitrage — The concept that underpins both purpose moats and mission moats.
Emotional Sustainability
The central thesis is that for social change workers, emotional sustainability is a superpower. You can’t separate what needs to be done from how you feel about it. Ultimately, this means that you need to pay attention to your emotions in order to be effective.
Mission Enthusiasm Half-Life — Over the long term, enthusiasm for most social programs fade with time.
In an Age of Purpose Work, Emotional Regulation is a Superpower
Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Mission-Directed Work
A User Review of the Social Impact Procrastination Equation
Knowing The Mission Dip Exists is a Heck of an Advantage
A Nuanced Take on Preventing Nonprofit Burnout
Research for Impact
The best way to learn is through experience. The next best way to learn is through other people’s experiences. Therefore: read books.
The Three Kinds of Social Impact Book — A useful categorization scheme for nonprofit books, and how to read them.
The Land and Expand Strategy for Reading About Social Change — How to read difficult topics when you don’t have that much time.
Follow Your Social Purpose — How to do what I do when writing this blog.
Every Actionable Nonprofit Book is Actually Two Books Inside
In Defence of Reading Goals for Change-makers — It’s trendy now to dunk on reading goals. Here’s why they aren’t a bad idea.
Reading Quickly is Reading a Lot About Social Impact — The best way to read faster is to read everything you can get your hands on in a single topic.
The Ultimate Guide to Reading a Book a Week For Your Nonprofit Career — Everything I know on how to read well.
Social Brand Building
Is social brand a universally useful thing?
Social Brand as Moat, Social Brand as Soft Landing
The Gap Between Social Reputation and Mission Brand — What Grameen Bank’s story tells us about the gap between reputation and social brand.
Obviously Impactful — A summary of an incredible book on nonprofit positioning.
Mission Networking and Purpose