Use this essential tool before launching your own nonprofit

Tivoni Devor’s “Getting Good Done” column focuses on new models of enacting impact.

Before you go about starting your own nonprofit, it’s important that you fill out a nonprofit ecosystem blueprint first.

So, what the heck is a nonprofit ecosystem blueprint?

It’s a nonprofit variation of a business model canvas, which is a design science approach to forming a business model. The business model canvas and its variations are used in the for-profit sector all the time to quickly prototype business models.

If you can define a tangible outcome, you can reverse-engineer it down to the base elements that made that outcome possible. The nonprofit ecosystem blueprint helps you break down your ecosystem to manageable pieces that you can begin to assemble.

Saying that you want to do all these great things is, well, great, but no one is going to simply fund your idealism. You have to have a plan. You have to design a solution that makes sense, can be sustainable and actually solves the problem.

To learn how to go from intentions to implementation, check out this Prezi. (You might want to make it full-screen.)

(Psst — here’s the worksheet in PDF form!)