KaBOOM! Goes Social

Katherine Fulton and Heather McLeod Grant of the Monitor Institute have written a fantastic case study about an extraordinary organization, Kaboom!, and its efforts to scale its programs.

Darrell Hammond started KaBOOM! in 1996 with $20,000. Today KaBOOM! has 81 employees and an annual budget of close to $20 million. After steady growth for years, Darrell and his team were frustrated that they really hadn’t scaled their efforts as much as they hoped.

They began to reconsider the barriers to scaling their efforts and made a critical decision to lose control. This is one of the key issues we explore in The Networked Nonprofit. The need for organizations to overcome their fear of letting go of their people, processes and materials.

KaBOOM! like many organizations felt that the pathway to success and growth was holding on tight to its programs, processes and people. They needed to control the KaBOOM! process from soup to swings entirely to ensure that they could maintain quality and get credit for the effort – they thought.

But it wasn’t true. Once KaBOOM! learned to let go, trust people in their networks to use their materials and processes well they became friction-free, able to scale their efforts faster and with fewer resources than before. And letting go felt good.

Here are the seven lessons that KaBOOM! learned as a result of letting go:

1. Keep it simple and concrete.
2. Treat your online strategy as mission-critical.
3. Build your own technical competency.
4. Nurture your online community via its leaders.
5. Create incentives for action.
6. Give up credit to increase your impact.
7. Care more about real-world outcomes than online metrics.

Download the case study and give a read (Full disclosure: Beth and I commented on a draft of the paper), I’d love to hear what your organization thinks about losing control.

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