Reading Time: 3 minutes

E16: Build Relationships Outside Your Industry To Scale Impact

by Sean Boyce

What can you learn from nonprofit leaders outside your industry that will help you scale impact in yours?

What I share with you in this episode:
  • Why you shouldn’t only network within your industry
  • Why different industries makes different levels of progress
  • Why you need to build relationships outside your industry
  • What you can expect to learn from other nonprofit leaders
  • How you can apply them to your industry
If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course.

Episode Transcript
0:39 – Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a strategy that you can use to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by partnering with and building relationships with other nonprofit organizations leaders that compete in an industry that’s different than yours. I’m going to give you a little bit of background here.

1:35 – Now the key to this strategy is that different industries move at different levels of pace, in terms of their development, and the strategies and tactics they’re using to scale impact and to grow. So because different industries move at different paces, that means that if you spent most of your time in industry A and someone else’s spend most of their time in industry B then chances are you may or may not be aware of the strategies and tactics that are working successfully for each of you independently. You may only be familiar with the ones that have been talked about more regularly in your industry.

2:11 – So whereas a lot of nonprofit leaders are building relationships with other nonprofit leaders, but within their industry, which is good as well, too. It’s somewhat limiting for you in terms of what you can learn from outside your industry. Because what you’re probably only hearing is how you’re building relationships today for the most part, which is fairly common, then you’re only likely hearing about what people are doing within your industry.

Get our awesome product content delivered daily-ish to your inbox

Sign up for my free email course on how to build a profitable AI-powered B2B SaaS for less than $750

2:38 – The reason why you want to get exposure outside of your industry is again because that key that I mentioned before, which is different industries move at different paces, meaning that there are other industries that may be trying things or have tried things, and they’ve worked successfully for them to see greater impact that you can take and then you can apply to yours.

2:59 – So the strategy here is to start building relationships with other nonprofit leaders, but in different industries than the one of your nonprofit organization. For example, if we compared the finance and the healthcare industries together because of how much regulation there is around healthcare it has a tendency to essentially just make that industry move at a different pace when it comes to innovation. So if someone from healthcare is learning from someone from finance, who may not have as much regulation as healthcare does, or they may be moving at a faster pace, someone in healthcare could probably learn something and what they learned from them is something that they may very well be able to apply to their own industry, their nonprofit organization in order to scale impact in terms of what they’re doing.

3:59 – So there’s a lot you can learn, if you kind of step outside of the relationships perhaps you currently have at nonprofit organizations, but in different industries than the one that you’re currently operating. So that’s the strategy here that I wanted to share with you an opportunity to scale and that can come from you partnering with and networking with and building relationships with other nonprofit leaders, executive directors, people that work in strategy or innovation, but nonprofit organizations that are different than the industry that which you are currently in. Leverage that whenever you can, in order to greater scale impact at your organization.