28 Education & Career
mojatu .com
ACKNOWLEDGING FAILURE AND LEARNING FROM IT
It can be hard to talk about failure,
particularly when charities are competing for
resources and recognition. None of us likes
to admit that things go wrong. However, if
we want to take risks and innovate with new
approaches, failures at times are inevitable.
As long as we move forward quickly and
learn from them, they can actually help us
improve our ways of working and maximise
our impact.
Rebounding and reprograming yourself after defeat and
how to use the lessons from those failures to achieve
winning results is an important lesson. Acknowledging
and accepting your failures can make you a stronger and
more successful business owner. Honest and focused
review of your role and responses is an important
step in learning the lessons and using them to grow.
Failure builds when you learn to use each failure to your
advantage, to let it fuel your future success.
Common mistakes among third sector organisations
Such honest discussions have revealed some common
mistakes that new and growing organisations often
encounter.
1. Losing Focus: New organisations are often tempted
to take on everything they encounter that comes
their way, especially when funding is involved. This
can often result in them losing focus on their mission
and taking on more than they can handle.
2. Scaling Fast: When an organisation suddenly
becomes more successful, forging new partnerships
and accessing new funds, it can be hard to increase
their capacity fast enough, particularly when
managing a whole range of grants, operating on
different time frames. New organisations often need
support to restructure their teams, refine strategies,
strengthen financial controls, monitoring and
evaluation and communications functions.
3. Incorrect assumptions: Organisations can often
make incorrect assumptions. Often political factors
and the local context is poorly understood. For
example, factions within political parties result in
conflicts between different government agencies
that need to be understood. There’s often insufficient
research and analysis. Crucially, end beneficiaries are
rarely consulted enough throughout project cycles.
4. The Complete Jigsaw: To really achieve social impact,
it requires sustained engagement on a lot of levels.
Collaborative and effective partnership initiatives need
to be combined with advocacy efforts and grassroots
campaigning/mobilisation. Organisations which provide
research or access and analysis of data are needed to
provide an evidence base. This requires strong partnerships.
These can be challenging due to differing objectives. It
also takes time to build relationships externally and clear
plans and commitments need to be put in place to keep
collaborative projects on task and on time.
5. Impact Takes Time, Funding Cycles are Short:
Because of the above, impact takes time, particularly
when an organisation is aiming for systemic/process
driven change. And the way things happen often
doesn’t fall into the neat little boxes that funders have
created to assess a project’s success. Funding cycles are
often too short to enable organisations to really follow
something through, which is frustrating for grantees
who have made significant ground way. There’s often
a mismatch between funders’ expectations and the
reality on the ground. The grantees are keen for funders
to support them with core funding, that supports their
long-term vision and strategy.
6. Training and marketing: Organisations often
underestimate how much budget is required for
training, marketing and communications. Many
realise that telling their stories effectively is key but
lack the capacity to do so. Sufficient training (and not
just once), marketing and ongoing support is needed
to ensure a tech platform is widely used. Marketing is
seen as an add on and it should not be so.
7. Citizen feedback: Citizens are often reluctant to
share data. It often costs them money to do so and
many mistrust how this data may be used. Most do
not believe their reporting will have an impact. They
may also fail to understand the value of the project
as much as you do. Remember, you care about your
project way more than anyone else does.