Description

Apply the needs theme on your ToC where you experience the most pressing needs and challenges to realize your ToC and its vision of success. You explain your needs to make your ToC a success and thereby the issues to be solved. These can be very specific or also more general depending on e.g. the scale of the change process and the phase of development. For example a refugee aid program indicating that they would like to see “better inexpensive housing for refugees”.

These needs offer (business) opportunities to stakeholders to contribute to your vision, and reflect your agenda where to employ resources and search for partnerships to make the ToC realistic.

For example, businesses, NGOs and scientists may be able to contribute to solve an issue that your organisation encounters. Investors may find out you’re looking for funding opportunities. Other organisations may become aware you are struggling with similar legislative issues and may become potential partners to address these issues and so on and so forth.

Stakeholders therefore, obtain an overview of your needs and gain insight in where they can contribute to help realize your vision of success and raise your level of social value creation.

Stakeholder Engagement

Social organisations

The needs theme gives stakeholders an overview of the desires and necessities of the organisation in its pursuit of societal value. Stakeholders gain insight in the kind of support that would help the organisation most to realize its vision of success.

The theme allows stakeholders to assess whether and how they might be able to deploy their knowledge and resources in a way that will contribute most to raise the organisation’s level of social value creation. It raises excitement, as they learn about how they can contribute and how this adds to the organisation’s capacity to create societal value.

Stakeholders

As a stakeholder, this theme presents you with opportunities to be of assistance. You can engage by deploying your knowledge and resources to help provide a need of the organisation and hence contribute to the realisation of the (shared) vision. This theme also informs you about how the help you provided fits within the larger picture of the organisation’s capacity for societal value creation.

Questions to Ask

What challenges or problems do we experience at what stage of the change process in realizing our vision of success? What kind of support could we use to tackle these?
What inputs and context elements restrain us in our operations, and what kind of support could lift these restraints?
In what areas do we see room for improvement to raise our level of social value creation and why aren’t we performing at that level yet?

What to Describe

Typical information to include about a need:

Description of the need.
How solving the need would contribute to the realization of your vision of success or to raising your level of societal value creation.
Potential directions for solutions or support.
Engage stakeholders. Discuss how to follow-up if they can help.

More About Needs

Different Types of Needs

Needs come in different forms and from different motivations:

Need for more of the same, such as more funding, time, expertise or political support.
Need for something new to further improve or completely revise existing practices, for example an innovation such as a refugee centre looking for better and cheaper housing solutions for refugees.
Need for a solution to a problem that the organisation experiences.

Community Guidelines

To make sure the Changeroo platform is a powerful vehicle for change, we’ve put together a few ground rules.

Content pages focus on consensus, integration of information and objective facts, instead of repetition and endless texts. Social organisations can open up these pages to stakeholder feedback and input.

Guidelines

Share your expertise and resources to be of influence and help social organisations move their social mission forward. Seek opportunities to contribute that align with your own values. Present yourself through your contributions.
Learn from stakeholders’ feedback and improve your understanding of an organisation.
Be constructive in your criticism.
Be open to disagreement and listen to other people’s opinions. Change happens when people with different backgrounds and perspectives can participate in a conversation.
Be reasonable, kind, respectful and use common sense.
Do not use hate speech, do not impersonate others, do not violate others’ privacy, do not bully, do not be unnecessarily graphic, do not spam and do not break the law (which includes respecting copyrights in your posts).
Update your ToC with developments. When you’re candid with stakeholders and tell them what we do and don’t know and make them part of the process, it’s much more engaging for them.