Thoughts
To be truly successful in today’s increasingly complex and interdependent world, it is essential for any non-profit organization to both innovate consistently and in meaningful ways and embrace inventiveness.
By exploring the ideas of innovation, inventiveness, and creative enterprise, along with examining a number of unique characteristics, we are better able to discover real insights into the role of the non-profit organization in our society and help clear a pathway to a stronger global community. So, what are these unique characteristics? • First, a non-profit must have a deep understanding of their differentiation and ensure that it is of true and meaningful value. • Second, taking risk is essential, and part of risk management is allowing innovation to gestate, to be given space to grow. These are only two characteristics, among many, that are crucial to the growth of an organization, but what we all must also realize is that, unlike a for-profit company, a not-for-profit organization relies on the support of a committed and open-minded philanthropic community to ensure the value of its programs and take important and necessary risks. At PRI, for instance, our funding partnerships with individuals, foundations, and corporations enable us to create and test program pilots; secure talent, production, technology, and business partners; and lay the base for future underwriting and earned revenues. In addition, with the ever-increasing pace of technological change — currently revolutionizing how content is created and consumed — contributed funds allow PRI to act swiftly and decisively to better ensure the future of public media. On a number of levels, research tells us that there is need for global news, different perspectives and sustained coverage to illuminate the interconnectedness of issues and people worldwide. At PRI, we are committed to realizing this need through our mission to serve audiences with distinctive programming that provides information, insights and cultural experiences essential to understanding a diverse, interdependent world. We believe democracy requires an informed electorate, and an informed electorate is a wonderful goal. But we submit that what democracy needs even more is a population that can imagine what it’s like to be someone else, that can understand what it’s like to see the world through different eyes. The power of the human voice on public radio can get us there, if we listen. And if we listen, we may act to make the world a better place. So at PRI, we use the power of the human voice to create connections between people around the corner and around the world through informative, entertaining and insightful programming — that is how we define our meaningful difference. |
