Vas Madness: What Nonprofits Can Learn From a March Madness Trend

Men queue up for vasectomies once a year — the first day of the first round of March Madness. I would give a reference, but who would believe that ANYBODY actually studies that? They do. Hit Google. The sheer volume of hits is worth doing it. Here's a gimme.

Sixteen games on Thursday, 16 games on Friday, eight on Saturday and eight on Sunday.

Good plan.

Urologists noticed a bump in vasectomies at the start of March Madness, and they took action. Vas Madness was born. Urologists got a bit of data — wow, we do a lot of vasectomies during March Madness — and took advantage of the landscape represented by that data.

Nonprofit income departments can do that too, if we don't get in our own way. Our field event staff and leadership volunteers bring us ideas every day. Some of these ideas have some amount of data behind them, as they have been tried in the field. Others, no data at all.

Most often, the new idea simply does not fit into our current construct. The new idea challenges a brand standard, doesn't conform to our idea of volunteer roles, messes with what we told our staff to do in the employee manual we just published or sounds a lot like something we already tried. We dismiss the idea. In short, we are bad at taking advantage of new ideas and recognizing data that shows up, gift-like.

We can fix that.

What if we had a system that helped people with ideas express them successfully? What if we gave volunteers, field staff, everybody we touch, the tools to benchmark and measure the impact of their ideas, and a framework within which to express the idea and the results to leadership? What if we even told them the likely "idea killers"? (The process-related things that make using a new idea a massive pain in the asparagus.) What if we rewarded them for participating in creating new ways to do things? Then, what if we level the playing field on presentation of the idea so the blowhard doesn't always win?