A new study published in the fall issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review will make you think twice about what makes for an effective nonprofit. Nonprofits that have managed their programs best and positioned their organization most prominently would seemingly be the most successful; these are the organizations most able make change happen, right?

Authors Heather McLeod Grant and Leslie Crutchfield find otherwise. They studied twelve "high-impact nonprofits" and found that their impact came less from how much these organizations built their own capacity and more from how well they leveraged the efforts of others.

The secret to their success lies in how high-impact nonprofits mobilize every sector of society – government, business, nonprofits, and the public – to be a force for good. In other words, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than with how they manage their own internal operations. The high-impact nonprofits we studied are satisfied with building a “good enough” organization and then focusing their energy externally to catalyze largescale change.

McLeod Grant and Crutchfield conclude by boiling this point down further, warning that most nonprofits focus too much on process and not enough on impact. I can certainly think of examples to fit that bill in the international development field: an entire industry has grown up whose impact on the problems it exists to solve is often uncertain.

But we have to be careful here. Plenty of good -- and good-hearted -- ideas fall short because their champions focus almost exclusively on impact. Many's the time a determined advocate has failed to realize her vision for change because there was seemingly no time to build capacity. I'm leery of wild swings toward either extreme. Rather, the planning, strategy and capacity-building process can itself be results-driven. Continuous Progress starts with the assumption that impact should drive process, so the tool is designed to build evaluation of impact into the way an organization plans and operates in "realtime." That way, if the process is not serving to make an impact as a campaign or program progresses, there's a basis for changing it.

That quibble aside, the authors' main appeal is that nonprofits should look outside their own organizations for ways to leverage greater impact. This rings true to GII's research on successful advocacy campaigns. McLeod Grant and Crutchfield distill six practices (i.e."Serve and Advocate," Make Markets Work") -- applied in different ways to different degrees -- that characterize the work of their twelve high-impact examples. But first, before going through these six principles of success, the authors outline six myths ("Brand-Name Awareness," "Textbook Mission Statements") that do not correlate so closely with impact.

As with any qualitative analysis that uses a limited sample, this study has its limitations. Not every nonprofit can apply six principles and catapult to success; and some that have worked very hard to cultivate the principles that are here relegated to "myths" are having a great impact. But the core principle of leveraging the work of others by fitting nonprofit work into the greater whole is an important insight, as is the emphasis on overall impact.