QUICK START GUIDE
INVALIDILIITTO
Enabling better lives!
Opportunity for Invalidiliitto to financially support decent work and livelihood for disabled
Africans
The tough nut to crack
What service/product we may develop and commercialize, so that profits could be
used to innovatively finance our development cooperation work in Zambia &
Ethiopia?
Research Plan & Exploratory Questions
● Understand how Invalidiliitto operates: e.g. what services and activities it provides
nationally and internationally? What are its values?
● What is the current cooperation development work model of Invalidiliitto? How do
they provide international help? How? What is the budget needed for these
activities?
● Understand the resources and constraints of Invalidiliitto: the solution should be
something that could actually be provided without making overly dramatic
investments or changes
● Who are Invalidiliitto current funders and donors? How to avoid “cannibalizing”
funds and donations among different streams of work?
● Who are current non-donors who could be most likely made into donors? How?
 Should the service/product be related to Invalidiliitto work in Zambia and Ethiopia?
How closely? Can it be unrelated? Up to which point?
Comparative Benchmarking
● What are the different models available to NGOs to raise funds? How do they
work? How profitable/effortful they are?
● Successful examples of NGOs finding/creating new alternative sources of funding
for their operations. How have other NGO’s expanded their offerings successfully
(into new areas)? And how do they communicate with their new markets?
● Benchmark interesting and innovative examples of social enterprises: how do they
operate? What resources they need? How do they interact and communicate with
the larger society?
● Benchmark successful cooperations between NGOs and for-profit firms, and the
most common mechanisms (e.g. “for every product bought, we donate 1 € to this
charity”)
Exploratory Benchmarking
● What can we learn from “impulse buying”? Could there be a way to trigger “impulse
donating”?
● Is there anything typically Zambian or Ethiopian that could be leveraged to create
an interesting product/service (e.g. coffee culture)?
● Is fundraising the only way to achieve the goal of “support decent livelihood for
african people with disabilities”?
● Get inspiration from campaigns, initiatives, operations, projects etc. that were
successful without using pity as the main argument to raise donations, but had
instead a strong “cool factor” and generated lots of attention and media buzz (e.g.
The Monokini http://www.monokini2.com/; ALS ice bucket challenge, Movember...)
● Get inspiration from products/services that are including, rather than separating
“normal” from “disabled” people, or raise awareness to important issues through
entertainment (e.g. the videogame A Blind Legend
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-blind-legend-uses-binaural-audio-to-create-agame-for-the-visually-impaired; any “design for all” project, …), A video game “That
Dragon, Cancer” (http://www.wired.com/2016/01/that-dragon-cancer/)