Quick Concept Mentoring Partnership
The IVMS Quick Concept Mentoring Partnership is a team based mentoring program designed to provide nonprofits with an efficient means to quickly assess the viability of innovative earned revenue concepts and opportunities. Quick Concept leverages the business experience and mission focused passion of InnovateVMS’ mentors to efficiently help nonprofits analyze and develop their social enterprise or venture.
The primary objective of Quick Concept is to provide early stage mentoring to nonprofits for the development of innovative, sustainable revenue concepts. The program’s structure helps the nonprofit evaluate the concept or program relative to its mission, social impact, and the implications on budgets, staffing, and other resource requirements.
The key benefits to participating social enterprises are:
Highly experienced mentoring team
High level investigation of
Mission alignment and social impact
Revenue potential
Market need/analysis
Pro Forma budgeting
Business plan outline
Unbiased analysis and recommendations
The InnovateVMS Quick Concept Mentoring Partnership is a structured, yet highly flexible, program to evaluate social enterprise concepts. An InnovateVMS mentoring team is assembled based on the individual mentor’s professional background, areas of expertise, and interest in the nonprofit’s social mission. Quick Concept mentoring teams consist of four to six mentors.
Generally, the program is a four week process that utilizes weekly focused mentoring sessions. In the first session the nonprofit’s founder, director, or other staff present the social enterprise concept to the team of InnovateVMS mentors. The two hour session explores a variety of topics including an overview of the nonprofit’s current situation in terms of budget, staffing, funding, constituents, board involvement, and strategic goals and objectives.
The second mentoring session will focus on identifying and analyzing the market or constituents to be served by the social enterprise, how that market will be reached, and how it aligns with the nonprofit's mission. This is perhaps the most critical aspect of the Quick Concept process.
In the third mentoring session a pro forma financial plan will be developed and evaluated. This is a high level profit and loss, not a detailed, line item budget. The objective is to realistically identify the projected revenue growth and the associated costs.
The final session focuses on the basic components that would be included in a business plan and the result is a detailed business plan outline.
The final result of the InnovateVMS Quick Concept Mentoring Partnership is a fact based evaluation by the IVMS mentoring team. This evaluation is designed to provide information to the nonprofit’s board and leadership team to use in their decision making. The evaluation may include recommendations to move forward, modify, or discard the proposed venture. The recommendations are based on the data available and the mentoring team’s unbiased, third party perspective.