Every day there are more companies that at the time of hire give priority to the soft skills, according to data from a global study conducted by Adobe creativity is the soft skill most demanded by companies in 2019. Companies turn to creative professionals to stay competitive and at the forefront of their sector. According to data from the same Adobe study, companies that have invested in creativity have seen an increase in their productivity by 78% and have achieved an increase in customer satisfaction by 80%.
Faced with this great demand for creativity that the world is experiencing, companies have turned their eyes to industries such as art, advertising, and entertainment where creativity is an everyday thing in search of talent and good practices. But there is a sector that no one pays much attention to and in which creativity has been present for decades and has meant the differentiating factor between success or failure. We refer to the NGO sector.
NGOs work with a different mentality than traditional companies since their focus is on the execution of projects that generate impact and live in a constant battle to secure funds that allow them to continue executing more impact projects. Because of this, NGOs have to be very creative when using the economic and human resources available to them. This has caused a powerful creative ability to develop over the years in NGOs.
The question that arises is: what we can learn from NGOs in terms of creativity?
Understand the problems from within
The NGOs from their conception focus on solving social or environmental problems that afflict a certain sector or population. In order to generate effective and efficient solutions, NGOs do a lot of work in the field to understand these problems. Large companies can apply a similar approach to that of NGOs when generating new products and services, making their employees work in the field, knowing and generating direct relationships with customers so that they can have a deeper and first-hand understanding of the problems and context of its customers.
Think of the customer first
NGOs always put their beneficiaries as their first priority and are constantly looking for new ways to help them. This approach makes the creative process of NGOs much more empathic and allows them to generate more and better ideas since the goal of the process is to really generate something that brings value to the beneficiary. Traditional companies start their creative processes with the bias of generating products and services that are profitable for the company without considering the real problems and needs of customers.
Creativity is a skill that all human beings possess, if companies really want to take full advantage of this ability, they should not only look for creative professionals but also should encourage and create an environment for that creativity to emerge in all employees and expand within the entire organization.
