Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact

Build Your Social Impact Expertise

Doing the hard work of changing the world is hard work. It's messy. It's ambiguous. It's circuitous.

No one discipline, degree, or expert alone has the answer to creating social impact. As nonprofit professionals, we must weave together ideas and tools from different disciplines. 

solveforimpact strives to find the best knowledge from across domains and across time that can help nonprofit professionals accelerate their social impact. These are our curated list of top 10 books for creating social impact:

Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Business Model Generation
Reveals that social impact business models are not machines to be assembled but rather are creatively crafted on a canvass.
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - How to Measure Anything
Social impact can be hard to measure. But it's not impossible. 
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - The Cathedral Within
Nonprofit professionals must wring the most out of all their personal, professional and organizational assets in order to spark the biggest possible social impact.
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Community: The Structure of Belonging
Demonstrates that social impact (health, happiness and positive change) come from the gifts within a community, not from prescriptive "interventions" bestowed by outsiders (like services nonprofits).
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Leading from the Emerging Future
Nonprofit professionals must envision the future in order to create it. 
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Thinking in Systems
In which the world becomes stocks, flows, loops, states and goals, with significant limits to growth. The author reveals leverage points with potential to influence a system's operations. Social impact is all about influencing systems.
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Paints a clear picture of how to build strong strategy, eschewing the ambiguity inherent in many nonprofit strategic plans.
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard
Combine the power of psychology, design, and social influence to make social impact big and small.
Top 10 Books for Creating Social Impact - Thinking Statistically
In which common abuses and quandaries of statistics are poked and prodded. Nonprofit professionals must be rigorous in identifying what's working and what's not in creating social impact. Statistics will help! (and they're not too scary)