Profile
Until 2022, Nick was Shift’s founder and CEO. His clear vision for an innovative organisation that brings together rigorous research, ambitious creativity and commercial expertise to design solutions to challenging social problems defined Shift for more than a decade. Nick grew the organisation from a tiny start-up to an international team, was actively involved in the strategic direction of all our work, and established the partnerships that allowed our projects, services and ventures to reach scale and sustainability.
Nick holds a BA Hons in History from Oxford University and draws on his experience working as a teacher, youth worker and campaigner.
Nick was named one of Britain’s 50 New Radicals by The Observer and NESTA and is a board member of the Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology. His blogs on the Huffington Post, papers on behaviour change and talks all over the world are met with great acclaim.
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Funders’ Collaborative Hub: the new role that is emerging
Nick Stanhope shares how the Funders’ Collaborative Hub’s role has evolved as it seeks to inspire and support greater interdependence, collaboration and collective action amongst UK grant funders.
Open enquiry: How can we multiply the collective impact of funding for youth mental health?
Shift’s Nick Stanhope shares the new open enquiry for youth mental health funders from Foundation Design Lab
Conditions for Collaboration — Part 2: the role of shared infrastructure
Intentions for collaboration are only as good as the shared infrastructure they need to thrive.
Conditions for Collaboration — Part 1: When it’s really hard
Collaboration, even amongst well-intended organisations that share the same values and purpose, can feel way too hard.
Catalyst COVID-19 strategy: building a scalable system for a sector-wide digital response
How, as part of Catalyst, we’re responding to the COVID-19 crisis.
Catalyst Digital Teams available to help charities respond to COVID-19
Are you a network of charities in need of digital support? Catalyst Digital Teams offer expertise to help you respond and adapt.
How can we make more collective progress when funding single organisations?
Introducing Catalyst Clusters and some big collective ambitions
The Catalyst is a big opportunity to build digital capabilities as networks, fields and ecosystems, not just as individual organisations. Blog by Shift’s CEO Nick Stanhope.
Joining the Dots: Digital technology isn’t the enemy of warmth within services
In this Joining the Dots blog, Shift’s CEO (and dad to a 3 year old) Nick Stanhope explores ways in …
Building the Ecosystem: an alternative to building the next new thing
Roles, collective assets and putting people at the heart of ecosystems. Blog from CEO Nick Stanhope.
5 Principles of Continuously Improving Social Impact
Confidence, great data, living breathing plans, design skills and consensus. Blog from CEO Nick Stanhope.
Scale with Care: 6 Ways Early Stage Social Innovation Gets Killed Off
Assumptions, failure, targets and flexibility in scaling social innovation projects. Blog from CEO Nick Stanhope.
From Gordon Gekko to Grant Funding: leveraging the full spectrum of capital to solve social problems
Driving continuous improvement: lessons from funding social tech
There is one question that dominates our work at Shift and has done for the last 8 years: how do …
5 Lessons in Developing Social Tech Ventures
Digital technology plays a powerful role in the response to social problems. Its doesn’t provide the answers to everything and, by …
The Question That Tech-for-Good Funding Should Care Most About
Grant funding has a vital role to play in social technology innovation. It can support the higher costs and …
The Next Frontier for Social Impact Investment
Featured in the Huffington Post
Can Consumer Product Design Really Drive Systemic Social Change?
A recent Forbes piece by Ashoka’s Michael Zakaras takes product design to task as a source of transformational social change. To provide an antidote to the fashionable fascination with “things” as the answer to all our social ills, the article uses examples like Toms Shoes‘ one-for-one model and the distribution of mosquito nets as evidence that products normally fail to engage with the roots of complex social problems.
A brand new version of our digital inclusion product, Buttons
We’re really excited to be relaunching our digital inclusion product, Buttons, this week, which represents a big step in the …
The Next Frontier for Social Impact Investment
Social Impact Investment is explored by Nick Stanhope.
Successful commercial entrepreneurs have to prioritise building two types of value within their ventures: user value and financial value. The job of creating value for users is hard. It relies on a profound understanding of the intrinsic motivations of the target audience. It requires the time, investment and experience…
Shift’s development process for social ventures
Nick and Tori explain the process that shapes and structures Shift’s work designing social ventures. As part of our three year partnership with the Nominet Trust, we have intended to codify and share this process more explicitly, both for our own benefit and in the hope that other mission-driven designers and social entrepreneurs find it useful.
Why Social Entrepreneurs Need to Be Better Than Their Commercial Counterparts
Featured in the Huffington Post
Most Mindfulness Products Miss Those That Need Them
Featured in the Huffington Post
Why Social Entrepreneurs Need to Be Better Than Their Commercial Counterparts
Successful commercial entrepreneurs have to prioritise building two types of value within their ventures: user value and financial value, but social entrepreneurs need all three.
From We Are What We Do to Shift: a new name for a different approach
Our work in behaviour change started 10 years ago, as a social movement that inspired people to use their everyday …
Most Mindfulness Products Miss Those That Need Them
You can’t call yourself a forward thinking company these days without some reference to mindfulness in your organisational strategy…
Why the world needs video games for good mental health
Over the last 18 months, with support from the Nominet Trust, we’ve been researching and developing the first version of …
The 3 strands of value vital to social tech ventures
This article has been written by Nick Stanhope, CEO of We Are What We Do, and Dan Sutch, Head of …
Three values
On the surface, the language and practices of Silicon Valley and other tech investors have brought the social sector a greater focus on ventures, accelerators, fast-growth innovations, of startups, incubators and investment…
A closer look at NT100 2013 project, Historypin
Historypin was launched in 2011, after two years of R&D and beta testing, with a mission to help bring people together, from across different generations and cultures, to share and explore the history of their communities…
Video games + behaviour change
Video games don’t normally get a good rap when it comes to the health of young people. Instinctively, replacing hours …
Street Food for social change: why gourmet hipsters are just part of the story
If you walk a few hundred metres west from Old Street roundabout, the new hub of London’s tech start up …
‘The simple habits and reciprocities of everyday life.’
This is how David Halpern describes the focus of work that examines and values the role of social capital in our communities. …
Box Chicken Launch
Hadrian Garrard from Create London and Nick Stanhope discuss the need for practical interventions to tackle poor diets at the launch of Box Chicken, a pilot of a healthy fast food outlet.
Progress still battles prejudice when it comes to mental health
In April this year, as part of our three-year partnership with the Nominet Trust, we set out on 12 months of …
Our obsession with chicken shops
Earlier this year, I wrote about our early obesity research, through which we started looking at the way that the …
Historypin share their top tips
Historypin is a suite of online tools designed to help museums, libraries and community groups share their collections of archived materials (e.g. historic photos) with as wide an audience as possible…
5 reasons why business models suit behaviour change
Business models don’t suit every social mission. As Dan Pallotta says in his March 2013 TED Talk, “social business needs …
Prompting, nudging and facilitating less food waste
Every year in the UK, we throw away almost 20% of the food we buy, which contributes to the even …
Real corporate responsibility is about making less money
2012 wasn’t a good year for corporate responsibility. As society continued to reel from the effects of the global recession, …
He Has Done a Lot for Charity
Last week’s Livestrong 15th Anniversary event in Austin, Texas, looked like an odd occasion. Everyone there seemed pretty sure that …
Overweight by default
We’ve spent a good chunk of the last year looking at how our approach to behaviour change can play a …
I’m Still a Plastic Bag
Our 2007 I’m Not a Plastic Bag project with Anya Hindmarch was, at the time, hugely successful. We applied our product-centric …
Before it’s too late
There is always someone in the family that knows everything, who recognises every face in every old picture, who could tell you where they were taken and what the occasion was, who could narrate an old family film to within an inch of its life…
The end of volunteering
People supporting their communities and making meaningful contributions to society without being paid is something that we all want loads …
The Participatory Museum
When real change comes, it doesn’t come from any one place. It emerges, gradually, from many different places all at once…
Historypin: Libraries, Archives & Museums Sharing Content
Nick talking at Stanford University on Historypin: Libraries, Archives & Museums Sharing Content.
Us and the Other Us
As part of our ongoing research on the Incidental Effect, we’re working our way through another huge array of books, …
Enjoyable things for local communities to do together
The After the Riots report from the Riots Communities and Victims Panel was a really good example of how to emerge …
Digital inclusion is ideal for an incidental approach
In the middle of three new launches of our Internet Buttons project into Ireland, Poland and Holland, we’ve been struck, again, …
The nudge potential of mobile payments
Starbucks Corp CEO, Howard Schultz, described the arrival of mobile payments as part of a “seismic change” in consumer behaviour. For …
Too important to make lots of money from
I’ve had lots of e-mails, tweets and a few calls from journalists asking for a bit more explanation on something …
A bit of new radicalism
It has been great for We Are What We Do to be included in the Britain’s New Radicals list, launched …
Facebook “built to accomplish a social mission”
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to shareholders illustrated once again that, while the world is obsessed with the wealth generated by …
Playing social change
Despite being interested from a distance for some time, we have only just started to explore the potential of gaming …
Customer service can change the world
We’ve just started working with Sky on some internal leadership events that they run each year and, once again, my …
The Incidental Effect
Hello. This first one is going to be very short, because what it refers to is quite long and I …
Mapping in the 4th dimension TEDxNHH
Nick talks atTEDx NHH, hosted by the Historypin Norwegian School of Economics, in Bergen.
Funding Historypin
Sincethe launch of Historypin in New York July this year, we’ve been blown away by people’s response to it…
@Shift_org
Research
Making collective progress: Towards shared ambitions for social change
February 24, 2022
Looking to collaborate for social change? Here’s a review of existing approaches and principles to get you started.
Hot, prepared revolution: A summary of two years work looking at takeaways
December 17, 2018
Shift has developed the UK’s most detailed understanding of takeaway food, families’ relationship with it, the role hot, prepared food plays in their food behaviours, the economics of outlets and the motivations of their owners. Possible avenues for positive change have been tested and the way forward is clear.
Driving continuous improvement: Insights from funding social tech
November 2, 2017
Commentable version here. Report giving a set of 5 insights and 8 practical recommendations on how funders and social organisations can work together better to ensure that progress and improvement of social products, services and programmes is given adequate attention.
5 ways to use the Social, User & Financial Value Model for social innovation
March 30, 2017
The Incidental Effect
October 1, 2011
Paper exploring new methods in behaviour change.By Nick Stanhope
Projects
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Affordable good food for families
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Relationships Project: a better society through better relationships
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Making collective progress towards shared ambitions
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Behaviours to guide nonprofits in times of change
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Powering nonprofits to respond to the crisis
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Tip: giving new parents high quality information they’ll love
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Mobile game helping children manage their emotions
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Researching how to improve parent-child interactions with NSPCC
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NSPCC: Understanding its market position to shape its strategy
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Using data and insights to improve early years services
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Specialist support for National Lottery Community Fund grantees
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A Design Lab for foundations and philanthropy
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Building self-reflection skills in young people
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Creating a system of continuous improvement for the NCS programme
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Changing Places: Giving young people a voice on their local area
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Designing a replicable approach for supporting children in care
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Progressively: a model to help organisations improve their impact
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Historypin: bringing communities together though local history
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Box Chicken:
a healthier alternative to fast food near schools -
I’m Not a Plastic Bag: Reducing single-use plastic
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Change The World For a Fiver: a book and social movement
Coverage
Nick Stanhope: Nesta New Radical 2012
The Observer, 2012
Q and A with Nick Stanhope, Creator of Historypin
Smithsonian Magazine, 10th August 2011