Minimum viable product — or MVP — is one of the most powerful and frequently misunderstood concepts from the Agile and Scrum world when applied to nonprofits. Rather than a shortcut or a rush to release unfinished work, MVP in a nonprofit context is about intentional, iterative delivery that keeps your stakeholders at the center of the process. This post explains what MVP really means for nonprofits and shares three real-world examples of how organizations are already using it.
(New to Agile or Scrum terminology? Download our free Glossary of Scrum Terms — written specifically for nonprofits.)
Why MVP Is Not a Practice Nonprofits Should Avoid
Our team at Agile in Nonprofits, as well as the larger DH Leonard Consulting team, regularly reads Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) articles as a core part of our industry reading. In August 2020, they published an article “Five For-Profit Practices That Philanthropy Should Avoid” that had a particularly relevant element for Agile. It was thought-provoking — and in this particular instance, we believe they got one item wrong. Specifically, we think they wrongfully included MVP (minimum viable product) in their list of practices to avoid.
Here’s why. We don’t see nonprofits embracing MVP as rushing to get services designed and quickly in place. Rather, MVP in nonprofits is about having small tests of services or supports available for feedback from actual stakeholders — instead of developing a big new program, releasing it in its entirety, and realizing that despite the best intentions, it doesn’t deliver what the needs assessment showed was needed.
In fact, SSIR itself published a great article “The Promise of Lean Experimentation” in 2015 which highlighted a nonprofit that embraced the MVP approach and benefited from it immensely.
What Is Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
The way to think of MVP in a nonprofit context is this: what is the smallest increment of value you can deliver that your community member, client, patient, or stakeholder can use, touch, read, or interact with — and give feedback on?
This is not about cutting corners. It’s about shortening the feedback loop so that the work you are doing is continuously shaped by the people it is meant to serve. This is a foundational principle of both the Scrum framework and lean methodology.
📥 Download our free Lean Canvas Action Guide — complete with real nonprofit examples and a blank canvas your team can use to map out your own MVP approach.
3 Real-World Examples of MVP in Nonprofit Organizations
We want to share three concrete examples of nonprofits already using the minimum viable product approach — in very different types of work.
1. Grant Application Drafts
Rather than delivering a fully polished grant application at the end of the process, a grant team can treat the application as an iterative product. Version 1 (v1) might be a rough draft with questions and comments in the margins. As the product grows through each Sprint, it reaches v3 — a smoothed narrative that has gone through grammar edits and is approved for submission. There are no surprise rounds of major revisions at the end, because stakeholder input is built in throughout the process rather than saved for the finish line.
2. Testing Hands-On STEM Activities for Students
A nonprofit running in-person STEM camps for middle schoolers pivoted to virtual programming during COVID and wanted to send boxes of hands-on activities to students — usable independently, without parental involvement. Rather than testing all activities at once, they started with just one: replicating the s’mores-at-the-campfire experience. They had children test the idea using a pizza box, tin foil, a small stick, and wax paper to build at-home solar ovens. One activity, tested first, before scaling to a full box.
3. Incremental Intake Form Updates
A nonprofit redesigning its client intake form updated one question at a time in their online portal. Each single-question update was tested and evaluated for feedback — both from clients completing the form and from staff utilizing the responses. This minimized the volume of issues the team had to address at any one time, and allowed learning from one change to inform the next update.
How to Apply the MVP Approach in Your Nonprofit
These three examples represent very different types of nonprofit work — grant writing, program delivery, and operations. But the through-line is the same: break the work into the smallest deliverable increment, get it in front of stakeholders, gather feedback, and improve.
This is exactly the kind of iterative rhythm that the Scrum framework is built around. Sprints — short, focused work cycles — are the mechanism that makes MVP practical and repeatable for nonprofit teams.
📥 Ready to build this rhythm into your team’s workflow? Download our free Backlog Guide to start organizing your work into manageable, iterative increments — and the Retrospective Guide to build in the feedback loops that make MVP work.
📥 If you’re working to bring this approach to your leadership team, the Building Buy-In for Agile Guide can help you make the case.
What are the ways that YOU have seen minimum viable product used in nonprofit settings? Share in the comments below or reach out at diane@dhleonardconsulting.com — we’d love to hear your examples.
This blog has been updated on 3/18/2026