Tri-Sector Toolkit

The Tri-Sector Resource Explorer is a free AI assistant that helps you find resources, connections, and ideas across all three sectors and find ways to maximize your impact, grow, innovate, and thrive.

The Tri-Sector Resource Explorer helps you:

• Discover Resources: Find organizations and assets across sectors to support your projects or ideas.

• Identify Synergies: Explore aligned interests and potential collaborations between different organizations.

• Uncover Creative Approaches: Find innovative ways to repurpose resources or explore new ideas.

• Reveal Opportunities: Spot potential partnerships and growth opportunities.

• Get Actionable Guidance in Useful Formats: Establish a framework for turning ideas into impactful innovations, including next steps and formats to help advance your ideas. Including:

  • Quick business plan

  • Draft pitch deck

  • Strategic plan summary

Whether scaling an initiative, seeking a fresh approach, or building new partnerships, this tool is here to help.

Give it a try. You’ll need an OpenAI/ChatGPT account (a free account is sufficient).
Get a quick start with helpful prompts & tips

Status: released Fall 2024

The TSI Canvas is a one-page silo-busting ideation tool designed for entrepreneurs and innovators from all sectors. The canvas helps you solve problems, find opportunities, and develop strategies using the tri-sector innovation approach.

The TSI Canvas is designed to:

• Help you expand options and possibilities and then home in on ideas to develop or enhance your business model and solve problems

• Integrate impact into the design process in a way that strengthens your business model

• Uncover existing resources that can be repurposed and aligned to benefit your model and create value for your customers and other beneficiaries

• Spark innovative solutions by enabling you to move between high-level ideation and pragmatic problem solving within a single view

• Be highly flexible so you can use it for a wide range of needs like rapid riffing on ideas, delving deeper into a concept, and as a complement to Lean Canvas, Business Model Canvas, and other innovation tools

Use the TSI Canvas: Download a pdf of the canvas | Use the interactive Miro canvas template  

Both versions feature a tool guide, innovator question bank, common pathways, and an example completed canvas. 

For a deeper dive, visit the Tri-Sector Innovation Canvas Tool section of our online Tri-Sector Guide for 21st Century Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries.

Status: v2 released Fall 2022

The Tri-sector Equation helps innovators solidify their tri-sector business model by getting specific about how to strategically combine and align existing resources, and identifying the ‘give-get’ and aligned self-interests of organizations, creating a win-win-win solution.

The TSE is designed to help you:

• Create a tri-sector strategy in which each organization contributes to and benefits from the model

• Delineate how self-interests will be aligned and harnessed

• Evaluate fit for resources and orgs based on factors like alignment of self-interests, accessibility of resource, and more

• Crystallize the roles each sector will play a role in your model/strategy

• Re-Imagine and plan how existing resources will be repurposed in in your model/strategy

Use the Tri-Sector Equation: Download the Excel worksheet |

For a deeper dive, visit the Tri-Sector Equation Tool section of our online Tri-Sector Guide for 21st Century Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries.

Status: Excel template released in December 2022

Spotlight Interviews is a tool designed to gather input from people with deep knowledge within a specific area, to help identify key, specific barriers, or opportunities, in their work. Interviewees could be managers in government agencies, researchers from foundations and think tanks, or an individual working in any sector with explicit insight. The insights gathered reveal the key areas that are ripe for innovation that can unlock opportunities for outsized impact.

• Tap into and connect insights from disparate pools of knowledge and deep expertise

• Interview experts to gain a richer understanding and identify bottlenecks

• Analyze with a tri-sector lens and share key insights within a collaborative, public data tool.

For a deeper dive:

• learn how to use our spotlight interview power questions to surface resources and opportunities

• visit the Spotlight Interviews and Maps Tool section of our online Tri-Sector Guide for 21st Century Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries.

Status: Examples available here, here, and here

Sometimes, the simplest way to find good, innovative ideas is to simply ask people for their input. Community Insights is a tool for crowdsourcing ideas from people using their feedback on government services in their community. Along with Spotlight Interviews, Community Insights is a community listening tool that identifies demand for specific innovation.

• Helps uncover needs/issues emerging or persisting in community conversation

• Gathers, processes, and visualizes public discourse from a range of sources, including social media, public sector data, and custom polls

• Analyzes discourse and organizes it by impact area, sentiment, source, geography, date, type, and more.

For a deeper dive, visit the Community Insights Tool section of our online Tri-Sector Guide for 21st Century Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries.

Status: Research prototype built in collaboration with the​ Urbanalytics Group at the University of Washington iSchool last updated Spring 2021 - development currently on hold

We consider the impact journey one of our most powerful tools—invaluable for finding and narrowing in on leverage points, bottlenecks and unmet needs. Impact journeys map sequential points in the journey in an impact area from the perspective of the impacted person(s), representing all possible steps, interactions and pathways identified through research and community insights.

• Helps surface obstacles, pain points, successes, gaps, and opportunities

• Offers sequential visualization of events and milestones, layered with relevant information such as engaged organizations, resources, statistics, and policies

• Provides a network view of a system with contextual information layered on top

For a deeper dive, visit the Impact Journey Tool section of our online Tri-Sector Guide for 21st Century Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries.

Status: Examples available here, here, and here—contact us for suggested process for mapping your Impact Journey

At the heart of the NewImpact model is the NewImpact Wiki database: a platform that helps entrepreneurs, managers, and policymakers identify potential partners across the three sectors. Knowing who is on "your team" is a key question. For example, who is working on food issues? Who is focused on maternal health? Who is interested in affordable housing? Who knows about clean water tech? And what are the programs or services they offer?

The NewImpact Wiki is a growing free and open online catalogue of organizations and resources tagged with geography, population served, and impact area.

• Maps out thousands of government assets, services, and datasets, along with those of nonprofits and private companies.

• Tags each resource to social impacts such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goals or the Social Progress Index.

• Tracks and tags budgets and outcomes.

For a deeper dive, visit the NewImpact Wiki Tool section of our online Tri-Sector Guide for 21st Century Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries.

Status: Access to the NewImpact Wiki is currently only available upon request due to current technical limitations | request permission

Our free and open tri-sector innovation tools are being designed to be used individually or combined for impact in endless ways. We’ve created a list of use cases to illustrate just a few of the scenarios where these tools might help answer questions and drive impact.

Want to learn more about the NewImpact’s free and open tools, and how your organization might benefit from a tri-sector business model? Contact us here!