December 18, 2025 | By Rebecca Griffiths and Candice Benge Steele
The marketplace for educational innovations is both complex and crowded. It can be especially challenging for mission-driven nonprofits, which are working to generate impact while balancing the need for financial sustainability.
In a conversation with LEARN Network co-principal investigator Rebecca Griffiths, Jay Bakhru shares insights from his new book, Mission Meets Market: A Sales and Marketing Playbook for Education Nonprofits, and from his work with EdSolutions, offering practical strategies for nonprofits working to move evidence-based innovations to market.
Key takeaways:
- Education markets are uniquely complex, with multiple actors—schools, teachers, students, funders, and policymakers—each shaping how innovations spread and scale.
- Mission-driven organizations face a “double bottom line” challenge: balancing impact and financial sustainability within restrictive funding structures and grant priorities.
- Translating strong research or intellectual property (IP) into real-world impact requires more than a great idea; it demands understanding the customer, articulating value, and building viable paths to scale.
Continue reading to learn more about what it takes for education innovators to move from great research to real-world reach.
Tell us a bit about your book. Who is it intended for and what were your goals in writing it?
The book is meant for mission-driven organizations in the education space. The book came out of the work that we do at EdSolutions. We work with nonprofit leaders who have great evidence-based products that are struggling to scale and achieve financial sustainability. As we worked with these organizations, the barrier, very often, was understanding and applying sales and marketing to their mission-based organizations. This book came out of that experience.
We wanted to create a framework, which we call the Mission-Market model, that is grounded first and foremost in a theory of change. It acknowledges the idea that nonprofits don’t exist to create a profit. They exist to create impact.
How do you think the education market is different from other markets?
The education market is more complex in a couple ways.
One is just the nature of having multiple stakeholders in the ecosystem that are all involved. So you have customers, such as a school or district. You have users, such as teachers. You have beneficiaries who might be the students. And then you have a host of stakeholders or influencers, like parents and policymakers. So part of the difference in complexity is the nature of that multi-stakeholder environment, each with different needs, each playing a different role.
Another complexity is that many markets are private markets, so the goods that are provided, the benefits that are received, that’s a private good for someone. Education is more complicated because there are private benefits. I, as a learner, can take that education and become a better worker, earn a better living.
But there are also public benefits. I’m a better citizen; I’m contributing more economically. And there are intrinsic benefits where we’re leading richer and better lives as human beings. That challenge of “What is our goal?” isn’t present in other sectors.
How would you describe what kind of challenges mission-driven nonprofits face, and how do you think they are different from for-profit organizations?
There are three or four things that are different for mission-driven organizations.
One is the idea of the double bottom-line. Without that double bottom-line, a typical for-profit organization has the right to focus exclusively on profit. We might hope that they deliver that profit by finding an impact-oriented need and serving it, but their fiduciary duty is to focus on driving equity value. And that is very clarifying. It’s more challenging for mission-driven organizations where they’re balancing the idea of impact and financial sustainability.
For nonprofit leaders, it gets more complex if you’re philanthropically funded or grant-funded. You may have grants coming from multiple organizations, each of whom, in funding your organization, is funding their strategy rather than your strategy. There may be points of overlap, but your activities are a means to their end, and that can mean greater complexity in terms of how you think about your work, how you communicate, track, and report it.
A related issue for nonprofits is the nature of the funding itself. The funding is generally not flexible. It’s often categorical funding that is committed for very specific uses. It takes an extraordinarily strategic and talented kind of leader to be able to think about a mixed funding model of general operating funds, research grants, targeted development grants, and earned revenue in a scalable way.
The last thing on my mind is related to philanthropically funded organizations. Philanthropic funding typically comes along with open access or global access requirements. These are great because they are meant to make sure that the work is widely and freely accessible, but it adds a new kind of hurdle for someone at a nonprofit where the most expected path to sustainability would be to monetize your intellectual property.
Based on the work that informed your book, what are three or four things that you would advise researchers to focus on to take something that they developed to market?
When we’ve worked with university-based researchers, one of the things I’m struck with, not surprisingly, is the IP tends to be very strong. They have a deep expertise and have identified something in the market that could be better and innovated upon it. That foundational piece is not the challenge. So we’ve worked with researchers on moving from having a solid IP to something that’s commercializable and scalable. We think about it in three big pieces.
The first piece is thinking about customer and value proposition. This is sometimes part of the IP development, but not always. Who is going to be the one who uses your product or service? And who is the person or organization that is going to exchange resources for that value? What is the value proposition? Who is this for? Why is it better? How is it different from what’s out there? That’s the first big chunk.
The second thing we focus on is how the value proposition is going to translate into something that is commercially viable or financially sustainable. That conversation is around revenue models and pricing. If you are putting something out in the world that has value and solves a specific need, how do you structure your offer so that there is an exchange of value? Even if your goal is not profit maximization, how are you pricing it in a way that creates a contribution margin that allows you to cover your overhead and reinvest in innovation?
And it’s after those two pieces—the value proposition and revenue model—that we start talking about marketing and sales. Almost everybody wants to start with sales, but we try to lay out the value proposition and revenue model beforehand. Then we focus on the marketing part of it, which is how are you engaging your customer and getting your product or service into their consideration set?
When you’re working with these folks, what tensions do you see people struggling with in trying to balance sustainability with their missions, and what advice do you give them?
The biggest tension is the mindset that you have to choose between having your mission and having financial sustainability—to not see those as diametrically opposed but to see them as complimentary and reinforcing.
We work with curriculum providers that see their work as developing something that, if used, is going to have a really meaningful impact. But the idea of charging for it is disagreeable. It is clouding the mission. We always say: That product you developed, there has to be a path for it to get adopted and used, and you need to get the resources that are going to allow you to reinvest and grow.
So the process of sales and marketing is really a process of translating what is good for the world with where the market is.
Understanding customer needs isn’t about watering down your product—it’s understanding who is most in need of your product and how it can improve their lives. And pricing is not about trying to gouge somebody—it’s about a fair value exchange. Money is going to be spent filling this need. Make sure those resources are going back to your solution so you can invest and innovate on that solution. The mindset of starting to see it that way, that it’s not a choice but one or the other, is typically the biggest hurdle.