Jonathan Poisner Strategic Consulting

I’ve recently been thinking about the concept of organizations being strategic.

Being strategic is a choice made by successful nonprofits.

There are a lot of ways nonprofits fail to be strategic.

Some make a list of all desirable things to do and then set out to do them all.

Some do whatever is advocated for by whoever on the board is loudest and most persistent.

Some just keep doing what they’ve always done without reevaluating it.

They are the easy way.

But they’re not the most effective way.

Across many organizational functions (governance, fundraising, program), successful organizations develop systems to make calculated choices where to spend resources (time and money in particular) in order to gain maximum benefit.

That’s because the to-list of worthwhile activities is always far larger than you have time and money to do.

So how do you prioritize your time and money?

There is no one solution for every or even most organizations.

But here’s one tool to consider.  I’ll suggest additional ones in the future.

When you have a list of activities you’re looking to prioritize, plot them on a graph looking at their level of urgency and importance and focus on the upper right quadrant.

This task is taken from Paul Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and specifically his third habit, “Put First Things First.”

In explaining time management, he divides the world into four quadrants based on two continuum.  One continuum is whether an activity is important or unimportant.  The second continuum is whether the activity is urgent or not urgent, with urgency about its time-sensitivity.

Covey makes the point that effective individuals figure out how to prioritize those things that are important, but not urgent.  In contrast, ineffective people get caught up in urgent (e.g. time-sensitive), but unimportant tasks.

Here’s what this looks like graphically and applied by me to nonprofit organizations.

Adapted from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits, Page 151

Here are three examples of urgent, but not important activities that often bog organizations down.

• Low performing fundraising events.  Because events come with inherent internal deadlines both in preparing for and running the event, they create artificial time urgency.  Yet, in the long run, many low-performing fundraising events are simply not important to an organization’s financial health.  They create artificial time urgency, but they are not important.
• Spending board time on short-term policy/politics.  Particularly for advocacy-focused nonprofits, board meetings can become dominated by backwards looking gossip about who said what, where things stand, and what the organization should do next week responding to some policy proposal.  It’s urgent in the moment.  But in the scheme of things for an organization’s board, it’s not important, since the board’s role should be focused on strategic governance and resources.

• Leadership attending too many meetings.  I’ve repeatedly been told by Executive Directors that the biggest barrier to their raising more money is carving out the time to do so.  Yet, I then witness them attending meetings where their participation is nice, but of limited importance.  Meetings, because they have territory on a calendar, create an artificial urgency.  It has to be done right now because it’s in the calendar.

In contrast, much of the long-term strategic thinking and relationship building required of successful organizations is never particularly time-sensitive, but it’s critically important.  Effective organizations make those happen even if it means some urgent, but unimportant tasks get jettisoned.

Of course, if a team is doing this exercise, you may need some group process to reach a meeting of the minds.  In one past planning process, I successfully had each member of the team rate the activities being prioritized on both the urgency and importance scales from 1-10 with 10 being highest and then we averaged their ratings.

Regardless of the technique used, even having the conversation using the important/urgency framework can be eye opening to teams.