Jonathan Poisner Strategic Consulting

Four years ago, I wrote about Ticket to Ride, a board game I had become “addicted to” during the pandemic.  My article identified lessons from playing the game that could be applied to nonprofit leadership. (By writing about it, I could justify my addiction).

Now it’s time to share some overlapping lessons from another game that I’ve played a LOT in recent years, Wingspan.

In Wingspan, you compete with others to build the best wildlife refuge. (For my wildlife conservation clients, I know!!!) 

To build your refuge, you collect different types of food, use them to play different birds, lay eggs on those birds, and then, over the course of the game, take actions associated with the different birds, based on the specific combination of birds you have in three habitats: forests, grasslands, and wetlands.

Here are six lessons from Wingspan that I feel nonprofits should consider.  They overlap somewhat with my Ticket to Ride lessons, but with some crucial differences.

Lesson 1: Smaller impact/less effort is sometimes better at the start

The winner of the game is determined by a combination of ways to score points, perhaps the most important of which is the numerical value of the birds you’ve played.  While it’s tempting to immediately play high point birds, lower point birds often are the ones that provide more resources to you when activated over the course of the game. (The higher point birds often just look pretty).  

The nonprofit lesson, especially for those getting going: Don’t always go for the biggest impact right from the start.  (See my recent blog and read the section about the impact/effort matrix). It’s often better to set in motion strategies that take less effort, for less impact, while building resources for a bigger play down the road.

Lesson 2: Search for synergies

In Wingspan, all the birds you play have powers.  For example, one bird when activated may give you a worm.  Another bird may let you permanently cache worms on a bird, which counts as a point at the end of the game.  These birds have more value when played together than just one of them.  It’s usually not the person who plays the “best birds” who wins, so much as the best birds that reinforce each other. 

The nonprofit lesson:  Look for synergies where work done to pursue one outcome also benefits another outcome.  Perhaps your community education reinforces your advocacy work.  Or the content you create for your email newsletter can also extend your social media reach.  Or your advocacy work yields ongoing funding that provides future opportunities for advocacy.

Lesson 3: Focus on a few things

While it’s tempting to build really strong sets of birds in all three habitats (forest, grasslands, and wetlands), my experience is that focusing on just two yields a better result, as you can play more birds in those habitat that build upon each other when activated in succession.  Not that you play zero birds in the third habitat – that rarely works – but focus that habitat on playing higher point birds. 

The nonprofit lesson: Don’t try to do everything equally all at once.  Pick one or two things to do really well and build out from there.

Lesson 4: Don’t chase shiny objects

The game has four rounds and each round has a unique goal that scores points, randomly picked from a large number of possible end of round goals.  These are things like: number of eggs in the forest, or number of birds in the wetland, or number of brown-powered birds (a particular type).  The randomness makes each game unique (or close to it).  The end of round bonuses are large enough they can determine who wins so it’s important to pay attention to them.  But they’re not THAT large.  If you deviate too much from an otherwise strong strategy to win those end of round bonuses, you often come out worse off. 

The nonprofit lesson: This is the equivalent of chasing money (usually from a foundation). It sounds great to get the grant, but if it’s for work that you wouldn’t otherwise want to do, it usually is a distraction from your mission and long-term strategy.

Lesson 5: Adapt to your opposition

There are special pink-colored birds that activate when another player takes certain actions.  Think about the bird that lays its egg in another bird’s nest!  Playing these pink birds can be very powerful.  But that’s only true if you’re paying attention to the other player’s strategy to predict what they’re most likely to do.  And if somebody else plays a pink bird early, you may wish to adjust your strategy to avoid benefiting them too much. 

The nonprofit lesson:  Particularly for advocacy organizations who may have organizations on the “other side” of whatever issue you’re focused on, you shouldn’t just ignore their expected opposition as you plan your activities.  Are there things you expect them to do that you should prepare for ahead of time?  Are there things you should avoid doing because it might boomerang back against you based on their reaction?  What messages are they giving to elected officials and how should you adapt your message in response?

Lesson 6: Sharing is often the best option 

Some birds when activated produce resources not just for yourself, but your opponents. Example: When activated, everyone gets a worm.  Or everyone draws a new bird card.   When I first started playing Wingspan, my competitive instinct took umbrage with playing these “sharing” birds.  But over time I saw that the combination of the bird’s point value and the resources offered often gave me more value than my opponents, particularly if I could use other birds that took advantage of the resources. Also, when playing with the same opponents repeatedly over time, my willingness to play “sharing” birds increased the odds my opponents would do so, sending resources my way.  When more players use these types of birds, overall scores tend to go up.

The nonprofit lesson:  There are things you can do as a nonprofit that benefit you and other nonprofits with which you are sometimes competing (over funding, for example), but with whom you often collaborate (working to advance overlapping missions, for example).  Sometimes the best thing to do is something that advances all the groups with whom you’re allied, even if you’re the one putting in the time/money to do it.  Becoming known as an organization that plays well with others increases the odds you’ll be invited into sharing opportunities in the future, including from funders.

Fancy a game?

There you have it: six lessons for nonprofit leaders from playing Wingspan.  I can now play the game more without feeling guilty.  If anyone is playing it online and looking for an opponent, just email me and we can set up a game while chatting about how Trump is taking the country over the edge into fascist authoritarianism. 

About a decade ago, I posted a blog that suggested how to apply a matrix approach in organizational decision-making.

The blog examined a time-management technique originally generated by Stephen Covey in his seminal book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  The technique involved assigning all tasks into one of four quadrants based on two axes.  The vertical axis was “important” versus “unimportant.”  The horizontal access was urgent (from a time perspective) and non-urgent. 

Here’s what the matrix looked like as I adapted it from Covey’s Seven Habits (page 151).

The obvious solution applied to organizations (and individuals) is to do away with everything you can that is both unimportant and non-urgent.  That requires discipline. 

The big aha moment (at least for me) was the necessity of addressing the upper righthand quadrant by forcing yourself to spend time addressing items that are important, but where there is never time urgency. 

This tool can be useful for both individuals in how they manage their own time and organizations in how they prioritize staff and board time.   

I recently came across two similar quadrant approaches that are also useful both for individuals and organizations when it comes to making decisions about where to focus time (including what programs/strategies to take on). 

Technique one: The Impact-Effort Matrix.

Technique two: The Impact-Achievability Matrix.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The Impact-Effort Matrix

The Impact-Effort Matrix, like Covey’s time management matrix, has a vertical access of Important versus unimportant (although the term impact is used as a substitute for importance).  The horizontal impact focuses on the level of effort needed to achieve the outcome (a lot of effort versus not much effort).

Of course, in the nonprofit context, “effort” often equates to dollars.  If something requires more effort, that usually equates to time, and money can buy more time (staff-time, contractor time, etc.).

This is what the Impact-Effort Matrix looks like:

Like with the importance-urgency matrix, one quadrant (the lower right) is easy to dismiss: stop doing things that have little impact, but require a lot of effort.  Often times these are things you’re doing because “that’s what we’ve always done.”  Maybe the activity once had a high impact.  Or maybe changes in the landscape have made the activity take far more effort than previously.

It’s also pretty straightforward to prioritize time towards activities that are in the upper left quadrant (high impact, low effort).  This should be the focus of brainstorms about new things your organization may wish to take on.  What are the things that will have the biggest impact for the level of effort required?

What about the other two quadrants? 

• High Impact/High Effort (the upper right) – Clearly you need to do some in this quadrant because the high impact may justify the level of effort.  These may be activities your supporters care about and want to see done.  For these activities, the primary question I’d ask is: can we accomplish the same result with less effort if we change how we approach the program/strategy? 
  
  
• Low Impact/Low Effort (the lower left) – Think about whether there are secondary ways where you can create impact beyond the primary reason (e.g. impact you’re trying to create) from doing the activity/strategy.  Are there ways to generate excess funding from the activity?  Or some communications/branding benefit? 

In a nutshell:

The Impact-Achievability Matrix

This is very loosely related to Impact-Effort matrix, since what’s achievable can depend on the level of effort applied. 

Nonetheless, I find “achievability” a more useful term than “effort” when evaluating situations where the level of effort is not the major determinant on whether something is achievable. 

This is often the case in advocacy/lobbying context where many of my clients do their work.  

Again, the easy advice is: do more things that are high impact, easy to achieve (upper right quadrant).

Likewise, it’s also easy to advise nonprofits to stop doing things that are low impact and difficult to achieve (lower left quadrant).

For the low impact, high achievability (lower right quadrant), doing some of this activity/strategy is worthwhile as an insurance to be able to have some “wins” or “success stories” you can point to, even if they are low impact.  But if that’s all you ever do, you’re probably not advancing your mission to a significant degree.

For the high impact, low achievability (upper left quadrant), you sometimes do need to roll the dice and take chances to make a big impact, even if success is less likely.  The question I’d ask is: are we designing the work so that we’re building organizational capacity so that even if we “lose” or “fail to achieve” what we set out to, we’re nonetheless positioning ourselves to win future “fights” or make success more achievable further down the road.  Will we come out of the activity with more volunteers, more donors, new skills, a better brand, etc.?  And are we designing the work to maximize the odds we’ll gain these ancillary benefits?

In a nutshell:

So when do you use these tools?  And do you use them in combination?

I’ve used these tools one at a time, rather than creating some more complicated scheme.  I’d be curious to hear if anybody has had success creating some 3-D matrix that pulls from multiple of these tools. 

If you’ve never used these tools, I’d pick the matrix that seems most relevant to your organization and try it out as a decision-making tool.  This could be as part of strategic planning, annual organizational work planning, or just as a tool used by an individual to focus their own time.

Of course, all three matrixes are worthless if the organization tends to misevaluate what’s important!  Or what will make the biggest impact!    

How to evaluate what’s important/impactful will be a focus of a future article.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about effective coalitions, , since I’ve been hired to launch a couple in the last year and facilitated meetings of a third.  Actually, I’ve been thinking about this topic for 25 years as coalitions have been at the forefront of my professional career, both when I was working as a nonprofit Executive Director and as a consultant.

I was looking back at a PowerPoint I created several years ago about effective coalitions and realized I’d never taken the time to update it and present it in written form.

So here for your reading please is some of my top advice when it comes to how to build and sustain an effective coalition.  Since much of my career has involved nonprofits for whom advocacy on public policy is a major component, this article is heavily weighted towards coalitions in the advocacy context.

In the article, I’ll discuss best practices for launching a coalition, some thoughts on different types of coalitions, and best practices for sustaining a coalition.

But first, an obvious first question: what is a coalition?  My simplest use of the term for purposes of this article: any effort involving more than two organizations choosing to work together for some shared purpose beyond just a one-time event/project.  By this token, I’m using the word coalition for a catch-all term that could encompass structures that may go by a different name, such as network, alliance, partnership, etc.

Best practices for launching a coalition

Step 1: Determine and start with the core.  This is everyone who has to be involved, not necessarily everyone who’ll ultimately be invited.  Who are the organizations who you’d consider essential?

Step 2: Take the core’s temperature.  This is best done in a series of one-on-one conversations.  In my experience, you’re more likely to get candor one-on-one.  If there aren’t at least a few people enthusiastic, it’s okay to pull the plug at this stage.

Step 3: Meet to answer 5 key questions.  This could happen at a single meeting, but I find it often takes two meetings, and I’ve been involved in at least one coalition where it took four.

Question 1: What’s the purpose of the coalition?   Is it around a specific policy outcome with a defined period of time to pass it or a topic area where the coalition would want to make progress over time?  Or is it about building capacity of the coalition’s members, irrespective of any policy goal?

Question2: What type of coalition makes sense given the purpose?  I’ll discuss this question further below. 

It’s a really good idea to put the answers to Questions 1 and 2 into writing.

Question 3: Given the purpose and type of coalition, what system of decision-making makes sense? 

Question 4: What is/are the initial priority or priorities for coordinated work?  If there’s no shared initial action to take in the next year, it’s probably premature to launch.

Question 5: Where will the resources come for the collective work?  Are you counting on additional outside resources to flow into the coalition?  Will coalition participants pool funds in some way and then hire/contract with someone to coordinate/lead?  Or will coalition members directly expend resources to do the work?

More on types of coalitions

There are many types of coalitions, but I find they usually fit into one of five categories.

Networks are when organizations that come together with the primary purpose of sharing information to allow for ad hoc coordination where interests overlap, so as to decrease duplication of effort and identify opportunities for greater impact. 

Associations are when organizations come together to advance the long-term interest of their members, with a primary focus on building up the capacity of the members, via shared resources and shared capacity building.

Coordinated projects are when organizations come together to advance a very specific project.  Obviously, if it’s a really simple, short-term project, you wouldn’t need a coalition. So presumably these would be complex, longer-term projects. It could be advocacy focused (e.g. pass a bill) or it could be generating more public attention to an issue (e.g. such as issuing a shared report).  

Campaign coalitions are a special type of Coordinated Project that usually involves advocacy around a fixed deadline, such as an election or the end of a Legislative Session. 

Strategic Alliances are when organizations come together around an issue or related set of issues where they hope to make progress over an extended period of time. Example: reduce air pollution in Oregon. A strategic alliance may spawn campaign coalitions or coordinated projects that involve other participants who aren’t part of the overall alliance.  

Extensions of a lead organization are when organizations come together under the leadership of a single, well-funded organization using a coalition structure to advance an outcome, and the other organizations are just fine playing a more supportive role. 

How do you decide which is appropriate?

Focus on the why behind the coalition.  Discuss and pick the most appropriate, but don’t feel you have to stay constrained by the options above.  You can create your own model.  Just be sure that the participants are in alignment about what you’re doing and why.

Why do some coalition launches fail?

In my experience, the number one reason is lack of individual leadership.  That’s partly why taking the temperature of the core is essential up-front.  I was once hired to help launch a coalition and we skipped the one-on-ones up-front and went straight to holding two initial meetings.  Everyone agreed upon the purpose, the type of coalition, governance, and an initial policy priority.  But then it fell apart. 

Why? Because nobody was prepared to lead.  The group instigating the initial meeting (and who paid me) assumed someone else would step up.  Nobody would agree to chair the coalition, plan for the meetings, or make it a major focus. 

Some individual with at least one of the groups needs to “own” a sense of responsibility and have sufficient time to invest to lead.

Sustaining coalitions

I see five keys: communications, power, planning, behavior, and personal relationships.

Communications: Failure to communicate internally can lead to schisms, with insiders and outsiders.  There needs to be enough meetings and materials shared between meetings, but not so many to bog things down.

Power: Not all coalition partners are equal, especially if the members of the coalition include some of very different organizational size/capacity.  In my experience, it’s best to be open in acknowledging such imbalances when setting up the governance.  There’s no one right answer to how to address power imbalances, but in my experience it’s best to openly discuss them than pretend they don’t exist.

Planning systems:  Like with individual organizations, failure to plan is planning to fail.  It’s really important to have agreement on the major strategies being pursued.  Not all members of the coalition will have the same strategic orientation, so it’s best to openly discuss this and hopefully reach alignment.

Any coalition planning should also establish an intention regarding whether to add/grow the coalition.  Coalition growth is not valuable for its own sake.  Be clear on why you’re going to invite others if that’s the intent.

Whatever planning should engage the participants who’re going to be counted on to implement it.  That means setting aside the time to do this planning. I’ve seen coalitions go seriously awry because they launched too precipitously into action and discovered too late that the coalition members were fundamentally at odd as to their overall strategy.

Behavior: The two most common things that can go wrong here are lack of transparency – where some coalition partners are keeping things to themselves, and confidentiality – where some coalition partners intentionally or inadvertently share information externally that was meant to be internal.   Another challenge can be around taking and sharing credit.  Having an open conversation about this can be helpful.

Of course, while you can come up with codes of conduct, norms around communications, or other techniques to address behavior, personal behavior also matters.  I saw one coalition really struggle because the person assigned to participate from one of the leading participants was just plain rude in how he treated people (he was not self-aware and I’m convinced he didn’t realize his tone and manner was consistently rude). It made people not want to work as part of the coalition anymore.

Relationships matter: The flip side to the example of a rude person shutting down a coalition is that coalitions function better when the participants get to know and like each other as individuals. Finding some opportunities for coalition participants to interact beyond the confines of coalition meetings can be really valuable for the long-term health of a coalition.

Do you have advice of your own to offer when it comes to launching or sustaining a coalition? Please share it with a comment!