Five Lessons for Effective Staff Management

April 22, 2025

Filed under: Human Resources,Leadership,Uncategorized — jonathanpoisner @ 2:30 pm

Business author Jim Collins, in his monograph Good to Great and the Social Sectors identified getting the “right people on the bus” as a core attribute of highly functioning nonprofits.

Of course, once you get the right people on the bus, there are many elements that go into turning them into an aligned, effective team that advances your mission. 

I was recently asked to summarize some of my past writing on nonprofit leadership as a guide for Executive Directors who’re building staff teams. At a high-level, here are five lessons that I believe every nonprofit Executive Director should take into account when building their team.

Lesson 1: Prioritize building on strengths instead of mitigating weaknesses

All employees have areas of strength and areas that, for lack of a better term, are weaknesses when it comes to delivering on their intended role.   Instead of focusing on mitigating weaknesses, my experience has been that identifying strengths and adapting work to take advantage of those strengths better maximizes team performance and results in higher job satisfaction for employees. 

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t identify weaknesses or blind spots with employees that can be worked on.  But more of your time and energy should go into aligning the work with employees’ inherent talents. 

Lesson 2: Foster Autonomy and Mastery as Motivational Tools

By and large, the nonprofit sector more than the for-profit sector can rely on the nonprofit’s mission as a built-in motivator for employees.  Almost always those employees motivated by money or status could better achieve those in the for-profit sector.

Yet, even with the mission as motivator, I’ve seen huge differences in nonprofit employee satisfaction.

Dan Pink has written and lectured about motivation in a broader context and highlights the concepts of autonomy and mastery as key.  Nonprofit leaders should keep these in mind when thinking about their own staff supervision.  (Here’s a video for more background).

Autonomy: Employees who have freedom to make decisions within the a broad strategic framework are more likely to be motivated than those who are continually constrained to simply implement decisions made by others. 

Mastery: Employees who have the opportunity to develop and exercise expertise are more likely to stay motivated than those who feel like they’re able to go through the motions.

Lesson 3: Building and Sustaining Relationships

Strong interpersonal relationships are vital for effective staff management.  People are more likely to respond well to those who they like and trust and to dig deeper to help a team with which they feel a sense of community.

That can all emerge spontaneously, but leaders who nurture relationships are more likely to succeed.  That means not neglecting regular activities that are designed to further the relationship, including both one-on-ones in the workplace and opportunities to engage beyond the workplace.  That doesn’t mean you have to become “friends” with those you supervise.  It does mean consciously working to draw connections within your staff based on open communication and opportunities to engage in informal activities.

Lesson 4: Time Management Matters

Time is a precious commodity in any organization as most nonprofit staff could probably work twice as many hours as they’re being paid for without running out of productive things to do.

To address that, choices need to be made as to where to prioritize time, preferably by looking at a strategic plan or other functional plan that identifies goals and top strategies for achieving them.

Even within those choices, too many nonprofits waste time and fail to adapt tools to save time.

Several time wasters relate to meetings:

  • Overly long meetings that could be done in half the time if there was a clear agenda, active facilitation, and a willingness to call the question rather than allow people to drone on.
  • Unnecessary meetings that could be eliminated with a few short emails and/or shared document editing.
  • Meetings that involve several people that really only need 2-3 participants. 
  • Executive Directors who feel compelled to be the organization’s face at every partner/allied organization meeting when they should be delegating that role to others.

There are also tools to save time that many nonprofits fail to use. Mostly these fall into the area of technology.  I’ve been amazing that in this day and age some nonprofits are still having multiple people edit Word documents sequentially rather than adapting to tools that allow for multiple people to collaborate at the same time (such as GoogleDocs).  Project management tools (like Asana, Trello, etc.) and communications platforms (like Slack) can also allow for a lot of project planning and task list accountability in ways that cut back significantly on the need for drafting/reading/responding to emails and meetings.

Lesson 5: Embrace Strategic and Functional Planning

I’ve seen too many nonprofits whose staff are frenetically doing lots of things, but those things are not strategic and thus not advancing goals. While this can bring temporary satisfaction to a team, it rarely does so over the long haul. 

While they serve other purposes as well, do not underestimate the value of strategic and other forms of planning as a staff management tool. 

  • They are a means of honing your staff’s thinking, to the extent you involve staff in this planning.
  • They are way to bring your staff into alignment (with each other and with the board), so their work is less likely to be at cross-purposes.
  • They produce products that are invaluable as orientation tools when you have staff transitions.

What do you think?

If you have a high-level staff management lesson you’d like to share with my readers, please comment away! Or shoot me an email for me to incorporate in an updated post.

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Short-term planning and project management 101

March 31, 2025

Filed under: Human Resources,Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 10:47 am

As a strategic planning consultant, I focus a lot of my energy on helping groups grapple with a 2-5 year time-frame.  Too often we’re so focused on the current moment that we never look beyond to define who we are, where we want to go, how to get there, and how we’ll measure progress. 

Yet, even as I write that sentence, I know that the current moment matters.  This year perhaps more than most. 

And as I talk to Executive Directors, I often find a haphazard approach to how they prioritize their work and track their to-dos on a daily or weekly basis.

Nonprofit leaders – more than just Executive Directors – need workable systems for short-term planning and to-do management.

Too many just wing it.

I recently was challenged to describe the elements of a useful system.

Here are four essential requirements for a nonprofit short-term planning and accountability system

1. Tracking to-dos

This is the basic building block.  This should include a nutshell version of the task, an opportunity to provide more details (preferably with a hyperlink to external information of relevance), a due date, and the ability to track progress (including marking the item as completed when appropriate).

As tasks are completed, they should be archived, but not deleted, so that it remains possible to search them or even reopen them if it turns out something wasn’t actually completed.

Ideally the system should allow for recurring to-dos, that automatically get a new due date upon completion of the prior one or that always occur on specific dates of the week, month, etc.

2. Project level organization of tasks

A flat to-do list with hundreds of tasks (as most Executive Directors probably could identify if pushed) can feel overwhelming and makes forward-looking planning challenging.

Ideally tasks should be categorizable by a list of “projects.”  I’m using the word project largely because the various online systems that can be used are often referred to as “project management” tools. 

For most nonprofit Executive Directors, the projects might be the bigger categories of their work (fundraising, board governance, fiscal management, communications, etc.).

Ideally, the projects should be able to be broken down into sub-projects, so that fundraising from individuals can be kept separate from grant fundraising.

The point of breaking things down into categories is so that you have the opportunity to view all your tasks either as one long list, presumably sorted by due date, or alternatively to just see all your tasks within a specific project – or even sub-project. 

While the long daily task list is great for when you start your day and want to see what needs to be done,  the “project” view is nearly essential when it comes to forward-looking planning that involves adding things systematically to your to-do list. 

Did you just schedule your next board meeting?  Take 5 minutes to add all the tasks associated with the upcoming board meeting (crafting the agenda, pulling together materials, sharing the agenda, etc.).   Did you just get invited to submit a grant proposal, take 5 minutes to add all the tasks associated with pulling together the proposal and accompanying materials. 

Yes, you could do this with an entirely flat list, but it’s much easier to think of all the to-dos when you’re looking at a partial list focused on just that project.

I used to accomplish the above in an Excel spreadsheet where I had a column for the broad area of work, a column for the task, and a due date column.  I could sort the Excel spreadsheet either by due date or by the broad area of work and also due date.  And then re-sort back when appropriate.

Of course, in the pre-computer age you could also accomplish this with detailed handwritten notebooks. 

3. Collaboration

While the above three requirements are sufficient for an individual, organizations are team endeavors and whatever system you utilize needs to provide some means by which multiple individuals within the team can share with each other what they’re working on and even collaborate on the same projects and to-dos.  This is where the dozen or so most robust online project-management tools really shine.

Reassigning tasks, sharing deadlines, showing how task A by person A needs to take place before person B can begin Task B, sharing links/comments on tasks taken on by others.  These are just a handful of the most basic boosts to collaboration that can now be secured at a very low cost.  I can only wish these tools had been realistically available in my years as an Executive Director leading a team!  

Getting everyone onto the same system and getting them to use it isn’t necessarily a hill to die on, but if I were a nonprofit leader I’d push really hard to make that happen, absent a really compelling reason otherwise.

4. Some connection to longer-term planning

The above system is a great way to plan for and accomplish a lot of things.  But how do you know that you’re prioritizing the right things?  When you’re an Executive Director staring at the long to-do list and realizing that 3 out of the 10 things you put into your to-do list for the week you’re just not going to be able to do, what gets triaged?

Or better yet, never gets put in at all because you’re thinking about your own capacity as you identify to-dos.

Whether it’s a strategic plan or some other tool, you (and your team) need some method to identify priorities.  This may show up in your project management system where you pre-identify the essential tasks from the “icing on the cake” tasks. 

What system to use?  There’s nothing magic here.  But having alignment around your broad, long-term aims, the major methods you’ve identified to advance those aims, and how to measure progress is a great start. 

Then taking stock – probably monthly – and saying: what’s most important in the next month or two?

Then going back to your project management system and verifying that the things you want to prioritize are definitely incorporated into your projects/tasks. And perhaps deleting or moving out in time those tasks that you’d still like to eventually do, but that aren’t priorities in the short or medium-term.

Is this too much planning?

I can already hear a couple people I’ve known saying: “Who has time to do all that planning? As an Executive Director, if I’m not running 100%, things will fall apart.” 

My response: Better to spend 4 hours/week planning and 36 hours/week doing.   You may do 10% less “activity,” but you can feel far more confident that you’re doing the right activity, especially in alignment with your team. You’re also far more likely to be proactive than reactive to events.

In my experience, leaders who operate with a higher degree of planning and project management also feel less stress.  Not zero stress.  But less, because they can more easily take stock and see with their own eyes what needs to be done by when and make adjustments accordingly, rather than relying on intuition and hope. This means less burnout and a longer-term ability to stay in the role.

If you have specific project management tools or approaches you recommend for others, please share as a comment!

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Staying Grounded in Dangerous Times #2

March 26, 2025

Filed under: Advocacy,Leadership,Politics — jonathanpoisner @ 10:30 am

February 28, 2025

I wrote my last email less than a week into our current wannabe dictator’s Term.

Now I can say: one month down, 47 to go.  Sigh.  

Last month, I noted that it felt wrong to put out an e-newsletter as if the world hadn’t changed fundamentally for nonprofits.

Of course, there are thousands of nonprofits right now struggling to survive as illegal and/or callous decisions seek to claw back their grants and contracts.  This is especially true for those involved in US AID and those reliant on funds related to the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act’s climate spending  If you’re among them, I feel your pain and hope you’ve found a way to get the legal and other support you need.  

For those of you who have yet to have your own funds cut, how do you react?  

Three bits of quick advice this month:

1. Reach out to your friends who’re struggling, either financially or emotionally.  We are stronger together.  

2. Speak out. Whether that’s calling your members of Congress (daily), writing letters to the editor, speaking out at town halls, or some other activity.  Now’s not the time to cower. 

3.  Be realistic about your own nonprofit’s fundraising.  I know a lot of groups whose annual budgets called for growth this year.  I’m not saying it won’t happen, particularly if you had solid plans and had investments (of time in particular) in place to actually do more fundraising.  Recognize there’s a very strong chance that increased inflation and massive layoffs, among with the business uncertainty engendered by chaos, will equal a recession. 

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The Leadership + Plan + Team formula

March 6, 2025

Filed under: Human Resources,Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 10:45 am

One of the lessons I took away from the last few years is what I’ve come to think of as the Leadership + Plan + Team formula.

Organizations lacking any one of these elements are unlikely to thrive on a sustained basis.

Leader + Plan but No Team: I’ve seen leaders who’re personally impressive and have a plan, but who don’t cultivate a team around them. The result is an organization that thrives in fits and starts, but not on a sustained basis because there’s only so much one person can do.   The organizational challenge becomes particularly acute when the leader in question decides to move on.  

Leader + Team but no Plan: I’ve seen leaders who’re personally impressive and do cultivate a team around them, but who never take the time to develop and use a long-term plan.  The result is an organization that does a lot of things, many of them well, but the lack of planned focus leads to lots of activity, but often misaligned and poorly thought out.     

Team + Plan but no Leader: I’ve seen great teams, who have a focused plan, but who fail to secure a top leader who has the leadership skills to attract new resources around their shared vision and to keep the team aligned over time.  The result is an organization that chugs along, but doesn’t shine.

Every example I can think of a nonprofit that thrives over a sustained period of many years the formula has always included Leadership + Plan + Team.

If you see your organization missing one of these elements, address it.  Don’t wait for the situation to somehow resolve itself. 

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Don’t drop the glass balls

January 29, 2025

Filed under: Human Resources,Leadership,Strategic Planning — Tags: , , , — jonathanpoisner @ 11:13 am

A client recently used the following phrase when discussing the challenge of being an Executive Director.

“I’m constantly juggling balls.  Too many to keep in the air.  The key is knowing which balls are glass and which balls are plastic.”

I loved the metaphor and doing some online sleuthing believe it originated with the author Norah Roberts, who used it to discuss the challenge of being a successful writer and raising kids

I’ve thought about the metaphor and would like to suggest several implications for how a nonprofit leader should approach their work.

Bottom line: there are steps you can take to be an excellent nonprofit juggler who rarely (or never) drops a glass ball.

About the Metaphor

The metaphor is pretty self-explanatory.  Drop a glass ball and it shatters.  Drop a plastic ball and it doesn’t.  The plastic ones can be retrieved and picked back up if necessary, or perhaps kicked out of the way if unnecessary.

Glass balls are your tasks where mishandling them would have significant consequences.  Plastic balls, in contrast, might be annoying to “drop,” but the consequences would be comparatively minor.

Of course, if you’re a nonprofit Executive Director (or anywhere in nonprofit management), you’re not just juggling your own balls.  You’re also setting in motion members of your team (at least those you supervise) to juggle their own balls.

So even as you have to scan the balls to make sure your own glass balls don’t drop, you also have to be cognizant of who among your team has glass balls that are at risk of being dropped.

Of course, you might say: “well the answer is to just never drop a ball.”  And I’d say: “good luck with that.”  Seriously, I’ve never seen an executive doing their job who isn’t consistently faced with triaging tasks to either let them go entirely or to push them off to some future date.

Distinguishing Glass from Plastic Balls

As you scan your tasks, identify which ones are glass.

Here are some examples of glass balls: 

  • Key activities for mission-critical programs.  If these go awry, it would significantly detract from your mission impact.
  • Activities where failure could seriously harm the reputation of the organization, thus threatening its future funding. 
  • Key donor relationships.  Work to maintain those relationships can be thought of as a series of glass balls.  Plus, activities of the organization that any of your very top donors particularly prioritize. 
  • Financial oversight, to some extent.  Not every task within your fiscal management system represents a glass ball.  But collectively, ensuring reasonably accurate, reasonably timely financial reporting definitely would count.
  • Losing top-notch staff.  Dropping balls that could cause your top staff to leave would fit in this category, as would loading up those staff with so many balls of their own that they feel compelled to leave.

Dropping these glass balls can lead to irreversible damage, loss of trust, financial instability, or failure to advance the mission.

What are your plastic balls?

They can be important too, but failure (or neglect of them) won’t be so harmful.

  • Many minor administrative tasks would fit into this. 
  • Meetings where your participation would be nice, but is not essential.
  • Minor events.  You want these to happen, and of course you want them to go well, but if you have to either cancel them or let them go forward in a middling way, there’s no permanent harm.

How to avoid dropping glass balls

Here are a handful of strategies to consider:

1. Don’t juggle so many balls!

This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to overlook. 

Use work plans to lay out what tasks you’re taking on and don’t commit to activities that are beyond what’s realistic.  If something emerges new, can you safely offload something else (in our metaphor, catch a plastic ball and either hand it over to another juggler to handle)?

This applies not just to you, but also the people you manage and their balls.  Don’t establish expectations that are unrealistic. That’s hard to do unless you require some level of work planning by them from which you can help them assess and manage their work and workload.

2. Don’t try to make the perfect throw every time

Juggling (literal juggling, not metaphorical) is something I learned to do at a summer camp as a teenager.  One of the things I had to learn was to get the basics down of the throwing motion, but not be so focused on the perfect throw that I wasn’t simultaneously able to track where the other balls were and prepare to catch/throw them.

Perfectionism is a common failing that many people face when it comes to how they approach tasks.  As a nonprofit leader, I often found that I could accomplish 90% of the benefit of a task at 60% of the time necessary. The remaining 40% of the time might get me to perfection, but that time was unavailable for other projects.

3. Use technology/tools to track your balls

In the real world, juggling balls blindfolded is beyond challenging.

Yet, I sometimes see nonprofit leaders who aren’t blindfolding themselves, but are definitely hamstringing themselves by not continually tracking and planning for their tasks.

Just last year I was asking a nonprofit leader how they organized their work day/week and pretty much it was: I show up to work, do what’s in my calendar, and respond to emails.  I wasn’t surprised to hear that balls were being dropped.

Back in the olden days when I was an Executive Director in the late 1990s, I relied on a paper “Franklin Planner” (bonus points for anyone who remembers those!) to keep meticulous notes around to-dos, organized within major categories and tied to a calendar.

As soon as possible, I gravitated to computer solutions, which at first for me were Excel spreadsheets that I used to keep track of the “balls” and could identify those that were critical.  I didn’t know the glass/plastic ball analogy, but I behaved like I did by bolding some spreadsheet rows to emphasize their importance.

About 15 years ago, I moved to online project management systems.  For the last 5 years I’ve been very dependent on Asana.  I use it to plan and track projects, activities within those projects, sub-tasks within the activities, etc.  I use priority-level settings to identify my “glass balls” as a consultant.  

Every day begins by looking at what I have to-do.  When any task is completed, I return to Asana to mark it done and immediately create any new follow-up tasks that are appropriate.  When I agree to take on new projects or tasks, I’m in Asana within a day or two laying out the tasks needed on a timeline.

I’m not telling you to be as relentless in using a tool like this as I am.  But you need to have some tool and don’t just use it half-heartedly.

Bottom line: if you’re not consciously identifying your balls and tracking their flight, you’re a lot more likely to drop one.

4. Consciously remove or let drop balls, particularly plastic ones

As a nonprofit leader, you should be regularly identifying plastic balls (or even glass!) that you can catch and hand over to someone else on your team.

Some balls you may not be able to delegate, but if you’re feeling out of control, you can still consciously catch the ball and instead of immediately rethrowing it as a juggler, you can set it on the counter next to you, to be picked up later. 

Of course, some balls are still dropped.  That’s okay.  When a ball does drop, it’s important to be aware of it, though, so you can perhaps kick it off to the side in a deliberate manner, so it doesn’t get underfoot and trip you up. 

Whether you’re temporarily setting a ball aside or dropping/kicking it off to the side, be sure and communicate to anyone else who had expectations you’d complete something that it’s going to be delayed.  (Note: some technology tools make this really easy!).

5. Recognize that some plastic balls can turn into glass

The same task may change on you over time.  Board recruitment at a time you have a really strong board may be plastic as a ball, but if you neglect the task for too long, it may become glass as your board strength deteriorates. 

So don’t just think about the relative level of importance of tasks as you take them on initially, but rather have some sort of process on a periodic basis (quarterly?) to spend a few hours taking a harder look at your overall work plan and see if anything needs more attention than you had originally envisioned.

6. Get help learning how to be a better juggler

You can juggle more balls if you’re a better juggler. And some of that is just practice.

But you can also get training to be better and handle more.  Sometimes finding time to get professional development is absolutely worthwhile to be a more effective juggler. 

In my early years as an Executive Director, I had the benefit of a lot of training thanks to a national organization with which we were affiliated. Those trainings absolutely set me up for greater levels of success, even as the time spent at the training meant I had to juggler fewer balls in the short-run (setting some aside).

Where the metaphor breaks down

I think the analogy breaks down, in part, because it may lead you to focus too much on the urgent things (that seem like glass balls), while plastic balls that are really important get neglected. 

Paul Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People wrote about a time management technique that divides tasks into four quadrants.  One axis is urgent versus non-urgent, with urgency about time sensitivity.  The other quadrant is important versus non-important.

The challenge for some executives is they fail to work on things that are important, but not urgent.  Because of the lack of time sensitivity, you may feel the ball isn’t glass.  Or you may see the ball is really high in the air so there’s just plenty of time to get to it.

Even as you think about the glass v. plastic ball metaphor, I’d encourage you to also recognize that some types of relationship-building, planning, etc. represent a series of activities that may individually be “plastic” balls, but collectively they are “glass.” Drop one or two, no biggie. Drop most or all, that’s big.

So recognize that you can’t just focus on this one management technique, but apply it in the context of others that make sure you’re focusing on the right things.

Feedback

As always, please share your thoughts on this metaphor or techniques you use to either distinguish between more important and less important tasks or to avoid “dropping glass balls.”

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Scary Nonprofit Quotes 2024

October 24, 2024

Filed under: Board Development,Communications,Fundraising,Human Resources,Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 3:04 pm

Welcome to the 3rd not-quite annual edition of Scary Nonprofit Quotes.

I authored the original edition in 2021 as Halloween approached and a follow-up in 2022.  After a one-year hiatus, I’m back.

I’ve wracked my brain and reviewed notes from the year. So without further adieu, here are the scariest things I’ve heard uttered by nonprofit leaders during the last couple of years.  Some of these may seem made up, but they’re not!

If you have a scary quote of your own, please add them as comments!

Scary Quotes, 2024 Edition

  1. I knew 10 years ago our fundraising database was a mess and needed to be replaced, but it just never seemed like the right time.

  2. I know this is what most of the people we had you interview said, but I don’t think they get nonprofits.  (Note: the people interviewed actually had more nonprofit experience than the board chair who uttered this].

  3. I can’t continue to be board chair of this organization unless the organization starts paying me as a contractor.

  4. I don’t believe we should work with deadlines or agreed upon objectives. 

  5. I don’t use talking points or write up what I’m going to say at our fundraising events. I prefer to wing it.   I’m not sure I could tell you what I said after the fact. 

  6. I know it’s a headache, but I’ll just leave that to the next Executive Director to deal with [after I leave in about 2 years].

  7. I don’t care if our board minutes are accurate.  Nobody will ever read them.

  8. I like to just use general topics for meeting agendas rather than specific questions.  I prefer to just let the meeting unfold.

  9. High staff turnover is something we just have to accept given we’re a nonprofit and therefore don’t pay well.

  10. I think I should be able to bring my wife to the board meeting. [notwithstanding the confidential information/topics that will be covered].

Let’s do a poll!  Please vote for your favorite Scary Quote of 2024.  I’ll be sure to post the results on Halloween. 

Please also comment if you have your own scary quotes you’d like to share!

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Why volunteers before how volunteers

September 25, 2024

Filed under: Advocacy,Board Development,Human Resources,Leadership,Strategic Planning,Uncategorized,Volunteers — jonathanpoisner @ 3:32 pm

With a few exceptions, the vast majority of nonprofits with which I’ve worked have viewed volunteers as both an important resource and strategy. 

Almost always, they immediately get to the question: how do we get volunteers?

In my experience, if you start by answering that question, you’re getting off on the wrong foot.

Instead, you should first ask the question: why volunteers?

How you go about getting volunteers will greatly impact what types of volunteers you secure.    You may recruit lots in raw numbers, but not meet your needs.

At the same time, understanding why you want volunteers will help you identify the right recruitment priorities.

So before designing the how, start with the why.

And to answer the why, I generally counsel asking two other questions in combination:

First, what do you most want out of your volunteers?

Second, what level of volunteer do you need?

Let’s take those questions in turn.

What do you most want out of your volunteers?

Here are five potential reasons I’ve experienced first-hand:

  1. To do the work staff just can’t get around to doing (either back-end administration/fundraising or programmatic).   The most recent statistic I found (from 2021) featured 60.7 million adults volunteering 4.1 billion hours.   A well-designed volunteer program should get more work done than could be done with the staff time necessary to recruit the volunteers.

  2. To be authentic voices.   Whether in fundraising or program, volunteers can speak authentically in ways that staff simply can’t. 

  3. To tap into their relationships.  Relationships drive fundraising, volunteer recruitment, advocacy, and other areas where nonprofits often focus.  Volunteers bring with them all of their relationships with friends, colleagues, etc. and can likely be heard by those people in ways that aren’t possible if the organization were to communicate with them directly. 

  4. As sources of local knowledge.  Particularly if your organization is trying to make a difference over a relatively large geography, volunteers are uniquely positioned to become your eyes and ears on the ground to help you make sure you deploy your resources in their geography in ways that will work.

  5. As sources of specialized expertise.  Whether it be graphic design, accounting, information technology, or a dozen other areas, organizations can sometimes meet their needs for technical expertise through high-level volunteers that save them money.

There is also a second question worth asking:  what level of volunteer do you need?

My very crude short-hand is there are three levels of volunteerism: participants, activity leaders, and organizational leaders.

Participants show up and do something for you.   Often just once, but sometimes repeatedly.   This is the bread and butter of many volunteer programs, particularly if they aim to generate lots of activity.  This looks wildly different based on the type of nonprofit.  A conservation nonprofit might have tree planting or cleanups.  An advocacy nonprofit (no matter the topic) might have phone banks or door-to-door canvassing. 

Activity leaders are the next level up: these volunteers are willing to lead all or part of some activity.  They may provide the training for participants, they may provide food for a fundraiser, they may take responsibility to recruit other volunteers, to cite just a few examples.

Organizational leaders take ownership for the long-term health of the group, overseeing either a series of activities or overall organizational health.  Board members are inherently organizational leaders if they’re doing their job.  But nonprofits shouldn’t assume that only board members will fulfill organizational leadership roles.  Other volunteers can be cultivated and given non-board authority in ways that allow them to take on organizational leadership as volunteers.

After answering these questions, it’s now appropriate to go back and set up a program that answers the how of volunteer recruitment.

If what you most need is local knowledge from people who’ll take organizational leadership, it argues for a very different volunteer recruitment strategy than if what you need most are activity participants who’ll do basic grunt work.

In a future blog entry or article, I’ll write more about effective volunteer recruitment programs.

But no matter your skill-set at recruitment, you’ll go further in setting up your program if you start by answering the question why.

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Building and Sustaining Effective Coalitions

June 28, 2024

Filed under: Advocacy,Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 2:47 pm

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!

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Nonprofit dashboards 101

May 30, 2024

Filed under: Board Development,Fundraising,Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 11:41 am

The phrase “Nonprofit Dashboard” is not one I recall hearing in my first decade in the nonprofit sector (1994-2004).  Then, a few years into the new millennium, I started to hear the phrase occasionally.  By the early 2010s, I started to hear the phrase frequently.  

Dashboards have emerged as a tool for nonprofits because most organizations have far more data about their own performance than their counterparts two decades ago (or longer).  In addition, tools for graphically displaying data have become commonplace, embedded within programs we already use like Excel. 

But Dashboards aren’t something that are right for every nonprofit and doing them right requires serious thinking.

So what is a Nonprofit Dashboard? 

The term Dashboard is used because the tool is analogous to a car dashboard – a quick, comprehensive view of the overall status of the car.  In the organizational context, a Dashboard is usually a 1-3 page document, produced on a regular schedule, which uses a combination of tables, charts, and graphs to visually represent key metrics by which an organization is evaluating itself.  

While Dashboards can be focused solely on a specific program or other activity (e.g. fundraising), more often organizations develop Dashboards that are comprehensive with regards to their organization.

Why create a Dashboard? 

Do staff really need one more report on their to-do list?

Dashboards can serve many purposes, but the three most common benefits Dashboard proponents cite are: 

  • It generates strategic thinking about how the organization measures success.
  • It can help to identify on a timely basis where an organization is being successful and where things may be going off course.
  • It can provide a useful tool by which to focus the attention of the board on the most important things.

For really small organizations just struggling to hire their first few staff, a Dashboard is probably overkill.  But at some point Dashboards become worth the investment.

What should a Dashboard measure?  

There are many terms bandied about, but the one I like is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  “Key” because you have to pick and choose since there are many metrics that matter to an organization and the challenge is to pick out a reasonable subset of them that are most important.  “Performance Indicators” because you’re measuring something that’s an indicator of success.

How do you choose your KPIs? 

If at all possible, the search for KPIs should begin with an organizational strategic plan, which should already identify goals and measurements of success.  The challenge is to then pick which measurements are the most important to pay attention to in the next few years. 

If you don’t already have these, start with your programs and ask: Which are most important?  Some are more likely to be icing on the cake and others get at your core.  Focus on the core. 

For each program, what metrics are you already tracking (or can you reasonably track in the future) to evaluate your performance over time?   For some organizations these are straightforward.  A school may be tracking enrollment and learning (via test scores or grades).  A homeless shelter may track people served and homeless placed into permanent housing. 

For other organizations, particularly those engaged in advocacy, the search for meaningful program measurements can be more complex.  But every time I’ve engaged with an organization on this topic, we’ve come up with some outputs that are good indicators of progress, even if they don’t represent the ultimate outcomes being sought.

Leaving programs aside, nearly every Dashbaord I’ve seen also include multiple KPIs that focus on finances – mostly on the revenue side of the equation.  Here the challenge is to think through your revenue generating strategies and identify what matters most.  Overall revenue is obvious. Unrestricted funding is another good one. Or you may find it important to focus on fundraising metrics by major type of revenue (e.g. individuals, corporations, foundations, etc.).

With regard to fundraising from individuals, some metrics that may be important are: the number of individual donors (or members), retention rate for individual donors (how many who gave in the prior year, have given in this year), average gift levels, the percentage of donors who have upgraded in the last year, number of donors who’ve made a second gift, etc. 

Over several years, the list of which metrics you focus on may evolve – but at any given time you should look at your fundraising strategies and see what matters most. 

Sometimes no one metric seems right so you have to invent something that rolls up several data points into a new one.  For example, when I was Executive Director of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, we developed a long-term communications plan where progress could be measured in dozens of different ways, no two or three of which seemed most important. 

Yet, in the end, we knew that what we really wanted out of our communications was for our constituents to take action.  So we created a new metric which we called “Total Actions” taken in response to our communications.  Each quarter we added up all sorts of actions people took in response to our online communications, such as clicking on links, forwarding emails, donations, downloading documents, social media shares, etc.  As long as Total Actions was on a solid upward trajectory, we knew we were making progress.

Of course, having good fundraising and/or communications data for your Dashboard presumes you’re using a valid Constituent Relations Management (CRM) database to track donations, online communications, and other data necessary to produce the metrics.  If you’re still on Excel or hate your current database, getting past that hurdle should come before you create a Dashboard.

Likewise, the discussion about program metrics presumes that you have a means of tracking the outputs and outcomes from your programs and you put that data somewhere – whether in your fundraising CRM or in some separate data set. If you’re not pulling together data to evaluate individual programs, it will be hard to create a Dashboard.

The last question is: how do you display the data?

I’ve found that Excel is plenty powerful to take data and generate good charts and graphs for a good Dashboard.  Or sometimes, just putting the data into a Table and color coding rows as Green, Yellow, and Red based on whether you’re doing great, okay, or not well is sufficient.

If your own Excel skills are too limited, you probably can find a skilled volunteer who in just a few hours time can take data in a spreadsheet and display it in a useful manner in a way you can easily replicate every 3-6 months without ongoing assistance.

It’s worth investing some time/energy to get the Dashboard display right.  If you’ve done all the work to generate and select the data, you should absolutely make sure it’s presented to your board and senior staff in a format that aids comprehension.  

If you have an example of a Dashboard you’re willing to share with me, I’m always looking for more ideas for how to use them effectively.

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On the value of one-on-ones

April 30, 2024

Filed under: Board Development,Fundraising,Leadership — jonathanpoisner @ 10:37 am

I was recently talking to an Executive Director and it became clear they hardly ever met with anyone else one-on-one. They were doing so much writing, emailing, and group meetings that they were hardly ever talking to just one person.

When I pushed them on this, they responded that meeting with just one person is inefficient.

I believe that is short-sighted. Organizations thrive based on personal relationships and it’s very, very hard to forge such relationships other than in one-on-one (or one-on-two settings when you’re forging a relationship with a couple).

Something happens in a one-on-one conversation that doesn’t happen at events and certainly not via email/mail or even on the phone.

You can form a stronger personal relationship and you can ask people to take personal responsibility.

Let’s start talking about forming relationships.

It’s not rocket science to understand forming relationships is easier in person.  Legions of studies have demonstrated the role of body language and facial expressions in communications – neither of which works over the phone. 

And in one-on-one meetings, you can make the communication truly two-way – asking questions of a potential organizational supporter and not just talking to them.  This can help you understand what motivates them so you can calibrate any asks to match their needs. You can do this in an authentic and not a staged way.

Meeting with people one-on-one also allows you tap into personal responsibility and not just collective responsibility.

At an event, it’s about how all these people in the room can help.  One-on-one, it’s about how you can help. Yes, peer pressure can matter. And well run events tap into that collective power. But getting somebody to take real ownership and dig deep when giving almost almost always works better off outside of events.

Studies done in the 1970s and 1980s focused on personal versus collective responsibility in a different context.  Scientists had people fake epileptic seizures in public places to see who would help. Sometimes they did this when only one person was around. Other times they did this when several people were around. Which situation led to more help?

Interestingly (to me), the answer is you were more likely to get help during the seizure if just one person was around. This is contrary to what I would have thought.

But it rings true upon further reflection.  When something happens and other people are around, you tend to look around to see how they’re responding.  And in unusual situations, people are often slow to act. If everyone else is also just looking around, you may think: I guess it’s not my problem. 

But if there’s nobody to look at for social cues, you know it’s about you, and you alone.

When you’re invited to give and the invitation is clearly about you, that’s when people tend to step up and make larger donations. 

In these contexts, as you get to know people, you’re also in a better position to add in further opportunities for them to step up — will they champion the organization to their friends, will they volunteer, etc.

This helps explain why time and time again, organizations that invest their staff and board time in doing one-on-one donor meetings are quicker to transform themselves financially than those that bank on fundraising events. 

The same thing is true beyond fundraising. Time and again, I’ve seen organizations build far more effective coalitions and partnerships with allies by doing a series of one-on-one meetings rather than relying on group meetings with several organizations at once. One-on-one meetings are also the bread and butter for community organizing where you’re trying to build not just an episodic volunteer base, but one where the volunteers are willing to take on leadership.

So stop putting your time into the next great event and banking on social media revolutionizing your organization.  If you want to grow, and grow quickly — get out and meet with more people and invite them to take responsibility.  Of course, for many Executive Directors, that requires figuring out what you can jettison from your busy schedule, a topic I’ll discuss next month.

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