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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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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Preparing for a Likely Recession

February 27, 2025

Filed under: Board Development,Fundraising,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 1:45 pm

February 2025

Preparing for a Likely Recession

No, I’m not an economist (although I do have a B.S. in Economics). 

A lot of smart people – including economists — thought there’d be a recession 2 years go and there wasn’t.

And the same thing the year before that.   And a few years before that.

You get the gist.   In any given year, somebody is predicting a recession.

Of course, this year, between the federal chaos/layoffs, tariffs, and general economic uncertainty created by businesses unwilling to invest under a unpredictable regime, it’s hard not to believe that the long overdue recession will finally come.

It doesn’t mean the end of your nonprofit.  Indeed, you may actually thrive during the recession.

I managed the Oregon League of Conservation Voters through the 2001-2002 recession and the first half of the 2008-2010 “great” recession. 

Having managed a nonprofit through these, what do I wish I’d done differently in the 6 months prior to them?

Here are six ideas of what to do and one of what not to do.  Some of these lessons are directly based on my experience at OLCV and others are based on my knowledge as a consultant.

  1. Pay attention to your cash reserve.  If you haven’t already, have a conversation with your board up-front about what level they are willing to let that reserve drop to during a recession.  It’s okay – indeed, it’s appropriate — to have an annual loss during a recession if you began the year with a large enough reserve.  Have this conversation openly with your board rather than making decisions on the fly

  2. Be open with staff about your financial situation.  Are you in a really solid position?  Or somewhat precarious?  At OLCV, I wasn’t always open with my staff about how tight our finances were leading up to the 2001-2002 recession.  When a difficult decision was made by the Board Executive Committee (with my support), to freeze all staff salaries (e.g. no pay raises during the year, even COLAs), there was some staff frustration.  If I’d done more in the year prior to educate staff about how thin our reserve was, I would’ve saved heartache later on.

  3. Think about delaying “icing” expenditures.  Some of what you do is the cake.  It’s what you absolutely need to do to advance your mission.  Other things are nice, but if you don’t do them, nobody’s going to look at your nonprofit and say: you’re failing.  Take a hard pass through your budget/expenditures and ask: what can easily be deferred 6-12 months until we know more about our financial situation?  Ask staff their opinion about what to defer (or just cut).

  4. Don’t stop fundraising!  If anything, step it up.  Some people might say: “our donors are probably freaked out, so now’s not the time to ask.”  Don’t make that decision for them!  You never know their situation.  I once had a donor who I knew had been laid off make his largest ever gift to us.  (I learned later it was because he’d received an inheritance).   Even in bad recessions, plenty of people have jobs/situations that leave them doing well financially.  They are sometimes even happier to donate recognizing the need and their relative good fortune.

  5. In your fundraising, focus more of your energy on cultivating existing donors to deepen your relationships than adding first-time donors.  When individuals cut back their giving during a recession, they tend to stick with organizations they already support versus those that are new.

  6. Also in your fundraising: focus on your relationship with your top donors.  In most organization, there are 10-15 donors who make huge difference.  Be proactive in the next few months cultivating your relationships with them.  Let me know what you’re doing, how your reacting to the new lay of the land, and how their donations are making a difference.

  7. Lastly, a lesson of what to avoid: don’t choose a recession as the time to launch a business-focused fundraising effort.  Corporate fundraising yo-yos much further down during a recession historically, compared to individual giving or foundation philanthropy.  If you’ve laid the groundwork or you’re targeting businesses that are somewhat recession-proof, this might not apply to you.  But think hard about making a new, business-focused campaign an important part of our 2025-2026 strategy.

Do you have lessons of your own to share? Please leave them as a comment!

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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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Theories of change – a primer

December 20, 2023

Filed under: Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 9:27 am

Organizations that thrive tend to have clarity regarding their theory of change.

What is a theory of change?  In plain language, a theory of change explains how the activities of the organization lead to accomplishment of the long-term goals an organization is working towards and how accomplishing those goals advances the mission.   

Sometimes the theory is a series of logical statements (because we do A, therefore B happens; because B happens, and we do C, therefore D happens; until one of these statements leads to the “mission” being achieved).

Sometimes the theory can best be explained via a flow chart or graphical diagram that visually displays the way different activities come together in ways that a logic chain or written statements can’t easily communicate.

Other theories of change I’ve seen are simply a series of “Strategic Assumptions” written down that collectively embody the theory. 

The format that makes sense for any particular organization is highly dependent on the circumstances – the nature of the goals being sought and mission being advanced, the types of activities pursued, and the complexity of the organization.

Why does articulating a theory of change matter?  And if it matters, how can a theory be developed?

Theories of change matter for at least five reasons.

  1. Resource Allocation: A theory of change can be a useful tool to identify how to spend scarce resources.  While there are some nonprofits that reach a scale that allows them to pursue many-pronged approaches to bringing about change, small and medium sized nonprofits almost always focus on a smaller number of strategies. 

    This is a basic function of the adage that it’s almost always more valuable to do one or two things really well than more things so-so.    

  2. Synergy: A theory of change can force an organization to think hard about how its various programs fit together to accomplish more  than the sum of the parts.  Instead of having programs A, B, and C running in silos, a theory of change can allow staff and leadership to more easily identify ways in which each of the Programs can be conducted in ways that build upon or reinforce each other.   

  3. Skill-Set Prioritization:  Having a theory of change also helps greatly in determining what skill-sets to focus on in hiring staff.   For example, if you are a nonprofit with a heavy focus on changing public policy, you might have a theory of change that focuses on grassroots pressure as a means of moving lawmakers.  Alternatively, your theory of change may focus on building strong relationships with centrist lawmakers who often hold sway.  Which theory of change should inform what type of staff skills you’d prioritize when hiring.    

    If you are a direct service nonprofit, by contrast, your alternatives might look very different.  Your theory of change may be very heavily dependent on having good relationships with the target audience you’re serving, in which case you should hire staff with a personality and track record for relationship building.  Conversely, if your theory of change is heavily focused on providing technical expertise, then technical expertise should be front and center in hiring.

    Of course, it’s easy when reading these examples to say: but we want both!  Yes, and I’d like unicorns and rainbows and leprechauns.    But when we hire candidates from the real world, we must pick and choose candidates with some strengths and other weaknesses.  Knowing what strengths are most essential to your organization is a by-product of having a theory of change.

  4. Communications and Branding: theories of change can inform how an organization brands itself publicly via its communications.   If you have a theory of change, it helps answer key questions about your message and audience.  Conversely, lacking a theory of change, it’s very easy for whoever develops your communications to settle upon messages that are problematic. 

    For example, more than once I’ve witnessed public policy organizations that lack theories of change who consistently try to both focus on pressure tactics that appeal to a base and simultaneously to use strategies based on personal relationships with centrist elected officials.  As a result, the organization’s communications are contradictory – language used to appeal to the base often sets back its personal relationship with centrists. 

    To use a somewhat analogous example from the movies:  There’s a reason a good cop, bad cop approach doesn’t work with a single cop. 

    In these cases, the organization should usually assess what allied groups are doing and then pick/choose one approach, rather than placing its communications professionals in an impossible situation.

  5. Team Alignment over Time: Lastly, theories of change can also prove really valuable as an orientation tool for new members of a team. The existing team may understand how your various activities work together towards your ultimate aims, but oftentimes new board or staff do not. On multiple occasions, I’ve found theories of change to be the best overall orientation to an organization.

So how does an organization set out to create a theory of change?

It’s definitely not rocket science. 

First, you need a clear goal or goals that advance your mission.  Until you know what change you are seeking, you can’t develop a theory for how to create the change.  The change sought by a nonprofit credit union will look very different from a nonprofit mentorship program for at-risk youth, which will look very different than the change sought by a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization. 

Yet, in each case, the first step is the same – identify one or more goals that you are seeking over a period of time (usually 2-5 years) that collectively will advance your mission.

Second, sit down with a group and describe your tentative activities and repeatedly ask “why” doing them would lead to your goal(s).  In doing this with others, I often find myself asking the question “why” 5-10 times in a row trying to tease out the steps in logic being used by participants.  In doing so, you may discover you’re making assumptions about the behavior of others that are iffy.  Or that you’re relying on allies to behave in a certain way without first securing buy-in from the allies for the strategy.

You’ll likely also discover interim outcomes that you’re seeking to achieve not because they are ends, but rather because they involve obtaining resources (money, volunteers, political power) that represents steps in the causal chain towards your ultimate end goal(s).  These interim outcomes should be celebrated, not dismissed as unimportant.

Third rebuild your list of strategies to match up with what you’ve discovered in the group exercise.  How do they fit together?  Are there ways they reinforce each other?

Fourth, write it down as a series of logical statements.  Or, if it’s easier, conduct an exercise where the team all individually creates a graphic/drawing of how the work fits together and then discuss your respective drawings. 

Most every organization I’ve worked with has been able to encapsulate its theory of change in either a page of text or a diagram.  Often times the diagram requires some explanatory text. 

Run the diagram or written theory by your board and/or others as a reality-check to see what questions they have.  You may find you’re leaving out something critical.  Or you may have made it overly complicated and you can simplify it to the bare essentials.

Of course, a theory of change – whether stand-alone or part of a strategic plan — shouldn’t be carved in stone.  A learning organization should continually evaluate and reassess its theory based on how its work plays out in reality.  You may believe that people involved in one of your programs are primed to volunteer for another program, but after 1-2 years of trying you may conclude that they’re not. 

Alternatively, the lay of the land may have shifted sufficiently to require a new theory.  Perhaps a pandemic upends a theory of change that relies on lots of in-person activities!

Do you have a theory of change that’s worked well for your organization?  Please share it with me as I’m compiling examples for a future, longer article.

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Musings on Theories of Change

May 24, 2023

Filed under: Leadership,Strategic Planning — jonathanpoisner @ 5:18 pm

I was recently talking to a potential client when it became apparent to me that they really could use a theory of change.  Yet, their Executive Director was unfamiliar with the concept and it took some back and forth to help them understand.  After all, most nonprofits never broach the topic.  Nonetheless, I find it’s sometimes a very useful tool as part of strategic planning or as a stand-alone exercise.

What is a theory of change?  How can it help?  And how do you go about generating one?

What is a Theory of Change?

In plain language, a theory of change explains how the activities of the organization lead to accomplishment of the primary programmatic outcomes an organization is seeking.

Sometimes the theory is a series of logical statements.  Because we do A, therefore B happens; because B happens, and we do C, therefore D happens; until one of these statements leads to the ultimate outcomes being achieved.

Sometimes the theory can best be explained via a flow chart or other graphical diagram that helps visually explain the way different activities come together in ways that a series of written statements can’t easily accomplish.

A variation that I’ve used successfully is a set of “Strategic Assumptions” written down that collectively embody a theory about why the organization’s principal activities are advancing the mission. 

What format makes sense for any particular organization is highly dependent on the circumstances – the nature of the outcome(s) being sought, the types of activities pursued, and the complexity of the organization.

Why are theories of change important?

Theories of change matter for a few reasons.

Most obviously, as a way to identify how to spend scarce resources.  While there are some nonprofits that reach a scale that allows them to pursue many-pronged approaches to bringing about change, thriving small nonprofits almost always focus on one.

And even mid-sized thriving nonprofits stay focused on one or occasionally layer in just one other core strategy.  This is a basic function of the adage that it’s almost always more valuable to do one thing really well than two things mediocre.

I’ve witnessed organizations lacking a theory of change that are very frenetic, generating plenty of tactics, but without any unifying strategy that ties them together.  They’re jumping to seize opportunities that don’t tie together into a coherent whole.

Having a theory of change also helps greatly in determining what skill-sets to focus on in hiring staff.   For example, if you are a nonprofit with a heavy focus on changing public policy, your theory of change might inform whether to focus on hiring staff who’re adept at grassroots organizing to put pressure on policy makers, as opposed to those who are skilled at messaging to centrist lawmakers.

If you are a direct service nonprofit, by contrast, your alternatives might look very different.  Your theory of change may be very heavily dependent on having good relationships with the target audience you’re serving, in which case you should hire staff with the personality and track record for relationship building.  Conversely, if your theory of change is heavily focused on providing technical expertise, then technical expertise should be front and center in hiring.

Of course, it’s easy when reading these examples to say: but we want both!  Yes, and I’d like unicorns and rainbows and leprechauns.

When we hire candidates from the real world, we must pick and choose candidates with some strengths and other weaknesses.  Knowing what strengths are most essential to your organization is a by-product of having a theory of change.

Theories of change can also inform how an organization brands itself publicly via its communications.   If you have a theory of change, it helps answer key questions about your message and audience.  Conversely, lacking a theory of change, it’s very easy for whoever develops your communications to settle upon messages that are problematic.

More than once I’ve witnessed public policy organizations lacking theories of change who consistently try to focus both on (a) pressure tactics that appeal to a base of supporters and (b) forging personal relationships with centrist elected officials.  As a result, the organization’s communications are in conflict: language used to appeal to the base often sets back its personal relationship with centrists.

To use a somewhat analogous example from the movies:  There’s a reason a good cop, bad cop approach doesn’t work with a single cop.

In these cases, the organization should usually assess what allied groups are doing and then pick/choose one approach, rather than placing its communications professionals in an impossible situation.

Lastly, theories of change can be particularly useful as a means of building and sustaining alignment within your team (e.g. your board and staff) as circumstances change.  If your team agrees on why you’re doing what you’re doing, alignment is more likely to endure than if they just agree on a surface level.  Often it’s this missing “why” that causes alignment on your team to break down.

How does an organization set out to create a theory of change?

It’s definitely not rocket science.

First, you need a clear outcome or set of outcomes embodied in your mission or top-level strategic goals.  Until you know what change you are seeking, you can’t develop a theory for how to create the change. 

The change sought by a nonprofit credit union will look very different from a nonprofit mentorship program for at-risk youth, both of which look very different than the change sought by a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization.

Yet, in each case, the first step is the same: identify one or more high-level outcomes that you are seeking over a longer period of time (usually 3-5 years).

Second, ask yourself what conditions or things must happen for the long-term outcome to be achieved.  You can think of these as interim outcomes or stepping stones on the path you’re laying out.

Third, identify the major strategies or activities you’re doing that you believe generate the desired conditions and therefore advance you down the path.

Fourth, ask yourself why those activities will lead to the conditions that will lead to the outcomes.  Sometimes I’ve run what I call the “annoying 5 year old” exercise when I pretend to be 5 years old repeatedly asking “why” to every prior statement. It can be annoying, but it often yields nuggets of wisdom the reveal the essential answer. Surfacing these underlying assumptions can create “aha” moments with the team that helps build alignment. 

Fifth, have somebody take a stab and putting the above “thinking” into both a written format and a diagram format.  In either format, this should be 1-2 pages and not more than that.  I’ve seen it done in half a page.

Lastly, discuss what you’ve developed.  Perhaps vet it with others outside your core to see what they think.  Does the theory adequately explain why your major activities are advancing the ball towards the desired outcomes/mission?  If not, what adjustments or refinements are needed?  Are any adjustments needed to what you do to allow for you to make the change being sought?

Then what

The theory may be included within your strategic plan or exist as a stand-alone document.

Trot it out annually to discuss how you’re doing as an organization in light of your theory of change. 

If it’s a diagram, blow it up and pin it on your wall as a reminder to come back to from time to time as a way to vet new opportunities.   

Use it as an orientation tool with new board members and new staff.

Of course, the theory should not be carved in stone.   I’ve seen organizations whose circumstances changed so dramatically over a couple of years that the prior theory of change no longer made sense.   I’d recommend revisiting your theory of change at least every 3-5 years through some form of exercise that abbreviates the steps above.

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