Here’s a really quick, but useful read about the science that explains why fundraising via storytelling is more effective than relying on statistics to mak your case.
Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling.
Why you Lead Matters
July 24, 2014
I recently came across a study published in Harvard Business Review that crystallized some of my own thinking about how to motivate leadership.
The article outlines the results of a study of 10,000 graduates of Westpoint (the U.S. Army officer training college) through their graduation and well into their careers. The graduates were asked questions to determine what motivates their leadership. In general, leadership motivations were classified as intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (instrumental). An example of an intrinsic motivation is “improving people’s lives.” An example of an extrinsic motivation is “more pay” or greater status from a position of more stature. Many people demonstrated evidence of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
I was not surprised that those who were intrinsically motivated had proven over time to be more successful leaders than those extrinsically motivated. I previously posted a great video on this precise subject.
What surprised me about the study was that those who were both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated also proved inferior in leadership success compared to those whose sole motivations are intrinsic.
In the words of the study author:
“Adding external motives didn’t make leaders perform better — additional motivations reduced the selection to top leadership by more than 20%. Thus, external motivations, even atop strong internal motivations, were leadership poison.”
Personally, I’ve always been wary of organizations that consider using bonuses or other similar rewards as a means of improving employee performance. This is especially true in cause-related organizations. It creates a perverse incentive that can change how employees perceive their role.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen an organization go awry in this way. A few years back, an organization I knew hired an Executive Director who insisted that the pay for his role be increased to match what they had been receiving at the job they were vacating, even though this higher pay would be dramatically more than the organization’s traditional pay scale. In their words, they didn’t want to be taking a step backwards in pay. It didn’t surprise me that the E.D. in question flamed out in 18 months. They were more motivated by extrinsic factors (pay) than intrinsic (the desire to best fulfill the organization’s mission).
What implications does that have for nonprofits? For those doing hiring, if a candidate says or does something suggesting their personal motivation is extrinsic, I suggest you think long and hard before going down that road. Focus on candidates where the flame is burning on the inside to accomplish the mission. Skills can be trained. The fire inside cannot.
A riddle about 5 frogs – updated
July 11, 2014
About 15 months ago I created a blog entry: 5 frogs sitting on a log.
Here’s an updated version.
The riddle:
Five frogs are sitting on a log. One decides to jump off. How many frogs are left on the log?
The answer is five. Deciding to jump off is not the same as jumping off, so all five are still on the log.
The five frogs are still sitting on a log. One gets training on how to jump off. How many frogs are left on the log?
Five, of course. Being trained on somethings is no guarantee of action.
The five frogs are still sitting on a log. One decides he’s a lily pad frog and not a tree frog, so he’ll jump off and onto a nearby lily pad. He recently was trained on effective jumping. He’ll jump at sundown. He knows he’ll have been effective if he winds up on the lily pad.
In short, he knows who he is, where he wants to get to, how he’ll get there, and by when.
How many frogs are sitting on the log?
Of course, the answer is still 5. But I’d venture to bet that the odds of it soon being four are very high indeed.
Although the parallels to nonprofit work are clear, I’ll hit you in the face with it: An organizational strategic plan should answer who the organization is, where it wants to go, how it will get there, and how it will know if it’s successful. In strategic planning terms, this is usually a combination of mission/vision, goals, strategies, and a timeline.
The best written strategic plan, even when combined with training, are no substitute for taking action.
But those who are trained and plan are far more likely to take action (and take it effectively) than those who are not.
Should your nonprofit get a drone?
June 18, 2014
Should your nonprofit get a drone?
Okay — never expected to ask that question. And I’m only half serious.
But at the River Rally I attended a few weeks back, a vendor (Intelligent Unmanned Aerial Solutions) was tabling and the price of drones with cameras was shockingly inexpensive. They were pitching to river groups for taking aerial surveillance of polluters.
Are there other reasons a nonprofit may benefit from having a drone?
Why don’t groups do strategic planning
May 22, 2014
Instead of thinking about all the reasons groups can benefit from strategic planning, a friend recently asked me: why do some groups fail to do strategic planning?
Here are the top reasons that have been shared with me.
1. Past planning processes are perceived as having failed to yield real benefits. This could be past planning by the organization in question or past planning by other organizations with which board members or staff have been involved.
2. They are too busy. Good planning takes time and some organizational leaders believe time taken up for strategic planning carries too high an opportunity cost.
3. Overconfidence. Some leaders are so confident of their ability to think through challenges on the fly that they just don’t see the benefit of thinking things through ahead of time.
4. Fractured leadership. Some organizational leaders are aware that they have deep schisms either on their board or between board and staff and feel like strategic planning might expose those schisms in an unhealthy way.
5. Not exciting. For some people, the thought of sitting in a room with others discussing strategy is worse than watching paint dry. They want to be “doers.”
For each of these, there are obviously rejoinders. But sometimes given where organizational leadership is, it may just be that it’s the wrong time or cast of characters to plan.
One lesson I’ve learned for certain: if the organization is doing planning to satisfy a funder, but doesn’t actually believe in the value of the planning process, the process will almost certainly fail.
Guest blog: Grantwriting as a Team-building exercise
May 19, 2014
Guest blog by Sami Fournier of Element Exercise.
Faced with the prospect of submitting a grant proposal, consider what a great opportunity you have before you. Beyond being a challenge and a bit of a chore, the grant writing process can define your organization’s work in a way that also improves the leadership of your team.
A looming grant deadline can be a team-building experience.
Let’s take the example of applying to a foundation for a general support grant.
Your first instinct as Executive Director might be to sequester yourself in your office and just write it.
But consider this alternative possibility: Get your team together (on a rational, roomy timeline, if possible) and build an outline using the funder’s guidelines and requirements. Suppose you start with something like this:
- Intro
- History and Background
- Statement of problem and need
- Goals and objectives
- Solution to the problem
- Budget
- Timelines
- Applicant qualifications
- Evaluation
- Organizational Sustainability
Carve out assignments for your team members, knowing that each will review and edit and feed into the main narrative as well.
Whomever is drafting the narrative is not working in a vacuum. That person is hopefully starting from the organization’s strategic plan and building on the organization’s mission and goals.
The main job of the narrative writer is to organize and delve into the details of the how and each step along the path to the goals. The proposal should describe clear goals, activities and tasks you will do toward each goal, the target audience, and the intended impact. Be honest and direct about your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and make it clear how you will evaluate the success of your efforts.
Now, back to your team. Perhaps you had a lead and some other folks (board? staff?) assisting with various sections, or perhaps it was a set of reviewers providing input. No matter how you organized yourselves, the process helped each team member feel pride of ownership, and the end product gave them more guidance in their work.
That’s how you got the multiplier effect of improving and developing staff as they work through drafting and presenting your organization’s proposal to a funder. Throughout, you can be making process improvements and tweaks, and finding and developing leadership qualities in each staffer.
By this time, you have a proposal that can be submitted as a centerpiece of your group’s work. It describes a problem, but puts much more emphasis on your approach to solutions and their execution. In the process, you came away with a tighter team, and more direction and sense of purpose. The support you got from the funder went well beyond the financial benefit. You arrived with stronger leaders and greater skill than ever to go forward. No matter what, make sure to tell the funder how much you grew in the process.
Sami Fournier has a Bend, Oregon-based consulting company called “Element Exercise,” which sounds like a personal training outfit, but actually specializes in grant writing in the field of alternative transportation. She formerly directed the League of American Bicyclists’ Education programs. Sami can be reached at elementexercise@gmail.com. http://www.Elementexercise.com
Connecting fiscal management to strategy
May 17, 2014
I recently published a guest article for 501Commons on the importance of building a fiscal management system that connects with strategic decision-making.
The main point: you should track revenues and expenses by categories that provide information useful for strategic decision-making. That means moving away from an exclusive focus on a “line item” approach that focuses on things like printing, postage, and salaries and also layers in a way of tracking by functional categories that represent your programs.
Check out the full article on 501Commons website and then let me know what you think.
Learning to let things go “wrong.”
April 29, 2014
One of the trickier challenges facing a nonprofit Executive Director with supervisory responsibilities is leaning to let things go “wrong.”
If you are to empower your staff to have areas of responsibilities and for them to flex their own leadership, they must be allowed to make mistakes. That means giving them authority to make some decisions without prior authorization.
After the decision with which you disagree, usually that means just accepting it and moving on. Sometimes, the situation may be repeated, so you’ll want to discuss the decision and find out what the staff person being supervised was thinking. This should be done by asking questions designed to understand their thinking rather than starting with: “that was a mistake.”
Even if they come to you for advice, sometimes the right answer is: “here’s my initial instinct, but I haven’t thought about it much and its your area of responsibility, so the call is yours.”
The benefit of this approach isn’t just that it gives junior staff a positive work environment in which they’ll develop more leadership skills. And it isn’t just that highly competent staff are less likely to leave your organization if they are given responsibility.
The benefit of this approach is also about how much time the Executive Director can put into their other duties. If the Executive Director is weighing in on matters that are really the province of someone else on staff, that means the Executive Director is taking time away from their core responsibilities. Every minute debating some minor potential “mistake” is a minute taken away from fundraising and other core Executive Director job duties.
Of course, sometimes you do need to intervene — on mistakes that would be serious. And serious is a subjective term.
But all in all, I’ve experienced more examples of Executive Directors who over-manage to ensure everything is perfect than the opposite problem of just letting everything slide. Bottom line: Executive Directors need to learn to let things go “wrong.”
Ideas for Donor Involvement
April 17, 2014
I once talked to an Executive Director who resisted inviting major donors to volunteer or become more involved because “I don’t want to seem like I’m bothering them. Their gift should be enough.”
I thought that was backwards. Of course, you could make the ask poorly in a way that’s bothersome. But as a general rule, inviting people to get involved is a key way to enhance the commitment of your donors to the organization.
Here are 6 ideas for how to engage current/potential donors, in no particular order.
1. Hold a conference call briefing for them. New technology allows opportunities for people to be on the call and ask questions, without it being disruptive.
2. Invite them to volunteer on tasks that could be done by staff or board members, but don’t have to be done by staff. This will vary wildly by the type of organization, but could include everything from having them help out in the office, to assist with an event, to lead a hike or tour.
3. Hold a “focus group.” Whether as part of strategic planning or otherwise, pick some topic where input from those beyond the board/staff would be helpful and invite enough donors to have 8-10 participate and lead them through a conversation.
4. Hold a “Salon.” Pick a book, article, or even a TedTalk video for them to read/watch and have them join a board member at their home to discuss it over a glass of wine. Obviously, you’d want to pick a topic that’s relevant for the organization.
5. Participate in a committee. This could be an ongoing committee or it could be a short-term committee charged with answering a specific question.
6. Send them an online member survey. Ask for their feedback on how the organization is doing and priorities for the future.
I’m always looking for more ideas, so let me know what else your organization has done to make donors feel involved.