Applied Wisdom for Nonprofits

Delighted to see Jim Morgan join Cindy Chavez at CreaTV San Jose. https://lnkd.in/gWMVd9tu

At a certain point, organizations need to build additional infrastructure. You can think of infrastructure like a trellis, a structure to support plants to grow higher faster. It supports skilled people and their work hours with things like templates, tools, software, and data at their fingertips, to either require less personal skill and experience to do a quality job, or less time to do their work. Building infrastructure can be as simple as creating a checklist, or as complex as implementing a major software tool such as Salesforce or NetSuite. Making infrastructure decisions involves climbing out of the weeds to assess how you are actually doing the work, so that you can decide whether additional tools or processes are needed to make the task: -           More efficient -           More reliable/higher quality -           Not need an expert to do it -           Faster -           More automated, less hands-on -           More capable of doing things it cannot do now. If you decide to build infrastructure in an area, know that you’ll often face an “it gets worse before it gets better” situation. Busy staff will need to carve out some time to devote to the infrastructure project. Additional funds may need to be allocated to the project. In what areas would you like to build stronger infrastructure at your nonprofit? Where does that work rank on your overall priority list? 

Build a trellis to support your team   “Doing The Whole Job” as a nonprofit leader means ensuring that programming needs are met, AND that there’s sufficient strength in essential supporting functions, including finance, HR, and marketing. At a certain point organizations need to build additional infrastructure. Infrastructure is like a trellis that supports plants to grow higher faster. Infrastructure supports skilled people with things like templates, tools, software, and data. The outcome is that the task either requires less personal skill and experience, or else requires less time to complete the job. Building infrastructure can be as simple as creating a checklist, or as complex as a year-long software implementation project. For example, a company that values high-quality personal interactions with each and every funder faced confusion whenever the person in charge of a specific funder relationship was out of the office and an issue arose. That organization chose to implement a CRM database where information and touches for each relationship are stored. The same high-touch practices remained in place but became more automated (with touchpoint calendars). Now others in the organization can simply look up key funder information without needing to ask the main contact. If you had the money and the time to build more infrastructure in your organization, what area would you pick first? What would be the desired outcome? How would the project benefit your team, your community, and your funders? #NonprofitLeadership #VisionaryLeadership #ExecutiveTeam #Nonprofits #LeadershipDevelopment #StrategicPlanning #PeerLearning #OrganizationalInfrastructure #OrganicGrowth

Doing The Whole Job is central to the success of nonprofit operation. This means ensuring that not only programming needs are met, but also that there are both the necessary skills and sufficient bandwidth in the key supporting functions, including finance, HR, and marketing. To strengthen any functional area, you have three choices: 1. Hire or bring on someone with greater skill, knowledge, and experience 2. If skills and knowledge levels are sufficient, but there’s just too much work, add staff or volunteers. 3. Build infrastructure. This means adding process and/or tools that make the work more foolproof and/or less labor-intensive. There is power in understanding whether there is a skills/knowledge gap or a simple bandwidth gap, where the volume of work has grown beyond the available hours in the day at the current staffing levels. Let’s look at the challenges at a couple of organizations we’ve worked with: One organization doing community health screenings experienced rapid growth in demand for their services. They had already reviewed and were satisfied with the efficiency of their screening processes. And so they knew that they needed to simply hire more screeners — which they did. Another nonprofit had assigned a couple of younger staff members to maintain the organization’s website and social media accounts. It was not the main role of either of the staffers, and the quality and consistency of the nonprofit’s online presence suffered. The organization decided to add both additional skills and bandwidth. They hired a professional communications person, skilled in not only online presence building, but in traditional PR. They were able to significantly raise the organization’s profile. If you were going to increase the capacity of just one functional area in your organization, which area would it be? How would you go about doing that?

Where could your organization use more skill? “Doing The Whole Job” is core to the successful operation of all nonprofits. This means ensuring not only that programming needs are met, but also that there are both the necessary skills and sufficient bandwidth in the key supporting functions, such as finance, HR, and marketing. To strengthen any functional area you have three choices: 1. Engage a consultant or hire someone with greater skill, knowledge, and experience. 2. If skills and knowledge levels are sufficient, but there’s just too much work, add staff or volunteers. 3. Build infrastructure. This means adding process and/or tools that make the work more foolproof and/or less labor-intensive. You need to understand whether the issue is a skills/knowledge gap or a simple bandwidth gap, where the volume of work has grown beyond the available hours in the day at the current staffing levels. A small nonprofit we worked with identified a skill gap when they continued to be surprised when their actual bank balances did not match their accounting records. The person doing the accounting was a very smart, experienced programs person. But she had learned accounting on the fly so that she could help out when the organization was just starting out. The solution was to recognize that the organization had grown enough to need a skilled, dedicated person in the accounting role. They decided to train a young staff member who had recently joined the team and had expressed an interest in finance. They partnered that staff member with a paid, highly experienced part-time consultant who, over the following year, trained them in nonprofit finance. Since that time, the young staffer has grown into a respected CFO within the nonprofit community. Another organization recognized its skills gap when it started experiencing unexpected cashflow issues during a period of high growth. They would run out of money in between tranches of funding. Recognizing a skillset gap, they hired an experienced CFO, more appropriate for the size the organization had reached, and the further growth they anticipated. If you were going to increase the skill or experience level of staff in one area of your nonprofit, what area would that be? What approaches would you use? #nonprofitleadership #capacitybuilding #nonprofitgrowthstrategy

Are you doing the whole job? In nonprofit management “Doing the Whole Job” means ensuring not only that programming needs are met, but also developing strengths in the various supporting functions, such as finance, HR, and marketing — all are necessary for your organization to thrive. As an organization grows the challenges it faces often reach beyond the skill level or the sheer bandwidth of the people currently doing non-programs work. This is especially true if the organization’s leader is focused primarily on the quality of programming, and is hiring fewer, less expensive, and possibly less qualified people to perform key roles in supporting functions. You can tell if a higher skill level is needed when content-related mistakes are made, such as unforecasted cash flow problems, missing important compliance deadlines, or missing an opportunity to lease space at a lower cost when current leases are up for renewal. You can tell if more bandwidth is needed when things fall through the cracks, when there are time delays in getting basic information, or when you are hesitant to bug a person with another request because you know they are swamped. It can be easy to overlook these skill and bandwidth limitations.. But if you commit to Doing the Whole Job, you’ll seek excellence not only in your programming but in the areas that support it. To help frame your thinking about the Whole Job, here is a list of many of the key supporting functions.: ·       Finance ·       HR ·       Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ·       Compliance ·       Marketing and PR ·       Communications ·       Supply Chain Management ·       Real Estate, Facility and Asset Management ·       Employee Development ·       IT and Data Management ·       Impact Analysis and Reporting ·       Fundraising, Events Management, Donor Relationships ·       Community Liaison and Collaboration For each function, rate on a scale of 1-3 the skill/knowledge of the people/person responsible for it. Then rate each function on a scale of 1-3 for the available bandwidth of the people/person responsible for it. Are they scrambling to keep up? In what areas are you strongest? And what areas need investment – either in skill building, hiring for skill, or in increasing bandwidth by adding people? Which one will you start with? Over time, without all functions operating well, the entire organization will suffer. 

How to get moving! At Applied Wisdom, we use the principle “book it and ship it” to encourage leaders to move ideas and plans into action. As David Ehrlichman said in his book Impact Networks, “Starting in exactly the right place is not as important as just starting, experimenting, learning and adapting as you move forward.” Instead of spending time crafting the perfect plan, spend time building your organization’s powers of observation and response. OBSERVATION: When you move into action, who is monitoring how things are going both with the execution itself, and within the surrounding environment? What regular meetings or communication systems do you have to take input from those observing, and then to make decisions about whether adaptation is needed? RESPONSE: Are you operating full out, or have you reserved some burst capacity to respond to urgent changes or new opportunities that present themselves? What decision-making processes do you and your team use to decide whether to make changes to a project that’s in motion? How are those changes communicated? Developing your observation and response capabilities will give you and your team the confidence to move ideas into action, test new ideas, and continue moving toward success. An organization that is already in motion can change direction more easily than one that hasn’t yet started. Here’s a classic quote that can inspire you: "The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." – Walt Disney