Author: whatifconcepts

Empowering those that inspire so they can excel at the work that matters.

Give or Get?

Is it is truly about what we give and not what we get?  It is a powerful idea.  What would be the central focus of your organization if you measured success and effectiveness based on what you gave?  Would it be different from what you do today?  As donors, how much of their contributions are driven by the stated and intangible benefits?  Are we encouraging transactions or gifts?  Does a strategic plan prioritize a program that is favored by a funder?  Does the board meet when it best serves the organization or because it convenient to the board members?  Do we compensate staff based on what they contribute to the organization or only based on benchmarks?  Do we ask our volunteers what talent they most enjoy contributing or do we simply assign them to the next available project?  Do we ask what the CEO what inspires them to give or do we ask them only to get?


What if we asked what does our enterprise have to give?  What if what we have to give became the driving message of our campaigns?


So much of the social sector seems driven by what we can get?  What grant can we secure, what board member can we get to join, what program will increase the organizations revenue the most?  

Perhaps we can remember to focus on what we have to give.  Somebody founded the organization because they had a vision of what they could give.

Innovation or Business As Usual?

Reading the book, The Leader Who Had No Title by Robin Sharma and I was struck by the following passage.

‘In the new world of business, the riskiest place you can be is trying to do the same thing in the same way as you’ve always done them.  Few things are as foolish as hoping old behaviors will somehow present new results.’

The social sector has been quick to innovation on some fronts and tied to the volumes of history in other areas.  The sector was the fastest to adopt to the promises of social media.  Many nonprofits found Facebook to way to claim a stake in the internet’s version of the Homestead Act.  Every enterprise was trying to get their virtual forty acres.  The Facebook application Causes was ideally suited to handle the growing swarm of grassroots campaigns.  On the other hand, many nonprofits were slow to respond to the current economic crisis.  There was much delay in considering cost-cutting, laying-off employees, merging or even closing the doors.  I noticed many for-profit businesses were far faster to make adjustments.  The social sector turned to its donors and asked for critical operating support with urgency. Soon each group’s message was lost among a cacophony of organizations trying to champion their dire situation.


We know that the old model will not work in a new economy.  Donor’s interest have moved, priorities have shifted, corporate giving has undergone a massive transformation, the collective memory of 2008-2009 will remain etched in the Baby Boomer’s memories (among other generations).  Those that the sector most planned to sustain us with financial contributions, time and talent may be less able.  So what has your organization done to amend the way it does business?  Did you adjust to survive the recession and plan to return to business as usual?  Have you altered your strategic plan to take advantage of opportunities that were unimaginable 18 months ago?  Are you still considering yourself a victim of a global economic crisis or has your enterprise become a entrepreneurial leader?

The book makes another point.  ‘The space shuttle uses more fuel during its first three minutes after liftoff than during its entire voyage around the earth.’  So often you find that launching an idea into orbit takes a tremendous amount of energy and commitment.  So much so that we frequently leave our ideas on the launch pad waiting for another day and more favorable conditions.  How can you combine innovation and your organization’s authenticity to find a new orbit?  As I wrote about last week, NASA is being given a new vision, the moon is being left to private industry and Mars has become the next challenge.  If your competitive advantage consisted of programs focused solely on the moon the game has changed.  Are you ready?

Maybe it is Just Me

Maybe it is just me but I have taken notice of the following items this week:

  • The Chronicle of Philanthropy is now posting a section announcing mergers.  For example it highlights the pending merger of three United Ways in N.H. or an agreement between a land trust and farmland conservation group in Washington State.
  • Forbes Magazine’s April 12 issue has a section dedicated to SecondActs that highlights the work of once highly compensated employees from the financial sector who have taken on a cause in the social sector, often without compensation or with a significant reduction from their previous salary.
  • His Holiness the 14th Dali Lama is using Twitter to spread his message of compassion.
  • TED held a session titled TEDxVolcano with participants from a previous conference who were stuck in London due to the suspension of air travel.  Checkout Peter Greenberg’s talk about the impact on air travel.
  • The iPhone App store is now selling applications specifically designed for nonprofit fundraising.
  • The Nonprofit Quarterly’s Newswire posted a link to a story that pondered the potential collapse of the nonprofit bubble.
  • Seth Godin’s Levy flight mathematical concept changed this blog just in a week’s time.

Change is constant.  Sometimes it is just subtle enough that I do not fully appreciate its impact until I seem the parts summarized.  A couple years ago I would have been amazed at any one of these headlines but now I take them in stride or barely notice their impact.  It is a great time to be in the social sector, despite the challenges of mergers, a recession, limited volunteers, competition, or the fear of pending doom.  The sector has more direct communication and control over its message, impact, outreach, networks, sphere of influence and fans than anytime in history.  For some causes the captain may have turned on the seat belt sign or perhaps that noise I was the wheels touching down at another great destination.  I am going to have a look around.

Testimony- Just Ask

If you could have one person in your community or from your geographic region speak to the benefit your organization provides, who would it be?  What would be most compelling about having this person advocate for your cause?  What barriers if any keep this individual from committing to this opportunity?  Who do you know who could ask them on your behalf?  In what setting would this person’s personal testimony have the greatest impact?

Sounds like you have a plan already- time to make it happen.  Your organization deserves the recognition.

Deadlines and Destinations

The debate taking place within the NASA community concerns the future role of the agency.  President Obama recently highlighted his mission for NASA when he spoke at the John F. Kennedy Space Center on April 15.

“So the point is what we’re looking for is not just to continue on the same path — we want to leap into the future; we want major breakthroughs; a transformative agenda for NASA…  Critical to deep space exploration will be the development of breakthrough propulsion systems and other advanced technologies. So I’m challenging NASA to break through these barriers. And we’ll give you the resources to break through these barriers. And I know you will, with ingenuity and intensity, because that’s what you’ve always done.”

President Obama        

What has some NASA insiders concerned is that there is no specific mission.  President Obama has presented a vision but some space supporters are concerned that it is not compelling enough. 

“Talking about a goal like that so far in the future- anyone can do that…What is the vision for NASA?  One of the things that the old hands at the space agency all say is absolutely crucial is timetables and destinations.  A firm destination and some idea of when you hope to be there.  The open-ended nature of what the Obama Administration is proposing has bothered some of those space hands…folks are worried about the long-term survivability of this plan”

William Harwood- CBS New Space Analyst              

Many of us who were alive during the moon landing or grew-up in the shadows of its legacy can recall the power of President Kennedy’s famous refrain, “send a man to the moon by the end of the decade.”


When planning organizational goals, how important is a deadline and a specific destination?  I would argue to NASA it is everything.  Study projects, congressional funding, attracting astronauts, sustaining key independent contracts, retaining the best and brightest assembled around a specific itinerary. 


How important are deadlines and destinations to your organization?  Deadlines force you to thrash early and then ship (see April 14 blog post).  Destinations provide direction.  If we agree that Jim Collin’s challenge to get the right people on the bus and then put them in the right seats is essential to success- can we also agree that the bus better be headed to a compelling destination?

Growth

Robert Litan’s research provides an interesting window into job growth and its impact on the US economy.  Interviewed by Marty Moss-Coanes on WHYY radio yesterday, Robert presented data that demonstrates that almost all the job creation since 1980 has come from entrepreneurs creating small businesses that were less than five years old.

The research is also the subject of a November 6, 2009 Wall Street Journal piece written by Carl Schramm, Robert Litan and Dane Stangler.

“The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007, two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly, without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have been negative for many years.”

Although the research does not focus specifically on data in the social sector the Kauffman Foundation has funded studies examining the impact of entrepreneurship on social responsibility as Bill Green speaks about at the foundation’s website.

One could argue that small nonprofits have contributed to this pool of new jobs.  According to the National Center  for Charitable Statistics The nonprofit sector is composed of 1.56 million tax-exempt organizations and accounts for 8.1% of all wages and salaries paid in the United States.

What is the impact of the nonprofit sector on your community?  Is your organization a younger nonprofit that is part of the job growth?  Are you able to communicate the importance of the social sector to your community’s economy?

Assessments

I am sure we have all seen a variety of assessment instruments.  Board self-evaluations, 360 degree CEO assessments, exit interviews and customer surveys come to mind.  Perhaps the most effective and efficient evaluation tool I have come across was developed by the Gallup Organization and outlined in the book, First, Break All the Rules authored by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.


The copyrighted questions are as follows:

  1. I know what is expected of me at work.
  2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
  3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
  4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition and praise for doing good work.
  5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
  6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
  7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
  8. The mission/purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
  9. My associates (fellow employees) are committed to doing quality work.
  10. I have a best friend at work.
  11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
  12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

The Gallup organization found that a high level of agreement to these twelve questions indicated a strong workplace.  The assessment became known as the ‘measuring stick.’  The data they collected was extensive (as one would expect from an enterprise know for its surveys) and outlined in the book.


How would your staff answer these questions?  Would you consider these questions as part of an exit interview?  How might your board respond if you altered the questions slightly?

Turn Right To Go Left

In the movie Cars, Doc teaches Lightning McQueen that sometimes you need to ‘turn right to go left.’  After many painful attempts, Lightning finally learns the art of the power-slide and cornering on dirt.  Sometimes the opposite force works more effectively than common logic would recommend.

Checking on my social community of Facebook friends I see friends stuck everywhere from Frankfurt to Turkey and on to Dubai.  They are waiting on the cloud of volcanic ash to disipate enough to allow for air travel to resume.  Suddenly booking a EuroStar train ticket is next to impossible, bus tickets are in high fashion and long road trips are the only alternative for everyone from Opera singers to cyclist trying to get to their weekend performances.

You never know when the world might turn right to go left and your organization may be the unexpected beneficiary of a global power-slide.  Being able to respond in real time to opportunities has become a competitive advantage for many organizations.  Is your enterprise ready to counter-steer?

Putting the Tribe Back Together

I have watched a couple organizations struggle to keep all their constituents connected as part of one tribe.  These are groups who started small and formed a loyal base of supporters.  As the cause grew and the membership increased suddenly there was need for new staff, databases, email newsletters, and phone systems.  Now the staff who were part of the organization’s early years and the original members are trying to regenerate the intimacy that they so cherished.  They have proposed multiple strategies and programs to re-create community.  Some of the initiatives are goals in the strategic plan.

It took me a while to see the common denominator in theses causes.  The challenge is that the tribe has grown larger than the organization’s could handle.  As Seth Godin points out in the aptly named book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us a tribe needs two things.  The two elements are a shared interest and a way to communicate (they also need a leader as Seth points out later).  In the case of the aforementioned organizations the shared interest had begun to deviating and communication was fractured.  There is another point.  At about 150 members a tribes typically begins to outgrow a level of intimacy and either splits into separate tribes or become less of a community.  That is why a national organization such as Alcoholics Anynomous has local chapters, so individuals can form their own tribes within a local community and still connect to a larger national tribe.  For an independent day school serving kindergarten through twelfth grade it might mean allowing tribes to form within the Elementary, Middle and High School.

Are you providing your tribe with information that resonates with their shared interest?  Is your enterprise constantly enhancing communication not only to the tribe but between its members?  Does your tribe need to split in order to thrive?

Fundraising Tremors

This week has been a busy one for those in the professional fundraising crowd.  The Association of Fundraising Professionals held their annual conference which I followed on Twitter using #afpmeet.  There are some great links, resources and videos if you search using this hashtag.  Additionally, in the April 8th issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy you can find the annual Fund-Raising Services Guide title, Keeping Donors Loyal in Tough Time.  A couple bullet points from the insert that I found to be most helpful.

   * Ask donors for advice- it makes them feel involved and valued.
   * Focus on the most-loyal donors, and give them more attention.
   * Be specific in thank-you notes about the results of donors’ gifts.
   * Donors want accountability along with thank-yous.

Some resources from the AFP conference include:

The Nonprofit Times put a series of videos online from the Association of Fundraising Professionals conference.


The Chronicle of Philanthropy created a Conference Notebook that they updated throughout the event.  An entry entitled, What Makes Donors Give: A New Study Offers Clues was fascinating.


And lastly, here are a couple of of interesting tweets from the conference:


AmyBlogTalk: #afpmeet Archbishop Tutu philanthropy is the opposite of selfishness #Cinch: http://bit.ly/bapzYB

gonnagetthere: #afpmeet “You cannot separate fundraising from leadership anymore” Karla Williams Session on NPO Leadership Models (via @TammyZonker) Amen!

ToDiFor: 66 percent of high wealth donors said they quit giving because they did not feel connected any longer #afpmeet

BTalisman: RESOURCE: #nfp Posted links to handouts, info etc from #10ntc and #afpmeet http://bit.ly/c8KNc7