For a limited time, my article The Nonprofit Paradox recently published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review is available online for free regardless of subscription.
Why are nonprofit organizations so often plagued by the very ills they aim to cure? Read the article online, or download a PDF, and let us know what you think.
Writing from the biennial gathering of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference in Pittsburgh, I have to say there is a really upbeat attitude among the participants, mostly foundation staff and trustees. I ascribe this optimism to the Dow hitting 11,000, a height fondly remembered but not seen for a long time. As the market picks up, foundation assets rebuild from their 28% decline and things get much more positive in the foundation community. Which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.
But on the other hand most nonprofits rely on sources other than foundations for the bulk of their support. Giving from individuals is still being pressed by high unemployment and uncertainty, some of which may also ease as the market rises. And the largest source of revenue for nonprofits is state and local government programs, and here we see no light at the end of the tunnel, only a precipice as the states try to balance their 2010-2011budgets.
So, as the foundation community regains some of its capacity to help nonprofits, let us not forget that the public sector funding in many cases is much more critical, day in day out, to the survival of most nonprofits, and it will not be rebounding any time soon.
As I waded through nearly a foot of water at the curb while exiting a cab at SFO, rain pouring down my collar, all I could think is “What possessed me to book a 4PM Sunday flight to Pittsburgh?” But I knew the answer. It was for a good cause, of course, the biennial meeting of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, where my colleague Heather Gowdy and I will be leading a session on our latest research initiative NonprofitNext.
GEO’s conference is my favorite gathering because it is a group of people who understand the importance of building strong, sound organizations, not just funding exciting new programs. Still, going out in this curiously wild April storm seemed a bit crazy. So I was all the more surprised when I was joined at the gate by roughly a dozen Bay Area foundation folks, all waiting for the same flight.
GEO is an important part of the nonprofit sector. I must be one of a very small number of people who have attended every one of its meetings, going back, if memory serves, to 1998. The first gathering of a few dozen people in Monterey has mushroomed into an international conference with several hundred foundation leaders and capacity builders.
Despite the dramatic loss of funding for organizational effectiveness issues over the past decade GEO has grown. It publishes important resources, including our Due Diligence Tool, and in addition to the biennial gathering, convenes smaller specialized meetings on many topics. GEO enriches the sector, even if getting to the conference requires traveling through rain, sleet, or snow, it’s always worth it.
Following up my recent Merging Wisely article in Stanford Social Innovation Review, I will be discussing the practical issues involved in merging nonprofit organizations at the next SSIR Live! webinar. From Nonprofit Partnerships to Mergers: How to Restructure for Success will take place Tuesday, April 6, 2010, from 11:00am – Noon PT. I plan to leave plenty of time for questions, so bring yours and join us. Register today!
A January 25, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention. Entitled “Strategic Plans Lose Favor, Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Decisions” by Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli, the article describes several big companies’ efforts to find a better way, in the current economic uncertainty, to plan for the future.
Walt Shill, head of the North American practice for Accenture, is quite blunt: “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead. Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.” Corporate planners are increasingly revising their forecasts monthly, but this too is the wrong solution in my opinion. It consists of continually moving the goal posts. When you first miss your numbers, recast them. Next month, repeat.
It is great to see corporate America, and consulting giants like Accenture, beginning to see the problems with long-term static planning approaches to strategy. We identified similar problems in the nonprofit sector years ago and prescribed a better approach to strategy, our Real-Time Strategic Planning methodology, which was described in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution in 2008. Sometimes our sector leads the way! In this work we describe an ongoing strategy process designed to anticipate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.
Recently I was asked to judge for the 5th Annual Young Nonprofit Leaders Awards given by Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. This is quite an honor, as I told the organizers, not least because it has indeed been a long time since I could qualify for membership in this group. I do not know what the exact age cut-off is, but I am pretty sure that I am way past it.
This request made me start thinking about the evolution of leadership development in the field. When I was a 26 year old nonprofit leader I was pretty much expected to learn on my own, kind of a sink or swim approach. This was largely true of my generation: we had no specific management training (I had a BA and MA in comparative literature), and sometimes we had no actual experience in the field. We spent a lot of time on the phone asking other, slightly less clueless colleagues questions, and we grew organizations through a lot of trial and error.
This approach fit with my generation’s “do your own thing” approach to life but I am not so sure it benefited our organizations. Back then we figured things out but trial and error is costly when you are on the thin margins of a small nonprofit.
These days more nonprofit leaders have specific training, often a masters in business or public or nonprofit administration, and once in the job they increasingly participate in programs that further develop their leadership and management abilities.
It is more than a bit ironic that having never participated in or benefited from any leadership development effort when I was new to the field, I now spend a great deal of time leading these programs. I’m glad the sector and I have evolved and I look forward to where the next generation will lead us.
In 2006, a Yahoo executive wrote a memo that I think many nonprofits would do well to heed. It became known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto. I just came across it in an article in the New Yorker.
We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything – to everyone. I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
Sound familiar? In good times there are resources enough to try new ideas, experiment, spread the nonprofit peanut butter far and wide in an effort to “do everything for everyone.” That could be the mission statement for a few nonprofits I know. But during tough times, you must focus, you must decide what is most important, what is your unique contribution, where you have the best chance to accomplish your mission. This may mean cutting back in some areas to strengthen others. It may mean job reassignments or even layoffs. But your strategy, now more than ever, must be clear and focused.
Pile the peanut butter thick on a smaller slice of bread.
For many years I have been giving talks on various topics at the annual Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Boot Camp. I usually feel these sessions are pretty well received and several of them live on as podcasts at the Craigslist Foundation web site.
Recently I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that one of these talks, from 2007, entitled “How to Succeed as a Nonprofit Executive Director” is the most popular podcast from all past Boot Camps. In fact, it has been downloaded more than 5,000 times!
And if that isn’t enough for you, my most recent Boot Camp presentation, from this past summer, on Real-Time Strategic Planning, was just uploaded on the site as well.
Check it out and tell me what you think!
One of the many joys of my job is to have a regular opportunity to meet lots of interesting and creative people who are trying to change the world. This week is typical.
Ben Paul of Communiteach. He is creating a forum for people to both sign up for learning opportunities and offer to teach others the special skills they possess. It is a kind of barter system for education and a very cool idea.
Linda Raybin, Managing Director of Community Foundation Services for The Council on Foundations. She has an exciting initiative she is starting in order to help community foundations to be as strategic as possible as they move through the recession.
Jeff Malloy, Director of Finance and Administration at the James Irvine Foundation. We spoke regarding a new initiative the foundation has launched to help its grantees with financial restructuring. We have been invited to serve as the Foundation’s consulting partner in this endeavor and are very excited about the possibilities this presents for real change among some key nonprofits in California.
Shiree Teng of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She is doing a retrospective of the organizational effectiveness movement. It turns out, by complete happenstance, that I was there at the inception, or is it conception, of the concept. In fact my firm was born out of the first stirrings of the OE movement, with Irvine, Packard and Hewlett as the original investors.
Eleanor Clement Glass, Chief of Donor Engagement and Giving at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. She is a long time colleague of probably twenty years. We spoke about the state of affairs in her community’s nonprofits and a variety of ideas for helping them through this difficult time.
Exciting conversations with dynamic people. Like I said, I have many joys in my job!
When the Alliance for Nonprofit Management conference ended last Friday in Palm Springs, I had gained at least one important and encouraging piece of information: despite the economy, people are still working on important things.
A group of capacity builders recently finished a book on culturally competent capacity building, others presented new ideas on training and developing consultants. The list of initiatives, while not so long as in past years, was at least, well, still a list. I was also encouraged to remember that we are all still here, alive, and working, from the level of fellowship among participants.
Old friends and new huddled in groups of two, three, or ten, sharing experiences, offering support, and just being there. It was a good reminder for us all in these trying times. Times that in California at least, just got more trying with the budget deal.
