Stanford Social Innovation Review

Telling Stories

We all know that telling stories is an effective and fun way to inform others about our programs—what’s worked and what hasn’t—and to garner support for them. But telling stories about our organization and staff is just as important, since it helps to create community.

Stories are powerful because they can: 

• Explain something complex or hard to believe in an understandable, manageable way
• Change someone’s perspective on an event, person, place, or issue
• Bring together people who otherwise would not have known about each other
• Change a situation or topic from taboo or uncomfortable to accepted and approachable
• Create a safe place for ideas, fears, questions, and wonder
• Start a conversation, as well as friendships, that will continue long after the story

To tell stories internally (to people from the organization, and not those served), you could:

• Start a staff blog to discuss volunteer work, personal projects, life lessons learned, etc.
• Post short videos on the staff page instead of photos of staff members, letting individuals share their passion for the organization, their focus area, or their job duty
• Create a group in Flickr or another photo-sharing tool so staff can post videos from events or the office
• Collect staffers’ individual descriptions of the organization’s projects to post collectively
• And much more

When it comes to telling stories from the inside, imagine a ladder whose rungs are:  blogs,  podcasts,  videos,  live chat, and so forth, all of which contribute to elevating the story.

How have you told stories from your organization? How could you add to the stories of your clients ormembers with your staffers’ stories?

Amy Sample Ward’s passion for nonprofit technology has lead to her involvement with NTEN, NetSquared, and a host of other organizations. She shares many of her thoughts on nonprofit technology news and evolutions on her blog.

 

Posted by Katie Harrington

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Bully!  The Scourge of Nonprofit Boards, and What to Do About It

Like every other human organization, a nonprofit board of directors is subject to being dominated by an internal bully. Nonprofit boards are actually more at risk of bully dominance than other groups, because the only compensation for serving is psychological. For most board members, the psychological reward is the consciousness of doing good in good company—but for some, satisfaction can only flow from being utterly and completely in charge.

The bully turns a nonprofit board into a corporation of one, and deprives the executive director (ED) and the agency of everyone else’s expertise and skills.

Here are three common forms of nonprofit board bully, and what to do about them:

The Martinet Bully: Often a man, and often the board chair. He is determined to import the standards of the business world to the nonprofit sector whether they’re applicable or not. His methods involve an exaggerated concern for efficiency: meetings start early, whether or not people are there, and discussion is foreshortened with a remark such as, “We’ve got the report—let’s just vote.”  In the short term, the ED should gently say, “I’m not sure everyone’s been heard from yet.” In the medium term, give the martinet a project he can handle by himself which will keep him out of others’ way. In the long term, find someone else willing to serve as board chair who will practice for that position by deliberately sticking a spoke in the current chair’s wheel when he starts running over the rest of the group.

The Expert Bully: “I’m on 33 other boards, and it’s always done this way.” He or she shuts down others’ opinions with a look of condescending pity for those lacking experience.  Interestingly, this brand of bully is rarely willing to serve as board chair (too busy with the other boards, perhaps). In the short term, the board chair and ED should make sure they know of at least one example of things being done differently, and mention it. In the medium term, give the expert a project that can be handled exactly as the expert bully pleases. In the long term, identify and work to empower other board members in specific areas of governance—personnel, say, or taxes—and thus gradually reduce the scope of the expert’s terrain.

The Passive-Aggressive Bully: “You can do it that way if you want, but then I’m going to have to quit.” This one arises most frequently at the pivotal moment when an agency is finally adopting a minimum gift. The bully hopes to make everyone else feel guilty for having too much money and not enough sympathy for poor little Passive-Aggressive. In the short term, the board chair and ED can pretend not to hear what’s been said. In the medium and long term, ask other members of the board to pretend not to hear what’s been said. The only way to handle these bullies is to ignore them.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Katie Harrington

4 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Young Nonprofit Professionals Need to Keep it Real

We are born followers. In school, we are taught to memorize blindly our alphabet, multiplication tables, names of presidents and their wives, dates of wars and treaties. As children, we play a constant game of Simon Says to get the best grade in the class. And all throughout life, we try to find role models that we can emulate - our teachers, supervisors, politicians, movie stars, etc. When I talk to my nonprofit peers, everyone always says how much they want a mentor to help them learn how to be. Unfortunately, many of them are not finding a viable role model in their executive director, and don’t want to be the pressure-driven, workaholic they often see in their bosses. So what do we, as born followers, do when the images we see are not useful?

Try keeping it real.

It’s a simple concept, but one that young people especially have a hard time wrapping our minds around. When you don’t have 20 years of experience under your belt, there is this need to justify who you are, what you do, and why you do it. What incentive do we have to be ourselves? I’m waiting anxiously for the day when I get up on stage or behind a podium and half the people in the audience aren’t looking at me, half amused, wondering just who the hell do I think I am.

For many young professionals that seek to lead in the nonprofit sector, we are always wondering if what we’re doing is “right” or “acceptable” in the eyes of our Baby Boomer bosses and boards. Sometimes we think that if we learn to act and sound just like our bosses, one day we will indeed get to be the boss. Or, if we flow with the status quo, surely we’ll move up the ladder to senior management. If we don’t rock the boat or bang our sippy cups on the table too loudly, well then…somebody might just let us lead. Recently I gave an entire media interview trying to come up with the same kind of phrases and language my boss would use, and I felt so fake afterwards. For those five minutes or whatever it was, I had literally forgotten how to be myself. I realized then that it’s really hard to be authentic when you’re trying hard to be someone else. And as young professionals, we need to speak our own words in our own way. That is the only way we will find our voice.

Baltimore neo-soul band Fertile Ground plays one of my favorite songs called “Star People.” It’s a fabulous musical expression about how we have lost our authenticity over time.

“Do you remember the time when we were one with the sun?
And all the joy that we had, ‘cause in our hearts we were one.

“We’ve been missing the point of who we are and why we came.
And as this reality deceives us, we get caught and lose our aim.
We get in the way of ourselves, and we make it so hard.

“Star people come down, we are preparing to be with you again.”

It’s kind of funny. We learn how to be critical thinkers and activists in college, then leave all the fire behind when we enter the workforce. Yet, the nonprofit sector is the one place where one should expect to find truth. It’s the one place where we should be able to bring all of our hopes and dreams for a better world. And it is, believe it or not. Young nonprofit professionals have an opportunity to be very intentional and tell the truth in our own words. And if we would all seek to become better followers, we might find our own leadership in that moment.

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Take Back Your 9 to 5: Develop a Personal Mission Statement

I have been developing my personal mission statement for almost a year now. It’s been a truly rewarding process to write and revisit my goals and values for my life and compare them to how I actually balance my priorities. There’s something really powerful and empowering about being able to say YES or NO to opportunities that come into your life based on how you want to live out your personal values. Dumb Little Man has a great definition of what a personal mission statement is:

Your personal mission statement should be a concise representation of what’s most important to you, what you desire to focus on, what you want to achieve, and, ultimately, who you want to become. In its purest form, it’s an approach to your life, one that allows you to identify a focus of energy, creativity, and vision in living a life in support of your inner-most beliefs and values. It is important to remember that your mission will change over time as you and your life change.

There are many ways to go about creating your own personal mission statement but I will highlight a three-step process here. In my session, we only had an hour, so this entire process was expedited. However, you can take as short or as long a time as you need to reflect and write out your mission statement. It can be short-term, career specific, or it can encompass your whole life. The key is really just to get down on paper what values and visions you want to manifest in your life. The process and the final statement can help you make many different kinds of decisions. And if you’re in a career rut, it can certainly help you figure out what to do next!

Step 1: Identify Your Values
What matters most to you in life? Often we find that we’ve forgotten about that which we care about because we’re stuck doing something else. Take 5 minutes to jot down a free-for-all list of what means a lot to you. Just a few examples of values include:

• Achievement, fame, advancement, leadership
• Money, power, authority, economic security
• Having a family, children, love, community, friendships
• Nature, religion, public service, ecological awareness, healthy living, physical challenge
• Democracy, civic involvement, wisdom, integrity, truth
• Location, privacy, country, adventure, fast-paced living

Step 2: Identify Your Goals
Once you’ve reflected on what matters most to you, then take 5 minutes to think about how you want to be remembered. How do you want to contribute or what goals do you want to accomplish for yourself or your career? This question is especially relevant to nonprofit professionals who for the most part, came to the sector to make some kind of social change. Other goals can relate to how you want to go about building your career. Just a few examples of goals include:

• Career aspirations
• Volunteer interests
• Ways to make social impact
• Ways you want to grow in your career or personal life

Step 3: Write Your Mission Statement
Now that you’ve identified your values and what you want to be when you grow up, you can take the ten minutes to begin drafting your personal mission statement. It can be as short or as long as you think it needs to be. And remember, it will continue to change as YOU change over time. I’m also sharing some concrete examples to get a feel for what the final version could look like.

Here is MY current mission statement:

I value education, achievement, adventure, creativity, and independence. I especially value authenticity in myself and others. I appreciate laughter, good food, music, art, poetry and Black history & culture. Before I die, I want to have made a positive impact on the world for young people, women, and people of color. As a writer, professor, consultant, and board member, I can lead according to my values by teaching others and helping nonprofits reach their goals. I will network to stay connected to others who are living a life of purpose. In my journey to take care of others, I will not neglect my own family, friends, finances, health, or spirituality.

Here are other examples of mission statements that others have written:

• I have a wonderful new job. It is located within thirty minutes of where I live. I work for forty hours a week. The job is with a first rate company which is successful, generous, ethical, well organized and embraces trying new approaches to leverage innovation and synergy. The company has good products and services which add to the quality of people’s lives. My employer appreciates my skills and there is good mutual communication. It is a joy to work with them. I really like and respect the people I work with and vice-versa. I have flexibility and can choose which projects I can stretch with. I love what I do and have frequent opportunities to meet interesting people and travel. I am paid $60,000 per year.
• I am a responsible spouse and parent; I give priority to these roles. I value differences and view them as strengths. I seek to build complementary win-win relationships with family, friends, and business associates. To keep these relationships healthy and to maintain a high level of trust, I make daily “deposits” in the “emotional bank accounts” of others.
• My mission is to give, for giving is what I do best and I can learn to do better.

If you already have a mission statement for YOUR life, please share it here! We want to know - how has it impacted the way you work, lead, or live your life?

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

3 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Take Back Your 9 to 5: Cultivate a Slash Career in the Nonprofit Sector

I’ve been reading Marci Alboher’s fabulous book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success. The book is filled with stories of “slashes,” people who have created multiple careers in their lives, such as a lawyer/filmmaker, a hip-hop artist/investment banker, a minister/lawyer, a rabbi/comic…even a nonprofit director/accountant. Marci shares practical tips for people who want to add another career to their repertoire to fulfill a passion, make more money, or both. It’s really an empowering look at how we can “custom blend” our careers instead of being stuck with one label or getting pigeonholed into one role. The successful stories of the slashes in the book show that you can have more than one interest and try on different hats, and in the process become more fulfilled and financially stable. Some look at their slash as a part-time job, some build an entire second career.

So I’m thinking, everyone in the nonprofit sector should read this book. I mean, one of our major gripes with this field is that we don’t make enough money. If we can’t change that, adding a slash to our lives could help pay the bills. Also, many of us young nonprofit professionals are stressing out and burning out after just a few years of working in a nonprofit because we view our day job as our only option of living out our values AND providing a stable financial future for ourselves and our families. Marci’s book assures us that that is not necessarily the case. You CAN slash your life and become more self-sufficient and fulfilled as a nonprofit employee. Let me tell you about a few nonprofit slashes I know:

Kevin, a development director/yoga instructor
Ben, a communications director/aerobics teacher
Elisa, a program coordinator/adult toy party consultant
Rebecca, a program manager/property manager
Eric, a program manager/artist/graphic designer
Carol, a program director/financial planning consultant

All of these people are living out their values and earning a better living while working in the nonprofit sector. They all seem more satisfied with their lives because they get to be more well-rounded. My slash experience is the same. As a writer/teacher/consultant/fundraiser, I get to work in all of the areas I love and increase my nonprofit income at the same time. My day job provides the stability, health insurance, and connection to an organization, while my other endeavors allow me to be more creative and bring every aspect of myself into my work. if you’ve been stuck in a nonprofit rut, or thinking about switching jobs just to earn $5,000 more, I’d encourage you to think about adding a slash, especially if you want to:

Earn Supplemental Income
Working part-time at anything can add more Benjamins to your bank account. Just because you’re a nonprofit employee doesn’t mean you can’t have another job on the side to make ends meet or pay for your dream vacation. Stop working those late nights and weekends and devote that time to another paid position. Or you can start your own business based on your other talents or interests.

Explore Your Other Interests & Passions
Adding a slash to your life can open up exciting doors beyond your nonprofit role. I’ve met so many people that talk about things they used to love in college like playing music, doing art, writing poetry. If you’ve always had an interest, this might be the time to pursue it as an additional career. My mom worked in the corporate world and wanted to get back into fitness training. She studied the certification materials for three months, passed the test, and was all set to train clients. Once I took a job at a restaurant just so I could be a cook, which has always been one of my passions. I also worked at library part-time because I love to read and be around books. The sky is the limit. For every interest, there is a career just waiting to be found.

Develop Leadership Skills to Bring into Your Nonprofit Job
Being the boss in your slash life can help you find the confidence to lead more fully in your nonprofit role. People who have their own business might be more decisive in their day jobs because they’ve obtained the leadership experience in another setting. No matter what slash you choose, you are in charge of it, and that attitude can carry over into your regular working life, and allow you to think more like a leader.

If you’re thinking about cultivating a slash career, you may want to check out other resources from Marci at www.heymarci.com.

Do YOU have a nonprofit slash career or know someone else who does? What do you think about custom blending your career in the nonprofit sector?

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Take Back Your 9 to 5: Ditch the Martyr Lifestyle

“I’m worried about you,” my grandmother said. I could hear her worry vibrating over the phone lines hundreds of miles away. “You never call your grandmother anymore, and you’re always working. Are they paying you overtime?” I chuckled. “No, Grandma, nonprofits don’t pay overtime. Besides, I’m on salary and I’m leading this big new leadership project. I need to work late so I can get it all together.” She clucked; you know, that disapproving sound that only a grandmother can make. “Well, you can’t do nothing if you’re in the hospital, and that’s what’s going to happen to you if you keep working so much.” A few weeks later, I found myself doubled over in my bed, too sick to go to work for a week. In an instant, my fast-paced world had come to a halt. Through the fog of all the medication I was taking, I could hear my grandmother’s words ringing in my ears.

That’s when I knew I was playing the martyr role for my nonprofit. I had neglected to take care of my body, and overworked myself for the sake of the cause. Many of us are stuck in this rut. We love our jobs and our organizations so much that we let our passion consume us and forget about taking care of ourselves. I changed some of my habits after getting hit with illness, but it really is a daily effort to set boundaries with myself, and to value my inner life over my professional life. Asia Hadley shares some of her self-care practices on her new blog, Beacons on the Frontline:

• Meditate daily in the mornings
• Pray with my husband, recite our marriage pledge, and read an inspirational daily thought in the morning and evening
• Maintain a gratitude journal
• Practice yoga
• Exercise daily (2-3 times per week at gym/other times at home)
• Spend time with friends
• Read
• SAVY Sister Circle with my mother and sister each Sunday over the phone (Prayer over the phone)

Here are some other ways to ditch the martyr lifestyle as a nonprofit professional:

Ask For a Raise
As nonprofit workers, our biggest beef is with our notoriously low salaries. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We don’t have to live in near poverty. Everything is negotiable, whether you believe it or not. If you’re doing a good job, there’s no harm in asking for a salary adjustment. I’ll take you back to my post on how to negotiate a higher salary. If what you really need for your own peace of mind is more money, by all means you should ask for it. You may not always get it, but at least your employer will know that you know your own worth. If you don’t place a value on the work that you do, your boss won’t value it either. It doesn’t have to be all about money either. You can negotiate a work-from-home arrangement or ask for more vacation time.

Take Care of Your Body
Exercise is a neglected part of our health, no matter what career field you’re in. But when you are dealing with a stressful position in a nonprofit, be it fundraising, counseling, or job training, you need to take care of your body much more than anyone else. Getting in regular exercise and eating healthy is essential. Springing for a relaxing massage every once in a while is a good idea, too. And if you can’t get motivated to exercise, try hiring a personal trainer or joining a group fitness class. I’ve learned a ton of other tips about staying fit and eating well from my mom’s blog.

Feed Your Spirit
Sometimes our spirituality can suffer when we’re focused on helping others. Regular prayer or meditation can be helpful not only in times of high stress, but to keep you centered and balanced during each day. I’ve just started going back to church for morning worship after years of taking all my Sundays for sleep because I stayed up late working all of the other days of the week. I also meditate and pray in the mornings.

Let Your Light Shine
Be a positive influence on others, even if you’re stuck in what you feel is a bad career situation. You may be overworked, but you don’t have to complain about it to everyone who asks you how you’re doing. Chances are, if you’re feeling the negative vibes, everyone else is, too. Break out your smile and ask your co-workers how they’re coming along. When you radiate positive energy, it tends to spread to others around you.

Quit Your Job
I know, it feels like a cop-out, but sometimes, you just need to let it go. Your nonprofit job may be noble and important to the community, but let someone else have that role if it is not working for you. Find another job that is a better fit for your personal and professional needs. It is not the end of the world, and quitting does NOT make you a failure. On the contrary, it can spare you from years of unhappiness with your career just because you feel obligated to the mission.

What are some other ways that YOU sustain yourself and prevent burnout in your career?

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Career Empowerment as Co-Creation

Recently, I wrote a series of posts to really target the theme of career empowerment:

• Take Back Your 9 to 5: Develop a Personal Mission Statement
• Take Back Your 9 to 5: Cultivate a Slash Career in the Nonprofit Sector
• Take Back Your 9 to 5: Ditch the Martyr Lifestyle

Each of the posts talked about an aspect of improving or enhancing your nonprofit career. But those are just some ways you can become empowered in this field. During this Saturday’s Women Rule Meet up in DC, seven awesome ladies sat around a table in a tea shop talking about so many ways we struggle and succeed in our work. I wanted to share one thread of our conversation that came from Gabriela Cadena, who is one of the most positive people I know.

Gabriela said that we need to see ourselves as co-creators in our careers. Our employers and even the nonprofit field itself are only one part of the relationship that we enter into when we come to work. And we should seek to take responsibility for that relationship. I took a step back in my mind when I heard that, because I meet so many young nonprofit professionals through my blog, at conferences, through my day job…and we have a lot of gripes with the nonprofit sector. Most of the time, our attitude is that our bosses are doing us dirty with these low salaries, our supervisors give us projects that are impossible to complete during regular working hours, and our clients need so much more than we can provide. No wonder so many talented people end up quitting before they’ve had a chance to make a difference. We give up because we don’t think about the other possibilities. We forget that everything is negotiable

Gabriela reminds us that we have to stop blaming other people or institutions or the culture of our sector for what we don’t like about our careers. If we can start to think of ourselves as co-creators of each relationship that we are a part of, it can lead us to more creative ways of structuring the way we work, so that it works for us.

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Mobile Volunteers

NYU new media professor and Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky likes to tell the story about a recent day when two of his friends were sitting with their 4-year-old daughter, watching a DVD. “In the middle of the movie, apropos nothing,” Shirky says, the girl jumps up off the couch and runs behind the screen. Her dad thought she was going to see if Dora (the explorer, from the kid’s cartoon show) was hiding there. But no, the girl was rooting around in the cables. “What are you doing?” her father asked. Sticking her head out from behind the screen, the girl said, “Looking for the mouse.”

For Shirky, it’s a tale of the times. “Four-year-olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken,” he says. “Four-year-olds know that media that is targeted at you—but that doesn’t include you—may not be worth sitting still for.”

No question: All social media innovators today are “looking for the mouse”—working to find new ways to let those who use, hear, read, and watch media participate more fully. The most innovative enlist the use of mobile phones for a cause: The nonprofit National Democratic Institute uses text messaging to spot vote fraud in elections around the globe; Witness.org asks its supporters to photograph human rights abuses with their cellphones; the Zumbido project in Mexico created a mobile social network for people living with HIV/AIDS.

But nobody has cracked the challenge of “on demand” volunteering—until now. Social media entrepreneur and activist Ben Rigby, author of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, thinks he’s “found the mouse” for it with Volunteer NOW, his on-the-spot, GPS-aided mobile application that directs people who suddenly find themselves with some free time on their hands to a list of short-term volunteering opportunities near to their present location—be it an airport, an office building, a local Starbucks, or a city park. Rigby’s goal: to transform volunteering into an “impulse activity” that, for the cause-wired not otherwise looking to tune out or cat-nap, could be done on the fly. (Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non-English speaker. Or, text for the nearest beach or park clean-up drive and spend your lunch hour in the sun.)

“Projects like SETI@Home showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data,” Rigby says. “(Volunteer NOW!) explores the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human ‘CPUs.’ We believe it will reveal a massive, untapped capacity to do good.”

Rigby is not the only social media innovator intrigued by the idea of spare-time, mobile volunteering. Leaders of Do Something, a New York-based nonprofit, started using mobile phones in March to recruit volunteers. The Beta version of its Do Something NOW! mobile program, funded in part by the Sprint Foundation, invites young people to sign up for volunteering through a form on its Web site; Do Something then sends them one or two text alerts each month with volunteer opportunities that fit their locations and preferences. So far, more than 1,000 people have signed up for the text alerts: Do Something hopes to have 10,000 signed up by year’s end. Opt-out rates, says Chief Marketing Officer Aria Finger, are running less than 5 percent.

Look for more examples of mobile volunteering in the months ahead. Katrin Verclas, founder of MobileActive.org, will be showcasing some at her global summit on cause-mobile technology in Johannesburg, South Africa, October 13-15. Google’s recent entry into the mobile phone market will add fuel to the mobile advocacy movement in coming months.

For more on how cell phones and other social media are dramatically changing society’s notions of free time, check out the Blip.tv video of Clay Shirky’s wildly popular talk at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this past spring. It’s about 10 minutes long but well worth the cognitive surplus—Shirky’s term for free time—that you carve out to watch it.

Reprinted with permission from Cause Global

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Is it Better to Work in the Front of the House?

When I was in college, I worked three jobs to support myself. I worked in a library, at a hotel, and in a few restaurants. I loved the restaurant business because I got to be around food all the time and talk to people when they are most happy: drinking and stuffing their faces. One of the main concepts you learn during orientation to work at a restaurant is the difference between ‘front of the house’ and ‘back of the house’. Front of the house restaurant staff are the managers, the hosts & hostesses, bartenders and the servers. Back of the house included all the kitchen staff - the cooks, prep staff, and dishwashers. Basically, front of the house staff represent the ‘face’ of the restaurant, while most customers never see the back of the house employees.

This concept is also true for the nonprofit sector. Most organizations are mainly represented by the Executive Director and/or the senior management team. The program and administrative staff are the ones making the organization’s impact on a daily basis, but the quotes in the news and the faces on the screen are that of the front of the house nonprofit staff. The higher salaries are also going to the front of the house.

But that’s often the dilemma for young nonprofit professionals who want to be close to the organization’s work on a daily basis: feeding the homeless, tutoring the kids, providing the counseling or training. Those program positions usually don’t pay the bills, so we are compelled to move closer to the front of the house to increase our salary. Many would say that being back of the house is more fulfilling, but front of the house is more financially rewarded.

What do you think? Is it better to work in the front of the house?

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

1 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Nonprofits Must Invest in Human Capital

People are nonprofits’ most valuable asset and they must be smarter about finding, engaging, and keeping the staff they need.

A new report from the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University, for example, says nonprofits can be more effective at recruiting and retaining staff—particularly from among “Millennials” born between 1982 and 2002, and Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964—by focusing on their mission.

“Offering staff a life of meaning can be a powerful tool for recruitment,” says Lester M. Salamon, who wrote the report and directs the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies.

Nonprofits also need to show they value their workforce by putting a high priority on personnel issues and adapting themselves to the diverse needs and interests of employees and prospective employees.

To attract Millenials, for example, nonprofits are shifting their recruiting to the Internet and looking for ways to offset student-loan obligations, the Hopkins report says.

Other strategies nonprofits can use to be more effective at recruiting and retaining employees include:

• Selling their organizations’ “context,” including physical environment, work environment, and mission.
• Taking the initiative on recruiting by reaching out to young professionals who may not know much about nonprofits. An approach can include recruiting young people as board members and donors.
• Redefining work and the work environment by redesigning benefits to reflect new family structures, offering flexible hours, and using focus groups to keep in touch with worker concerns.
• Staffing and investing in human-resources departments.
• Offering relief to recent college graduates who face debt burdens.
• Reaching out to diverse communities in recruiting.

The workforce is changing and becoming more diverse, and nonprofits must move quickly to make sure they reflect and connect to the interests, needs, and values of the workers they will need so as to thrive and grow.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

2 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Beware of Excess “Creativity”

I just thought I’d warn you: Creative directors are basically a race of evil beings. I know, because I am one. (For the record, a few of us have vowed to use our dark powers for good, and must battle our own wicked hearts; this would make a great movie.)

Creative directors in service to nonprofit organizations do a lot of damage. I’ll prove it to you with just one recent ad, done for the World Food Programme.

This ad shows clearly how creative directors become adept at persuading others to trade aesthetics for effectiveness. That’s no doubt why this ad has a stark and beautiful black-and-white photo, rather than a “real” looking color photo.

The photo isn’t the only problem with this ad:

• It has an almost totally abstract, noncommunicative headline. The creative director no doubt loved the “impressionistic” quality of this headline.
• The headline’s type is so tightly kerned, it looks like a printing error of some kind. The creative director might have said, “It signals a kind of embrace within the headline.” Putting the headline above the photo is a design no-no that CDs love and practice constantly for aesthetic reasons.
• The entire ad is in reverse type, which is significantly harder for people to read than regular type. But it sure looks gorgeous, doesn’t it?
• No clear call to action. There’s a seed of an offer, but they just couldn’t quite make the leap to actually including a sentence that directly challenged the reader to participate. (Concreteness is like kryptonite to creative directors; if they get anywhere near it, their pretension starts to shrivel.)

What can I say? That’s what creative directors do. They use their knowledge to create confusion—leading to bad communication that doesn’t accomplish anything.

But you can say no to them. Insist that you never create a marketing message that doesn’t create quantifiable results. Then you can test everything your creative director tells you. The level of confusion will clear away. 

Many more Stupid nonprofit ads here.

Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle, a direct-response agency serving the nonprofit world.  He blogs at the Donor Power Blog.

 

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Diversity Is Everyone’s Business

I had the opportunity to speak at the National Human Services Assembly Summit last week on the topic, “Responding to the Diversity Gap” along with Carolyn Creager, director of the Multicultural Executive Development Program of the National YMCA. The theme underlying our discussion was that society is changing all around us, yet the nonprofit sector isn’t keeping pace with the cultural shift in America, nor making enough of an effort to recruit, retain, and promote people of color to top executive positions in our field. The reality is that the current racial makeup of this country is changing, and as nonprofits we have to think about who we will be serving, and who will be leading. I know you saw this in The New York Times:

“Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago. The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, Black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.”

I also shared some up-to-date stats about the current racial makeup of nonprofit leadership, as well as my disappointment with the lack of people of color who are being recognized for their contributions. I think everyone agreed that we need to promote sweeping changes in nonprofit culture regarding diversity issues. My aim was to remind the audience that all of us in that room were agents of nonprofit culture, and there were many things we could each do individually and collectively to raise the issue of multicultural leadership at every opportunity we get. In that room were CEOs, VPs, directors of mostly national organizations, and I know they each sit on some committee, board of directors, or taskforce where their voice is influential to others in our sector. If in fact we are concerned about increasing the racial diversity of nonprofit leadership, we need to put our money where our mouths are and start taking some risks, personally and institutionally, to make that happen. What role can we each play as an agent of nonprofit culture to change the game? A few ideas we discussed:

• Prioritize cultural competency—educate yourself and your staff to be aware of how our different cultural backgrounds affect how we see others.
• Expand your networks beyond your comfort zone.
• Make the extra effort to reach out and include people of color on your committee, your board, and your taskforce.
• Attend trainings to learn more about race, ethnicity, culture, and equity to better understand the issues.
• Support affinity groups.
• Avoid tokenism—don’t just look for one representative of color to fill a spot; invite several people to participate at once.
• Speak out on this issue by writing letters to the editor and opinion pieces in your sphere of influence to motivate others to pay attention to this need.

We ARE nonprofit culture, and it is up to us to be the change we wish to see. AFP’s magazine, Advancing Philanthropy, has a great article in the current issue about the importance of having lunch with someone of another culture to get to know people outside your usual networks. I think that’s a great idea. But I also think we each can use our voices to motivate others in our organizations and across the field.

You CAN take action today: Write a short email to the Nonprofit Times editor to express your support for an open nominations process in their selection of the annual Power and Influence Top 50 list of nonprofit leaders. Tell them you want to see their publication reflect the racial diversity of leadership within our sector! Send an email to Paul Clolery at: ednchief@nptimes.com or call him at: (973) 401-0202 Ext 211.

Together we can change our culture, one step at a time. I share my presentation with you here so that it might spark some thoughts of your own. What are your ideas about individual and collective action we all can take to make diversity everyone’s business?

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, DC area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

1 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Nonprofits Can Work Smarter With Volunteers

Volunteers represent an indispensable asset and resource for nonprofits, which can do much more to engage volunteers and put their expertise to work.

New research by the Corporation for National and Community Service finds that while most volunteers do not use their professional skills in their nonprofit work, those who do find their volunteer service more satisfying.

Nearly 61 million Americans age 16 and older volunteered in 2007, giving 8.1 billion hours of service worth over $158 billion, the Corporation for National and Community Service says.

But an estimated 22 million volunteers, or over one in three Americans who volunteer, stopped volunteering between 2006 and 2007.

That “leaky bucket,” the corporation says, underscores the importance of treating volunteers as valuable assets, giving them meaningful work, and using best practices to manage volunteers.

The group’s research also finds many volunteers are involved in fundraising, an important task for nonprofits but one that can divert the volunteers from opportunities to put their skills to work on other organizational needs.

The research also suggests volunteers who use their skills when they serve are more likely to keep volunteering.

A key way to better connect with skilled professionals as volunteers, the Corporation for National and Community Service says, is to build relationships with local businesses, and to be prepared to offer volunteer assignments that match their employees’ skills.

Professional associations also can serve as key partners in promoting the idea of pro-bono service by their members’ employees.

The American Bar Association, for example, helped establish pro-bono service as a common expectation in the legal profession, which at 47.1 percent has one of the highest volunteer rates in the U.S.

Research also underscores the need for nonprofits to be looking for ways to better engage Baby Boomers, young people, women, and “intensive” volunteers.

Baby Boomers, or those born from 1946 to 1964, will double the number of older volunteers in the coming decades, and young people are volunteering at higher rates than the previous generation, the research says.

It also shows women volunteer at higher rates than do men, and that women with children and working women volunteer at higher rates than other women.

And the percentage of volunteers giving over 100 hours of service a year totaled 35.6 percent in 2007, the highest level since 2002.

Previous research has shown that volunteers tend to give more to charity than givers who do not volunteer, and that people who start volunteering at an early age tend to keep volunteering.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of nonprofits, and they have a lot more to offer than nonprofits typically ask them to do.

By developing strategies to better recruit volunteers and better match their skills with organizational needs, nonprofits can better equip themselves to operate more effectively and better serve their communities.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

2 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

A New Spirit, a Time for Giving

The election of Barack Obama as president marks the start of a new era for giving and making a difference.

In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama asked Americans to serve, sacrifice, and work together to fix what is wrong in America and strengthen our communities, our economy, our environment, and our security.

Throughout the campaign, Obama has urged Americans to pitch in.

He has promised, for example, to repay college graduates who perform public service for groups like the Peace Corps and Teach for America by helping to cover their college costs.

Charitable giving in the U.S. totaled $306 billion last year, and nearly 61 million Americans age 16 and older volunteered, giving 8.1 billion hours worth over $158 billion.

Over one million nonprofit organizations depend on the contribution of time, money, and know-how, and the dedication of employees who often are overworked and underpaid, to address the urgent needs our communities face.

“So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of service, and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other,” Obama said Tuesday night.

Long known as the “nonprofit sector,” or “voluntary sector,” the charitable work and investment of individuals and organizations more accurately should be known as the “giving sector.”

The giving sector is the heart of America.

And now, in the face of overwhelming economic, environmental, and global-security threats, the giving sector needs to be stronger, more strategic, and more collaborative.

Nonprofits must equip themselves to truly succeed. They need to engage their givers and their boards. And boards need to know their role, help the organization focus on the mission, and give staff the support they need.

Individuals must connect themselves to causes they care about, and make strategic investments of their time, their expertise, and their financial assets.

And charitable foundations and corporate-giving programs must dig deep and do more to address the organizational and operating needs of nonprofits.

Obama promises he will work to engage everyone in the job of fixing what is wrong in America, making government truly diverse and inclusive.

That job will require that we learn to bridge the gaps that divide us and work together, and nowhere is that more needed than in the giving sector.

Nonprofits and foundations talk a lot about collaboration, but few are willing to actually give up even the tiniest measure of control or power to form the partnerships that will be critical to solving problems that are bigger than individual organizations can handle.

And most foundations, for all their talk, still will not give more each year than the law requires them to “pay out,” a mere 5 percent of their assets.

In addition to the financial incentives he has promised to give college graduates who perform public service, Obama can push for incentives for individuals, foundations, and corporations to give more.

Obama also can engage in the giving sector the truly remarkable political organization he has built.

And nonprofits, applying the social-networking strategies and technology Obama used to build his organization, now can do a better job mobilizing, engaging, and managing their own givers.

“This victory alone is not the change we seek, it is only the chance for us to make that change,” Obama said Tuesday night. “And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.”

In this new era of giving, the challenge for the giving sector is to move beyond talk and giving as usual to truly fulfill the dream of a “new spirit of patriotism, of service, and of responsibility.”

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of
Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

1 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Volunteer as a Leader

Dear Nonprofiteer,

Your posts about volunteerism seem addressed to nonprofits—how they can better meet the desires of their volunteers. Do you think you could write a corresponding post about how volunteers can better meet the desires of nonprofits? I know you’ve said that we as volunteers need to think more about who we want to be, rather than what we want to do. I’d love an expansion on that.

I’ve been trying to volunteer with an organization that works with children, or hunger, or the blind, for about two years and I keep having near-disastrous experiences on the way to becoming a volunteer. Maybe it’s me? I really want to volunteer with a local organization and have contacted several, but something always seems to go wrong—either the nonprofit doesn’t respond to me or the work they give me doesn’t match my expectations. It’s very frustrating!

Do you have any thoughts or advice?

Signed, Tripping on the Way up the Aisle

Dear Tripping:

There’s very little a volunteer can do to deal with a nonprofit that simply doesn’t respond, although using a Rule of Three might help: don’t give up ’til you’ve e-mailed, and then e-mailed again, and then called. If those three efforts at outreach don’t produce a face-to-face meeting, cut your losses and move on. By the same token, don’t give up after the face-to-face meeting ‘til you’ve e-mailed a thank-you note, and then e-mailed a follow-up, and then called; but if that’s not enough to produce a specific assignment, what you’ve encountered is a nonprofit not yet ready to take advantage of a volunteer.

And there are plenty of those, which somehow is the elephant in the living room of the nonprofit world: that agencies with functioning volunteer programs are very much in the minority. No amount of calling us “the voluntary sector” will magically produce volunteer opportunities in agencies up to their asses in alligators. So the first thing a prospective volunteer can do to be useful (and magnify her chances of actually being able to contribute) is to recognize, and articulate her recognition of, the fact that managing volunteers takes time, and effort, and expertise, and that all of those things are in pretty short supply at most nonprofits because they all cost money. An initial cover letter that says, “If you don’t have a full-fledged volunteer program, I understand it’s a little difficult to figure out what to do with a single volunteer.  But please let’s get together and talk through it” will flag you instantly as a person who understands the nonprofit world and is therefore likely to be useful in some capacity or other.

But on the subject of volunteering as an expression of who you want to be: it’s hard to get to that question directly, as it’s such a huge one, but here are a few ways of backing into it. Try thinking a bit more rigorously about why you want to go to a particular agency. “I’d like to volunteer because I like children”—however accurate, and laudable—doesn’t give an Executive Director very much to go on. But “I’d like to volunteer because your program of teaching at-risk youth to do gymnastics reminds me of my own childhood experience of finding a home away from home in the Red Cross Junior Lifesaving Program” at least gives you and the ED a place from which to start the conversation: she can say, “Yeah, that gymnastics program is great but the new program we’re doing teaching boys to cook is turning out to be an even more powerful tool . . . ” and then you’re off to the races talking about what the program does, what it could do with more staff (or volunteers!), what they’re afraid it won’t do . . . and so on. If you share your own passion, you give agency staff the opportunity to get back in touch with theirs—and that’s a basis for beginning to work together.

Notice that you’re not required to say, “I’d like to volunteer here because in five years I see myself running a social service agency of my own,” or whatever.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the successful match of person and volunteer assignment is the mistaken belief that it’s like a job interview—a belief reified and magnified by the number of experts shaking their fingers about the need for “volunteer job descriptions” and “accountability” and “checking references on volunteer resumes.” This is NOT a job; it’s an environment in which to be of service. And when we think of ourselves as servants—in the broadest sense, the way people call politicians they like “public servants”—we’re less concerned about our knowledge, skills and abilities and more with what we want to help get done in the world. “I can’t sleep at night unless I’m doing something to help children grow up without rickets” might be greeted with raised eyebrows (or indifferent agreement) in a job interview, but it’s the essential sentence in a conversation about volunteering with UNICEF.

Another “Who do you want to be?” question has to do with the actual disposal of your time on a volunteer assignment. You need to know, so you can tell the agency staff member, whether or not you want to do direct client service. In some places, you won’t be able to (and most child welfare agency Web sites are quite clear about this); but often you’ll be offered the choice between serving food to homeless people and working back in the stockroom where the food is donated; between teaching displaced homemakers computer skills or helping the outreach staff find locations for those classes; between visiting terminally ill people and working with medical administrators to make sure the need for hospice care is identified promptly and responded to appropriately.

The Nonprofiteer herself is shy about working directly with clients, so she volunteers at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic: thus she’s able to do something useful while sitting safely in a soundproof booth. So she believes, or at least hopes, that we’re all able to be of most service doing things we’re most comfortable with. No one’s eager to describe herself as “unwilling to work with people who smell bad,” but it’s something you need to realize and own before you sign up for an overnight shift in the Night Ministry’s van. Likewise, it’s important to recognize that you’re scared of courts and yelling before you join a domestic violence hotline.

Be sure to distinguish, though, between things you’re afraid of simply because you don’t know how to do them yet—agencies will train you about what to say to people who are threatening suicide—and things you’re afraid of, period. The first can be overcome; the second really requires a different form of volunteerism.

Finally, every volunteer—and the Nonprofiteer can’t say this strongly enough—should consider whether s/he might be a suitable Board member for every agency that lights his/her fire.  It’s remarkable how few people picture themselves in the Board room, compared to how few would actually fit there and be useful.  (Women, especially, forget to think of themselves in the role of overseer, or person-being-answered-to.) Of course, at most functioning agencies you can’t just walk up and say, “I want to be on your Board;” but if you can imagine yourself taking serious governance responsibilities—because you’re an accountant, or a lawyer, or just bossy like the Nonprofiteer—then it’s sensible to talk about management issues in your very first contact with the organization.  “I wonder if you have any Board committees—for public relations or fundraising—that non-Board members can serve on?” The answer will generally be “yes” (or the less elegant “Oh, my God, are you kidding?  You’d really be willing to do that?”) and if you take a committee role and discharge it ably, you’ll find yourself on the Board in very short order. And there’s hardly anything you could do for an arts or social service agency that would be more valuable than that.

More succinctly: one possible answer to “Who do I want to be?” is “A leader.”

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Why All Leaders Should Have Gone to Design School

How do I get my kids to read, to do well at school? How do I get my staff to do better work? How do I get people to support me, vote for me, and even volunteer for me? How do I get myself to stay in shape or lose weight?

Designing environments where people do things is the bedrock of our society. In a professional setting, it is essential in order to maximize efficiency, productivity, and/or innovation and often called human resource management. Go one step beyond management. “Getting the most out of people” or helping people reach and go beyond their potential is a common definition of great leadership. But great management and leadership are outputs; you know them when you see them. The inputs are more elusive. After going through the Stanford MBA program myself and $100K+ later, I can say with confidence that there’s still little clarity around what these inputs are! Although we’re still taught the core management “skills” like strategy, accounting, finance, etc., it’s now commonly argued that these have become commoditized; they can be obtained from an online course or manual. Good management and leadership are born elsewhere. After starting and managing an ostensibly successful nonprofit, I have some street-cred to confidently say I agree.

What if great management is less about the skills of the trade, being a good “people person,” or having a killer network? What if it’s more about design, the design of the “doing” environment? What if there were best practice design principles and processes that could be brought into any casual or professional work environment to get more out of people? Let me be more specific: What if there were design principles that either extracted more value out of a finite number of people or that tapped into a larger pool of human resources at the same cost? Although deep belief, personal commitment, and a knack for clear and compelling communication are undeniable requisites to effective leadership, I would argue that the primary driver of great leadership is great design: great designers of social systems!

What is your first reaction when you hear that people have given away without any compensation more than 100 million hours of their precious time to build Wikipedia? What is your reaction when you hear about software developers spending millions of hours coding massive new software programs for free? Let me guess: either complete shock or a glib dismissal of these contributors as losers without anything better to do with their free time.
Due to the recent societal phenomenon in which we only believe in fame, fortune and status—extrinsic motivational forces—as effective ways to incentivize work, we have collectively forgotten, for the most part, about intrinsic motivational forces that are equally powerful ways to get great work done. Intrinsic motivational forces include feeling competent and capable, feeling good (ethically and morally righteous), feeling entertained, and feeling appreciated and loved. A more colloquial way to summarize intrinsic motivations is the feeling of a sense of meaning and fulfillment. In fact, these intrinsic motivations usually are the most important to people. Repeatedly you hear the wise reminding us that what really matters are those things that reinforce you intrinsically rather than extrinsically.

We can shake our fists and get mad at the world and at ourselves, but let’s instead try to understand this phenomenon. In my version, there’s actually a happy ending. So why has this happened? Why have most of our society’s most powerful and important institutions collectively forgotten or dismissed intrinsic motivations? It doesn’t seem like a utility-maximizing way to organize ourselves.
Let me venture an answer. One of the main reasons I think this has happened goes back to the industrial revolution when most of the work became modulated, granular, and process-orientated, the work of armies of ants. It is difficult to harness the power of intrinsic motivation to get work done and, when human capital is not scarce or expensive, then it’s not worth the trouble. Extrinsic tools like a salary were used and relied on almost exclusively, and it worked so well that it became the gold standard. Most of the economy is still industrial, so I don’t expect people to dismiss this style of management altogether, although I don’t encourage it. However for those bumping into the future, the informational economy, where the most critical input or factor of production has become human capital (not physical capital like iron ore), we have had to get more innovative about how to motivate people. People have become in effect the only input in many professions (software development, consulting, finance, law, etc.) or the only point of differentiation in others (Toyota, Cemex, etc.). Market forces are requiring us to evolve our level of understanding and sophistication around motivation. 

It’s not as intangible as you might think. You don’t have to be born a charismatic leader in order to unleash the advantages of an intrinsically motivated work force. You need to design it into your work environment. There are design tricks (principles and templates) to make that happen. Just ask Obama (we funded and organized his campaign and might also run his administration—see change.gov) or Google (we create the links) or eBay (we vet for quality—reputation system) or the film studios (through word of mouth we market their movies) or any successful social entrepreneur like Gandhi or Wendy Kopp. I could go on, but you get the picture. We are inclined to overvalue the importance of managers’/leaders’ vision and charisma and drastically undervalue their ability to design systems that tap into people’s intrinsic motivations to do much more or better work than any extrinsic motivational tool could ever do. 

I am told that many studies have recently and conclusively shown that getting the most out of people, not surprisingly to any of us, involves making work interesting, rewarding, and fun. No longer will this be a luxury but rather a necessity for success in all professions, not just the citizen sector (NGOs, government, and education) where we also have done a terrible job overall. I’m excited and encouraged that the industrial period’s mode of human resource management is fading: that market forces are starting to evolve our society towards a more enlightened (higher level welfare or utility-maximizing) mode of management where our intrinsic motivations are no longer ignored. To succeed in this new paradigm, we need to put on our designer hats and sharpen our designer utensils!

For more insights into these trends, get acquainted with the brilliant Clay Shirky starting with PopTech!, techPresident, and TED.

Lloyd Nimetz founded the online giving market HelpArgentina.org. While pursuing his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nimetz has focused on for-profit business models that address social challenges. This summer he will launch a payments platform for India’s bottom billion.

Posted by Katie Harrington

2 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

10 Ways to Become a Better Nonprofit Leader in 2009

It’s that time of year when we all are making our New Year’s resolutions. This is the best time to be thinking about how your nonprofit career will grow in the coming year as well. The economy dealt us nonprofit folks a difficult year (especially in fundraising), and undoubtedly there are more unknown challenges ahead for all of us. But we have to remember all the things that we ARE in control of: our actions, our intentions, our career choices. Here is my top ten list of things to add to your 2009 goals if you want to enhance your leadership in the nonprofit field. Please add your own in the comments!

1. Clarify your purpose: Don’t go into 2009 without first asking yourself if you are in the right place. Are you really doing what you want to do? Take some time to reflect on who you are and why you are in the nonprofit field. Where is your passion? Does your job have anything to do with the way you want to be in the world?
2. Speak up: When someone asks you what you think, tell them! 2009 is not the year of the shrinking violet. We need more nonprofit leaders, especially young people, to share their ideas and innovation to help move organizations forward. This is not the time to get intimidated by your boss or Board Chair, there is too much at stake. The most damaging behavior in a nonprofit is when everyone says yes to everything. Be the one who says “no” or “why” if you know it is the right thing to do.
3. Join a nonprofit board of directors: There’s no leadership training like the experience you get serving as a board member. Over the past year, I have learned so much more in my board role than I ever would have in my day to day nonprofit job. You will undoubtedly learn about finances, staffing challenges, fundraising, and make decisions regarding pretty much everything. On a board, you HAVE to lead, that’s all there is to it. You also make some neat friends along the way. Start with boardnetUSA to find openings in your area.
4. Find a mentor: We all know of someone whose leadership we admire. If you want to learn about the career of a leader who you feel has “made it” to where you want to go, reach out to them for a brief call or meeting. Ask them if they would be willing to be a resource for you and get together a few times a year. Most people aren’t that busy they can’t talk to you once a quarter. If you meet you role model at a conference, get her card and contact her right away to reintroduce yourself. Mentoring relationships have to be cultivated like any other; don’t expect your perfect mentor to magically find you.
5. Learn how to raise money: The reality of being a nonprofit leader is that most of the time our big ideas require funding. You can talk a good talk all you want, but be sure you have the skills to make things happen. People respect a leader who can get things done, and in the nonprofit field, asking for money is the only way we can do the work. Take a fundraising class at your local nonprofit state association and practice as much as possible.
6. Write an op-ed or start a blog: Putting your voice and name out there in print is scary, and people will respect you for it. Op-eds or blogs allow you to speak up about a cause you care about to a large audience that can end up helping to move your issue forward or at least call attention to it. Your reputation as a leader will soar once people see that you aren’t hesitant to say what needs to be said. Don’t get bogged down by always trying to be politically correct; the days of bullshit are over. People want to hear about values and truth. Everyone’s not always gonna agree with you; that is impossible. But chances are, there are thousands of people who feel the same way you do, and are so glad you said what they were too afraid to. Visit the Op-Ed Project to learn how to write one.
7. Advocate for your cause: Just because you are an administrative assistant at a food bank doesn’t mean you have to stay behind that desk. Get up and go testify to your local government officials about legislation that would affect your clients. Write letters to your state representatives to show your support or opposition to policies that affect your cause. Don’t just feed the poor. Ask why the poor have no food. Visit the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest to learn all you need to know.
8. Build your network: We all know that when you’re ready to take that next big leap in your career, it’s really more about who you know than anything else. Take the time to attend at least one networking event per month and go to professional conferences to meet people both in and outside of your field. Pick a social network you like and connect with like-minded folks. You never know how people will be able to help you through the power of Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn until you dive in. I know the membership fees can be steep, but you can meet so many great people (and potential mentors) through professional associations. If you’re a fundraiser, join the Association of Fundraising Professionals!
9. Explore a slash career: Need more money in the new year? Don’t quit your job just to make $5,000 more or get a demeaning job at Target. This is the perfect time to explore another career alongside your nonprofit job that allows you to pursue one of your passions. And if you’ve been working in the same job, it might be time to think about trying something new to sharpen your skills and ability to adapt. Always wanted to teach? Try contacting your local nonprofit association or community college to see if they could use your expertise. The sky is the limit.
10. Take care of yourself: My grandmother constantly reminds me that I can’t take care of anyone else if I don’t take care of myself first. Make 2009 the year you put your health first, stop working so late, spend time with family and friends, eat right and exercise. Build it into your schedule so that you can’t say you “don’t have time.” Set up a recurring appointment (let your Blackberry remind you) in the morning or evening for time to just be.

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.

Posted by Katie Harrington

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Nonprofits Can Reap Big Returns From Volunteers

While they need to work even harder during the recession to ask for contributed dollars, nonprofits also should focus on recruiting more volunteers.

The troubled economy clearly is chilling the fundraising climate.

According to the latest Philanthropic Giving Index from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, nonprofit professionals are reporting the lowest overall level of confidence in the fundraising climate in the U.S. in over a decade.

That confidence index now is 64.8, down 21.7 percent from just six moths ago and down 27 percent from December 2007.

The center’s research for Giving USA Foundation also shows an annual falloff of roughly 2.7 percent in total giving during longer recessions.

A separate survey by the Association of Fundraising Professionals finds that over half the charities in North America were raising less money during the last three months of 2008 than in the same period in 2007.

Among charities surveyed, 53.3 percent were raising less money than they did a year earlier, and only 22.7 percent were raising more money, while 23.9 percent were raising about the same amount.

In stark contrast, the survey a year ago found 48.3 percent of charities were raising more money in the final three months of 2007 than in the same period in 2006, and only 26.3 percent were raising less.

Experts on fundraising and giving say nonprofits should not panic but instead should focus on sharpening the case they make to givers and continuing to ask for support.

And new research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business suggests that encouraging volunteerism can generate healthy financial contributions for nonprofits.

Because volunteers make an emotional connection to an organization and its mission, asking supporters for their time rather than their money is a better way to increase donations of money, says the study, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In fact, it says, initially asking givers for money can alienate them and make them less likely to get involved and less likely to actually give, the study says.

Increasing volunteerism, by young people in particular, also is the focus of a new initiative by Youth Service America.

With support from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, the new “Semester of Service” campaign aims to engage millions of young people by providing “service-learning” opportunities that give students the chance to connect community service with curriculum either in or out of school.

Youth Service America says a report from RMC Research Corp. concludes service-learning has a great impact on students and the community when projects last the length of a semester.

Times are indeed tough for the giving sector, but that simply means nonprofits need to be smarter and more focused than ever on connecting with givers and asking for their time, their expertise and their money.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Swarms

Manhattan’s birds are brilliant. From my 42nd-floor conference room in Midtown, I often see flocks fly by in perfect formation, suddenly veering right, then left, to dodge the buildings below. It’s as if they’re being choreographed by some grand master hawk squawking orders from atop the Empire State Building.

Truth is, of course, birds aren’t very smart. [Central Park’s birds still can’t seem to distinguish a cookie wrapper from a bagel chip.] But flocks of them? Different story. Group-think helps them to negotiate skyscrapers and migrate to Miami in a heartbeat.

Humans, too, gain some advantages in groups: we’re just starting to figure out how much smarter we can be when linked online. [Five years ago, we began using social media to find and aggregate the people we knew into simple social networks. Then we started organizing our networks to do things, like raise money for a cause.] Now? We’re experiencing another big evolutionary shift in the way we use the Net to collaborate. Think swarms—multiple social networks that aggregate rapidly to influence the offline behavior of others. They’re much bigger and more powerful than our single social networks ever were. And like SWAT teams, they’re all about swooping in to do something quickly, then disbanding.

Four types of super-swarms made headlines recently, offering up some tough lessons in mass collaboration for organizers and bystanders, alike:

• Twestival—the 250-city, one-day global gathering of Twitter users offline—ended up catalyzing hundreds of thousands of people in 186 cities worldwide to raise money for charity:water.org, a New York-based nonprofit that builds freshwater wells in Africa. It was the largest, if not the first, swarm-for-good ever assembled. Yet for more than a week after the Feb. 12 event, Twestival organizers still didn’t know how much money they raised toward their goal of $1 million. Amanda Rose, Twestival’s London-based chief organizer, sent out a tweet that attempted to lower expectations: “Reaching $1 million that quick was always going to be tough,” she tweeted, “but the awareness that came out was worth it. Will not blame those who didn’t reach it.” [This followed an earlier tweet that indicated that only 25 percent of the cities participating had reported how much money they raised. Later still, she tweeted: “We are close to £200k ($284,703.210) so nothing small. Announce soon.”] Throughout the day, Rose urged people to continue donating in a last-ditch effort to bring the tally closer to the goal. Take-away: Swarms can easily overwhelm the individuals who organize them; their behavior is very difficult, if not impossible, to document in detail or control by any one individual or nonprofit once catalyzed.
• More than 4,000 people swarmed into London’s Liverpool Street Station Feb. 9 to both mock and mimic an ad by a local phone company. Some characterized this Facebook-driven swarm—which totaled 14,000 participants online and off—as, simply, the latest in a series of Internet-inspired pranks in recent years [The first recorded flash mob occurred in Manhattan in 2003.] But this one was different. It might be the first swarm mobilized to mock or mimic something commercial. Previous “flash mobs”, new media experts say, have been focused simply on having fun. This swarm resulted from viral marketing writ huge. Take-away: Companies can help to launch a swarm as part of a viral marketing campaign but can’t guarantee it will stay “on message.”
• The Women’s Media Center mobilized a swarm in New York and Washington on Feb. 10 to protest remarks made by TV personality Bill O’Reilly following President Obama’s first press conference. O’Reilly derided veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, calling the 88-year-old journalist “the wicked witch of the East” and poking fun at her age. Within hours, more than 10,000 people sent angry emails to O’Reilly and his producers, forcing the conservative provocateur to apologize to Thomas on air the next day—precisely what the swarm ordered. Take-away: Swarm-advocacy can be used to both challenge and promote free speech and social norms in new and highly powerful ways, raising new questions about the power of a networked crowd to shape the expression—and the behavior—of an individual.
• al Qaeda forces Feb. 11 staged simultaneous suicide attacks on three Afghan government ministries by mobilizing newly formed online strike-swarms. Terrorist “flash mobs” are now being used in smaller-scale terrorist violence, similar to the kind first seen in Mumbai last November, swarm theorist John Arquilla says in a piece he wrote Feb. 17 for The International Herald Tribune. Arquilla says al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using swarm tactics for several years and that they are being coordinated, increasingly, through the use of social media. Take-away: Flash causes, or swarms—when politicized—can be dangerous and difficult to minimize or pre-empt.

Howard Rheingold, the author of the 2003 bestseller, “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”, says digital swarms are just getting started. Given the evolving “brush fire” mentality of the Web, expect to see many more of them taking collective action offline—for better or worse—in coming months. Warns Rheingold: “As these [flash groups] become politicized, there is a potential for good and for danger.”

For more on the early work of swarms, see Cisco engineer J.D. Stanley’s recent paper, “Digital Swarms”, here. Also check out “Swarm Theory,” an article by Peter Miller in the July 2007 National Geographic. And for the upside of swarms, check out Charles Leadbeater’s 2008 book, We Think, about mass collaboration and innovation.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Dissecting the Network Approach

Many organizations have been saying the same thing about using the Internet for many years now, “we need someone to make us a Web site!”  No, you really don’t. At least, you don’t need to think of your online “presence” as being a stand-alone website. Let’s dissect a networked approach to an online presence and see what the core dynamics are.

we20

“Our leaders, face a huge task this year. The G20 is a group of 20 leaders including Obama, Brown, Lula and Sarkozy. The G20 are tasked with reforming our failed economies and mapping out our future.

These G20 leaders meet in London on 2 April. 20 world leaders. 20 people together making plans that will affect our future.

we20 is your opportunity to have your own G20 meeting. 20 people together creating plans for your future.”

we20 wants to inspire people, online, to get together, offline, to talk about ideas to improve our lives and our world. They don’t have a website, yet. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be spreading their message and mobilizing people into action both on and offline. 

The Key Elements:

• Spreading the word online: this doesn’t require a website when there are countless social technologies to leverage.
• Mobilizing people to get together offline: we are social creatures, but we don’t always know the people we want to get together with; but thanks to social technologies it is much easier to find and make these new connections.
• Don’t wait for a website: often organizations wait between 3 - 18 months to get a website live; a project like we20 doesn’t have that kind of time and you shouldn’t assume you do either.

we20 has a time-sensitive campaign (though, who’s isn’t?), with people who are excited and energized to do something right after hearing about the idea. It would be a big mistake to let all those supporters trail off, their energy wain, and have the only action provided be to wait for that website to go up with more information…later. Instead, take advantage of tools you and others who could be interested in the campaign are already using. Put your message out there right away and let the momentum build.

The Networked Approach:
The networked approach to online campaigns is really a cycle, like most other strategies you’ll come across. You move from step one, through all four, and the fourth leads right back to the first. Here are the four steps to creating a networked approach to a campaign, using we20 as our example.

• Make your group of friends public: When starting something like we20, it’s really just a group of friends and colleagues that start talking about an idea and get enthusiastic about it. You want it to take off and believe it really will. Those early conversations about how, where, what, and all the other gooey details should be made public if possible. In this case, we20 started a Facebook group to keep everyone together and communicate with each other. But, by making it a public group like this, they also enabled others to find and join them, as well as to help shape the answers to those gooey but important questions.
• Make your message moveable: Be sure to put solid content out there for people new to the campaign. Even though there are still many aspects of we20 still to be configured, when you visit the Facebook group, for example, you are still able to find clear, direct messaging about what the group is focused on. This doesn’t just let people understand and join, but it also allows them to copy and paste - the greatest messaging option individuals have! By putting clear, concise messages out there, you enable supporters to move the message around the web for you.
• Make your movement actionable: Sharing your message isn’t action enough for many people who really want to jump in.  Even if it was, the message should have an actionable opportunity for those who receive the message further down the line but want to do more than pass it on.  we20 has done an excellent job of presenting an actionable movement. It isn’t simply about raising awareness, or causing a stir; we20 is asking people to have their own we20 meetings and share their ideas. The action (the individual meetings/gatherings) is simple and clear to understand, but also flexible enough that anyone could bend it to their specific situations: some friends in a bar, a lunch club using it as a theme, and so on. 
• Make your actions public: If you’ve inspired people to join you and invite others to join, and to take action, providing a way for those same people to share their actions publicly will take you back to the first step, in making the group public. As more actions become visible, more people will join the movement and subsequently share their actions as well. It’s always a cycle. In the case of we20, they have put their introduction video up on YouTube, defining a very obvious place for others to put up videos either as a response or a report from their own we20 meeting and the ideas that came out of it. Though, people could participate in other ways as well since we20 has a networked presence, meaning Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This means that new participants can close the loop for learning about the movement to actually sharing ideas via the platform or process they prefer.

Though, there will be a we20 website, eventually. For now, that networked approach is letting them start and build and move forward anyway. The we20 group sums this up quite nicely, “We are expecting to launch http://www.we20.org soon but please don’t let us slow you down. Please start organising your meetings now.” Exactly: don’t let the lack of a traditional website hinder the movement; use the tools we are all already using to learn about and spread the movement, organize with your friends and colleagues, and share your ideas back to the movement.

What do you think? Has your organization or your group of friends used a networked approach to start a campaign? Have you relied on a main website instead? What have been the best examples of networked approaches to campaigns that you’ve seen?

Amy Sample Ward’s passion for nonprofit technology has lead her to involvement with NTEN, NetSquared, and a host of other organizations. She shares many of her thoughts on nonprofit technology news and evolutions on her blog.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

2 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments