Heart: What is the overall intent of the program? Is it on target?
Head: Do the plans make sense and hang together? Do they have a reasonable connection to the goal?
Hands: Are the right people on board to execute, do they have what they need, and are the proper controls in place?
Some time ago I wrote about the importance of hands when you are looking at why something failed. Especially in the nonprofit world, there’s an aversion to clear feedback. But often, plans fail not becuase they were poorly developed or ill-intentioned — but because someone goofed in the execution. These episodes need to be looked at. Sometimes the answer for next time isn’t a “better plan,” but “tighter controls.”
These days, that can seem anachronistic and old-school. But, execution is often about the hands.
The White Pages and their Yellow buddies are, for the majority of consumers, a nuisance. They are bulky, out of date immediately, and increasingly don’t have the information one wants (as more people use cell phones as their primary connection). They’re also a waste of money and resources — there someone has to deliver the things, they need to be printed, shipped, stored, etc.
And yet they are delivered to me whether I want them or not.
Then I learned that most telcos still give out the books becuase they have to. Local jurisdictions require them as part of their operating agreements.
I get that we can’t penalize non-Internet users and shut them out — but can’t it be something they opt-in to, rather than something I need to opt out of?
Switching To Opt-In Marketing
That got me thinking about other organizations’ marketing efforts.
For example, I have an email list that I have built up over many years. (I’m supposed to send one out today, in fact.) Looking at my stats, I am certain there are people who have long been on that list who simply tolerate receiving it — they haven’t opened and email in years. What if I were to run a “census” and ask people to affirmatively say they want to remain on the list? It might be painful to watch the number on my list drop, but those that remain really, really want to hear from me.
Think about how much you send out (whether by mail or by email) that people did not ask for. What if you switched over to entirely opt-in strategies?
There were two reasons for this, and each holds a huge lesson for nonprofit leaders:
Ethics. The main reason the organizations cited was the dramatic downturn in fundraising the DC United Way was able to bring. This downturn (from $90 million per year to $35 million per year) is a direct result of the financial scandal that rocked the organization and forced its leadership to resign.
Lesson: Ethics at the top is not a luxury — it has a direct bearing on the bottom line and even on the survival of the organization.
By flickr user texas_mustang
New Realities. “I and a lot of others were stuck in the way things have always been, thinking that the United Way was the only way to do things,” according to one Community1st board member. That’s absolutely true. In the workplace-donations space, the field was (and is) ripe for an upstart that is nimble and can promise that a greater share of the collections will actually make it to the charities in question. Community1st [America's Charities] promises 98% will go to the orgs.
Lesson: These are killer times for old organizations and middleman organizations. They both need to watch their backs. If your organization is both — watch out. You suddenly have competition where there was none.
This is the last of my three-part video series on challenges and pitfalls facing nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations.
This segment focuses on the problem of waste:
As an independent consultant with no real apparatus to speak of (which is by design), it’s easy to spot expenditures in organizations that simply don’t need to be made. Nice conference rooms, class A office space, behemoth IT departments — often it seems to just accrete over time and become part of how the organization values itself.
But, these dollars don’t flow out to the mission, they get diverted into organization-building. Some amount of that, when done strategically and thoughtfully, is important. But at the same time, many expenditures don’t need to be made.
The trick is, as I say in the video, to think about how you would manage if you had only five years left before you disbanded. How would you pursue your mission then?
I am in the middle of a three-part video series on challenges and pitfalls that nonprofit organizations face.
This second challenge is (like all these pitfalls), not unique to nonprofits, but it does afflict many. That is the tendency to begin to confuse the health of the organization with the effective pursuit of the mission. In other words, the organization begins to believe that anything that’s good for it must by definition be good for the mission. I discuss that here:
This can be a real problem, because it really sneaks up on people. It can befall founder’s organizations, as the entrepreneurial itch that got the organization off the ground continues to flower.
One way to see this in your own organization is to pose this question, as a group: Say we did not exist. Why would someone need to invent us?
(Andrea Jarrell asks a version of this question with her clients.)
Next, and last in this series, is the problem of waste.
I am doing a three-part video series on challenges and pitfalls that face nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations.
The first pitfall is “inwardness,” as I discuss here:
This is not a new idea. Indeed, one of the drivers of the whole strategic planning movement of the late 1960′s was the notion that businesses needed to begin looking outward rather than planning based only on their internal goals.
More recently, my friend and colleague Rich Harwood has had a lot to say about the problem of inwardness among civic institutions, and much of his work involves getting organizations to turn outward. I highly recommend Rich’s report, The Organization-First Approach, written with John Creighton, that goes in-depth into this problem.
(This issue was also at the root of an interesting project we worked on together last year.)
Next up, the problem that faces all too many nonprofits: when organizations confuse their mission with their existence, and begin to believe that whatever is good for the organization must by definition be good for the mission.
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