Leading by Design: A Resource for Nonprofits

A Career Full of Happy Accidents

2012-01-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

WHAT'S BEEN THE ROLE OF SERENDIPITY IN YOUR CAREER PATH? I'm knee-deep in trying to map out new segments of my own career path and, because of that, I was recently asked to write about personal career planning. So I did what any author who's looking for some inspiration would do -- I reached out to the cultural nonprofit community via LinkedIn for some input. And here's where serendipity comes in.

The second response to my question was about the importance of serendipity -- those accidental opportunities -- to the enrichment of a career. "Too much planning can limit your options," wrote the responder. Happy accidents can't be planned and that's the point. I, too, have been the beneficiary of serendipitous career moves that, looking back on them, were completely unknown to me at the time, but in hindsight emerge as important turning points to my career development. I certainly didn't plan them to be what they ultimately became.

Interestingly, my dictionary defines serendipity as "an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident", which implies that there is some innate or acquired ability to sense discovery, to be open to the not yet known, or maybe to be able to generate or attract opportunities. To me, artists of all types are great examples of people with aptitudes for serendipity, as are many entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders. To be a cut above, they've honed their abilities to search for, discover, and invite happy accidents.

How can you create a personal career plan that keeps you moving toward some fairly specific goals while recognizing the importance of being able to expand, strengthen, or magnify your ability to make happy accidents happen or simply to be in the right place at the right time?

Related article: Building a Nonprofit Career Path, Bridgestar.org

Image: Fork in the Road from Jessi Joy via Flickr

What's on Your Board's First Meeting Agenda for 2012?

2011-12-28T15:49:00.002-05:00

JANUARY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER (yikes!) and many if not most nonprofits will be holding their first board meeting of the new year sometime in the next four weeks. While we might be inclined to fall back on comfortable agenda formats and conversations for this meeting, if you're embracing 2012 as a year of intentional organizational development (see my post about that here), then I know you're giving serious thought to rethinking what and how business will be discussed.

For those of you from organizations that tend to tick methodically through task lists at board meetings before calling it a day, structuring the first board meeting of the new year around an evaluation of past successes and failures coupled with discussion about future directions is in order as one way to move from microscopic dissection to big picture strategy. For this type of conversation to be successful, it needs to be structured. One way to do that is with a handful of big questions and some supporting information. If you want to talk about why admissions, ticket sales, or event attendance was up or down, provide some contextual data that can help trustees understand trends and evaluate possible organizational responses.

Example: instead of focusing solely on money raised or lost, what if the big question was about the demographics of who supported and how the demographic could be expanded or shifted for the future?

If you've got a written, goal-based and mission-driven plan (and hopefully you do), that's your starting point for both assessment of the past year and future work. Make review of the plan a chunk of the agenda and make sure that all other agenda items connect to the plan. What a great way to get the new year off and running!

And speaking of mission, doesn't it make sense for the first board meeting of the new year to focus on that? One board I'm now serving on plans to devote half of its first board meeting of the new year to just that discussion. We're arming ourselves with some context-setting 'homework' that will not only help frame the conversation, but fuel it.

Bringing new board members on for their first meeting in January? For my money, there's probably no better opening conversation than a round robin discussion about why each of you cares about the organization and wants to be a part of it. Even the newbies should be able to articulate why they agreed to join the board. It's not only a good icebreaker, it's also a team-builder.

Perhaps you'll want to mix up the first meeting with a brief tour of a physical space, collection or department in need of attention -- attention that will find its way to future board meeting agendas. Or perhaps there's a hands-on activity that will help to enlighten board members to the important work done every day. At the upcoming retreat of a staff and stakeholders of a school archive, we're going to spend some time looking at primary source documents and talking about why they're important.

I hope you'll be encouraged to begin 2012 with a reinvigorated board meeting road map that balances board attention between the present and the future; between the 30,000-foot overview and knotty, on-the-ground issues; between the known and the unknown. And I hope you'll share what's on your first of 2012 agenda with the readers here at Leading by Design.

Make 2012 Your Organization's Year of Intention

2011-12-22T09:48:00.001-05:00

NOW THAT THE END OF 2011 IS PLAINLY IN sight, many of us are taking some time to evaluate our progress these last twelve months and plan for the next twelve. What's on your agenda -- personally or organizationally -- for tweaking or downright change? Have you already identified a few strategic shifts for 2012?

From an organizational point of view, any amount of course shifting can be difficult. The tiniest changes can be disruptive and angst-producing....and may not produce hoped for results. But, small changes, when introduced intentionally, thoughtfully, and tied to larger goals, can have great effect over time. Tackling challenges from the margins is often a really useful strategy.

How does an organization determine when a challenge can be resolved or reframed from the edges and when it needs to be addressed head-on? Isn't this just one of those perfect strategic questions for board and staff to work on together?

The key word is, of course, "strategic". Course shifting for the sake of doing something different just doesn't cut it in a time of depleted resources and donor fatigue. Part of the answer to these questions rests on how open your organization is currently to engaging in deep conversations of this type. Part of the answer rests on your organization's commitment to embracing relevant external and internal information along with its vision-mission-goals as the guideposts for decision-making.

Part of the answer rests with you. As the board or staff leader, as a staff member or volunteer leading from within, as a donor who goes the extra mile for your organization, how can you illuminate the pathways to strategic development? What questions will you ask?

A new year is coming. Are you ready?

Can You Plan Without Passion?

2011-10-17T07:36:00.000-04:00

WELL, I GUESS THE SHORT ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS 'YES'. Plans are concocted everyday for all sorts of things from grocery lists to multi-year programmatic initiatives and I can see where many of them can be accomplished with little reflection and less excitement for the results. There are proponents who assure us that even the most complex plans can be achieved with short, highly focused bursts of effort. And, indeed, that's possible. But it seems to me that any plan will lack dimension and luster if it's written as an internal 'beat the clock' exercise or a requirement to satisfy someone else's desire.

The best planning is borne of possibility and one's own desire to marry the here-and-now with the what-if's and can-do's. Its underlying thesis has everything to do with making aspirations reality, even if the aspiration is as universal or as necessary as getting out of debt or revisioning the work of a downsized staff.

When done right, most types of organizational planning take time and talent to complete, but it is rarely a draining experience, often it's just the opposite. Yet, I've seen many organizations approach the idea of planning as a burden, a maze to get through, or as one trustee exclaimed, "So we don't have to do this again for another 50 years!" Really???

Is it really mind-numbing or wasteful work to consider an organization's future beyond the regular board meeting? Is it somehow inappropriate to chart a big or better future for an organization rather than letting circumstance chart it for you? Is the idea of thinking beyond one's personal interests too big a leap to take? Too risky?

All I think I can say in response is if an organization is willing to invest its resources to any degree to plan for its future, why ever would it not want to be fully committed to exploring the possibilities, the potential and, yes, the pitfalls that lie ahead? Why ever would it not want to dig into bridging the gaps of what exists now with what could be?

I guess the question isn't so much can you plan without passion as it is why would you purposely plan half-heartedly? Why would any organization waste such an opportunity to lift up the hood and examine the engine? And why wouldn't that be exciting as well as challenging?

Image: Neighborhood Plan Update...from litlnemo

The Boardroom Blues

2011-10-16T12:07:00.000-04:00

DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

So, what should be on the agenda instead?

How about trying a little strategy .... using the organization's plan and key success indicators to evaluate how well program is meeting mission?

Maybe ditching most of those reports of past activities to free up time to discuss future steps?

How about breaking into smaller discussion groups for a deeper dive into issues?

Would a staff or volunteer presentation, a brief tour of a project, or a hands-on activity help board members to better understand your challenges and opportunities?

We talk a lot about how to engage audiences. Shouldn't engagement of the board be a top priority?

Leading With Your Servant's Heart

2011-10-10T09:34:00.000-04:00

THERE'S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT: WORKING IN THE NONPROFIT SECTOR is an act of commitment -- often an act of faith -- and always an act of service. Doesn't matter if you're the head of a major performing arts center or a volunteer manning the reception desk, most of us are drawn to the sector because its meaning is bigger than us.

I became more conscious of this reality this summer as I listened to the staff leaders of a nonprofit repeatedly introduce themselves by using the words "I serve". I wrote about that experience here and since then I've had a lively exchange with one of my former clients about this wonderful notion of nonprofit service and the importance of the words we choose to describe our relationships to the organizations we care about.

Imagine my delight when I discovered Ken Blanchard's post, Keep Focused on Your 'Servant Heart':

Try to keep focused on leading with a servant’s heart. It can be part of your daily habits, such as how you enter your day by reminding yourself of the difference you can make in the world. It’s a matter of making a habit of practicing a helpful attitude when you are interacting with people. The question you want to keep top of mind is, “How can I help?”

How we describe our relationship to our work must, of course, flow from a deep-seated attitude of service. When was the last time you reflected on why you chose the path of nonprofit work?

The Intentionality of Building Relationships

2011-09-27T10:47:00.001-04:00

WHEN I RECEIVED THE FOLLOWING RESPONSE TO my summer vacation posts (here and here), I just had to share it. It shows how an organization can take a really good idea and adapt it, and it further proves the point that really good ideas are scalable if people have the imagination to run with it.

Sally Roesch Wagner is the executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, NY. Gage was a formidable force for equal rights and Wagner is the visionary scholar who has brought Gage's work to life and life to the public. Here's Sally's approach to making stakeholder communication intentional:

I like the idea [of trustees porch conversations] so much that I'm going to propose we think about it as a strategy rather than an event -- that we (board, staff, volunteers, docents) all engage visitors at all of our events in a conversation about what they'd like to see us do, transparent talk about our finances, what we need, see what questions they have, etc. Then we have a process sheet for after, notes about what was learned. And then we expand it to outside our events, and develop it as a lifestyle.

Folks involved in the Foundation are already doing great outreach, talking to people all the time about the Foundation. What the "trustees porch conversations" idea does for me is to open the thought of doing this systematically as intentional conversations rather than ones that just develop. And we can build the intentionality based on the typical conversations folks have; what people want to know about us, etc. And then we can keep track of the conversations, which will help us with personal recruitment of volunteers, board and committee members.

AND as we develop dialogue as the language of the institution (as we're doing with a grant from the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, setting up a train-the-trainers program so everyone involved gets trained in the process of dialogue eventually), we can in stages turn these casual conversations into meaningful dialogues which will involve the community in our work on a continual basis. Sort of a walking "write on our walls." And I think we can also literally adopt the trustee porch conversations at our Wonderful Weekends - our yearly gatherings.

Also I'm going to send out an email to the volunteers today encouraging a conversation about the language "I serve". I really like that language, too. Want to see what it feels like to them and if they buy into it.

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation, Part II: "I Serve"

2011-09-24T10:33:00.001-04:00

THESE TWO WORDS GAINED EXPANDED meaning for me this summer. While spending a week at Chautauqua Institution, my vacation companion and I attended a dizzying array of performances, lectures and conversations with authors and staff. Each was introduced by the Institution's president or senior staffer, who began by introducing themselves to the audience. In every case -- and I mean every case -- the staff welcomed the audience, said their names and added their titles by saying "I serve Chautauqua Institution as [insert job title here]."

It was my companion who pointed this turn of phrase out to me. "Do you hear how they're introducing themselves?" she asked. She'd picked up on right away. The more I heard it, the more I was amazed by it -- not just the uniformity in which it was delivered, but by the powerful servant-driven idea behind it. Obviously, the Institution's leadership made a conscious decision about emphasizing the service aspect of the work and for some of us in the audience, at any rate, it carried deep resonance.

We agreed that it's a perspective that we just don't hear much in the nonprofit sector when our colleagues introduce themselves or talk about their work. Yet nonprofit work is service work no matter if it's health care or arts education, and those of us working and volunteering in nonprofits do so in service to an institutional mission and, thus, the audience.

As nonprofits of all stripes struggle to gain ground against seemingly unrelenting economic forces, it seems that now is the perfect time for all of us in the sector to examine why we serve and how we each uphold our institution's mission.

Click here for Part I of What I Learned on My Summer Vacation About Stakeholder Communication

Image: The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, director of the Department of Religion, kept the conversation to interfaith dialogue within the strategic plan at a Trustee Porch Discussion. The Chautauqua Daily, August 6, 2011.

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation About Stakeholder Communication

2011-09-04T16:39:00.003-04:00

There's a special place in western New York where life-long learning, spiritual and artistic exploration, and recreation meet. This place is Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit community now in its 138th year. When I'm lucky, get to spend a snippet of the nine-week season there. Each season is programmed with roughly 2,000 events ranging from lectures and classes to performances of all types, art shows, book readings, community events and everything in between.

Chautauqua Institution -- the nonprofit corporation -- is a $24+ million annual operation governed by a board of 24 trustees, employing more than 1,200 full-time and seasonal employees, with a physical plant numbering more than 80 buildings and a ton of recreational areas, and a balance sheet that totes up more than $60 million in assets. Visitors to the grounds number in the tens of thousands over the course of the nine-week season (late June to late August). Some of these folks own property on the grounds and they make Chautauqua their summer home. Others, like me, manage a visit for a few days or a week. Many others come for the day or for a specific performance or activity.

OK, so much for the set-up. What I've come to learn over my time at Chautauqua is that pretty much all of the full-time professional staff are constantly in and on view, because they introduce programs, facilitate discussions, squire speakers/performers around, and press the flesh with long-time supporters and newbies alike. Think of the demands on you at your biggest annual event or program series and multiply that by nine back-to-back, non-stop weeks. You're surrounded most every day by your trustees, your most faithful donors, and curious first-time visitors. Everyone wants to say hello to you, make a suggestion, offer a criticism, get directions to the restrooms, engage you in some deep topic that might make your head explode right at that moment or just trip you up. They're your closest supporters, your allies, your peeps.

How would you take the opportunity of being surrounded by your audience and use it to communicate your organization's mission, intentions, future plans, and tough choices? Draw them closer? Perhaps get their buy-in?

This summer I noticed for the first time that the Institution's trustees and senior staff held weekly, one-hour conversations on some aspect of the organization's operations with anyone who wanted to show up. Called "Trustees Porch Discussions", the conversations took place on a long, broad porch of a building near the largest venue, the amphitheater, so there were lots of people strolling by, many of whom stopped to listen. Each discussion had a focusing topic -- family and educational programming, finances, religious diversity, how speakers are chosen for the lecture platform, or how the institution is marketed (these were the topics this summer). While staff lead the discussion, the trustees were on hand to add insights and help answer questions. The audiences ranged in size from 20 or so people to more than 60.

"Trustees Porch Discussions" were augmented by two Board of Trustees "Open Forums" -- one in July and one in August. These were held in a large public venue right after the trustee's regular board meetings. Here, larger audiences asked questions ranging from expanding the interfaith community to future restoration/renovation plans for performances spaces, to enforcement of registration for dogs and safety issues of motorized scooters.

I really like the accessibility to staff and board members that these two activities provide and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think about how similar face-to-face discussions could take place with members, donors and visitors in smaller institutions. Many organizations use their annual member's meeting or annual report to communicate with stakeholders on the business end of the issues. Some nonprofits hold board meetings as part of program meetings. Social media can facilitate the flow of communication, also. But unless these typical channels are purposely programmed to be conversations about the health and forward momentum of the organization, then they're usually nothing more than glossy one-way reporting.

Is it too much to ask that we figure out ways to reveal more of the challenges of our work, to ask our member and donor partners the same questions we ask at our staff meetings; to debate the pros and cons; to lay the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly on the table?

Our stakeholders need to know when things aren't working well just as much as when things are. Most of the time they just need to be afforded an opportunity to know. After all, they are our partners in the enterprise of our nonprofits.

Images from the Chautauqua Institution Flickr stream

Board Time Investment = Executive Director Satisfaction

2011-08-28T18:29:00.000-04:00

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU HEARD THAT BOARD RELATIONSHIPS MATTER? If you're an executive director reading this post, think about how much time you spend each month interacting with your board. If you happen to serve an organization whose board meets monthly, that's probably at least a couple of hours right there, plus another couple of hours prep for it that could include agenda review with your chairman and check-ins with various committee chairs. Maybe you attend one or two committee meetings or conference calls every month. So, what are you up to -- 6-10 hours per month? Sounds like a lot.

According to the CompassPoint and Meyer Foundation Daring to Lead 2011report, which surveyed 3,000 executive directors, you'd be in the majority of respondents -- 55% report spending 10 or less hours per month focusing on their boards. (That's just 6% of a full-time executive director's time -- even less if you routinely work more than 40 hours per week.) Now, maybe it doesn't sound like so much, right?

The report further reveals that there is a direct correlation between the satisfaction executive directors have with their board's performance and the amount of time they choose to invest in their boards. Makes sense. But, this finding ultimately underscored a couple of paradoxical things for me: 1) as executive directors, we have the very real potential to get as much as we give when it comes to building our board relationships, and 2) the quality of time you give is more critical than the quantity.

Let's face it: if the main focus of your interaction is board and committee meetings, which for many organizations are too often focused on the relatively limited outcomes of reporting and short-term operational decision-making, no amount of your additional time is going to significantly move your satisfaction meter higher. I mean, there's more to your board relationship than crafting meeting agendas and reports, right?

In her 2008 report of healthy board chair-executive director relationships for the Journal of Nonprofit Management (2008, Vol. 12, No.1), Mary Hiland shows us there's much more. She discussed the levels of working together that build trust and ultimately add value to an organization. The more trust the ED and board chair built together, the potential for moving as a pair from managing to planning to leading increased. "The leading pairs worked together, with engaged boards, on issues of organizational vision, mission, and strategic focus. They described energy and synergies in their relationship, and with the board and the staff, that catalyzed organizational productivity and engagement with the community."

Investing the 'right type' of time as well as the 'right amount' of time with your board needs to be part of every executive director's strategy for not only achieving professional/personal satisfaction, but for creating organizational capital.

Making a Personal Plan: UPDATE

2011-08-14T09:08:00.005-04:00

MY LAST POST DESCRIBED HOW I WAS PREPARING FOR A GET-TOGETHER WITH CONSULTING COLLEAGUES to examine the next steps of our careers. If you visit Linda Norris' blog, The Uncataloged Museum, you'll read a really good recap of how five of us came together last week to work through a discussion that none of us had had in quite this way with others before. Linda describes the flow of our activities and some key ideas and elements that made our time together not only worthwhile, but truly energizing.

What we did is not a new concept -- people get together all the time to share information, network, and help sort out career questions. Our families and friends often are our sounding boards, mostly because they're convenient, they care about us and are, therefore, likely (or required) to listen. But they may not be as helpful as colleagues or mentors who bring the world view of our respective professions, as well as some critical distance, to our seeking.

Do opportunities like this seem to happen more in the for-profit world, where resources are presumably more abundant for professional development? Given the responses to Linda's and my posts and tweets, I think it might not happen as frequently in the nonprofit sector -- at least, the cultural part of the sector where I spend most of my time. But given the fact that most of us are facing economic constraints of one sort or another, stagnate or declining employment, arts/cultural organization mergers or dissolutions, or the squeeze of elder care, child care or both, it makes obvious sense for nonprofits to focus more attention than normal on structured professional growth. You might check out Michele Martin's Bamboo Project blog for a great post on positive professional development.

What I learned last week is what many of you may already know or have experienced: it's really helpful when you can receive insights from some respected colleagues about your skills and attributes, your strengths and weaknesses, and which ones can carry you forward to something you hadn't thought of (or dared to think of) before. When we decided to spend the morning performing a SWOT (strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats) analysis on each other, we uncovered a wealth of information that crystallized into a number of fairly specific potential opportunities. It set the stage for a day's worth of creative problem-solving that only a group of engaged people could do.

Where we take our individual plans is now up to each one of us. But we'll have the group to return to for advice and ideas. We've made a commitment to stick together to help each other as well as ourselves.

Image: Idea from faithseekings

Making a Personal Plan

2011-08-09T08:05:00.000-04:00

DESPITE THE FACT THAT I DO A LOT OF ORGANIZATIONAL PLANNING in my consulting work, it's been far too long since I've sat myself down and drafted a personal plan for my career and life. I think the last time I did any real serious work on a personal plan was more than ten years ago. 'Yikes!' was my reaction when fellow consultant Linda Norris asked if I had one. Turns out neither did she. Nor several other colleagues she asked. Hmmm.....

It wasn't long after that conversation when Linda called again with an invitation to attend a personal planning retreat at her house. Starting tomorrow, five consultant colleagues are converging for 1.5 days of conversation, soul-searching, group problem-solving, and individual plan creation, and I, for one, am getting really excited about what I might contribute as well as bring home.

I think I've done a fair amount of preparation -- we kick the party off with a discussion about our past and current work and whether or not we see ourselves at a crossroad -- so I've spent some time thinking and writing about all of those things. Since I'll be summarizing these issues for the rest of the group, I've created a big mind-map that I'll tape up on a wall that will help explain where I think my consulting has been and is now.

The mind-map is a graphic representation of a short outline-cum-narrative I wrote first. (I'll share the narrative, too.) It's been a lot of fun (and work, too) developing the map, but it's really helped me to clarify my consulting past and present. And most importantly it's helping me to think about the future.

Once each of us has presented our past/present/crossroad overview, the power of group work will take over. Our plan is to use the group brain trust to help each one of us [re]focus and clarify our career aspirations for the 'next stage' of our lives (however each of us defines that stage).

I'm so glad to have the chance to put into practice what I advise my organizational clients to do all the time. Our retreat starts tomorrow --- I'll let you know how I do.

Make a Clean Exit

2011-07-16T09:58:00.000-04:00

WHEN AN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR DECIDES TO LEAVE she walks a particularly tricky tightrope from the time she announces her intentions until she flicks off the lights in her office for the last time. The length of the tightrope is one issue: some believe that once you announce you need to be on your way as quickly as you can engineer it; others feel it must take several months in order to tie up loose ends or participate in an overlapping transition period. Then there are a handful of others who announce a year or so ahead of their intended departure for reasons that may have everything to do with finishing milestone capital projects or completing major gift solicitations (and these folks more often than not it seems are announcing their retirements, not moves to new organizations). So far this year, colleagues of mine have used (are using) all three scenarios.

Regardless of the length of the tightrope, the tricky part involves the emotions that come with a pending departure and how they're handled. Once a person decides to leave, his head is in a different place -- he's made a critical mental transition. (Note to Boards: not a good idea to try to talk a person out of leaving who's already made up his mind to do so. If you're successful, won't there be just the tiniest bit of 'what if?' hanging over everything?) Once you've announced, it can be really tough to remain engaged with the people and the work -- the folks and projects you never really liked you might be inclined to ignore because they'll soon be someone else's problems. The projects you began you will now leave unfinished so you may be inclined to move them into the filing cabinet or, perhaps, the wastebasket.

Or, you might worry that all your lynchpin initiatives -- your vision -- will get dumped by your successor. You might spend your final weeks and days figuring out how to prevent that. (Note to You: if you haven't been able to institutionalize a guiding vision and values in your organization, you won't likely do it on your way out.)

As much as your departure is an opportunity for you, it is also an opportunity for the organization you are leaving. It's an organization's opportunity to reassess and recalibrate without the pressures of personality (yours) or of loyalty (to you). It can be freeing and unnerving at the same time (remember, that's how you felt when you made your decision to leave?).

My advice about departing is make it a clean break.

Put as much of the big, hairy stuff to bed so that the new E.D. isn't surprised (there'll be enough surprises without finding out that your grant funding is in jeopardy because you failed to sign off on the final report before you left).
Don't allow yourself to be a sounding board for unhappy staffers or board members once the new boss is hired. What good does that do except fuel division? Or are you the type that enjoys a little organizational arson?
Stay out of the picture in deference to your successor's need to establish herself. That means: don't become a volunteer, take on special projects or a consulting role, or offer to serve on any committees unless expressly invited by your successor.
Do not serve on the governing board of your former institution. It's weird -- and it can send really bad vibes to your successor because it elevates you to a commanding position over him.
Refrain from maintaining an office at your former institution (see #3). It's also confusing to many -- some will figure that since you still have an office, you must still be in charge.
Don't drop in for a visit with your former staff unless expressly invited and you've gotten an OK from your successor (this opens the door to being a sounding board - #2).

Once you decide to leave, it's not about you anymore.

Image: Untitled from jagosaurus

Can I Work with this Board?

2011-06-22T10:17:00.000-04:00

MOST EVERY NONPROFIT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR HAS A BONE TO PICK with his or her board at one time or another. If you talk to enough directors you soon have a lengthy list of complaints mostly clustered around the biggies: the board doesn't do enough fundraising (that's probably #1), the board is unfocused, the board doesn't respect the work I do, the board doesn't seem to know or care about the work the organization does. Perhaps you have a favorite I've missed that you'd like to share.

If you read those surveys where boards and staff independently rate the work of the board, the board always thinks they're doing a bang-up job, while executive directors almost uniformly think boards under-perform. Definitely staff leaders have pretty high (and in some cases unrealistic) expectations for their boards no matter the size, mission or sophistication of their organizations. What I suspect staff leaders don't always take into account is the fact that no board will perform to expectations if the basic ingredients of forward-looking, strategic-thinking skills, attributes and the supporting infrastructure aren't already in place.

I know for many staff leaders such a litany of complaints leads to the ultimate question: can I work with this -- my -- board? After all, how does it happen that we work for the same organization, yet we're not on the same page?

Last fall consultant and blogger Gayle Gifford took a long look at the pros and cons of the nonprofit board. The subsequent discussion she started at the BoardSource group on LinkedIn continues to elicit responses seven months later! The issues Gayle so clearly and thoughtfully laid out will resonate with anyone working with or for a board.

It started me thinking about how an executive director candidate or new board prospect might ferret out just how complementary a specific board might be to work for or with. I've concluded that the obvious place to start is with oneself. A thoughtful, if perhaps not the most critical, examination of your approach to work and to play, to interacting with others, to opportunities and to challenges, to risk and to failure will help you to look for similarities and disconnects with an organization's governing culture.

Just as search committees and governance committees might ask questions to surface attributes, approaches and skills, so, too, should director candidates and board prospects ask similar questions of organizations before signing on the dotted line. Not easy to do, I admit, when you're in the hot seat hoping to be chosen!

Boards are dynamic -- they can and do change over time and they do so because of the board and staff talent that gets added to the mix (remember what I said about basic ingredients?). If not now, do you see enough potential in a board to make your participation with it a satisfying experience? Will your talents help a board to make positive internal change? Or do you need to walk away?

Recruiting Entrepreneurial Leadership

2011-06-05T08:32:00.001-04:00

AS MUCH AS NONPROFITS NEED FORWARD-THINKING, entrepreneurial staff leadership, they need it just as much in the board room. Recruiting for it is not unlike recruiting for entrepreneurship in the CEO -- it requires definition and identification of some key attributes around which conversation and questions can be had.

My not-so-official definition of nonprofit entrepreneurship -- be it social or cultural -- is an organization's willingness to shift its perspectives to find opportunities and partnerships in unexpected places, reset old boundaries to expand audiences and, in doing so, use the strengths of its mission to diversify and/or grow income streams. And woe be the entrepreneurial CEO who doesn't have a like-thinking board to support and advance her efforts.

Cultural and social entrepreneurs share some or all of the following attributes:

They see and understand the relevancy of the work and the cultural/social value it provides
They can make value connections forward and backward -- in other words, they can apply previous lessons to the work of today and tomorrow (but they're more forward-thinkers than backward-lookers)
They are comfortable with change
They are mostly optimistic; open to new ideas and diverse perspectives and they're willing to figure out ways to apply them (in fact, they enjoy it)
They are comfortable with exploiting opportunities by taking calculated risks to increase cultural/social value
They have a heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created
They are careful listeners and work well in groups

How do you recruit board members for these attributes? First, recognize that it may require several conversations to discover an individual's world view. Here are three conversation starters:

Give them a problem: how will they connect the dots between the organization and the world around it? Do they balance forward-thinking with backward-looking? Will they develop more than one approach?
Ask them about a problem they solved: how many internal and external dots did they connect? How far did it advance the program or the entire organization? Was failure a part of the process? Were new voices a part of the process?
Ask them if they consider themselves to be entrepreneurial! Listen for key descriptors of attributes.

If your organization is serious about recruiting for attributes, it must be serious about taking the time to listen to prospective board candidates. Consider all board recruitment as a journey of discovery, even if you believe you know your prospects well. Just because an individual runs a great fundraiser or is recommended by a trusted source, doesn't mean they have the entrepreneurial attributes your organization is searching for now.
Image: Entrepreneurship from Michael Lewkowitz via Flickr

When a Frame Becomes A Box

2011-05-19T12:21:00.001-04:00

I'VE ALWAYS VIEWED CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ORGANIZATIONAL VISION as exciting opportunities to put a whole host of ideas and convictions from the sublime to the ridiculous out on the table for everyone to think about. You never know where a spark might come from that will light the path for an organization's direction and enlighten thinking.

I've always been puzzled by folks who think visioning is nothing more than silly, unattainable chatter. I suspect that these naysayers have participated in enough visioning discussions where nothing was done to pin down key concepts so that all of it floated away like a clutch of helium balloons. I hear that.

The absolute requirement for me is to never leave a visioning discussion without pinning down key concepts or common threads of ideas. These, then, become the contextual frame which holds all the nuts and bolts discussions of strategies and tactics. As I've written here, I am believer that the nuts and bolts ought to be driven by vision -- otherwise, you'll never achieve it.

Frames can be complicated, but they can be simple, too. For most organizations, simpler is probably better -- after all, the bottom line for using contextual frames has got to be because they cut through the clutter to provide clarity of direction and impact. For the more literal among us, I'm going to suggest a literal frame: four sides with each side representing a piece of the vision. If you chose just four key concepts that would define your organization's impact, what would they be? Civic engagement? Sustained economic development? Excellence in education? Furthering the creative process?

I think there's a lot of merit in being fairly restrictive when converging ideas -- it's much easier to add later than to decide on too many right off the bat only to have to cut back when it's clear you can't move that much forward.

The fine line we all must walk is knowing when a contextual frame becomes more of a restrictive box. What would the warning signs be?

Photo: frames from Robert in Toronto, flickr

Backing Into a Mission

2011-04-12T18:00:00.000-04:00

LOTS OF PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU (myself included) that an overarching organizational mission is the logical starting point for developing a course of action. The deep understanding of the need an organization can fill, along with the resulting impact from filling that need, typically form the bedrock for the planning, programming and evaluation that is to come. But I'm willing to bet that there are loads of nonprofits who find themselves meeting a need and making an impact without ever fully articulating a mission statement (or a vision statement, for that matter).

An arts organization I'm working with may be a case in point. The founder, who is no longer on the board, but occupies a revered place in the organization's universe, has an extremely articulate and sophisticated idea about the importance of integrating the daily artistic process with the public. The result of her desire became a successful grassroots artist project that eventually, for reasons having mostly to do with managing a bunch of artists working in donated spaces, morphed a few years back into a formal nonprofit. Small and creative, what was once very intuitive is now more structured and layered with concerns about staffing, funding, and board development. They've decided it's time for their first-ever written strategic plan.

The day we spent together recently focused on their vision for the organization's foreseeable future, not laboring over crafting a mission statement....at least, not until the very end of our time together. I wasn't too worried, though. They'd spent their best time thinking about external realities and what they wanted to do with their programming in light of those realities. Their founder was also in their midst acting as an important and reassuring touchstone for the group. (Would that every founder be so open-handed!)

While one or two board members expressed concern that we hadn't started with a discussion about mission or impact, by day's end, it seemed clear to me that their revisioned mission statement would flow seamlessly from what and where they wanted the organization to be -- particularly true for an organization that was in many ways reaffirming its founder's guiding idea. Actually, this example may be more about "back to the future" than "backing into a mission."

In fact, I wasn't planning on asking the group to work think about the mission statement at all, but I reconsidered thinking it wouldn't hurt to capture some key words and phrases for some future mission-writers to draw upon. Much to my surprise, the words and ideas spilled over several flipchart sheets. At the end of the day, the group had strung together enough desired vocabulary for a couple of wordsmiths to further polish. As I reflect back on the course of the day, I don't think it was a mistake to leave mission writing until last.

What Do We Owe Our Members?

2011-03-16T09:55:00.001-04:00

THIS POST IS FOR ALL THOSE ORGANIZATIONS out there who rely to any extent on membership dollars to fund their work. This maybe even applies to organizations who don't have memberships, but rely on ticket subscribers, major donors and underwriters. The question that's on my mind has to do with how much information we give (or withhold) from folks who support us. How much of the organizational curtain do we pull back for these faithful and generous souls? After all, it can get pretty messy behind the curtain.

I guess it depends a lot on how you/your organization view members. We expect, perhaps without much thought, that members will automatically renew their support year after year. We throw some benefits their way, give them a wine and cheese reception every once in a while, and cash their checks. Are they just dollar signs for the balance sheet, hungry mouths to constantly feed with programming, precious commodities or fickle friends? All of that or something else...or something more?

I've come to view members as something way more. I'm thinking about them as organizational partners. Sure, they're often the primary beneficiaries of our programs and services, but they also help to pay our bills. Their ranks provide the people power for our events, our committees and our boards. They're more than just an organizational ATM -- they have ideas and opinions...and most of them care a lot about what we do.

So, why do so many organizations fear exposing the mess behind the curtain to the very folks who invest the most in their success? (If it's truly a mess, we're embarrassed to show how out of control we are. Just remember, that kind of a mess will come to light sooner or later.) Or are we afraid that if the curtain is pulled back, our partners will find nothing there?

But what about those times when we're just simply struggling to get a compass reading for organizational direction-setting? When we need some different perspectives, some fresh organizational oxygen? Don't members -- organizational partners -- deserve an invitation to those conversations? Isn't that a big chunk of being transparent and, dare I say it, entrepreneurial?

Image: ending a hand from sam b-r

The Caretaker Board: Anchoring Stability or Rusty Anchor?

2011-02-27T10:17:00.002-05:00

IS IT ENOUGH FOR A NONPROFIT BOARD'S primary focus to be protection of the status quo?

It's expected that every board will take care of the organization entrusted it. There's a definition for what care means in this instance -- it's commonly expressed as the duty of "care that an ordinarily prudent person would exercise in a like position and under similar circumstances." Many will argue that in times of economic or societal stress, the best defense of a nonprofit is to hunker down and shepherd the resources -- to, in fact, take extra care. By this definition, taking care is an active and positive (indeed, critical) quality of a vigilant board.

The benefit of a board's prudence gets lost when that board slips into passive management of an organization's affairs. This board -- the caretaker board -- has become comfortable with the safe harbor of complacency. It's best at protecting its past achievements and preserving the reality it has created. As a result, it exercises an auto-pilot oversight (even that word is too active), and as long as the organization isn't showing any signs of outward disintegration or internal dissatisfaction, the caretaker board can deliver on its well-worn mission. That is until something comes along to rock the boat that is beyond the caretaker board's ability to pay for it or ignore it.

To be fair, I don't believe any board starts its life aiming to be simply "the caretaker". However, I do believe a board can unwittingly take on that mantle if it's not sufficiently challenged by its leadership or engaged by staff or program. There was a time when only the most well-heeled and, perhaps, the very smallest or most marginal of nonprofits could support the sleepy-eyed caretaker board. Where a caretaker board might once have provided an anchoring stability, it has become more often than not a rusty anchor that prevents today's nonprofit from moving forward.

Image: Anchored in time from Oh Lenna (Photolena)

The Dialogue of the Board

2011-01-22T10:18:00.000-05:00

I ALWAYS GET A LITTLE SHIVER UP MY SPINE when a I see a board meeting agenda that is nothing more than a pro forma list of reports. I bet you know what I mean -- after the call to order and the approval of the previous month's minutes we're off and running with a litany of updates from the president, the director, and any number of committees. You can kind of put yourself on auto-pilot for most of these meetings. In fact, one (at least) organization I know hands out the same agenda for every meeting. It doesn't even take into account that a committee or two haven't met -- your committee is on there even if all you have to say is "we haven't met." (And, yes, that shows up in the minutes!) Please tell me what would excite you about attending that meeting if the agenda was all you had to go on?

The fact is a board is a community -- a community of doers and seekers. In order for this community to do it must seek meaning not only from facts, but from the contexts surrounding those facts. In order to do that, there must be space for dialogue.

It is very easy to talk through and around a meeting agenda that's filled with reports. Talking through and around the many issues that make up at a typical business meeting doesn't necessarily constitute dialogue. To extract meaning from information and ideas, and to reflect on the implications of an organization's work requires a deeper level of conversation and a bit of time to reflect and connect the dots. Very hard to do in a business meeting, I grant you.

However, it is only through dialogue that the community of the board can consider its organization's relevance, can encourage innovation and can expose ideas to competition. It is with dialogue that individual board members can ponder their personal obligation to their organizations. It is through dialogue that strong boards are built and sustained.

How do you introduce dialogue into your board's work? Here are some ideas:

for 20 minutes at every other board meeting, split up into smaller conversation groups -- everyone discuss the same topic or question, then regroup for a 10-minute dialogue as a community
ask a committee to prepare a 10-minute presentation about why their work matters to the larger work of the board, then spend 10 minutes asking the rest of the board to expand on that meaning (connect the dots, as it were)
ask a staff member or volunteer to talk with the board about why their work advances the organization's mission -- see how many dots you connect in another 10-15 minutes of dialogue
ask an audience member, a client, or representative from another community organization to dialogue with your board about why what you do is important to them -- dialogue around that for 15 minutes
set aside longer blocks of time for in-depth discussion -- perhaps as a special board meeting or a retreat

Please share your ideas -- we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Photo: Share 5 from Idea Maps

Time to Get to Work

2011-01-03T09:02:00.000-05:00

NEVER MIND THAT IT'S THE FIRST MONDAY OF THE NEW YEAR and you're still struggling with those resolutions. When you get to your desk this morning, will you really make any changes to how you approach your work? The fact is that you don't have to make any big changes. After all, big change is most often made up of the accumulation of lots of small changes, sideways glances and out-of-the blue inspirations.

Thanks to the good thinking of others, today I've got a manageable handful of small, sideways and out-of-the blue for you:

The "Ten New Year's Resolutions for Boards" from Barry Bader's Great Boards Blog offers advice that you can put into action almost immediately. How's this: make a list of the board members who are your board's future chairpersons and figure out ways to get them lined up for leadership (OK, that last part is my advice). Barry's advice is if you can't identify anyone on your current board who's willing/able to become the board's leader, then you've got to put your heads together and develop it from within or recruit for it. If you've one or two folks, what can you do right now to develop them further? Should they be part of the executive committee (if they're not already)? Should they be included in conversations with the current board president? After you've made your list and answered these questions, call or email your nominating/board development committee chairperson and suggest a meeting. Do this before the end of January.

Another great suggestion from Bader's list is to rethink what you give your board members as prep material before a board meeting. Are they really getting material that will help them be better critical thinkers and decision-makers about the organization? It seems like it's feast for famine for most boards -- either they're inundated with reports or they don't get anything (even an agenda). If you're responsible for helping your board understand the organization's issues and their responsibilities, take a couple of hours this week to find out what your board members need and want for prep material (call a few of them for a quick convo). Then make a plan to deliver on that before the next board meeting.

Over at Gail Perry's blog, Fired-Up Fundraising, you'll find her resolutions for board members. As far as I'm concerned, her set of ten resolutions amounts to the basic job description for all modern board members. Two of her ten are "get more engaged" with the work of the organization (actually easier done than thought) and "have a bias toward action". Add a discussion around Perry's list to your next board meeting agenda.

Barry Hessenius gives us a baker's dozen of resolutions at Barry's Blog. Among them are these: the two watchwords for 2011 (and beyond) are Austerity and Authenticity; and put someone on your board who's under the age of 30 -- as Barry says, "Just do it already." You might review your strategic plan with austerity and authenticity as the filters. Would you make any changes to your plan because of them? As for the under 30 board member, we'll you've already got your call into your nominating/board development chairperson.

Spark a Resolution for 2011

2010-12-30T11:33:00.002-05:00

SOME THINGS HAVE A WAY OF STANDING THE TEST OF TIME. That's why I'm dusting off this post from 2009, because I think the ten resolutions I wrote about then still make good very good sense for 2011. This time around I'd like to emphasize resolution #8: get comfortable with change. It's not just a clever catch-phrase anymore. Today, it's as much about organizational survival as mission impact.

While some folks will shrug their shoulders and say "change happens", others will be proactively using change to generate sparks. You might think that making sparks is just so much wasted energy, but sparks light fires. Shrugging change off doesn't even get the match lit.

Head into your office on January 3rd with my list of resolutions or your own and see if you can make some sparks fly.

Who will be your organization's change agent in 2011? Will it be you?

Photo: desejo-lhes um santo 2011 - I wish...from Marcos Arruda

Nonprofit Governance Blogs

2010-12-23T10:00:00.001-05:00

I'm so honored to be listed among Debra Beck's favorite governance blogs! Check out the others on Debra's list: http://bit.ly/hHRdS5

I'm in great company! And Debra's blog is one of the best.

Image: Blogging 101 from martin.canchola

Making it Stick: What Strategic Planning All Comes Down To

2010-12-23T08:28:00.000-05:00

JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH A BOARD PRESIDENT who was checking in with me about the planning process his organization was wrapping up with me. I told him what I had told the planning committee a week earlier at the end of our last meeting together, "Now the hard work begins. You've got to summon the discipline to stick to this plan you've created."

My advice wasn't just for the planning committee, although they were the only ones in earshot of my parting words. Planning committees may think all they have to do is create the written document, and while that is the immediate goal, I think they also have the added responsibility (along with staff leadership) to figure out how to institutionalize it at the board level. This is especially critical if this is the first plan the organization has ever produced or if the organization has previously failed at following their plans. So, part of the planning committee's follow-through responsibilities include teaching their board colleagues about the issues and conversations that drove the plan, regularly sharing and expanding on some of the new ideas and information that framed planning meetings, cheerleading for following the plan and celebrating when that occurs.

In fact, the planning committee and I spent time during our last planning meeting talking quite specifically about how to move the plan to the center of organizational life (something this organization wasn't used to doing). We considered the following tactics and decided they deserved a place in the planning document:

make sure that every planning committee member had a leadership role on all standing committees, thus driving the conversation forward with board colleagues and other volunteers in the small group environment of the committee
restructure standing committees and add new ones to deliver on the plan's strategies (in the case of this organization, creation of several new committees and taskforces were identified in the plan)
rewrite (or create for the first time) committee and taskforce job descriptions that mirror goals and strategies in the plan
focus the first committee meetings of the new year with a thorough orientation to the plan and those areas of the plan for which each would be responsible (this goes for staff, too)
build full board and staff meeting agendas around the goals and strategies of the plan, thus reinforcing the plan as the central, guiding mechanism for the organization's work
develop an informational dashboard of key measures that will help the board and staff evaluate their effectiveness in working the plan
consider a formal review of the plan at the six-month interval, rather than at 12 months (at least for the first year), again to reinforce vision, mission, goals and strategies

When you consider what has to happen to make a plan stick, writing it is the relatively easy part.

Photo: Knock Knock - Sticky Notes from kardsunlimited

Fostering Good Board Ideas

2010-11-29T08:15:00.001-05:00

IN HER RECENT BLOG POST "Where good (board) ideas come from", Debra Beck links to a great video (you've just got to watch it) and poses the questions "Do we nurture breathing room and value insights shared amidst the rush to check reports off the agenda? Do we foster opportunities for good ideas inside board members' heads to make it to the surface so they can be connected?"

Thoughts of inspirational discussions and deep-diving into issues that were cut short by a too-full agenda and not enough time came flooding over me as I read Debra's post. Yes, I've been in those situations and I look back on them with mixed emotions knowing that some great conversations will never be rekindled and some organizational energy was lost.

So, how can we build in time for idea generation, rumination, and synergy at the board and staff levels? Here are some of my thoughts:

It's counter-intuitive, but the space to spark and nurture ideas needs to be planned. We like to think that idea generation is improvisational, spur-of-the-moment, a random act -- and yes, it often is that. But, it's one thing to react creatively to a stream of conversation and quite another to take ideas to the point where they might actually put down roots. If you can pluck an idea from the stream and get it in some terra firma in 30-45 minutes, then do it, otherwise it'll float away.
The best ideas are often borne from seemingly opposite perspectives. That's one of the reasons why board and staff diversity is so important. An organization can expand its perspectives by making space for periodic or ongoing stakeholder meetups and think tanks. I see great potential in gathering together a variety of people to focus on idea generation around specific organizational issues -- not committees per se and maybe not even task forces, although they might well function as a task force. It's the perfect blend of planning and improv.
There are organizations (although I don't know any personally) that have "blue sky" committees -- formal groups just for knocking around ideas and creating new connections. I like the idea, but they'll only work if there's some supporting structure around them that can absorb the best ideas into the organization's culture.
The coffeehouse, retreat and salon are idea incubators that many boards and staff don't use enough. After-hours brainstorming and ruminating are best done in relaxed settings. Where better than the neighborhood restaurant, a cabin in the woods or someone's deck? There just needs to be a plan in place to move the good conversation to another level for nurturing.
I'm also intrigued by the town hall concept, where a large group of people work on one or more issues with the guidance of facilitators. What would be gained by the local museum holding a town hall or two a year? I think a lot.

How is your organization capturing and fostering good ideas?

Photo: yes and no from *_Abhi_*

An "Aha!" Moment in Strategic Planning

2010-11-20T09:09:00.001-05:00

WHEN DO "AHA" MOMENTS COME FOR YOU? If they rolled up on your doorstep with unfailing regularity, you'd take them for granted. They wouldn't elicit an "aha!" at all. But real "aha" moments, for me at any rate, come after stretches of concerted problem-solving and reflection. They more often occur as a prolonged unfolding of understanding rather than in one flash of insight.

So it was with a strategic planning committee I'd been working with for months. Our regular meetings were moving well through the obstacle course of mission refinement, goal development and strategy creation. But it wasn't until we were buried knee-deep in strategies and tasking that some very forthright conversations started to take place.

As the morning fog lifts from the landscape, this team began to articulate -- as a group -- that its resources for at least the short-term had to be spent on strengthening its organizational core. Board and staff development, along with financial management and planning, were without question a top priority. How will board leadership be chosen? What is the role of a nominating committee in a 21st century nonprofit? What approaches can be employed to integrate all fundraising activities?

The animated discussion around these and dozens of other questions was unlike any other meeting of this committee. Was it because we had moved from the theory of strategic planning into the very real realm of practice? I think so. We began to see where and how earlier decisions about mission, goals and strategies would need to be played out. We began to make concrete connections between all the plan's elements. But, it didn't happen until now -- now as we near the end of the formal planning process, where tasking strategies challenged us to connect all the dots. Aha!!

Photo: AHA from St_A_Sh

Should Vision Statements Be Impact Statements?

2010-10-12T08:50:00.000-04:00

A KEY AND EARLY COMPONENT OF STRATEGIC PLANNING involves a critical review of an organization's vision and mission statements. Most of the cultural nonprofits I work with have mission statements; few of them have vision statements. I often refer to mission statements as the articulation of where an organization is now (and its importance for being, serving, and providing a public benefit) and the vision statement as the embodiment of the organization at some future point in time. Sure, that's what visions are all about, but shouldn't they be about something more?

That's where impact comes in and thanks to practitioners like Hildy Gottlieb and her Community-Driven Institute, the women of the Social Change Divas Daily and others, I really do think that the vision statement must answer this question: if we consistently meet or exceed our mission, what will be our organization's impact on our audiences and our community?

Without long-term external impact, what's really the point of your nonprofit? I posed this question to a planning team last week and they responded immediately and with great conviction that the impact of meeting their organization's mission would result in deeper public engagement on a variety of levels and acceptance by schools as a vital educational resource. These were very tangible (and achievable) responses, not the usual "we want to be the premier" this or that. I'm meeting with this same planning team today to continue the impact discussion and I'm can't wait to hear where they take the conversation next.

So, I think it's time for a change of terminology. I'm attracted to the idea of renaming the "vision statement" the "impact statement". I think it's vastly more descriptive, both for the organization and for its publics. The name embodies action and realities that dreamy visions often fail to pin down.

Building the Trust Factor

2010-09-23T08:37:00.000-04:00

A MUSEUM STUDIES CLASS IS ABOUT TO LAUNCH A planning process with a local historical society as part of a semester-long project this fall. As a preliminary activity, one of the students (who is responsible for the outreach portion of the project) and I chatted yesterday about my take on organizational planning. We covered a lot of ground and a lot of the basic elements of a solid planning process: vision, mission, where do goals come from?; how much outreach can you suggest an all-volunteer organization do?; as well as the more mundane how much can you devote to this class project when you're a busy student with tons of other claims on your time?

That aside, I encourage my grad student friend to spend considerable time at the beginning getting the board to engage in the emotion-based discussions about why their organization is important, who it serves and what impact it can make on the lives of its audiences, its neighborhood, and its larger community. These are critical conversations to have early on, because every subsequent conversation about the how's and the what's will flow from them. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the why's/who's/impact conversations are the spaces where understanding and trust blossom among a group -- even in groups where individuals have known each other a long time. It's practically magical and so satisfying to hear someone say, "I've learned so much about us!" or "I never thought about our organization like that before!"

Since my conversation, I've been thinking about how planning can -- and should be -- be a platform for trust-building in an organization. It's generally not the primary objective of planning, but it you're able to achieve it, it's certainly a whopping big benefit that can play a huge role in implementing the a plan.

Photo: 2005 Focus Groups Yass from NSWRFS via Flickr

A Scalable Recipe for Getting Out of Financial Trouble

2010-09-17T15:36:00.003-04:00

THE ARTICLE I JUST READ ABOUT THE COLUMBUS SYMPHONY ending its season just a hair's breath in the black is cause for celebration in many ways. As symphonies across the country struggle, merge or outright die, the Columbus Symphony turnaround is worth taking a look at. What was the secret from going from a projected deficit of more than $1 million to a surplus of $200,000? Were there lessons for the rest of us embedded in the experience?

In a nutshell, here's what symphony leadership did:

secured major corporate/foundation support, admittedly much of that was already in the pipeline, but the lesson here is that you don't give up on fundraising in a tough economy, you work the hell out of it
secured municipal support -- a tough sell right now, but one likely built on strong economic arguments. Do you know how much your cultural organization contributes to your local economy? If not, you're overdue in pulling that information together.
musicians are now in their third year of pay cuts. The typical salary for musicians went from more than $50,000 to $35,000. Ouch. They also gave up paid vacation this year. Sharing the pain must encompass managerial and executive staff, too, not just your program staff or the pain you inflict cuts that much more deeply.
combined administrative functions like accounting, ticketing, etc. with a performing arts association. Doing so reduced the symphony's office staff by two-thirds. More of us have to be on the lookout for cost-sharing opportunities -- it's probably easiest with back-room functions, but there may be lots of synergy to be had by sharing program staff and, hmmm, maybe an executive or two.
and speaking of executives, the director of the performing arts association is serving as the volunteer managing director and CEO of the symphony. Interesting concept, but a lot harder to pull off than sharing ticketing functions. What could make this work for your organization? (A tightly drawn job description is one key.)

There you have it, that's the published recipe. Pretty simple, really. It's a recipe many can follow.

What's the big lesson here? Repeat after me: NO SILVER BULLETS. That's right. If your organization is in financial trouble, it probably didn't get there in a day or a week or even a year. It took a while. And it will take a while to get out of the mess. And it will take hard work and, yep, everybody gets to pitch in.

Is it scalable to organizations of varying sizes? I think yes, mostly. I think yes, definitely, if you're willing to put the sacred cows on the table along with the more obvious stuff and to accept that the solution, whatever combination of ingredients from the basic recipe you choose to use, will require months if not years of commitment.

Photo: Columbus Symphony Music Stand from lottadot via Flickr

The Telltale Signs of Trouble

2010-09-04T10:36:00.002-04:00

MY MENTAL LIST OF CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS ABOUT TO GO UNDER was significantly lengthened this week. Just yesterday a neighbor told me that a small environmental/ natural history research organization she works with was about to fold. She was told that the board was casting around for a place to transfer the organization's collections of books, maps, photos and videos (although no one knows exactly where that will be despite the fact that they may have to shut their doors in a couple of weeks).
The day before that, a colleague called to say she was retiring from her organization and that there's a movement afoot to dissolve it (not her doing). A third organization has burned through its endowment fund to the point where some board members think it's time to close the whole place down.
That's all in just the last week.

I've been hearing for a long time that the pace of consolidations and dissolutions in the nonprofit sector would speed up as the recession deepened. Apart from symphony orchestras and the occasional museum, I wasn't seeing a great deal of evidence of that in the cultural corner of the sector until this summer. But now I'm wondering if we're starting to reach a tipping point. The money that's typically in a cultural's pipeline (from government, foundation and corporate grants, usually) tends to keep it lagging behind the rest of the economy. Maybe now the time has run out.

The fact is, the recession may be blamed for the demise of some of these organizations, but it isn't the sole reason and it's usually not the primary one. Unless an organization is relatively new and still a bit shaky, many of these organizations got into a fragile state well before the recession can be blamed for putting the final nail in the coffin. Organizational deterioration can go on for years before it becomes palpable and impossible to avoid.

But there are dozens of telltale signs (easier seen in hindsight, of course) -- OK, here's the first (baker's) dozen:

failing to understand the purpose and role of the organization
cutting back on the staff that produce mission-driven programming, and as a result
cutting back on programming
deferring maintenance on buildings and equipment (that's one of the first telltale signs in my book)
failing to file required reports (to the IRS, to state regulators, funders, etc.)
failing to follow the Bylaws by ignoring term limits of board members, by-passing membership meetings, sliding by elections, not constituting stated committees, etc.
slacking off on producing timely financial reports
failing repeatedly to reach a quorum for a board meeting or
reducing the number of board meetings for fear of not reaching a quorum or because the work has no forward momentum
giving inordinate power to an executive committee thus marginalizing the decision-making of the full board
sporadically communicating with supporters (or not communicating at all)
regularly spending more than is earned
borrowing from invested funds with the promise that those funds will be paid back

What telltale signs of trouble would you add to this list?

Image: Here comes trouble t shirt &...from birdarts via flickr

Poke Your Head Up and Ask

2010-08-26T12:51:00.000-04:00

I'M IN LOVE WITH BENCHMARKING. I love gathering data about organizations, but not simply for gathering's sake. It's got to be focused information that can help to paint a picture about success (or the potential for success). For me, benchmarking is a nifty tool that can help to answer two key questions every nonprofit needs to ask: 1) how can I tell how my organization's doing until I start to compare it with similar or better organizations? and 2) how can I know all that might be possible for my organization until I know what's out there already?

Benchmarking is one way to get a handle on exactly this type of information. It can be as simple as sending an email or as formal as making an on-site visit with a laundry list of questions for specific staff or board members. What you find out can help you to place your organization on the great continuum of organizations like yours. It gets you grounded and lets you know if your organization is at or near the top of its game, or has many miles to go. No matter how simple or complicated your benchmarking, here are what I think the overriding factors are to make your benchmarking the most useful for you:

get very clear on what you want to find out. Unless you want to do just a general overview for comparison, i.e., budget size, number of staff, size of board, extent of programming, etc., make your focus for benchmarking fairly tight.
choose organizations based on what you want to find out. Looking to elevate audience development activities, for example? Put your thinking cap on and choose benchmarking prospects that do audience development really well.
always benchmark organizations that are at or above your own organization's level (whether it be size or programming sophistication). Benchmarking organizations that are below your organization's level won't necessarily teach you anything new or help you raise the bar.
never benchmark organizations you know are mediocre -- that's a waste of time in my book.
develop a list of questions from which to work and stick to them; do this so that you can compare organization to organization (sure, sidebar conversations are great and you may discover something you'll want to explore that you hadn't anticipated, but make sure you cover your primary list first).
benchmark across geographic areas and the nonprofit spectrum. Depending upon the topic of your interest, a for-profit might be a likely prospect. This is about moving out of your comfort zone a bit to discover possibilities you might not have thought of before.

Bottom line, benchmarking is about poking your head up out of the your own institution's particular hole and taking a look around. First, you've got to be willing to poke your head up. And then you've got to ask some questions. It's an interactive activity, this benchmarking stuff. So, come on out of the hole and breathe some fresh air! It can be so worth it.

Photo: Whack a mole! from catgotti via Flickr

Nonprofit Trends: Lost in Translation?

2010-08-24T08:28:00.000-04:00

STARTING TODAY I'M SPENDING A BIG CHUNK OF TIME shifting the furnishings around in the nonprofit office where I work part-time. My organization will soon be sharing space with another nonprofit in order to save a bit on rent. The last time I had to share an office with others was almost 20 years ago and that was with a co-worker. So, as much as I want to help the bottom line of my association, I'm a little worried about the personal workstyle adjustment I'm facing.

I wasn't surprised, then, when I learned from a group of rural nonprofit leaders earlier this month that workplace sharing and consolidation are trends they're seeing on the horizon. But, interestingly, no one knew of an organization that was actually doing it. So far, it's just talk. Almost in the same breath the group agreed that another trend is the demise of some nonprofits -- indeed, about three cultural organizations in their area were down for the count -- an arts council, an performing arts center, and a sports hall of fame.

None of us, including myself until just now, made a direct connection between the two trends the group cited. Wouldn't you think that if your organization was witnessing the demise of a nonprofit in your town or region that you'd be all over looking for lessons and putting them into practice? It seems as though many of us are looking for the lessons, but far fewer are making any type of substantial readjustments. Perhaps a tweak here or there is enough, but is it?

Is it -- when, almost daily, we are bombarded with tough news from the nonprofit sector? Is it -- when we're warned that the "new normal" for nonprofits requires a new mindset, an almost complete shift in the way we relate to stakeholders, plan and execute fundraising, and measure our impact?

I fear that for many cultural nonprofits there are far too many that are paralyzed with fear of this uncertain future and by the change that may be required to thrive in it; too many without smart enough leadership who can see the path and help us stumble over it; too many content with waiting it out, to see how the other nonprofit fares before making a move.

I'm heading back to sorting out where my desk is going to go.

Photo: Deer in the headlights from T Hall via Flickr

Getting Beyond the "Bored" Meeting

2010-08-23T07:44:00.002-04:00

MY AUDIO/POWERPOINT SLIDES TO MY WEBINAR for NYS Arts on how to up the quality quotient for board meetings is available here.

This webinar looks at some basics: what board meetings should accomplish (and often don't), how revisioning an agenda can provide meaning as well as focus, and how dashboards, breakouts, facilitated discussions and conversation recorders can both deepen and expand understanding.

Illustration: The Boring Meeting from fourborne via Flickr

Board Recruitment: Still Missing the Mark

2010-08-20T08:58:00.001-04:00

LET'S FACE IT -- IF FINDING COMMITTED, DYNAMIC AND FORWARD-THINKING board members was easy, you wouldn't be reading this post. And I wouldn't have written about board recruitment as much as I have (see here, here, here, and here to list a few of the dozen or so posts I written on this topic). I'm not the only one writing about it -- there are dozens of articles and book chapters devoted to it and plenty of workshops and webinars (OK, these are webinars I developed for NYS ARTS) available. I like to think we might be making some headway on understanding that board recruitment is an ongoing process made up of interlocking pieces. And, indeed, we are.

Nevertheless, I was struck when a nonprofit leader in a focus group I conduct recently declared that, in her community, most nonprofits had no clue what the role of the nominating committee was and no understanding of how important this committee was to the long term health of their organizations. Several of her colleagues heartily agreed. This remark had obviously struck a chord with the rest of the group...and it did with me. This was a community not unsophisticated in nonprofit board work, yet this seemed to be a deep and long-standing issue. I was disappointed that I had to steer their conversation back to the subject of the focus group -- I would have liked to explore this issue further with them.

So, perhaps we can explore it together here.

I suppose that part of the reason why organizations aren't implementing new approaches to board recruitment is that old habits die hard. An organization that's been used to tapping recruits from a tight network of friends and associates will likely be reluctant to search too far beyond these networks. Organizations that condone the pre-election scramble of a nominating committee can become hostages to these committees or the recruits they bring to the board room. Boards and nominating committees that operate from a mindset that there isn't anyone who wants to join their ranks will undoubtedly fulfill that prophecy (they're the ones who -- with heavy sighs and shrugging of shoulders -- repeatedly re-elect themselves, because "we can't find anyone to replace us"). But, wouldn't you think, that precisely because board work is so challenging boards would be welcoming new approaches to recruitment?

Photo: On Target from caruba

You Get What You Deserve

2010-08-03T17:39:00.000-04:00

MY COLLEAGUE LINDA NORRIS AND I HAVE a long history in the trenches of museum administration. The post is really a tribute to her insight, which is that boards get the directors they deserve and vice versa. It's a tough philosophy particularly when it refers to a negative relationship. But, frankly, both of us have seen it played out in dozens and dozens of organizations.

It reminds me of what another colleague told me about a particular board that hired the same type of director over and over again and could never understand why they had a mess on their hands....over and over again. What's that old saying? -- insanity is when you keep doing the same thing expecting to get a different result.

Boards who want to maintain tight control (or Machiavellian control) will generally seek a director they can control tightly. They'll look for the passive personality, the blank slate, the eager to please. Boards that embrace challenge with the understanding that it can lead to growth will generally hire directors who will challenge them as well as themselves and the staff.

Controlling executive directors, on the other hand, will work hard to keep their boards at arm's length, perceiving erosion of power -- and perhaps knowledge -- if the board gets too close. They'll withhold information, gloss over the tough questions, and roundly chastise any whiff of board exerted management (micro or macro). Executive directors who are willing and able to embrace collaborative leadership -- which may also include some scrutiny, pushback, and a challenge or two -- will seek a board who can hug back.

If someone were to venture a concern about why such an organization isn't moving forward or seems to be living in suspended animation, part of the answer may lie in the fact that someone got what they deserved.
Photo: 75/365 I wanna tear my hair out from bonus living (away)

My Webinar: Building Your Board

2010-07-16T08:17:00.001-04:00

The June webinar I conducted for NYS Arts titled, Fulfilling a Role or Just Filling a Seat?, is available for viewing and listening here.

I think it's full of practical tips, many of them I've written about over the last couple of years of Leading By Design, but the audio and my scribbling on the PowerPoint slides lends a certain animation that I simply can't achieve in my posts.

Photo: Executive Board Room Facility at...from SFO CP

Building a Board Recruitment Program

2010-06-21T08:22:00.001-04:00

IF YOU WERE BUILDING A BOARD RECRUITMENT program from scratch, what would you make of it? I think I'd start with two pieces of information: a board job description and a criteria list for the skills and attributes I need around that board table.

The job description would give me most all the information I'd need to approach a prospect to discuss board service. I'd consider it my script for the conversation. It would include all the expectations my organization would expect of a board member and it would include what the board member could expect from the organization.

The criteria list would be my road map to the people I'd be sharing that job description with. As I've written about in other posts (here, here and here) it's knowing what I've got to work with and what I need that sets me up for my search of the who's. Without this data, I could just ask any passing stranger if she or he had interest in joining my board. I could just paper the neighborhood with that job description and it wouldn't mean a thing.

If I were building a board recruitment program from scratch, I'd also want to think about what surrounds those two pieces of information -- what supports and reinforces them. They're two pieces of an overarching program that includes several activities ranging from prospect identification to orientation to full engagement of new members into the work of the board. Each of these activities requires a plan of attack and related materials. I'd want to have that all thought out and in place.

For example, orientation is an important early opportunity to ground a new board member in the vision, mission and values of the organization. It requires face-to-face discussion that's best supported with a facilities tour, staff meet-up, and reference manual of all key documents (including organizational documents, policies, financials, strategic plans, contact lists, and program info).

Full engagement of new board members requires that they receive an assignment right away and perhaps some mentoring from veteran board members.

So, here's your assignment: take a look at your current board recruitment program. If you were to rebuild it or build one from scratch, where would you start?

Photo: Tinker Toys from M & J: Character Hunters

Prospecting for Board Members: Map That, Too!

2010-06-17T08:21:00.001-04:00

IN MY LAST POST I WROTE ABOUT mapping your current board. Let's go to the next step and think about how this same type of mapping can be used to identify skills and attributes needed to add to a board. Your map might begin with a simple list of these skills and attributes -- a list that is drawn from discussions about your organization's vision, mission and values, from your strategic or long-range plan, from a board self-assessment and/or from writing a statement about what your ideal board would look like.

As I've written about here, this exercise sets you (and your nominating or board development committee) up for moving your search from the "what" to the "who" -- the people who might fill your skills/attributes requirements.

Some of your primary candidates might be found among your members, your volunteers, your corporate underwriters, and any number of people your organization interacts with every day. But other prospects may be more removed...or not yet known. Your map might consist of a set of concentric circles, with the inner most circle containing the names of prospects closest to the organization. Each expanding outer ring contains people with less and less direct connection, but all this means is that you'll have to 1) use a wider network to learn about them and 2) invest in a longer period of cultivation.

Or your map might be a matrix with skills listed on the left-hand column and attributes in headers along the top. Start filling in the matrix with prospects you know best (a prospect may be listed multiple times depending on how many of the criteria he/she meets -> that's a good sign). Then move on to names you know less well. The blank spaces left on your matrix represent the folks you don't know yet and you'll need to expand your networks to identify.

And what about those people you don't even know yet? That's where the skills/attributes list is key, because it becomes the basis for asking your networks the question "Do you know some who meets these criteria and might be interested in our mission?" And that's when your organization's network can grow exponentially.

Image: 2010 - February - NodeXL - ssm2010...from Marc_Smith

"I Can See it Now!": Mapping Your Board

2010-06-16T09:56:00.001-04:00

IF YOU WERE TO MAKE A MAP of the to make a map of the diversity, skills, attributes and networks each of your board members brings to your organization's table, what would it look like? A board's combined talents form a profile that may be well-understood or barely perceived. And we should all know that what a group thinks of itself may not be anything like what others might think.

For a number of years I've used, and encouraged my client organizations to use, a simple chart to inventory these important elements. Yesterday, I sat with an executive director and the chairperson of her organization's nominating committee and watched them complete just such a chart. They inventoried gender, race, age, profession/avocation, skills brought to the organization, how each person is active in the organization, and what each person can help the organization accomplish.

It revealed obvious characteristics (average age is about mid-50s to 60); it also revealed some not-so-obvious gaps, such as the under-utilization of some board members, while others are active to the point of burnout. Even with the obvious stuff, it didn't quite hit home until it was seen on paper.

It also raised a question or two about why some folks were on the board in the first place.

More than once the nominating committee chairperson exclaimed, "I can see it now!" How board member talents fit together and complement each other is one very important byproduct of this exercise.

A quick scan of the chart told us that, going forward, the nominating committee will need to be more strategic about identifying future candidates who can bring several things to the table: younger, of color, access to new/targeted networks, along with specific skills and/or interests that the organization needs.
If you haven't done this type of assessment, I encourage you to try it -- it took us less than two hours to do it (including related conversations).

Image: The Conference Board Review. The Identity Recession by Tony Spaeth. Winter 2010.

Board Recruitment: Look for the What, Not the Who

2010-06-01T08:23:00.001-04:00

BOARD RECRUITMENT IS SERIOUS BUSINESS. Or it should be. Now more than ever, our nonprofits need engaged, forward-thinking leadership. Our nonprofits need board members who are willing to use a continual loop of strategy and feedback to define and shape mission, relevance and community connectedness. To be content with board members who are ONLY interested in slices of an organization's mission is not enough. Board members have to want to embrace the whole enchilada, because they understand that a nonprofit's impact is more than the sum of its parts.

Nominating or board development committees need to sharpen their recruitment skills to laser-like precision. Recruitment no longer begins with the question, "who do we know?", but with "what skills or access do we need?" If you don't know what you're looking for, you're liable to accept any who. That worked decades ago when boards were merely extensions of wealthy social clubs. There's no time for that nonsense anymore.

It's time to start making that list. An organization's vision and mission statements, along with the strategic plan, are pretty much all the tools you'll need to develop a list of skills and attributes your organization needs around the board table. Use your list to go shopping for prospects by working your networks (and the networks of others) to identify them.

This isn't easy work. It's never-ending work, really. But it's the life-force for your nonprofit.

Photo: My grocery cart is filing up. h964 from SouthernBreeze - "God bless...

The Evolution of Storytelling

2010-05-31T17:58:00.001-04:00

The Evolution of Storytelling from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

This video summarizes the power and possibility of arts and culture. Enjoy it, pass it along.

Oxygen for the Organizational Brain

2010-05-27T09:22:00.000-04:00

THIS WEEK, NONPROFIT CONSULTANT MARION CONWAY is running a series of articles on her blog about the importance of board retreats. She's giving you all the best insight on why to do them and how to do them; she's even sharing sample agendas! So you've got to check that out.

I consider the board retreat oxygen for the organizational brain. It provides space and time to breathe and think deeply about the organization's health and well-being. As I've written elsewhere, the coming together of boards, staff and volunteers can be a bonding experience that can move an organization to new levels of achievement. And taking time to breathe and think deeply can clear away the cobwebs and refocus everyone on the mission and the impact.

Most regular board meetings just can't do that very well. With their agendas and often rigorous timeframes, getting the chance to even take a breath, much less a deep one, is almost impossible. You've got to create separate space for deep breathing.

Lots of boards go on hiatus during the summer months. I think this could be a great time to hold a retreat -- even if it's just for a few hours around the backyard grill. It's the chance to take the long view, review options, ask the "what if's" and keep the oxygen flowing.
Photo: Oneness Family Board Retreat,...from cliffkayser

The New Ventures Think Tank: Why Your Organization Needs One

2010-05-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

BRAINSTORMING SESSIONS HAVE A WONDERFUL WAY OF invigorating people. It's exciting and, yes, liberating to contemplate future accomplishments, even if they're too lofty to achieve. Cultural organizations are full of creative people with lots of ideas -- big ideas, too -- but few have a structured means of capturing them and funneling them into workable actions. This is especially true when it comes to developing earned income strategies. Beyond the typical mix of nonprofit fundraising activities, who's routinely minding the store when it comes to creating opportunities for long-term self-sufficiency beside the director?

I recently met with the executive committee and director of an historic site with a massive physical plant. Almost three-quarters of current income comes from earned income and much of that is from for-profit activities, such as apartment rentals and lease of space to for-profit business. Their efforts to come up with ideas for income-generating ventures is an ongoing conversation that could be considered sporadic or unfocused due, in part, to a lack of time and talent to devote to such efforts. How could that be remedied?

Many for-profit businesses devote big money for research and development in an effort to remain competitive and profitable. R & D is more often a by-product in the world of cultural nonprofits, the result of an immediate problem in search of a quick, inexpensive solution. But, what if we could create a think tank that met regularly to brainstorm, research and evaluate self-sufficiency ventures? Why couldn't a committee made up of various talents come together to do this for your cultural organization?

You may have heard or read about the importance of a "blue sky committee", a group just focused on the big picture what if's. I'm dubbing my think tank the "new ventures committee" to not only contemplate the what if's, but to also assess project feasibility and identify venture partners and funders. It's groups like these that will help keep nonprofits flexible and in tune with the needs and trends of their external environments, as well as make substantive contributions to the bottom line.
Photo: All Blue.... happy blue sky! from Andreza Pinheiro

Executive Committees Walk a Fine Line

2010-04-16T10:36:00.000-04:00

WHEN I READ THIS TWEET "The only board members who like the exec. comm. are the ones who are on it!" I had to admit I agreed with it. Afterall, what's the point of serving on a board if all the important and interesting discussions and decisions are had by a few leaving the rest of us to suffer through report meetings? Who wants to be just another pretty rubber stamp?

Executive committees walk a fine line. Typically consisting of the board's officers, they are often indispensable in times of crisis. Big organizations with big boards quite rightly find that smaller "steering" committees serve important oversight functions. In this instance, the make-up may go well beyond officers to include committee chairs and others (and the size of a steering committee could be as large as a small full board). But as a routine decision-making body acting on behalf of the full board, an active executive committee can alienate or isolate the rest of its board.

I have worked for and with many organizations where the full board meets every other month or quarter and the executive committee meets on the intervening months. Or where the executive committee AND the full board both meet every month -- how's that for duplication? Any one of these scenarios begs these questions: If there's so much board work to be done that the executive committee needs to meet just as often or MORE often than the full board, why isn't the full board meeting more frequently? Or is the executive committee working on a specific crisis or issue that was not assigned - or could not be assigned - to another committee or task force? The distinction is very important and must be made clear.

And then there's the issue of burn-out. Meeting after meeting, particularly if duplicative, is such a waste of energy and talent. Since great board members are seemingly hard to come by, why intentionally overburden them?

If your executive committee is a stand-in for full board meetings, making decisions that a full board should be making, stop the practice for a few months to see if it makes any difference. If work gets backed up, that's an indication that the full board needs to be meeting more frequently. If your full board meetings become more engaging, then you've become the beneficiary of "less is more". Who wouldn't love that?

The Meaningful Outside

2010-04-10T08:53:00.000-04:00

I JUST FINISHED READING THE REPORT from two focus groups conducted by one of my cultural clients. This client, like many of my clients, had never talked with constituents in quite this way before. It's funny that a concept so basic to the for-profit world is so largely overlooked by the nonprofit world -- at least in the cultural corner.

I've even had clients tremble with fear at the thought of talking to stakeholders about what their nonprofit does. In one case, a client was barely able to identify a group of "non-member" community leaders to invite to a focus group. Despite all the talk about how the current economy is forcing nonprofits to rethink their work and their relationships, many, it seems, remain in a curious bubble of isolation.

The two focus groups in question raised a wide array of perspectives about my client -- a lot of it good; some of it critical. Some of it, I'm sure, is well known to the client. Others of it might be complete revelation. Each group offered suggestions for creating or strengthening community connections that ran the gamut from working more closely with the Chamber of Commerce to offering affordable family oriented special events. The specificity of their suggestions will be helpful when the time comes to act upon them.

Another client met for the first time with a group of nonprofit leaders in its community and found a fertile ground for possible future collaborations. Community conversations held by a local children's museum resulted in several new representatives joining the planning team.

In each instance, focus group participants were encouraged and pleased that an organization was reaching outside its four walls to tap into the meaningful outside. After all, no nonprofit lives in isolation of its external environment. Now that the hurdle to the outside has been successfully jumped, the organization must live up to the expectation that it will act on what it has heard.

Photo: Streets Ahead Week of Action focus...from Hillingdon London

Younger Minds Attract Younger Audiences*

2010-03-27T09:55:00.002-04:00

IF "YOUNGER MINDS ATTRACT YOUNGER AUDIENCES" isn't your institution's mantra, you should seriously consider making it so. Not just for staff and volunteers, I'm thinking this needs to be your board's mantra, too. That's particularly true for well-established, highly structured cultural organizations presenting traditional programming formats. You know these organizations; you may work or volunteer in one.

While we read about the graying of audiences for some cultural activities, I'm wondering how gray the board and senior staff are. Do you think there's a distinct correlation?

Younger minds do more than attract younger audiences. They keep the cobwebs at bay. They help us question accepted practice and remix familiar elements to make new connections. And they are the fundamental bridges to our organizations' futures.

Some organizations utilize "junior boards" for folks under 40 to try out their chops. If you shine there, you'll get to move up to the "grown-up board" someday. Some organizations create "junior committees" primarily to foster under-40 philanthropy (their activities always look like a lot more fun than the grander, big-money affairs).

In big, bureaucratic institutions these mechanisms undoubtedly have a place for training, mentoring, and shaping next generation leadership. But for most culturals, there's a pressing need to bring younger minds to the board room today. It seems that few, though, have any inkling how to do that.

Stereotypes about board service -- good, bad, and downright ugly -- seem to prevent so many boards from looking beyond a fairly short radius of known quantities. This is particularly true when it comes to looking for younger minds. These boards need to do two things immediately: 1) quit repeating that under-40's don't have time for board service, and 2) quit saying you don't know anyone. All great boards are fed by far-reaching, complementary networks, and age is one of them.

If you've made an honest attempt to attract younger minds to board service and come up short, I submit that you need to rethink your organization's expectations of board service and its mission.

Photo: Visitor Video Competition from Brooklyn Museum

* Carol Vogel. "The New Guard of Curators Step Up". New York Times: March 13, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/arts/artsspecial/18NEXTGEN.html

Working Together Doesn't Just Happen

2010-03-21T10:35:00.001-04:00

I'M THINKING ABOUT TWO GROUP EXPERIENCES I'VE ENCOUNTERED IN RECENT DAYS: one is a planning team for a professional development program and the other is the board and staff of a historic site that has entered a new phase of independence. Both groups are in the throes of creating something new; both have many voices around the table. But, one experience has been a struggle at almost every turn while the other was a high-energy, highly focused (even fun) effort. How come so different?

Group work is shaped by several common elements, but how they're addressed and tended to can lead to quite different -- even deleterious -- results.

Who's at the Table: Anything you read about effective collaborations underscores the importance of having all the major stakeholders at the table. It's incredibly important to take the time to put this group together and to give them an opportunity to get to know one another. That's especially true when you've got a disparate group who come from divergent sectors or backgrounds. Barring all the potential positives of a "team of rivals" approach, personality does play a critical role here, as well.

We know that with many start-up projects, the group that develops them tends to be fairly homogeneous and "like minded". That is largely the case in my examples. The group that's struggling is made up of cultural sector leaders, most from one industry. In this case, homogeneity has not been, so far, a predictor of success. The seemingly more successful group at this point is also quite homogeneous with very little economic and social diversity. Their struggle is to become more diverse and less "club-like". Would that also help the struggling group?

Focus of the Work: Both groups have relatively focused agendas. The struggling group's focus is to create from scratch a high-level professional development program for a specific audience. Over the course of the work, many twists, turns and false starts have made some stakeholders question the focus. Considerable time has been spent rethinking the focus and stakeholder roles. Continued ambiguity of focus and outcome is sapping the group's energy, enthusiasm and sense of ownership for the project.

By contrast, the high energy group is not quite developing something from scratch. The focus for this group is tangible -- it surrounds them everyday in three-dimensional form. They "own" their focus both literally and figuratively. While they aren't building their project from scratch, they must continually break new ground in order to thrive and they must make some key leaps in institutionalizing their roles and responsibilities to be successful for the long-term.

Leadership of or Within the Group: The leaders of the struggling group suffer from professional attention deficit syndrome. Their plates are too full, their commitment too splintered. They pay the most attention to the project when a deadline is looming or when team members complain. When group members have attempted to exert leadership, it has not been well-received. Lack of leadership continuity can be a breeding ground for second-guessing, splitting into cliques, back channel discussion and decision-making, and drifting apart.

The high energy group has strong, long-tenured and respected leadership. But leadership within the group, particularly at the committee level, is uneven. And burnout is always a concern. This group must figure out ways to push leadership deeper into its ranks to build a bench for succession while thoughtfully widening their circle to include more diverse representation.

Communication: What is true collaboration without it? Our struggling group example is plagued by a lack of regular communication. Misunderstandings result in the voids. Despite the fact that this project is now more than a year in the making, many on the project team are strangers -- colleagues, yes; friends, not so much. I find myself saying that I'm having a hard time "falling in like" with the team. Part of that I am convinced stems from a lack of opportunity to get to know one another.

When I met with the high energy group, the first thing I was told was this group had just been together the night before for dinner at the board president's house. They talked animatedly and laughed a great deal as they gathered for their meeting with me. They agreed that their internal communication was frequent and informal and this will need to change somewhat as it grows.

This brings me to a book I find continually useful: Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith's The Wisdom of Teams (my copy is from 1999). The authors identified six overarching characteristics of high-performing teams and I refer to them whenever I reflect on teamwork. They are:

the team is relatively small in number (generally less than twelve)
team members bring complementary skills to the table (too much homogeneity can lead to "group think")
the team has a common and clear purpose with a
common set of specific performance goals
the team agrees on the approach to the work
team members are mutually accountable for their performance

Photo: artomatic huddle! from mofo

Building a Plan Layer by Layer

2010-03-18T09:52:00.000-04:00

LET'S TALK ABOUT SOMETHING THAT'S THEORETICALLY very simple: the architecture of a plan -- you know, that written thing that's supposed to help guide your activity. It doesn't matter if we're creating a plan to manage a project or a plan to reinvent an institution, the architecture of it ought to be pretty much the same. In its most basic, stripped-down state, a plan is a hierarchy of information, built up in layers like the foundation of a house.

The "house", which the foundation supports, is the result the planner is seeking to achieve. For the project manager it's completing an activity on time and on/under budget. For the institutional re-inventor it's about articulating and achieving a new vision or a renewed mission.

I typically use three different kinds of informational layers in building a plan: 1) broad overarching goals shaped by mission and understandings of external needs and realities; 2) sets of focused activities that, over the life of the plan, will achieve goals; and 3) specific individualized action steps, or tasks, to accomplish activities. These three layers go by a number of names, but the key is that they form a hierarchy of information -- broad ---> focused ---> specific and individualized -- that I believe is critical to building a foundation strong enough to hold the house we envision.

For many people this is a tough hierarchy to understand, let alone master. Countless organizations consider a list of tasks, untethered to goals or a mission, as a plan. But a list of tasks is nothing more than a "to do" list, which can lead an individual or organization in any direction if not informed or kept in check by the informational layers above it. Here's an example of one organization's "goals" for a five-year period:

develop a website
develop job descriptions
review personnel policies
clean out the basement
organize filing system
collect email addresses of members

Are these really goals? They are so specific, so obviously boundaried in scope, that they clearly support some larger -- although not articulated -- directions or overarching mission that they really belong in the third layer of information. It's a lot easier for people to get their heads around tasks, it seems -- and why not? -- many of us live out our daily lives in the form of "to do" lists. But, if we are ever to accomplish the meaningful stuff of personal or institutional life, we must have the "house" and at least the first layer of information clearly in our sights.

So, here's a thought -- a relatively painless, low-tech, and maybe even fun way to review the construction of your plan: gather a group together (ideally board members and staff), give them a bunch of colored index cards (one color for goals, one for sets of focused activities, one for tasks) and ask them to dissect your current plan according to those three layers of information. When everyone is finished, sort the cards by color on a big table. What emerges? Will you be changing the colors of some of the information? After you've done that, what information gaps are you facing? How will you fill them?

Photo: Index cards from redspotted

Audience Development: Not Just a Marketing Issue

2010-02-28T12:55:00.001-05:00

THERE ARE TWO COMPETING REALITIES IN PLAY for arts and cultural organizations that don't seem to be destined for resolution any time soon, and they both have to do with audience. The first is the fact that for many traditional cultural activities, audiences and volunteerism are declining. The second has to do with a perpetual lack of resources most arts and cultural organizations dedicate to ongoing audience development, retention and loyalty-building.

The American Association of Museums' reports in its Museum Financial Information 2009 that museums with separate marketing budgets dedicate anywhere from 2 percent to 8 percent of annual expenses, depending on total organizational budget, to promoting attendance, memberships or products. The lower end of the range likely doesn't include personnel. Bottom line: museums spend on balance $1.29 per visitor per year to get them in the door, on the membership rolls or purchasing from the shop.

The Theater Communications Group tracks similar data in its Theatre Facts surveys. The 2008 survey reports a range of 10.8 percent to 12.6 percent of total operating budget spent on marketing/customer service/concessions (including personnel). However, Joy Zinoman, founding artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre, notes, "A relationship to your neighborhood, the idea of theatre being very tied to a place, is a very different notion.... That costs different money and has different implications.”

Most of us tend to think of audiences as those who show up. Indeed they are that, but they are more than that. Despite the current economy, which has sliced marketing budgets and staffs at those institutions fortunate to have marketing budgets and staffs in the first place, paying attention to the care and feeding of audiences is more often an after-thought than a top priority.

Chad Bauman takes on this question for theaters here and here in his blog Arts Marketing. The comments to these posts are good reading, too.

Arts organizations lacking the expertise of marketing staff are left to their own devices to think about audience development and many just don't or can't. Too busy with mounting productions, exhibitions, classes or festivals, the last questions asked - if asked at all - have to do with audience engagement and communication. As Bauman and some of his commentators note, often programming is established without input from the folks who are charged with marketing it, much less without input from potential consumers.

The health of arts and cultural organizations surely depends on its audiences, not just to fill seats, but for long term personal connection as board members, volunteers and donors.

Photo: I Am The Audience from vaquey

What the Health Care Summit Was Not: Four Tips for Holding Difficult Meetings

2010-02-26T14:16:00.001-05:00

I GOT SUCH A BAD VIBE from watching snippets of President Obama's Health Care Summit that I almost had to avert my eyes. This was a train wreck in more ways than one and I'd like to take up some blog real estate to focus in on some very practical aspects of the meeting that, frankly, occur a lot in nonprofit board and staff rooms all across the country.

1. Room set-up: I immediately focused in on the fact that all 37 participants were seated around a hollow square configuration of tables. This way, everyone could see everybody else. Name tags were prominently displayed on the tables in front of everyone's place. Certainly, when you're trying to encourage discussion, everybody needs to be facing each other. Yet, the group was large enough that the folks on the ends would not have been able to see the face of a speaker in the middle of a their row. A really big round table would have been much better.

The meeting room at Blair House seemed exceedingly small and the table space each participant had assigned to them exceedingly cramped. Sure, behind the legislators were rows of staffers and camera crews, but still I winced to see folks jostling mounds of paper in too small a physical space. As it was, the folks sitting across from each other were fairly far apart, while at the same time they seemed to have none of their own elbow room.

I just can't imagine being in that space, around that table for hours on end. In those bamboo ballroom chairs with little pads on the seats, too -- uncomfortable without regular breaks! Undoubtedly, the group got up and moved to other spaces for lunch -- maybe even for breaks. But I keep asking myself how could the space have been configured differently to promote more real discussion?

2. Group size: Any meeting advice book tells you that you have to have all the stakeholders in the room to make something happen. In this instance, I doubt the group could have been smaller, but I'm also wondering if the group dynamic would have been helped by the participation of some nonpolitical stakeholders. Would their voices have helped to cut through the worn rhetoric?

I've always found that fresh knowledgeable voices can often help a group to move beyond old arguments. They can help to balance the loudest voices, too.

3. Moderator as Participant: I was also struck by the fact that the president tried to wear two hats at the summit -- he tried to be the moderator for all while at the same time be a partisan participant. As a result, I think the process of discussion really faltered, because no one without a stake in the game was really moderating. As a result, he cut folks off, challenged their points of view and didn't really work overly hard to push for finding mutual ground.

Any time there is as a consequential issue on the table, it's best to call in a non-objective third party to focus on process to move the group forward. That lets all the stakeholders fully participate.

Besides, a partisan moderator really sends the message to all that the discussion isn't likely to be very objective.

4. Agenda: If you're attempting to bring two sides closer together, each side must have a role in developing the agenda -- at the very least in developing the outcomes or objectives of the meeting. With partisan disagreement so high - so volatile - on this issue, perhaps the best agenda might have been one the participants built together as the summit took place.

The summit was designed to be the Kabuki theater that it turned out to be -- scripted, formal and unsuccessful at unlocking new interpretations or understandings. If you've got a Kabuki theater playing in your nonprofit board room, perhaps these rethinking these four elements will move your discussions forward in positive new directions.

Photo: Meeting in Progress - 8th April2009 from Sven1976

Video: We Love Museums - Do Museums Love Us Back?

2010-02-26T08:33:00.003-05:00

Presidents' Day: Leadership Lessons for Nonprofits

2010-02-15T09:08:00.000-05:00

IT'S SNOWING LIGHTLY IN THE NORTHEAST THIS Presidents' Day morning and I'm hoping that many of you have the day off to enjoy - what else? - cherry pie, a visit to a presidential home, library or gravesite; or settling in to watch Abe Lincoln in Illinois, the 1940 flick starring Raymond Massey. Twice in the last ten years, the folks at C-SPAN have asked presidential historians to rate the effectiveness of our commanders in chief in ten critical leadership areas. The most recent of these rankings was released last Presidents' Day (2009). If you'll forgive the fact that I'm a year late, I think you'll find this list of leadership qualities one worthy of incorporating into your recruitment strategies for nonprofit board and staff leaders. So, help yourself to another piece of pie and enjoy.

C-SPAN developed, presumably with the help of their presidential scholars, a list of ten key attributes of presidential leadership:

Public Persuasion: Here's a skill that any nonprofit board and staff leader will draw on routinely during internal meetings, and with external stakeholders be they loyal supporters or the toughest elected officials.

Crisis Leadership: We're in uncertain times. Which nonprofits will survive, which will fail? Who doesn't want a honest voice and a confident presence in the face of lost funding, program cutbacks, declining audience, building disasters, or bad press?

Economic Management: Shepherding financial resources shouldn't preclude some calculated risk-taking, however, it must be understood that it takes infinitely longer to build economic mass than it does to expend it.

Moral Authority: Now that would seem to come with the territory of nonprofit work, but it's never a given. Create a code of ethics or dust off the one you have.

(International) Relations: International for presidents; perhaps community (or whatever sandbox you play in) relations for nonprofits. Building and nurturing those networks can enhance your nonprofit's mission as well as save its bacon.

Administrative Skills: Even presidents need to know how to push work forward and encourage use of the best ways to do that. A nonprofit leader must keep committees, staff, and volunteers on track, on task and in communication. Time management, project management and facilitative skills, and use of technology not only get you closer to meeting goals, they become the models by which others can learn to work.

Relations with (Congress): Who is your organization's Congress? Is it a board of trustees?, a governmental agency? Are you able to reach out to them in meaningful ways and allow them to see themselves in the organization's mission?

Vision/Setting an Agenda: Board and staff leaders who are unable to articulate a future state of being for an organization and a way to get there, really aren't leading....they're following someone else's lead.

Pursued Equal Justice for All: I liken this one to pursuing an organization's mission by making it real and meaningful everyday.

Performance within Context of Times: For nonprofit leaders, knowing how external realities affect the organization, understanding the trends of cultural consumption and the trends within specific cultural industries (and across industries) all boost performance.

Photo: Dolly Madison - George Washington from Waffle Whiffer

My Top Tips for Working For and With Boards

2010-02-11T13:36:00.001-05:00

I'VE WRITTEN THESE TIPS FROM AN EXECUTIVE'S POINT OF VIEW. I do believe that the executive wears three hats when dealing with her board: a leadership hat, a facilitative hat, and an implementation hat. I think that most of these tips would fall predominantly in the first two hats.

Your Board is Your Team: your board may not be the most sophisticated, the wealthiest or the smartest, but this is not an “us” vs. “them” rivalry. Your nonprofit is the enterprise in which you are all vested. If you’re not, maybe this isn’t the team to be on (that goes for staff and board members, too).

Communicate: be the first to pick up the phone. Try to spend 20% of your time engaging individual and small groups of board members in meaningful conversations about the mission of the organization, your needs as the staff leader, and your staff’s needs. Strategize with them; use each one as your personal brain trust.

Don’t Hold Back on the Bad News: trusting and mutually respectful relationships get that way because each participant knows they’re getting really useful information and unvarnished opinions. When no one wants to “talk turkey”, it usually means your board (and you) haven’t been able to coalesce as a team.

Help Boards Understand…and Learn: work with board members, individually and collectively, to figure out what information about the organization is most useful to decision-making (in addition to your insights and recommendations) and develop the means to deliver meaningful, measurable and readable information and evaluative tools. Take some extra time to reach out to and work with board members who you know are having a hard time understanding or processing information.

Help Your Board Do a Good Job: board members are expected to do a wide array of things – not all of which may come easily. As the staff leader, work hard to make expectations clear. Find ways to support board members as they strive to meet their responsibilities, perhaps with training opportunities, facilitators, and practice.

Keep and Sense of Balance and Perspective: working for and with boards is just that: work! But it should be rewarding work and, yes, even fun at times. Know that a sense of humor is an important skill that shows you can roll with the punches.

Photo: Communication from DailyPic

Are We Asking the Right Question When We Start a Cultural Nonprofit?

2010-02-07T10:28:00.000-05:00

AN ONGOING DISCUSSION IN THE HISTORY MUSEUM COMMUNITY (and I suspect in other cultural communities) has to do with its saturation of organizations. Practically every county or parish in the United States has at least one history museum, historic house or historic site. At least one. In some areas of the country, it's impossible to travel ten miles without landing on the doorstep of a local history museum.

Almost all of them are nonprofit entities, which means they are organized around a board of trustees, committees and legions of volunteers. They rely on philanthropy and perhaps some government, foundation and corporate funding. They own property that runs the gamut from one-room schoolhouses to whole historic districts, recreated villages, airplane hangars and everything in between. And then there are the multiple millions of collection items in their care.

Nonprofit cultural institutions, whether they're a storefront theater workshop or a major symphony, are heavily resource dependent all the time. Their board seats must be filled, their committees must be active, their staffs and volunteers must be producing programming and garnering support, their audiences must show up.

Two sobering reports were recently issued by the National Endowment for the Arts and Americans for the Arts that discuss the decline of audience participation in all traditional arts and cultural organizations, yet the formation of traditional arts and cultural organizations remain on the increase. This obvious disconnect, I think, is the result of default mode thinking on the part of organization founders (and encouraged by community leaders, elected officials and governmental incorporators) that a nonprofit organization is the remedy to addressing community - or in some cases, personal - need.

As a result, the starting question always seems to be: how do we start a nonprofit organization, be it a museum, an arts center, a community theater, a you name it?

I think we're asking the wrong starting question. The question is not should we form a nonprofit entity, but something more like

how should community history be preserved or taught?
what is the best way to showcase and build the capacity of our region's artistic talent?
how can artists of all types participate in schools?
how can non-traditional arts and culture participants share their talents, experiences and passions for what they like to do?

The answers to these kinds of questions don't automatically involve starting nonprofit organizations. They might just lead to something completely different like expanding the missions of or fostering collaborations with existing nonprofits, creating a program that lives within another organization, or developing more flexible networks that live informally or virtually. It's kind of liberating, don't you think?

Photo: Orange Question Mark Button from jhhwild

The Dollar and a Dream Syndrome

2010-02-02T13:10:00.000-05:00

IT'S THE "DOLLAR AND A DREAM SYNDROME" -- someone thinks getting up a community theater would be lots of fun or starting a museum about local history or gathering artists together to open an arts center. Great ideas, all. But how workable for the long run?

As with most small businesses, new cultural nonprofits can be pretty fragile, partly because they develop from personal desire that, ultimately must be shared by many people. As a result, they can live on the edge for long periods of time, surviving on the friendship and handouts of devotees. But one can hardly call that sustainable, right? Yet, new groups are forming -- getting legal -- all the time. In New York State alone, 20-30 new museums are green-lighted by state authorities every year (by the way, only a fraction of them legally go out of business each year).

If you were to create a checklist of what a group of people needed to have in hand before they got that piece of paper from the government making them a legal entity, what would be on that list?

Here's my short, but growing, checklist:

No duplicating the mission or work of an existing organization in the community - if there's another organization that isn't active, don't start a new one, figure out ways to make the existing one active.
Benchmark other similar organizations - know what's already operating in your future universe; know what's good, what's bad, what works, what doesn't. Use the best examples as models.
Gather written and signed pledges from supporters totaling an absolute minimum $10,000 (could be more depending on what you're trying to start and where) -- consider this is seed money or the "rainy day fund".
Obtain letters of support from local government, school superintendents, libraries and other nonprofit groups, peers in other nearby communities, other stakeholders and potential collaborators.
Write a business plan that includes: a statement of need for the organization; understanding of the audience to be served; a mission impact statement, scope of work for years 1-5, specific targets in terms of numbers of supporters, programs, performances, exhibitions, etc.; scope of collections and collecting, if part of your dream; collaborations/collaborators; operating budgets for years 1-5; plan for raising endowment funds; and evidence that all legal requirements are being, have been or will be met.
List of board members (or people who have agreed to serve on the organization's first board) with affiliations and what each brings in terms of skills, networks, and financial resources.
A job description for the board.
In addition to budgets, written plans for raising annual funds (membership, special appeals, fundraising events, etc.) that include lists of prospects, amounts to be raised, who has responsibility for raising it and by when.
Write a technology plan that not only talks about hardware and software, but speaks to how the organization will build its profile and audience -- as well as its infrastructure -- by using it.

Photo: Bursting with Bright Ideas from fpsurgeon

Five Guiding Trends to Help Your Organization Reshape Its Future

2010-02-01T09:18:00.002-05:00

Thanks to a comment on one of the many listservs I read, I’ve just started reading Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector, published last November by the James Irving Foundation. Right off the bat I’m encouraged that there are many avenues cultural nonprofits can explore right now based on the report’s findings.

These avenues stem from five trends the report discusses:

• Demographic Shifts Redefine Participation

• Technological Advances Abound

• Networks Enable Work to Be Organized in New Ways

• Interest in Civic Engagement and Volunteerism Is Rising

• Sector Boundaries Are Blurring

The future will bring a wider array of structural options and a greater willingness to experiment, as well as a heightened demand for accountability and compelling measures of social value. The driving question will be, “What do we want to accomplish?” Successful organizations will quickly move beyond traditional assumptions about how those goals are attempted and think creatively about structural forms, recognizing that different goals demand new solutions.

These five trends offer so much opportunity and optimism for cultural organizations – two commodities that seem to be in short supply. Fortunately, inventive thinking is free.

Discussions based on the driving question, “what do we want to accomplish?”, are excellent starting points for reengineering organizational infrastructure. Taking small steps, an organization can change its board composition, its committee structure, its staffing structure, its volunteer composition and structure, and ultimately its programming – even its physical assets – to support the answer to “what do we want to accomplish?”.

Photo: Pigeon Point Lighthouse from MumbleyJoe

"sustainability does not = doing the same thing"

2010-01-29T13:46:00.001-05:00

MY TITLE IS A QUOTE FROM Nelson Layag of CompassPoint, who commented on Rosetta Thurman's post about the future of nonprofit service/professional organizations. The whole discussion struck a chord with me, but that quote just leapt off the screen.

(The Andy Warhol quote I found on flickr is no slouch either.)

If there's ever a time for nonprofits to seek new approaches and opportunities, I think this is it. Much of what we've depended upon to sustain us -- audiences, donors, programs, endowments, networks -- are now dwindling or shifting or are far too narrow or shallow. To approach planning for the next year or two with the idea that more of the same, but implemented with fewer resources, is somehow a sustaining tactic just seems like so much whistling in the dark.....or spitting in the wind.

This morning I read about the perils of a west coast history museum that now, after more than two years of trying to sustain the loss of significant local government funding, is ready to re-envision itself. "We are paralyzed," the director said the day before a public meeting to announce plans for divesting itself of some of its historic buildings (they operate a history museum, a children's museum, three historic house museums of which one is a farm, as well as other spaces that are rented for functions). The organization also has in its care a million or so artifacts and a huge archive. Their public "plan" is to become self-sustaining. We'll see.

I recall some years ago another museum whose main benefactor said it was pulling the plug if the museum didn't reinvent itself. The savvy director developed a bold new plan and got the benefactor to buy in (and buy) a complete revamping of the physical space, reinstallation of the collection and new programming initiatives. The funding, while less, did not go away. The director's challenge then became sustaining the momentum (which I think is quite different from sustaining the institution or sustainability).

What's one thing you need to do away with that could put your organization on a more sustainable path?

Photo: Change from estheticcore

When Internal Discordance Goes Public

2010-01-27T12:03:00.000-05:00

YOU'RE READING YOUR LOCAL NEWSPAPER AND YOU come across this headline "Financial Woes, Board Defections Hurt Arts Center: Former board members question executive director's decisions." Well, that's a little gut-wrenching (particularly if you work or volunteer in the nonprofit sector, or if you're an ED).

How would you react? You'd probably dig right into that article, wouldn't you? Would you also ask yourself what the heck is going on that it's so bad to have made this kind of news?

As you pick your way through the article it becomes clearer that taking the ugly stuff to the press is a symptom of more deeply rooted dysfunctionality. Sure, we readers can see it in a instant -- the lid's just blown off a whole kettle full of long-standing problems:

lack of internal communication (particularly between the board and the CEO)
misunderstanding of roles and responsibilities (on either or both the board's and CEO's parts)
misplaced or unmet expectations
an "us" versus "them" mentality -- a lack of governance or leadership sharing, sometimes overlaid with suspicion
the organization is hemorrhaging red ink (and has been for some time) -- this could also be a symptom, which becomes the tipping point for an explosion/implosion

Don't you think that folks turn to the court of public opinion when they feel they've been wronged and they're not being heard? In one case it was the fired director who needs to clear her name. In another it's a board member who hasn't been able to convince enough of her board peers to fire the director. Or it might be the only way a person thinks his/her concerns will be taken seriously.

Like turning on the lights in a dark room, sometimes moving organizational dysfunction into the realm of public scrutiny can be a good thing. In the case of one organization, local citizens are now calling for the board (via letters to the editor and op-ed pieces) to engage the community in an honest conversation about the organization's future. Sometimes it can help release the toxicity from the organization and offer opportunities for new people and perspectives to become involved.

Sometimes it can have the opposite effect.

Either way, the organization and its mission gets derailed, because it can't function until the crisis is addressed.

How would you handle an internal crisis that suddenly goes public?

Photo: Dear Karrth Sair, from Shadow Viking

Planning and the 'Clear Idea'

2010-01-21T09:07:00.000-05:00

I'M GETTING READY TO TALK WITH A GROUP OF BOARD MEMBERS and staff from African-American heritage sites about the importance of planning. My discussion is one small part of a full two-day immersion into all sorts of capacity-building topics. Much credit goes to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Northeast Regional Office for recognizing the need and pulling us all together.

All of these sites have some level of historic designation, such as National Historic Landmark status and/or listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Some are newly formed and others have been around for a while. Almost all of them are small, with operating budgets below $50,000 a year. They're all important to the histories of their communities and our country, yet I know there are days when they must feel as though they're swimming upstream.

Few have done much, if any, formal planning. By 'formal' I mean writing a plan as a collective activity. A tiny number have very specific planning documents -- a maintenance plan or a marketing plan. What I don't know is if any of these groups tried more comprehensive organizational planning and got stuck or just dropped the idea altogether.

Does this quick sketch of these workshop participants remind you of your organization or an organization you know?

I think I'll try to make a strong case for planning in these terms: if an organization has a clear idea of who it is and where it wants to go, it's in a strong position to attract audience and support -- the two dearest things for most cultural nonprofits. The 'clear idea' can't be owned by one or two people; it must be shared by an entire board and staff in order for it to take root and grow.

So, that's part of the message I'll be bringing along with me these next couple of days.

Photo: We can only appreciate the miracle...from mangtacio

Find Me in Alltop's Nonprofit Section

2010-01-20T07:58:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that this blog is now listed on Alltop in the Nonprofit section. Lots of great company there.

Looking for Decision/Performance Measurement Tools? Here's a New Take

2010-01-20T07:35:00.000-05:00

Eleanor Adams' report, Towards Sustainability Indicators for Museums in Australia, was released this month offering museums -- and all cultural institutions -- a set of pilot indicators built on a combination of economic, environmental and social factors. "Whether they acknowledge it or not," Adams writes, "museums are inextricably linked to sustainability principles....However, most museums seem to be inherently unsustainable organizations."

Certainly museums occupy huge environmental footprints, deemed by many directors of large and small institutions as "energy hogs". But libraries and performance spaces aren't far behind in energy consumption and insatiable need for storage.

How can -- should -- environmental sustainability shape vision and mission (and vice versa)? They're inextricably linked, right? Adams gets at this by remixing established programmatic and operational metrics with environmental impact indicators and clustering them around "four pillars of sustainability": environment, society, culture and economy. Might these pillars be the essence of cultural organizations?

Here are some of her indicators for the Environment pillar:

Sustainability Goal: To use resources in the most efficient way possible.
Suggested Core Indicators:

Total energy from non-renewable sources used over 12 months
Total water used over 12 months
Ratio of waste recycled to waste sent to land fill in 12 months

OK, that makes sense. What about some Economy pillar indicators?

Sustainability Goal: To have a balanced and diverse budget
Suggested Core Indicators:

Ratio of Government funding to ‘other sources’ of income
Number volunteer hours worked in 12 months
Ratio of 12 month growth of collection to 12 month growth of income

And the Society pillar?

Principle of Sustainability: Calibre and Diversity of Current and Potential Staff

Number of workers with a PhD in their relevant field
Number of qualified applicants for the most recent curatorial opening
Percentage of staff involved in decision-making processes broken down into age, sex and cultural or minority group backgrounds
Ratio of staff who are within the first 10 years of their career to those within the last 10 years of their career
Ratio of paid staff to volunteers
Number of staff attending training sessions in regard to the organisation’s sustainability plans
Rate of staff turnover
Rate of board turnover

If you've made 2010 the year to get serious about developing criteria for measuring your organization's performance, definitely add this report into your mix.

Dead Wood: Moving On

2010-01-18T10:41:00.000-05:00

MY LAST POST CONCENTRATED ON SETTING the table for addressing the under-performing or non-performing board member. At any given time, most boards have one or two members who struggle with engagement -- it's a natural part of the ebb and flow of board work -- but if it's a chronic predicament for your board, don't be content to look the other way. In the long run, it's not helpful to the individual or the organization to do so.

As Anna Tegen noted in her post here, board members run out of steam or lose focus. In Anna's case, she's taking the initiative to find ways to re-engage. For other, not so self-motivated people, their fate will be in the hands of their board peers to figure what's going on and what to do about it.

The Options: Stay, Shift, Off

Of course you always have the option of doing nothing. But is that really an option?

Once you've had "the conversation", you've got several ways to go depending on its outcome:

board member is under a particular burden that is taking his/her focus off the organization: you can work with him/her to temporarily relieve assignments and attendance expectations until life settles down; a temporary (six months or less) leave of absence from the board may also be an option; or the board member shifts into some other voluntary capacity or steps down all together.

board member has lost interest in board work: this requires an examination in both directions -- is the work truly uninteresting or has the board member discovered it's not his/her cup of tea? The options here are many, I think. It might be time for the full board to re-engage with the mission (the reason everyone's around the table in the first place) and figure out ways to focus on making mission impact the top priority.

As Anna is doing, it might be useful to get active in a more hands-on way. Board work is not the only way to participate in an organization. Shifting from the board to another volunteer capacity might be just the ticket for a person who loves the mission, but finds board work unrewarding.

board member wasn't the right choice from the get-go: the fit just isn't there; the relationship never clicked. Cut your losses, call it a day and don't drag it out.

Your 10-Point Action Plan for Removing Dead Wood

1. Write a board mission statement

2. Select a short list of criteria for what makes a good board member for your organization

3. Write a board job description

4. Build a board discussion around 1-3.

5. Seek board approval for 1-3.

6. Evaluate participation and effectiveness of current board members using 1-3.

7. Make your list of under-performing/non-performing board members.

8. Schedule and follow-through on one-on-one conversations with everyone on the list.

9. Develop a course of action based on the conversation, using some or all of the above options....or options you create.

10. Use items 1-3 to identify and recruit new talent!

Photo: harvesting dead wood from robertcmccabe

Dead Wood Continued

2010-01-12T17:37:00.009-05:00

MY LAST POST LEFT YOU AT THE POINT OF determining why it's important for your organization to have a fully functioning board. I think that getting very clear on this -- even to the point of writing it down -- as a sort of board mission or vision statement -- will help all board members understand the board's role in leading and protecting a complex system of stakeholders, programs and services. This statement, along with a board job description outlining organizational expectations of board service and the criteria used to identify board talent, form the foundation for evaluation of board member performance.

While some boards are more forgiving of extensive absences or cantankerous behavior, these and other idiosyncracies can ultimately affect effective governance and jeopardize "street cred". (I discuss the absent board member in more detail here.) So, another discussion might have something to do with how much a board can/will tolerate.

These discussions certainly fall within the responsibility of the Nominating/Board Development Committee, and that's perhaps where they should start, but they should continue through to the full board. The very act of discussing these topics at the full board will cause many individuals to re-evaluate their commitment to board service. Some attrition may naturally occur because of it.

The table has now been set to consider easing dead wood into other capacities. I'd love to hear from you about the table-setting discussion you've used to prepare for removing dead wood!

The Conversation

It's now time for one-on-one conversations with your dead wood. Typically these conversations need to come from the head of the Nominating/Board Development Committee or the president. At the very least, the conversation must be held by a board peer. Your first objective is to discover why the dead wood isn't connecting with board work (or the organization in general).

I think the conversation might best be started with an empathetic offering: "We know you've been flat out with getting you new business off the ground, Frances, and you haven't had much time to devote to our organization" or "We know you've had a lot of heath issues this year, Irving." It's important, I think, for the dead wood to know that his/her board peers have noticed the lack of engagement.

The empathetic offering provides an opportunity for the dead wood to acknowledge delinquency, offer to be relieved of responsibility or make a case for staying on. Whatever the response, it's important to always tie the discussion to what the organization/board needs right now. This is not a personal indictment, it's an opportunity to explore why a board member has been unable to engage with the work of the organization.

It may be that any number of issues will surface in the conversation, related and unrelated to the organization. Perhaps the dead wood feels marginalized at board meetings or is feeling over his/her head keeping up with board work. You may be able to discover remedies that could lead to a win-win for the individual and the board.

The conversation can also lead to the opportunity of letting go: "perhaps rotating off the board now/at the annual meeting/at the end of the year will relieve you of a responsibility that you've been struggling with." You know, sometimes this offer is just what the dead wood has been waiting for, but has been too reticent to ask for it.

Next Post: Easing Into Another Capacity

Photo: Dead Wood from bluevalley_photos

What to Do With Dead Wood on Your Board?

2010-01-12T07:21:00.005-05:00

MY POLL ASKED WHAT ONE BOARD DYNAMIC YOU would change this year and the top response was "remove dead wood". For my first post on this topic I'd like to start with two obvious facts: 1) most boards have some non-performing or under-performing board members AND 2) most boards already have mechanisms in place for removing dead wood...or at least the non-attending dead wood. Those mechanisms are found in the Bylaws and perhaps in a board job description.

Few boards, it seems, invoke these mechanisms, mostly out of fear of offending the offender. We end up side-stepping the dead wood, dancing around it, ignoring it, wishing mightily it would go away. Oh, and complaining about it. So, even though the dead wood isn't doing much, it's sapping the energy and focus of many others. (There must be a Law of Physics about this!)

Where to start and how to implement? While removing dead wood is not the most pleasant of responsibilities, it does not need to be -- and should not be -- a negative, "You're fired!" kind of conversation. Removing dead wood needs to come from a clear understanding of what a board must accomplish in order to sustain organizational health and strengthen organizational impact. This is a board and senior staff level conversation beginning, perhaps, in the Nominating/Board Development Committee.

I'll continue this train of thought in my next post.

Photo: wood2.JPG from whiteoakart

What Would Make You Turn Down an Invitation to Join a Board?

2010-01-08T09:04:00.004-05:00

THERE'S SO MUCH WRITTEN ABOUT RECRUITING BOARD TALENT, I thought I'd spend a little time thinking about it from the prospect's point of view. Clearly, there are boards where the line is long to get on them. But what would make you turn down an invitation?

Here's a short list to get the conversation started:

1. You've had no prior exposure to the organization. Your immediate reaction is "did you pull my name out of a hat?" (Is that lady in the picture the head of the Nominating Committee?) Seems as though there must be a hidden agenda at work (like you're rich and once you become a board member you'll pour all your resources into the organization) or the organization is simply looking for any warm body to fill a seat.

2. The organization doesn't have a good reputation. There's something to be said for street cred. An organization that's floundering may be strengthened by your participation or you may find yourself sucked into a morass with all kinds of legal and financial complications. What are the clues and cues to help you figure out which it will be?

3. You're a former employee of the organization. You bring baggage -- good and bad. It's an awkward situation for current employees to be governed and evaluated by former employees. Former employees may make terrific subject-matter advisors, but not governors. Draw the line there.

4. There's no written and shared plan for the future. This is an indicator that resources could be going in many directions with little overall coordination toward an articulated endpoint. It likely means there is also little or no critical assessment tools in place to measure resource effectiveness.

5. The organization offers board seats as prizes. Do a great job on that fundraiser, get a board seat! Usher for 30 years, get a board seat! Perfect attendance at board meetings, get to be president! The organization's lack of a thoughtful evaluative process for building its board is a detriment (relates to #1).

6. Who else serves on board. A pretty good indicator of all of the above.

I'm sure there are more reasons, so share your stories!

Photo: Mom's name hat from nokapixel

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

2010-01-06T09:19:00.009-05:00

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance.

There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote!

In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here, here and here.

New Poll Question!

2010-01-05T10:04:00.003-05:00

IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE dynamic about your organization's board in 2010, what would it be? Take the poll at your right.

And be sure to read my post from January 4.

The Healthy Side of Conflict

2010-01-05T07:46:00.006-05:00

I REMEMBER WELL A MEETING WHERE A COUPLE of board members engaged in a passionate exchange that left some of us around the table lamely floating compromises and the rest of us merely spectating. While it was a tough discussion (and tough to sit through), it remained "gloves-on" and civil. It was just tough, but in the long run, I think necessary.

A few months later, this same board convened by phone, and with some new members on board. The topic that had caused the previously heated discussion, was now dealt with calmly and strategically. The meeting concluded with a plan of action to move us forward.

A group dynamics expert would be able to pick apart what worked and why in a hot minute. Here's my non-expert take:

At the first meeting, the topic hadn't been discussed previously as thoroughly by that particular group of board members. The focus of the discussion was on recapping past actions and evaluating whether the "right" decisions were made. There were some board members new to the conversation and they had lots of questions, which put veterans of the issue on the defensive. Lesson: new voices in an old conversation will have a lot of questions about what's gone on before. New voices also bring new perspectives to past actions. As a group, how far do you backtrack through decision-making and to what end?

The second meeting had new voices, too, but the focus of the discussion this time around was moving forward, not looking back. The discussion required problem-solving skills, not butt-covering ones (personally, I see these two skills as completely different, don't you?). The new voices came with new approaches that happened to help move the discussion forward really well. Did being on the phone instead of face-to-face help or hinder? Most people will agree that face-to-face is usually better, but in this instance it didn't seem to matter much. Lesson: even though there was some summarizing of the issue for the new folks, the emphasis this time was on moving forward and the board members were ready for it. Framing difficult issues prior to discussion is really important.

I think the second conversation also worked better for the folks who'd been at both meetings precisely because a difficult, air-clearing conversation had already been had.

Last night I watched the first installment of PBS's new documentary, This Emotional Life. One of the group dynamics experts noted that conflict is inevitable when groups of people come together, whether it's a group of friends or a board of directors. If the group tries to sweep conflict under the rug -- ignore it or smooth it over -- the chances are very good that it will reappear more intensively at a later time, so best to deal with conflict right away when it's small and manageable.

Addressing conflict in a healthy way is one way groups grow. It can deepen relationships and commitment, also.

I don't know if my board example did much right in handling this particular conflict -- it was really the first time this board had experienced conflict in a very long time. But, I think the group regrouped in a positive way that gives me a sense of confidence for their future discussions.

Stay tuned.

Photo: Struggle (Chess I) from Shyald

What Would You Change This Year?

2010-01-04T06:54:00.006-05:00

NOW THAT WE'RE ALL STARTING TO REFOCUS IN EARNEST after the New Year holiday, here's a question for you:

If you could change one dynamic about your cultural organization’s board in 2010, what would it be?

Would it be something major, like a change of board leadership? Or some small tweak to what you already do that could have a big impact over the course of the year?

Whether your board elections are right around the corner or months away, it's always a good time to talk about the leadership needs of your organization. Seems to me that the first quarter of the year is as good a time as any to take stock of the coming year's challenges and determine the organization's resources to meet them, including leadership skills. It may be that certain challenges will be best handled by committee members or junior staff, rather than the board president, a committee chair or the director. What needs to happen to allow everyone to "own" a leadership role in your institution?

Thinking of tweaking instead? Here's a thought: what difference would it make if you were to call a couple of board members every month for a one-on-one chat about the organization? Could be just an update; could be seeking advice; could be posing a question for which there may not be an answer (at least not a ready one).

Or what about using a consent agenda to open up time at your board meeting to talk about current and future issues or challenges? Or developing a dashboard of really useful metrics that can help board and staff track mission impact?

Photo: Meeting Checklists from drv1913

drv1913 writes: One part of my job is to coordinate monthly, public meetings for three boards of directors. Each board serves a different purpose, and there is a LOT of work that goes into getting ready for each meeting and a LOT of work to be done after each meeting. I created detailed checklists for each board so that I remember everything that needs to be done. These also come in handy on the rare occasion that someone needs to cover for me.

Here is the second sheet for one board and the first sheet of another. I print off the next month's checklist after each meeting and use those to jot down that next month's agenda items throughout the month.

My Favorite Quotes About Planning (and what they mean to me)

2009-12-31T08:06:00.004-05:00

WE'RE ON THE CUSP OF THE NEW YEAR, A TIME WHEN I try to use the next few days to do some reflection and personal mission review and goal setting. Sounds very serious, but I assure you that it's not so much that as it is reinvigorating. Taking a bit of reflective time puts me back in touch with some basic ideas that are foundational to my work and to my outlook on life.

I thought I'd begin the process this time around by sharing some quotes with you that have particular meaning for me:

Eleanor Roosevelt: It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. When I first came across this quote, I wrote it right down. It clicked with me, because I've worked with so many organizations whose dreams seemed to far exceed their capacities to fulfill them. Or one person has big, vocal dreams, while everybody else is either not yet in dream mode or is completely clueless. No matter whose dream or how big, without an articulated plan to achieve it, it almost certainly will remain just out of reach. An organization needs both, so why not do both?

Immanuel Kant: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. This is the quote that pops into my head every time I hear folks talk about all the stuff they believe is out of their organization's control -- "our city doesn't recognize the good things we do for it's image", "other organizations won't collaborate with us", "we're destined to second class status because we're a nonprofit", "we'll never achieve the operating budget we really need". Just because you're a nonprofit doesn't mean that you're not steering your own ship. You can consciously shape an organization's future with wishes supported by plans and actions.

Peter Drucker: Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. I love this quote because it exposes an unvarnished truth: no amount of planning will achieve a desired future unless you're willing to work for it. There are so many nonprofits that go through a planning process just to get that sheaf of paper they can wave in front of funders, but they have no idea how to work that plan to reality (or no intention of doing so). Plans need to include fairly detailed and timeframed implementation steps that begin immediately.

Brian Tracy (motivational coach and author): A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power. This is the payoff! And what a feeling it is to be steering your organization's future rather than drifting along, susceptible to the whims and schemes of others.

Happy New Year and Happy Planning!

Photo: Yeah Happy New Year...Now Who's...from Expatriate Games

Who Writes a Plan?

2009-12-30T08:48:00.004-05:00

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE IDEAL PLANNING PROCESS includes many voices along its way from inside and outside the organization. Casting as wide a net as possible for stakeholder opinion and insight can help the plan’s developers frame questions they might never have thought of asking, which can lead to the creation of important criteria by which to filter possible future scenarios. It’s also a way to gain broad buy-in to a final plan, because many people will have had an opportunity to put a point-of-view, an idea, or a warning on the planning table.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

In practice, few organizations are able to take on as much opinion gathering as they or their consultants would like. If truth be told, all that surveying, benchmarking and focus-grouping is time-consuming work requiring as much (or more) coordination as the actual writing of a plan. But it can be so richly rewarding! Organizations that short-circuit this “research” phase of the process, however, go into planning with only internally generated information – necessary, but skewed by the fact that it’s coming from one source.

There does come a point in the planning process when many voices must become one. I believe that transition should begin to occur at some point shortly after the board and staff have had the chance to absorb the external research and generate a number of future scenarios. Many organizations will then turn the process over to a smaller planning team to draft a plan that blends the best scenarios into a cohesive, doable program of action. Some organizations turn the drafting over to staff leadership, while others may turn it over to one or two individuals.

Is there the threat of losing broad support for a plan if it is ultimately drafted by a small handful of people….or by one person? Only if no one else has had a chance to participate in the process at points along the way. The bottom-line success of any plan is that it is cohesive AND doable, and here is where staff and board leadership are critical to its drafting. While built on a broad base of input, the best plans embody focused courses of action on a limited number of strategic targets that have been chosen for their ability to significantly advance the organization toward mission and vision.

Photo: Hands typing on home laptop...from brownstock

Organizational Resolutions

2009-12-29T07:47:00.006-05:00

AS WE NEAR THE END OF ANOTHER YEAR, I offer up this post of organizational resolutions, which I wrote in 2008. As I re-read them, I think they hold up pretty well for the continuing financial uncertainties most cultural nonprofits face in 2010, although two are particularly salient right now: become financially literate and get comfortable with change.

Financial literacy is more than being able to read a monthly or quarterly statement, although that's a basic skill everyone should be taught. To me, financial literacy is being able to draw conclusions about how the numbers support mission and make an impact on the audiences you serve. That entails understanding how the numbers relate to each other, such as all annual income raised from individuals, as well as what among them are your organization's key financial and operational indicators. Every organization needs to have a handful of key indicators that will help boards and staffs track financial health. The recently released 2009 Museum Financial Information from the AAM Press is a great place to start benchmarking your organization's financial activity.

Getting comfortable with change is the mantra for the nonprofit sector. Economic downturns are important catalysts for strengthening good-to-great organizations, fostering innovation, and otherwise weeding out the herd. While hunkering down to weather out a storm is our default approach, those who do may one day emerge from the trench to find they've been left in the dust. Hunker down as you feel most comfortable, but remain flexible enough to take calculated risks along the way.

Photo: Happy New Year !!! from Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton

V is for Value

2009-12-28T11:13:00.008-05:00

"A COUPLE OF BOARD MEMBERS HAVE BEEN ASKING questions recently about the value of our organization. I realize I have to do more than become angry and come up with something that answers the question with a business-based answer."

That was the substance of a recent email from a heritage organization board member.

There are some things in professional life that continue to confound me – even pull me up short – despite the fact that I know they exist. For me, these “professional surprises” run the gamut from an organization’s unwillingness to ask for community input to the downright failure of some boards and staffs to recognize, or understand, that a nonprofit organization’s reason for being is the public benefit it provides. Knowing all that still didn’t prevent my heart from skipping a beat when I read that email.

There it was, the “V-word” (not to be confused with the other problem “V-word” – vision). Articulating the "value" issue plagues many cultural organizations, yet it’s the life-blood of what an organization does. If an organization’s own board members struggle with the “V-word” is the organization doomed to failure? On some levels, I would say, most likely, yes – particularly when it comes to making opportunities and seizing those offered by others.

Part of the struggle resides in the fact that there are many ways value can be measured – educational and economic are two that come immediately to mind. As Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, comments in this post, we might do our organizations a world of good by learning to value them for the reputation, access, and ideas they embody. Brown identifies and defines six values criteria: network, brand, social, knowledge, meaning and monetary.

And in this post, Terrie Temkin makes a strong argument for determining mission impact. How would you take on her challenge?

Another part of the "V-struggle" is slogging work: collecting and analyzing the data that illustrates whatever values or impacts your organization deems critical to delineating its public benefit. But collect and analyze you must or be relegated to vague, squishy descriptions of worth.

So, my emailing board member has some work to do before a case is made that the organization does have a “business based” impact. I suggested that determining the amount of money visitors to the organization spend in the community as a result of their visit would be a place to start. Combining that with how much the organization spends on local goods and services, on salaries and sales tax should result in a fairly impressive dollar amount that no one has heretofore given much thought to.

Photo: Measuring tape sphere (large) from Nick Sayers

Your Nonprofit as a Wind-up Toy

2009-12-09T10:29:00.004-05:00

I SUPPOSE THIS POST MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO with the gift-giving time of year, or perhaps it's the phone conversation I just had that touched upon the phases of organizational growth. I don't know, but I'm going to put the two together for today's post and see what I can make of it.

I actually want to concentrate on the founding stage of a nonprofit -- those early, heady years of excitement and energy fueled by a gratifying sense that one is creating something important and needed. I got to thinking about organization founders: community activists, groups of friends, lone rangers -- passionate people, all. They have a vision and often the power to make that vision reality. They utilize their networks to accomplish their vision. And they may easily embrace others into their vision or they may not.

The most enlightened founders know that organizations are living, breathing, dynamic things, with changing leadership and funding needs. These founders understand that someday they will need to let their organizations go. Here comes the toy analogy: Founders have the wonderful job of winding the organization up and setting it on the floor. But they, along with their boards and staff, also have an obligation to make sure the organization doesn't dissipate its energy by running all over the place and getting stuck under the couch.

We can guide the course of organizations just as we can a wind-up toy and we can do it by establishing pathways or boundaries with planning, measuring and evaluating accomplishment, and communicating objectives, success and failure.

I think the wind-up toy might be a pretty good analogy, because most organizations do require a re-wind every so often as they progress along their paths. That's another lesson for another day, I suppose, for founders and young organizations.

Photo: watch him go from girlhula

The Mission Statement Wrestling Match

2009-12-07T08:25:00.008-05:00

A CLIENT OF MINE IS WRESTLING WITH REVISING ITS mission statement. And wrestling is a good word for it. Writing a deceptively simple, but truly meaningful, statement is not easy. So many mission statements are mired in the what's and how's of an organization's activities that they barely acknowledge an audience or rarely talk about the whys of their existence. (Hint: audience and the whys of existence are the two most important things.)

I've written (and spoken) a lot about this here. One of the connecting themes to all those posts is about digging deep to taste and savor meaning; to layer in texture and color; to make the statement connect on some emotional level with the people who read it. In fact, the mission statement is not so much about helping the folks within the organization decipher what the organization is, as it's about helping folks outside the organization discover your power and purpose.

Here are some of the words from the image above that came from a mission brainstorming session: "design dialogue", "forge", "nurture", "weave", "enable", "facilitate relationships", "outreach", "galvanize". These are the people words of an organization. These, and other words like them, are the connective tissue that is so often missing in the "official" statements organizations use when talking about themselves.

I'll use my client's example (with names changed, of course) to show you what I'm talking about. The current mission statement is this:

The mission of the Old House Museum is presently to preserve the Smith family home in Our Town, interpret its history between 1740 and 1880 and educate the public.

Really grabs you, doesn't it? The focus is squarely on preserving that old house and talking about its evolution. Oh, yeah -- and educating the public. "Educating the public" reads like an afterthought to me.

So, they're thinking they might want to revise the current statement to this:

The mission of the Old House Museum is to preserve the Our Town home of the Smith family, prominent merchants and heroic patriots, who lived here for many generations, and to engage the community by sharing their history through educational programs and exhibits.

But, frankly, it's just a longer version of what they already have. Would this make you want to visit or become involved any more than the mission statement they already have?

What if the museum were to put the community engagement piece first? What if the mission is about bringing you into the story of how one person, one family, can have an impact on the course of community and country? The dynamic starts to change. Regular folks can start to see themselves in that mission -- you've opened the door to your organization for them.

So, here are three suggestions for revising your lackluster mission statement today:

Write a mission statement for the person who doesn't know anything about you.
Focus the first phrase or sentence of your statement on your audience.
Let readers see themselves in the story of your mission by connecting the whys of what your organization does to their lives.

Can you help my client by redrafting their mission statement?

Photo: Mission Statement Brainstorming from design_bridge_do

"Key Questions" Post Receives Kudos

2009-12-01T08:00:00.004-05:00

I'M REALLY PLEASED THAT MY POST, “Key Questions for Board and Senior Staff”, received some high praise from readers at AssociationJam.org. It was voted one of the best ten stories for Leadership in November 2009!

AssociationJam.org is a website sponsored by WildApricot.com, a subscription-based blog “for volunteers, webmasters and administrators of associations and nonprofits. We discuss issues and trends in web technologies that help your organization do more with less.”

Encouraging Board Learning

2009-11-28T14:24:00.004-05:00

I KNOW THAT MANY OF US, MYSELF INCLUDED, ARE LOOKING for ways to encourage and maybe even inspire boards to take an active role in their own leadership and decision-making growth. It's not easy.

That's why I thought the following from Hildy Gottlieb, President of the Community-Driven Institute, in response to a question on LinkedIn about board learning was one I wanted to share with you. Hildy's suggestions for creating a board learning environment can be used by organizations of any size, with staff or not.

So, go for it!

I have been encouraging boards to actually begin doing their work as learning communities - with generative discussion being a big part of each meeting, focused on the things that matter most - vision, values, making a difference, measuring that difference.

Focusing on the "intentional" part of your question, some strategies I've seen work well.
• Have the generative discussion be the first item on the agenda, to set the tone for the rest of the meeting (and to not get lost in the shuffle)  

• Have the vision and values of the org handed out to every board member at every meeting (yes mission is important, but not as important as vision for the change they want to create, and the values by which they will do their work)  

• Routinely have an agenda item "What do we want to learn?" It doesn't have to be every meeting, but every few months. Let the board discuss what they feel they need to learn - what they wish they knew more about, what would help them be better leaders on behalf of the community's aspirations
• At the end of every meeting, have as the final item 2 questions. 1) What stood out for you at this meeting? What was an "aha" for you? What is the most important / interesting thing we discussed? (this provides reinforcement of the things they learned / explored / discovered together) and 2) What do you want to be sure we talk about next time re: making a difference in our community?  

• Ask the immediate past president to act as "consciousness monitor" or "learning monitor" to gently remind board members when they are straying from the vision and the values in their discussion.   

These are just a few concrete strategies we have seen work. The main ingredient, though, is that the board agree to be an ongoing learning community, always focused on their leadership towards making a difference.

Photo: My Brain in Post-its. from animechix

Building Cohesion Among Board Members

2009-11-24T06:57:00.004-05:00

AS WE WORK TOWARD GREATER DIVERSITY ON OUR nonprofit boards, more and more boards are being made up of people who may not know one another well or at all. They don't run in the same social circles in the community, they may come from a wide geographic area or spend just a part of their time in one community. The result is they may only see one another at your organization.

Moving a group of relative strangers toward a cohesive team requires that each person shifts from an individual to a group mindset where the success of the whole is the goal. Successful teams care not only about the organization, but care enough about each other to ensure that everyone is able to meet their responsibilities. To get to that point, team members need to have opportunities to get to know one another just enough to foster mutual trust and respect. After all, it is just those two behaviors that get groups through stressful, even difficult, times.

So, how can board and staff leaders build cohesion within a board whose members scatter to the four winds after each board meeting, or at the least, have few points of intersection outside of the board room?

This question was posed recently to a board with just this kind of makeup. Here's what the group suggested for itself:

Add breaks during board meetings where folks can mingle
Offer dinner or cocktails after board meetings to enhance social interaction
Meet over dinner or over lunch, again to interject a social element
Meet more frequently? (for example, if your board meets six time a year, would eight times a year up the cohesion?)
Lessen amount of information on agenda, therefore giving more time for discussion and breaks
Relook at how committees are used (are task forces a better way to foster a greater variety of board member interactions?)
More assigning of tasks from board discussions for members to work on together (again, a variety of interactions being the key)

The goal here is cohesion, not group-think. Opinion-sharing and healthy debate are key elements of board and organizational vitality. A cohesive group allows for and even embraces differences of opinion because underlying values about the organization's vision and mission are respected and shared.

Photo: Committee Meeting from voteprime

The Importance of Focus Groups to Strategic Planning

2009-11-17T07:42:00.004-05:00

THE VERY NOTION OF STRATEGIC PLANNING DEMANDS that one get out of one's skin to view an organization the way others do. There's valuable information out in the landscape about your organization and all you have to do is ask for it. But, frankly, that's enough to send chills through some of the most hardened organization leaders.

Most organizations rely on the survey as a means to collect community input. But surveys are passive things -- they generally only tell you what's written on the page. No chance for follow-up questions. While they're great for reaching a large group, it's really hard to create a survey that gives you much new or really insightful information. Talking face-to-face in small groups also has its limitations, but hold tremendous opportunities for making deeper connections. And since few cultural organizations seize the opportunity to use focus groups in any regular way....or at all....the format is definitely worth exploring, particularly for planning.

Call them what you will -- focus groups, community conversations, town halls, meet-ups -- these opportunities to explore public perceptions about an organization often reveal insights that can have substantial impact. Imagine re-visioning a key programming component or a whole mission based on community input. What could be more pure, more close to the public benefit our organizations purport themselves to be?

When designing a strategic planning process, I think community conversations are best done at the very beginning as part of a broad research phase that looks critically at both inside and outside of the organization's four walls. However, they can also stud the process at various stages to gain input on the plan as it evolves.

No matter what, these discussions ought to be focused on questions that are critical to the organization's future, such as opportunities for collaboration, what shifting demographics mean to traditional programming, or how can income sources can be grown or redeployed to meet stakeholder needs.

One small cultural organization held an astounding six focus groups as a ramp up to its planning. Staff and board members spoke with town leaders, business owners, parents with young children, other nonprofits in the community, educators, and representatives from a civic group for people of color. The chairman of this effort noted that it was a lot of time to organize the conversations, but what was learned far outweighed the work that went into them. And the good will that has now been generated because of this outreach couldn't have been gained any other way. This group sees the long-term benefit of continuing these conversations, and I hope they will.

You can gather small groups of stakeholders together to talk about almost anything. Test reaction to your current mission statement, ask for help solving a problem that's been kicking around for a while, get some feedback about what future exhibitions, plays or concerts folks would like to see or participate in. Noodling around with a new program idea? Ask potential program users if you're on the mark.

Your commitment to the conversation is to ask meaningful questions and act on the responses.

Photo: 2005 Focus Groups Yass from myrfsphotos

Templates are the Enemies of Innovation

2009-11-11T11:55:00.004-05:00

NOT MY TITLE, BUT A GOOD ONE DON'T YOU THINK? It comes from this article in Fast Company by Dev Patnaik on how the The Rotman School of Management is restructuring its MBA program based on developing business leaders who are well-grounded in multiple disciplines (including strategic and creative problem-solving). No wonder then that one premise held by the school’s dean is that “templates are the enemies of innovation.”

Hmmm.....templates. My world is littered with them. I'm always searching for them to use as examples, to shine new light on old dusty topics. But, think about it: templates are meant to provide a standard output, whether it's that envelope up there in the image or a policy statement. In the organizational context, it’s so easy to copy or spin someone else’s work, even if it’s not quite the right fit. Yet, one of our oft-stated mantras is “don’t reinvent the wheel”; when someone or some organization has already gone down that road, why should we? Templates aren’t all bad, but how do we know when to use them, when to hybridize them, and when to start from scratch?

When to Use Them

Templates are very handy for hammering together routine, systematic or non-"creative" work, particularly if it needs to fit within a larger, profession-wide context, like cataloguing specimens or music scores. Some solicitation (donor responses forms come to mind) and “how to” (such as how to sign up for a class at the art center) materials fall into this category. These are materials that may need very little or no organizational interpretation.

When to Hybridize Them

Templates become less helpful for drafting policies and procedures, mission or vision statements, planning documents and the like, where the results should fit an organization’s personality like a glove, not a hand-me-down. Their purpose can help to underscore professional practice with guiding language or in raising issues not thought of, it’s true. We need to resist the temptation to simply "fill in the blanks" without understanding the consequences of such actions on the longer term health and operational capacity of our organizations.

When to Start from Scratch

When it comes to approaching a challenge, a problem, or an opportunity from a fresh vantage point, the template is too bound up in someone else’s perspective to be useful. Templates in these contexts often act like blinders, limiting exploration and creativity. They can be especially detrimental in the long-run to organizations that circumvent the creative process by using them. Development of particularly meaning and value-laden narratives, innovative services or products, reinvented ways of accomplishing work may receive a kick-start from the examples of others, but they deserve an unimpeded space for experimentation.

Photo: envelope template from fishbowl_fish

Why Do You Care? Making Personal Connections to Organizational Mission

2009-11-02T07:51:00.006-05:00

I FREQUENTLY USE THIS INTRODUCTION/ icebreaker at board-staff retreats and it almost always results in a new level of mutual understanding and respect: I ask participants to talk about why they care about the organization and want to be a part of it.

Emotional connections to the importance of the organization and to its mission are often revealed in heartfelt ways. Participants revel in newly discovered information about each other. Boards and staffs rarely allow themselves the opportunity to talk in such a way, yet their underlying desires to play a part in an organization are, in fact, the connective tissue that holds the enterprise together. It's a worthy thing to share.

This activity is also a great pick-me-up for those times when a group has just plain run out of steam. It helps bring the energy level up, because it asks people to get in touch with what they deem is personally important.

This discussion is also an effective opening to the creation of vision and mission statements or review of existing ones. Boilerplate or overly clinical statements don't pull people into the work of the organization -- personal stories about why people care do.

Photo: Why Care from Dogtrax