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Engagement Marketing

Working Smarter, Not Harder: A Nonprofit Case Study (Part 3)

Here’s the last post in this nonprofit case study on how small nonprofits can effectively balance growing demands and limited resources by working smarter, not harder. As a quick review, the first two steps involved staying mission-focused and inventorying your organization’s program offerings.

The third key step called for role clarification and communication. Each ABC Healthcare affiliate was increasingly recognized as an organization that “made things happen and got things done.” As a result, other groups’ expectations were becoming unrealistic in looking to ABC Healthcare to do everything – providing funding, leadership, and manpower. The affiliates needed to better manage these expectations.

Step 3. Clarify and communicate your organization’s role

To do this, they assessed their participation in regional activities – from program development and implementation to assisting with other groups’ programs to serving on community committees. They recognized they played a number of roles (based on their mission and operation) that they labeled as: “advocate,” “catalyst,” “connector,” “do-er,” and “facilitator.”

The resulting discussion helped staff identify which role was most appropriate for certain situations instead of being all things to all people. When someone came to ABC Healthcare with a request for money and/or manpower, staff clarified “up front” their limited resources and the specific role the organization was willing to play. As a result, the affiliates learned how to better manage expectations within their communities.

An ongoing challenge

Coping with success involves a delicate balance of mission, need, and resources. To maintain equilibrium, nonprofit leaders need to continually ask hard questions: What are our mission and purpose? What programs and activities do we need to offer, maintain, or give up to fulfill our mission? What is our role in the community we serve? Should we change that role, given our capabilities and resources?

The answers may be as difficult as the questions themselves. But the results, as ABC Healthcare has learned, are worthwhile. Those who don’t engage in these critical discussions are at serious risk for fragmented focus and staff burnout.

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Engagement Marketing

Working Smarter, Not Harder: A Nonprofit Case Study (Part 2)

This post continues the case study on how small nonprofits can effectively balance growing demands and limited resources by working smarter, not harder.

The first step is to stay mission-focused, but that can also present a challenge. Many nonprofits have broad mission statements that let them justify responding to even remotely-related requests. Staff who are truly passionate about the mission find it difficult to turn down such requests or discontinue programs that are no longer worthwhile. (“But we helped the three people who came to our educational seminar!”)

Recognizing this situation, one ABC Healthcare affiliate took the next step to address the question: Where can we, with our limited resources, really make a difference?

Step 2. Inventory your program offerings

To answer this question, the affiliate conducted a detailed inventory of its educational programs and activities. This was a multi-step process in which staff completed program descriptions and developed a profile for each educational offering. First they reviewed the following key questions (several adapted from the Drucker Foundation’s nonprofit self-assessment tool: The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask about Your Nonprofit Organization) for each of their programs:

  • Who is the target audience for the program?
  • What does the target audience value about the program (based on evaluations and other feedback)?
  • Could this audience get the same program elsewhere?
  • What is the estimated return on investment for the organization (based on mission-fit, resource input, and resulting output)?
  • Will this offering advance our capacity to carry out our mission?
  • If we weren’t already presenting this program would we start now?

Answering these questions allowed staff to sort the educational programs into three categories:

  1. “Need to have” (programs that should be kept)
  2. “Nice to have” (those that might be expendable) and
  3. “Not sure.”

They further assessed each program in the “nice to have” and “not sure” categories by considering: Is what we’re doing precluding other opportunities? Can (or should) we invest our time and energy more effectively elsewhere? What would be the greatest consequence if we didn’t offer this program for a few more years?

Their answers to this second set of questions helped determine which programs to keep, which to phase out, and which to eliminate. Staff also revisited programs in the “Need to have” category to see if they should be kept “as is” or if there might be opportunities to enhance or expand them.

The inventory exercise was a valuable way for employees to prioritize and streamline their programs and activities. While initially reluctant to let go of a number of programs, they recognized that doing so would free them to explore new initiatives as well as improve current ones.

The next (and final) post in this series explores the 3rd critical step involving communication.

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Engagement Marketing

Working Smarter, Not Harder: A Nonprofit Case Study (Part 1)

Picture this: You’re the head of a relatively new nonprofit serving a community need with a small, dedicated staff and board. In just a few years, you experience major growth in your activities and accomplishments. Such success, however, is a mixed blessing: work demands have grown faster than your human and financial resources. In addition, the more you do and the more successful you are, the more others expect you to do.

How do you continue to serve the community’s growing needs with increasingly limited resources?

The challenge of coping with how to do more with less is twofold. On one hand, nonprofits have to guard against potential burnout when staff members are pulled in too many directions. On the other hand, mission-driven organizations have a hard time saying no.

Several of my clients found themselves in this situation, and how they effectively dealt with it may be helpful to others. In this “case study” to be covered in three posts, I’ll share the experience of several affiliates of a healthcare-related nonprofit who learned how to manage their success by working smarter, not harder. To maintain confidentiality, I’ll call this nonprofit ABC Healthcare.

With a broad-based mission and regional scope, each ABC Healthcare affiliate – ranging in age of operation from four to 10 years – was challenged to respond to its area’s diverse healthcare needs while not spreading itself too thin. They were initially funded by government grants, so their budgets were variable (never knowing how much they would get or when they would get it).

To cope with growing demands and limited resources, they followed three vital steps:

  1. Stay focused on the mission.
  2. Inventory your organization’s program offerings.
  3. Clarify and communicate your organization’s role.

Step 1: Stay focused on the mission

Regardless of how long a nonprofit has been operating, it’s a good idea to keep the “big picture” in mind by focusing on the mission. Why? Because the mission describes your organization’s purpose and reason for being.

ABC Healthcare affiliate staff regularly revisited the organization’s mission to: 1) ensure they were on target, and 2) guard against fragmenting their focus to avoid overextending manpower and other critical resources.

In routine meetings or special planning sessions, staff members placed high priority on mission “fit” when evaluating requests to participate in new or ongoing programs. Any requests that didn’t directly fit with the mission were turned down.

While using the mission as a touchstone is a no-brainer, the reality is staff in small nonprofits can lose focus because their jobs involve multiple and time-consuming roles (such as outreach and development) beyond their primary responsibility.

Starting with the mission is an important first step in working smarter, not harder. But by itself, it is not enough as I’ll explain in my next post. So stay tuned.

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Engagement Marketing

Gaining Employee Support through a New Type of Journalism

[2014 update: the following content still resonates, although the original links in this post were removed because they are no longer available.]

Here’s a fascinating concept to add to your internal marketing & communications toolbox: Workplace Journalism — “a conscious effort to make employee communications at least partly about employees and their concerns, not just the business and its issues.”

I learned about this from Barry Nelson, who believes business communicators can have a positive impact by adding more “empathetic, employee-advocacy journalism … into their otherwise business-results focused reportorial mix.”

He recommends that in addition to communicating corporate strategy, goals, progress & results, (which employees need to know), companies should also share stories of how employees cope with on-the-job issues & stresses (which employees want to know). According to Barry, we need to give “at least some prominence to our employees’ human concerns” such as “how and why to get along with the boss, make friends on the job, cope with stress, live the brand, be a good teammate, and other aspects of a satisfactory work life.”

The Pay-Off

This isn’t just ‘feel-good’ communications for the heck of it. Organizations that share these types of stories demonstrate their care and concern for employees, and this contributes to a strong sense of employee commitment and loyalty in turn.

To learn more, check out Barry’s guidance on getting started with Workplace Journalism.