DonorDreams – Page 4 – The Healthy Non-Profit

Non-Profit Time Management: The Trick About Delegation

June 7, 2012 DonorDreams leadership, Planning

This week’s “Mondays with Marissa” post was titled “Non-Profit Time Management: Scheduling Social Media Updates“. After reading Marissa’s weekly pearl of wisdom, it got me thinking. During tough economic times, donors are asking non-profits to do more with less, which is leading to longer task lists for both executive directors and fundraising professionals. All of this contributes to a lot of stress in the workplace. In honor of Marissa’s awesome blog post, I am dedicating this week’s posts to the idea of looking more carefully at time-saving tips with regards to managing your agency and implementing your resource development program.

Let’s continue this conversation by looking at the difficult art of delegation.

It would be so simple to just say “delegate early and often” if you want to improve productivity at your non-profit organization; however, the truth of the matter is: it is more complicated than that.

The Heaping Plate effect

Let’s think this through for a moment. Donors are telling non-profits to do more with less. From what I’ve seen in the last four years, non-profit boards did not respond by rolling up their sleeves and investing more time in serious fundraising. Instead, many of the boards I know circled the wagons and tried to “cut-cut-cut” their way out of crisis.

In the final analysis, those non-profit organizations are stretched very thin now, and they’re trying to run their pre-2008 program with a skeleton staff.

So, an executive director or fundraising professional might not be able to delegate their way to increased productivity because everyone’s plate is heaped too full of work.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that delegation can’t be effective; however, it will need to be done with volunteers (e.g. board volunteers, program volunteers, fundraising volunteers).

All hands on deck!

Trust But Verify

When I was an executive director, I learned that delegation is not a magic cure-all that made everything on my task list disappear. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way. 🙁

For example, I would delegate a task to staff or volunteers and expect that it would get done on or before the agreed upon deadline. It never failed . . . the task would never get done on time and I usually ended up taking it back (while muttering under my breath something like “if you want it done right, you got to do it yourself“).

I really was wrong. In reality, I just didn’t know how to effectively delegate, and it wasn’t until someone share with me those immortal Ronald Reagan words — “Trust But Verify” — that I start getting better at delegation.

I learned to use my Microsoft Outlook task list to manage BOTH my tasks and the things I delegated. For example, if I delegated a grant compliance report to a staff person, then I would add it to Outlook with a digital reminder to check-in and see how things were going a few weeks before the deadline. I’d do the same thing with volunteers who agreed to do things for the agency.

Since opening my non-profit consulting practice, I’ve started using Basecamp, which is an online project management service to keep track of who is doing what and by when.

Have you used other tools other than Microsoft Outlook to track and manage things you’ve delegated to staff and volunteers? If so, please scroll down and share your best practice in the comment section of this blog. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
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Non-Profit Time Management: Letting Go of It All

June 6, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, leadership, Planning

Let’s continue this conversation by looking at David Allen’s Mind-Sweep concept.

I don’t know about you, but when I’ve found myself “under the gun” to produce, I feel like something has a hold over me. I can best describe it as a “gripping feeling” or a “paralysis”. When I feel this way, my productivity falls dramatically. I think this happens because I am concerned about all of the plates that I have spinning. I get too focused on all of the things I need to do and not focused enough on actually doing them.

A few years ago, when things were especially bad, I asked my employer to send me to a time management training that was based on David Allen’s national best-selling book “Getting Things Done” (GTD).

While I still fundamentally consider myself more of a Frankin-Covey guy, there were a number of interesting and effective tactics that I took away from the GTD training. One of those tactics was called the “Mind-Sweep” and here is how it works:

Secure a pen and stack of loose leaf note cards or a small pad of paper.
Search your mind for things that you need to do — both big and small.
Write down one task per note card and put it in your inbox.
Once you’ve cleared everything out of your head — everything from buying a gallon of milk to calling a specific donor — go back through your inbox and prioritize the tasks in their order of importance.

If you think this exercise seems elementary, I wouldn’t argue with you. However, there is something “freeing” about dumping all of the contents of your brain out onto small pieces of paper. Whenever I have done this, my mind seems to focus and that gripping feeling seems to melt away. Essentially, I am no longer consumed with the thought that I may forget to do something, and I am able to spend time “doing” stuff.

While I’ve done this during extremely busy and chaotic times, I’ve also modified this approach and used it to help me in a Moves Management type of way. Simply focus your mind on an individual donor and everything that you think needs to happen to move them from one gift level to another, and dump it all out on one sheet of paper. The contents of that exercise become all of the “moves” (e.g. cultivation activities) that need to occur to position a donor to the next solicitation. Add dates to that list and put it in a spreadsheet (or your donor database Moves Management relationship tab), and TA-DA you have an individual donor plan.

The same approach can be applied to building a project management plan for a special event fundraiser.

The “mind-sweep” is more than just an organizing tactic, it is a time-savings strategy that can help you stop dithering and start doing. “Getting out of neutral” can be one of the best feelings in the world and can make all the difference when it comes to time management.

Have you ever felt gripped by a similar feeling that I described earlier in this blog post? If so, how did you get “unstuck” and moving forward again? Please scroll down and share a quick thought in the comment section. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Non-Profit Time Management: Managing Your Task List

June 5, 2012 DonorDreams leadership, organizational development, Planning

Yesterday was Monday, which can only mean one thing at DonorDreams blog . . . it was “Mondays with Marissa” and her post was titled “Non-Profit Time Management: Scheduling Social Media Updates“. After reading Marissa’s post, it got me thinking. There has to be a million-and-one ways for non-profit professionals to improve upon managing their time. In honor of Marissa’s awesome blog post, I will take the next few days to look more carefully at time-saving tips with regards to managing your agency and implementing your resource development program.

Let’s start this conversation off by simply looking at your task list.

In the last seven days, I visited with two non-profit executive directors who both expressed utter frustration with how many things are currently on their “To Do List”. As you can imagine, not being able to get to the bottom of your task list every day adds stress to the average person’s life. This stress turns into chaos and panic when the list grows exponentially every day. Having been in the same situation, I compare it to what I can only imagine drowning must feel like.

In an effort to help my friends, I pulled out and dusted off my old executive coaching textbooks. It was in a book titled “Coaching Questions” written by Tony Stoltzfus that I found the following nugget of good advice:

Make sure that EVERY item on that list adheres to the following four characteristics:

Clarity: I know exactly what to do
Datebook: This step can be scheduled at a specific time
Commitment: I know I will do this
Deadline: I’ve set a date for completion

I know this sounds simplistic, but when the item you’re adding to you task list doesn’t meet this four-part litmus test, then you have two options:

Go back and secure the information you need in order to satisfy the test, or
Don’t add it to your task list.

Tony also suggested that you re-think adding tasks to your To Do List when you hear yourself using language or phrases such as:

I could …
I might …
I’m thinking of …
If …

The reality is that times are chaotic for non-profit professionals. Donors are demanding that you do more with less. The simple prescription can be summed up in one word:

FOCUS

Good non-profit professionals, especially effective ones, know that they can’t do everything all at once. They seem to have mastered many of the simple aforementioned suggestions related to their task list.

How have you found focus at your non-profit agency as times have become more chaotic and demanding? Do you use a similar approach as described above? If so, how has that worked for you? What type of task list tools do you use?

Your time is in high demand and none of us should be re-creating the wheel every day. So, please scroll down the page and spend 60 seconds sharing a best practice or something that works for you with your fellow non-profit professionals.

Here’s to your health!

Non-Profit Time Management: Scheduling Social Media Updates

June 4, 2012 DonorDreams Mondays with Marissa, Planning, technology

The non-profit world moves fast. You walk-in at the start of the day, sit down, check-in, and before you know it the day is over. When time moves this fast, it can be hard to remember to update your social networks. Even if your job is solely dedicated to cultivating an online community, time can sometimes get away from even best time managers.

Today we are going to look at three tools that can help you schedule your social media updates and ensure your online presence is not neglected during the busy times in your life.

Plotting It All Out

When pressed for time, coming up with the perfect status update can be hard work. What do you want to say? Have you said something similar recently? Are you talking about an engaging topic? Planning what to say, when to say it, and where to post it, can save you time and make the whole process go a bit smoother.

DivvyHQ is a great resource when you have multiple people in charge of updating your social networks. It allows you to create a calendar to plan out what type of posts you are going to put up and where you are going to post them. There also is a post approval option if you need that as well.

For example, if there is an upcoming event and you are not the right person to talk about it, then why not ask the person who is? With DivvyHQ you can create a task within the program which will notify them via email. This gives you a place to manage your social media calendar.

DivvyHQ does offer a limited free plan, but their best features are found in the paid options.

If you decide that paying for DivvyHQ is a too expensive, you can still accomplish the same things using tools like Google Calendar and a spreadsheet. Simply create a Google Calendar named “social media” and plan out your posts by creating events for each day. You can even put the time you’re going to post it and create a reminder. If you need help, then you can invite others to that event. A good old fashion Excel spreadsheet can also work much in the same way.

Whichever method you choose, sitting down to plan out your posts can save you lots of time in the long run.

Posting to The Future

After you have planned everything out in advance, you can write posts and schedule them for publication in the future. That’s right . . . where we’re going, we don’t need roads. What’s nice about taking the time to do this is that your social networks will automatically be updated and you don’t have to freak out about not posting on the correct day if something comes up.

The best thing about scheduling your posts far in advance is that you can actually go on vacation.

One tool that can help you with posting to Facebook is Post Planner. Post Planner is great because for a very low-cost ($4.95/month) you can post to your organization’s facebook page in a very organic way. Going beyond telling it what you want posted and when you want it posted, Post Planner allows you to upload photos to albums you already have on Facebook. You can post videos and links the same way. What’s nice is that it will look like you updating in real-time.

Another option to consider is HootSuite. HootSuite is a popular social media manager that allows you to schedule Facebook and Twitter updates in advance.

While HootSuite works well for many people as free social media tool, it isn’t something that works well for me because I have a number of photo albums that are updated on a weekly basis, which means all of my pictures go into a HootSuite album. So, I just use HootSuite to automate non-photo tweets and find it extremely helpful.

It should be noted that both Post Planner and HootSuite will email you when your scheduled post is posted.

Taking the time to come up with a calendar of when you post to your social networks will save you time in the long run and allow you to have a more structured social media plan. Using tools like Post Planner or HootSuite can help you schedule your posts so you don’t have to worry about posting at exactly the right time. What tools do you use to plan your social media message? I’d love to talk about it further in the comment section below!

Can’t change your non-profit ways? That’s just BS!

June 1, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, leadership, organizational development, Planning

Welcome to O.D. Fridays at DonorDreams blog. Every Friday for the foreseeable future we will be looking more closely at a recent post from John Greco’s blog called “johnponders ~ about life at work, mostly” and applying his organizational development messages to the non-profit community.

Today, we’re focusing on a post that John titled “The Cow Path“. In that post, he talks about cow paths that started hundreds of years ago and somehow have turned into urban roads we drive on today. Of course, there is a classic organizational development point of view at the middle of John’s post. In a nutshell, his point is threefold:

It is relatively easy for organizations to start new initiatives.
It is very, very easy for organizations to continue doing what they’ve always done.
It is downright difficult to stop doing things your organization (e.g. staff, board members, volunteers, and donors) have become accustom to doing.

If you haven’t done so already, please make sure that you take a moment to click over to John’s post because he does a very nice job of illustrating this point. Heck, he even uses a poem from Samuel Walter Foss in his post to drive home this point.

When I read “The Cow Path,” I had to chuckle because it describes so many small non-profit organizations that understand the need to change their resource development approach but don’t understand the threefold organizational development principle laid about in John’s blog post.

Let’s look at an example of a typical non-profit organization that I’ve worked with since the economic crash of 2008:

Start a resource development or annual campaign planning process (aka start a new initiative)? Responses range from a hesitant maybe to a lukewarm yes.
Stop pursuing more and more government money? Responses range from polite resistance to outright defiance.
Stop running so many special events (and stop trying to add “just one more event)? Responses range from polite resistance to outright defiance.
Stop recruiting board members who don’t want to fundraise and who don’t have any skills and experiences with fundraising? Responses range from polite resistance to outright defiance.
Continue writing grants, chasing government funding, running special events, and recruiting warm bodies to sit in the boardroom? You betcha! Full steam ahead.

Why is status quo normally the victor in 70% of change initiatives? Because “we’ve always done it that way” is the enemy of “OMG, there is an iceberg ahead and we need to change course immediately“.

In John’s post, he talks about an exercise he uses called “Stop-Start-Continue”. I’ve been through a similar exercise facilitate by Noel Tichy called “Rattlesnakes and Pythons”. Click here “to read a short description of it in Tichy’s book titled “The Cycle of Leadership”.

Unfortunately, my experience with “Rattlesnakes and Pythons” was similar to John’s findings with “Stop-Start-Continue”. Even when things were identified as needing to be eliminated or squeezed out, there was great resistance to it and sometimes it didn’t happen.

In the end, John is right. As always! There is only one person to blame when change is allegedly out of reach, and we continue doing the same thing over and over again with an anticipated different result.

What a load of BS! Grab that bull by the horns and make some change happen.

If you took 15 seconds and wrote down a few things that you know need to be eliminated from your non-profit organization’s modus operandi, what would be on your list? What process have you used in the past to identify things that need to change at your agency? How effective where you at eliminating those things? Please use the comment box to share your answers.

Here’s to your health!

Donor Loyalty: Inspect what you expect

May 31, 2012 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising, Fundraising

Tuesday’s post titled “Time in the office versus time with donors” begged more questions than it answered. Today, we’re going to zoom in on one of those questions and examine it more closely.

How do you measure relationship building
and the success of such activities?

It was suggested in earlier posts that a weekly contact report is one tool that can be used to track relationship building activities; however, there are other tools that you should consider using in conjunction with a contact report.

Dashboard
Scorecard
Annual performance plan
Weekly or monthly reports
Donor database reports
Moves Management reports

If you want to learn more about organizational dashboards, click here to check out a BoardSource book titled “The Nonprofit Dashboard: A Tool for Tracking Progress“. If a dashboard isn’t appealing to you, then you might want to look into a balanced scorecard approach. Click here to see what Bernard Marr at the Advanced Performance Institute has to say about this tool.

Of course, choosing the tool is probably the easiest part of this decision. The more difficult thing is determining which relationship building metrics to track. Here are a few suggestions:

Number of cultivation meetings with prospects
Increased contribution size – maintained – decreased
Number of face-to-face stewardship meetings
Number of prospects converted into donors
Donor loyalty rate
Donor satisfaction survey score
Renewal rates for year two, year three, year four, and year five donors
LYBUNT and SYBUNT renewals

There are no right or wrong answers to the question of what you should track. I believe that it really boils down to the title of this post: “Inspect what you expect”.

I suppose the best advice I can give to you is “don’t try to make decision by yourself”. I encourage you to engage fundraising staff, resource development committee volunteers, board members, fundraising volunteers, and even donors. There is nothing wrong with pulling together a small focus group, ordering a few pizzas, and engaging them with a few thoughtful questions.

If you are looking for a few good samples, the following are a few links that I think are worth looking at:

DZO Strategists: “The Beyond ‘Cash Fundraising’ Management Dashboard“
Candler County Schools: “District Balanced Scorecard“
Blackbaud: “Embracing Technology for Moves Management® Success“

Using tools and metrics like these should help you answer the difficult question posed in Tuesday’s blog post: “How much time needs to be spent outside of the office compared to behind your desk?”

What tools does your non-profit organization use to track relationship building and resource development activities? What metrics do you hold your fundraising professionals and executive director to? Please use the comment box below to share your thoughts.

Here’s to your health!

Cultivation and stewardship: Who’s on first? What’s on second?

May 30, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, Planning

Yesterday’s post titled “Time in the office versus time with donors” begged more questions than it answered. Today, we’re going to zoom in on one of those questions and examine it more closely.

Should the executive director be more responsible for relationship building than the development director?

I have always advocated that, regardless of how hard they try, a non-profit executive director cannot abdicate their role as their agency’s chief development officer. Even when an organization is lucky enough to have a fully staffed development department with talented fundraising professionals, the executive directors is ultimately the person who needs to provide vision and direction.

I think Harry Truman said it best when he said, “The buck stops here!”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the executive director needs to be the person out on the street cultivating and stewarding relationships with every prospect and donor.

To answer the question posed at the beginning of this post, I believe it is as simple as taking an inventory of who does what well. While I firmly believe that prospects and donors prefer meeting the executive director and developing a relationship with him/her, there may be situations where the executive director doesn’t possess the requisite relationship building skills to cultivate and steward people to the extent necessary for a successful fundraising program. If this is the case, then the answer becomes simple . . . whoever is the natural “people-person” takes on the lion’s share of cultivation and stewardship.

It really can be that simple. Right?

How do you know if someone is a natural relationship builder? Here are a few things I lused to ook for when I interviewed fundraising professionals:

If their network is big, then there is a good likelihood that they are good at building relationships.
Do they keep in contact with their network? If so, then they are most likely someone who intuitively knows how to maintain relationships.
Have they ever “taken advantage of” someone and violated their trust? Trust is a foundational issue in building relationships, and it is something good fundraising professionals know how to navigate.
I always like to learn more about what is being talked about between a relationship builder and the person with whom they are trying to build a relationship. Why? Because good relationship builders are inquisitive and take an interest in the prospect or donor.

Again . . . while I personally prefer that the executive director takes on this role, it doesn’t always work that way and the fundraising professional might need to become the primary cultivation and stewardship person for the agency. It might also become something where certain board volunteers need to help step-in and help. Regardless, the executive director cannot abdicate this role completely and must find places where they are comfortable meeting prospects and donors.

In these circumstances, it is important to clarify roles and responsibilities and the executive director needs to take the initiative in doing this. Off the top of my head, the following are a few tools that can and should be used to achieve clarity:

written annual performance plan
weekly contact reports
written comprehensive resource development plan
weekly in-person checkpoint meetings
written cultivation & stewardship plan
Moves Management program

Doing an inventory of skill sets and assigning and managing roles and responsibilities for cultivation and stewardship activities will keep your agency from sounding like Abbott and Costello in their famous Who’s on First? comedy sketch. It will also likely help you answer the difficult question posed in yesterday’s blog post about how much time needs to be spent outside of the office compared to behind your desk.

Who is the person primarily responsible for cultivating prospects in your agency? Who stewards your donors? What tools and strategies are used to maintain clarity? Please scroll down and share your thoughts in the comment box below.

Here’s to your health!

Time in the office versus time with donors

May 29, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising

When I was an executive director, I always struggled with the question of how much time should a fundraising professional spend behind their desk? In fact, it drove me crazy. My personal opinion has always been that resource development is all about relationship building, and it is hard to build or grow a relationship from behind a desk. My assumption was that the less I saw the development director in the office, the more effective they were at growing relationships with donors and implementing the organization’s resource development program.

After many years of reflecting upon these beliefs, I now wonder how wrong I might have been.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I still believe with all my heart that resource development is all about relationships, but I now have questions such as:

Should the executive director be more responsible for relationship building than the development director?
Should the development director be more responsible for the “technical” stuff involved in implementing the annual resource development plan (e.g. writing, organizing, planning, etc)?
If it is a “shared responsibility” (which is what I suspect many of you will conclude), then how much time behind the desk versus out of the office is the right balance for both the executive director and the development director?
How do you measure relationship building and the success of such activities?

If you are an executive director who likes to chain their fundraising professionals to a chair in the office, then you need to get over that instinct. You are most likely killing your resource development program unless your plan is highly focused on grant writing. I think Marc Pitman does a great job of speaking to this issue and provides a free weekly call report tool for your use in his blog post titled “Are fundraising professionals stupid?”

My best suggestion for both executive directors and fundraising professionals is to read Marc’s blog post, download his weekly call report template, and start using them. I might even go as far as suggesting that copies of these reports get attached to the executive director’s monthly report that gets turned in to the board of directors (possibly included in the board packet).

You’ve probably heard the old expression:

What gets measured gets done.

I believe that Marc’s weekly call reports speak to this point. If you want to motivate yourself and your resource development staff to get out of the office, then start measuring it.

I posed a number of different questions in this blog post and haven’t even come close to providing as many answers. I thought I’d ask the readers of this blog to first weigh-in with what you think the answers are. Please scroll down and use the comment box to share your opinions or how your organization addresses such questions. There are no wrong answers. In the next few days, I will spin-off a few more posts on related subjects.

Here’s to your health!

Stewarding donors this Memorial Day

May 28, 2012 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising, Fundraising

Happy Memorial Day everyone!

I always feel funny saying that because this holiday doesn’t feel very happy. After all, it was created to honor Americans who died during war. For many Americans including me, this holiday has taken on additional meaning in that it provides an opportunity to say THANK YOU to all military service men and women for their service.

What can your non-profit organization do to turn Memorial Day into another donor stewardship opportunity? Here are a few ideas:

Send a card to those donors who are veterans and thank them for their service. Not only did they service their country, but they invest in their community by supporting your organization as well as many other agencies.
Write a letter to the newspaper editor about what Memorial Day means to you and your agency. Remind people that sacrifice is sometime essential to preserve values such as freedom and equality. While honoring the sacrifices made by soldiers for your agency and your community, you can also honor sacrifices of time and money given by volunteers and donors to your organization.
Host a patriotic themed stewardship event for your donors.

Non-profit professionals are typically stretched in too many directions because our agencies are under-resourced. It is for this reason that stewardship often becomes a “back burner issue” and low priority. So, why not use big holidays like Memorial Day as anchors in your organizational calendar to remind us to steward our donors?

Does your agency do anything special for Memorial Day? Please scroll down and share your ideas and thoughts.

Here’s to your health!

Is your non-profit smarter than a fifth grader?

May 25, 2012 DonorDreams Board development, Fundraising, organizational development, technology

Today, we’re focusing on a post that John titled “The School Bus Won’t Wait“. In that post, he talks about an aging professional who ends up relying on an internet acquaintance to help him with technology challenges. As things turn out, his online friend turns out to be 12-years-old. As always, John’s post has multiple themes and meanings, but the main things I saw pertained to: “Technology. Adapting to change. And possibility.”

These themes are at play throughout society, and they are changing the non-profit sector in ways that couldn’t be predicted. Here are just a few examples that I’ve seen, heard of, or read about:

ePhilanthropy. Donors continue to contribute more via online channels. According to the most recent Blackbaud Index of Online Giving report, “… online giving increased by 9.8 percent for the 3 months ending March 2012 as compared to the same period in 2011.” Believe it or not, this has been the trend for quite some time.
The digital boardroom. Board volunteers are busier at work and the rate of retirement is rising. Time is a premium and some volunteers don’t want to take time out of their day to travel to a physical meeting. Retirees (esp. in colder climates) are splitting their time between their primary residence and a winter residence. Add technology into the mix and now board members are “conference calling” and using “Skype” to conduct board meetings. Documents are being distributed digitally and board members are casting proxy votes via email.
The paperless office? Ha! While that appears to have been a 1980s pipe dream, the reality is that there are tons of electronic tools at a non-profit organization’s disposal now. Donor databases replaced index card donor systems, volunteer files, and membership paper systems. One agency who I am very familiar with is upgrading their network server to include a few terabytes of hard drive space because a few gigs just didn’t hold everything. LOL

With change comes challenges. Isn’t that what life is all about?

Here are two tips that I hope you will take to heart as you read John’s blog post and contemplate “Technology. Adapting to change. And possibility.”:

Education doesn’t end when you receive your certificate or degree. If you want to survive, I encourage you become a “Lifelong Learner”. There are tons of free resource available to you on the internet. Carve one hour out of your schedule every week and visit an online resource like Network for Good’s Learning Center. There are tons of great articles there for you to read. There is even a section of this website where you can access pre-recorded webinars.
Plan to stay current. Technology is always evolving. Do you have a written technology plan in place to keep your systems from getting old? If you need help answering this question, then look at the computer sitting on your desk. How old is it? If it is 3-years-old or older, then you probably don’t have a plan in place or you aren’t funding it appropriately.

How is technology changing your non-profit organization? Are you adding fifth graders to your board development prospect lists? 😉 Please scroll down and share one quick example in the comment box below.

Here’s to your health!