Moving, Moving, Moving

Starting with the next blog, you’ll notice a new look to CauseEffectivePerspective.

We’ve built a new Cause Effective website (wshew), and we’re linking the blog onto our site.

Our tech advisors assure us we can redirect you without a hitch – so, let us know if that’s the case!

And take a look at our new site while you’re on board… we’ve piled it full of resources and tools to help make your nonprofit life easier (or, at the least, more productive).

Here’s to progress…

Sliding Into Home

We're at the final stages of preparing for our 30th Anniversary Celebration here at Cause Effective, and we're going through what we've been through with our clients so many times... that feeling of being on a shared enterprise that is rapidly, rapidly, rapidly coming down for a landing.

But it’s the shared enterprise - the team - that I want to take this space to reflect on.

A nonprofit is, by its very nature, one of Tocqueville’s “associations” – a group of individuals coming together for a shared purpose.

In the 1830s, Tocqueville traveled to America from France and wondered at the preponderance of voluntary associations to accomplish social good: “Americans

of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” he mused.

Almost 200 years later, we still are.

But my point here is not the proliferation of nonprofits in the past several decades – though that’s certainly true – it’s the idea of a joint endeavor. At the heart of board-staff relations, at the core of how we run our organizations, is the concept of collective shoulders to the wheel to get the job done.

And even more than the idea, that concept of collective associations – is the feeling of shared purpose and collaboration.

It’s exciting, it’s affirming, and it’s reinforcing. I’m not in this alone – we’re all pulling the cart along, together.


Nothing brings that home more than sliding into home on a special event.

The whole office is working late. People are taking on responsibilities that “aren’t my job” to help each other out. Board members are responding to emails within seconds, even generating an-idea-a-minute to help the engine along.

I know I’m using a lot of movement metaphors here, but that’s what it feels like – we’re being swept along by a collective force that’s far, far stronger than any one of us doing our jobs in isolation.

And the question post-event?

How to keep that collective energy going, albeit at a lower pitch, to keep the communal strength of purpose and lightning-pitch clarity about goals that we experienced with the event.

Stay tuned…

The Communal Moment

My family went to the Rockaways yesterday.

Not to sunbathe, or to surf the waves – but to hand out food and deliver blankets.

It’s not something we usually do on a Saturday, but all of New York is engaged, it seems, in a collective effort to lift each other up.

Hey, there’s 8 million of us here in the City – if we each hauled out a day of muck from a basement, we’d clear out a ton of garbage (or more – and I’m sure there’s more).

So welcome to our post-Sandy recovery.

But as a nonprofit professional, nay as a fundraising professional, I have to step back from the muck and ask: What does this mean for the nonprofits in New York – both now, and going forward?

Well, by the way I titled this blog, you can see what I think is the “seize the message” takeaway.

This is, indeed, a communal moment. A moment in time when everyone – from the Mayor and United Way to churches, synagogues, mosques, activist groups, traditional charities, even large corporations – are all mobilizing ways to help.

It’s a moment of New York City-neighborliness – where Team Ralph Lauren sends a group of 30-somethings to clean up for a day, and Times Up sends bicyclists to deliver supplies when cars can’t get through. Where everyone is finding their own way to help; and everyone is thinking collectively that it’s each of our own personal responsibility to help.

There’s no turning away, like the appeals we get in the mail that we don’t even open. No, this is a zeitgeist moment, a barn-raising moment – of taking responsibility for each other as citizens of the same city, or even the same world.

And isn’t that, at the heart, what all nonprofits are about?

Working to further a social good, not just a personal gain?

We at Cause Effective have been thinking a lot about this, and about how nonprofits can use this outpouring of collective responsibility to further fundraising for Sandy-related relief work – and also to extend our sense of communal accountability post-Sandy.

Stay tuned…

Why Nonprofits Matter: A Reminder

I am writing this via candlelight. But my heart is lit with awe.

At the collective spirit of people to help each other, and at the nonprofits who have mobilized deep in their communities, their neighboring communities, and communities clear across the country, to pitch in.

Of course it's not just nonprofits. This photo is from a neighborhood restaurant which cooked pizzas in its coal oven by flashlight for a neighborhood starved for hot food. And reminders of the generosity of the human spirit abound, certainly in disasters but in the everyday as well.

But the very nature of a nonprofit - organized not-for-profit but in service of the common good - means the helping of others is at its very core. And we certainly saw that after Sandy - from Brooklynites helping Brooklynites to list serves that placed volunteers where they were most needed.

Our own New York State governor said it best:

“New York has one of the largest and most sophisticated non-profit sectors in the country and as we recover from Hurricane Sandy, this sector will be a critical partner."

It was good to hear a political figure acknowledge the tremendous force of nonprofits for good, and what a critical partner they are in building and bolstering a civil society.

Now if only nonprofit funding streams reflected this acknowledgement of their critical importance to the civic sphere...

People Want to Help

The guests have arrived. The table isn't set, the salad vegs still need chopping, the hors d'oeuvres are yet to be set out. What to do?

Ask for help.

Usually, the guests are happy to comply, if they're given a specific task. Jane gets busy setting out cheese and crackers, Andrew starts cutting up carrots, and Nina distributes silverware among the place settings. In an instant, they're co-conspirators, part of the team making the evening happen. Though guests, they've turned from "they" into "we."

There's a lesson here for nonprofits.

I'm thinking specifically about boards, although the lesson could apply to all volunteers (and unwitting would-be/will-be volunteers.) It has to do with the comfort of specificity.

If you ask someone to help, but can't tell them a specific task, they're left on their own to figure it out. Maybe they'll realize the table has no knives, and maybe they'll guess if you're having steak that you need knives. And maybe they'll ask where the knives are and try to divine your (the host's) intentions. But that's a lot of maybes - and a lot of guesswork - on the guest's part to join the team.

The same is true in the boardroom. "Who wants to help with the gala?" is a pretty open-ended question. While you may think the response is a simple hand raised to say "me," the fact is that the hand-raiser has had to do a wild series of guesses and calculations to estimate what their "yes" actually means, and if they're up to the ill-defined job. Their "yes" might or might not refer to the same job you were thinking they were volunteering for - a miscommunication that can lead to ill-matched expectations and, in fact, failures of execution and resentment that can KO a volunteer or board member's enthusiasm for being of service to the organization overall.

The other response to the "Who wants to help with the gala?" open-ended question is...silence. Dead silence, and a changed subject. Because it sounds huge, whatever it is - or it MIGHT be huge - and nobody sane's going to take that on. Ever have that happen in a board meeting?

But "Sally, would you help publicize the gala to your women's club?" - now there's a task that Sally can agree to, knowing what she's taking on. And it's a hop, skip and jump from successful completion of that task to doing more publicity and indeed overall ticket marketing, because we all know that success breeds confidence and more success... and a greater appetite for taking things on.

Calling a Lifeline

I don't know everything.

Heck, there are times the world is moving so fast it feels like I barely know anything relevant to this new-ish century.

So I have my "gurus" I call, everything from HR to social media to IT. Many of these folks offer me their expertise on a voluntary basis - their way of contributing to a better world.

I started thinking more about this when I realized that I, myself, serve as a life-line to several nonprofit leaders, on fundraising and board relations.

It's the "I think I know what to do but maybe my thinking is a little skewed so I'll run it by Cause Effective" school of thought.

And, surprise (!) our clients' thinking is often a little skewed - they're too down in the trenches to have the right perspective. "My board member wants to weigh in on the invites for the house party, but she's not even the host and it's really slowing down the process" went one lament.

The lifeline's answer? "Be glad she's interested enough to take the time - it's a hop skip and jump from there to making sure the invitations go to some of her pals, too."

Another recent query? "Do I really need to mail-merge all my appeal letters if I hand-write on them?"

Lifeline answer? "Depends on how much money you want out of the folks you’re writing to. If it's enough that it reflects a real personal commitment to your agency, you'd better honor that sentiment with personalization choices all the way down the line."

Don’t we all have that with someone? From asking advice on how a dress fits, or a tie is knotted, to how the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted on fundraising-related matter.

The outside eye, the lifeline…

Breaking It Down

We get asked a lot to help groups figure out how to make more money from what they’ve been doing for years.

Of course there are a lot of reasons why appeals and events and other types of fundraising efforts stagnate (or slip) – but there’s a common strategy to looking at how to shake it up and invest new energy in it profitably.

And that starts with breaking down the big number. Someone came in last week with a Spring auction that nets $43,000.

More or less, every year. Now this is a group in a low-income neighborhood, so that’s not too bad. But they have parents sending their kids from all over the city to their programs, so I had a feeling there might be more there there.

I started by asking how much came from ticket sales, how much from the live auction, and how much from the silent auction. Then I went further – how many items went for over $500, for over $1,000, how many had multiple bidders, and so on? And I delved into ticket prices – were they asking everyone to give at the same level, were some people giving more, were those the same people bidding higher on auction items, were parents bringing other parents, how much were there “cliques” of attendees that could egg each other on? Etc.

I was looking for capacity, and for motivation – and for which leads seemed promising if we put more staff resources into pushing them. In other words, if there were three sets of parents who brought grandparents who were high bidders: what were they bidding on; could we feature those items in emails to parents with a “FORWARD ME” button; and could we build in a “3rd Generation” component to spur others to come forward like these folks had?

But just knowing that the event brought in $43,000 wouldn’t have revealed the data that allowed me to suggest this component. It took – breaking it down.

Who Speaks

It matters, a lot.

Whether board members present the latest financials at the board meeting, or the CFO carries that portion of the meeting.

Whether board members discuss amongst themselves what they’re going to do to build up attendance at the annual benefit.

Whether board members feel the “message” is one they can carry to their friends – and if they don’t get it, do they speak up and say so?

We all want to avoid the “nod-and-avoid” syndrome – where you have board members who genially agree with whatever’s on the table…and simultaneously check out.

One shortcut around this is a classic middle-school technique – a presentation from a classmate. It’s the same principle, really – you listen to your peers, you snooze to the teacher.

Another middle school staple to borrow? The working group. (A committee by another name.)

And when you combine the two – the working group stands up at the lectern to lead a discussion on the agency’s new messaging – well then the room comes alive.

It’s peer-to-peer, middle school style.

Is it that we haven’t progressed?

Or is it that these techniques call upon the verities of human nature, which surface in middle school (if not before) and stick around for life…?

Development = Sales?

“You wouldn’t try to sell a product without an adequate sales team, would you?”

That’s the analogy a board member put out, as he tried to convince his organization to hire an additional development staffer.

It was an interesting thought – that posited the development department as the organization’s advance team, and the group’s real-world impact as an item to be sold to people just waiting to buy something they hadn’t known they needed.

Well, sure. Sorta.

And yet – it made me uneasy.

Not the aspect that posited that it takes staff to position and support an organization’s fund-seeking visibility/viability.

But the part that implied that staff itself were the “sales team” masterminding a pitch to an unsuspecting public.

Maybe I’m naïve in thinking of fundraising as a higher calling, but I see it as partnering with people of good will to help the world rise to a better place. There’s an element of sales, sure, because that’s the tools you need to get the job done. But at the core is a fierce dedication to mission, by all means necessary. At the core, it’s not about finding people who need/will purchase your wares – it’s about saving the world and bringing us all along with you.

But in any case, your development department is not your sales team. Your board is. The development department supplies the tools, but the board – and committee members, volunteers, other donors – are the ones doing the listening that allows the organization to close the sale.

OK, I said it. I guess there is more than a little element of sales here. But it’s a means, not the end.

Moving Raw Ideas Around – or Editing as Fundraising

Spent a day editing various documents and realized, for each of them, that the ideas were all there – just jumbled together. 

Some of my work was inventing an outline system that separated big ideas from means.  That ordered recommendations so that a followed b.  That made sure, to get down to a level of detail, that the break on the first page happened at a point that the reader had been given enough intriguing “meat” to make the effort to turn the page.

Presentation details, sure.  But essential to content perception – yep.

And why is this relevant for fundraising?

Because when you’re asking someone else to invest in your ideas, you’d better be clear on what’s first and what follows.  The higher the stakes, the more your vision and clarity about what it’d take to get there, matters.

There’s lots of great vision out there.  We see nonprofits all the time with fantastic visions.  Hey – there are 30,000 nonprofits in New York City, and hundreds of thousands more in the rest of the country – and many have fabulous visions…especially those led by fresh founders!

The real separator is those that have the drive to adapt to the real world and figure out what it takes to move that vision the first steps into fruition.

Moving raw ideas into background and foreground.  Editing as the process of opening up vision into a real plan to move forward.

The red pencil as a primary tool of fundraising.

Get your sharpeners out…

The People Who Surround You

“Make a list,” I said.

Not a list of donors, or potential donors, or even potential board members, which was the subject at hand.

A list of people who know people (not to quote Barbra Streisand or anything) – and who think your work is great.

It was amazing how the names, and descriptions of relationships, began to flow, once the imperative/constraint of naming people who could be asked for something now, was off the table.

And so affirming to discover how many people surrounded this organization, and the people who worked for it, and cared.

When a group is facing financial difficulties (and who isn’t, now-a-days), we tend to get hunkered down. No matter the latest economic trends in the news, we feel that somehow, the situation is our fault. If we’d been smarter, better managers, more connected, made wiser choices, our nonprofits could have been nimbler, had more options, been more resourceful.

But reaching out is, in fact, resourceful.

And while the instructions had been to create a list of people who cared, the idea was not that we’d never ask them for help – just that we’d “give” them something first. The magic of witnessing work that changes lives. The breathtaking opportunity to be part of that change moment (we asked them to take part in a youth outing). The camaraderie of doing this alongside someone they respected and liked.

A moment of meaning.

The strategy will get played out over the Fall, so we’ll see where we are when it comes time to actually ask some of these individuals to serve on the board. “Now that you’ve seen our work firsthand, and been part of making it happen, might you step up to a greater place of responsibility for it?” is the planned pitch.

But even before that “consummation” close, the very listing of those who care, and the realization that we are surrounded by those who are – has started this group on the road to revival.

We get so scrunched over, scrutinizing the numbers, that we forget we’re surrounded by a universe that wants us to succeed. And is just waiting for us to ask them to help us.

The Moment of Re-Think

Maybe it’s because I’ve been on vacation, but I’ve had several moments of “re-think the plan” since I’ve been back. And so I’ve been realizing how useful that can be.

One was for an organization whose development director is taking another job. Of course there’s the race-to-replace; but we spent some time on the phone talking through what kind of a development department they’d need in 3-5 years (as opposed to what they’d home-grown through the skills and contacts they had on hand). By the end of the call, the job description they were thinking through – indeed the very job of development for this organization – had shifted. The way they might most profitably spend their staff time and energy had evolved.

New possibilities had opened up.

Another was for a nonprofit – like so many others these days – approaching the end of its fiscal year with a noticeable budget gap. Instead of just re-shaking the same trees, we took the occasion to rethink the whole formula – the relationship to the board, the percentage of earned and unearned income the group was striving for, even the timing of when the group was aiming for economic independence (that holy grail when expenses equal business-as-usual income). We ended up creating a 3-year-framework to climb towards that mountain, and the group is sounding out its board to get buy-in (and start-up funding) to move towards that trajectory.

A different game plan.

The final “re-think the plan” moment was for Cause Effective ourselves. We’re coming up on celebrating our 30th Anniversary, and we’ve had trouble settling on the right space to hold our celebration. Last week we broke through our miasma around a sea of options, none of them perfect (what is?), changed the date, and signed a contract. Done! (and on to the next decision-point…)

What links these disparate occurrences is an out-of-the-weeds moment of clarity – when we pick our heads up from doggedly following the plan, and choose an alternate route.

These days, that can be a really important moment in the day-in, day-out struggle of running a nonprofit.

Getting To Know You…

“I’m a great Italian cook.”

“I swim across rivers.”

“After dropping out of college, I went back and got two master’s degrees.”

“I lived in the bush in Africa for a year.”

So began a board-staff retreat we led last weekend – with similar reports the week before, and the week before that.

It’s the summer…time for retreats. And time for slowing down, enough to get to know your fellow nonprofit travelers – as people.

The prompt? A standard: “Tell us something personal that no-one in this room knows about you. Something you’re proud of.”

The result? A roomful of people who appreciate each other a little more, who have a little more respect for the out-of-the-box individual before them.

Sure, we’re all here to further the mission. And we all bring professional strengths to the table – comfort with finances, an understanding of risk, instinct for what makes a good story, a group of friends who show up when we ask. But we’re also in it for the juice…the ease, comfort and interest we get from each other’s company.

Boards of Directors work well when people are glad to see each other, when the pleasure and respect is mutual and helps tide the group over the terrain when times are tough.

Well times are certainly tough enough, now-a-days.

The personal…is the professional…is what helps us stick around.

A Signature of One’s Own

There’s in the box – a gala dinner-dance with choice of chicken or salmon entrée (or, these days, no choice).

And there’s out of the box – a theater party with the opportunity to converse afterwards with the playwright about the issues (relevant to the nonprofit’s mission) that are brought up by the play.

And then…there are the groups that go above and beyond to create an event that’s all their own.

Such is the Mermaid Parade, back in the day when it was a small civic-booster event for Coney Island USA.

(Photo credit: Maia D'Egidio) 

Such is Transportation Alternative’s 100-mile bicycling fest on New York City Streets – the NYC Century Bike Tour.

(Photo Credit: NYC Century Bike Tour) 

And to join these once-in-a-lifetime who-else-could-have-done-this adventures, such is the Brooklyn Ballet’s “Baseball Meets Ballet At the Brooklyn Cyclones.”

A History of Ballet in Nine Innings, performed in between the innings of a Brooklyn Cyclones game – the very definition of audacity, imagination, and a unique flavor reflecting and pushing at the boundaries of nonprofit identity.

And to top it all off: “Any fan who wears a tutu to the ballpark that evening will receive a voucher for a free hot dog and soft drink.”

Who could resist?

Going all the way. Beyond a wild and wonderful sounding evening, there’s something important about individuality and embracing, even exaggerating who you are – to create a signature that’s all your own.

One of the mantras of event planning is that “People come to nonprofit special events because of who invited them – not because they thought that dinner and a speech from your board chair was a good use of their Thursday evening.”

But, sometimes, a nonprofit develops an event that so reflects their identity and extends their core strengths that people do, in fact, come for the event, for the distinctive experience – and learn about the nonprofit in the balance.

Strive for it. A true reflection of your unique identity.

It might, just might, have legs…

Summer Retreat: Joint or Solo?

It’s summer…time for the ½ day board retreat.

Or, in some cases, the all-day staff retreat.

And (least usually), the joint board-staff extended session.

We facilitate a bunch of these each year. As a result we’ve become reflective about how this partnership works best.

It’s tricky. On the one hand the board needs to bond – to gel as a group and not depend on staff to prop them up. Looking at each other in the room without staff present can open up the space for board members to ask questions they feel inhibited about voicing with staff present – but which may, in fact, be inhibiting not just their curiosity but also their whole-hearted participation in being an advocate for the organization (with all that means).

And staff, for their part, need a space to get into extended implementation mapping – i.e. developing a marketing strategy for a new initiative and drafting outcomes, brainstorming partners, assigning tasks. A space in which board member input is needed for selected segments, but not to dwell in the weeds that are necessary to get the job done with accountability.

Yet there’s also an extraordinary synergy when board and staff members come together to bring their varied perspectives to bear on an institutional challenge/opportunity.

We worked on a retreat last week in which they managed to combine all three.

The first half was board (with the ED in the room). The focus was general, on looking at the overall board responsibilities, what this board was doing well, what it’d put in progress over the past year, and what they knew was yet to come. And, of course, what that meant for the individual board members and for new board member recruitment.

Then the group had lunch – and kicked out the staff. There’s nothing like eating to bring a group together socially, but the meal conversation veered naturally from kids and vacations into more substantial questions that some of the newer board members had – which actually opened up space for some of the more long-serving folks to also voice their concerns. There was definitely a different tone in the room, with only the board members (and me as facilitator) there – not one of criticism, but one of “we” – as in “we” as a group need to make sure “we” are exercising our responsibility since “we” are entrusted with holding this gem of a mission in “our” hands.

Simultaneously, the senior staff was upstairs getting briefed on the earlier session’s results and talking about their own concerns.

The day ended with a board staff partnership – in committees. Each committee chair was paired with a staff member in that area, and an additional board member or two, to create a map. On the table: what the committee’s general mandate was, what the coming year’s most urgent areas of focus were, and naming the next three action steps that the committee needed to undertake after walking out of this room. (We also asked them to brainstorm on who they might also need at the table, to the end of recruiting additional committee members to help get the job they’d just defined done.)

It was a nice mixture of all three forms of leadership – and a productive use of a lovely summer day...

Taking the Donor Point of View

It’s not about us.

Driven home to me the other day when I was coaching a board member on “how to talk to a potential donor.”

It’s not about the organization.

It’s about what that person standing in front of you, cares about.

What about taking the tack – instead of communicating YOUR impact – of communicating THEIR impact? 

What they can help fund.  What they can make happen.  What THEIR legacy is. 

We all want to leave a footprint.

But the donor conversation isn’t about our mark – it’s about the change in the world the donor leaves behind.

This is a profound 180-degree turn, that we need to recalibrate in all our printed materials, e-newsletters, and cocktail-party chit-chat.

Not what do I do?

Rather –

What do you care about?

Getting it Wrong

I was sitting with a new executive director last week, making suggestions that wouldn’t work.

Which she found invaluable.

And not because she wanted an ego boost by hearing me make mistakes!

What she found so helpful was the process of thinking through what a donor might be interested in and how to figure that out.

Sure, I’d get it wrong.  I don’t know her organization all that well, and I sure as heck don’t know her donors all that well.  But I do know how to strategize about what’s in it for the donor, and what would give meaning to them in their affiliation with the organization.

As I explained to her, it’s like a puzzle, and we keep thinking about ways to put the pieces together till they unlock the relationship to get us to the next level.

Advice, intro gifts, door-opening, rolling up one’s sleeves – there’s lots of ways to move a prospect onto our team.  And that’s the key – being on the same side of the table in making the world a healthier, more creative, or more equitable place.

Once you’ve got that positioning, it’s just a matter of time (and playing your cards right).

So I laid down the wrong cards – and in so doing, taught her the rules of the game.

Margin Time

As Cause Effective drafts its FY 13 budget, I started thinking about the importance of margin-space – those places in the budget that can be shrunk (or expanded) as needed to help maintain equilibrium.  For example, consultant fees…staff lunches…office spruce-ups…etc.  Those “soft costs” that make the machine move ahead more smoothly, but that can be cut back in hard times without sacrificing essential service.

I started wondering about applying this concept to core workload…and in particular, to the development workload.

We have the hard costs – the development deadlines that are essential to the big buckets of income that carry us. And then there are the soft costs – the cultivation of potential major donors, taking board members out for breakfast, updating the data base, doing the extra research. The stuff that leads somewhere – if we have the time to put into it.

Let alone the thinking time.

Is there a formula for how much “soft time” to leave in the schedule?  And a consequence for not doing so (besides stress and lack of sleep)?

The fact is, the “hard time” tasks get done.  That’s what’s meant by “not dropping balls” in a development job description.

But making sure that opportunities appear and can be seized upon – that’s “soft time.”

Yet so often, that’s the space that’s transformational.

Managing Up

Keep ‘em happy.

Or at the least, help them do their job.

Ever since I got my first full-time job in my early twenties, I’ve followed the principle of letting my boss see the “good job” I’m doing.  It helps build trust, has been my philosophy – if they think I’m competent, they’re more likely to let me do the job my way and not be all over me.

In our coaching practice, we see this in its rawest state with founders…and development directors.  Development directors get paid a good amount of money, proportionally, in many a founder-led organization.  To get the founder to the point where he or she doesn’t get so frustrated they decide “I could do this better myself” (a thought always lurking just below the surface for a founder) – a development director has to build up trust, with a big quick win.  Or two, or three.

Interestingly enough, this also works for board members and executive directors.  As an ED of one organization and a board chair of another, I know how frustrating board service can be.  You want to help, yet you’re not right there.  You have all the right intentions, but you’re on the outside looking in.  The stress can be pretty debilitating – and it’s pretty much out of our control. In other words, it’s not an easy job.

So it’s the least we can do, those of us on the ground, to pass along encouraging news as well as warnings of an impending budget gap (and goodness knows there’s a lot of that around!).

Motivation by encouragement.  When I’m on the receiving end, I’m pretty grateful.  And what could be better than giving your board the impression (which is hopefully correct) that they’re on a winning team?  

Making a difference.  That’s what they’re in it for.  That’s what we’re in it for. 

An optimist always sees the bright side.  A pessimist sees the dark edges.  But a smart manager finds the light and spreads it around.  Giving us all the strength to continue.

The Expression on His Face

It happened again.   In fact, twice in the past week.

The first time it happened to a CEO whose board we’re working with to get them to step up to the plate in a big way, fundraising-wise.

We were leading them through some “what’s the value-added of this board” discussions, that sort of soul-searching stuff.  As the board was coming to its own understanding of what the mandate ahead of it was, I could see a number of expressions pass over CEO’s face.  Boredom, exasperation, ennui.  Even a flash of anger as the board went through the “We don’t know enough about what this organization does…” litany – and I could just see his thought bubble:  “But I send you oceans of stuff, all the time!”

And then the change moment happened – and his jaw dropped.  When one of the board members offered to throw a house party.  And another volunteered to make a standing appointment on his work calendar for an hour a week allocated to calls and/or visits on agency’s behalf.  And a third said (and I quote):  “We’ve got to get on the stick, folks!  Who’s with me on this?” – and you could see heads nodding all around the room.

And now it’s like the real estate saying – follow-up, follow-up, follow-up.  (And I mean on the staff side.)  This CEO has to go through the same transformation as we saw pass through his face – from sitting on his hands waiting to see if the board will come through (or fail “as usual”), to seeing a moment of change and moving to support it whole hog.  We talk a lot at Cause Effective about moving toward the light – discovering the positive in the threads around you (especially in board behavior) and thrusting them forward.  Behaving “as if.”

Well, as I said it happened twice.  In fact, the second time was me, with my board.  They were having quite a lively discussion, and I was trying to remain silent.  But then one board member looked at the expression flitting across my face (I’ve never had a good poker face) and called me on it: “Judy, what are you thinking about all this?”

And I had about 3 seconds to recharge from doubt, thinking about the daily workload and other administrative concerns, to “look at these guys coming through!”  From staff supervisor to institutional leader, in other words.

Love those board members!  The good ones really keep you honest…and performing as your best self.

What Happened

"He Said-She Said."

I've read board minutes where my brain goes into whiplash trying to keep up with the back and forth.

"Decisions Were Made."

I've read other sets of minutes where I'm left scratching my head, trying to figure out how a meeting in which two decisions were made took two hours.

The answer is somewhere in between.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that minutes should not only reflect core decisions, but should also serve to keep board members who couldn't attend in the loop.  There's always someone who couldn't make the meeting and the notes should serve to bring them along, both so they don't drop off the face of the earth and also so they don't come to the next meeting trying to reinvent the wheel (i.e., remake the same decision again because they weren't part of the process of thinking it through).  Minutes can bring the process to those who weren't in the room, and keep them involved.

But minutes are also public documents and so shouldn't reveal individual viewpoints or every last sordid detail.  In other words, due diligence but not bickering.  They should be clear and transparent – and should reveal reflection, consideration, and solid, thoughtful decision-making. 

Good minutes are teaching documents, creating coherence out of a group of disparate individuals.  There's a craft – beyond the tape recorder – to transforming notes into minutes that move an organization forward.

Mission and Means

I’ve been thinking about where money and mission coincide.  Or don’t.

We’ve been working with a client that is wrestling with finance questions around its business model.

But, really, these are mission-based questions – who do they serve, what’s their core expertise, and what is the meaning of why they’re here on God’s green earth.

Or something like that.

It’s not just about who they charge for what.

And it’s been the board pushing the staff – to look beyond – that’s forced the issue.

To look beyond the budget numbers, this year’s and next.  To look beyond the profit and loss, the cash flow knot in the stomach, the accounting tricks that make them look stable.

And to look towards mission.

“It’s not about the market – it’s about the mission.”  I listened to the board chair say that to the executive director, and I was once again reminded of the power and necessity of the board’s point of view.

But how does this come up for “fundraising consultants”?

We’re often called in to help an organization fundraise around program assumptions.  But sometimes, a lack of financial support for a program is, in fact, a sign of larger mission drift.  Programs that might have been started because there was a ready financial market, are now orphaned without funding and without a strong enough tie to mission.

And it takes a board member – who’s not bound to the day-to-day grindstone – to point it out.

Is it mission?  Or is it means?

If it’s mission, a fundraiser can find a way to sell it.  But if it’s means, it may not have the significance, the weight, to be carried.  It may, paradoxically, be too “light-weight” – too far from the core – to be saleable from a fundraising point of view.

Easy To Slip By…

My emails come in thick and furious, every day except Friday.

I try to reply in a timely fashion, but…benefit coming up, website redesign, kids gone beserk…you name it, it’s coming at us from all directions.

Which makes it even more important to stop, once every week or two, and go through to catch all you’ve missed.

Especially the thank yous.
It’s so easy to focus on the balls that will get dropped, essential projects that are stuck, meetings needing to get scheduled, all that muck.
But what about the simple courtesies that make life pleasant – and work life even more so?

The secret is…it’s also easy to catch up.
To send a “So sorry this is belated, but I’ve been thinking about how great it was when you…” email that is delightedly received, no matter what the timing.
To send a “Yes I’d love to get together when you’re in town, I was just wondering how you were…” message that reminds someone they haven’t fallen off your radar screen.

To slip in, as it were, a touch…of that human connection that makes our days just a little bit more enjoyable to get through.

I tend to do these sweeps over my email stream early in the morning, so that people get these messages before they’re too tired to see them amidst the barrage of all their email accumulation.


Well, I have to come clean.


I don’t do this sweep at that time of day for a strategic reason relating to the emails’ reception – I do it because that’s when I have the time to focus on this level of detail.


But it helps to start my day off sweet – as well as, hopefully, the day of the recipients.

Raising the Stakes

We just taught a full day seminar yesterday– on upgrading.

Deepening the relationship, we called it.

The message? It’s not about the money – it’s about the motivation.

What is the donor getting out of making the gift, and how can we strengthen that? How can we amplify the donor’s return on investment? How can we draw a donor closer to our impact, so that he or she sees firsthand how their gift is about making the future possible for these kids right before us, or these immigrants laboring to get ahead?

We spent a lot of time at the seminar today talking about transition moments.

From the first gift to the second. (The first gift is made for any number of reasons – it’s the second gift that signals an actual interest in your organization.)

The upgrade conversation, when we start to stand out from the pack.

The capital or “special” gift (I know, all gifts are special…) when we ask the donor to be thoughtful about their impact instead of simply giving from habit.

The take-a-way? There’s gold in these hills all around us. And sure we need to be mindful of adding new donors, but we get so fixated on “getting names” from our board members that we stop focusing so fiercely on mining the relationships that are already started.

It’s a partnership – we say that a lot. But for that to truly be the case, we need to consider our donors as our partners, as equals with interests, wishes, needs… and make choices with our time that support this partnership.

We need to upgrade our input, to upgrade their output.

The power of numbers

I was reminded again this week of the power of numbers to speak…loud and clear.

I’m talking about the gift range chart – that “it-doesn’t-add-up-if-it-doesn’t-add-up” tool that makes the equation between prospects and total raised, pretty darned clear.

In a gift range chart, you list how many gifts at $10,000 you expect, and put names next to them. Then you look at how many gifts at $5,000 you expect, and put names next to them. And so on and so on, down to the small gifts, where the actual names aren’t listed but the vehicles (such as the annual appeal) are, and the expected totals make rational sense with what you really expect to raise.

What we’ve seen happen again and again, is that once you put names next to the numbers…there’s a real sobering moment. In other words, the group of co-conspirators has put together a list that doesn’t, once it’s broken down, add up to the goal.

But the chart, and the numbers, tell that tale. You, as executive director, development director, board fundraising chair, whatever, don’t have to be the naysayer, cause the numbers do it for you.

With the right board members, once they see the numbers don’t add up to the total hoped for, they add some more prospects to the list – and you’re off to the races.

With board members who don’t rise to the challenge – well, at least you know you’re not going to raise it, cause you’re not going to raise it anyway…by wishful thinking. So you can adjust expenses, or do whatever you need to do – instead of getting to the end of a campaign and discovering “Oops, we’re $60,000 short of our goal!”

Numbers don’t lie. Well, sometimes they do, but a gift range chart speaks the truth.

The Day After

I have a new theory – that you can judge the success of a board meeting by the flurry of emails the day after.

It’s the holy grail – that our board members will be talking and listening to each other, not sitting passively by as staff drones on.

But it’s when that active inquiry spills over to their own time – personal time, work time – that you get board members thinking about the organization in the shower.

Owning its successes, its challenges, its path.

We had two board meetings in the past week where the emails just flew afterwards. More ideas people had to express, more questions to raise, more excitement to share.

That’s when you know it’s working.

Meeting Them ½ - Way

Well, let’s say, ¾ - way….

I’m talking about the idea that once board members get activated, it makes more work – for us, as staff.

We have to give them lists! We have to research options! We have to do the legwork! Yipes! We already have full-time-plus-plus-plus jobs…

It’s often true that once a board “catches fire” – the staff literally has to sprint to keep up with their enthusiasm. Board members get serious about asking other board members to bring personal friends to the benefit, and they start asking for info on how other organizations have transitioned a vendor-oriented event into one that feels appropriate for personal friends. They decide to run a family-oriented fundraiser, and ask for materials to be created. They brainstorm a Spring fundraising campaign, and ask for a wall-display to be created in the lobby.

All of these have direct returns for the dollars invested, so it’s easy to see the reward. But sometimes board members ask for info that isn’t so transparently remunerative. Like requesting data on economic trends in the neighborhood. Or 3-year projections of earned-to-contributed revenue. Or even past history of program graduates and “where they are now.”

But I was reminded of the necessity of all this – fundraising or not – when I was meeting recently with a group I’ve known for awhile, that’s really in trouble. A long-time funder suffered some extensive losses and pulled out, unexpectedly, contributing to a perfect storm that may leave them going under.

We’re helping them with scenarios, but the big question remains: Where’s the Board? Who’s the group sitting around the table, worrying this out? It’s just the founder, his devoted second-in-command, and one friend – and us. And that’s just not enough.

But the die was cast long ago, when the staff did it all, and the board – every once in a while – advised.

The moral? Be happy for a board that asks for work – and is ready to roll up their sleeves to deliver.

But we all knew that, right?

Focused on Meaning

“Focus us on the big picture” one of my fellow board members requested of the executive director. “I love your updates and I really feel like I know what’s going on – but what does it mean?”

It’s that step from the accumulation of information to the creation of meaning…what gives order to a set of random (or not so random) facts, so that we can use them to predict future conditions or behavior.

Are summer camp pre-enrollment fees up or down? That’s one set of information. Does the reason behind the rise mean that they will continue to go up or was it a blip due to non-recurrent circumstances? And if the circumstances could be recreated and even maximized further, is the organization planning to put more effort into generating that revenue? And if so what will that do to staffing, and to mission – will it detract from mission to be running more of a “business venture” or will it add to the organization’s ability provide more mission-based activities to those who can’t afford those fees?

You can see that the set of questions generated from a simple fact – registration income up or down – can lead an organization in many different directions. I believe it’s the executive director’s charge to help the board to contemplate those larger questions – and that it’s the board’s job to serve as thought partners to push the executive director, in fact, to ponder those larger questions.

That’s the board at its highest and best use.

And that’s the kind of board conversations, by the way, that keep attendance at board meetings high, and the board jazzed up, paradoxically, to do the “mundane” work of fundraising.

So often these days we see boards who want to be engaged, who understand their organizations are in perilous times – and who are relegated to “Show me the money” directives by the staff. But without ownership, without a sense of “agency” – fundraising is a mandate unconnected to real impact on the world.

As a board member, as a staff member interacting with board, as a consultant brought in to “fix” the board – it’s our job to craft that real job of the board, that of pondering the big questions…by how we shape and context the information we provide them.

The primary question is not: What?

It’s: So What?

When Board Members Lead…

It’s a delicate balance.

You want a board dynamic where board members are shooting forth ideas, taking initiative, signing on and signing up. Especially in fundraising.

But sometimes what they suggest isn’t practical, is way off the mark, or just simply won’t work.

Well, that’s easy enough to deflect by suggesting your board members engage in some feasibility outreach – talking to a few of the people who’d be critical to the successful implementation of their idea. Surveying the intended targets – it’s a great way to involve board members in hearing the lay of the land directly from the horse’s mouth (and in the process getting board members talking to donors/intended donors). Misconceptions fall by the wayside, and you’ve done nothing in the process to discourage board members’ enthusiasm (and sometimes they even get a better idea once they hear where prospects are really at!) .

But sometimes it’s not that board members are coming up with bad ideas – it’s the manner in which board members leap to action. Like the board member who takes on leadership of the development committee and comes to the next meeting with a fully-fleshed out fundraising plan for the rest of the board to take slots in.

That wouldn’t work if the staff simply handed a fundraising plan to the board to carry out – and it won’t work either if one board member merely gives assignments to the rest of the board members.

Ownership begets responsibility – word that were burned into my brain from my first nonprofit fundraising job. Those who are involved in coming up with an idea are the ones who feel most responsible for implementing it successfully. We take that to mean that board members have to have a hand in developing their fundraising plan of action – but sometimes the dynamic goes deeper. It’s board member(s) – not a board member. Process is a (not the only, but a) determinant of outcome.

The moral – don’t sit back in relief once you’ve got a take-charge fundraising committee leader, and assume that all will go well from here. Keep watching that dynamic – cause one leader and 12 passive not-quite-followers is better than a whole board of balking-fundraisers – but you’re not there yet.

The Moocher

I was reading a parenting column the other day about the “Mooching Parent.” The person who’s always sending her kid home with yours on a playdate – at the last minute. The one who never hosts a sleepover. The one who texts asking you to pick up their younger child as well as your child’s best friend.

The one who’s using every lifeline they’re offered, and more.

I started thinking about that in light of a conversation I had earlier this week with someone about my board.

I was asking this person to find me someone with expertise in finance, and explained that I had one board member I leaned on heavily in communications, another who had expertise in strategic planning, another in HR, etc. How, really, I had a board of thought partners, each with their own area of expertise.

And that, together, we powered this nonprofit into much greater impact, in the manner of a nonprofit with a much larger staff.

We do that with volunteers, too – rope them in to help add to our professionalism in all sorts of realms, from social media to office systems to financial analysis.

It takes a village, to haul out a very tired phrase.

But for nonprofits, so true. Not mooching –corralling.

For the public good.

Selling Shoes

I’ve been thinking lately about the part of running a nonprofit that’s like running a business.

Well, actually, that is running a business.

With receivables, and getting the best price, and employee loyalty, and new lines of business – all that great stuff we thought we were getting away from when we went into social change instead of selling shoes.

I used to wonder, when I was a kid, how my cousins could go into selling shoes. Weren’t they concerned about making an impact on the world, doing something for people, I thought at the tender age of 10 and 12 and 14 (not knowing the term “social good”)?

And then at some point someone took me aside and took my self-righteousness down a notch by explaining that people needed something to put on their feet, and so even people who sell shoes are giving something back to the world.

Got it.

But there’s something very pure – tricky, but pure – about selling a product to people who pay if they like it. You hit the market right, you make money. Of course there’s advertising and capitalization and all that jazz, but how refreshing to have your popularity reflected by sales resulting in income!

(As opposed to the nonprofit economy where the product may be highly lauded by those it’s intended for – but they’re not the deep pockets that pay for the service. Welcome to two, even three or more, masters.)

How do you navigate all those imperatives, those drives and needs and social pulls – not least of which is the relentless mandate to make payroll, every two weeks?

Well, obviously (duh) – fundraising…

Welcome to our world – suppliers of social good and providers of a roof over our heads.

A Nose for Trouble

I’ve been following the Susan G. Komen Foundation debacle, as I’m sure everyone concerned with nonprofit governance has been. There’s been millions of words cast into the blogosphere about it, but the failure I’m thinking about has to do with the board’s job to sniff out trouble – to act as a brake on staff’s impulse to fix a problem with an immediate solution…that seems reasonable at the time.

Okay, here’s what I mean.

Laying aside the failure of the Komen Foundation’s value judgments – and the wrongheadedness of those value assumptions are, I admit, hard to put aside – the Komen Foundation’s leadership made a series of decisions based on a spectacular misreading of public temperament. To wit, if you can believe the backpedaling as the decision was reversed:

1) They thought that hiring an avowed partisan political figure (Karen Handel) would help them make headway in state Republican administrations (and goodness knows, there’s plenty of those) – but not affect their policies otherwise

2) They thought that including Planned Parenthood among their grantees was causing more controversy than would casting Planned Parenthood adrift

3) They thought that a decision of this magnitude could be released unnoticed

Wow.

And those are just some of the more egregious decisions they made along the way that seem to make no sense from a “What were they thinking?” smack-on-the-head, what-planet-are-they-living-on perspective.

In retrospect.

But isn’t that what the Board of Directors is for – to provide that retrospect in more-or-less real time – to serve as a brake on staff assumptions, be a sounding board, give feedback, all those other Governance 101 principles?

Or, in other words – to have a “nose for trouble” and bring the community’s perspective to decisions that make a whole lot of sense (OK, some sense) from a narrow, immediate, running-the-store stance?

Here’s another example of that “nose for trouble” real-world board perspective, from my own board service.

I’m chair of a arts community center with a flourishing afterschool music and arts program. So flourishing that during the prime hours of 3-6 pm, every inch of space in the school is booked, even to the extent that offices are commandeered for violin lessons, there’s a piano tucked into the staff lounge, etc. Get more space – you say – well we did that, and other than 3-6 pm Monday-Thursday we’ve got plenty of room to grow.

Under a mandate from the board to squeeze out more earned revenue wherever we were leaving money on the table, the staff came up with the idea of “value pricing” the time of the lessons. In other words, during prime time, lessons would cost more. Makes sense, from a business perspective…

But from a community-relations perspective, a potential disaster! Warning bells went off in my head: “Rich kids get preference for afterschool program, poor kids have to miss dinner to learn” – newspaper headlines like that. I voiced my concern at a board meeting, and we decided to table the solution for now – and to run it by a cross section of the community if we did decide to institute it someday, to see if the firestorm I was afraid of would erupt or if it would be a yawner (as in “Sure, do what you can do to increase your revenue as long as there’s space somewhere for all our children to learn.”)

Where were those warning bells among the Susan G. Komen Foundation board members?

Or were they so blinded with admiration for a founder that’d taken the organization from a promise 20 years ago to a fundraising juggernaut that’s generated over $1.9 billion…that they ignored what their common sense – their nose for trouble – told them?

Whose Idea?

The Duty of Loyalty – that’s an old one, engraved in law and “best practices” board manuals from fifty years back.

The way I’d always heard it explained to me, it requires that board members put the interests of the corporation – the nonprofit – above all others, including their own.

Or that of other boards they’re on.

Tricky, for folks on multiple boards, if the organizations’ spheres of activity intersect at all.

I saw this come down last week, when a board member who’d been a driving force in promoting an annual Chili-Tasting Festival posited the idea that the Festival should be spun off – and he should run it.

Well he was right, the Festival had become too big an idea for the nonprofit organization to house. When it was five home cooks facing off, that was one thing. Now it was 25 chefs from around the country and growing, and producing the Festival – though profitable – was draining the resources of the hunger advocacy organization, called EAT (Everyone Advocates Together).

So here’s the dilemma. The board member proposed to run the Festival as a separate organization, and use the proceeds – the surplus – as a donation to EAT. Sounds good, right?

But there’s a few complicating factors. For one, EAT was about to see its brand equity, the sweat it had put in, the loyalty of the event volunteers, the interest of the event’s sponsors…evaporate without a value given to that. Without having EAT’s name on it, all of this intellectual property and relationships were being transferred over to the Festival without a second glance. (Here’s where a loud buzzer should sound – WRONG!)

But it was the board member’s idea and it wouldn’t have happened – or grown the way it did – without him! was the thinking.

Well, sure, but the board member had worked on the Festival as part of EAT. So his labor…and thinking…and the contacts he’d made…were under the umbrella of EAT, and remained the “property” of EAT.

This concept is clear and wide-spread when it comes to employees – what you create as part of your job becomes the property of the organization you’re working for unless agreed otherwise – but it applies to board members as well.

Let alone that if EAT were to spin this off, and the new group hired someone to run it, would this board member have been the best person for the job if there was an open job search? Maybe yes, or maybe no…

SO… the duty of loyalty. The obligation to ensure that the interests of the nonprofit corporation come first. You can see how this gets kind of messy!


PS The answer was, to have EAT co-sponsor the Festival with the new entity – and the board member stepped off the EAT board to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest (one of the other guiding tenets of board service).

Making It Fun

Cause Effective hosted our “It’s A New Year” party last week. A few years ago my board members protested too loudly when we were setting the date for a December holiday get-together, and asked if we could push the annual gathering till January. I complied, and we’ve never looked back.

So here we all were at the lovely Pescatore Restaurant, on the Upper East Side. We invite staff, former staff, board, former board, spouses, and a few long-time organizational “friends” – about 25 were planning to come, when all was said and done. We create nametags, but really, it’s a gang of insiders, most of whom have known each other for years.

The food was delicious, the wine kept flowing, but I was struck, most of all, by the squeals of delight every time someone new walked into the room. The people at this party – board members, mostly – were really glad to see each other, and to see the staff. Spouses got to catch up with each other’s doings, people shared news about kids and jobs and the state of the world – it was a chance to let down our professional divisions and share our commonality as humans.

Three days later, I think we’re all still carrying the glow.

We spend every day doing good in the world, or trying, at least. The warmth in this room was testament to the fact that the human connection, the pleasure in each other’s company, is as important a factor in where we put our energy, in how we choose to do good, as any rationale based on political values about the world.

Congeniality, collegiality, cordiality – not just the “c” list in a thesaurus…

They’re the hidden gems, the glue that makes slogging through the hard times of nonprofit governance/management (and lord knows there’s been a lot of them these past few years!) worthwhile.

Will I Be Noticed?

Remembering back to my college days, I was thinking about one semester when I made the mistake of signing up for an art history class at 8 am. Dark room, big lecture hall, slides, early morning…you get the picture. I just couldn’t stay awake.

I’m sure I was not alone.

And I’m equally sure that no one noticed.

At the last possible moment I had a fit of conscience and dropped the class. Nowadays I might have kept going and learned the material from the Web.

But the question at hand is: who paid attention? Who knew I was there in body but (truly) not in mind?

I’ve come across a few boards lately with that anonymity issue – or perceived anonymity. One board is pretty large, and another is actually quite small – but I can sense in all of them a feeling, on board members’ parts, that nobody will really notice if they’re not coming up to the plate.

So they come to meetings late because they don’t feel essential to the first half (or any) of the meeting. They don’t respond to group emails because they’re just one of the names on the distribution list. They don’t read the materials and they don’t ask the questions, because they know you (or someone, at any rate), has it in hand.

Anything familiar about this?

We’ve all been in situations where we’re happy to have someone else carry the ball. It’s rational – who wouldn’t be?

So what makes people step up to the plate?

In a nutshell – the attention (and praise) of their peers.

Does that happen on autopilot?

No.

It needs to be built, brick-by-brick. In day-by-day groundwork that gets volunteers, especially, to know in their gut that they’re a critical link in the chain.

That if they don’t show up, with full presence, that they’re breaking that promise.

That they’re letting other people down.

And that by their actions – or lack thereof – your clients, your organization, your mission, will lose.

Strategizing…Stargazing

Serendipity.

Sometimes that’s all it takes – a misguided spell-correct – to put a different angle on the task at hand.

In the frenzy of post-holiday emails, I dashed off a note asking someone for help strategizing on an upcoming grant deadline.

Well I guess strategizing isn’t a proper English word, though I certainly use it a lot. So in the infinite wisdom of the spell-checking gods, it was changed, I was going too fast, and there it was.

Need some stargazing with you…

Who wouldn’t respond positively to that invitation?

But beyond the chuckle, it brought me to reflection.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with our strategizing – we’re too busy plotting a route between the trees.

Maybe what’s really needed is stargazing – lifting up our sights to imagine what’s not right in front of our eyes.

Maybe that’s what’s meant by leadership, what was so paradigm-busting about Steve Jobs (never mind his parsimoniousness in denying employees matching gifts).

The best ideas don’t come from the trees…we all know that.

But do we need to go on a 10-day vision quest to absorb the stars?

I feel a New Year’s resolution coming on (so what if it’s two days late).

More stars.

The forest day-by-day, for sure, but a little more time for the sky.