Long time gone--again

Well, we are deep into the holiday season and i've been gone ever since thanksgiving--no excuse, but posting has gone down my priority list.

Time to play catchup.

1. Wall Street Journal last Monday had a long article about making good charitable choices for holiday donations. Nothing radical, but two full pages on WSJ space highlights the importance of, and the oversight on the issue. One of the criteria was, not surprisingly, transparency, and another was "Cost of fundraising" These articles are important for nonprofits to attend to, as they set the standard for many people who are trying to be more selective with their donations. So, if you are a nonprofit manager, pay attention. Here is one shortened (read: dumbed down) version of the article, but the full article is not available unless you are a WSJ subscriber....

2. I have long contended that Good To Great, by Jim Collins is the most important nonprofit management book out there--even though it is written solely about for-profits. Rumors have abounded that Collins was trying to take his deep research methods and apply them to find some magic in and for nonprofits. The rumors are true---but it was MUCH harder than he thought it would be.

The result of his efforts is a monograph available on Amazon called Good to Great and the Social Sector. I have it ordered, but have not received it...when I get it and read it through, I'll post a review.

3. Saw Boston University with Caitlin last week. She loved it, and is really excited about the Hospitality Management program there. Applications still going out....


More soon.

Online Donations

We all know that online donations are growing, and I have long recommended to all of my clients to have the ability to accept donations both by credit card and PayPal. Of course, there are numerous providers who process donations, and lots of software that tracks it. So where to start.

As always, start with TechSoup. Their current newsletter highlights a set of articles on selecting a good online donation tool. http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articles/funding/page4172.cfm will get you there.

Take a look, and make sure that you consider taking donations online, and if you do, in upgrading your donation interface. I saw one last night that only let me give $10, $25, or $50. Really. No more, no different.....silly.

Thankful for.....

So we've just finished our turkey, and while we wait to go to our movie (a family tradition), I'm thinking about what I'm thankful for (beyond family, friends and health--always first on my list). Here are some thoughts... in sort of priority order....and then a hope....

1. I'm thankful for a generous and compassionate population, who reach out to others directly, and through nonprofits.

2. I'm thankful for freedom--freedom of speech (which often results in people realizing that others are being hurt - think slavery, women's rights, prisoner abuse), freedom of religion (which is the basis of so much good in the nonprofit sector) and freedom of choice -so we don't have to get all our education, health care, art, music, from one central source.....

3. I'm thankful that the US Senate came to its senses and didn't mandate 15 board members for every nonprofit, or that all nonprofits have to be re-authorized every three years. Actually, I'm just grateful the Senate came to its senses at all...they seem to have lacked that until the past few weeks.

4. I'm grateful for creative compassion. I'm always awed by the endless number ways that bright, caring people can come up with to help others.

5. I'm thankful to live in an age allows instant communication all over the world, so that people who have never known each other can still help each other quickly and efficiently.

And I hope that one day, we all, everywhere, can be as united in thought and common hope as we were on that wonderful July night when I was 17, and the first men were landing on the moon. I have never forgotten the sense of global unity, of common purpose, of togetherness that we talked about for weeks afterward. Even though it seems so remote in this fractured, angry world, it sure would be nice to feel that again.

Anyway, hope you had a good thanksgiving...

Again impressed

Janet Froetscher, the CEO of the United Way of Greater Chicago, came to speak at our Kellogg class Monday. I was again impressed, not only by Janet, but by what the United Way in Chicago is doing. It has made huge strides in re-empowering communities, in driving performance and outcomes, and in forcing the area's nonprofit community to think differently.

One crux of all this is common information, common indicators, larger databases, and people who are dedicated to sifting through the data to find signficant nuggets.

And, a great outcome of all this work was the community's response to all the victims of Katrina who began showing up two days after the hurricane struck. Janet told us that story and noted that the trust/visibility United Way had built up over the prior three years was put to great use as the UW coordinated the community response.

Yet again, Janet said the magic words---"United Way buys outcomes, we don't fund projects."

If only the rest of the funding world would listen.

Drucker remembered

What a mind. Half of my book clubs read Managing the Nonprofit Organization this month, and we talked (three days after his death) about the importance of Drucker's weighing in on nonprofit organizations needing to be better managed when he did (1990). As I vividly recall, his ideas (which a bunch of people, including yours truly had been advocating for a decade with no luck), created a firestorm of criticism. People in the field, particularly foundations and large national nonprofits, scoffed at the idea of a charity being businesslike, dissing the concept as unseemly, and bemoaning the "fact" that adopting business techniques would sully the pristine landscape of charities.

Some people still feel that way today, although far fewer, particularly in an era of outcome measures, benchmarking, and transparency. Drucker's name and reputation was so large, so imposing that he really was the father of good nonprofit management.

And we owe him a pause in our busy days to remember that.

Ann Arbor thoughts

In Ann Arbor for parents' weekend. Yet again impressed with the next generation of young people and their amazing talents. We've been to games, concerts, shows, had dinner, all with students who make me sooooo optimistic about the future.
And where is the missing one of my son's roommates? At a conference on organizing college students as volunteers with some huge number of his peers. And where are a large number of Michigan students going at spring break (including my son)? To the Gulf, and other locations, to help others.

We're growing a great new generation of volunteers and community activists. The trick will be to keep them active in our organizations after they get into the "real" world.

Let's stop spam

Our friends at Techsoup have some great ideas on stopping spam. PLEASE join in....

From today's Techsoup newsletter comes the following:

The third annual "Stop Spam Today!" campaign begins today. This

educational campaign is sponsored by TechSoup.org and Mailshell,

one of our long-time technology partners. The campaign

culminates on December 14 and 15, when nonprofits and libraries

can order free MailShell anti-spam software at TechSoup Stock.

Throughout the campaign, TechSoup.org will feature content

focused on protecting your organization from the dangers of

spam. Highlights include articles to help you fight spam in your

organization and links to helpful anti-spam resources.

Not bad---free advice, free software, and anything that can reduce the plague of spam gets my vote.....check it out at:

http://www.techsoup.org/spam/?cg=media&sg=BTC110805SST

Die, spam, die......

SOX stuff

No, not the White Sox (who?) or even the Red Sox. Most readers know what SOX is. The Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which Congress enacted to counter the excesses of Enron and WorldCom, has some implications (although no outright provisions) for nonprofits. And, pretty much everyone (including yours truly) feels that there are provisions of SOX that make sense for you to implement at your nonprofit.

Independent Sector and BoardSource have done some good work on this. Two papers are available, both in .pdf form:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Implications for Nonprofit Organizations

and

Learning from Sarbanes-Oxley: A Checklist for Nonprofits and Foundations

These two documents are worth both reading and printing out to have on hand if you are asked what your organization is doing in this area.

Leadership fun

Had a ridiculously fun discussion at Kellogg last night with my MBA students about leadership in nonprofits. The students were engaged and animated, and it was a great time.

Most interesting to me was the number (about 25%) who responded to a pre-class assignment by providing the same top two leadership characteristics for for-profit leaders AND nonprofit leaders. Previous classes had made careful distinctions between the two. As I told the class, I think this is because, more than our previous classes, this group "gets" the concept that leadership is about people, and people are really pretty much the same everywhere.

We did agree, however, that the impact of poor leader behavior for nonprofit leaders is greater than in for-profits. Thus Martha Stewart comes out of jail, gets a reality show, and is back on track, her company little if any worse for her time in the slammer. Try imagining a nonprofit leader getting her old job back after jail time for a felony.

Anyway, good discussion. A room full of bright eyes. What a rush.

Electric Embers Rocks

Yet again, I have to sing the praises of the people (all 3 of them, I think) at Electric Embers. They are the world's best, easiest, friendliest and least expensive ISP. If you are a nonprofit and you want to both save money and work with great people who are dedicated to social sector progress, check them out. I cannot say enough good things about them.

And, on an equally important note--have a safe Halloween. I'll be in Evanston teaching, so no trick or treat for me this year.

Long time gone

Gad. It's been more than a week since I posted. Time flies when you're busy. And, with a book deadline coming up, I only have so many words in me....

Been thinking about economic models for nonprofits more. I blogged about this a bunch a couple of weeks ago, and the more I consider it, the more i think that a more heavily volunteer model--even for SOME skilled jobs, is going to be a partial solution.

Read "Managing the Nonprofit Corporation" this week, by Peter Drucker. Pretty good. Our book club will be discussing it in a couple of weeks. I like Drucker's writing style, and his early insights into the sector.

On a more fun note, I read Kurt Vonnegut's "Man Without a Country" one afternoon (it's a short set of essays) and was reminded why he was my favorite author in high school and college. Warning: If you are political conservative, don't bother. It will just make you mad.

Back to work--oh, on a very personal note, my daughter Caitlin, who regular readers knows is applying to college, was accepted into the first school she applied to: Purdue. One down, six to go.

Great group at Tahoe

For the second straight year, The Center for Civic Partnerships, based in Sacramento, has provided an Executive development session for 20 small, public health related organizations. And, for the second year, I had the privilege of doing part of the training.

A wonderful eclectic group, with lots of energy and passion for their missions. As I often do, I came away impressed with the resourcefulness and commitment that people bring to our sector. Makes me have renewed hope on some days.

What's so interesting about these kinds of groups is always the commonality of their issues. Whether they are large or small, new or old, from metropolitan areas or rural, the same stuff vexes them: Boards, competition for donations, staff turnover, reduced federal/state funding, funder oversight, etc. And, all the execs talk about the constantly increasing stress of their jobs.

What bums me out is that these same issues vexed me as an exec in 1979. With all the progress we've made in management, media, technology and research, the same stuff still gets in our way.

I wonder whether execs in 40 years will still be grappling with them. Probably.

Huh.

Strategy: chase the money

Our class this week at Kellogg was about strategy in nonprofits. It was a well-discussed issue, with the NFTE (the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship) as the case.

I loved the discussion, but the next day on a plane to Sacramento, I was thinking how far too many nonprofits have the following strategy: Chase the money, and rationalize that this enhances the mission. Really. When you look at many nonprofit organizational charts, you see three, four, five, even ten different industries that they are in, all wrapped around an issue (hunger, homelessness, disabilities), and many of these services are provided adequately, but not well.

I fully understand that issues like homelessness can't be solved just by providing shelter, and that in the quest to go after root problems, some expansion of mission is pretty common. But there is so little careful consideration of whether or not a new service can be done well, right from the start. The lure of the grant/contract, and of growth overshadows quality nearly every time. When was the last time your organization turned down money on the basis of poor quality? Do you do everything, really, really well?

Don't the people we serve deserve to be served better than just adequately?

Book review....

I received a copy of Sue Bennett's great new book from the Fieldstone Alliance, The Accidental Techie; Supporting, Managing and Maximizing Your Nonprofit's Technology.

It is great. It has a broader audience than you might think, but is focused on those of us who inherit the tech roles in our nonprofits, and yet don't hold a master's in computer science from MIT. That's most of us. It is full of practical advice, checklists, worksheets and resources on the issues that vex most part time techies. For example, there is an entire chapter on tech protection...an area where many of us lose sleep. There is a chapter on funding for technology, and one on supporting tech users. Not only would this be a good book for techies, but also for executive directors who are supervising techies--there is a fair amount of explanation of the key issues that would be helpful even to nontechies.

This book is a must for anyone who dabbles in tech, or who becomes a techie because, in the words of the first quote in the book: "Since I knew what a motherboard was, and I had a screwdriver, I became the computer "expert" in our office."

This is a resource that I will both refer to myself and recommend to clients for a long time.

Here's a thought...

One thing that concerns me mightily is the losing battle most human service nonprofits are fighting in the battle between higher demand for services, more mandates from funders and static or even falling funding.

This is not news to anyone in this part of the nonprofit sector, but many agencies are reaching a breaking point, and something has to give. So I had this thought while hiking the other day here in Idaho. Why not rethink our model of service provision and incorporate more highly trained volunteers?

Most human services are primarily trained by paid staff. And, most funders and accrediting bodies mandate certain levels of education, regular training, and experience.

But so what? There are lots of critical services already provided in the U.S. by highly trained and dedicated volunteers. Most firefighters in the US are volunteers--it's just that they live in smaller communities who can't afford full-time paid protection. And they do a great job. Same with EMS services, and search and rescue. Most of these life and death services are provided by a willing network of highly trained unpaid community servants.

So why not in human services? I thought of my sister's group home. Staffing small group homes is always a challenge. So what activities could safely be outsourced to a group of volunteers?

Food comes to mind. It must be planned, someone must shop for it, it must be prepared, served, and cleaned up. 3 times a day, seven days a week. Say two hours of total staff time per meal, that's 42 hours a week--a full FTE. What if the agency that runs the home asked a church group to do these chores say, two days a week, or even 3? If you think of the amount of time that would save the staff, who could focus on actually being with the residents of the home, rather than off shopping and cooking?

Such transitions would not be easy, and as anyone who works with volunteers will tell you, they are not "free", but the model bears examining.

Nutty week

I've been traveling--all good stuff. But as always it gives me time to think and reflect. And, on this trip, I had a bunch of one-on-one time with two of my three kids. All of which leads me to a couple of nonprofit relevant observations.

First, Caitlin and I went to Purdue to look at their Hospitality and Tourism Management department. A good visit, but unconvincing as a slam-dunk for her as a top choice. We returned home and she started in on her applications. Of the 6-7 schools she's applying to, just one uses the so called "common application" which is designed to reduce student workload. So not much of a benefit for her. But it reminded me again of how great it would be if nonprofit funders could agree on basic common information (perhaps coordinated with the 990?) How much money would that save nationally?

Next, I came out to Seattle, where I am writing this. I spent a full two days with my son Ben, who is 23 and works for Microsoft. We talked at length about Ben's and his friends' habits and preferences in volunteering, donating, and being involved in general with nonprofits. I learned a lot and it confirmed some things I have already observed. But here are two nuggets for you to chew on if you are interested in attracting 20-something volunteers.

1. The people in this age group PARTICULARLY if they attended high-end universities, are trained to (and a bit obsessed by) "making our time productive", in Ben's words. This confirms a lot of what I've read. These kids have been so scheduled, have taken on so much to compete to get into college and then to succeed in tough universities, that they squeeze every minute of every day. Lesson for us: Don't waste their time. If you have a volunteer event scheduled from 10-4, make sure it starts promptly at ten, and that you have enough to do to keep people gainfully employed until 4. If they get done early, let them go. Ben talked about two volunteer events, one where he and a bunch of other Microsoft employees moved mattresses for a few hours (very rewarding--he knew that the regular staff couldn't do this well), but then sat around for the last hour doing nothing (drove everyone in the group a bit crazy). So, keep your word.

2. This generation is SOCIAL. They live, work, email, chat, and network in groups like no generation before them. They WANT to be with others of their age, and will volunteer in groups IF YOU FACILITATE IT. Lesson for us: Thing socially in volunteer development: design events for groups (at least for this age group), and ask people in this age group to invite their friends and/or peers.

There were a number of other things that impressed me, but I'll blog about those tomorrow or the next day. I want to mull them over first.

Good stuff, if you are interested in this age group.

Funding Technology

Got two things in the email today about funding technology,

First is from TechSoup, their newsletter features an article on Ten Tips for Funding Technology;

Second, a newsletter from Fieldstone Alliance (the former Wilder Foundation Press) highlights their newest book "The Accidental Techie: Supporting, Managing, and Maximizing Your Nonprofit's Technology", by Sue Bennett.

Both are worth checking out...that is, if you want to get more tech, or more FROM your tech

Juggling many fun balls

A ton of new stuff going on. I am developing a new, more interactive business development course for NISH, one that will be much more tech oriented, and probably include podcasts, a website, and a course CD. Fun.

I have been asked by a pair of Kellogg graduates to be their faculty advisor for the development of a case study about a Chicago area school. Again, something new and fun.

I'm finally getting into the depths of my new book, which is due to my publisher in January. I wrote like a demon for most of June and early July, then basically stopped while I did some research, and now am back at it, but behind the word production curve, so to speak. I should catch up in the next few weeks as my travel time is nutty. People have asked me for years how I am a Dad, a husband, do my work AND write books. The answer, plane rides and hotels...

Speaking of nutty travel, I'm going to the U.K. again next spring to do a session on governance for NCVO. This year I'll share a day of master class training with my good friend and board guru Carol Weisman. But the way the schedule works I'll arrive in London on a Monday morning on an overnight flight from Chicago, and leave Tuesday afternoon. Thus, I'll be on the ground in the UK for 32 hours, and gone from home 51. Certainly won't have to worry about adjusting to different time zones.....

The Alliance for Nonprofit Management's Standards Committee met this week, and we're getting there on revising our Ethics Standards for Capacity Builders. Great group of people with great discussions. We've been at it for over a year. Silly me, I thought that a set of ethical guidelines would be easy and quick. Hah. It's a LOT more complex than it looks at first glance. But the draft set of guidelines was good, and we got a lot of good input from the membership.

And, most important, today is my daughter's high school homecoming game. She's a senior, and an officer of everything, so this is a big event. It's always fun to go and hang out with all of our neighbors and friends at tailgate and the game. A good reminder of why community is so important.

John's question

John asked a great question yesterday---here it is:

"What suggestions do you have for differentiating between governance and micro-management - and who determines where and how the lines are drawn? The administrator suggests monthly financial statements for a Board that meets monthly and oversees a charter high school and junior high school are an attempt by the Board to micro-manage. My take is a board has an obligation to micro-manage if necessary to insure compliance with state and Federal regulations and protect the public interest."


Of course the answer is not cut and dried. But I tell my clients that there are three times that boards must do management or even micro management---First, at startup when there are no staff; second, when the organization is in severe financial crisis--as in it may not make it through the next 60 days--which of course means that the board has probably been deficient in its oversight; and third, when there is immoral or illegal behavior in the ED/CEO position.

But other than that, no. If the board does not feel that the staff is doing the job, particularly in the area of compliance with state and federal regs, don't do the work for the staff--get new staff who can do the work. Now, this does NOT mean that boards should not get assurance that these things have been done, they should--and there's a simple way--have an audit with a management letter.

But micro management is NOT the board's job, and it will drive away competent staff.

Great group of students

What a terrific group of students we have this year---so much more depth of experience working and volunteering for both domestic and international nonprofits. Wow.

We had a good start-the students proposed key areas vexing nonprofits and Don Haider and I gave them opposing points of view in a debate format of the issue. A lot of fun. I'm particularly eager to see how the students deal with our final project related to nonprofit response to the asian tsunami of last Christmas.

A good start.