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Setting Organizational Goals: Does your team know what to do?
Do your employees know when they are doing a good job? If you were to ask your team what the most important thing the organization needs to accomplish this year, would you get consistent answers? When your organization’s managers write performance revi …
Ensuring Dogs and Cats Get Equal Scratch in Decision-making
Are you a dog or a cat person? I don’t mean your preference for a pet. If you show up to a meeting barking and clawing to make your point, you might be a dog person. If you lay back during the decision-making process but circle back to pee on outcomes …
The Growth Paradox for Nonprofit Organizations
We have been talking about the Overhead Myth and the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle for many years, but there has been only modest progress on donor demands that result in underinvestment in nonprofit infrastructure, and malnourished organizations. But if …
How to Improve Nonprofit Culture Through Mission and Values Realignment
We’ve all seen cultural problems: low morale, burnout, turnover, lackluster results, low client satisfaction, and donor attrition. We hire new staff, we hold team-building events, we might even bring in a consultant to determine the causes. But there i …
Role of the Nonprofit CFO in Executive Management: The CFO-ED Relationship
In the capacity of CFO for the past 25 years, I have partnered with seven executive directors in four different nonprofits. I have worked with an athletic director, an artist, and a number of social workers, and I have found nothing more satisfying tha …
Why Social Movements Require Entrepreneurial Values
When the news broke a few months back about my nonprofit Swipe Out Hunger acquiring the College and University Food Bank Alliance (CUFBA), we received an overwhelming positive response alongside a dose of skepticism about the term “acquire.” “Acquire? …
How to Unite Your Nonprofit Workforce—and Keep It United Through Misperceptions
Our teams work from different operational levels and knowledge bases than we do. As leaders, we want to consider all these perspectives and areas: research, operations, programming, etc. If we start to focus on our “slice” of the work and our knowledge …
Download Spreadsheet: Forecasting Nonprofit Finances & Pivoting Programs in a Crisis
Though many people see finance as nothing but a collection of terrifying spreadsheets, I see it as the central branch of nonprofit philosophy. When the pandemic hit, our nonprofit changed everything about the way we work—overnight—and spent the …
How to Be a Great Supervisor: Insights Learned from 20 Years of Managing
People are experiencing a level of stress never seen or imagined in the past. We call on employees more than ever to effectively balance their work life with increasing economic, health & safety, family, cultural, and political challenges. How can …
The Power of Shared Power: Co-Directing Nonprofits Through Compassion
We have found that qualitatively, compassion is often perceived as weak, soft, and forgiveness-focused. But compassion is as much about discussion, truth telling, and the hard work of moving forward together. We discovered that many people have a cultu …
