I recently came across this fascinating short video about why some videos go viral.
The bottom lines: tastemakers, communities of participation, and unexpectedness.
It’s worth a watch.
How Not to Run a Board Meeting
I recently observed two of my pet peeves about board meetings in the same meeting.
1. Orally report on past activities, when there was plenty of time to put the report in writing.
2. Framing broad general subjects, rather than specific decisions.
What’s wrong with both.
Let’s start with orally reporting what you could put in writing ahead of time. This is just a poor use of time. Your board’s time is one of your most precious resources. And your board’s time in the same place is even more precious.
The vast majority of people can absorb information quicker reading. Listening to one person share orally not only wastes time of those who could absorb the information quicker by reading, but it squanders the time your board has to do its most important job: govern. Governing takes conversation.
What about selecting topics, instead of questions, for board deliberation? This is perhaps an even bigger time sink. Adding topics to a board meeting just because it’s always on the agenda is not a reason to schedule an item for the agenda. And even if it is, you need to give your board some decision or options around which to frame the conversation, or it will be meander.
The conversation I recently witnessed went off in five different directions not just because the board chair didn’t intervene to keep it on a single topic, but because the board chair had no guidance for how to do so since the agenda item was set up as a topic, instead of a decision.
Don’t let your elevator speech fall flat
January 25, 2012
This morning I led a conference call teaching organizations about how to create an effective elevator pitch.
It was an interesting exercise, since I’d danced around having an elevator speech both for my business and past organizational work, but I’d never formally been trained on having one.
So I read a lot on the web and some of the advice I agreed with, while other advice seemed off-base.
Nonetheless, I forged ahead and reached my own conclusions.
Here’s my top 9 things to keep in mind about elevator pitches.
1. Don’t discount their importance
Sure, you’re unlikely to get in an elevator and be asked what you do. But there are countless other social settings, from cocktail parties to formal networking opportunities, where you’ll have 30-60 seconds to make an impression while talking to 1-3 people. These first impressions very much matter — if people start tuning you out, getting them to tune you in again is hard.
2. Avoid jargon
In the words of a mentor (Joel Bradshaw), start where they are, not where you are. You use jargon inside your organizations/coalitions because it’s really efficient to do so. But when talking to outsiders, jargon makes the eyes glaze over at best.
3. Cover the what and the why, then engage.
You need to give people a teaser about what you do. And you need to give them an emotional hook — the why — so they will recognize that you share their values. Lastly, you need to close with an engagement question, such as: Would you like to hear more?
4. But put the why first.
This is probably really the number one challenge most people have. Our rational brains want to say: This is what I do, and here’s why. But lots of evidence suggests beginning with the why is far more compelling.
People will identify with and want to support you for the why. The “what” involves important details, but it’s not what will drive people to engage.
For a great speech on the rationale for putting “why before what,” check out this Ted talk.
5. Make it conversational
Remember, this is for 1-3 people in a small group setting — it’s not for a big speech. And it’s certainly not for the written form.
Speak like you’d speak in the real world — in short sentences, using contractions, simple words, ignoring punctuation rules.
6. Don’t try to be comprehensive
For most organizations, trying to summarize what you do in 30-60 seconds is impossible, so don’t try. Remember, your goal here is to engage somebody to want to learn more. If you try to summarize succinctly, you’re most likely to have to speak about your organization at such a high level of generality that you’ll only succeed in generating boredom.
Pick the 1-2 things that are most interesting about your organization and make them the focal point of your elevator pitch.
7. Brainstorm with a group to create it, but then let 1 person draft it
If your organization can take the time, getting 3-4 people to really focus on the “why” you do what you do for awhile, and see how that flows into a “what” answer.
But ultimately, somebody needs to go through the results of the brainstorm and create a draft. Or a couple alternative drafts.
8. Test it out on the real world
Before getting your whole organization to start using it, test out the draft on a handful of friends who’re “outside” your organization/movement. This could be family, friends, or anybody who you think will give you honest feedback.
Do they understand it? Did they want to learn more? What questions does it make them want to ask?
9. Once you finalize it, get people to practice it
You’re looking for the fine line between doing it well and not coming across as rehearsed. The latter could be a blog entry entirely of its own. Bottom line: let people get used to doing it in pairs through role playing, or set them up for situations where they’re testing it out on a stranger.
Find opportunities to use it. Incorporate the language into other communication vehicles. Have 1 person on staff role play it every staff meeting for several months until everyone’s internalized it.
Of course, the best pitch is in the eye of the beholder
Nobody’s ever going to be perfectly satisfied with their pitch because let’s face it, what we’re doing is so much bigger than can be explained in 30-60 seconds. Not everyone in your organization will love it. But it’s generally a useful exercise to create one, particularly if you emphasize the “why.”
How do corporations differ from individuals
December 21, 2011
No, this isn’t a blog about Citizens United and the inanity of the Supreme Court giving corporations the right to make unlimited contributions in elections.
As I work with clients on fundraising, many of them manage corporate giving and major donor giving as very independent efforts, while others treat them as entirely the same.
I’d advocate for a middle ground recognizing the differences in the ways corporations give, and the differences between different types of corporations.
If you’re thinking about how corporations differ from individuals when you’re soliciting a $250+ gift, here’s some of my rules of thumb.
Very Small Companies
Very small corporations are not different than individuals. You should be speaking with the owner and their motivations for giving and the methods of solicitation should be no different than an individual donor.
Most Small/Medium Sized Businesses
Most small and medium businesses have no formal process for making contributions.
They tend to be on an ad hoc basis with the owner and/or manager having some authority.
Most donations are done either because the owner/manager has a strong connection to the charity or because the giving is done in a way that generates marketing. You should be clear going into an ask which motivation you’re focused on so the pitch can be appropriate.
While managers may have some authority, you are almost always better off talking with the owner if you can solicit them directly.
Large Corporations
Large corporations tend to have formal processes for making contributions.
These processes often have significant lead times prior to making a decision
Managers/staff are the decision-makers, not owners.
Different managers may have separate budgets for giving. A public affairs manager may have one budget and a marketing manager may have a separate pot of funds.
People other than those directly with the authority to make donations are generally not all that helpful as a route to generating a donation, unless they are higher in the corporate hierarchy than the person making the decision.
While these corporations tend to have policies around donations, personal relationships still are king – if you have a personal relationship with the person making the decision, you are far more likely to secure a donation.
Why volunteers before how volunteers
December 20, 2011
It’s an age-old question in virtually any social impact organization – how we do get volunteers?
In my experience, if you start by answering that question, you’re getting off on the wrong foot.
Instead, you should first ask the question: why volunteers?
How you go about getting volunteers will greatly impact what types of volunteers you secure. You may recruit lots in raw numbers, but not meet your needs.
So before designing the how, start with the why.
And to answer the why, I generally counsel asking two other questions in combination:
First, what do you most want out of your volunteers?
Second, what level of volunteer do you need?
Let’s take those questions in turn.
What do you most want out of your volunteers?
Here are four potential reasons I’ve experienced first-hand:
1. To do the work staff just can’t get around to doing (either back-end administration/fundraising or programmatic). 62.8 million adults volunteered almost 8.1 billion hours to local and national organizations in 2010 (Source: VolunteeringinAmerica.gov). A well-designed volunteer program should get more work done than could be done with the staff time necessary to recruit the volunteers.
2. To be authentic voices. Whether in fundraising or program, volunteers can speak authentically in ways that staff simply can’t.
3. As sources of local knowledge. Particularly if your organization is trying to make a difference over a relatively large geography, volunteers are uniquely positioned to become your eyes and ears on the ground to help you make sure you deploy your resources in their geography in ways that will work.
4. As sources of specialized expertise. Whether it be graphic design, accounting, information technology, or a dozen other areas, organizations can sometimes meet their needs for technical expertise through high-level volunteers that save them money.
If this is what you most want out of your volunteers, the second question is: what level of volunteer do you need?
My very crude short-hand is that there are three levels of volunteerism: participants, activity leaders, and organizational leaders.
Participants show up and do something for you. Often just once, but sometimes repeatedly. This is the bread and butter of many volunteer programs, particularly if they aim to generate lots of activity – tree plantings, stream cleanups, canvassing door-to-door, phone banks, and mailing parties are just a few of the potential activities for which you need participants.
Activity leaders are the next level up: these volunteers are willing to lead all or part of some activity. They may provide the training for participants, they may provide food for the fundraiser, or they may take responsibility to find 10 people for a phone bank, to cite just a few examples.
Organizational leaders take ownership for the long-term health of the group, overseeing either a series of activities or overall organizational health. Board members are inherently organizational leaders if they’re doing their job. But social impact organizations shouldn’t assume that only board members will fulfill organizational leadership roles. Other volunteers can be cultivated and given non-board authority in ways that allow them to take on organizational leadership volunteering.
After answering these questions, it’s now appropriate to go back and set up a program that answers the how of volunteer recruitment.
If what you most need is local knowledge from people who’ll take organizational leadership, it argues for a very different volunteer program than if what you need most are activity participants who’ll do basic grunt work.
In a future blog entry or article, I’ll write more about effective volunteer recruitment programs that match up with the different why’s.
But no matter your skill-set at recruitment, you’ll go further in setting up your program if you start by answering the question why.
Raising money through strategic planning
November 11, 2011
Strategic planning can require significant resources — both time and money.
Fortunately, going through the process can also be a means of raising additional resources.
In my mind, there are three key tactics you should think about using to raise money from your strategic planning process.
The most obvious, and the one most people think about, is using the finished plan to sell donors on funding whatever is “new” in the plan. Usually this involves creating a short 1-2 page summary of the plan and using it with selected major donors and foundations. If, for example, the plan calls for hiring a full-time communications director and upgrading a website, those items could be pulled into a mini-budget and presented to funders as a reason to step up their level of giving.
But there are two other tactical steps organizations should also consider to turn a planning process into a revenue generator.
For starters, you should look for funders who will underwrite the planning process itself. Many foundations fund capacity building either in general or for those organizations with which they have a long-term funding relationship. Occasionally, an individual major donor (perhaps a board member) who values planning will step up with an extra donation to cover a significant portion of the planning process costs. Start thinking about this the year prior to a planning process, so you have ample time to make the case to funders.
Second, you should think about using the process to cultivate your relationship with your supporters. Many strategic planning processes involve some sort of interview process for stakeholders and you should think consciously about whether some major donors should be added into the process as a means of cultivating their support for the organization. This may slightly increease the cost of your process (more interviews), but with a big potential pay-off afterwards.
Cultivation shouldn’t stop with major donors. If your organization has a membership or base constituency that it can reach via email, do an online member survey. Ask some questions to ascertain what your supporters want you to prioritize, while lao learning things about them that could be useful for future fundraising. Beyond what you learn, just the process of asking for their input will help cement their support for your organization’s work.
Should you hire for skill or spirit?
I’m not sure I’d use the term “spirit,” but I definitely think too many nonprofits hire based solely on who has the experience/skill and not enough attention is paid to passion, authenticity, teamwork, and natural aptitude. Those can’t be taught.
Here’s an author who agrees with me, from the for-profit business perspective.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1793369/hiring-for-skill-or-spirit
On the perils of chasing money
October 28, 2011
I recently had a conversation with an organizational Executive Director who was having their group round up its grassroots supporters to generate online votes to have the group selected to win a small grant. (Small means that in the organization’s context, it would at most be 1% of the organization’s budget if they received it).
What was odd to me is that the grant they were seeking was to do work that wasn’t part of their strategic plan. Indeed, it wasn’t even something that fit within the group’s core niche/role, so it’s not that it wasn’t part of the plan because it was low priority — it was off the map entirely.
When I asked the ED why they were nonetheless pursuing it, their response was that the dollars flowing in would be twice what it would actually cost to implement and it would get the group on the radar screen of a foundation.
I pondered this for a few minutes and my reaction was — that’s not right.
Chasing money off-plan fails to account for:
- Staff time necessary to first chase the money, then implement the small project, then possibly to report back on it.
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The opportunity cost — eg. what the staffers involved in drumming up “votes” for the proposal could have raised from spending that time meeting with individual donors.
- The dilution of the organizational brand, as grassroots supporters become confused about what the organization is all about. The same is perhaps doubly true with foundations — being on a foundation’s radar screen, but then perhaps being misidentified as something you’re not strikes me as a negative, not a positive.
Bottom line: chasing money can be hazardous to organizational health.
Look for more on this in a future edition of my article: Why Organizations Go Off Course.
Talking in values language
October 20, 2011
I recently was speaking to a board of a conservation organization and said that they were working to protect “environmental values.” And that we should lead with our values, not our policies.
One of them asked, what’s that mean?
Here’s my answer:
Values are the first-order rationale for why you want the policies you want. They are too often unstated by advocates.
Clean water is a policy choice.
The value is why you want clean water.
Here there are multiple potential answers:
Safety — Because people deserve to be safe from poisons
Fairness — It’s unfair for current generations to rob future generations of the world’s precious resources
Responsibility — We have a responsibility to protect the natural world for future generations
And you can I’m sure think of other examples.
Safety, fairness, responsibility, legacy, family — these are examples of values that underlie the why behind the work that conservation advocates do.
Organizations focused on other issues have their own constellation of values.
The important thing is that we need to be up-front about our values. When we are, people will pay more attention to us when we drill down into the policy. If we lead with the policy, their eyes will glaze over and they won’t find us worth their time.
How Organizations Learn
August 8, 2011
Just read a fascinating article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on how organizations learn.
It definitely has tremendous applicability to any effort to help an organization establish systems or conduct training. Still pondering what it means for my work, but thought it was worth sharing.