Posted by: Don Linnen | 25 February 2008

Fruit of the Nonprofit

It’s been right under my nose all this time, and I just now saw it. I love nonprofits. Actually I love good nonprofits and find myself wanting to gently weed our garden of the bad nonprofits.

What does it take to make a good nonprofit? A lot of seeds are planted to grow nonprofits. Some turn out much better than others. They bear fruit. How do you get that good fruit? The answer was in the Bible right under my nose.

Pull out that dusty old Bible of yours and check out Galatians 5:22-23. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a believer or even a spiritual kind of person to read this (it does help if you’re literate).

That passage says that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” To me, these are the common denominators for good nonprofits:

Love – is your organization motivated by genuine love for your cause?

Joy – do the key leaders exhibit a steady, contented joy, even during trying times?

Peace – do staff and volunteers feel a sense of peace as they tackle the mission?

Longsuffering – can you wait patiently knowing you’re doing the right thing and wait for people and programs to grow steadily and strongly?

Kindness – do the people of the organization really care about who or what they serve?

Goodness – does everyone really want what’s best for its constituents…even if it means stepping back to allow others to do a better job?

Faithfulness – are we keeping our commitments to the mission?

Gentleness – is our strength under control? can we speak loving truth?

Self-control – do we have the discipline to stay within budget and make progress towards our goals?

Not a bad checklist, huh? I’d like to take credit for coming up with this, but a guy name Paul wrote it around 50 A.D. (amazingly, there’s a few original copies around, I think). Also, John Maxwell in his Leadership Bible uses the same characteristics to describe leaders.

Fruit is a good thing, isn’t it?

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 23 January 2008

Conversation with the Mayor

Had a little visit with my buddy, the mayor, earlier this month. Okay, it wasn’t just me. It was me and 200 or so others active in the nonprofit world of Dallas.

And, though I believe Tom Leppert is a good guy, we’re really not buddies. But I sure have to give him credit for spending time answering questions off the cuff on a wide variety of subjects. I’m not sure previous Dallas mayors have spent time in a town hall meeting like the one organized by the Center for Nonprofit Management on January 16th.

The Center is an active member of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, the national coordinator of the Nonprofit Congress. Other nonprofit groups are meeting in various cities around the country in preparation for the upcoming national meeting in June. There they will address the three current national priorities for nonprofits:

  1. Organizational effectiveness and efficiency (a familiar subject in earlier postings)
  2. Acting collectively for positive change (a more familiar subject from the past)
  3. Public awareness

There were a lot of good ideas and good questions from this meeting. For example, are nonprofits asking what the donors want? Public awareness is not a one way information push.

The mayor believes that the future of Dallas is in the hands of the nonprofits. He wants to encourage an entrepreneurial attack on problems from different angles. Some solutions will work. Some will not. Even in failure, there is value from this approach.

Mr. Leppert went on to say that unless the poorer rooftops of the city are improved, the more wealthy rooftops cannot continue to support the city. His goal is to make Dallas more competitive. Not just in Texas. Not just in the U. S. He wants Dallas to be more competitive among world cities.

Hear, hear, Mr. Mayor. Set that bar high. Extremely high. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 31 December 2007

Due Diligence

There’s over 9,000 nonprofits in Dallas County today. More than 3,500 of them filed a 990 tax return so say the smart folks at Urban Institute. With that many working nonprofits in town, chances are that there’s someone trying to do the same thing you’re doing.

Okay. Let’s narrow the field from that 3,500+ and add another filter to look just at your cause: healthcare, poverty, children, environment, aging, the arts, whatever. Chances are that you’ve still got somewhere between 5 and 25 other nonprofits trying to do something very similar to what you’re doing. That makes it a little challenging to raise more money and excite more volunteers year after year.

You may be slightly different or very different from your peers (aka partners …. aka competitors). But to potential donors who want to help fight poverty, for example, all the homeless organizations look the same at first blush. The fact is they are mostly very different.

How do you distinguish yourself??

It’s no longer enough that you have a compelling case statement. (Although you can take some comfort in knowing that some of your peers have not reviewed or updated their mission statement or web site in years.) Being current and relevant certainly helps you distinguish yourself.

Each year, donors ask better questions and perform more due diligence about the nonprofits to whom they may give. It’s important for the nonprofits to improve their own due diligence.

The keys for many donors are:
– show me the numbers!! (quantities, percentages, benchmarks, results, results, results)
– show me some independent evaluation
– show up (as either a volunteer or a site visitor)

Showing up is not a popular choice for many foundations, donors, and evaluators. It takes time. You might be uncomfortable in the surroundings. You might get dirty. (I’ll save this rant for another time.)

GiveWell is a new foundation in NYC with the noble intent of evaluating charities in different fields and making the results public. They began this with big hearts, good business brains, and a real drive to bring efficiency and order to the evaluation process (ahhh….the appeal to my own left brain….). There are other evaluators across the country.

Many nonprofit evaluators are still learning that there’s a lot more to evaluations than just cranking the numbers and publishing the results. For one thing, the numbers on true effectiveness are elusive. It’s often made more difficult by our mobile society and the fact that many clients just don’t stay in touch on a consistent basis.

The best way to distinguish your nonprofit is to show everyone how effective you are. Until you can get the donors and evaluators to show up for site visits or as volunteers (….do you have a really good volunteer coordinator???….), you need to be able to show you’re effectiveness. It takes a process to measure your successes. That costs time and money, but it needs to be done.

You may learn something about your organization. It may mean a very critical self examination of what’s working and what’s not. It may take real guts to change. But you’ve got to ask yourself, why you do what you do? Who are you really trying to help?

Whether you’re new or have been in this business for years, it’s absolutely vital that you not only show everyone you are different, but that you make a difference. Due diligence and investments in process, self examination, and change will pay big dividends for everyone involved.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 22 December 2007

Wiki Social Science

Does your nonprofit really offer what your end user clients need? Or are they just taking what’s offered even though they really need something else?

Currently I’m on a church committee with a goal to facilitate social, economic, and spiritual transformation in one of the poorest areas of Dallas. Realizing it’s nearly impossible to find a solution until you’ve identified the problem, I’ve been a part of two different surveys to determine the main problems in this area of need.

Results from both surveys were very similar. But two things bother me about these surveys:
1) they were conducted by well meaning people who had little training in preparing or conducting surveys
2) over 90% of the participants represented only about 40% of the people in the area

How can we be sure we are addressing the real problems in the area???

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article on investment research and wiki’s. Wiki’s are a fascinating way to me (a yawner to my wife) of collaborating on most anything. Wikipedia is currently the most prominent example of lots of people working together.

In Everybody’s an Analyst the writer discusses a new kind of web site that offers financial information from a broad group of people acting unofficially (and with little regulation) in concert.

This has significant limitations when it comes to investment advice, but what about research? Especially in the area of social science.

Accurate surveys cost money. Even if you get a nearby university to put its students at work on this.

But if there was a demographics wiki web site available, it seems to me that lots of nonprofits could take advantage of better information on their end user clients.

Imagine that. Getting more efficient on the cheap. Actually working together, maybe even towards a clearly defined goal.

Are there any smart people out there working on this?

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 28 November 2007

Who’s Your Buddy?

Coordinating volunteers.
Coaching kids soccer…or any other sport for kids under 8.
Getting your church committee to do SOMETHING besides talk.
Starting a new business, a new project from scratch.
Riding bicycles in a pack.
Shopping at the mall after Thanksgiving.
Finding other organizations to work with yours.

Yes. They all have the common denominator of cat herding.

Can’t we all just get along?

No. Well sometimes yes.

So what do you do if you’re one of the 837,027 U.S. nonprofits trying to do more than just exist from month to month? (Nearly 40% of you ran deficits in 2003.)

How ’bout finding a buddy??

Remember. It’s not all about you. At least it’s not supposed to be. Aren’t you doing this for a cause? Who else is trying to do the same thing? Can you help them? Can they help you? Each of you probably has unique strengths. If you’re duplicating each other, someone needs to go…or change. Remember, you’re trying to do good, not just look good.

Life is full of chaos, but often in the middle of that confusion is someone going the same way you are. There’s your potential buddy. Watch a bike race sometime. The Tour de France is the big one, but there are lots of others.

The riders ride in a pack for miles. They’re mostly competitors, but they’re actually helping each other along the way. It’s amazingly more efficient to ride in a pack. They are cooperating at the same time they compete against each other. It’s chaos at its most elegant.

The chaos turns into pure teamwork when the teams pull out of the pack and form pacelines and work together to go further and faster with less effort. (I’m trying valiantly not to repeat an earlier blog…but this is such an important concept.)

Nonprofits are in a competitive business. David LaPiana wrote an excellent book about this. It’s called “Play to Win, The Nonprofit Guide to Competitive Strategy.”

You’ve got to be a successful competitor or you’ll fail. But you’ve also got to be a buddy to get along in this herd of cats.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 18 November 2007

Starts and Finishes

Time to start your next project? Or are you just too whipped to think about climbing a new mountain?

Wonder when this current project will EVER finish? When will we ever get out of this valley? Is it time to give up?

Don’t like those words? Try these: It’s time for someone to feed us. We’ve been feeding others long enough.

Ahhhh….the joys of projects, especially those that start with good intentions, but seem to lose their luster and energy as time goes by.

The November issue of Christianity Today has an excellent article by Greg Snell titled “Developing Good Development.” More than a few skeptics think millions (billions?) of dollars are being wasted (they probably are) and that all that generosity is harmful to its recipients (in many cases it is).

Some of those skeptics are saying “give up.” That’s just what you wanted to hear, right? A reason to quit. Mr. Snell disagrees. There are others who share the views of Mr. Snell.

Ram Cnaan, in his book, The Other Philadelphia Story, talks about how faith-based giving initiatives in Philadelphia are making huge differences in that urban environment. His studies conclude that faith-based nonprofits in Philly contribute as much as $250M a year for vitally needed services that the government does not have to maintain.

Byron Johnson of Baylor University looked at Ohio and concluded in his study that faith-based programs in that state can bring about “dramatic increase in the cost-effective provision of social services that otherwise go unmet in so many communities.” It seems to me this applies to the world, not just a city or state.

John DiIulio, does a good job of summarizing the works of Cnaan and Johnson in his Wall Street Journal article, The Other Philadelphia Story. Mr. DiIulio has also just released a book, Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith-Based Future. A magazine that presents a vision of liberal philosophy, politics, and public life, The American Prospect gave the following review of his book: “If there were more liberals who shared John DiIulio’s passion for justice, liberalism would be better — and so would America.” My comments on faith vs. secularism and liberals vs. conservatives will have to wait for another time.

Back to “Developing Good Development.” Mr. Snell offers ten principles (my comments are in parenthesis):
1. Know more than your mission statement (make sure everyone knows it)
2. Avoid deficit auditing (live within your means)
3. Seed the project with local seeds (insure there’s “skin in the game”)
4. Make the rounds early and often (relationship 101)
5. Build values before buildings (see number 1)
6. Practice cost sharing (find partners willing to invest)
7. Use the eyes and ears of locals (relationship 102)
8. Don’t patronize (relationship 201)
9. Answer questions slowly (relationship 202)
10. Plan your exit strategy (plan on eliminating yourself)

Whether your working in Kenya, Mississippi, or Dallas, Mr. Snell offers principles that every nonprofit will do well to consider.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 30 October 2007

Big Heart, No Plan

This is nonprofit variant to the Texas idiom: “big hat, no cattle.” I’ve worked intimately with a lot of great nonprofits over the last year. A common denominator is a huge heart and passion for making the lives of children better than anyone can reasonably hope. This is not only a big plus for the kids, but a big lift for our communities and even our planet.

But there’s a big problem with some of them. They’ve got no plan. They just grab onto the latest concept or donor or volunteer or foundation and HOPE that will solve solve their problems. They call that their strategy.

Hope is not a strategy.

The most recurrent problem is under funding. Sometimes the “strategy” is to work harder for a home run; or wish for the Hail Mary pass for the touchdown; or just pray more fervently.

Don’t get me wrong. Prayer is a very good thing. A necessary thing. But get off the railroad tracks before you start praying for the train to stop. Take that first step (to the side for your safety) then the next step forward. In other words, get a plan. Like my dad always said, “plan your work, and work your plan.”

In Brian Hurd‘s excellent paper, “Growing Ministries the Right Way,” he makes the point that successful, sustainable fund raising is not just scheduling a series of events and making a bunch of asks. It’s about putting a system in place. Planning a process and sticking with it.

This is not rocket science, but it does take time and persistence. It also means taking the first step. If you think you’ve run out of time to plan because the bills are due, you’re wrong. The bills will always be due. A good way to insure you never catch up is to never plan and never put a system in place to run your organization like a healthy business.

Where do you start?

Peter Drucker, the legendary business consultant, gave us five must answer questions in order to run an effective nonprofit. Do you even know the questions?? Hint: they’re about mission, customer, value, results, and plan.

There’s that word again. Plan.

If you expect to get funding from big donors, whether sophisticated foundations or individuals, make sure you’ve got answers to all those questions. The big donors are big because they live in a world that works to the answers from those questions.

Where do you think they got all those funds to donate? From well run, for profit organizations with good answers.

If you’re a brand new or very small nonprofit without a 990 or audited financial results, you at least need a good business plan until you get bigger. People want to give to people, especially people who are helping children. It’s the easiest of all fund raising.

But savvy individual donors and virtually all foundations want to insure their funds will go to good stewards no matter how good their cause. They will be asking to see the results and understand your plan before they contribute to your great organization.

So take all those strengths that helped you develop a great heart and develop a great plan in order to have a great organization to help those in need. And don’t let the ego from the big heart get in the way of what’s best for the kids.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 15 October 2007

Paluxy Lessons

Life is good! Did a bike ride in the hills around Glen Rose, Texas Saturday. The weather was gorgeous, the vistas beautiful, the long runs down county roads thrilling, the people among the best in the world! And the food was good. Just wished I’d slept better.

Tossed and turned in our B&B the night before the ride called the Paluxy Pedal. Wasn’t sure I could really finish the 45 mile route laid out for us. If I’d be going it alone. If I’d get lost. If I’d have a flat. If I’d make it over “the wall.”

The “wall” is a steep hill….a 19% grade. It is a third of a mile hill climb at about the 22 mile point in the ride.

As usual, my concerns the night before just weren’t that big a deal after the sun came up. Sitting on the banks of the Paluxy River that afternoon, I had time to reflect on my lessons learned. Actually relearned. Somethings just aren’t that new. They just bear repeating. Or maybe I’m just a slow learner.

Lesson numero uno: having a partner makes a HUGE difference. My best buddy, Mark, rode with me the entire way. He wasn’t any more sure of being able to finish than I was. At the go / no go point about 15 miles into the ride, we both agreed to go. And we agreed that if one of us had to ask for help, we’d both ask for help. Sort of a pact to not be too macho. (As an amendment to our pact that we weren’t gonna let a bunch of wienies outride us.)

Lesson numero dos: obstacles can be bigger in your mind than in person. The hill known as “the wall” was a grueling climb physically for this old guy. But it was also a big pysche job. You approach it with a steep hill sign on your right and notice the pavement changes because normal paving of this section is not possible. Your brain tells your legs, “this is not good.”

You start the slow grind upwards and rapidly reach your lowest gear before you’re even half way to the top. You look up to see a curve to the left which means you cannot even see the top. Your brain tells your now burning legs, “this is really not good.”

Your legs yell at your brain, “NO KIDDIN’ MEATHEAD…GET OFF AND WALK RIGHT NOW!”

Your brain half-way listens but keeps your head down trying not to look up in order to postpone disappointment at how much further you have to ride. Your brain also remembers other climbs that were even more disappointing because you quit just before a summit that was closer than you thought.

Your stubborn brain, though totally focused on the moment, looks up one last time, sees the top of the hill, and pleads with the legs, “just a few more turns!” The legs are too tired to talk back.

With the goal in sight, you get a few more strokes from your aching legs and actually make it to the top with a smug smile. You’d dance in celebration except that your legs would totally embarrass you…or by not working, keep you from embarrassing yourself.

These lessons apply to nonprofit organizations as well as to cyclists. Every nonprofit endeavor needs partners, allies, buddies. Can you make it alone? Maybe. But you really can go further and faster with less effort with a good partner you can trust. And if you can do that, you can do more good. (Is it about helping more people, or is it about your ego?)

There will always be hills to climb, some dauntingly steep. But you’ve got to try them. Even when you don’t quite make it one time, it’s great “ammo” for your brain to hang a little tougher a little longer so you can make it the next time. Or the next.

Keep working “heads down,” focusing on the details to make things happen, but don’t forget to look up to see where you’re going. (Do you have a goal and a strategy on how to get there?)

In the meantime, ride safe, have fun, and try not to slobber with that big grin while you’re zooming down hills.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 28 September 2007

TMI

Too much information.

You know the feeling. It’s usually when your wife starts talking about female medical issues or your Uncle Hiram in Niceville starts telling you about all the desert choices at the retirement center.

But there’s another, more insidious, danger from TMI besides being grossed out or bored to death. It’s called reinventing the wheel.

Two things affecting everyone in the commercial and nonprofit world this century:
1) how do you do more with less?
2) how do you sort through the tons of information available today?

This isn’t rocket science folks. Whether you’re trying to avoid starting a redundant teen pregnancy center in a single zipcode or trying to build a high tech immigration data base to protect our borders. What you need is to find who’s done this before you. Chances are good that someone has tried. Maybe even succeeded.

The problem is, how do you find out what’s been done so you’re not starting from scratch or building something new that turns out to be not so new?

I can’t help you a whole lot with the past, just encourage you to look and dig and talk to others before you start spending lots of time and money on a “new” idea. But starting now, I can encourage you to start using “tags.”

This is a popular concept in Web 2.0, but even this isn’t a new concept. In 1989, my mentor persuaded me to include keywords in the subject line of EVERY email I sent. It’s easy to do. It only takes a little discipline. Once done, it’s amazing how easy it is to search for just the right email you need.

It’s also amazing (and frustrating) how many emails I get with little or no information in the subject line. Heck, sometimes they’re even asking a question about an email written hours or days before without attaching the old email. I’ve noticed that sometimes I have another distraction or thought after I sent that email. Until my clairvoyance gets perfected, you’re just wasting time and bandwidth.

So here’s the deal folks. Starting right now. Take a breath. Put a significant word or two in the subject line of each email you send. This helps sort the clutter into categories. It helps bring order out of chaos. It gives you the opportunity to tell people you are practicing folksonomy (your new word for the day).

It you want to see how well this works, check out the folks at Technorati. They’ve done incredible work by getting the masses to put category names on blogs, photos, music…pretty much all the garbage – and treasure – that’s on the web today.

Trust me. It’s gonna help your life get simpler. And it’s gonna make it a lot easier for those following you to discover your brilliant ideas and apply them to changing the world. You might even get credit for it. At the very least, it will help you find the recipe for Uncle Hiram’s favorite, homemade cough syrup.

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Posted by: Don Linnen | 19 September 2007

Spies, Terrorists, and Donors

What in the world do these groups have in common?

From today’s news: “since February of this year, none of our phones have been tapped without a court order.”  Don’t know if I feel relieved or disappointed about that.

Indignant is probably a better description. I like my privacy. I think I guard it pretty well. But between my frequent buyer cards, my frequent flyer cards, my frequent stayer cards, and just about anything else that calls for either a plastic card or my phone number, there’s not too many marketeers out there that don’t know a lot about me.

So pardon me if I’m more than a little annoyed that big brother isn’t listening to conversations of suspected bad guys. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of big brother. But do you really think the government has more of an agenda than all the marketeers collecting data on us??

Everyone has a right to privacy, but at what cost to the common good? Nonprofits are public organizations that must operate “in the sunshine” and at the same time protect the rights of their donors. Apparently some of our most noble np’s are not very open about their operations. Ask the Smithsonian.

It’s a good thing to give without expecting accolades. For those who really want to maintain their privacy, the BBB of giving acts as a watchdog that will bark loudly to insure there are plans to “take action to ensure that privacy concerns of donors are respected in the collection, dissemination, and securing of personal information, and allow donors opportunities to have their names removed from solicitation lists.”

It’s called a donor privacy policy. It’s important to publish. It’s easy to do.

On the other side of the coin, the public does have a right to know and a right to expect accountability of our funding – both expenses and income. That’s not hard to solve either.

The answer to the question at the top? What do spies, terrorists, and donors have in common?

PRIVACY.

Some groups need the privacy of working in the dark to “succeed.” But bad things rarely happen in the light of day.

Privacy is not a bad thing when kept it in balance. Take care of your donors. They take care of you.

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