Author: Marion Conway

This is a companion piece to Board Recruitment –Don’t Expect the “Fully Loaded Potato” at First at my blog at marionconway.com.

Governance Committee Chair’s Presentation

The presentation should include:
-Roles and Responsibilities of the Board
-Expectations of Individual Board Members
-Qualities of Board Members

Interactive Activity
Pass out large sheets of construction paper. Ask each person to draw a picture that represents their associationwith the mission of the organization or what they could envision it being if they are a guest. Have everyone share their picture with people at their table. The facilitator can ask volunteers at each table to share with the whole group. This activity helps wind the evening down on a positive tone still focused on the mission of your organization.

Wrap Up and Next Steps
Ask each guest to fill out an “Interest Form” or an application. If you are seeking committee members who may not also be Board members then you need to talor your form that that you give to attendees. Explain that the ED and a Board Member will follow-up with a tour of your facilities or invitation to one of the organization’s events.

Closing the Deal
Once you have completed the post recruitment visit, it is time for the close. Either the ED or Governance Committee member should now ask the invitee to join the Board and feel comfortable about making a sales pitch. If the person has stayed with you up to this point you should be able to close the deal.

Summary
This is only one suggestion for a recruitment plan. There really is no one size fits all that works for all organizations. Each organization has a different set of parameters to deal with when recruiting board members. It is worth it to make the investment of upfront analysis and planned recruiting to attract the type of board members you need.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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I just finished blogging at MarionConway.com about giving your website a facelift this summer. That article included some basic design advice and some quick and easy ideas that you don’t have to wait to implement. As I sometimes do, this is a companion article and if you like this one I suggest you read It’s Summer – Give Your Website a Quick Facelift at my other blog.

This article is about the importance of knowing as much about your website as possible from an user perspective and putting that information to work. There are lots of SEO (that’s search engine optimization) experts and articles. I am not an expert and this article isn’t about SEO – well not really. I promise not to use any jargon without explaining what I am talking about.

When I lead social media for nonprofit workshops I always start by talking about how your website is your base and you have to start there and get your website in order before you develop a strong social media presence. The reason for this is that much of what you want to do with social media is drive people to your website where they can learn more about you and upcoming events, sign up for your newsletter and, of course, donate.

But how do people find you on the web? Do you know? You should know. It is easy enough to find out. Check the analytics for your website. The what? Yes, your website almost certainly has analytics but if your webmaster is the only one who knows about it it doesn’t do any good. Most platforms that websites are built on have statistics reporting built in. These statistics about your users are called analytics. You can also use my favorite, Google Analytics. Google analytics can very easily be added to your website by adding a simple script – and it is free. Your webmaster can do this in less than five minutes. Analytics programs tell you all sorts of useful information such as:
-How many visitors you have each day, week, month and year
-Cities, states and countries your visitors come from
-Referring sites – Other websites that have a link to your website and someone clicked on that link
-Search words/phrases that people typed in and your website came up in search and they visited the site
-What was the landing page – not just the home page – that the visitor reached when they first came to your site
-Who was the service provider – Frequently this may just be something like Verizon. But it can also be the name of a foundation or company if they host their own website.

This information is crucial for nonprofits and small business to understand their website from a visitor’s point of view. Not everyone comes directly to your site. Its possible that a significant percentage of your visitors come via other routes and you should know about it.

Another question is your website coming up when people search on certain words and you hope the find you?

What You Might Find Out
This is an exercise that I do live with workshop participants – when we are in a room with wifi. Type into Google search words that you would like your website to come up for. Examples might be “Shakespeare NJ” and indeed the Shakespeare Theater of NJ comes up first. But when I type in homeless shelters NJ, HUD articles, and newspaper articles come up before any actual homeless shelters. Then a few well known ones begin to appear. But some of the biggest ones do not appear. They needs to use the words that people search on more frequently on their websites – and especially in article headings.
Maybe people are landing on a page that should be getting more attention and updating.
Where is your traffic coming from anyway – Is it from facebook? LinkedIn? Is it from your partner websites? Did someone mention you on the web or highlight a link in a news article? These sources should be thanked and perhaps there is the opportunity to return the favor.

In January 2010 I wrote My Blog in 2009 Laid Naked and Dissected – The Analytic Results as a blog post. I explained what I learned about my visitors and how I planned to use it. It was a very popular post. Check it out.

Understanding what makes you website visitors tick when it comes to your website can be very valuable information. Don’t leave this information behind.

Marion Conway

http://marionconway.com

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

A new national study of nonprofit executive leadership provides a keen insight into and useful benchmarking statistics on the state of nonprofit leadership. Daring to Lead 2011 is a joint project of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and the Meyer Foundation. The report is based on responses from over 3000 executive directors and follows similar studies completed in 2001 and 2006.

I am writing companion pieces here and at my blog at http://marionconway.com about the study. This piece discusses the results from the perspective of the Board and the other one from the perspective of Executive Directors. As always, I add my two cents along the way.

The last report, in 2006, caused quite a stir with its projection of the number of executive directors who planned to leave their position in the next five years and the need for succession planning. The magnitude of the exodus was somewhat delayed but it is definitely upon us now as 20% of the respondents were over 60. In this study 67% said they expect to leave their present position within five years. Retirement isn’t the only reason that EDs leave an organization. Planning for it remains important.

The talk is all about succession planning and developing employees to move up in the organization. But, in fact, in smaller organizations this may not be realistic. If it isn’t Boards still need to be prepared for executive turnover. The likelihood of executive turnover is much higher than most Boards realize.

I think that one of the most important things a board can do to be prepared for executive transition is to have a performance evaluation process in place. I say this because developing an evaluation process forces a board to think about what are the skills and performance criteria which they think are most important. It also causes the Board to be more knowledgeable about what is involved in being an ED of your organization. I was surprised that 45% percent of EDs said that they didn’t have a performance evaluation and an additional 8% said that their evaluation was not useful. Boards definitely need to do better in this area.

68% of EDs expressed satisfaction with their boards – not that bad a grade although it should be much higher. After all, one of the main responsibilities of the Board is to support the ED. This chart shows what EDs have to say about the areas of Board support.

An important issue for Boards and EDs is financial management. An amazing 42% of executive directors say that they don’t thoroughly understand the financial underpinnings of their organizations. At the same time boards of directors are evermore focused on financial oversight. In my experience financial management issues can be a key point of tension between a board and an ED. In addition to being a primary contributor to executive director burnout, financial instability can threaten an organization’s ability to carry out its mission and its very existence. EDs definitely need more training and development in this area and Board members with skill should think about providing skill development and not just oversight to EDs in this area. One of my favorite biographies was that of Kathryn Graham of the Washington Post. When her husband died, she became Board Chair and was ill prepared for the job. Warren Buffett was on the board and he would meet with her before each Board meeting and basically trained her on financial management. We need more Board members who are willing to step up to this task.

Fundraising, a basic Board responsibility, does not fare well at all. This is so important – for Board members to engage actively in fundraising – I just don’t understand these consistently poor results.

There is a multistack chart showing how satisfied EDs are with their Boards in relationship with the number of hours they spend on Board work. It seemed pretty spread out to me but bottom line satisfaction peaks if it is 5 -10 hours a month. If your ED is spending more time than that on Board work per month, it probably is too much.

I highly recommend that Board members read this whole report. You will get good insight into what makes EDs tick and Board-ED relationships.

Read the full report here.

Read the companion piece, “All About Executive Directors – Results of a New Daring to Lead Study on Nonprofit Leadership” on Marion’s blog here.

Marion Conway

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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See my blog at: http://marionconway.com

I recently gave this presentation entitled “Being on a Board: What’s It All About?” at the Grant Professionals MidAtlantic Conference and I am sharing the slides with you here. I was asked to give this presentation because many grant professionals get asked to be on a Board and some would like to be on a Board for professional development.

Being on a Board is a serious responsibility and commitment and should be considered thoughtfully. It also can be a major personal growth experience and be an important career enhancing experience. The slides are posted on slideshare for downloading and you can view them here.

Marion Conway

http://marionconwaynonprofitconsultant.blogspot.com

There are two new large scale study reports on Nonprofits and technology just released in March 2011 that have quite a bit of noteworthy information in them. I am again writing two companion pieces on this topic:

This article discusses The Third Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report published by NTEN, Common Knowledge, and Blackbaud You can read my report on The Convio Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Index™ Study here. Both of these reports pull from organizations that have a relationship with Convio, Blackbaud or NTEN and they already have some meaningful technology involvement. So the highlights of the reports that I include don’t include percentages like “percent of nonprofits on Facebook” because in this regard it is a skewed sample. When you get past that, there is a lot to learn from these statistics about organizations who have already gotten their feet wet using social networks such as Facebook and YouTube.

Here are highlights – along with my commentary – from the Social Network Benchmark Report:

Facebook is by far the most popular social network tool being used by nonprofits and continues to grow. The number of fans on Facebook is growing as nonprofits focus more attention on it, but it is not a good source of fundraising. There is a considerable difference between creating a “casual” presence on Facebook and growing a viable program with a connection to a large audience and scalable results. This shows up in the statistical correlations between size of the community and staff and budget dedicated to it.

Participation in Twitter and LinkedIn is lower and has leveled off.

YouTube continues to be popular. I noticed at the NTEN national technology conference held this month in Washington, DC that there was a great interest among small nonprofits in YouTube and the whole Google for Nonprofits line. Google sponsored a long workshop and had a well manned booth for the entire conference and YouTube was definitely on the minds of the many visitors to check it all out.

Small new donor-empowered peer-to-peer giving sites CrowdRise, FirstGiving, Razoo and Causes all made a very small appearance in the study but they are on the map and worth watching. Who know who may take off and be the best new thing.

I am always asked about what is the right amount of staff time to budget for social networking and this report provided the clearest answer I have ever seen about what organizations with established social networks do. Over 60% of respondents say they allocate ¼ of a full time staff equivalent to it. Amazingly almost half the respondents allocate no – that’s right – zero, nothing, nada – budget for it. I can’t imagine any other activity that an organization was willing to dedicate 25% of an employee’s time without any supporting budget. It seems to me that unless you have a tech savvy, communications savvy, super dedicated overall dynamo on this you really should have some budget.

How about fundraising? 98% – that’s right again – do not use a social network for fundraising (52%) or have raised under $10,000 with it (48%). This was no surprise to me but it would be to the people who come to my social networking for nonprofits workshop who have fundraising in mind as a top goal.

It is always good to have information to benchmark ourselves against. Here are some important takeaways I have from this report. Whether large or small, many nonprofits are using social networking as an important tool today. They are using it for marketing and building relationships with their communities. They are also making strides in using social networking for education, advocacy, and program delivery.

If you haven’t been using social networks, or you haven’t done so effectively, it may be time to invest – time and money – to get up and running. Social networking has become a good investment for those making a reasonable effort.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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Is your nonprofit publishing an annual report? If not, you may be missing a big opportunity. Funders are interested in this report and posting it to your website is becoming a more important part of accountability and transparency standards. Having an annual report is required by Guidestar to have their Guidestar Exchange seal. If you have program accomplishments you’d like to brag about and are fiscally sound, this is a wonderful opportunity to toot your horn.

Writing an annual report does not have to be a “going to the dentist” experience. Here are a few ideas:

• Keep it brief and crisp.
• A picture is worth a thousand words – Use them to show off your programs in action.
• Charts work best for financial information – Pie, bar, line – whatever tells the story best.
• What to put on charts – Sources of income, program distribution of funds, program/administrative distribution of funds, growth in clients served/audience/customers and whatever statistics you would like to show off
• Feature major accomplishments rather than a long laundry list of everything you did last year
• Tell anecdotal stories
• Highlight a client, volunteer, board member or staff member

Before you start, check out the NonprofitMarketingGuide.com by Kivi LeRoux Miller. On the subject of nonprofit annual reports, Kivi has an e-book, a pre-recorded webinar, a lengthy list of examples with links and free articles at her website. She is the expert in this field. Kivi has a four page annual report model, a postcard model and a video model

On my blog at Marion Conway –Nonprofit Consultant I have just posted an article – From a Foundation Perspective – What Makes An Effective Nonprofit? – that summarizes a report on this subject by the Association of Small Nonprofits. One of the items they recommend foundations review is the annual report. If you’d like to see what else is on the list, visit my blog now.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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In my last blog post, I said I would write about funding for technology for nonprofits – and so here it is.

One of the main reasons for a lag in use of technology by nonprofits is always claimed to be a lack of funding. This articles provides some ideas for developing stronger technology funding proposals. I think the two most important things you can do when putting a technology proposal together are:

1. Ask for the appropriate/right thing
2. Connect to you mission

Know What’s Right for You

The perfect example of a technology funding request error is requesting funding for hardware and software but not for training or ongoing maintenance. I know a number of small nonprofits who purchased Raiser’s Edge but did not go to the training. Their money would have been much better spent buying something like GiftWorks plus their full training package for a much lower price. If you don’t need or have any idea on how to use all the bells and whistles, then you may be better off with a more modest product that will meet your needs and you can learn to navigate easily. I’ve also recommended to some organizations that a web-based service like eTapestry may best suit their particular needs, but they thought they had to ask for funding to buy software rather than say five year funding for a license.

I think that funders are getting smarter about technology “fit” for nonprofits and they may not look kindly on technology funding requests that they don’t think are a good fit for your organization. Make sure you are doing your homework, getting knowledgeable technology advice and checking out resources like Idealware and Techsoup . These resources have detailed articles that will help you assess what’s best for you and you can work that knowledge analysis into your request.

Connect to Your Mission

If you look at your successful grants they were probably the ones most closely connected to your mission and what you are good at. Did you address sustainability and did you take the time to choose the right funders? Well, if all of those things were part of the recipe for your success with other grants, make sure they are in your technology grant requests too.

1. Don’t just ask for funding for new computers because your old ones are old. What will new computers enable you to do that you aren’t doing or do well now? Will you be using your computers to deliver better, more timely services or serving more people? Does software that you want to implement for better customer service require more capacity than the computers you now have?
2. Funders will respond to your objective to provide better customer service. New computer/software systems that increase customer access, privacy and support should be presented in relationship to your mission rather than addressed merely from an administrative point of view.
3. Will systems that track information enable you to do better program evaluations and receive/analyze customer feedback? These are results that funders are interested in supporting.
4. Make sure you address ongoing technical maintenance/support, computer/network security and training in your request. All of these can be tied to the quality of your service. Your plan for sustaining the value of the initial investment will make for a stronger proposal.
5. If your request involves website development or development of a social networking presence you can tie this to fundraising capacity and communication. Certainly communicating about your mission is tied to your mission.

Two Other Things to Consider

If you are preparing a program proposal and it will involve additional staffing, make sure that you embed your technology requirements for new staff in the proposal – and don’t forget training!

Increasing your technology capacity IS capacity building. If you know a funder that has capacity building for things like vehicles, buildings and equipment as part of their charter, then they may be a candidate for this proposal.

I hope this article provides some ideas to help you put together the strongest proposal possible. Please share your success stories with us and let us know what works for you.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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Marion Conway

Visit my blog at: http://marionconwaynonprofitconsultant.blogspot.com

I am so enthusiastic to be the new co-host of the Nonprofit Capacity Blog here at the Free Management Library. Greetings! One topic that hasn’t been mentioned much here, that is an interest of mine is technology for nonprofits and so I plan to write about that subject. Frequently when nonprofits talk about capacity building they forget to include technology as a critical and important piece of that puzzle.

Recently the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Studies in association with ten leadership nonprofit organizations completed a study of nonprofits and technology. I’d like to share some key findings.

Although virtually all nonprofits use technology and it is frequently well integrated into financial, administrative and fundraising functions it lags well behind into integration into program and services.

I was surprised to see the low level of importance was put on technology for advocacy/lobbying, staff training and recruiting/managing volunteers as I see technology playing a key role in these areas.

Small nonprofits sometimes have older computers that are not networked, have outdated virus and other important updates, literally no IT support, slow internet connections and no ability to access information and work from home. They didn’t ask but if they have these problems security is also a nightmare. Fortunately they are in the minority.

Here’s the good news – many nonprofits – large and small are making great use of technology and it is paying off.

Some innovative ways a diverse group of nonprofits were using technology in delivering programs and services:

– Putting client data and assessments into digital format to determine service needs;

– Enabling the public to access materials such as oral history recordings, archival photographs, and

genealogical information;

– Releasing public policy alerts to mobilize members and supporters;

– Screening benefits and eligibility online for elderly individuals;

– Providing opportunities for autistic adolescents to communicate using technology;

– Making exhibits available on-line so that teachers can use them in their classrooms;

– Employing YouTube videos for therapy with children.

Organizations reported that over the previous year alone, incorporating

IT into program and service delivery

• • Helped create a public presence for their organizations -89%
• • Increased their capacity to communicate with clients, customers, and patrons – 87%
• • Resulted in faster service delivery – 83%
• • Improved the quality of services delivered – 80%
• • Allowed them to be more client, customer, and patron-friendly in delivering services – 78%
• • Allowed them to serve more people – 71%
• • Satisfied funder and/or regulator requirements – 71%
• • Allowed them to make innovations in their programs – 67%
• • Resulted in cost savings in service delivery – 67%
• • Allowed them to expand into new program areas – 56%

Lack of funding is one of the leading reasons given for this lag by some nonprofits. In a future post, I’ll have some ideas for dealing with technology funding more effectively.

See the whole Johns Hopkins report here.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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For more resources, see our Library topic Nonprofit Capacity Building.

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