Third Sector Connector Blog

Our last blog post about 21 burning questions for the Nonprofit/NGO Sector left us – and many of you who read it – wanting answers. So, we’re asking you to gaze into your crystal ball and help.

What trends do you foresee or predictions can you make for the nonprofit/NGO and philanthropic sector in 2010?

Whether your thoughts are about partnerships, social media, programs, volunteerism, fundraising, or other topics, we want to hear from you. We’re asking more than 5,000 people this question, not only here, but via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. You can be as general or specific as you like.

Here’s a small sampling of our early responses just to get your “predictive juices” flowing:

“I am hoping – actually I’m praying – that nonprofit organizations have learned some lessons and will be steering clear of trends and returning to the basics, emphasizing sound systems and comprehensive donor appreciation. I would love to see organizations begin to focus the same commitment to their development efforts that they show their mission (perhaps then they’d have the funding to SUPPORT their missions!).” From Pamela Grow, President, GrowConsultingPA and Pamela’s Grantwriting Blog

“The current recession will impact the voluntary sector in deepening ways – funding organizations will have less resources as they try to bounce back from losses, United Ways will be pressed with fewer donations as corporations pull back and governments are facing unprecidented deficits – this will call to us to be creative, strategic and to look for those opportunities which will ensure our resilience – those organizations that resist this – will be left behind. It seems bleak – but in every challenge ~ there is opportunity.” Liz Weaver, Lead Coach, Vibrant Communities Canada/Tamarack Institute

“I see an uptick in non-profits of all sizes losing valuable leaders and having great difficulty replacing them. Two reasons at least: 1. Revenue and good salaries will remain hard to come by for the NP and for the home of the leader. 2. Many leaders are ill-equipped (or too tired) to make the changes necessary to survive/prosper in this environment. They’ll move on to more fulfilling opportunities.” Tim Deuitch, Senior Consultant, Strategic Enhancement Group, Inc.

Won’t you pull out your own crystal ball and add your voice?

I recently posted a question to some colleagues on a members-only discussion group, “Does the nonprofit sector need a re-boot? If so, what questions should we be asking?” I received many thoughtful responses and thought I’d share the list of questions that came from that posting here:

1. How can we convert meaningful conversations into actions that produce strong and timely results for the entire nonprofit and philanthropic sector?
2. Are we truly meeting the needs of those we serve, whether it be a soup kitchen or a museum?
3. What is our impact and are we measuring it? Which leads to… how do we raise our bar higher?
4. How do we avoid burn-out and tap into the talents of the next generation of leaders? How much training really is needed?
5. Do we need to rethink compensation at both ends of the spectrum?
6. What is nonprofit ethics and how well do we walk our talk?
7. Why does our sector continue to rely on business modeling and imagery for solutions to our problems?
8. How can we enlist and sustain executive and trustee leadership who see their roles as serving not just their organizations but the sector as well?
9. How can we advance the sector’s identity as a place for those who seek meaning and purpose in life and work and who are rethinking, if not rejecting, acquisition and accumulation as goals for their careers?
10. In the spirit of “never waste a good crisis”, is it possible/wise to promote some rationalization rather than letting social Darwinism dictate the shape of the sector and the strength of its “place at the table” five to ten years out?
11. Accepting that the governance model for the sector might itself require a “reboot”, what role should directors play in any move toward rationalization?
12. Many nonprofits — and their boards — inadvertently sacrifice business basics to mission and service delivery. In the spirit of rebooting the governance model, how can boards better serve to balance stewardship of mission with sustainability of operations?
13. How do we address what our members/consumers/recipients really need not only from a local or personal perspective, but also with a global vision?
14. How do we remain inclusive [bring together stakeholders, maintain and honor diversity, respect many voices] and sustainable [revenue, best practices, and stewardship of resources]?
15. How do Boards stay “honest” and ethical in their stewardship to those they serve?
16. What stops us (as a nonprofit sector) from embracing our value and our power for affecting and effecting positive social change?
17. How can my nonprofit help another nonprofit to advance its mission while also achieving something to help mine move forward?
18. How can we enhance our capacity to talk and think more deeply together about the critical issues facing our communities, our organizations, our nations, and our planet?” (from The World Cafe, (c) 2005)
19. How can we access the mutual intelligence and wisdom we need to create innovative paths forward? (also from the World Cafe)
20. How do we work together to build sustainable infrastructure that will allow us all to flourish?
21. How do we build cross-sector partnerships that are designed to create and drive a new future, not only within individual communities, but regionally, nationally, and across the globe?

Note: The final two questions are ones that I asked in my recent blog post about the blurring of the private, nonprofit, and public sectors.

What strikes you about the questions themselves? What questions do you have to add to this list? Or, what answers do you have to contribute?

Most of us already know that if you’re a serious professional, you need to have a profile on LinkedIn. What you may not know is that you can use LinkedIn as a powerful tool for building your organization’s brand. Below is a list of 21 ways that you can maximize LinkedIn to:

• Connect with existing donors and leverage their networks
• Prospect for board members, volunteers and donors
• Promote your nonprofit’s brand

Out of the Gate

• Set your public profile to full view so that even those who are not on LinkedIn can find you. (LinkedIn is indexed by all major search engines.)
• Add all former employers so that former colleagues can easily find you.
• Create a custom url for your profile with your name in it. Hyphenate your first and last name to make it more easily searchable.
• Bring your profile to 100% completeness so that it is ranked higher in searches. LinkedIn walks you through how to do this.
• Make sure your organization’s website is listed on your profile.
• If it doesn’t already exist, create a profile for your organization so that people can link to the organization’s profile directly from yours.

Weaving Your Web

• Upload your personal address list and invite those contacts who are already on LinkedIn and those who are not to join. Sending individual invitations and adding personal notes is most effective.
• Encourage all of your staff to join and build profiles.
• Ask your board members to make sure that their board role is listed on their own LinkedIn profiles if they have one and that it links to your organization’s profile.
• In addition to your personal contacts, import your major donors, your volunteers, and your vendors (like your web designer or your attorney). Invite them all to become linked.

Prospecting for Gold

• Look at the networks of each of your connections. See who they know that you don’t yet know but that you would like to have in your network. Important: Ask them to make a personal introduction for you, either face-to-face or via email. Once you’ve had some interaction with them, then invite them to join your network.
• Check the status updates of your contacts on a regular basis. If something changes, it gives you a reason to give them a call or send them an email and quickly connect.
• Use the advanced search feature. You can search by geography (especially useful if you’re a local organization with a limited service area), company (if you are targeting corporate support), industry (if you are recruiting volunteers, staff or board members), and more.

If You Build It, They Will Come

• Ask for recommendations from your contacts. Reporters often use LinkedIn to identify sources, and those with the most recommendations often appear at the top of their searches.
• Join groups and post interesting news, start a discussion or chime on others’ posts. Set your group notifications to “daily” and scan each of them for interesting news or discussions.
• Use LinkedIn’s “Answers” function to answer questions in your area of expertise or to get free advice from others.
• Always add your full email signature (web, phone, etc) to any of your posts.
• Use LinkedIn’s Slideshare or Google Presentation applications to add any significant presentations you’ve done recently. If you have a general organization or major donor presentation, be sure to add it.
• Use the Blog Link or Word Press Application to connect your blog or your organization’s blog to your profile.
• Use LinkedIn’s Box.net application to share content like FAQs about your organization, e-newsletters, and more.
• Update your status when you want to share great news from work. If you use Twitter for business, you can easily link your tweets to your status update in LinkedIn. Or you can use a service like ping.fm to update multiple social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously.

How else is LinkedIn helping your organization?

I’m usually so immersed in the community benefit/nonprofit/NGO sector that it was fascinating for me to spend the entire weekend with leaders from the American South’s public/government sector. Coordinated by the Charleston-based think tank Center for a Better South, the non-partisan invite-only conference was held at Davidson College in North Carolina and included longtime Southern progressives, current policy wonks, media, academics and others who work not only in the general policy arena, but also in diverse areas such as budgeting, energy, governance, poverty, taxation, and service learning.

We kicked off the weekend with a panelist discussion from Winthrop University’s Adolphus Belk, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Ferrel Guillory and Governing magazine’s Richard Greene. You can see the live tweets from several of us, but I’ve pulled out a couple of the messages that resonated the most strongly for me and that are important guideposts for the nonprofit sector as well:

• Poverty is a common theme for all Southerners, with an average annual income of $32,000.
• High school drop-out rates are high. Only slightly more than two-thirds of Southern Whites graduate from High School and this drops to only 40% of Southern Latinos.
• Rural areas are particularly struggling as young generations of all races head to the more metropolitan areas.
• Thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost and not yet replaced with a knowledge-based economy.
• Religion plays a critical role in Southern ideology and behavior both for Southern Blacks (83.6%) and Southern Whites (69%).

I must say I was surprised at how much it felt like I was sitting in a room filled with nonprofit/NGO leaders. Increasing poverty. Lack of education. Rural crisis. Disappearing jobs. Religion. Racial disparities. Just think about how many community benefit organizations are also focused on those issues, not just in the American South, but across the globe!

Next up was a panelist discussion on the topic, “Can the South lead today?” by former U.S. Congressman Glen Browder, Hendrix College’s Jay Barth, and policy consultant Mac McCorkle from Chapel Hill, NC. McCorkle mostly spoke about the history of Southern leadership, but the answer to the leadership question from Browder and Barth was a definitive “No.” According to the panelists:

• The South has resisted embracing diversity, and that’s reduced the South’s capacity for creative leadership.
• Authoritarianism fueled by resistance to change and the “politics of emotion” results in insular decisions that are community-specific instead of regionally focused.
• This authoritarianism means that not only can’t the South lead the nation; the South can’t lead the South.
• According to Browder, the South’s political brand is broken and tainted. “Having an “S” behind your name is worse than having a “D” or an “R.”

Hmmm. Anything sounding familiar? Barriers. Resistance. Reputation. Branding. Leadership. Same topics as we nonprofit folks discuss, with just a slight twist. In fact, for the entire weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of the “Sector Blur” trend that was highlighted in the just-released monograph funded in by the Fieldstone Alliance and the James Irvine Foundation. I should note that Browder and Barth later disclosed to me that they were intending to be provocative to spur us to action, and that the firm “no” was really intended to be a “not-right-now-unless-we-kick-it-into-gear-and-begin-by-looking-in-our-own-backyard” message.

So what to do?

Following thought-provoking lunchtime perspectives shared by H. Brandt Ayers from the Anniston Star and Warwick Sabin of the Oxford American, we set to work to design an “Agenda for a Better South.” Although not yet completed, we spent a full day drafting key recommendations for Southern leaders in the following areas: Job Creation/Employment, Education, Wellness, Energy, Taxes, Infrastructure, Governance, Social Justice, Community Safety. Once completed, the Center for a Better South is going to stamp those recommendations “draft” and broadly circulate them for feedback via a quick survey. Then once finalized, these recommendations will be widely distributed to Southern leaders, and likely will form the basis of the ongoing work of the Center for a Better South.

As I gathered my own thoughts following the weekend’s intensive session, I realized that regardless of what sector we focus on (including the private sector), we all have the same key priorities:

• How do we work together to cultivate and grow our next-generation leaders?
• How do we work together to improve education, health and job prospects?
• How do we work together to build sustainable infrastructure that will allow us all to flourish?
• How de we build cross-sector partnerships that are designed to create and drive a new future, not only within individual communities, but regionally, nationally, and across the globe?
• How do we lift each other up and support each other to become all that we can be?

Although I don’t pretend to have the answers, I can tell you that I was both honored to be part of the dialogue this weekend, and am excited about the possibilities, not only for the South but for all of us as the public sector and community benefit sectors continue to focus on what we need globally. I also find myself energized by the recognition that to truly build healthy, vibrant communities, the public and community benefit sectors need to link hands with the private sector and answer these questions together.

–LD

I always find it fascinating when my online discussions, my consulting work, my teaching and my free-time all end up pointing me to a new “ah-ha” moment that reinforces my commitment to all community benefit organizations.

How Donors are Swayed by the Irrational

I just finished reading the book Sway by Ori and Rom Brafman this past weekend. It’s a fascinating look at the many forces at work that lead people to act irrationally. Through an analysis of scientific studies and recent current events, they bring home the power of swaying forces such as fear of loss, the “swamp of commitment,” our own personal tendencies to attribute value illogically, diagnosis bias, the “chameleon effect,” and more. Time and time again, the authors cite studies and give examples of how these forces can lead a business student to pay $204 for a $20 bill, cause smart investors to cling to failing stocks instead of selling, and even lead a head of airline safety to disregard years of training and cause one of the deadliest plane crashes in history.

While reading it, I couldn’t help thinking about the way that these “sways” impact the philanthropic sector. Value attribution will lead some donors to continue to fund high profile nonprofits because they have a higher “perceived value” than other organizations. The “swamp of commitment” will lead other donors to give to organizations that champion causes that they or their friends are passionate about. Diagnosis bias and the “chameleon effect” will continue to marry donors to organizations, even when they know that they aren’t high performing.

Why Charity Is Still Alive and Kicking

Not only will donors always be “swayed” by irrationality, just as all humans are, but “charity” itself has a “feel-good” component that likely won’t be overwritten by movements like the “social investing” movement. Sure, some will get their “feel-goods” from investing in only high performing organizations, but others will feel good about giving for other reasons. Saabira Chaudhuri said it beautifully in a blog post about David Hunter’s recent article about the End of Charity:

[Hunter] seems to be propagating the notion that “charity” will just roll over and die, elbowed out by the more practical “social investing.”