How to Grow an Effective Remote Culture

Does your nonprofit work remotely or with a hybrid structure?

If so, it’s just as important to pay attention to your team’s culture and how it may be impacted by remote work as it is to develop a strong culture when you’re in the office. While many nonprofits offered remote work pre-Covid, many others found they had to adapt how they worked due to the pandemic. The impact remote work has on culture may surprise organizations.

Remote work brings many benefits, such as better flexibility for team members, cutting back on commutes, and, according to various studies, higher productivity.

On the flip side, growing an effective organizational culture while working remotely is one of the common challenges. Some organizations have struggled, finding that going remote has negatively impacted the culture they built previously.

This kind of impact doesn’t have to be the story of remote work; it shouldn’t be the story of remote culture for your organization. Here’s what you can do to grow an effective culture:

Common Challenges with Remote Culture

One of the most significant impacts of remote work on culture is that people simply don’t see one another anymore and engagement levels drop. Culture naturally develops in an office or other in-person settings as people interact and normalize “how we do things around here.” It’s vital to note that whether you intentionally develop the culture or not, your organization will have a culture. 

Values such as teamwork and overall camaraderie tend to be simpler to manage when everyone gets together. There are more casual “water cooler” conversations that help people build engagement, respect, trust, and support.

When everyone works remotely, it’s easier for people to miss out on those connections. Sitting behind a computer can lead to employees focusing more on their tasks than their team. They might lose touch with what’s happening in the group and perhaps not feel as connected to people.

For your nonprofit, those connections are critical if you want your team to work successfully together toward your mission. A healthy organizational culture should be part of your overall strategic plan. When working remotely, find ways to engage your team.

Tips for an Effective Remote Culture

The good news is that with some best practices in place, you can develop a strong, healthy culture, even among a remote-based team. Below are some tips to help make that happen.

Set Up the Right Systems

HelpScout’s Nick Francis says: “A culture’s effectiveness revolves around how information flows. Everyone needs to feel like they have access to the same information, but remote and co-located cultures share information differently.”

In a remote environment, your channels of communication become more important than ever. You must have systems and tools in place that make the exchange of information easy for your team, and promote keeping everyone in the loop. There are no impromptu stand-up meetings or chats as you pass by someone’s desk. Your online communication channels need to serve those purposes.

We commonly rely on email, but it doesn’t cut it as a tool for facilitating easy information flow in a remote environment. “Chatting” via email can be awkward. Inboxes are often overflowing, and it’s easy for important messages to get buried.

Consider your needs for remote meetings and enhance the ability for people to chat. Apps such as Slack tend to stand in nicely for chat, but you should have a structured setup of channels so that conversations are easy to track. It’s less effective for more complex discussions.

For remote meetings, video calling apps can help everyone put a face and voice to each name. Zoom usage boomed over Covid, but other apps are also worth considering.

What about keeping track of projects and resources? A project management tool tends to be the best way to keep everything in one centralized spot. They have the advantage of giving a clear overview of project status while ensuring accountability is maintained by assigning names and due dates to tasks. 

Mission Met Center is a tool that documents and tracks your nonprofit’s strategic plan. Inviting all team members to view and engage in the organization’s strategy will help foster a positive culture where everyone feels their voice can be heard and it is valued.

Have Clear Policies and Practices

You want a remote culture where people follow standard policies and practices, developing a shared understanding of what team members should be doing. Handbooks are a great place to share this information. Some particular things to be clear about include:

• Expectations around availability. If you have flexible working hours, are there times when people must be available? What about communication outside of work hours? It’s easy for people to pick up phones or laptops and check in at weekends or during evenings. Still, if that’s not necessary, it’s essential to discourage communication during this time. When people see an email sent on Friday evening, they may feel pressure to respond because they’ve seen it. Not having enough time to “switch off” is a common cause of burnout.

• Expectations around when and how to communicate. For example, on projects where one person must complete a task before handing it to the next person for their part, how should they communicate? How should people communicate (and to whom) if they need to take a sick day or sign off early?

• Communication response times. How soon do you expect a response? When do you not expect a response? (E.g., evenings and weekends). As with a co-located office, you should also have policies to protect team members from unwanted communications (such as shares that are “not safe for work”).

• Communication with clients and donors. You need a shared understanding of how to communicate with donors and clients. Your organization should aim to give a consistent experience.

• Security and technology. What are your policies and practices around system security and looking after the organization’s own technology?

• Training and storage of information. How will information be stored so that people can access it if necessary? What will you do when onboarding new team members to ensure they feel part of the team and get access to the information they need? Consider that having access to the information necessary to help them do their job well is a key component to people feeling comfortable in their roles.

Developing a remote team culture? Clear policies and practices are important for getting everyone on the same page.

Have Regular Check-ins

There’s always a danger of team members feeling isolated when they work remotely. You’ll have some people who absolutely love it, while others wish they could have some more “people time.” Regular check-ins can help everyone to stay motivated, no matter how they feel about working remotely. A few practices that some remote-based nonprofits have in place include:

• Morning kickoff meetings. This tends to be short - no longer than 15 minutes - and is used to set up the priorities of the day, and report back on anything from yesterday.

• Weekly or fortnightly meetings. A “meeting for the sake of a meeting” doesn’t tend to have positive impacts on team culture, so if you don’t need daily meetings, sometimes weekly or fortnightly will do. The idea is still to get your team face-to-face.

• Encouraging team members to keep an up-to-date status on apps such as Slack. For example, you can show yourself as active, away, or busy. 

Don’t forget the importance of 1:1 meetings where an employee and supervisor can build a positive work foundation. The 1:1 should be an opportunity to get to know each other well and provide a forum where everyone can safely speak up. 

Find Ways to Foster Teamwork

Co-located teams tend to do things such as have celebrations at the office or even socialize outside of the office. This helps them to develop those casual relationships that can build a strong culture.

You can take some of these concepts and bring them to the remote environment, too. For example, celebrating success is still just as important. It can be as simple as making a congratulatory announcement, or you could arrange a remote team lunch or coffee break.

Some other ways teamwork can be fostered remotely include:

• Team challenges. Things such as trivia quizzes or show and tell are fun ways to start meetings.

• Team meet-ups. Consider arranging in-person meet-ups or team retreats. These can be great for helping develop strong relationships. If keeping things remote, host a lunch get-together where everyone can eat and chat about nonwork related topics.

• Surprise treats. You could surprise team members at random with small tokens of appreciation. Coffee vouchers or gift deliveries are common but you don’t have to spend money to show a team member they are valued. Consider praising individuals in team settings or offer professional development opportunities. 

Survey your team to find out what interests them. Most people don’t like “forced fun” environments, so find some activities that people have genuine interest in.

Conclusion

Remote work can make maintaining a solid culture challenging, but you don’t have to sacrifice culture to have a remote-based team in your nonprofit. 

Having the right tools, systems, processes, and practices to foster communication and teamwork can go a long way toward developing a solid culture. Of course, as nonprofit leadership, you need to show up too. You need to be active and intentional about “showing the way” toward the type of culture you want to build.

Lastly, remember the interrelationship between culture and strategy. Your strategy will absolutely be impacted by your culture and vice versa. Include cultural planning in your strategic plan to ensure your remote team is at its most effective.

How to Build a Successful Nonprofit Culture

Culture is the foundation of any organization, including your nonprofit.

Have you built a deliberate culture? Or has culture developed organically?

Every organization has a culture, deliberately cultivated or not, but that isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes aspects creep in that you don’t otherwise want as part of your organization, which is why intentionally building a successful culture is essential.

Most nonprofits aim to inspire, contribute, and, perhaps most importantly, meet the objectives of their mission. Here’s why and how you can build a culture of success:

Why Culture is Important for Nonprofits

Peter Drucker, one of the most prominent management consultants of the twentieth century, famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This quote is concise in saying that you can have the world’s best strategy in place, but it does you no good if you don’t have the thriving culture to support it.

Here at Mission Met, we firmly believe that culture goes hand-in-hand with strategy and that working to improve culture should land in your strategic plan.

Organizational culture determines “how we do things around here.” It also shapes your people’s expectations, attitudes, and feelings toward your nonprofit. Culture influences all aspects of what goes on in your nonprofit. From punctuality to discussion and how your team interacts with donors and stakeholders, everything is colored by the culture. You’ve probably experienced companies with a poor organizational culture before. You can feel it when you walk into a workplace, and people are disengaged or generally disinterested in providing good service.

Paying attention to culture in your nonprofit is important because culture will develop, even if you don’t mold it consciously. It’s definitely preferable that it develops with intention! Poor cultures can lead to high turnover, poor client/donor experience, or lack of engagement. Your goal should be a workplace where people want to be and a motivated team to work toward your goals.

Culture impacts nonprofit strategy and should be part of your strategic plan

Defining Your Nonprofit Culture

Creating a definition of your nonprofit culture is an important place to start. Whether starting from scratch or working to improve your current culture, you need to know where you’re coming from and where you’re aiming.

Your mission and values are an excellent place to start. Importantly, you need the buy-in of your whole team on your values, including what those look like in practice. Some organizations will espouse values but don’t seem to live them. There’s often a disconnect between what the value indicates people should do and what they actually do in practice.

Core values should align with your mission and guide workplace expectations. For example, do you consider work-life balance and team member mental health alongside values that directly relate to your impact? A value such as “wellbeing” can be part of both your internal culture and how you work with people in the community.

You may find that it’s a helpful exercise to define each of your values, then a set of statements to go with each that elaborates on “how we do things around here.” For example, “we listen” might include statements like “all team members have a valued voice and can share ideas, without fear of judgment.” “Wellbeing” might consist of statements such as “we encourage all team members to take breaks when needed and balance work with non-work commitments.”

Another thing to consider is that if you want employee buy-in and for your nonprofit to be a desirable workplace, involve employees in this process. This way, they feel that they genuinely do get to contribute and that your organization gives more than just lip service to listening to team members.

Employee feedback can also be invaluable for assessing the current state of the culture, especially if you’re looking for any areas that need improvement. You might ask for feedback directly, or sometimes employees are more comfortable with an anonymous survey. Encourage frank feedback so that you learn “here is what really goes on around here.”

What Contributes to a Strong, Successful Culture?

While you ponder your own culture, some other well-documented attributes are worth considering.

• Employees have meaningful work. Usually, nonprofits have this in spades, but be aware that too much “filler” work or work that doesn’t take advantage of the employee's strengths can be less-than-meaningful.

• Leadership is unified and supportive.

• Employee wellbeing is genuinely valued.

• Teams feel a strong sense of connection.

• Recognition occurs frequently, and you celebrate achievements.

The Role of Leadership in Culture

What is the role of nonprofit leadership in shaping organizational culture? Leadership culture contributes to overall organizational culture. Leaders help to shape and drive the desired culture, but the culture among the leaders must be consistent with what aligns with the entire organization's culture.

It’s about leading from the front. If your organization says that it values work/life balance, then your leaders need to demonstrate how they schedule and allocate work, determine leave requests, and react to such requests. Additionally, they need to live it themselves. If leaders work themselves to burnout, that behavior creeps into organizational culture. The story within the team becomes that moving ahead in the organization requires excessive hustling.

Leaders influence culture with every interaction and task. How they hire, what they accept at work, how they speak to staff, donors, and stakeholders, and how they execute business strategy all help to tell the story of “how we do things around here.”

How to Build and Reinforce an Effective Culture

You’ve defined the culture you’d like within your nonprofit, including some specific examples of how that looks. Next, you need to build on and reinforce that culture. Here are some tips to help:

1. Document it as part of your strategic plan. You should revisit your strategic plans often to check on progress, and by having organizational cultural goals there, you’re encouraged to review regularly.

2. Be a role model as a leader. This tip may involve some introspection — is there anything you do now that you need to stop or change to reinforce cultural norms?

3. Include cultural measures as part of performance management. For example, link organizational values with performance.

4. Encourage open communication and provide appropriate platforms for doing so. When everyone has access, regardless of their role, this encourages healthy communication and helps employees feel heard.

5. Demonstrate that what employees say matters — take meaningful action on feedback. You may not be able to implement every suggestion, but at least show that you’ll do what you can (and let people know the “why” when you can’t).

6. Look for reasons to recognize individuals or celebrate team achievements. Sometimes within busy organizations, recognition gets put to the side; however, it’s crucial for a strong culture that you make the time for it.

Conclusion

Nonprofit culture is a key aspect of any strategy. Even with the most well-planned strategies, success or failure can hinge on your setting up to successfully reinforce your strategy.

We strongly suggest you make cultural goals part of your strategic plan and revisit them often. Every organization has a culture, whether deliberate or not. Develop an intentional culture that serves your organization well and moves your mission forward.

Steps You Can Take to Retain Your Nonprofit Volunteers

Volunteers play an important role in many successful nonprofits. Having good, consistent people dedicating their time and resources is critical to achieving your organizational goals and accomplishing your mission.

Some research shows that volunteerism is on the rise. In 2017, nearly one third of adults in the United States contributed time to some cause organization, the highest number in over a decade.

Despite their enthusiasm to join a cause, keeping volunteers in one organization can be quite challenging. 2018 saw 38% of volunteers leave the organization they volunteered with the previous year. More people might be joining, but they don’t necessarily stick around.

Our experience has shown that organizations keep volunteers longer when they feel organized, informed, and appreciated. Doing this requires a plan, one that involves resourcing these people and showing them that they add value to the organization.

Below we outlined three essential steps your nonprofit can take to retain your existing volunteer base.

Onboarding

Stepping into a new organization for the first time can be quite disorienting. Volunteers get won over by the nonprofit’s mission and vision, but on their first days, they will still be unfamiliar with the necessary processes, policies, and systems in place that will make them successful contributors. Onboarding helps orient your volunteers so they can feel secure and prepared to do the work needed of them.

Provide Inspiration

Successful onboarding starts with a formal volunteer orientation. Encore, a nonprofit that focuses on bridging generational gaps, explains that the best orientations begin with excitement. Share your organization’s mission, strategic plan, programs, and social impact with the volunteers and help them discover how their role helps the organization accomplish its goals.

Provide a Tour

Volunteers will also need to get oriented with the space they’ll operate within – whether it's an office building, a health clinic, a wildlife facility, or any other location. Some of this has to do with practicality – it’s easier to work in a space when you know where things are – but a more important element deals with the comfort of the volunteers. It can feel intimidating to not know your way around an area, and providing new recruits with a thorough tour will help them get their physical bearings and make them more comfortable.

Make Introductions

Orientations also give you the opportunity to explain different responsibilities of staff and leaders, especially those people they will report to or work closely with. If it’s appropriate and non-disruptive, you may want to introduce them to key leaders, giving them a chance to become familiar with others. As they get more accustomed to the space and the people, they’ll start to become familiar with the organization’s overall culture, giving them a deeper sense of connection with the work and the community they’ll be serving with.

Clarify Roles and Responsibilities

The final part of onboarding will include outlining specific responsibilities for the volunteer. This doesn’t have to be a full-scale training; that will come later. But giving them a chance to see the scope of their work early will help give them an idea of what’s expected of them. Encore suggests making the following aspects clear from the beginning:

• Specifications on the scope of work.

• Goals and expectations.

• Reporting relationships.

• Expectations for check-ins, time frames, and the proper communication channels.

Provide a Handbook

After the orientation, new recruits should receive a comprehensive handbook they can reference for more information. Here’s an example of the policies page from the National Wildlife Foundation that covers items like:

• Expectations around dress code, attendance, and general conduct.

• Information on record keeping, safety procedures, security protocols, and property usage.

• Protocol for training, evaluation, and recognition.

Training

Every volunteer will need some level of specific training to gain the skills needed to do good work for a long time. Most volunteers don’t have extensive experience doing the kind of work they'll be asked to do. Many will have to adapt to the specific systems, processes, and workflows of the organization.

Training Increases Retention

Clear and organized training will help instill confidence in your volunteers, which can also increase your organizational retention rates. Corporations in the for-profit sector have found that retention rates increase by 30%-50% in companies with strong learning cultures. While the exact numbers may not be transferable to the nonprofit world, the data suggests that people are more likely to stick around when organizations value training.

Key Components of Your Volunteer Training

Although specific training content will differ depending on the scope of work, the programs themselves will have many of the same characteristics. In the Community Tool Box, a resource of the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas, the authors explain that training should be thought out and strategic. Early sessions with new volunteers should include the following four things:

• What to do

• How to do it

• What not to do

• What to do in an emergency.

This framework will help your team think through the specific content of training sessions, but they’ll also want to consider who will be leading the training, a budget for any additional materials or resources, and any other logistical concerns prior to the training sessions.

Utilize Best Practices of Adult Learning

The Community Toolbox also suggests utilizing adult learning practices in the sessions themselves. Show volunteers the relevancy of the material. Provide them with problems to solve, and incorporate interactive learning methods like discussions, demonstrations, or writing. Give them space to share experiences and tap into their creative side. These sessions need not be boring. The volunteers will likely learn better the more they can engage with the material.

Document Your Training Program

Like any successful piece of nonprofit operations, having a plan in place for your training will help things work much better and run much more smoothly. It can be tempting to throw your most experienced people up there and let them speak, but volunteers learn better when they can follow a structured learning path. Lesson plans for individual sessions will help with this as will plans for evaluations and ongoing training.

Rewards and Recognition

Providing appropriate rewards and recognition is the third key step in retaining your nonprofit’s volunteers.

Know What Your Volunteers are Worth

Independent Sector has developed an insightful tool that quantifies the value of volunteers across the nation. In November 2021, the average national value of each volunteer hour is $28.54. While volunteers will obviously not be paid this amount, the figure can raise awareness of the value of their contributions. Organizations can take this information and think of ways to honor their volunteers in lieu of payment.

Know What Your Volunteers Want

The more you know your volunteers, the better you’ll be able to create a rewards program that actually makes them feel appreciated.

People volunteer for a number of different reasons. Many do it because they care or have had a personal impact with the organization or one similar to it. Others do it to network or because they find it a better use of their time. Some volunteers want to use and grow in a special skill they have.

All of these are true, but there’s usually something deeper going on.

Building off of Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Tobi Johnson explains that people are motivated by three things:

1. Mastery

2. Autonomy

3. Purpose.

Johnson then connects Pink’s finding with the nonprofit world: “Pink’s arguments point to the very premise of volunteering itself — volunteers are driven to help organizations and communities, without pay, because they can bring about improvements in society and because they matter.”

Nonprofits can take this knowledge and use it to shape their reward programs.

Know What to Do Next

There are simple things you can do to get a rewards program off the ground. Writing personal thank you emails or handwritten cards, giving public praise or kudos in meetings, or hosting small events to honor the volunteers, are all easy ways to recognize volunteers.

Some organizations may want to go deeper than this, though. Using the knowledge of what motivates your volunteers can come in handy here. Johnson suggests providing training programs that

• Encourage mastery by giving them the tools to learn new things or entrusting them with greater responsibility in certain areas.

• Provide autonomy through self-directed training and resourcing.

• Reinforce purpose by showing them the effects their volunteer efforts are having in the organization and the community as a whole.

Closing Thoughts

Volunteers play a critical role in successful nonprofits, but keeping volunteers in your organization requires keeping them organized, informed, and appreciated. By implementing strong onboarding, training, and rewards programs, organizations can retain more high-quality, dedicated volunteers who are well-equipped to help accomplish the nonprofit’s mission.

The Secrets to Effective Nonprofit Board Recruitment and Onboarding

Building a board is a challenging task. Identifying key leaders, ensuring they fit the culture of your organization, going through all the interviewing and onboarding processes – each part of the process feels intimidating on its own. And that doesn’t even really scratch the surface of all that goes into it.

Despite these challenges, getting your board in order is one of the most important parts of running a successful nonprofit. Among other things, they’re responsible for overseeing and governing the entire organization and ensuring that the executive director has what they need to accomplish the vision.

Having the right board members in place will help things run as smoothly as possible, but the reverse is also true. A poorly structured team can have severely negative effects on the organization.

Building a good board starts with recruitment and onboarding. In this blog, we’ll cover some helpful tips for identifying and incorporating the kind of board members that will lead your organization to success.

Understand Your Board’s Model and Purpose

Every board needs a vision of the model and purpose of the board that they’re trying to create. Boards may take on different models depending on the organization’s specific needs. Recruiting new members gives you a chance to evaluate the kind of board you want to create for the next season of the organization. Ask a few questions to figure out which model works best for you.

• Are you looking to create a working board where people will roll up their sleeves and get to work?

• Are you looking to create a governance board that provides oversight and guidance to the staff?

• Are you looking to create a board that is largely focused on fundraising?

• Do you want to combine these various options in some way?

Building the model will involve thinking about the specific roles and responsibilities of your board. How will new members fit into the overall vision? Board member responsibilities should be clearly set and communicated both to the recruits and the existing board members.

Another factor to consider is the size of your board. How many new members are needed? Boards are not one-size-fits all, and each organization will make the decision on what size works best for them based on state laws, organizational bylaws, and the mission and vision of the nonprofit.

Boards should also have a predetermined idea of who is involved in the recruitment process. The executive director may play a part in this, but it’s often the role of the governance, executive, or nominating committee to lead the effort. This will reduce the risk of the executive director selecting people with whom they have an additional relationship.

Advisory boards, also known as advisory councils, can significantly impact your thoughts and decision making processes as well. Advisory boards do not have the same legal responsibilities as the board of directors. They instead support the board of directors by making recommendations or providing additional materials and information. Organizations with both an advisory board and a board of directors can consider candidates to fill both in the recruitment process.

Fully understanding your board’s purpose and mission will provide you with a strong foundation from which to recruit. Utilizing a board member matrix spreadsheet like this one from Build a Better Board can help a group clarify the composition and needs of the board that they are trying to create. Doing this early in the recruitment process will make it easier to avoid the pitfalls that lead to challenging board members.

Find the Right Candidates for the Right Roles

Boards won’t operate well without the right people in the right roles. Some candidates may bring a lot to the table in areas your organization does not need help. While it may feel like you’re losing out on someone great, it’s important to remember that board members fill specific needs.

In the recruiting phase, we recommend that board member responsibilities are clearly established and communicated. This will accomplish two critical things simultaneously. First, it will narrow your pool so you mostly get applicants that fit the specific criteria you’re looking for. Second, it helps keep your organization on track during the process to only look for candidates that fit that criteria.

Remember that the most successful boards are made up of different types of people. Having a range of skill sets and experiences helps the board become more well-rounded. The same can be said about the positive effects of creating a diverse board.

Recruiting can be a great time to evaluate your board's diversity and inclusion needs. Bringing in members with diverse backgrounds can help bring positive change to your organization.

Candidates can be found in a variety of places. Internal networks serve as a great starting point, but boards can expand beyond that by looking at various board posting and matching programs like the ones listed here. LinkedIn now also offers a service that helps nonprofits get in touch with potential board and employee candidates.

Every nominee should apply for the process, even if they have an existing relationship with the board. Recruiters can "shoulder tap" these people to encourage them to apply, but having them go through the vetting process allows them to expend some effort and show their commitment to the organization and its mission.

Thoroughly Plan Your Interviews and Evaluations

Having specific expectations for your board members will make it easier to interview and evaluate candidates. As applications come in, you’ll have a set idea they need to fit before they move to the next stage of the interview process.

The application should be thorough enough to get a good sense of the candidate. Find out about their previous experience and involvement with the community. Boardsource has put together a helpful prospective information sheet that can be filled out in addition to your organization’s application.

Interviewers should think through questions that allow the candidate to speak for themselves. Invite them to tell stories and share their experiences. Ask about their level of commitment and remind them of the time expectations for the role. Share information about meeting times, frequency, and, if relevant, requirements for serving on committees. Use a rating form like this one to ensure consistent criteria across candidates.

Beware of red flags, like the two mentioned here. Some candidates will want to serve only to bolster their own standing in the community. When real work is required on their end, these people often become frustrated and unproductive. Likewise, some candidates have a specific, personal agenda. They want to join only to make a change to the organization. While board members should be passionate, that passion should be channeled into the organization’s success, not personal gain.

Not every candidate will fit the specific needs you need filled. This can be frustrating, especially when you feel a connection with the person and see their skills benefiting the organization. Keep these people on file in case something opens up in the future or see if they would like to serve on an advisory board. It may prove helpful in the future to keep these people close to the organization.

Follow a Clear Nomination, Election, and Orientation Process

The organization’s bylaws will include specific protocols for nominations and elections. Follow them carefully.

The recruitment committee should equip the rest of the board with information about the nominated candidate before the official nomination meeting. This gives them time to prepare specific questions before the official nomination.

Candidates should not be present at this meeting so that everyone has the freedom to ask questions and raise potential concerns. This should take place before the official, open election that gets recorded in the meeting’s minutes.

Once the candidate is officially elected, boards will want to onboard them with the organization as a whole to help them get oriented. Using a checklist like this will make the process go as smoothly and seamlessly as possible, giving your newly elected board member a strong understanding of their responsibilities and the organization's programs, history, direction, finances, structure, and operations.

Closing Thoughts

Board recruitment and onboarding can be a challenging part of building a successful board. Identifying the right candidates who meet specific needs can feel impossible, especially after sitting through frustrating interviews or reviewing piles of resumes.

Nonetheless, boards are bound to need new members at some point. Following these tips will give you a strong starting point as you evaluate new candidates and bring in new people to lead your organization.

4 Ideas for Nonprofit Storytelling (With Examples)

Any nonprofit professional knows the challenges that come with engaging their audience. Whether you’re trying to drum up support or simply raise awareness, capturing someone’s attention can turn out to be quite difficult.

People typically only pay attention to an idea when it means something to them. Delivering information can help them think differently about the idea, but until they actually care about it themselves, that knowledge might fall flat.

That’s where storytelling comes in.

Stories make abstract things concrete. They help make the communicated idea real to the audience so they can imagine the problem or situation themselves. Raw numbers and statistics often remain abstract, making it harder for the listener to identify with the problem themselves. Stories put a face to numbers and compel people to respond.

Below, we’ll look at 4 ways nonprofits can harness the power of storytelling and share examples that highlight just how effective it can be.

Communicate Your Mission and Inspire Viewers

Stories can have a massive effect on a nonprofit’s ability to communicate their mission and inspire others to get on board. They give the audience a chance to see the mission play out rather than just hear it articulated.

Take a look at this video from Charity: Water, an organization that wants to “help bring clean and safe water to every person on the planet.”

The video shows how a lack of accessible clean water stopped a woman, Honorine, from fulfilling her dream and made her sick. It communicated the problem Charity: Water seeks to solve, but it also put a real face and a name behind it, sparking compassion in the viewer. They feel for Honorine and therefore start to resonate with the organization’s mission. In a sense, it becomes personal because they have a clear picture of what’s at stake.

This kind of storytelling can raise awareness of the issues your organization addresses, and it can help people start to care about that issue themselves.

Share Data and Statistics

Storytelling and data don’t have to be enemies. In fact, having the statistics to back up the story can lead to even bigger impacts.

Consider this promo from Feeding America, one of the largest nonprofits in the U.S. dedicated to ending world hunger.

Like the Charity: Water video, this campaign focuses on a clear, specific situation. Instead of an individual, however, there are two main characters–a young boy and his single mother. Viewers get an inside look into how hunger affects a small family.

The boy is distracted at school. He has less energy than the other kids. The mother is constantly thinking about how to provide food for her and her son at work, going as far as taking wasted bagels from a dumpster at the end of the day. All of this communicates the need Feeding America wants to highlight, and it prepares the way for the data driven voiceover at the latter part of the video.

The voice speaks about how “millions of working American families and their children” hide their struggle with hunger. He talks about waste, mentioning “over 17 billion pounds” each year. He lists statistics, but these statistics mean more after seeing the story of the little boy and his mother. It is as if the numbers show that the two characters are not alone. Many families just like them exist throughout the nation. The numbers help viewers know more, but the story of the family helps them care. It brings the data closer to the heart.

Raise Support Through Open-ended Storytelling

For 25 years, Steven Screen has helped nonprofits across the country tell better stories to raise financial support. He has pointed out that the organization’s story isn’t the only one at play. Donors have stories, too.

“Most donors are telling themselves a story about their life and their giving and their philanthropy,” he says. Most of the time, these stories focus on the donor helping people or organizations who need help.

Nonprofits that understand the donor story can use it to shape the way they fundraise. Screen suggests telling open-ended stories so the donor sees how they can step in and help provide a strong conclusion, effectively filling in their own story in the process.

What does this actually look like? Screen provides a few tips:

1. Narrow your focus. You don’t have to talk about all your programs and all you do. “Instead,” Screen says, “talk about some small identifiable part that takes a certain amount of time that’s happening now.”

2. Show the need for today. It can feel intimidating to ask for help with an ongoing project instead of showcasing all the good your organization has done before. However, Screen explains that to the donor, telling a completed story can make it sound like their help isn’t needed. When nonprofits are vulnerable and can articulate a sense of urgency, the donor can better see how their support will make a real difference right away.

3. Tell the complete story when you report back. The beauty of telling an incomplete story is that it gives the donor a chance to shape the ending. It’s not supposed to stay open-ended forever. Screen talks about three stages of fundraising: asking, thanking, and reporting. The story is only incomplete in the asking stage. When you report back to the donor, you show how their contribution helped create a nice ending, which may encourage them to offer more support later on.

One of clearest examples of incomplete storytelling Screen talks about is disaster response. When the story gets told, it isn’t complete yet. No one knows how effective the relief efforts will be. In fact, the incomplete story shows that success will only come if the donor helps, which is what they want their own story to be.

Utilize Various Media to Tell Your Stories

Stories don’t have to take place only in live-action video format. This video from Call and Response uses animation to communicate harsh working conditions of people who provide goods for many consumers.

The creators pack the video with data, but the visualizations engage the viewer in multiple ways. We see images to associate the data with. We hear the numbers read out loud. It plays to a variety of senses, tells a compelling story, and then challenges viewers to act.

Written articles or blogs can be another way to utilize nonprofit storytelling. Charity:Water wrote a great piece about how the water crisis has particular effects on women in villages. They even repurposed the video about Honorine. Here’s one section that tells a compelling story about how collecting water steals time away from women:

“We’ve met young girls who walk in the 115ºF (46ºC) heat of the Sahel Desert to collect water from 1,000-year-old holes. We’ve met women in Ethiopia who walk to the river before sunrise and don’t get back until after lunch. We’ve even met mothers in Mali who sometimes sleep next to an open water source so they can be first in line when the water refills the next morning.

That time adds up. Worldwide, women and girls spend an estimated 200 million hours every single day collecting water.

This burden robs women and girls of time to learn, time to be a kid, time to earn an income, time to rest, and time spent with family. For hundreds of millions of people, being born female means life revolves around water collection. Everything else comes second.”

The data is sandwiched between two compelling stories. The first one tells how women sacrifice their time and energy to get water. The second shows that the problem is greater than time being taken away. The work of retrieving water makes education, joy, jobs, rest, and family time less likely for these women.

Nonprofits can use videos, animations, photographs, infographics, blogs, podcasts, or any other medium to reach their audience and tell compelling stories. Those that have the resources may even consider investing in multiple channels to see which have the greatest effect. If there is one thing that we've learned in our INSPIRE process, it's that nonprofits need to tell their story in written and visual forms.

Final Thoughts

People are naturally storytelling creatures. We use stories to make abstract ideas concrete and to help us imagine situations more fully. Nonprofits can use stories to inspire people with their mission, communicate important data, and raise money, and following these 4 tips will give you a great place to get started.

How a Co-Champion Can Transform Your Strategic Planning Effectiveness: From Eric Ryan's Upcoming Book

I’m thrilled to tell you that later this year I’ll publish my upcoming book, Mission Met: Proven Strategic Planning Guidance to Help You Build a Financially-Secure and Impactful Nonprofit. The book will provide you with a suite of practical strategic planning practices that will help you and your team better execute your strategic plan. 

This blog post, about the power of co-champions in the planning process, represents the second article in a five-article series where I’ll share a brief preview of some of the guidance that I provide in the book. 

The Benefit of a Fitness Partner

Imagine that it is 5:30 AM on a Friday morning. Your alarm goes off to get you up for an early morning jog. It’s cold outside, you’re tired from a long week, and you end up turning the alarm off and going back to sleep. In other words, the short-term discomfort of an early-morning rise got in the way of your ultimate desire to be physically fit. 

Now imagine a slightly different scenario. The setting is the same, but this time you’re supposed to meet your jogging partner, Wendy, at 5:45 on the corner a block away to run together. In this case, you get out of bed, put your running gear on, and fulfill your commitment to Wendy. As usual, Wendy is on time, and the two of you laugh about wanting to go back to sleep but not wanting to let each other down. 

After your run, you feel good about yourself, your friendship with Wendy, and have more energy for the day ahead. 

The difference between these two scenarios is obvious: Wendy’s accountability and partnership was what propelled you to act.

Now, let’s create a similar set of scenarios regarding strategic planning. 

The Benefit of a Strategic Planning Co-Champion

It’s 9 AM on a Friday morning, and you have an important grant application due by 5 PM. At 9:30 AM you have a one-hour block on your calendar to work on your organization’s strategic plan. It’s been a long week and you haven’t been able to focus on the grant as much as you’d like. You decide to blow off your strategic planning time and work on your grant instead. You don’t end up rescheduling your strategic planning work, and as a result, your plan doesn’t get the attention it needs. 

Now imagine a slightly different scenario. The setting is the same, but this time during your 9:30 block you’re scheduled to review the plan with your administrative assistant, Maurice. You want to set a good example, and despite the pressure you feel from the grant deadline, you maintain your commitment to meet with him. 

After the two of you meet, you feel good about your leadership and you’re reminded, yet again, about the value of regularly reviewing and measuring progress on your organization’s plan. Plus, you ended up getting Maurice to help you with the grant application and you easily beat the 5 PM deadline. 

Like the jogging scenario, having a person who serves as an accountability partner made all the difference. 

In the world of strategic planning, we call this partner a “co-champion”. 

Over the years, I have become a huge fan of the co-champion model. Having a co-champion significantly increases accountability to the process, improves results, and, frankly, just makes planning a lot more enjoyable. 

Employing this one practice significantly increases the odds that your planning process will be well-executed.

In a recent conversation with Laura Anderson, an expert in co-leadership models, she agreed, saying, “We all have unique individual strengths, but even the best leaders are still a single human. Having an effective pair—somebody who complements you and adds to or multiplies your value because your collaboration is so effective—is when you start to see so much opportunity.”

the MVP of the Planning Process

I’ve seen many people effectively serve as a co-champion with the executive director: the board chair, programs officer, development director, etc. 

That said, the most successful co-champions have often been administrative assistants. In this model, the executive director keeps an eye on the big picture, while the assistant focuses on the mechanics of measuring and tracking the plan. Further, administrative assistants often feel a strong sense of pride in being called upon for such an important organizational role. They take their responsibility seriously and the organization benefits as a result. 

In nearly all cases where I’ve seen an administrative assistant play the co-champion role, they evolved to be the MVP of the planning process. 

Sometimes I’ll observe executive directors who are hesitant to select an assistant as a co-champion out of fear of setting them up for failure. This can be a missed opportunity. Instead, use the co-champion role as a “vote of confidence” that empowers the assistant to develop their leadership. Further, this assignment serves as a great weather balloon to predict your assistant’s potential for future leadership.

Using Social Media Effectively in your Nonprofit Organization

Ensuring your nonprofit organization is successful requires a dedicated focus in a variety of areas. Effective community engagement is one of those critical areas, playing an integral part in telling your organization's story while giving you the ability to gain new supporters.

Social media has become one of the most effective ways for nonprofit organizations to engage with their communities, support fundraising efforts, and develop strong relationships. You may have already realized this and created some social media profiles to build an effective engagement strategy.

However, while social media can be a great tool for nonprofit organizations, there are right and wrong ways to approach your social media strategy.

Below, we'll cover some relevant tips you can follow when using social media effectively in your nonprofit organization.

Establish Your Nonprofit Goals

Before beginning any social media initiatives, it's important to identify the goals for your nonprofit. Imagine that, a strategic planning company suggesting you should begin with the end in mind and be strategic about your goals!

Are you building general awareness about your organization and its mission? Are you looking for new donors or funders? Are you trying to encourage community discussions on particular topics or issues? Answering these questions will help ensure you serve the right content in the right channels to be successful.

Decide Who Should Manage Your Social Media

When beginning any social media initiative for your organization, maintaining consistency in your messaging and level of engagement is essential when building credibility in your organization. One way to ensure consistency in messaging is by relying on the same person(s) to manage your social media engagement. Assigning one or two people to manage your organization's social media presence will help keep your team accountable and ensure your goals and objectives are met.

Over time, you should also develop branding and social posting guidelines so that other team members, or potentially interns, could take over the work of drafting and expanding your social media presence.

Diversify Your Social Media Channels

Some nonprofits make a mistake when establishing a social media presence by sticking to one or two social media channels and not diversifying their outreach approach. When building social media profiles for your nonprofit, it's crucial to establish yourself on multiple platforms and cater your engagement strategies to each applicable channel. When diversifying your social media channels, however, it's essential to diversify your content.

Social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are all great places to engage with potential donors, staff, or board members. Still, the type of content you deliver should be catered to the kind of audience found on each social channel. Rather than posting the same content across multiple channels, take the time to adjust your engagement strategies depending on the goals you're trying to achieve.

Develop a Social Engagement Calendar

Creating a social engagement calendar helps to keep you on task and ensures all of your social media platforms have a balanced and consistent amount of content.

A common mistake for nonprofit leaders is a lack of consistency when it comes to posting content, following up with emails or direct messages, and active outreach campaigns. Develop a social engagement calendar to stay consistent with social media activities. Whether sending organization updates, staffing announcements, fundraising requests, or thought leadership pieces, the more regular you are when engaging, the more credibility you'll develop for your nonprofit. Engagement calendars will help you stay on top of initiatives and keep you accountable for maintaining your social media presence.

Make Effective Use of Hashtags

When posting content on various social media platforms, use hashtags (i.e., #nonprofit or #our-mission). They’re a great way to bring targeted traffic to your social media posts or website. Hashtags act as keywords relevant to your posts and help categorize your content for other users who aren't already part of your network.

When making proper use of hashtags, it's important to reference as many non-branded key terms as possible, as most people won't be familiar with your organization's name and will be less likely to find your content otherwise. So #StopViolence or #SupportVictims are much better than #RichlandViolanceShelter.

Create Opportunities for Easy Donations

Social media platforms are great places to host fundraising campaigns and events for your organization. However, while creating fundraising events is a great proactive way to use different social media outlets, there are also passive ways for you to encourage donations to your nonprofit. When establishing social media profiles on various public platforms, most of them offer the ability to categorize your organization as a nonprofit, and therefore allow you to create specific call-to-action buttons or pages in support of your financial goals. Making use of these "donate" buttons is an easy way to simplify the process for new community members who want to support your organization's mission.

Engage With Purpose

A final important note about your social media engagement strategy is that it’s vital to engage your audience with purpose. Creating a content calendar can help you with this initiative. Ultimately, however, one of your primary goals when posting on social media platforms is not to come across like you're simply posting information to gain web traffic or simply to keep your social streams active. Your objective should be to always consider the emotional appeal of your posts and the audience who reads them.

While your social media objectives may be different from other for-profit organizations, it's okay to view certain aspects of your nonprofit's engagement strategy the same way highly recognized brands do. Think about your core values and how they relate to the posts you submit. Does your content display the attitudes, values, benefits, and vision your nonprofit represents? Considering this question aligns your social media objectives with the reputation your nonprofit has worked hard to obtain.

Final Thoughts

Social media platforms are an invaluable tool that nonprofits can use to gain new constituents, engage with a broader audience, share with the community, and learn from other nonprofit leaders.

By following these basic steps, you'll avoid bad habits when creating your social media presence while building the credibility your organization deserves.

---

We just launched our online strategic planning course called START! START provides organizations with a practical strategic plan that they can successfully achieve. Learn more about how START can transform your organization.

Choosing a Nonprofit CRM

When you consider the most valuable aspect of your nonprofit organization, what comes to mind? You probably immediately think about the organization's big-picture objectives and mission statements, what they mean to you personally, and how achieving them can positively impact others in various ways.

Of course, you know that to achieve these objectives, you are heavily reliant on all of those supporting your nonprofit, your "constituents" in which you place your trust, confidence, and respect to help you build and sustain your organization's forward momentum. Depending on your organization, these constituents can be made up of donors, funders, volunteers, board members, staff, and other organizations or individuals who help support your nonprofit's financial and operational needs.

But establishing and maintaining these critical relationships requires keen attention and follow-through, both of which are easy to lose sight of as your nonprofit grows, as does your list of active constituents. This is where the value of CRM comes into play.

What is A CRM SysteM?

The acronym CRM can mean different things for nonprofit and for-profit organizations. While CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager in traditional business spaces, the term refers to Constituent Relationship Management in nonprofit organizations.

A Constituent Relationship Management system or solution is a tool that nonprofit organizations can use to track, monitor, and improve engagements with all their relevant contacts. This is achieved by providing an on-premise or cloud-based database solution for collecting and storing your constituent information, streamlining targeted and personalized communications, optimizing fundraising capabilities, and automating various workflows and processes.

Should Your Nonprofit Invest in A CRM?

Whether or not you choose to invest in a CRM tool is entirely up to you, the size of your nonprofit, and the organization's goals when it comes to scale and sustainability. However, for many nonprofits, CRMs have become less of an option and more necessary, especially when improving engagement, maximizing fundraising efforts, and improving organizational efficiencies.

Maintaining relevant and impactful relationships should be one of your primary goals when growing your nonprofit. While keeping yourself organized through email clients, social media platforms, and digital calendars might get you to a certain point with this initiative, new opportunities will quickly dissolve without using the right tools and systems.

CRM solutions allow you to manage all of your constituent relationships in one unified platform, eliminating manual and repetitive processes while being able to focus on establishing closer relationships with supporters.

How to Choose the Right Nonprofit CRM

If you've been considering investing in a CRM platform for your nonprofit, it's important to note that there is no shortage of options to choose from that range in all types of sizes, feature sets, and price points.

Companies like Salesforce, DotDrives, Bloomerang, Neon CRM, and Little Green Light are only a few of the many CRM companies with a strong reputation for helping nonprofits improve their donor management and constituent engagement strategies. But while these and other similar solutions may look like they're the best option for your organization, there are some important considerations you should make when choosing the right CRM for your nonprofit.

Profile Tracking

Most CRM platforms will have some type of relationship-tracking functionality. However, you'll want to ensure that the system you choose allows you to create custom profiles and fields relevant to your constituent types. While having the ability to store basic information on board members, donors, funders, clients, etc., is necessary, the platform you choose should be flexible enough to be customized to your nonprofit's unique relationship profiles.

Donation Management

An invaluable feature of certain nonprofit CRM systems is the ability to simplify the donor management process. This includes proactive outreach campaigns, auto-generated donation tax receipts, document generation and storage capabilities, and other relevant features useful for managing close relationships with current and potential donors or funders.

Event Planning and Coordination

Certain CRM platforms have given organizations the ability to plan and execute fundraising events and other critical nonprofit functions. Having all of your constituents managed in one place is more efficient when sending invitations, managing RSVPs, and scheduling follow-ups.

Reporting and Analytics

Part of improving your strategic planning process has to do with extracting relevant data from your relationship history and creating actionable insights that can help you make informed decisions for your nonprofit. You want to find a CRM platform that can provide you with these deep insights through transparent donor reports, donation trends, and transaction and payment tracking.

Simplicity

An often overlooked feature is how simple the CRM is to use. If you get a souped-up platform at your fingertips but you’re only using 5% of the functionality, you and your team are less likely to actually use it. Make sure your CRM makes often-used functions simple and straightforward to use and get value from.

Automation

One great feature of many CRM systems is the ability to automate many daily workflows and processes through useful native integrations. Every CRM differs, so find the one that streamlines as many third-party services and solutions as possible, giving you the ability to use one source of truth when driving communications with your constituents.

Affordability

Of course, we couldn't talk about how to find the CRM platform that's right for you without talking about cost. As with all tools and technology, CRM solutions can vary considerably in affordability; find one that offers you a sustainable pricing model.

Pricing models for CRM platforms can be formatted and tiered in several ways, including by user count, the number of emails sent per month, required database size, or the level of integration you're needing. Again, it's vital that you consider your organization's needs now and in the future and choose a platform that you're able to get the highest return on investment.

Setting Yourself Up For Success

While finding the right CRM tool is important, sourcing the right onboarding partners that can help you get the most value out of it is vital.

CRM platforms can be an invaluable tool for any nonprofit, especially as you begin to grow your number of constituents and focus on creating more automation in your day-to-day routine. However, remember that CRM tools are simply that — "tools." In order to get the most value from these solutions, invest the necessary time and effort into adequate training and customization.

Finding the right CRM solution for your nonprofit, and teaming up with the right partners who can help you extract the most value out of the solution, will maximize constituent relationships and create a sustainable path for your nonprofit's success.

---

We just launched our online strategic planning course called START! START provides organizations with a practical strategic plan that they can successfully achieve. Learn more about how START can transform your organization.