Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Introduction by Wendy Liscow
Program Officer

Laura Otten, Executive Director of the LaSalle University Nonprofit Center, has been the lead consultant working with the Dodge Foundation to design a comprehensive board training series, now in its fourth successful year. If you have missed a workshop or would like to share some of the key “take-aways” with your colleagues, check out the Dodge Foundation’s Board Leadership Training Video Series. There are interviews with each of the workshop trainers on key board development issues including: the most critical issues facing boards today; the importance of understanding organizational lifecycles; implementing assessment practices that measure what matters; strategic planning tips; and how to recruit and keep strong board members.

A sample video from our most recent Care and Feeding of Board Members workshop is below. However, if you are interested in the topic of improving your board engagement through the creation of more productive board meetings, we suggest you read the complete blog post…it just might be what you need to transform your board.

Want to rachet up your board’s performance? Change your agenda.

By Laura Otten

My 23-year old son has his first board meeting for a nonprofit coming up. He is so excited, so thrilled at the opportunity to help, a bit nervous that they view him as a finance “expert” but his joy at the prospects of this board service is palpable. I hope he’s equally excited after the meeting.

This fear is not just a mother’s fear; it is a fear I have for the vast majority of board members attending their first meetings. Though I’ve no scientific information to bear this out, my anecdotal information is overwhelming: nonprofits lose more board members through boredom at meetings than they do through fear of fundraising! Think about that. And funny thing about this is that you can turn a boring meeting into an engaging meeting in far shorter course than you can turn a reluctant fundraiser into a confident one.

Oddly, what makes board meetings so boring is the fact that the vast majority of boards do not do board work at board meetings! It is really that simple. If you look at a typical meeting agenda for most boards, it looks something like this:

XYZ Center Board Meeting: 20 January 2012

8:00am-9:30am

Approval of the minutes of the last board meeting

Reports

• Executive Director Report

• Finance Committee Report

• Committee A Report

• Committee B Report

• Committee C Report

• Committee D Report

New Business

Adjourn

This process, start to finish, can take anywhere from 1.5 hours to three hours, or even five or six (as I hear far more often than I should). Assuming a board is meeting every month or every other month, a typical board meeting should last no more than two hours, with 1.5 hours being an ideal. Obviously, grappling with a large or particularly contentious issue might force a board meeting, on occasion, to go beyond that time frame, but that absolutely should be the exception rather than the rule.

In following this agenda, however, a board is not doing board work; it is merely collecting data, albeit data that it needs to do good board work. But when board meetings focus on learning about things that have already happened, things over which board members have no control—as they have already happened—boards are not doing their work. They are being sponges, soaking up important data, but data they should be using to move an organization forward, not simply absorbing; they are learning about what happened instead of thinking about what could and/or should be. This data should be shared and absorbed in advance of a meeting, so that board members are equipped to use that data productively at board meetings. (Compounding the boredom factor is that far too often these reports are simply read aloud at meetings, taking away from board members any initiative they might have.)

I can guarantee you that no board member joins a board because s/he wants to be a sponge. Rather, they, as you might expect, want to make a difference, make a contribution, give back, help others, etc. In order for any of these to happen, we must engage people’s brains; droning on about what has passed just doesn’t do that.

So, what do you? There are multiple options, none of them scary in and of themselves; they are only scary in that each signals change. All, however, must address both form—or content—and function. (more…)

By Allison Trimarco
Founder, Creative Capacity, LLC

We’ve all been there…we decide that it’s time for planning at our organization, so we carefully set up a retreat meeting and craft an agenda designed to help us “be strategic” in our thinking about our future. As soon as everyone has gotten their first cup of coffee, however, the process starts spinning out of control. Board member Bob decides that he wants to change the entire mission of the organization before noon, and refuses to move on until everyone agrees with him. Betty hasn’t been to a board meeting for three years, but shows up to the strategic planning retreat to talk about how they do it on the other six boards she’s on. The Board Chair and Executive Director try valiantly to get everyone talking about the key challenges the group is facing, but diverging focus and personal agendas eventually wear them down. So, they write up a summary of the retreat discussion, label it “strategic plan,” and file it in its rightful place at the bottom of a desk drawer underneath several boxes of binder clips and a bottle of white-out that no one uses anymore.

These kinds of experiences have given strategic planning a bad rap among nonprofit leaders. Too often, the process leaves board and staff members feeling tired and disappointed. Where does this feeling of time wasted come from? I think it’s from planning processes that:

• Are not grounded in the reality of the current situation that your organization is facing. These are the processes that start with false questions like, “if money were no object and you could do whatever you want, what would you do?”
• Don’t offer board, staff, volunteers, and other stakeholders the chance to collaborate in determining what’s most important to the organization and how we will work together to achieve it.
• Stir up conflicts about key issues like mission, programs, and constituents – but don’t do anything to resolve these important questions.
• Include every idea in the final plan, rather than determining the best ideas and prioritizing them. This lack of decision-making results in a plan that is too large to realistically be implemented.

If you’ve been involved in a planning process like this, chances are your strategic plan is also filed in a bottom drawer under the old white-out. And you’re relieved that it will be awhile before you have to “plan” again.

This sense that strategic planning is just a waste of time is such a missed opportunity, however – both for the organization and for its board and staff members. Done right, strategic planning is the fun part! It’s the moment when you actually get to influence the organization’s direction, what it will do for the community, and how that will happen. These are probably the things you wanted to do when you got involved with the nonprofit in the first place, but most of us spend most of our time thinking about far more mundane, everyday matters. Planning is the moment when passion for the mission and the community can be at the center of our discussion – and even if that’s not as fun as a day at the beach, it should be meaningful and enjoyable for all of us.

So, what kind of planning process will actually result in decisions you can use?

1) Before you do anything else, take the time to look at where you are.

Good strategic planning is a process – it takes time, asks hard questions, and aims to make everyone smarter about the organization and its situation. Start your analysis by giving board, staff, key volunteers, and constituents the chance to contribute their thoughts, so people know that their ideas matter. This initial roundup of people’s opinions will also identify key issues that need to be part of the planning discussion.

2) Ask hard questions.

Planning is not the moment to embrace the status quo. It’s the time when we should bring up third rail questions such as, “are all of our programs functioning well?,” or “what does the economic situation mean for us?” or even, “ how will the demographic shifts in our community affect the need for our work in the future?” The most effective planning processes tackle these questions in a deliberate, structured way designed to give you facts that you can act upon. Here are some ideas about questions to ask about your external environment and a simple method for evaluating your programs:

3) Use what you learn from evaluating your current situation to answer big questions about your mission, vision, and programs.

Our organizations don’t live in a vacuum, and we shouldn’t make key decisions about our mission, vision, and programs based on the opinions of the small number of people on our board and staff. What do we want to do? is only part of the question – we should really be thinking what do our constituents need us to do? and what can we be really, really good at? We can form more meaningful answers to these questions when we look at our current successes, feedback from our constituents and stakeholders, and the conditions in our environment that are likely to interact with our work. Really strategic planning takes all of these factors into account when defining mission and vision.

4) Choosing everything is the same as choosing nothing.

Often, so many exciting ideas are generated during brainstorming that we decide we can’t choose – we want to include all of them! But this is a surefire way to make it impossible to implement your plan. You have to make decisions about where you will focus your energy in the coming years. This is what will make your organization more strategic (and your plan more readily implemented). Not sure how to make these tough choices? There are a million decision-making techniques, but here’s a description of one of my favorites:

Once you decide on your goals, make sure you also decide on your objectives – the results that you want to achieve. Too often, we build plans that emphasize the activities that will fill up our to-do lists. But we only work on our activities in order to achieve results for our mission, constituents, and community. What are the results you really want? Knowing this will make your organization more strategic every day, even if you’re not “planning:”

5) If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

The most common complaint I hear about strategic plans is, “we did all this planning, but then we never did anything about it.” Usually, this is a symptom of a planning process that was not inclusive enough (so people don’t feel ownership over the decisions and won’t implement them), or a plan that is not grounded in reality (so we could never possibly have the money or human resources to implement it). You can make it more likely that you will actually implement your plan if you:

• Have board and staff collaborate in the process so they feel enthusiastic ownership about plan decisions.
• Force yourselves to prioritize all the good ideas that will come up, so that your plan focuses on the most important things the organization can do.
• Create a budget that outlines what it will cost to implement the plan, and how you will obtain those resources. These financial projections can inform your annual budgeting.
• Focus on implementation right out of the gate – if you don’t implement initial work in the first six months, the opportunity is lost. Make sure everyone knows what they should do, and make sure they do it!

Most importantly, remember: if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. If you want to change something about your organization, you have to change the way you approach your work. You can choose to make plan priorities essential to your work – and hopefully spend more of your time and energy focusing on the interesting, challenging, fulfilling projects that emerged during your planning process.

Thinking about starting a planning process at your organization? Here are some resources to help:

Allison Trimarco is the founder and principal of Creative Capacity, a consulting firm that collaborates with nonprofits to find creative solutions to management challenges. She is also an affiliated consultant and instructor at The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University.

Greg Usberti of Artworks gives a ringing endorsement of our Board Leadership workshops (specifically the Board Bootcamp), which are part of our Technical Assistance Initiative. We’re blushing.

By Gregory Usberti
President, Artworks

My parents always told me that raising two kids was a nearly thankless job, with horrible hours and no compensation. They bemoaned every time my sister and I fell out of line, and cheered every success as they stewarded us to adulthood, and to some extent still do today. Now, somewhere lost in my 30’s, I was invited to join a nonprofit board and finally understand what my parents were talking about. They relied on their parents to figure it out and provide guidance, and through a serious of mostly successful turns, they managed to craft two decent upstanding citizens. I, in turn, rely on Laura Otten. She is the guiding star in my role as a board member of a nonprofit.

Laura Otten’s Board Bootcamp is just that: bootcamp. The training is an intense overview of all aspects of nonprofit management, and its the best way you can possibly spend a Saturday if you’re a new, or even experienced board member. From the first words out of her mouth to the last stroke of your pen on the rubric analysis, every moment is worth committing to memory, learning and applying to your non profit job.

In fact, this is my second time through the nonprofit board Bootcamp. When I attended it last year, I left with a feeling of complete distress. I just bought a ticket on the Titanic. The amount of work to get my organization from where it was to where it should be seemed insurmountable. Over the course of twelve months, we made a plan at Artworks, directly in alignment to what Laura had taught us. We shored up our policies through the guidance provided by Laura; we refocused what our fundraising responsibilities are, we made sure everyone understood the financial policies, and the requirements of financial oversight and review; we critically examined programming to make sure it was in alignment with our mission, and even enacted new policy to develop and grow the board strategically.

A year later, I attended the boot camp again. This time, confident that I had worked a plan over the past year to address the questions Laura had raised during my first run through. I was proud to know that I had done much of what she had prescribed for a healthy nonprofit, and I learned a few things I had missed along the way. The experience the second time, while less shocking, was still eye opening to see how far we had come, and to learn that there was still more work to be done. If you had to attend one Dodge instructional session, this was the one. No other resource can provide the overview and clear vision of what your responsibilities are as a nonprofit board member.

As an added bonus to this years class, the attendees were treated to a short bonus session run by Mark Sickles. Mark’s excellent presentation, providing practical tools for change management and perceptions of knowledge and the unknown, were a great counterpoint to the clear black and white instruction presented by Laura. Overall, the two training sessions dovetailed nicely, and their incredible value to a board member cannot be emphasized enough.

It is with great pride and deep appreciation to The Dodge Foundation for supporting us at Artworks. I sincerely thank them for their financial support, but I cannot stress enough the importance that their guidance, knowledge and leadership has provided us.

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Dodge’s Technical Assistance Initiative has a YouTube channel! We’re building a library of interviews and thoughts on our Technical Assistance workshops and will continue to add videos as our 2011-2012 workshops happen.

Recently, we talked to Tom McMillian, Board Member of Arts Council of Morris Area and Janice Ewing, a board member from Sustainable Haddon Heights, about the Board Bootcamp workshop. We asked, “What’s the one major thing you learned today and what would you take back to your organization?”

See what they say:

Today’s blog by the Institute of Music for Children shares an important lesson in making sure that your members  and audiences truly understand the value of the services you provide. We think you will find it a very useful reminder.

By Alysia Souder
Executive Director
The Institute of Music for Children

In the spring of 2010, the Institute of Music for Children was deep into its first ever Strategic Planning process, examining all its programs top to bottom with management consultant Alissa Baratta. The results were perplexing. Despite years of offering top quality arts instruction at significantly discounted prices and receiving consistently outstanding evaluations from students and parents, pre-registration was slow, revenue was down, and student attendance was erratic.

Alissa pointed out that our Summer Institute program, scheduled to begin in just a few short weeks, only had 11 students registered. “That’s not enough to make it worthwhile,” she told a quiet room. “You should consider dropping it.”

The Institute had begun 15 years before with that summer program; the community relied on it for affordable arts training in a safe environment. It was also our favorite program to run, not to mention it was core to the DNA of the Institute.

We simply could not drop it and stay true to our mission.

It was also our biggest expense, and it looked like it might lose significant dollars this year. “They’ll come. They always do,” said long-time Board members. “That’s fine,” Alissa said. “But if your community doesn’t understand the value of the programs enough to register early, you’ve got to make them understand.”

She was right.

Our average cost per client was $210 per semester, yet we charged only $96 and never made sure the families heard about the discount they were getting. We assumed they knew. But it went beyond mere numbers. We assumed they understood that we paid teachers even when students did not attend. We even assumed they realized the Institute was a non-profit organization – and that they appreciated what that meant. We all know what happens when we assume. We realized that we needed to fundamentally change the way we talked about our work.

In the fall of 2010, we developed the Membership Program as an effort to educate and inform our community. Member families would receive the discounted tuition, but more importantly, they would gain a true appreciation for the complete range of our work and multiple opportunities to invest in an organization about which they cared. In exchange, Members would pay an annual fee of $50 per student, offer one hour of volunteer time per semester, and commit to help the Institute raise an additional $50.

There was risk here. Rules were changing. Expectations were rising. Price per family was actually going up (repeating families were grandfathered into the Membership Program without fee for the first semester). Yet right from the start, our families responded to the challenge. New families immediately saw the value of the Institute plan, and sought out ways to get involved. Returning families understood the necessity of the changes and appreciated the opportunity to get more involved with the Institute as a whole. Clearly, we had been undervaluing our services.

We expanded the service, holding a series of Parents Meetings to explain the program. We talked about the Institute as a whole (particularly the 400 students we served offsite, whom many of our Member families never got to meet). We emphasized the importance of regular attendance and home practice. We offered assistance and support for families with transportation challenges and other practical issues. And we gave context to the financial math involved in our classes, and our mission to provide the best in arts education without regard to the ability of a family to pay.

As the summer approached, we waited with bated breath. Would our year-long experiment show real results? Were we still an assumed community offering? At the year anniversary of our Board Retreat, we parsed the numbers: 70 pre-registered students, including many students from the afterschool classes! Tuition deposits had been made, and we were on track for over 100 students in the program—by far our largest Summer Institute ever. We were relieved, elated, and too busy to think about any of it as we dove into setting up the program for all those kids.

As we move into 2012, enrollment in the Membership program has reached more than 95%, and families are communicating more regularly with us and with each other. Attendance has improved, particularly in our private lessons, with students arriving on time, carrying music that they had practiced at home. Parents stay longer at the Institute, stopping to talk with other Member families and to form social bonds amongst themselves. Enrollment is up more than 30%, too. Fundraising results have waivered, especially in these tough economic times. Yet through regular Members, we have been introduced to corporate philanthropic departments that are particularly motivated to give where their employees volunteer.

But more importantly, our students are thriving. They are engaged in the art forms in new ways, they are exploring multimedia and electronic music in digital environments, and they are building confidence onstage. Our teachers are making a real impact on their educational, emotional and spiritual development, and we are able to track programmatic effectiveness over the course of a year or more, rather than simply over one 12-week class.

The Institute began as a community outreach mission here in Elizabeth, and the Membership program has taken that initial impulse to the next level: by reaching out to the community and asking for what we needed, the community is getting more of what it needs.

Images courtesy Institute of Music for Children

By Wendy Liscow
Program Officer

What if you could attend a workshop and magically walk away feeling renewed and ready to face the daily challenges of running a nonprofit organization?  What if you suddenly saw your organization’s programs, staffing, financial circumstances and board through a lifecycle lens that made everything you were experiencing come into focus and you no longer felt  alone because you understand that every organization has or will go through a similar process?  You would find the time, right?

Through May, 2012 the Dodge Foundation is offering a Board Leadership Training Series that promises to provide new tools for strengthening your organization by increasing the effectiveness of the board. The series began on October 18th with two foundational basics:

1. Understanding where your organization is on the nonprofit lifecycle continuum, and
2. Learning how to rethink assessment practices so that you measure the things you care about most in order to improve the work.

It was a day of paradigm shifts. By the afternoon we could turn off the artificial overhead lighting, because so many proverbial light bulbs had been turned on!

David Grant, former Dodge President and CEO, spent the morning teaching Nonprofit Lifecycle basics as described by Susan Stevens in her book Nonprofit Lifecycles: A Stage-based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity. Her theory underscores that you need a different type of board for each stage of organizational lifecycles. For example, if you run a Start-Up organization and your ideas and programs are expanding rapidly because, you are seizing every opportunity that presents itself; you can expect your board to be very hands on. This board is doing whatever it takes to keep the organization running, even if it means licking envelopes, hosting the bake sale, or cleaning the bathrooms. They are working tirelessly because they believe in the founder and his/her vision.

But there comes a time when your programs grow so much that you need to hire more staff to accomplish your goals. Now you need a different kind of board. You need a board that has a clearer understanding of their governance role, one that can develop a strategic plan and help with the fundraising to implement the plan to navigate through this Growth Stage.  This is when the organization begins looking for board members who can help out with legal, financial, marketing and other specific issues. And it can be stressful when the “jack-of-all trades” faithful founding board members are no longer a match for the organization’s needs.

Or maybe you are on your second or third executive director and programs are well-established. You have a strong staff serving in the right seats on the bus. When you get to this Mature Stage, the danger is that boards can become so complacent and confident that all is going well (the Executive Director would have told them if it wasn’t going well, right?) that they fall asleep at the wheel and go into a Decline stage. If the board isn’t prepared to step up their governance role, and execute a Turnaround an organization can reach the Terminal Stage. Just knowing that this is a common risk factor for this lifecycle stage can be enough to prevent it from happening.

The second half of the training day focused on changing how we think about Assessment, practicing a new way of evaluating our work, and discussing what gets in the way of this important effort. I wish every nonprofit in New Jersey could attend this workshop. Fortunately, we have developed a step-by-step online version of the workshop that can give you a taste of what healthy assessment looks like.

There are seven remaining workshops in the Board Leadership Training Series. After each workshop we will ask the instructor and attendees to share their biggest takeaways. I must confess that I too was feeling so jazzed after David Grant’s Lifecycle and Assessment workshop that I kept asking questions, so the video is a bit long. But I guarantee it is worth the 11 minutes. David shares insight on what he feels are the biggest challenges facing nonprofits today and makes suggestions on how you can use Steven Covey’s concept of Quadrant II (PDF) time to change how you approach your work. He also suggests some other resources that you will definitely want to put on your read list. And if you get to the very end of the video, you find out who David would want to play him in the movie of his life!

Remember, you are not alone in your journey. We hope you will attend the Dodge Foundation Board Training Series and join a learning community of nonprofit leaders dedicated to doing great work and improving the quality of life in New Jersey. See you there!

UPDATE: When we published this blog post yesterday, we ran into technical issues with David Grant’s video. We believe we have fixed the issue, but in case you still can’t see view it, please click here.