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.

Flipping the agenda

Beginning with form, the easiest, and least radical, is to simply flip the order of your agenda. Start off meetings by discussing new business. The very name of this agenda item tells you it hasn’t already passed and suggests that this is about exploring things going forward. Reversing your agenda immediately shakes things up and starts meetings off in a vibrant manner, engaging people and their brains. You should expect to see people showing up on time, eager to participate and help influence the future. Board members may even start to see the difference between being engaged and being a sponge.

Strategic Question Agenda

If you want to try something more radical, then frame your agenda as a series of strategic questions, rather than as reports. Questions which require answers yield board engagement and discussion. So, rather than listing “Executive Director’s Report,” have the Board President and Executive Director, when putting the agenda together, pull from the executive director’s report one key strategic question that flows from the report. It could be about declining participation of clients or staff turnover or responding to common pushbacks the organization is getting from funders or how to translate success in one key area of the mission work into another. The goal here is twofold: one, engage board members and let them do what it is they are supposed to do—and want to do—as a board and, two, help propel the organization forward by playing to strengths and correcting weaknesses. It is a huge mistake to think that the only time an organization and, therefore, a board engage in strategic thinking is during its triennial strategic planning process.

Using a strategic question agenda model, your agenda might look like this:

XYZ Center Board Meeting: 20 January 2012

8:00am-9:30am

Approval of the minutes of the last meeting

Executive Director: What strategies might we enlist to stem declining enrollment/attendance?

Finance Committee:

• Contributed income has continued to decline over the past 12 months; what are potential earned income sources that we should explore?
• How shall we fund the 7% shortfall projected for this current fiscal year?

Program Committee: What is the gap—50%, 33%, none– we are willing to tolerate for programs that have high mission fit but do not cover their costs?

Development Committee: Our tweeting campaign has brought in 30 new contributors in the two months; how should we design a program that will maximize the conversion of these new contributors into long-term contributors?

Governance Committee: We are having trouble finding candidates matching demographic A and D and having expertise in area X; where might we look/what might we try that we haven’t yet done?

New Business

Adjourn

Reports have to go out in advance of the board meeting so that board members have the opportunity to read them and each strategic question would come directly out of the content of each of those reports. Should board members have other elements of a committee report they wish to bring up, they could, but the focus is on addressing the big picture items that the data contained in reports reveal.

The Consent Agenda

Moving up the radical scale of agenda change, next would come a consent agenda. The rationale behind a consent agenda is not, as the suspicious folk on a board think, to hide or gloss over information, but rather to provide the information that is crucial for doing real board work to be distributed and absorbed in advance of the meeting so that at the meeting the board maximizes its meeting time to do the real work of the board.

To be successful in implementing a consent agenda, first must come a clear understanding of why a board would want to move to a consent agenda and a full board commitment to make that move. Then, second, must come an agreement as to what will be included in that consent agenda—generally, anything that is merely providing information and status updates, such as committee reports (but never the finance committee), executive director report, etc. What is put under the consent agenda does not vary meeting to meeting, but is constant. Third, as part of this agreement, board members must understand that they are agreeing to read those reports in advance of when the board meeting agenda is set so that, should they have something they want pulled from the consent agenda and added to the discussion portion of the agenda, they have time to notify the board president and request that the item be pulled. And fourth, the board must agree to the time line: when is the agenda set and how much in advance of that do they need to receive the reports so that they can read them and, if necessary, request something be pulled.

With a consent agenda, your agenda would look like:

XYZ Center Board Meeting: 20 January 2012

8:00am-9:30am

• Approval of the Consent Agenda
• Executive Director’s Report, item 3
• Development Committee’s Report, item 4
• Review and discussion of finance report
• Insert here: key strategic question(s) that needs the board’s input

New Business

Adjourn

The first three items on the sample agenda, above, should take, on average, no more than 15 minutes, leaving 1.25 to 1.75 hours for the finance report and solid, deliberate discussions on matters of key importance to the future of the organization and its ability to deliver on its mission promises. At the meeting, it is imperative, and this cannot be stressed enough, that the Board Chair/President control this portion of the agenda tightly. S/he simply says, “Do I have a motion to accept the consent agenda?” There is a first, and a second but there is no discussion. This is where tight control must happen. If any person says, “I am just reading the Executive Director’s report now and I want to discuss item 2 now,” the Chair must say, “Sorry; you needed to read the Report ahead of time and call/email your request ahead of planning the agenda.” The Chair cannot waiver on this protocol, or make exceptions.

The Strategic Agenda

The last agenda option, equally as “radical” as a consent agenda is a strategic agenda. Here, the agenda mirrors your strategic priorities. It would like this:

XYZ Center Board Meeting: 20 January 2012

8:00am-9:30am

I. Expand Educational Program into East Side: Documentation of need (Program Committee), Analysis of program profitability (Finance), Potential board member from East Side (Board Development)

II. Increase profitability: Analysis of overall agency profitability (Finance); Proposed change in insurance agency (Finance)

III. Development of Information Systems: Discussion of new technology plan (Executive Director); Consideration of capital investment needs (Finance); Report on staff needs (Personnel)

IV. Finance Report

V. Approve minutes of last meeting

VI. Adjourn

Items I-III, above, are the three strategic priorities in current play. Each committee or individual working on some aspect of helping to implement this priority reports his/her/its work to date. In this process, several things happen:

1. The strategic plan remains a living document that is guiding the organization;
2. The plan is monitored on a regular basis, thereby allowing adjustments to happen, if needed, then and there, not months later after things have stalled; and
3. The board meeting is interactive and being used to move the organization forward along a structured course.

There is no generic right or wrong among these options. Each and all of these different agenda add more interaction, engagement and strategic thinking into a board meeting than the traditional agenda pointed out at the start of this blog. The right one is the one that will help propel the board and, therefore, the organization forward. For organizations feeling “bold”, carpe momento, grab a new, stretch agenda and ratchet up your board’s performance. Allow board members to do what they signed on to do: build a strong organizational future and mission delivery to the community.

Stayed tuned: next month Laura Otten talks about how to run an effective board meeting.

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.

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:

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

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.

Board leadership is critical for successful nonprofit organizations. Board members are your ambassadors; they develop strategy, help fundraise, and give your organization a level of professionalism and cohesiveness that it needs to thrive. When your board isn’t functioning well, your organization isn’t either.

Fortunately, there’s help.

Dodge has just announced a new round of its Board Leadership training series, an intensive, step-by-step program to build a stronger and more effective Board of Directors for your organization.

We have teamed up with The Nonprofit Center at La Salle University’s Business School to present a FREE, comprehensive series that has three components:

1) FOUNDATIONAL OVERVIEW: Two mandatory introductory full-day workshops: Assessment/Lifecycles and the Board Bootcamp

2) DRILLING DOWN: A series of six follow-up intensive workshops on the most pressing Board Development subjects

3) INSTITUTIONALIZING THE LEARNING: Access to our “Just In Time” consulting, as well as an opportunity to apply for a matching grant which pays for a consultant to work with your full Board on any area that your organization has identified as a priority.

Please note: all workshops are limited to 25 participants and will fill up quickly. Preference will be given to Dodge grantees and groups who attend the two mandatory Foundational Overview workshops (Assessment/Lifecycles and the Board Bootcamp) and are working towards eligibility for the matching grant.

View the full workshop series and schedule, and register online here.

Image: Joe Geinert

By Sue Nyoni

In 2009, I led the first series of social media workshops offered as part of the Dodge Technical Assistance Initiative. At that time, only a handful of the people attending were convinced of the value of social media to their organizations. Many of them weren’t even really sure what “it” was and were completely unfamiliar with Twitter and Facebook. As a consequence I had to spend most of the time defining social media and then demonstrating its potential value to them. It wasn’t easy and there was some serious resistance.

Fast forward two years, and here we are with a new series in full swing. The series consists of a full day session which covers how to strategically plan for the use of social media in support of mission and goals, followed by five tool-specific webinars. Much has changed in the intervening two years. I didn’t need to explain what Twitter and Facebook are, nor did I have to convince anyone of the potential value of social media to their organizations. It was clear that everyone in the room now knew WHAT “it” is, but they still didn’t know what to DO with it.

Every organization attending had already made some foray into the social media space, with varying levels of success. What they felt they lacked, however, was confidence in their ability to use these tools to maximal effect. They were unsure how to integrate social media into their missions, goals, programs and processes.

The landscape of the social web has certainly changed since Dodge first offered this series. New platforms have come and gone, and the reach of existing platforms have shifted. While the technology may have evolved, the challenges for many nonprofit organizations remain the same: not having in-house expertise and support; not having dedicated resources to commit to social media efforts; not knowing which tools to use and how best to use them; the frustration of trying to keep up with the latest and greatest tools.

Given these challenges the most practical advice I can offer is to be realistic about what you are trying to accomplish and the resources you have available to you to make it happen. It’s OK to start small. You don’t have to be on every single social network. In fact, unless you have dedicated media staff you can’t do that and do it well. Far better to focus and get the basics down. With so many tools and so little time to master them all, it is very easy to get caught in flurry of social media activity without actually accomplishing much. It is far more effective to pick the one or two tools/networks which best support your goals and learn them well so that you can use them well.

This foundational approach is what we are trying to achieve with this series. Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll share with you some tips for getting the basics down. In the meantime we’d love to hear your experiences with social media.

Getting attention for your organization in today’s world can be challenging. It’s no longer enough to rely solely on traditional media or grassroots engagement to get a story out to the public and garner support.

We’ve heard from our grantees that they are eager to hone their communications strategies and learn how best to use social media tools, but that the technology changes so fast, it’s overwhelming to keep up. We’re responding to our grantees’ needs with a new series of free Technical Assistance Communications Workshops to help them catch attention, raise awareness and inspire action.

Public Image Works, led by Ennis Carter of Design for Social Impact, is a three part participatory series that allows you to do a deep exploration of your organization’s identity, develop a promotional plan, and figure out where and on whom to focus your energies.

Smart Social Media for Nonprofits, led by Sue Nyoni of Conscious Technology, is a one day overview workshop on how to utilize social media for your communication strategy, followed by five online webinars exploring effective and innovative ways to use Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and Online Fundraising Tools.

To register, please visit us on the Dodge website.

* Please note that the workshops are intended for Dodge grantees, but where possible, we try our best to accommodate other non-profits.

“Our goal is the success of our grantees.”

This is how one of our board members recently summarized Dodge’s investment in technical assistance and capacity building for our grantees. Many of you have already registered for our current Board Leadership Training series, but if you haven’t already, register now. Today’s guest blogger, David Gray, is one of the many consultants working with our grantees who attended our Board Training series and were then eligible to apply for a matching board capacity building grant. David  has a lot to say on the topic of financial management for nonprofits, and his new book is arrives in stores today. We thought you would appreciate a taste of his wisdom.

David Gray
President, Finance Arts, LLC

With increasing focus in the nonprofit sector on the broad concept of sustainability, many organizations are struggling with determining just what sustainability means. Does sustainability mean, “How do we stay in business?” Does it mean, “How do we ensure we have enough money to keep doing what we are doing?” Does it mean, “How do I stay in business without counting on the continuing support of fickle foundations?”

Before you can determine how to become sustainable, by any of these definitions, I believe it is essential to understand your business model, and the annual cash flow that emerges as a result of your business model. I believe this so strongly that I have written a book about it, The Finance Arts Guide To Nonprofit Cash Flow (available at Amazon and other online booksellers).

We don’t tend to think about nonprofit organizations in terms of their business models but every organization has one, whether they know it or not. The business model combines how an organization is capitalized (what kind of financial structure has been used to create and operate it) and how, in most cases, the services we provide are “bought” and paid for. Of course, in many cases, services aren’t “bought” by the end user. Neither a soup kitchen nor an orchestra charges the end user a price that covers the costs of providing the service, so additional funds are required. How we organize this financial picture determines the business model.

In a perfect world everything we do would be paid for in full, and in advance. So we would collect all the funds and then generate the service so that at no time would we be “out of pocket.” In the real world there are few nonprofit organizations that can generate sufficient funds in advance of incurring costs for providing services. Theaters sell subscriptions to get money in advance of providing the service. Private schools try to get tuition in advance for the same reason. But even these organizations must raise additional funds and it is very difficult to do so in advance of the theater season or school year.

Your business model also determines your annual cash flow. Imagine that you are a florist. You need to have lots of flowers on hand for Valentine’s Day but you don’t really know how many, and people don’t tend to buy them in advance. So you have to pay for the flowers in the hopes that you sell them on Valentine’s Day. You need to come up with substantial money in advance. Many businesses maintain lines of credit with banks for just such purposes.

This contrasts with the busy spring wedding season when most florists require substantial deposits as part of their contract to provide wedding flowers. Here the florist is at much less risk because they have already got funds from the customer to pay for the flowers in advance.

The cash flow of the nonprofit organization will reflect the business model. Do we get money in advance of providing the service and therefore have relatively stable and positive cash flow? Must we provide the service and wait for months for reimbursement from a government agency, reflecting an ongoing cash shortage? Of course small and even medium sized nonprofits may have trouble getting lines of credit so it makes sense to have money saved and set aside for such times.

You can’t address making your organization sustainable, by most any definition, without understanding what your business model is and how that model is reflected in your cash flow. Once you do have an understanding of your business model and its commensurate cash flow, you can then determine whether a line of credit, a cash reserve, an endowment, or some combination of these will provide the most effective route toward sustainability

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David Gray is President of Finance Arts, LLC, which provides personal financial planning and nonprofit consulting services. Gray, who is a Certified Financial Planner and Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, has also served as Executive Director of nonprofit organizations. His book, The Finance Arts Guide to Nonprofit Cash Flow, is a user friendly guide to understanding nonprofit finance. In the book Gray reviews familiar personal finance topics and explains how they relate to their nonprofit organizational counterparts. Including real-world examples from his own experience, and that of his wife, former New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Kyra Nichols, Gray makes the irregularity of nonprofit cash flow easier to comprehend. Gray also introduces a new method for determining the appropriate cash reserve for nonprofit organizations, based not on outdated rules-of-thumb, but targeted to the specific operational model of the individual organization.

Finance Arts, LLC, located in Princeton, NJ, provides nonprofit consulting and personal financial planning on an hourly fee only basis.

www.FinanceArts.com
dgray@FinanceArts.com

Changing the Face of Reality
By Lydia Johnson and Camilla Finch Teitelman

Lydia Johnson, center, with dancers Kerry Shea and Jessica Sand

Lydia Johnson: Artistic Director and Founder

When I first arrived at the Dodge Workshops I was hesitant to share all of the reality of our small Dance Company’s situation. We were presenting full-scale performances with 10 professional dancers in both New York and New Jersey. We had recently performed at Jacob’s Pillow (a prestigious dance festival). We had received insightful and deeply positive reviews from the New York Times, and Backstage Magazine and articulate listings in About The Town in The New Yorker. A well-known New York arts Blogger had come forward asking to feature the Company in a series of articles on the creative process. He wanted to follow the creation of a new dance from start to performance and publish photos of our rehearsals on his blog. We had plans for a Gala Celebration of our 10th Anniversary at both our home theater, SOPAC in South Orange NJ, and in New York at The Ailey Citigroup Theater. Our dance classes were steadily growing and we had an expanding scholarship program for underserved children who wanted to dance.

But this was not the whole picture! There was a reality that our glowing reviews and newly redesigned website did not expose. Our dancers are paid by the project and thus the scheduling around their other commitments and jobs is extremely difficult. We have no office. We had no paid administrative staff. Our Board is a small group of dedicated supporters who meet in each other’s houses. At that time, they were constantly trying to figure out how to divide the never-ending list of volunteer jobs for the next event. Our equipment was unbelievably old and difficult to use. I had to race back and forth between two 10-year-old computers when I was working since one would not open PDF’s and the other held our old hard drive- based database. I functioned as Executive and Artistic Director and Administrative Assistant. I choreographed, taught and did publicity and all of the secretarial work. The Board members who had been with us for a number of years were exhausted from doing everything from cutting up vegetables for fundraisers to planning how to raise awareness of our performances. And most importantly, our understanding of the process of focused fundraising was just beginning to emerge. We were consulting with a development professional but only sporadically.

Ensemble for DUSK, Lydia’s two-part Gorecki ballet

I assumed we would downplay the difficulties of being so small and underfunded. True, we were accomplishing miraculous things with almost no resources, but what we couldn’t possibly have seen, without the Dodge workshops, was that this path we were on had been traveled many times before by creative nonprofits who were now integral to their communities! Nonprofits we admired and aspired to be like had actually been where we were now!

As David Grant began to speak on the Lifecycles of nonprofits, I felt the lifting of the burdens I had been carrying. The burden of thinking we were alone in this experience, that the difficult path was unique to us and therefore somehow our “fault.” The burden of thinking we would be judged harshly if anyone really knew how we were functioning. The burden of being unable to ask questions regarding how to progress since we were reluctant to expose the whole situation – assuming it would shock and upset possible advisors.

Josh Kurtzberg and Laura DiOrio

What a revelation the workshops were! We were given the tools to place our journey in perspective. We had markers and concepts with which to understand our strengths and our limitations. And most importantly we began to understand the tools to change and grow in ways that simply would have been impossible without the structured information and warm support we received.

Kerry Shea and Eric Vlach; Laura DiOrio and James Hernandez, from Lydia’s Untitled Bach

We realized, for example, that while our programming was at a “mature” level, our infrastructure was at a “start up” stage! Well okay that wasn’t such a bad realization – I began to honor and respect even more the wonderful people I was working with and to respect our persistence and ingenuity in moving forward given a pool of resources which were as yet inadequate! The pathway we were on had been traveled before. It had colorful and clear signposts! We were in good company – we were in fact a part of the community of growing nonprofits – and our strength could be expanded by opening up to the pool of collective knowledge I now realized existed. •

Camilla Finch, right, with founding Board member Rayna Pomper

Camilla Finch Teitelman: Board Chair, Founding Member

There was a moment of truth for me during the Dodge fundraising workshop that helped LJD put in place many new changes. Allison Trimarco (the instructor for the Board as Fundraisers workshop) said “You can’t continue to work at this level of sacrifice. It’s just not sustainable.”

We had all known this for years but hadn’t found the right way to change it. We knew the next level for LJD was right around the corner, but we didn’t seem to be able to get there. Of late, we had put in place a number of new initiatives. We had added two new board members—bringing our grand total to six, we expanded our fundraising activities to include individual asks in addition to mail solicitations and income from performances and events, and we began writing more grant applications. But it clearly wasn’t enough. It just took too much to keep the organization going at the current level; moving it forward was another matter.

Going to the Dodge workshops galvanized us to treat LJD more like a business. (Although if I had known what a lousy business running a dance company is I might have had second thoughts!) Our Board meetings became more structured. Board roles were more defined and responsibilities laid out clearly. We faced and changed some of our fiscal management and changed our view of fundraising from a huge sometimes embarrassing chore to a game, even a puzzle. And finally, the Dodge workshops gave us a platform from which to discuss issues that we had often found difficult. “That’s OK, but you know Dodge said…” I dare say was uttered more than once.

In the future, I can see using other tools we learned at Dodge, including strategic planning, methods for assessing our programs. And of course, rubrics for the board and all the activities of our organization! •

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Lydia Johnson, (Choreographer, Artistic Director)

Originally from Massachusetts, Ms. Johnson is the Artistic Director of Lydia Johnson Dance, which has received generous support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in 2008, 2009 and 2010. LJD performs and teaches regularly at SOPAC in South Orange, NJ where they are Dance Company in Residence, as well as at The Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York. The Company performed recently at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts. LJD was founded in 1999 and has received additional support from The Garden State Arts Foundation. The Company has been featured in a series titled “The Creative Process” written by Philip Gardner and photographed by Kokyat on the New York arts blog Oberon’s Grove.

Ms Johnson studied at SUNY/Purchase and on scholarship at The Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. She continued her studies in New York with Finis Jhung and Sara Rudner among others. She presented her early work in New York at numerous dance spaces and founded One Night Stand, a series of Co-operative showcases, which allowed choreographers to present new work inexpensively. She has received a Monticello Foundation award sponsored by The National Association of Regional Ballet as well as a Harkness Dance Center Space Grant from the 92nd Street Y.

Camilla Finch Teitelman, LJD Board President

A journalist by trade, Ms. Finch Teitelman worked on the ABC Network News programs, 20/20, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and Business World with Sander Vanocur. She has also worked in print journalism with, among other publications, Crain’s New York Business. A native New Yorker, she moved to New Jersey 17 years ago where, along with Lydia Johnson and Rayna Pomper, she began the process that led to the founding and development of Lydia Johnson Dance. Currently LJD’s Board President, Ms. Finch Teitelman is moving into the nonprofit sector and is near completion of a Certificate in Nonprofit Management.

Performance photos courtesy Oberon’s Grove