Nonprofit

During the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many nonprofits halted their communications activities. Many were uncertain if they should continue their usual activities. Would it be misconstrued if they sent out a fundraising campaign? What about the quarterly magazine—should it be put on hold? Would it seem in poor taste to send press releases out to the local papers about recent activities in the community?

These are great questions, and no two nonprofits will answer them the same. What remains consistent during this time of uncertainty is the knowledge that constituents both want and need to hear from their favorite nonprofits.

It’s easy to let communications slide when there’s so much to manage right now. Transitioning everyone to remote work, figuring out how to continue providing services to the public during social distancing, are all pressing needs. But communications must be part of the immediate response to the COVID-19 crisis, or you run the risk of becoming invisible.

Stay Connected

If your organization doesn’t have a marketing or communications manager, appoint someone to take on the task during the pandemic. It’s essential to have a consistent and meaningful communications strategy. Discuss among crucial team members what messages you believe the public needs to hear during this time, and then develop a strategy and outreach program to share those messages.

Connect with key internal and external stakeholders:

• Employees and volunteers: Use instant messenger, email, video conferencing, and phone calls to stay in touch. Make sure that your teams feel connected even though everyone works from home.
• Donors and supporters: Send periodic messages to donors and supporters assuring them that your organization continues its work during the pandemic: update blog posts, social media, and other channels.

Tips for Sharing Information

During times of crisis, it’s essential to remain calm and focused. A sound communications strategy should be:

• Focused: Stay on message. Don’t rush messages out without ensuring that they are accurate and verifiable.
• Transparent: Keep key internal stakeholders updated on the messaging strategy and ensure they’ve reviewed messages before they go out. They may have advice or feedback to improve messages.
• Multichannel: Don’t rely on one channel, such as email. Utilize all of the communications channels at your disposal, including social media, blogs, and snail-mail, if appropriate.

Tell People What You Are Doing Now to Help

Supporters of your organization want to know how you’re continuing to offer services during this time of crisis. Consider the many ways in which your organization is helping during the COVID-19 pandemic. These may be direct help (such as donating supplies to first-response workers) or they may be indirect help (such as working from home).

A few ways in which your organization may be helping to combat the COVID-19 epidemic:

• Keeping employees and volunteers safe by asking everyone to work from home
• Ensuring all employees keep their benefits even if you have to cut back on pay
• Maintaining sanitary and clean conditions in offices and other spaces
• Offering online resources, programs, and other virtual services
• Other facts unique to your organization

Remember, share only what is relevant, verifiable, and factual. Avoid speculation and wishful thinking and stick to specifics.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, remaining silent or hesitating to communicate means losing valuable supporters. People do want to hear good news now. They want to know that their favorite nonprofits are still active and supporting the work that’s meaningful to them. For your good, and the good of others, communicate now with precision, accuracy, and thoughtfulness, and remain top of mind among your supporters.

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact Welter Consulting at 206-605-3113 for more information.

Of all the items on your to-do list, strategic planning probably ranks low on the list—if it’s there at all. Most nonprofit managers and directors believe they are too busy serving constituents and members, leading teams, and reacting to challenges and demands of the organization to develop a strategic plan.

That’s the key: reactive. Most nonprofits and indeed most companies overall react rather than act with forethought, planning, and insight.

That’s where strategic planning comes into the picture. By creating a strategic plan, you’re taking charge of your nonprofit’s future. While you must still react to changing circumstances and the daily challenges and demands of an active nonprofit, you’ve got an overarching plan in mind to guide the organization through it all.

What Is a Strategic Plan?

Many people confuse strategy with tactics, so it’s essential first to understand what a strategic plan entails. A strategic plan presents a series of coordinated actions and activities that help advance the nonprofit’s mission. After describing the actions and activities, the “how-to” may be added. The “how-to” are the tactics or discrete actions to be taken to achieve the overall strategy.

Think of a strategic plan as a deliberate choice. Rather than react and rely upon your creativity, knowledge, and insight, it helps you to outline a series of intentional and considered steps to advance your organization’s mission.

If your mission is to reduce hunger in your town, your strategic plan may include establishing a pipeline of donations from local restaurants (hot meals) and supermarkets (non-perishable and perishable food) as well as networking with local churches and charities to meet the needs within the community. How you do this may include phone calls to the owners of the restaurants, meeting with corporate representatives of supermarket chains, and local networking. The strategy to reduce hunger will guide your decisions and the overall work of the organization for the year.

Why Bother with Strategic Planning?

Some people view strategic planning as a mere exercise or paperwork. Not so. It’s vital for a healthy nonprofit. If you have a strategic plan in place you can:

1. Make better decisions: Strategic plans provide a framework against which daily choices can be made. It’s easier to decide whether to do one thing or another if you have a rubric against which you can check the choices.
2. Clarifies the organization’s mission and values: With a strategic plan in place, it is crystal clear what your organization values and what it intends to do. It clears up where you are headed and makes it easier to describe activities to the public and staff.
3. Guides the staff: One way to improve employee engagement is to give them clear directions. People generally work better together when they understand what is expected of them and the direction in which they’re heading. When you build a strategic plan, you outline the overall goals and direction for the year, and the staff understands now what they can do to help achieve the plan and support the organization’s mission.
4. Improves fundraising: A strategic plan may provide the impetus and inspiration for marketing staff to create new campaigns and better align their messaging with the organization’s mission.

As you can see, a strategic plan serves many functions. An annual strategic plan offers you the opportunity for direction-setting and cohesive staff guidance. Perhaps, more importantly, it helps you set and guide the direction of your organization, so you’re no longer tossed about by the winds of chance but have your hand firmly at the wheel to steer where you’re headed.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact Welter Consulting at 206-605-3113 for more information.

Wouldn’t it be great if our organizations could get a checkup the way we go to the doctor to get a checkup? When you go to the doctor for a checkup, she takes your blood pressure, listens to your heartbeat, and generally checks your vital signs to ensure they’re within normal parameters. Anything that stands out as unusual can be investigated and, if possible, corrected to ensure you stay healthy for a long time to come.

Nonprofit organizations could also benefit from checkups. Their financial health, along with their overall operational health, needs to be in tip-top shape to continue fulfilling their mission for a long time to come.

Here are seven “vital signs” to check on the health of your nonprofit organization. If anything is amiss, it’s time to speak with Welter Consulting, your nonprofit counselor, to correct it before it becomes an emergency.

Seven “Vital Signs” to Check on Your Nonprofit

The ‘vital signs’ in this list fall into three major categories:

• Financial: dealing with the nonprofit’s funding
• Operational: dealing with the organization’s corporate infrastructure, culture, or programs
• Marketing: how the organization appears before the general public and donors

The following are typical signs of a troubled organization. Check these ‘vital signs’ against your organization. If you see any, it’s time to take action.

1. Chronic cash-flow problems: Are you always scrambling to find the cash to pay the bills? How about chasing after receivables and invoices each month? Persistent cash flow problems are a sign that something is amiss in the way you’re running your nonprofit.
2. Crisis-driven funding: A grant dries up, and there’s a scramble to fill the gap. Or there’s a push for an emergency funding drive because no one realized that the coffers were running low to fund the programs to the end of the year. Anything with the word “crisis” in it should be a red flag that something unhealthy is brewing in the organization.
3. High staff turnover: High staff turnover in any organization or company is a big warning sign of an unhealthy corporate culture. It usually means high stress and little fulfillment for the employees. At a nonprofit, it may also be a sign of a dysfunctional organization that makes it difficult for people to do their work. High turnover rates are a big warning sign that should be investigated immediately.
4. Burnout: Burnout goes along with high attrition rates. Burnout means that people no longer care about their work. They may continue to work at the nonprofit or volunteer out of a sense of obligation, but the passion, the drive, the fire to fulfill the mission is no longer there.
5. Loss of programs: Programs are quietly retired without much ado. Instead of an outcry that it’s needed, such programs fade away for lack of participation.
6. Adding many new programs at once: The flip side of loss of programs is the frantic push to add more programs. It’s as if the new programs will somehow “make things right” within the organization. The feeling one gets amid all the new programs being added is a feeling of frantic desperation rather than healthy growth.
7. Bad press or negative mentions from the public: One or two bad mentions may not signify much, but consistent questioning of the organization’s leadership, mission, and funding are red flags that the nonprofit is sending signals that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing to support its mission.

All nonprofits, even the healthiest ones, may pass through one or all seven of these issues at any given time. The point isn’t to check off each one with a sigh of relief – “Whew, glad we don’t do that!” – But to see if it’s a chronic problem. Chronic, long-term issues, such as high turnover or poor cash flow, can sap the energy of an organization to the point where it begins to falter. One quarter of high turnover may be a blip on the radar, but a year of people coming and going can seriously degrade the morale of those left in the organization and leave it leaderless. Look for patterns rather than a checklist of vital signs to spot problems.

Welter Consulting

If you’re not sure how healthy your organization is, then speak with the experts at Welter Consulting. Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact Welter Consulting at 206-605-3113 for more information or to schedule a ‘vital sign checkup.’