I recently returned from New York City, where I was able to spend two incredible days with 72 fellow global nonprofit leaders selected to attend the fourth annual American Express Leadership Academy Global Alumni Summit. The theme of the summit was Leadership in Times of Transition. This year's summit featured a special livestream conversation with Angela Fernandez, Esq., executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, and Dan Parks, managing editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. They discussed leadership in times of transition, and how our sector can be effective under current conditions. You can watch the archived version of the conversation here, and I highly encourage anybody, whether you work in the nonprofit sector or not, do so.

Rather than spend time telling you what they said and why it’s important – thanks to modern-day technology, you can learn directly from them on your train ride home (you are using mass transit, right!?) – I thought I’d talk a bit about what I have learned through transitions in my career.

Like Angela Fernandez, I have split my careers (in my case, pretty evenly) between the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Through those experiences, I have been through a lot of transitions. These transitions go beyond changing careers, sectors, geographies or titles. I’ve transitioned…

If you research the topic of volunteer retention, you will find many lists of “best practices” or “high priority” tasks for nonprofit managers.  While these lists are valuable, and applicable to specific types of nonprofits, it is difficult to find a list that can be applied to the majority of nonprofits, regardless of mission and size.

The following list contains best practices that are easy to implement across a wide range of nonprofits.  They are also common-sense solutions, which can be easily understood and transferred into practice.  These practices are mutually beneficial to volunteers and nonprofit organizations.

1. Create Clear Job Descriptions – State the title of the position, what job duties are included, what type of environment volunteers will be working in, and the name of the person they report to.  Most importantly, state the mission of the organization, and show how the position directly contributes to the accomplishment of that mission. 

Why Is This Important? Volunteers want to know what they are getting in to before they sign on for a job.  Creating a clear, concise job description gives them a good idea of what will be required of them, and allows a chance to ask questions.  Nonprofit managers can save time and money by screening out volunteers who are not ready to commit to the task at hand.

2. Ensure Good Matches Through Onboarding –…

My story with Public Allies Arizona starts years before I even walked into a job fair and met my former program manager. For you to truly understand my impact with Public Allies, you must first allow me introduce my journey, my obstacles, and myself. You must first understand how having a village of leaders, nurturers, friends and loved ones all played a part in my journey to get this far. I was born the second oldest of six to a single mother on the north side of St. Louis, City. Where I lived, 16 family members in a three-bedroom home, mostly boys, you would think the house would be a rowdy environment. It was quite the opposite. The house was always full of love for each other, but outside the door was another story. I can still smell the lingering scent of a gun recently fired. I still feel the pangs of not eating and not being sure  when a meal would come. I remember how hard my mom had to work to provide for the household, and all of this was before my sixth birthday. 

When I joined Public Allies back in 2017, I didn’t exactly know what I was getting myself into. After meeting the strong men and women in my cohort, I knew I was a part of something special. I started working with Creighton Community Foundation, for two reasons. First, I wanted to impact the lives of the next generation through education. Second, the founder Jeff Boles, knows and lives the mission that my Godmother instilled in me, “it takes a village, to raise a child.” While…

The one-size-fits-all mentality may work with buying a hat but it is not an effective way to attract new donors to your nonprofit. 

It is possible to diversify your revenue and bring sustainability to your organization by attracting new donors. These individual donors will want to support your organization and its mission. 

We have identified three key items that you can immediately implement to attract new donors to your organization.

1. Choose to engage the donor’s head and heart to make the investment decision. 

While some donors want to hear about the tear-jerking story, other donors gravitate to the infographic that clearly demonstrates the direct numbers impacted by the mission of the organization. And to make things a little more difficult, some donors appreciate both – the heart felt story and the hard facts combined with data. 

We have found that you will achieve your best results from a donor appeal letter when you genuinely know your audience. Keep in mind that this is not only the words on the paper – it is also how your solicitation letter made them feel. You want your donors (and prospective donors) to remember their feelings, even after the last punctuation mark on the paper. 

When marketing to a donor demographic that you have not identified their giving preference, go with the heartfelt story. Make sure you are able to clearly illustrate the impact…

Nonprofit organizations have added pressure in the area of Leadership Development due to smaller staff sizes, with smaller salaries. This means people are expected to do more for less. Volunteer bases, while passionate, also sport high turnover. Volunteer managers are constantly training, on top of everything else they do. Between being understaffed, stretching resources and constantly training new people, little energy is left over to put into leadership development. 

Even in the age of technology and virtual meetings, the most impactful moments of development happen in regular face-to-face meetings on a daily basis. Your conference room (or coffee shop table) is sacred space. Use the moments in and around meetings to foster the kind of leadership that will support your organization.

Here are a few toxic signs of ego to watch out for that will invade your sacred meeting space and derail leadership development:

Steamroller:

To steamroll a conversation is to take the focus off a subject and turn it into being all about one person. If you witness a person is consistently taking over a conversation to talk about themselves, you can veer the focus back by kindly acknowledging what they were saying using reflective language, and then saying, “but this meeting is about X and we need to hear from Mr. Y.” It may not work the first time, but you’ve taken the first step to establishing a precedence for your…