From an excellent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review Fall 07 edition:
1. Serve and Advocate in order to achieve large-scale social change. It does not matter which angle you start with but to have a high impact you need both [my note: agree, but advocacy is much harder, costlier, unmeasurable etc than serving as well as less attractive to funders -unfortunately]
2. Make markets work: tap into the power of self-interest and laws of economics. Understand how to influence the market through working with different partners e.g. changing business behaviours, earning income.
3. Inspire supporters to help in whatever ways they can and nurture supporters' groups to maximum benefit.
4. Nurture networks; share ideas and information and harness the power of partnerships.
5. Be adaptive by responding to external changes; make sure you listen to others and understand the changes as well as evaluating activities and incorporating learnings.
6. Share leadership within the organisation and with other organisations by building strong leaders internally, building strong executive teams and powerful boards. This is crucial for sustainability.
Other important management principles:
-diversified, sustainable, financial support
-invest in HR and build reliable infrastructure (even if this means higher admin costs)
One area the article touches upon but I believe is the most crucial practice of all, is the use and leverage of other organsiations and other resources through the use of mutually beneficial (or 'strategic') partnerships. Finally an excellent point is made about the need to focus less on process and more on impact!
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Myths of Nonprofit management
From an excellent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review Fall 07 edition:
Myth 1: Adequate management is necessary but perfect management is not and has little improvement on social impact [my note: agree, but it depends how you define this as financial management is crucial as is HR management; the latter terribly neglected in all organisations, especially nonprofits]
Myth 2: Brand name awareness is not always important and does not have to be a critical part of strategy [my note: agree, but it depends on if the brand is also a message/'voice' that is crucial to the organisation's mission]
Myth 3: Breakthrough ideas are not always necessary; what is better is to tweak existing ideas to make them more successful [my note: the problem with nonprofits is most of them do not know what other ideas are out there, working and why and there is little genuine sharing or knowledge transfer in the industry globally -maybe higher staff turnover would be a good thing?]
Myth 4: Missions drive an organisation but there is not much need to specify what it is, fine-tune it and write it down [my note: surely this requires a nonprofit whose mission is already well understood by existing staff, easily understood by new staff and brings staff together rather than causing rifts, which also seems common]
Myth 5: Measuring nonprofits' impacts does not work as something like 'overhead ratio' has little direct bearing on impact [my note: agree, especially as most nonprofits need to spend more on HR to ensure effective programs and more on advocacy to ensure sustainable programs]
Myth 6: Large budgets does not mean high impact; organisations of large and small budgets can have high impact [my note: yes, but larger organisations should be able to better pool resources , partners and knowledge to make a greater impact. Unfortunately they should also be more flexible and innovative and work more with the low budget nonprofits to provide them these capacities]
Myth 1: Adequate management is necessary but perfect management is not and has little improvement on social impact [my note: agree, but it depends how you define this as financial management is crucial as is HR management; the latter terribly neglected in all organisations, especially nonprofits]
Myth 2: Brand name awareness is not always important and does not have to be a critical part of strategy [my note: agree, but it depends on if the brand is also a message/'voice' that is crucial to the organisation's mission]
Myth 3: Breakthrough ideas are not always necessary; what is better is to tweak existing ideas to make them more successful [my note: the problem with nonprofits is most of them do not know what other ideas are out there, working and why and there is little genuine sharing or knowledge transfer in the industry globally -maybe higher staff turnover would be a good thing?]
Myth 4: Missions drive an organisation but there is not much need to specify what it is, fine-tune it and write it down [my note: surely this requires a nonprofit whose mission is already well understood by existing staff, easily understood by new staff and brings staff together rather than causing rifts, which also seems common]
Myth 5: Measuring nonprofits' impacts does not work as something like 'overhead ratio' has little direct bearing on impact [my note: agree, especially as most nonprofits need to spend more on HR to ensure effective programs and more on advocacy to ensure sustainable programs]
Myth 6: Large budgets does not mean high impact; organisations of large and small budgets can have high impact [my note: yes, but larger organisations should be able to better pool resources , partners and knowledge to make a greater impact. Unfortunately they should also be more flexible and innovative and work more with the low budget nonprofits to provide them these capacities]
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