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Bright Ideas

Most Executive Directors Are Hacks (and That’s a Good Thing)

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Psychologist Anders Ericsson found that a critical factor in becoming an expert musician is spending 10,000 hours in solitary practice. To be an expert executive director, do you have to spend 10,000 hours practicing executive directoring?
The vast majority of nonprofit executive directors are hacks at their jobs. There, I’ve said it. They aren’t experts at their craft. They haven’t spent 10,000 hours honing their expertise. They aren’t well-versed in the wide spectrum of skill sets that a great executive director should need: fundraising, staff management, vision-crafting, priority-setting, financial management, motivating others, hiring and firing, negotiating, planning staff retreats, making coffee, and plenty of others. In fact, most executive directors are unusual if they’re really good at even one element of their job, much less a bunch of them.

(And yea, it is actually pretty hard to find people who are really, really good at making coffee.)

Yet these are the people that often run our nonprofits. These are the folks that see a need in their community and step up to fill it, or step into the breech when their own organization suddenly needs someone in that buck-stops-here role. They often bring some area of knowledge to the table … maybe they’ve been fundraisers for a few years, or they’ve led some successful advocacy campaigns, or they spearheaded a cool art or education or social services program. Most executive directors don’t come in cold. But they are often ill prepared for the challenges and demands of the role.

The amazing thing: a lot of them do a great job guiding kick-ass organizations despite their lack of expertise. They are hacks in the best sense: they care deeply about the work, they care deeply about learning what they don’t know, and they piece together all of their knowledge, experience, and intuition to chart a course, solve the problems that come up, and push their organizations to perform better. They try, they fail, they learn, and through all that they make it work.

This isn’t an argument for ignoring that long list of critical skill sets … those skills really are important. But it is an argument against the notion that you can only be a good executive director after you’ve become an expert. There are hack executive directors all over the place, and for that we are grateful.

Our First Book Launch: The Nimble Nonprofit Hits the Streets (and Barnes & Noble)

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The Nimble Nonprofit is now available at Barnes & Noble ($4.99)!
Yesterday Trey and I launched our first book, The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, with a ton of help from our Bright+3 colleague Ted Fickes.

We’re only a day into it, but it’s been great fun so far: a ton of awesome reviews on Amazon, a bunch of great Twitter traffic, and even an unsolicited and really favorable full-on book review (thanks Bonnie Cranmer!).

In addition, I now have a “Jacob Smith” author page on Amazon. I wasn’t expecting much when I logged in to set it up, but I must not have paid author pages much attention previously because it turns out they’re actually set up pretty well. In addition to what you’d expect (profile, photo, etc.), they also allow you to bring in a Twitter feed and an RSS feed, which is a nice touch.

And great news if you are a Nook fan: The Nimble Nonprofit is now available at Barnes & Noble!

The book is in review at Apple, and as soon as it launches there we’ll announce it.

We’re thrilled to sent our little book out into the world, and we welcome your comments, critiques, and thoughts … send them our way:

The First Bright+3 Book Launch: The Nimble Nonprofit

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I am thrilled to announce the launch of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit.

The nonprofit world truly is in a state of flux. Much of what used to work doesn’t anymore. The need to invest in growing ass-kicking staff and to develop sustained organizational capacity has never been greater, yet the difficulties of doing so are growing as quickly as the need. In The Nimble Nonprofit we cover a wide range of what we believe are critical challenges facing the nonprofit sector:

  • cultivating a high-impact innovative organizational culture;
  • building and sustaining a great team;
  • staying focused and productive;
  • optimizing your board of directors;
  • creating lasting relationships with foundations, donors, and members;
  • remaining agile and open; and
  • growing and sustaining a nimble, impactful organization.

We mean for The Nimble Nonprofit to be a guide – an unconventional irreverent, and pragmatic guide – to succeeding in a nonprofit leadership role, and to tackling this incredibly challenging nonprofit environment. We aimed for a conversational, practical, candid, and quick read instead of a deep dive. If you want to immerse yourself in building a great membership program, or recruiting board members, or writing by-laws, there are plenty of books that cover the terrain (and some of them are quite good).

But if you want the no-nonsense, convention-challenging, clutter-cutting guide to the info you really, really need to know about sustaining and growing a nonprofit, well, we hope you’ll check out The Nimble Nonprofit.

This is our first book, and the publishing industry is a state of disarray, so – following the spirit in which we wrote the book – we are taking an unconventional path. We decided to publish strictly as an e-book, and we decided to self-published (with a bunch of help from Ted here at Bright+3). We are offering the book through the big three e-bookstores (Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, and we might add a few more to the mix), and we’ve priced the book at $4.99, which is much less expensive than the vast array of other nonprofit books.

As of right now, the book is available on Amazon (and it’ll hit the other two stores shortly). If you’d like to score a copy of The Nimble Nonprofit and enjoy reading it on your Kindle, iPad, or another tablet, jump on Amazon and grab it (did I mention it’s only $4.99?).

And, because our main goal is contributing to the conversations around these critical questions, we are also making a .pdf version of the book available for free.

We suspect that most readers will agree with some of what we argue and disagree with other parts, and because we challenge much of the conventional wisdom about building strong nonprofits, we’re pretty sure that some folks will disagree with a lot of what we write. And we look forward to the conversations. Please send us your thoughts, critiques, comments, and ideas

Tell us where you think we’re wrong and where we’ve hit the nail on the head, and please share with us other examples of nonprofits doing a great job of tackling these challenges and where they are just getting it wrong.

Happy reading –

Jacob

(P.S. The Nimble Nonprofit is available right now on Amazon.)

Twelve Tips for Encouraging Innovation at Your Nonprofit

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Some innovations are better than others (photo from the How To Be a Dad blog).
One of the more energetic exchanges at the Nonprofit Technology Conference earlier this month took place during a plenary discussion on innovation among nonprofits. The discussion was interesting but heady, and the pragmatics of fostering a culture of innovation within your nonprofit or becoming more innovative in your own work matter just as much as the big picture discussion that took place on stage.

One critical but often overlooked element is making sure you build in strong learning loops. Experimenting with creative ideas doesn’t end up being very valuable if you can’t learn from the experience and apply those lessons in the future. What does that mean? Most of the time, it means setting clear goals, being clear about your assumptions and hypotheses, being clear about your evaluation process, and finally making sure you debrief thoughtfully and share the lessons learned.

But even this kind of language is pretty abstract. Just how do you encourage innovation? A few practical suggestions:

1) Once in a while attend a conference that you wouldn’t ordinarily attend. If it’s in a different field, all the better. Try a conference on marketing, social media, museums, technology, creating a strong professional development program, or pretty much anything that involves a different group of people.

2) Just getting out of your own narrow nonprofit space can be really valuable. If you focus on women’s issues, try engaging with environmentalists sometime. If you run a botanic garden, plug in with the education-focused folks.

3) Once in a while read through blogs in those other areas. And if you can’t afford or make time for any more conferences, blogs are a great way to pay attention to conversations in other spaces.

4) Give each member of your staff a small discretionary “sandbox budget” that they can spend however they wish so long as they explain the goal, why they think it might work, and how they’ll evaluate the outcome.

5) Give an award every month to the member of your staff that tries the most interesting new project.

6) Make open conversation about failures a part of your staff meetings … what was the logic of the idea, what did you learn, how might you iterate from here?

7) Mix up the location of staff meetings and especially retreats.

8) As part of the workflow for any new project, ask who else has tried this and what have they learned, and show how this project iterates on those lessons.

9) Establish a consistent system for evaluating new ideas and then evaluating the outcomes when you test them.

10) Read business books off the bestseller list, or read books on innovation and creativity, or histories of social and political movements.

11) Watch TED videos or read Kottke.org.

12) If you work with any philanthropic funders that support groups across multiple issues, ask them which of those other organizations really stand out for their innovative approaches. Or ask local angel or venture capital investors about the most innovative startups in the area, or your local culture reporter which local arts organizations would be the most interesting to talk with. Take those executive directors or founders out for coffee.

Two Kinds of People in the World

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A nesting osprey (photo by Flickr user Yai&JR).
There are two kinds of people in the world, as the saying goes, those who divide the world up into two kinds of people and everyone else. One way to draw the line: those, when presented with a new idea, a challenging opportunity, or a risky possibility, who come up with reasons to say no, and those who come up with ways to make it happen.

A couple of decades ago, while sharing office space with an environmental law firm, I posed a question to one of the attorneys: could I use the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to prevent a local government from placing a trail near an osprey nest. The answer, in a word, was no, accompanied by a host of reasons. The law wasn’t designed to prevent that sort of activity. It was hard to enforce. No one had done anything like this before.

You know how this kind of conversation goes. They may be highly skilled at their work, friendly, and supremely earnest. But when presented with the new and different, they tap their creativity and cleverness to present barriers – all of the reasons why it’s a bad idea, why it won’t work, why it will cost too much – rather than ferret out how to pull it off.

Government (sadly) tends to cultivate and reward this approach. Large organizations of all types are notorious for doing the same thing. Even small organizations can inadvertently find themselves elevating inertia over taking risks and tackling the hard problems.

Not liking the answer to my bird protection question, like a kid who tries the other parent when the first answer is no, I tried again with another attorney. The answer: it’ll be really tough, but sure, it might be possible. You’d have to find strong science showing trail impacts to the birds. You’d probably need documents showing that the local government knew there might be impacts. You’d probably even need to show actual dead birds to more clearly establish the link. No sugarcoating and no false sense of optimism, to be sure, but a profoundly different attitude to the challenge: it won’t be easy, but here’s what it would take.

Inertia and the art of ‘no’ cohabitate, and it can take some real effort to hold it at bay, but if your organization wants to uncover better solutions to the problems you are hoping to solve, if it wants to delight its customers and frustrate its adversaries, and if it wants to generate extraordinary results, it’s worth encourage your colleagues to adopt the “here’s a puzzle to solve” attitude instead of the “here’s a bunch of reasons why it’s a bad idea” approach.

Cultivating a Culture of Innovation at Your Nonprofit

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Photo by Flickr user elycefeliz (and h/t to Beth Kanter).
A persistent focus of conversation among nonprofit folks – and the highlight of one of the plenaries at the Nonprofit Technology Conference a couple of weeks ago – is the challenge of fostering a climate of innovation within the nonprofit community.

Why does it matter? For one thing, nonprofit folks know that some of the challenges they face aren’t solvable with conventional approaches. For another, funders often explicitly emphasize their interest in funding innovative approaches (a topic for another day). And innovative just sounds cool. Who wouldn’t prefer to be innovative and ground-breaking instead of dull and conventional?

The trick about innovation, though: it’s one thing to say we encourage it, but quite another to actually follow through. Cultivating a culture of innovation means encouraging your staff and colleagues to take risks. It means embedding an expectation about learning from those risks – the successes and the failures – and sharing that knowledge. It means rewarding people on the team for questioning assumptions and suggesting new ideas. And if fostering a culture of innovation is important enough to you, you may even need to penalize people for not taking risks.

Most importantly, you need to convey – not just pay lip service – to your staff and colleagues that you genuinely support them thinking creatively, testing their ideas, and sharing what they learn, even when it fails.

Lets Get Local: Using Social Media in State and Local Campaigns

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Earlier this week, Jacob and I were joined by a colleague, Karen Middleton of Emerge America, at the Nonprofit Technology Conference where the three of us spoke about the use of social media in state and local advocacy campaigns.

The three of us are longtime activists and advocacy campaigners. Jacob and Karen are both former elected officials (Jacob a city council member and mayor, Karen a state legislator and member of the state board of education). Having served, they bring a unique perspective to the discussion. We explored the challenges that elected officials face, particularly those at the state and local level where resources are highly constrained.

Saul Alinsky in Chicago, 1966. We may be communicating digitally but it's still about organizing relationships.

The framework of our presentation was tied together by the premise that while social media (and email and other online communications) are digital (or virtual, if you like), advocacy is local and, especially at the state and local level, the work of influencing local elected officials is all about relationships. Understanding how the people in your online networks know and relate to officials goes a long way towards using social media in a powerful and strategic way.

We had a great discussion with people in the room, many of whom are engaged in some strong campaigns. Nancy Marks from the Boston-based organization Health Resources in Action shared their Face Off Against Tobacco campaign which is a great use of personal messages and photos. The more personal you can make your messaging, the better, and this is very true at the local level.

We are sharing the slides from the session below. We’ll be sharing similar versions of this talk at some future events in Colorado and online. Stay tuned.

You might also want to check out the Digital Engagement Guide. I came across it recently and it looks to be a good new site tracking the use of digital tools and networks in the public sector.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has a page listing the social network links of the legislative leaders of all states.

If you have tips or other examples of local campaigns with great uses of social media we would love to hear from you. Share them in the comments.

Surviving a Cash Flow Crisis

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What to do when the cash runs out? (Photo by Flickr user NoHoDamon).

One of the most difficult challenges of running a nonprofit, but one of the least discussed, is surviving a cash flow crisis. If you’re really lucky, you may never encounter the “crap, we’re going to run out of money before the end of the month” moment, but most folks who work for small or mid-sized nonprofits have experienced that moment at least once or twice. After you negotiate the immediate crisis you’ll need to buy yourself some breathing room and then tackle whatever systemic failure led to the cash crunch in the first place, and if happens more than once in a while you’ll need to grapple with the possibility that your organization simply doesn’t have a viable business model. But first you have to survive the crisis.

Some tips for surviving to fight another day:

  • Stop all of your discretionary spending. All of it. No computers, cameras, pencils, hotel reservations, coffee, or anything else. If it’s something your organization truly can’t live without, then do whatever you can to beg, borrow, or steal it.
  • Figure out what bills you can ignore. Some accounts payable won’t notice you haven’t paid them for a cycle or two. Others might notice but not care. Ignore (for now) any expense you can get away with ignoring.
  • Identify every automatic subscription expense. Cancel any you can get away with, and where canceling will cause you to lose critical data or severely hamper your organization’s ability to do its work, downgrade to the cheapest possible service level.
  • Identify every vendor to whom you owe money or will soon owe money. You may be able to directly approach some of them about your predicament to work out a payment plan. In many cases, for instance, a landlord would rather work out a deferred payment arrangement with you than kick you out (especially if you don’t have a habit of coming up short on the rent). For other vendors, you may need to take a more aggressive approach, and simply pay them a lot less than you owe them, perhaps with an explanatory note. As one of my favorite CFOs points out, a vendor is very unlikely to sue you if you are paying them something, even if it’s modest.
  • Talk to your staff about delaying payroll or in some other way reducing what you pay them in the short term. It’s a tough conversation to have, but for many nonprofits payroll represents a very large proportion of the monthly cash burn, so buying some time on payroll obligations can make a big difference in the short-term.
  • Identify any revenue stream you can accelerate. Any accounts receivable that you can get to pay you now instead of in a month? Any foundations who might be willing to cut you a check a little early? Any committed membership donations you can ask for early delivery on?
  • Calmly (but quickly) reach out to all of your mid-size and larger donors and ask them to make a one-time extra donation to help you out of this pinch. Before you start reaching out, arm yourself with at least something that looks like a plan to both stop the hemorrhaging and then recover your longer-term financial health. It’s much easier to ask for help in a crunch if the donor feels you really can solve the crisis and fix the deeper problems as well.
  • Think about donors that might not be directly invested in your organization specifically but might place a lot of value on your role in the community. Some of them might be willing to help on a one-time basis in a crisis if they know you and value your contribution even if your work isn’t part of their normal philanthropic giving.
  • Explore getting a line of credit from a bank. This is expensive money, and of course it’s easier to secure a line of credit before you find yourself in a crisis, but especially if your organization has some real assets, you might be able to come up with some short term cash.
  • Credit card debt is expensive and dangerous, and once you get into a hole it can be difficult to get back out, but in a real cash flow disaster it can be a lifesaver.

The problem with all of these strategies is that they truly are short-term solutions. They won’t generate any additional revenue, for instance, but at best they’ll simply accelerate payments you were already counting on for use in the future. Most of these spending cuts don’t change your organization’s burn rate; they simply push expenses into the future, where they pile up into even more ominous obligations.

Although surviving the cash flow crisis is your first priority, you should tackle this as best you can with the long-term challenge in mind, and you need to turn your attention to solving your long-term problems (whatever it was that led to the cash flow crunch in the first place) as soon as possible. You have to tackle the structural issues – too many staff for the revenue, overly expensive infrastructure investments, or whatever the problems are – or your organization will find itself dealing with the short-term cash crunch over and over again.