Identifying the skills your team needs to bring your strategic plan to life with Heather Burright10/30/2023
![]() In episode 84 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and Heather Burright discuss: how strategic planning, implementation and staff and volunteer skills development all fit together. We delve into the critical aspects of strategic planning and its effective implementation. I highlight the importance of aligning the implementation plan with the organization's regular processes and cycles, emphasizing the need for a shorter time frame for implementation, typically six months to a year. I also talk about the significance of continuous evaluation, tracking progress, and making necessary adjustments to ensure the successful execution of the plan. The conversation underscores the pivotal role of understanding and addressing the skills gap within the organization. Heather discusses how to identify the skill gaps that will undermine the success of your strategic plan and then the essential elements of creating a training program, focusing on relevance, meaningfulness, and a touch of fun to engage employees effectively. She emphasizes the importance of custom competency models and the value of building cross-functional relationships and trust within the organization to facilitate successful change management. Episode outline: (00:07:07) Strategies for Successful Strategic Planning Implementation Planning (00:11:09) Integrating implementation into your regular practices (00:12:36) Why training is a key piece to strategic plan implementation (00:16:11) Maximizing Impact Through Whole Organization Involvement (00:24:29) Listening to People: Key to Change Management Guest Bio: Leveraging 15 years of experience, Heather Burright, founder and CEO of Skill Masters Market, specializes in creating dynamic, people-centric solutions that drive business goals. With her comes expertise in strategies for diversity, equity, and inclusion; instructional design; and change management. She’s dedicated to identifying core competencies that are needed to see real results and to creating the learning strategies and solutions needed to develop those competencies. Important Links and Resources: Heather Burright: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-burright/ Skills Masters Market: https://www.skillmastersmarket.com/ Learning for Good podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learning-for-good-podcast-learning-and-development/id1621971310 Standards for Excellence Institute: https://standardsforexcellence.org/ Transcript: Carol Hamilton My guest today on Mission Impact is Heather Burright. Heather and I talk about how strategic planning, implementation and staff and volunteer skills development all fit together. Implementation planning and support can often be the missing link to really make a strategic plan come to life and be useful and relevant to an organization. A plan gets done – but if those big goals and initiatives are not integrated into the regular work of the organization – then the plan can sit on the proverbial shelf. And when the organization doesn’t commit to integrating, reviewing and updating the plan on a regular basis and make it part of their regular practices, it can go by the wayside. I appreciated Heather’s point about – looking at the plan – not just from the point of view of who is going to do what by when – or from the point of view of budget implications – but also what are the skills that those putting the plan into action are going to need to make it a reality. Then with those skills in mind – where do people know and where do we need them to be? I don’t think many organizations are taking the time to think about this piece. It is something I will certainly be bringing forward in the future when I have the chance to work with organizations on their strategic plan implementation planning. Mission: Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. On this podcast we explore how to make your organization more effective and innovative. We dig into how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers. All of this is for the purpose of creating greater mission impact. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategy consulting for nonprofits and associations. We help you move your mission forward, engage all voices and have fun while we are doing that. We combine left-brain strategy and analysis with right-brain wisdom about human complexities for a proven, whole-brain, whole-organization process through which every stakeholder thrives. Reach out to us for support and facilitation of strategic planning, mapping your impact, auditing your services for mission alignment and getting an organizational assessment. We especially love working with staffed nonprofits and associations with human centered missions. Today Heather and I are doing a little bit of an experiment with this episode. Our conversation is appearing on Mission: Impact – and on Heather’s podcast, Learning for Good. I am looking forward to listening to Heather’s version and hearing what she took from our conversation. Heather, I'm curious what drew you to the work that you do? What would you say motivates you and what would you describe as your why? Heather Burright I am motivated by a few core beliefs. I believe that people excel when they know what is expected of them and they can show up authentically at work. I believe people are worthy of investment, and I believe investing in your people makes them feel valued and gives them new skills and a new passion for their work. And I believe organizations are better when they empower their people to operate from their strongest capabilities. And so that's why I personally work relentlessly to create dynamic, people centric solutions for nonprofits and associations. I want the solutions to be both strategic, supporting the organization, but also compassionately human centered, supporting the people themselves. And I want nonprofits and associations at the end of the day to have exactly what they need to support their people and move their mission forward. Carol Hamilton I love that combination between the strategic and the human centered. That's definitely something that I'm always aiming for as well, enabling people to do well. I don't know whether it's bringing your whole self to work, but bringing whatever part of yourself that you want to, to work and then being fully supported in what you're being asked to do. Heather Burright Absolutely. But Carol, I'd love to hear a little bit about you too. Tell me a little bit about what I generally ask about people's career journey, but share a little bit about your journey to where you are, how you ended up here, and why you do what you do. Carol Hamilton After college, I worked at an organization that helped people get on talk shows, but we did it for all comers. And so quickly after that, I decided I really wanted to if I was going to be doing something like that. And I wanted to do it for organizations that I supported the mission of and so shifted into the nonprofit sector and worked for a variety of organizations over the course of my career with those human centered missions. And I continue to really enjoy working with organizations that center education and helping people thrive in their human capacity, but over time just became more and more interested in really what helps organizations work more effectively so that we can really move that mission forward strategically. And so over the last several years, I've been consulting to nonprofits and associations, helping them with strategies, strategic planning, mapping their impact, doing audits of their services, and then also organizational assessments. And I really enjoy doing all of those things to, again, try to help the organization hone in on what's really their core competency so that they can be less stressed as they try to move their mission forward. Heather Burright That's always a good thing, right? A little less stress. That never hurt anybody. So I love what you do. I think that what we do complements each other so well. You really help the organization set that strategy, be really clear about what they're trying to accomplish and do so, like you said, in a more effective way, hopefully a stress free or at least less stressful way. Carol Hamilton Probably not stress free. Heather Burright Right. At least less stressful. That's the goal. And so then I help organizations take that strategic plan, prepare their people to implement. And so we're so complementary in our work. And I love that. I know you mentioned that one of the things you do is the strategic planning process. What are some of the challenges that you see when it comes to actually implementing that strategic plan after it gets created? Carol Hamilton I think those challenges are part of the reason that strategic planning gets a little bit of a bad rap. People are always, oh, we went through that whole process and then the plan just sat on the shelf for probably more appropriately now, sat in a Google Drive or sat in a Dropbox folder and never was referred to. And I think it's that moving from the process to then how are we putting this into practice? How are we actually going to? I think making that translation, taking the time to think about how we are going to bring this into our regular planning processes, into our regular meetings, what's the cadence that we're going to be doing? All of those kinds of things, asking those questions and having a plan to implement really supports an organization making the most of the time that they've spent together to identify what's really important for them to move their mission forward over the next couple of years. Heather Burright That makes a lot of sense. You do all the work. A lot of the focus at the time is on the plan. If there's not a plan to then implement the plan, if it's not then integrated into your existing plans processes, then. Carol Hamilton It makes that integration. I think integration is really the key thing. It's like, how are you integrating it into how you regularly work rather than thinking of it as something special? Heather Burright That makes a lot of sense. And what do you recommend for nonprofits to overcome that or what have you seen them do in the past? Carol Hamilton A couple of different things. I think the first is for that implementation plan being realistic about the time frame. So your bigger plan may be that medium term time frame of three to five years, but the implementation plan really needs to be a shorter time frame. It could be six months, it could be a year. Really depends on the organization and its cycles and what makes sense. And then for that plan, that's where I recommend that people get into the real nitty gritty of who does what by when and how. All of those kinds of things because that year one or first six months, you're getting into those details, planning that out, and then having a process to say, okay, we've come to the end of this time period. What did we actually manage to accomplish? What do we still need to do? What is less relevant or what might need some tweaking? What have we done that we didn't expect to do? And so asking those questions on a regular cadence and having a way to track and then do the next six months or the next year implementation plan where you get into that nitty gritty. Because I think one of the challenges is when organizations try to nail everything down for that entire period, and that's where it starts ending up feeling a little ridiculous. It's like we can't actually predict what's going to be happening three years from now. I say don't waste your time trying to nail that down in terms of the specifics that make sense. Heather Burright When you put it into that detail of a plan, you have something that can help guide you as you're implementing. But like you said, it also allows you to go back and trust so that you can see, am I on the right track? Are there things I need to adjust? And doing that in those smaller increments makes a lot of sense. Have you found that nonprofits have a lot of success with that? Carol Hamilton I think when they are able to make a regular practice of it, know what's expected at that check in, do that within their regular meetings, whether it's staff meeting or at a regular cadence at a board meeting, and or both. Knowing what part of the plan the board is responsible for, what part of the plan is staff driven, and then just having someone be the champion to make sure that they're doing that as well, all of those things really help. And then realizing that it's not just about checking off what you've done or doing. I've seen a lot of groups have that green light, yellow light, red light of where things are in terms of progress, but also having those questions in mind so that you are making those adjustments as needed. Heather Burright That makes a lot of sense. Carol Hamilton Part of going into implementation, sometimes there's a new initiative or something that really needs some extra support for an organization to really make it happen. You work with creating training for nonprofits and association members. How do you see training actually supporting the implementation of a strategic plan? Heather Burright I typically look at a three pronged approach, and it does all go back to making it strategic and compassionately human centered. As I said in the beginning, it's very important to me. So the three pronged approach that I typically take is you want to make it relevant, you want to make it meaningful, and you want to make it fun. And I'm going to define what I mean by those because some people probably just went for fun what? So I think it's important that we define each of those. So the first was to make it relevant. And that to me is where you really go back and you look at that strategic plan, you look at the things you've said you really need to accomplish and you look at other supporting documents in the organization. What is your mission, what is your vision, what is your DEI commitment? Those kinds of things that also impact the work that you do. Review all of those things and identify the skills that your people are going to need to be successful. Start with skills. Skills are always the driver for any training if you want to see a behavior change. So identify the skills that are going to be needed to deliver on that strategic plan and continue on with your mission, vision and DEI commitment and then compare those skills to your learner's current skill set. So where are they now and where do you need them to be? And that change, that shift, that gap is what you want to focus on to make the training relevant. The next piece was to make it meaningful. And so this again, it is a little bit more of that compassionately human centered piece. If it's relevant, it will already be meaningful, right? Because it's going to impact them in their role and their job. But you also want to take the time to build cross functional relationships, trust, psychological safety, all of those foundational things that need to exist in the organization for the change to be successful. And any sort of opportunity that you have to bring people together, whether virtually or in person, is an opportunity to build those cross functional relationships, to build that trust and to build that psychological safety. So yes, there are self paced training options out there but a lot of nonprofits and associations are running in person or virtual gatherings as their training option. And so there is a huge opportunity to build that trust during that time. And then the last is to make it fun. And again, I use that word, I laugh every time I say it because sometimes people think about forced fun, which is not very fun. But what I mean by that is to do something unexpected within the experience, design that training so that there is something unexpected, so that they remember what they are learning. And you can do that in a variety of different ways. I've certainly used improv in a very light way. It can be intimidating for somebody who is not used to improv, right? But if you do it in a very light way, then it can be fun for people and it is memorable for people. You can use outside tools like Kahoot brings in a game experience. Or you could use Mural or Miro where they're working together collaboratively in a different way. There are different things you can do, different elements you can bring in to make it unexpected, to make it just a little bit playful. And then they're going to remember what they're learning and be better able to actually change that behavior. Bring the skills that you need them to bring in order to execute on that strategic plan. Carol Hamilton I love all the parallels between the actual planning process. I always want it to be for people to tell me that it was fun, that it was unexpected to them because they might have been dreading a strategic planning process. But what you described in terms of the relevance, meaningfulness and then fun, and that gap between, okay, what are the skills at the individual level? What are the skills that are needed for this initiative? And then at the individual level, for me, there's a lot of like when you look at that gap, essentially it's what the whole group has done as a cross functional group through the planning process. When I'm working with groups, I really want them to not have it just be a top down process, but really have it be a whole organization process. And in some cases when the organization is really large, that might be a slice of the organization. People representing the various constituencies and levels and stakeholder groups. But then you are looking at what is the current state, where are we right now and where do we want to be and what's the gap in between? What do we need to do? There's so many parallels and then with what you were describing in terms of training and how that can really support the plan moving forward and the actual planning process. One of the things that I always hear from clients is that by bringing people together, mixing them up into different groups, there's all sorts of other benefits that come out of the planning process because people get to know each other and understand their work better. But I really feel like thinking about what the skills that are going to be needed in a plan is probably a missing piece that very few organizations are actually looking at. Heather Burright I would agree. I have seen strategic plans where there is a people component baked into it, which is amazing, so fun to see. But even if there's not, there's probably something in there that's going to require something different of your people. And if that's the case, there is always room for skill development. Carol Hamilton Oftentimes the people piece is -- We want to have a thriving, healthy organizational culture. But really getting into what people need to be able to know how to do to make this a reality. Oftentimes another goal might be something around fundraising or working on board development and all of those things end up clarifying roles and responsibilities depending on what the stage of the organization is. where they are in the lifecycle of the nonprofit can all be different. But I love the piece about really honing in and probably because I came out of a learning background before I did this work, one of the things that I always have people do is make sure that we cannot have an action step without an action verb. It's like doing learning objectives. Heather Burright Yes, absolutely, I agree there. Carol Hamilton When have you seen organizations take that next step of doing that analysis of the skills and what are the competencies that we have now and what do we need to be able to move folks forward to be able to actually get this plan done? Heather Burright I love it when an organization brings me in at that point in the process because it really does set you up for success. Like you said, they're coming out of a strategic planning process where they've been really collaborative, hopefully, and they've been hearing from people and they've been taking a different approach to their work in some cases and then coming right behind that and saying, now let's do the same thing for your people. It's just a nice flow and it sets people up for success in the very beginning. So I have seen organizations do that and I love that. I think a lot of times it's a little bit later down the line when they realize they're ready to scale a program or a service or launch something new and they realize there's going to be a gap in their people being able to implement that thing. So it's a little bit later in the process, it's a little bit harder to go back and really capture that analysis and the energy that's already coming out of that strategic planning process. So I've seen it both ways. It's still doable the other way. If it's a little bit later in the process, definitely still doable. It just might feel a little bit like you're taking a couple of steps back before you can move forward. Carol Hamilton And I feel like, for me, as I think about projects moving forward, as I help organizations map out that implementation plan, certainly coming out of this conversation, one of the things that I'll be adding is what are the skills that are needed to move this forward and help people even think start to think about it. Because I think it's not necessarily a top of mind conversation for most folks. Heather Burright Absolutely. And one of the things we're talking about training today, but one of the things that I do is custom competency models. And that's a great time when you're getting ready to implement a new strategic plan. That's a great time to either create or revisit your existing competency model because you are able to say, okay, this is where we're headed and these are the skills that we need people to have in order to achieve that. And this is what that looks like. That one skill, right? One skill can look different to different people or in different roles. And so a competency model allows you to define what that skill is going to look like at various levels in the organization. And then you can build your entire learning strategy around that competency model, which is built around where you're headed as an organization. Carol Hamilton And I've seen those on the association side built for the field, but I've rarely seen them built for the people inside the organization. Heather Burright They work well in both scenarios. Carol Hamilton And for smaller organizations, what are some ways that they could tackle this, that there's a level of sophistication and resources that you need to be able to do some of those things? Are there some smaller chunks that they could bite off to get started? Heather Burright And this might be contrary to what other people would recommend, but I actually would recommend a competency model for a smaller, smaller organization as long as they have staff in place or a set of volunteers in place, because it does define the skills. You can always go and look for off the shelf training to help develop a particular skill. But if you don't know which skills you need, then buying a particular training isn't going to be all that helpful. So while a larger organization might say we want the custom competency model and we want the custom training because we're going to be training hundreds of staff over the next year or whatever, the case is a smaller organization. Taking the time to identify what those skills are that are going to be needed will allow them to be more particular, more strategic in what professional development they invest in in the future. Carol Hamilton If you want to start without having to start with a blank page, what comes to mind for me is the Standards of Excellence for nonprofit organizations, where you have an entire comprehensive set of standards. A few organizations go through the full accreditation process. A lot of other organizations use it as an assessment of where they are and would help them pull out those competencies so that you're not having to figure it out. Especially for smaller organizations, there's very little that hasn't been done before, so don't feel like you have to go it alone or start from scratch. Heather Burright Absolutely. Carol Hamilton What final words of advice for nonprofits creating training to support strategic planning implementation do you have? Heather Burright I think the first, and we've talked about it a little bit already, is to listen to your people. If you're going to be creating training to support strategic plan implementation, you have to know where your people are and where they need to go. Talking to senior leaders, asking supervisors, holding focus groups with the staff that are going to be impacted by the change. And really listening is a great way to understand what the gap is that you're going to need to fill. And then the second piece is, remember the change component of this. If you are doing anything different, there is a change and there's always something to fit in the strategic plan. Right. So tap into people's motivations. Why do they care? Why would they even want to make this change behavior, change, whatever it is, make sure they have the skills, which is where the training helps, and then surround them with the resources that they need to be successful. Carol Hamilton There’s so many parallels to the actual planning process of not starting small, starting larger, where you're really listening and hearing from, mapping out that map of stakeholders and constituents that you have and then getting that input from them. Feel it, figuring out how to pull their voices together so that you can make some decisions about what you need to do moving forward. I think people hesitate around change or at the top can feel like they've communicated enough times around the thing. And then I think there's a lot of it that can become a little bit of us and the people who want the thing, the people who are quote-unquote, resistors. And it goes back to listening to hearing really what is getting in their way, what hesitancies do they have so that that can be integrated into how you're supporting them with the resources that you were talking about? Heather Burright Absolutely. Part of surrounding them with resources is absolutely removing barriers. So you have to understand what they're experiencing in order to really make those changes happen. But Carol, I'm curious, any words of advice from you? Any final words, I guess, of advice for nonprofits undergoing the strategic planning process? Carol Hamilton I think starting with the whole organization and really thinking about how the whole organization is contributing to the planning process. And I think that also supports implementation because when people have been part of the process, they see themselves in it. They understand why decisions were made a certain way. They're more ready to roll up their sleeves and get ready to put the plan into action. And so while leaders might feel a little intimidated by, well, if it's just this huge cacophony of voices, how are we going to actually make decisions? But there are ways through a good facilitated process to ensure that you have a succinct plan at the end and folks know what they need to do. Heather Burright Absolutely. And I definitely see that in the needs analysis side on competency models and training as well. So, like you said, there's just so much overlap in the way that we work the process that we use and then so many good complementary pieces to it as well. Starting with that strategic plan and then moving into what do our people need to be able to implement? Heather Burright Carol, it's been so fun to have this conversation with you. Thank you. Carol Hamilton Definitely and talk about change. You're going to be helping me tweak my practice in terms of working with organizations in that implementation planning phase. Heather Burright I love it. Carol Hamilton I appreciate that. Well, thank you. Heather Burright Thanks, Carol. Carol Hamilton Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Heather, her full bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Cindy Rivera Grazer of 100 Ninjas for her production support. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategic planning, mapping for impact, & mission alignment audits for nonprofits and associations. We combine Left-brain strategy and analytics + right-brain wisdom about human complexities for a proven, whole-brain, whole-organization process through which every stakeholder thrives. Reach out to us for support and facilitation of strategic planning, mapping your impact, auditing your services and getting an organizational assessment. We especially love working with staffed nonprofits and associations with human-centered missions. Please take a minute to rate and review Mission Impact on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps other people find the podcast. We appreciate it! And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 83 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and Alexander Lapa delve into the benefits of using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce for nonprofits. These include improved data management and streamlined processes. Alexander shares his expertise in setting up and optimizing CRM tools for nonprofits. He explains why having a consultant to guide organizations through the complexities of finding the right tool to meet where they are in their stage of development is helpful. The conversation also explores challenges in fully utilizing a CRM system and the need for training and support to empower users as well executive sponsorship. Integration, AI, and organizational culture in nonprofit CRMs are also discussed. Episode Outline: (00:08:30) Benefits and Challenges of Using a CRM (00:13:36) Leveraging CRM for Effective Communication (00:18:28) Integration and AI in Nonprofit CRMs (00:23:40) Challenges with CRM Adoption Guest Bio: Alex is a Salesforce Architect & Advisor who helps nonprofits improve their social impact. He has 10 years of Salesforce and nonprofit experience and 20 years of CRM experience. Aside from working on CRM projects, Alex is host of "Agents of Nonprofit". It's a weekly podcast that interviews guests about products and services which help nonprofits. It's often discusses the benefits of technology, and currently has nearly 70 published episodes. Alex also shares his experience in a short daily email, helping junior Salesforce consultants level-up their knowledge, deal with challenging clients, and advocate for a digital nomadic lifestyle. Episode Links: https://dryadconsulting.com/welcome https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderlapa https://podcast.agentsofnonprofit.com/ Transcript: Carol Welcome, Alex, welcome to mission impact. Alex Thank you. Thank you for having me. Carol So I'd like to start each conversation with just finding out a little bit more about what drew you to the work that you do. What would you describe as your why or your motivation? Alex Yeah, great question. I've been doing salesforce because I'm a salesforce architect, working not exclusively, but definitely specialized with nonprofits. And when I started working with salesforce, at the same time that I had some for profit clients, I also had a nonprofit client. This was about ten years ago now. And I just found over the years that my favorite moments, the ones that I look forward to, the meetings I look forward to, the projects I enjoyed working on most were the ones related to nonprofits. And I think it has something to do with the fact that nonprofits, the focus of nonprofits, are not about profits. It's not about profit, it's not about how much money you can make, how wealthy can we make their shareholders. It's how big of an impact we can make, how can we help our community? And that really drew me in. The people were less about their egos, more about the impact or the type of impact that it can have. And it just felt like that was my tribe. And I've been doing it now for quite a while. I would say maybe three years now I've been specialized with nonprofits, and it's a labor of love. Carol Yeah, whatever the mission, when I'm working with organizations, I just always appreciate the people who are drawn to this work. It definitely makes a huge difference. Alex We promote each other, we support each other. It definitely feels much more of a community than any other for profit. I mean, I've worked with some great for profit companies as well. I can't knock all of them, but it's a different mindset altogether. And the reward, I mean, I want to feel like I've accomplished something at some point during the day. I want to feel like I've contributed in some small way, and using my knowledge to help leverage and improve nonprofits seems to be working for me, at least at the moment. Carol So you said that you're a salesforce architect, so can you say a little bit more about what that means and what being an architect in that sense entails? Alex Certainly. So salesforce is a company and it's a platform. It's actually more than just a CRM these days, a client relationship management tool. It's a platform which basically means it gives you all the tools that you need to do all your CRM activities, but it's also very extensible. You can add your own functionality on top of the platform and it is pretty much the top of the food chain in terms of complexity for CRMs, especially for the nonprofit industry. But basically any industry I tend to see nonprofits focus more on them moving up the food chain from maybe pen and paper to Excel to maybe a basic CRM to maybe a more advanced CRM to salesforce. They work their way generally up that ladder. I don't see too many nonprofits moving away from salesforce and because it has all those features and functionalities and great things, but because it has all this stuff, there's a lot of complexity to it. So having an advisor or an architect that comes in and tells you look, this is what you should do. Here's how you should set up your programs, your services, your volunteering, your cases and so forth, as opposed to having someone who might be a bit technical but doesn't know the salesforce platform itself. mucking around and building this spaghetti of mess because it is very possible to do so and then have to have someone like me come in and rescue them from that situation. So having an architect, having a consultant come in and help you from the early phases will really pay you dividends toward the end and make sure that you're leveraging your entire investment from salesforce. Carol Yeah, I'm laughing because I worked for an organization that used Salesforce, but I think we probably used this much of the capacity because we spent a lot of time trying to get a particular staff person trained in it. But there was such a learning curve that to really maximize its capacity, it didn't translate to the rest of us really being able to really leverage it. And it's funny that I feel like over the period that I've been doing this podcast, oftentimes when we're talking about change management or technology implementation, oftentimes the example that people end up using is around CRM or helping people. Move from that many Excel spreadsheets that everybody has their own and we don't have it up to date or common to some type of client management system. What are some of the benefits that you see of an organization actually taking the time to really make sure that a system like that is working for them? Alex Just to go back to the previous point for a second, we actually have a term in the salesforce ecosystem. We call them accidental admins because the term that we use for salesforce administrators are the ones building the platform. And if you are just thrown into that role, you become an accidental admin. So there's definitely a story that we could dive into for that. But to answer the question that you there is, like I said, salesforce is really the top of the food chain in my perspective. There are some smaller nonprofits that I've seen use Salesforce and there's some great benefits they can get out of it. But the key element is just using a CRM altogether. I would never recommend using pen and paper even if you were to start, just go to Excel as your entry starting point. And when you're a small nonprofit. If you're just starting off, that's a very viable CRM. You don't need anything fancy, any bells and whistles. As long as you're tracking things and you're not losing track of things. You're managing your donors, you're managing your constituents, your volunteers, whatever your organization is doing, that's great. The fact that it's digital gives you a leg up. Because when the time comes, as you're growing as a nonprofit, and when the time comes where you've outgrown the capacity of an excel program, for example, it's much easier to shift that or import that into a CRM of sorts, as opposed to pen and paper, which then it's harder to import. So the idea is to start using a CRM and pick a CRM that fits your needs at this point in time with a certain amount of understanding that there is going to be potentially growth in your future. And we all want growth, of course. So some CRMs, for example, not talking about salesforce, but some CRMs offer tiered programs where you start off with a free model of the platform, giving you basic functionality. But they do have a more advanced and a more enterprise level version that as your organization grows, you can grow into that to give you more capability, more functionality. Carol What are some of the signs that it's time for an organization to move to that next step? Alex Basically, it doesn't work for you anymore either. Things get lost along the way. You're not able to keep track of donors anymore. You're not able to do your day to day operations. There's a limiting factor, like Excel, for example. It's great for if you're one person, but the minute you become two or three, now you have versions that you're passing around. Maybe you're using SharePoint as a common area, but you'll naturally feel that there's a breaking point that you just can't scale. As your organization grows, you can't have 1020 people working in an Excel file. It just doesn't work. So making sure that reading the signs, basically saying that we're not able to grow, we're not able to scale, doesn't support all the users that we need to have as part of our organization. These would all be signs to say, maybe it's worth now investigating the next level up in terms of a CRM. Carol And once an organization has a CRM, I've seen instances where pretty large organizations have a pretty robust system, and yet staff are still defaulting back to those Excel spreadsheets by exporting some data, and then they're keeping that up to date versus always getting it back in the system. What are some ways that you help organizations actually get people to really use what the system can do for them? Alex It's actually a very common phenomenon, and it's basically a matter of control and comfort. If a user, if a person doesn't feel comfortable using the system, they won't know that a lot of people are much more comfortable with Excel than any other platform or any other program, so that they know that they can rely on it. It's usually a matter of training and of change management, of being able to feel supported, to feel like they can be empowered to use the CRM, and then they will use it, especially if they see that the more they put into it, the more they get out of it. The whole idea of using a CRM is every moment you spend putting in data to the CRM, you will get much more out of it. It's an ROI return on your investment. So it's making sure that people feel supported, that they have the necessary training as they're onboarded and keeping them going, making sure they can provide feedback in case there's ever a situation that they do have, whether it's a positive or a negative type of feedback, and just supporting them as they go, saying, don't worry. There is a benefit to using a CRM in the salesforce ecosystem. For example, we have this model. If it's not in salesforce, it doesn't exist. And the idea is that by having it in a centralized system like a CRM, everyone can benefit from it. So you can see, potentially, all the interactions you've had with a particular person outside, all the times you've made phone calls, every time you've done an outreach, an email, anytime they've done a donation or volunteered or applied for. A program or service so that when a new person comes to your organization, they can see that holistic view of that person and have better conversations, have more personalized conversations. Carol And I think for me, what was a stumbling block sometimes was that I wasn't using the system very often, and so I'd forget how to navigate. But what you're talking about is really everybody logging all those interactions, all those conversations means that right. A new person then has that history. But then also for organizations that are across different multiple departments, they have a sense of what's been the most recent communication with that person versus the volunteer person reaching out, and then the donor person reaching out the next day. And clashing and overwhelming folks because they're not coordinated. Alex And imagine a situation where a person does not want to be contacted, and there's no central point that says do not contact. And then that person keeps on getting contacted, gets frustrated every time they get a call or an email. It's like, listen, I don't want to be contacted. Thank you, but no thank you. You don't want to have that disturbance, let's call it. And having that central point, that source of truth is really, really important. And that's what a CRM can provide. Carol So you talk a lot about really leveraging those systems. What are some ways that you see organizations really getting the most out of that investment? Alex It's about empowering the people that are using the system. Again, as long as all your team members are using the CRM effectively, efficiently, then you'll see a great return on your investment. If people are resistant, if they don't want to use it, they're more comfortable using other tools. Then you either have to train them more and empower them more, or provide alternatives. Find maybe a person that can serve as an administrator to help digest and translate what they're doing into salesforce or into a CRM. Sorry if I use salesforce, I'm just so used to using that word for CRM. It doesn't matter if it's what CRM it is. The idea is that you want that central source of truth because the more you put into it again, the more you'll get out of it. Carol What are some of the things that organizations need to think through when they're choosing which system is going to work for them? Alex Yeah, it's a great question as well. So I mentioned the growth part, I think knowing that as you're getting into or as you're choosing your CRM, knowing that the CRM has various tiers that you can grow with, just so you don't want to change CRMs on a yearly basis because of the change management that's involved. So starting off with, well, starting off first of all, what are your business requirements? What do you hope to achieve with the CRM? How many users are going to be using it? What is your budget? There are hundreds, maybe thousands of CRMs now, a lot of which are, or at least a good portion of which are related to nonprofits focused on nonprofits. I mean, there are some fantastic ones if you're only doing fundraising, for example, there are some fantastic nonprofit fundraising CRMs that do that job really, really well, but it could be very, very narrow in terms of their scope. So make sure, that maybe today you're doing fundraising, but, within a few months from now, you might be volunteering. Making sure that the CRM that you choose or will plan to choose can do both is important. And then doing some because there are so many to choose from, the next question is, well, how do I choose? Ask for recommendations, make sure you have the requirements, and then try to shortlist it down to, let's say, three CRMs, and then have the vendor of those CRMs do a presentation to your organization. Do this proper assessment where you have various individuals at your organization evaluating whether this works for you on multiple criteria. I've seen a large organization do that not so long ago when they were choosing their CRM. And it was a wonderful exercise to validate and to prove to the organization that this was the right CRM for their needs. Carol Yeah, I would think that one of the steps would be thinking through who are all the people that either are going to be using it in terms of kind internally, but then also all the different kinds of categories of groups that you're working with, whether it's donors or volunteers. And sometimes a volunteer will become a donor. So they could be in multiple categories. The people that you're serving, people who are coming to programs and constituents, all of those different aspects. And so it can get pretty complex on what all those interactions are. Alex It can, and that's why there's a certain look ahead that you need to do. How far is your runway if you get into this CRM today? How long do you think it could last? And if it's longer or less than a year, then it's probably not a good fit. If it's something you think you can grow and scale with for a good measure of time, it's probably a better fit. Carol What are some of the challenges of that organization? We've talked about some of the challenges in terms of kind of. I think one of the ones that can be the hardest is just getting people to use it. What are some other things that come up as organizations try to really make the most of the CRM that they're using? Alex Usually CRMs are not in a silo, that is to say they need to connect with other systems, if only your email system. So making sure that for example, it connects to your Gmail or your Outlook, just to have that communication so you don't have to copy and paste emails from your email system to CRM. Maybe you can send emails from your Outlook or Gmail and that'll be captured in your CRM. So all that integration would be really important. Not just emails, but contacts, calendar events and so forth. Mobile support would be a consideration as well. Some CRMs offer a mobile, not necessarily for donors, but a good thing for volunteers to make sure you can have volunteers checking in, checking out, offering their availability and so forth. Sometimes SMS support could be really cool as a feature. Again more for alerts and stuff like that. And then of course the cool kid on the block these days is about AI and whether the CRM has any AI capabilities to help leverage your team even further. Carol So in terms of AI, what are some of the ways that that gets integrated into well, maybe I have seen it and I didn't even know it was happening, but I don't feel like I've necessarily seen that aspect. But obviously it's all the conversation right now. Alex It is. Carol How are you seeing it show up? Alex It's showing up everywhere. People are still trying to figure out how to make it work for them. And there is a bit of an exploratory phase for nonprofits, I would generally say. It's good to be curious, it's good to keep abreast of what's happening in the AI market. There is certainly the Chat GPT of course that tends to be the most popular ways that you can leverage it to write your grants, for example, or write first drafts of things. And I wouldn't recommend using it like that for sure. So you are comfortable using AI. But more than that, I think it's still too premature because we're still overall as an industry trying to figure out where it fits and how it fits and how well it fits. But the more you can use those kinds of the chat GPTs of the world to be able to write, let's say, first drafts of certain things, or give you ideas, that can be very useful because sometimes your ideas are just new ways. You could prompt, for example, to say, find me, or give me some common ways to reach out to people who have lapsed in donations. And that could give you a whole bunch of ideas so you don't have to think about it all yourself. It's a starting point. So those are common ways that I see AI working for nonprofits. Carol Yeah, and I appreciate that it's thinking about it as your first draft so you can shift from that blank piece of paper, blank screen to, okay, at least I've got something to work with. How are CRM providers integrating that into their systems? Alex How are you seeing? Yeah, I can't speak for all CRMs, of course. I know that they're trying to throw it in there as much as possible. I know Salesforce is doing that. They've had a version of an AI for a long time, which they called Einstein, and they're trying to integrate some of these AI more and more now into writing sales emails, for example, or analyzing data, especially if you have a lot of data prompting the AI to provide, for example, the list of top ten possible donors or donors or people who could be potential donors. These are all different ways of not having to leave your Salesforce instance and use your Salesforce data in order to be able to analyze it and get data from it. The AI though version, that's the one that everyone is talking about in terms of Einstein AI is still in a closed beta at the moment, which means only a select number of clients are able to use it in that salesforce ecosystem. But there's still the capability of not using your own data in your CRM and talking to an AI to help you get that through that writer's block, right? Carol Yeah, as a way to get yourself out of writer's block. I appreciate that. That's a good point. What are some other things that help as an organization is wanting to make that shift? They've gone through that requirements process. They've made a decision about which one they're moving forward with, what helps that project go smoothly in terms of implementation. Alex I'm hiring a consultant for an architect. The idea is that I tend to find a lot of nonprofits that don't have a lot of technical knowledge. So having someone, it depends, of course, on the complexity of the CRM, but having someone guide them through that process, handhold them through the process, someone who's been through that process multiple times and is now almost like a cookie cutter. They talk your talk, they know your language, they know your market, they know the CRM, they know what problems you tend to generally have and what pitfalls to avoid. It'll make the whole process significantly easier. And that would be for sure. That is a huge benefit and fantastic return on your investment. In addition to that, I would add making sure that training and documentation is very strong. Again, as I mentioned earlier, when your people are empowered to use the CRM, the more they are likely to use it. And if they don't remember what to do to your point earlier, having some documentation to go back to or training videos that they can reference will help raise their knowledge once more. We also know that a big part of or a big problem for nonprofits is churn as employees come and go. So having this training material and documentation will help new people on board more quickly so that they can get up and running more quickly. Carol Yeah, I was involved in a big CRM project when I was inside an organization. It's now multiple years ago, but I felt like the big piece that was an afterthought was that training and documentation and a lot of work got done ultimately to do that. But it never then was actually effectively shared with people. So that it ended up being a resource that got stuck on a shelf or lost in a computer file that people didn't know about, having it, doing it, but also making sure everybody knows how to access it. Alex Too, and making sure it stays up to date. Because if it gets outdated, it goes stale. Then there's no point having it. You have to remember, a CRM, like everything else, is just a tool, right? It's like a hammer. It's a very powerful hammer, but it's still a hammer. You can't use the hammer for anything in your renovation, in your work, but if you use it properly, it will be very good. And it's also about using it properly. So make sure you use it when you're supposed to use it and how to use it, as opposed to just trying to use it for everything. The expression once I have a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Using it properly and making sure you know how to use it properly, the training, the processes around it is half the equation. Technology tends to work itself out. Usually that's not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is change management and adoption. And so having all this in place really will help with that. Carol So you mentioned it's a tool, it's for a specific purpose. What are ways that you've seen people where they've actually tried to have it do more than it should be doing. Alex Yeah. I can only give you examples for Salesforce because Salesforce, like I said, is more than just a CRM. You can use it as an order management tool. You can use it as a lead management tool, you can do emailing with it. But like everything else, there are limits to what it can do. You can sometimes get past those limits by adding packages or add ons to it, but you can make it into a monster. It's like a Lego block. Imagine a Lego system where you have an infinite number of pieces. You can build some awesome things, but you can build a complete, utter mess. So no, you're not knowing what you should do, what you shouldn't do. There's a general rule 80% to 20% type stuff where you want to make sure that you are covering your needs without going too custom, without going too personal. In Salesforce, you can use code called Apex to really customize the platform. But the more you do that, the more you have to maintain it. It becomes less scalable or it has a tendency of becoming less scalable, less like, with great power, comes with great responsibility. You want to make sure that as you're using it, you're using it within its proper confines and you're not just trying to stretch that balloon to a point where it will just eventually break. Carol Yeah, that's definitely another thing that I've seen and probably 10-15 years ago where these systems weren't quite as powerful as they are today. And so organizations were really investing in doing a lot of that customization, but then when a new update rolled around, all of that got lost. And so in a way, the less you do of that, it could be where you're better off. Yeah. So what other things do people need to think about as they're trying to really move forward with one of these projects? Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you should have mentioned and need to be on the checklist of things to watch out for? Alex On the technical side, I think we've covered at least the major points. The rest is really about the executive sponsorship, for example, making sure that everyone in the team is aligned with where we're trying to go and really making sure that the outcomes are clear. You need to know your destination before you get into a car, otherwise you're going to be driving randomly. So knowing where your destinations are and building in a way that allows you to offer an MVP a minimal viable product, let's say as a first release. Just making sure people get comfortable using the tool before you build the Cadillac version or the fully enhanced, fully optimal version. Salesforce has another model called Crawl Walk Run, which basically means get the thing in their hands, get the feedback going, get the comfort higher and then you start adding more and more features, more functionality, more automation to get to that walk and then crawl phase. So I think that applies to any technology as well, that is to adopt slowly, keep on improving, keep on iterating to make these improvements. I don't think that the first version is going to be your last version, but make sure you know where you're going because otherwise you're going to get lost. Carol Yeah. And you mentioned executive sponsorship and I would imagine that just because of who's in what generation and generational comfort with technology and changes, that at least in my experience, it's been sometimes the people at the top of the organization who are the hardest to get to adopt a new system. What have you seen that's been helpful there? Alex Yeah. So the executive sponsor has to be open to the idea, right? And they have to make sure that they're well informed, that they understand the benefits of it at a high level. So going back to that architect consultant, that can be one person that can help indicate and show the benefits. Having certain project champions or CRM champions can be another measure where you have got people internally who maybe have used a CRM before in another organization that can rally the troops and get people excited about what's to come and what the possibilities can be would be another way to do it. And they can also whisper ears into the ear of the executive sponsor. So just making sure that, again, things are very tangible, things are very clear on where we're going, how to get there. Yeah, I would start from that. Carol Awesome. So on each episode, I like to ask each guest what permission slip would you give to nonprofit leaders? Or what would you invite them to consider as they avoid being a martyr to the cause, which is my tagline for the podcast trying not to be a martyr to the cause and how they can work towards cultivating a healthy organizational culture. What would be your invitation or permission slip? Alex I would say find balance. It can't be all work, no play. I know it's not very techie or very CRM, but from my perspective, it's finding balance as much as it is a labor of love. There is a certain labor element to it. So being able to balance that with some relaxation, some calmingness, some downtime, not feeling the challenge, especially when you have a CRM up and running, is the ability to always keep it up to date, to have this real time concept. So being able to acknowledge the fact that there are moments in your day that you just don't want to be accessible or you don't want to talk to a CRM or think about a CRM, and that's okay. You have to have some downtime to give. Yourself the energy to be better at when you're on your absolutely, absolutely. Carol So where can people find you? How can they be in touch? Alex Yeah, so the main way to reach me is through my website. It's Dryadconsulting.com Dryad Consulting.com. I also have a newsletter for salesforce consultants, and it's called thegoodenoughconsultant.com. And lastly, the podcast that I have, which is also related to nonprofits, it's called Agents of nonprofit, and that is Agentsofnonprofit.com. Carol And it's a great podcast. So yeah, check it out. All right, well, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on mission impact. Alex It's my pleasure, Carol. Thank you for having me. ![]() In episode 81 of Mission: Impact, Danielle Marshall and Carol Hamilton have another ‘learning out loud’ conversation where we delve into the evolving landscape of nonprofit work, focusing on key themes: 🔥 Burnout and Beyond: We kickstart the discussion by addressing the prevalent issue of burnout, which has long haunted the sector. Discover how it has been exacerbated by recent events and how individuals and organizations are tackling it head-on. 🌟 Redefining Success: We dive deep into the changing definitions of success. It's no longer just about productivity and traditional measures. Learn how individuals are crafting new narratives and aligning their actions with their values. 💡 Deepening Impact: Explore the shift from relentless scaling to strategic deepening. We uncover innovative approaches to maximize impact, even with limited resources. 💼 Resource Reallocation: Get insights into how nonprofits are rethinking resource allocation. It's not just about budgets but also about investing time, human resources, and energy more intentionally. 🎯 Mission Focus: Discover the power of niche specialization. What are you doing to hone your focus to prevent mission drift and build confidence in your abilities? Do you have time built into your day or week for intentional and quiet reflection and strategic thinking? 🤝 Collaboration and Partnerships: We explore the art of collaboration and how nonprofits are building meaningful partnerships, passing tasks, and referrals, all while fostering trust and growth. 🌈 Well-Being and Productivity: Learn about the importance of individual and team well-being. How are you incorporating joy and playfulness into your life – inside and outside of work? Timestamped Outline: (00:03:47) Reevaluating values and redefining success during the pandemic (00:07:37) Fostering Internal Cohesion for Organizational Success (00:10:09) Redefining success through thoughtful resource allocation (00:14:19) Narrowing focus for increased impact and success (00:22:33) Creative thought organization with mind mapping (00:36:59) Redefining emergencies and prioritizing strategic thinking Guest Bio: Danielle is an inclusive leader focused on strengthening collaboration among teams, leaders, and stakeholders to foster problem-solving, create solutions, and improve culture. She finds her inspiration in leading systemic change work that promotes equity and inclusion. Danielle founded Culture Principles in response to a persistent need to operationalize Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion metrics, centering REDI goals and creating accountability systems. She supports clients through her Mapping Equity Framework focused on Unearthing Knowledge, Elevating Strategy, and Transforming Sustainability. She centers her work around organizational assessment, racial equity learning intensives, and the development of racial equity action plans. Understanding that each organization arrives at this work from different perspectives, she utilizes assessment in building a customized strategy for each unique partner. Previously Danielle served as a non-profit leader for 20+ years and today works on strategy development that enables nonprofits to achieve equitable mission-driven results. Danielle holds a Master's degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Louisiana Tech University and draws on her background as an I/O psychologist in applying a racial equity lens to organizational policies, practices, and programs. She is a Certified Diversity Professional (CDP)/ Executive Coach (ACC). During her playtime, you can find Danielle traveling, knitting, and kayaking in all 50 states. Episode Links:
● https://www.linkedin.com/in/danimarshall/ Transcript: Carol Hamilton Welcome, Danielle. Welcome to Mission Impact. Danielle Marshall Thanks, Carol. Good to be back. Carol Hamilton This is the second of and I'm borrowing this language from you, Danielle, the Learning Out Loud episode. Danielle came on on episode 75 to start. Just a series of conversations that we're going to have checking in every couple months or so on what we're seeing in terms of the nonprofit sector and our clients that we're working with and having a chance to go a level deeper than I typically do when I'm doing a one time interview. So really excited for the conversation. Danielle Marshall Same. Likewise. Carol Hamilton One of the things that I've been talking about a lot with folks is just the prevalence of burnout in the sector. And also probably I feel like burnout predated the pandemic and then was exacerbated by the pandemic, like many things. But the thing that I see is different is the way in which people are really rethinking and renegotiating their relationship with work. And I'm just curious what you're seeing in the work that you're doing around that. Danielle Marshall Sure. I think I'm having a similar experience in terms of the folks that I come into contact with. And again, I would agree with you that it predated, let's say, COVID. However, I think the period where people were able to be home, many people were either furloughed or laid off. It caused a global, quite frankly, opportunity for us to sit back and just reflect on what was important. And I think we would be remiss to not bring into the conversation all of what was happening. So, again, there was loss of life. There were people who found themselves who used to be doing quite well financially in dire straits at the moment. There's a lot of sickness going on. And I think it was a moment even beyond just thinking about work, like, what are my priorities? How do I want to live my life? And so I've definitely seen some carryover of that thought process, thankfully, quite frankly, into our work today. Carol Hamilton Just a chance, well, being confronted across many fronts with the fact that we are finite beings. We don't go on forever. And so what does that mean? How am I living my life right now? Is that in alignment with my values? And maybe I just hate to say that it was slowing down because I think in many ways it wasn't, but there was a different way of time, space maybe, for people to be with their thoughts, think about what's important. And certainly for me, it also predated the pandemic, so I started to try to rethink that by moving into my well. If you turn 50, are you moving into your 6th decade? I guess so. I never quite get that one right, but hitting that half well, probably more than halfway mark and thinking, okay, what do I want to do with the rest of my time, whatever that time might be, and is how I'm spending my time, the way that I want to be doing it going forward. And part of that has just been for me trying to unpack how much I had internalized the Protestant work ethic and my worth being tied up in my productivity, the outcomes that I produce, all of that and really trying to untangle all of that. Danielle Marshall I have a deep appreciation for that last piece that you mentioned in particular because I think what I saw many people, including myself, going through during this period was a redefining of success, right? So we've all been told on some level what success means. Much of it has been tied to Protestant work ethic, but even what it means to be successful in one's career, what it means to be successful in one's family life, like, are you married? Do you have children? Right? These are things that were set up as norms that people were expected to adhere to. And I think what I witnessed, and particularly as I add a racial lens to this as well, is it's almost like people got a collective memo at the same time that was like, we're taking a pause on the way we used to do things. And it's not to say that there was one particular way to move forward, but what we want to do is start asking a deeper question of is this meaningful to me? Who am I today? And we had a lot of time to think about that while we were home for two years. Plus, who am I today? Who do I want to be? Should I be telling this story to my kids, my grandkids, or any future person that would come across my life story? Did I lean into the values and ideals that I espouse? And so that feels really important to the conversation in terms of success, because what a lot of folks realize is I don't actually subscribe to the success that is normal. It's just a narrative we've been told. Carol Hamilton And I think a lot of people are in the nonprofit sector because in some ways they're already stepping away from those typical measures of success. Very few people go into the nonprofit sector to make a lot of money. If you want to do that, you're going to go into something where you do make a lot of money. And at the same time, we're still in a capitalist society, we're still measured by a lot of those things, like how big is your budget as an organization? All of those different things factor into what people see as successful or not successful at the organizational level. So we still have those pressures even when as individuals, we may have at one point made an affirmative decision to say, that's not my life goal. And then, of course, there's the flip side of having made that decision, the extent to which that can be really weaponized against people 100%. Danielle Marshall I think it speaks volumes to this idea of what it takes to disrupt systems. Right. So I may have changed my mind, or the next person may have changed their mind about what they want to sit in, how they're defining success. But it does not mean that my team members or the organization or the greater world or sector is following along with that. And I think what I've seen that's been particularly interesting is all the conversations that are happening with multiple stakeholder groups around Redefining that I think the first group I consciously remember, and some of this started even pre COVID, was with the foundations and the funders where people were saying, we believe in metrics. We think they're important, but there's more than just how many people were served, how many trees were planted that we need to actually think about in the grand scheme of things. And as I think about the metrics today, it's really interesting to hear how many companies are now talking about satisfaction rates among employees and engagement and retention, because they're understanding it isn't simply about coming to the job and making the widget. Right. There is something more about building a cohesive team that still works to uphold nonprofit missions. But we're part of that process. We're part of the mission because we have to be in a healthy space in order for us to leverage the best of our teams. Carol Hamilton I think that recognition of it's not just about the outside mission, it's not just about how many people we served, but how are we working with each other inside the organization, and is that also in alignment with the values that we espouse? Danielle Marshall And that feels like oftentimes it's in misalignment, quite frankly, even to today, I'm seeing many more people care for the conversation overall, but it doesn't mean that it seems to be working for everyone. Right. They're aware that they need to have this conversation, but we've not been in a place, quite frankly, as a society where we have cared for our people in that way most of the time. We came from an industrial place where it was like, hey, I need you on the factory line making X amount of product, et cetera, in this many hours. And I think some of that mindset has very much carried over to even how we do our work in nonprofits. We're serving this many people because one of the things that's hard for me sometimes when I think about nonprofits is I understand that our ability to scale who we serve has a lot to do with the greater impact that we have. But if we're not providing quality for our staff, that translates into not providing the best quality for the communities that we say that we care about at this moment. Carol Hamilton There's a definite ripple effect, and you're not setting up your staff for success in being able to deliver those programs if they're constantly being expected to just burn themselves out. Before we got on the call, I was thinking about this in terms of I feel like a lot of folks and certainly there's an extent to which this is outside of folks control, but in a lot of the conversations I hear, I feel like people put that more of it is outside of their control than actually is. That with the pressure to always be doing more, always being growing, that that's a have to versus we're choosing how we're going to expand or not expand. And even looking at, okay, if we were to just wonderful to have a growth strategy and plan and for how we're going to increase our resources. But if we were actually just to think about what our current resources are right now, what can we reasonably do with those. Danielle Marshall and what could we do differently? I know the last time that we met we talked a little bit about language. And so even as I hear you say growing and growing, what does that mean for us? So if we have a budget, and it doesn't matter if your budget is 500,000, a million, 20 million, what could we be doing differently with the resources that we have available today? Because I think some of the challenges that we're experiencing are not just related to sort of this shift in culture that we're seeing, but it's also related to the fact that we want to continue to do business as we've always done business. And so if I'm only thinking about my resources in the way that we've created a budget for this million dollars, here's how we've always spent it. This is how much gets allocated to the community. This is how much is overhead. It doesn't leave a lot of flexibility for us to rethink what we might do if we move some of those things around. And I think that is part of. It’s an opportunity, I guess I would say, for us to both be thoughtful about the communities. Again, that is our mission, right? To serve the communities, but also to think about how we're allocating those resources to serve our staff in the process. Carol Hamilton What are some ways that you've seen people start to rethink that versus always? Because I do feel like oftentimes the answer to what could be better is more staff, more volunteers. So instead if we flip it to thinking differently about what you do have. Danielle Marshall I'm thinking about it as growing impact does not mean always scaling. So what would it mean to deepen the work that we did within the organization? So instead of an example that came up not too long ago for me was a nonprofit who was basically saying they knew what the community needed and they were providing these resources only to really over this COVID period realize, hey, there are probably some things we might be able to do differently. So taking the same exact budget that they had prior to the pandemic, it's like we're going to go back to the community, the stakeholders themselves, and ask them what that we are providing today is of value to you. Right. And what are the things that we may have been missing completely or what are the things that need to be tweaked. And so I still have the same amount of resources, but I am amplifying our ability to have this impact in this moment because I'm being more thoughtful and intentional about how we apply those resources. And so I think that's an example of where growth to me doesn't necessarily mean growing to reach more people, though there is the possibility that because they've made these shifts, they may actually impact more people's lives because they're providing the right tool. Right. So instead of saying we can't do this or it's not going to work for our organization, what are the possibilities that exist? Carol Hamilton I appreciate not only redefining success but also redefining growth. That growth could be not necessarily increasing numbers always, but going deeper and working differently. So there's an evolution in that growth versus just a linear metric, moving the needle upward, if you will. Danielle Marshall I just had a conversation with a colleague this morning and we were working on a presentation that we're doing together and she just said at one point, and I really appreciated this, she goes, I know we have limited time, but my preference is to go narrow and deeper as opposed to wider but shallow. And that just resonated so much with me because I think sometimes with what we consider limited resources or limited time, et cetera, we're like, well, how much can we squeeze in to maximize this? As opposed to pausing and saying with the resource, whether it's time, human, or financial, what do we want to do that's really going to deepen our impact at this moment? Carol Hamilton I think narrowing can be just the hardest thing for organizations to do. And not just organizations, I've found that in my own practice, like making choices about who I'm going to be working with and what services am I going to work on. All of those things take time to hone in on and figure out what is going to make more impact. But I do really appreciate the idea of being able to focus in and go deeper versus always trying to be all things to all people. I think organizations, my experience is that they struggle with that just out of a sense of wanting to be helpful. But then, as you're saying, if you take that minute to think because the resources are always limited, no matter how abundant your resources, they are limited. So with that, what do you want to do? Danielle Marshall What do we do? It's so interesting too, because so many nonprofits, and I've worked for many over the years. One of the first conversations that always comes up is we're talking about Mission Drift. How do we make sure we stay on target, we serve the clients we're expected to serve, that we're getting to the outcomes that we've outlined. And I think my experience has been where I've seen a lot more success is where people niche down and they say, even if it's three things, here are the three things we do. And if it is outside of those things that we do and we know that we do well, we'll recommend another partner. There's another agency that can support you. But when you know what it is you're supposed to be focusing on, that means all of your resources and time and energy really goes to deepening that. Carol Hamilton Impact, getting better at it, increasing your competency around that. And then I think there's a confidence in being focused and centered in on that and having the confidence that you can pass things along, that people will be taken care of. It's not your entire job to do it all and that you would be aware of what else is going on around you. So that part of that might be, okay, we're going to stop doing this thing that we've done every once in a while. When it's popped up in our request box, we're going to hand it over to this other group, but we have to spend some time actually building that relationship so that that handoff goes well versus it feeling just like, well, ping, ping, ping. You're off to refer to yet another organization. Danielle Marshall I also think that ties right back into where we started with Burnout, when we can niche down and be very clear about what we're doing, we're not spreading our staff thin. There's still going to be ample work to go around in the organization. But it feels very different to say I work on this one major project or initiative or these two things in the organization as opposed to where do you spend your time? I'm like, oh, I do 30 things right, and that's on a good day, that feels much more intentional. And if you think about your own life, and I don't know if you've had this experience, but when I am able to really focus on one thing and do it well, I'm not in the process of trying to multitask and move between these activities. I am focused. The quality of work that I'm able to produce is much higher than what happens when I'm like, oh, I have to take this call and I have to work on this report, and I have to do all of these things. And coming from the nonprofit sector, that feels like a big part of life. And so when you think about Burnout, well, of course people are burning out. They're exhausted, right? And then we're not caring for them when they go home to give them the space and the time they need to recharge themselves to come back to the office. And so it just feels like we could be certainly much more intentional than we have been to date. Carol Hamilton I feel like it's almost a badge of honor. Like, I wear so many different hats and I have to do so many different things. I've just given up the notion of multitasking, but it's also taken me a long time and I'm probably still definitely a work in progress in terms of have I right sized my to do list for today of what's actually possible to get done? Danielle Marshall Oh my gosh, I feel that so much. I have started to practice at MITS. So they call it MITS because it's your most important task. And the idea behind MIT is that it is something that is really important. So if you set your goals, let's say for the month, for the week, whatever, you're picking the one task that if you advance that, it's going to make everything easier for you. Okay? And so it's really significant to your overall goals. But the goal then, furthermore, would be to get it done before 10:00 A.m.. And this has been a game changer for me because after 10:00 A.m., it's like all bets are off. Anything could happen. You have a client, you have a funder, you have someone who is stepping in. They're like, oh, I need you to fix this problem. And if you have not focused on the things strategically that were going to advance your goals or the organizational goals at that moment, it may get lost. Right? So now we're looking at 05:00 and you're like, oh, I ran out of time today. I had meetings, I had all these things come up. And we're constantly behind. So what does that lead people to do? They go home from work, maybe they have dinner if they're lucky with their families, kiss their kids goodnight, and it's like, boom, off to the races, I'm back on email. When does that give you time to actually settle, to have some joy in your life? And so when I think about this, I'm like that's partially true, at least in my world, what I am seeing from people is they're like, I just can't work around the clock anymore. Carol Hamilton I don't want to do this, don't want to. Of course, studies have also shown that when you're working like that, you're much less efficient. You're not bringing your best brain power. You're just too tired. You can't think well about any of those things. So with that MIT most important thing, what are some of the questions that you ask yourself to try to help you prioritize? What is going to be that most important thing for the day? Danielle Marshall I'm a big goal person, right? So I will set my goals for the year, and then I set quarterly goals. And then I'm thinking about monthly, but even as I'm doing that, what helps me get to my monthly sort of or I should say weekly. Right? We take the big picture and then we whittle it down. What is it based on my quarterly plan that feels important for this month? And maybe I'll just choose one big topic that I'm working on. So it might be my own professional development. It could be if we're talking about nonprofits, it could be a fundraising objective, whatever it happens to be, I'm thinking about that. What are all of the steps that I need to take in order to make this big goal that I have for the month come to life? Right. And so if I were to think about that now in terms of the weeks and the month, what could I break this down to? Say weekly is the theme, and then under that if I only have five days because we don't work on weekends, if I only have five days, what are the things, the five big things that I'm going to do before 10:00 A.m.? I don't know that I have a particular question, but it's just generally thinking what is going to help me get to this thing? And the example I might use with some of my clients is if you, for instance, let's say you want to buy a house, right? And so everyone's thinking about this house, and the big thing that comes to mind for people is like, oh, I got to save all this money. Okay, great. You do need a down payment for a house, but there are so many other steps that one might take before you even get to the purchase of it. Do you know? Have you researched what neighborhood you want to live in? If you have kids? Do you think about the school systems? What is your savings plan? Have you run a credit report? Right. Like, there are all of these steps, and they don't need to be done on the same day. So to break them out over time allows you to scale. And even if you spent an hour a day on this one task, at the end of the week, you've done 5 hours, at the end of the month, you've done 20 hours. You are far more like, ahead of schedule in terms of working through your objectives than you were when you were just leaving it to the end of the day, hoping there would be time for you to get to it. Carol Hamilton Having that bigger thing in mind and then breaking it down into the smallest steps. I'm starting a new project, and my favorite way of doing this at first is to do a mind map so the circle in the middle and then all the whatever comes to mind. Because I feel like if I write a list, it should be organized this way. I have no obligation to be organized in any way. One thing can spark another. And then I take that mess and I put it in. Okay, well, what would be some of the first steps to get me going? And I love that idea of taking an hour during the day before you know things are going to start pulling you away from your plan for the day and get that thing done. Danielle Marshall And for people who are visual, because I use a mind map tool, it's like a favorite tool. Now. You could actually post it near your desk. Right? So I go a step further with my mind map and I actually apply numbers to it. So what's the first thing I think I should do? What's the second thing? And even within the spokes that come off of a mind map, there still may be multiple steps. Right. But if I'm thinking about it in terms of a process, what feels like I must do it first in order to enable me to do these next couple of things. And so it can be visual, it can be a list. But the thing is, do you have a system to be intentional? Carol Hamilton One of the things that I started doing in graduate school and then after graduate school, I was very reluctant in graduate school where they're always like, okay, so we did the thing, you've written the paper, now write the reflection. I was like, oh my God, do I have to do that? But I built myself a tool so that I could integrate this and now I do it on a weekly basis. And so I have that. I have a chance every week to look at all those questions. Then I've got data over time, right, to be able to look at the big picture, what's going on. But it also the other way is important too, to go from the big, but really breaking it down into the small pieces and figuring out what is going to get you just one step further. Danielle Marshall I wonder to some extent how what we're talking about now also relates back to burnout. Because one of the things that I've had to be intentional in my own world doing is I carve out the time to plan, right? So I have my quarterly retreats with myself. I'm taking some time to think about what I want my week to look like, my month, et cetera. But when I think about most people at work, they come in on Monday morning and it's like hitting the ground running. These ten problems came up over the weekend. We need you to address them. Where is the intentional carved out space for quiet thinking and reflection? So if you want me to be strategic in my approach, I need some time to think about strategy. Carol Hamilton Certainly. It's been a lot easier in the same way for me, once I'm a little bit more not completely in control of my schedule, but a little bit more to be able to set some boundaries, take that Friday afternoon to do those kinds of things. But even inside organizations, I think I was always the person who was like, there are emergencies and then there are the emergencies that we create for ourselves, and we can build systems to deal with the second type so that we don't have to do this over and over again. Early in my career, I worked for a company that put a magazine out every two weeks and we acted like it was an emergency every two weeks. I was like, we do this every two weeks. We can figure out how to do it without it being a crisis. So trying to differentiate between those two and I think sometimes there's almost like a valorization of that chaoticness that we must be more important if we're this busy and we're spinning like this. It's like, no, it's just disorganized. Danielle Marshall That's a mindset shift again around what it means to be successful. Carol Hamilton Right. Danielle Marshall I am not measuring my success on the amount of angst. I feel like that is not the measure that I want to bring forth. And I think it takes time. But I think the leadership team, additionally, really needs to be involved in this. I have one client right now, and they do something that when I first met them, I was like, wow, it's so simple in nature. And yet I was like, I don't hear of many groups doing this. On Fridays, they meet as a team. The entire team comes to these meetings and they just talk. They talk about an article, a podcast, a thought that they've been having, a client issue that they've been dealing with. And there's no agenda. It's just anybody bringing whatever they want to the table and they have a discussion. But what I experienced, because I sat in on a number of those calls, is the level of thoughtfulness and opportunity to play with what we considered sort of half baked ideas. Like, you don't have to have a fully fleshed out thought around this. It's just I was wondering, or I was thinking here's my initial thought. What do you think about this? Right. So in that space, and it was only an hour, it was working time with the group to challenge assumptions, to think differently, to bring new perspectives in. And they were able to then take those learnings and apply them to their everyday jobs. And I'm like, it was an hour and how innovative but transformative it was for the organization. Carol Hamilton It was an hour. But it was a weekly practice too. Danielle Marshall Yes, exactly. Carol Hamilton An investment. And probably, I would guess, that there was a real commitment for everyone to show up to it too, for it. Danielle Marshall To work, that they want. . The word practice, I think is important because, again, very similar to the MITS, right? Like, if I do this four times a month, that's 4 hours off. Dedicated staff time that we have to really think beyond our current vision, if you will. Right. What could be? What are the possibilities, what are we missing? And I think what I also appreciated about that is there was no question that wasn't appropriate to ask in that space. We could go where our minds and our imaginations took us. So it could be thinking about a particular project or just maybe a worldwide issue here, something that we are dealing with, but it's having ramifications in our field and our work day to day. How do we tackle this, what is our position on this? And so when we're asking those big questions and bringing curiosity to the forefront, I think it sparks more curiosity in our everyday work. It was safe to do that and so therefore, I'm going to continue that practice. Carol Hamilton Right. It's modeling, being able to talk in a first draft and ask those different questions and not just wait until they're doing strategic planning to think about the bigger issues that are going on around them. Once every three to five years we're going to do an environmental scan. No, it's every week we're bringing something in to ponder. Danielle Marshall What really I think excited me about that opportunity is everyone on the team participated in it, including the CEO. And that's a big deal to have literally your leadership also commit to say, you know what, I'm not too busy that I can't be in a thinking. Carol Hamilton Space with you all well, and to model thinking out loud. Danielle Marshall You got it, right? That's it. Carol Hamilton I mean, there are some organizations that are literally dealing with emergencies and I think there's a mindset that many more organizations believe they are than they are and so differentiating the two. And I'm trying to think of what would be some other ways that organizations could carve out some more time. I think another one comes to mind is having a certain day where you don't have meetings and it's okay to say no to client meetings or whatever it might be, just having some space so that people have time to do some deeper work. Danielle Marshall I do that for myself. And I will say this, I am not always successful, but Wednesdays have been labeled my thinking day and it's on my calendar as thinking day. And so when I introduce this to people they're like, well, what do you think about for 8 hours? The thing is, I can think about whatever I want. If there is something that is happening in my industry, I can think about that. I might use the time to write because writing is also reflective of me. There's a lot that can be occurring or I might actually reach out to a colleague during my thinking day because I'm just the same as we're doing right now. As we're learning out loud and we're having this conversation, I'm like, oh, what nuggets can I pull from this that I might be able to apply. And so I don't know that we always need to think about this in terms of huge resources or all hands. Some of these things might be a team is focusing on it and some of it might just be allowing people to have space as an individual to reflect. Carol Hamilton Another thing that you had brought up around the flip side of Burnout or maybe it's one way we've been talking about it is building in some practices, having some shared agreement that Friday is going to be no. Meetings. Or Wednesday is going to be no meetings and people have time to think. Or we're going to spend an hour as a team talking about something beyond the to-do list, but also bringing Joy back into the work. For me, it's always reconnecting to why do I do this? Help me. But there are lots of other ways. Danielle Marshall I think it's joy in the work, but I think when we initially even started talking about joy, I wasn't even thinking about it connected to the workplace. And I think part of this is in the redefining of success and reevaluating who we want to be. It's also a reevaluation of how I want to spend my time right. Both inside of work and outside. So during the pandemic, a lot of people found new hobbies. Like, I remember how the news every day talked about you couldn't find baking supplies anywhere. Needs to be found. And we sort of laughed at it. But there was a reason, like people found something that they could literally make with their hands. I am finding pleasure in cooking for my family or knitting or running whatever it was that brought them joy. And I think when you are doing more of those things for yourself outside of a workspace, when you return to work, you are refreshed. You are sort of renewed at this moment. But the other thing is, and I don't know if you've had this experience, I'm a big crafter, so I knit a lot. I like fiber art. When I spend time doing that, my mind actually has a chance to just go, right. And I'm not thinking about anything other than what I'm doing at that moment. And it allows me to come back with clarity. Right. Because I wasn't sitting in this place, I have to fix this problem, I have to solve this for someone else. I literally just had time for me to sit with my own thoughts. And so there's a beauty in that because now when it is time to go back, wow, you're going to get a very different version of Danielle than you would have gotten if I had been on call 24/7 for the entire week. Carol Hamilton Definitely. For me, a lot of it is getting up and taking a walk or swimming laps where I just remember my mother in law once she couldn't imagine swimming laps. It seemed incredibly boring to her. So she was like, what do you think about it? And I was like, the whole point is I don't think about anything. Danielle Marshall That's exactly it, nothing. Carol Hamilton But in that reexamination, one of the things that I started doing, and again, just for the pleasure of it, is learning how to draw, and it's not for any purpose. I don't want to call myself an artist. I'm not trying to display things or have anything come out of it. It's just for the fun of it. And I get into a state of flow, and I'm really focused. And the whole notion that people can have hobbies, I think, is having a comeback. Danielle Marshall Years ago, I worked at a nonprofit, Kaboom, and one of the things that they had was boomerisms. And they said, we don't want to do routine things routinely. And I had a deep appreciation for that then, but it really feels true for me now. So even if we are to take this concept of joy and bring it back into the workspace, what are the things that we're doing that we're so in a routine with? It's just like, oh, I have to fill out my travel paperwork or I have to submit this reimbursement, and it feels like it's drudgery, or I have to go to this team meeting. Are there ways that we can begin to do things in non routine? Ways that allow for joy, that allow for some playfulness? Because that feels like that's missing when everything's mission critical constantly, that's hard. There are certainly organizations that are in the business of saving lives. Many of us are not. It doesn't mean our mission is not important. Carol Hamilton Right. Danielle Marshall But if we took a day off or we were somewhat playful in this process, it wouldn't do any damage. If anything, it helps us. It brings us alive. And I think about, what are the things that we call emergencies that we react to almost immediately that did not have to be emergencies if we had taken time, one, to plan for them, and two, to do things in a non routine way because we're shaking it up. Carol Hamilton I think reevaluating what actually is an emergency is a big one, unfortunately. I feel like in our culture, there's a status in being able to create emergencies that is really unhelpful. Danielle Marshall I want no part of that. I don't know. Just call me boring. I like, is where I want to be. Absolutely. Again, go ahead. Carol Hamilton I was just going to say I love a good routine. I was in a workshop where they said, who are you the patron saint of? And I was like, I think I'm the patron saint of routine. So I'll have to think about, though, how I can be more playful with my routines. Danielle Marshall My favorite thing to tell people when they call me, and they're like, what have you been up to, and I'm like, nothing. It's amazing. And you know that's not true. We all have things that are on our agenda, but honestly, a life that is drama free, where it's consistent in a lot of ways, that feels good. And I'm not saying that to shy away from risk or experimentation with things, but I want to be mindful in how we approach that so that the intentionality is there. We're going to try some new things out because it helps defer on creativity and innovation, but sometimes that routine means that slow and steady actually allows you to do more. Carol Hamilton So as we wrap up from this conversation, what invitation would you give to nonprofit leaders? I don't know. As they think about their next quarter, let's say. Danielle Marshall I think the first thing that I would be asking right now is, where are there opportunities for you to embed reflection time in both as a team and as individuals? And for those who push back immediately and say there isn't that, why is that? There's 24 hours in every day, and it's all about, for me, how we choose to use the time that we have allotted. So if we're at work for 8 hours out of the day, is it not a valuable use of your time to see where planning, even for an hour or two, just to get started, might yield greater benefits for you? Carol Hamilton And what are the assumptions that are embedded in we can't . Danielle Marshall That's a limiting belief. Carol Hamilton And for me, I think it would be, how can you bring a little more playfulness into what you're doing inside and outside of work? Danielle Marshall I'm going to go a little bit deeper on that one, too, because I like that. But what does joy mean for your staff? What does it mean for you? Right. So instead of mandating that we all go bowling this Thursday oh, God, no. Because we do that right. As nonprofit leaders. But instead of mandating fun, the beatings will continue until morale improves. What does it mean for the team to actually say, this is a valuable use of my time. I not only enjoyed it, but I got to know my colleagues better? It felt good to be in that space. Carol Hamilton Because there's a lot of Band Aid approaches to that that don't actually achieve the goal at all. Danielle Marshall Absolutely. Carol Hamilton All right. Appreciate it. All right. Well, thank you, Danielle. Danielle Marshall This was so much fun. Talk about joy. It's a joy to talk to you. Absolutely. ![]() In episode 76 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and Devon Lawrence discuss
Guest Bio: Devon Lawrence is the Founder and Principal of Clark Lawrence Consulting, Inc. For 10+ years she has worked with non-profits of all sizes, both domestic and international, to advance their capabilities around development operations, fundraising events, project management and leadership. Her clients have praised her ability to be well attuned to the needs, opportunities, and challenges of non-profit organizations and her reliability as a source of guidance on fundraising and organizational development. Devon currently serves on the boards of the Bowery Residents' Committee (BRC) and Association of Nonprofit Specialists. She lives in New York City with her husband and two-year old son. Important Links and Resources: Transcript: Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Devon Lawrence. Personally I love to step back and see the big picture, look at the wider trends that are happening in the world and help groups think about what the implications of those trends are for their future. To help them envision their future and then come to agreement about what are the big 3-5 things that are really going to help them move the needle on their mission over the next 3-5 years. I love helping them map out the elements of their organization and programs and get clear on why they do what they do and how they can demonstrate their impact. AND just thinking of the big picture isn’t enough. Without a clear plan for implementation and action all the strategy in the world won’t actually get moved forward. So rather than thinking of strategy as a once in a three year event that includes planning sessions and retreats, thinking of it as practice is really the key. How are we integrating what we decided in our planning sessions into our more day to day work. That is what I talk with Devon about. She focuses on fundraising – and a lot of fundraising consultants also focus on the bigger picture – the fundraising strategy – but Devon does something different – she helps organizations create systems and implement systems that really make their fundraising work. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I am Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Devon and I talk about what metrics and other aspects are important to track and monitor for successful fundraising, why that thank you note you been procrastinating about writing is REALLY important, and some of the differences across cultures in attitudes about nonprofits and philanthropy. Welcome, Devin. Welcome to Mission Impact. Devon: Thank you. It's great to be here. Carol: So I always like to start out by asking the question around what drew you to the work that you do? What would you say motivates you, or what would you describe as your why? Devon: Well my career started in non-profits. So my background was already there and then it was. When I was introduced to consulting and being able to, to support nonprofits in a different way, that was what was exciting, being able to help more organizations and people out there than I was already through just, working in a full-time role. So it was the ability to, to share my skills and expertise with as many organizations as possible. Carol: And you really focus on development and fundraising operations and project management. When you're working with clients, can you just say a little bit more about what that looks like? Devon: Sure. So development operations, I like to say, is really the behind the scenes work. It's the systems, the processes, the structure that needs to be in place in order for an organization to be successful. So, whether that's, working with. Development directors or executive directors on just, prospecting strategies as well as thinking about, tracking the, the data behind solicitations, cultivation, stewardship, coming up with the right processes for, acknowledgement letters, matching gifts, et cetera. It's all of those pieces that are part of the puzzle to learn, I mean, to do. Go towards sustainability for an organization. Carol: And it's funny cuz I, I feel like in a lot of cases consultants err on the side of being the bigger picture strategy piece. And, and that's where I am and .That's all great and you need that, but then, How do you actually make it work?. What are all the 99 steps that you have to think about and keep, keeping track of and making sure that you're maintaining all the things?. What are some of the things that we, you would say are common stumbling blocks for organizations as they're trying to set up those systems? . Devon: That's a great question and a lot of people just don't have it. The bandwidth or capacity. A lot of organizations, you're so focused on the fundraising itself and bringing in the money and reaching your goals, that it's, remembering to track and monitor all of your communication so that you can go back and say to this donor, yes, they made a gift of X amount. On, a year ago, and we need to get back to them. But what were all those touchpoints in between so that we know, like what is their interest? What is it about our organization that gets them excited? What was the last meeting that they had? What board members do they know? It's all of those pieces that people forget about, but it's really important to come up with the right strategy and continue to engage with donors. Carol: What are some of those things that you think are really important for organizations to track along the way?. Devon: Communications. Absolutely. So when you think about a lot of people, a lot of organizations think of communications as not being a part of development. They might even be different departments. But they really do go hand in hand because, every time that a prospect or donor is reading about. Or seeing something about the organization, that's something that works towards the cycle of engagement. And so communication is definitely one, like understanding what the different touchpoints are that they receive throughout the year. And in many cases it is also tiered communication. So, donors at certain levels might be only getting newsletters or, just. A quarterly email, whereas donors at a higher level might be, might be receiving invitations to an intimate event or getting a preview of some project or program that's happening that maybe the larger audience might not be. So keeping track of communications absolutely. Number one is, Following up as quickly as possible when someone makes a gift. So thanking them for their gifts, acknowledgement letters is a huge one. I've worked with clients that, and this happens to everyone at many organizations, is that you, it, it falls to the back burner and donors notice those things. So, even if it takes 48 hours or two weeks. That's acceptable. But when it takes, six months, nine months, sometimes even a year, donors really do notice. And that can affect the relationship you have with them. So I would say those are some top, must, must haves, make sure that all organizations are tracking. Carol: Yeah, and it's, it's interesting. I'm, I'm. I work with a group where we've been working together for a couple years, and this isn't a nonprofit, that's not the point of it, but there's some similar things that if we had set up some of those systems at the beginning to be capturing all this information and tracking. We wouldn't be doing the cleanup that we're gonna. In the middle of trying to do it now. Like, oh yeah, wow. Let's have one spreadsheet where we keep everybody's email and who the primary contact was and are we getting their home address so that we can send them a thank you card. Absolutely. All those kinds of things that it's easy to think about. After the fact. And then, to think about, well, where would it be easiest for us to ask for this information in the process when, like at a, at an initial gift asking for example, for that address or whatnot. Yes. So that you're not asking for it. Like, oh, I wanna send you a thank you letter now, could you please send me your Devon: address? Yes, yes. Definitely, and that's a good point because, I was thinking even bigger picture, but those are the small things that make a huge difference is the address, emails, phone numbers, being able to stay on top of where people are, even annually following up sometimes to just confirm with donors what their, what their contact information is, if anything has changed. Those are all very important things to consider. Carol: And it's interesting thinking about like, you're talking about those different tiers and. My husband and I donate to a variety of different organizations. One here locally and we recently got invited to an event. Now we don't donate a huge amount of money, but we've been consistent. We've donated, yes, probably now for the last. Seven years or something, I bought some of their merchandise. I don't know whether we've gone to any events. I'm trying to even think maybe once. So I was a little bit surprised that we got invited to this event, but it made a big impression. My husband ended up going. It was really experiential, very close to, really being able to get closer to their mission. So it is interesting to think about kind of, there could be lots of differences. Criteria that would push people into that next tier. What are some of the things Absolutely that organizations might be thinking about? The obvious one is the amount of money. But are there other things that they should be thinking about, to be able to notice who their, their. I don't know, next level Devon: givers are. Yeah. And it sounds like the organization you give to has they, they have everything in order that they're able to, to reach out to you. And with that invitation, because that's actually a really good example is that even if your giving has been the same over a long period of time those, the donors that have been giving for. For long periods, they're as important as someone that comes in at a very high level for the first time and is giving to you. Sometimes they're even more important because, I know a story from another colleague where she had a client that they had a campaign and the donor had been giving at a. Let's just, for the purpose of this podcast, just say $10,000 for a long period. And at the campaign, the person might have capacity to give more, but the organization was nervous to ask for anything, six figures or higher. But the consultant said, well, why don't we just ask? And no one has ever asked before, she's, this donor's been giving for. many, many years and they asked for a million and she said, well, no one's ever asked me. And yes, I will. So, wow. It is, IM, it is very important to not forget about those who have been giving to you for a long time because, that just shows that they clearly have a passion and care about the work that you're doing. And really, if you don't ask for more, you're never gonna know if they'll be willing to, to, to give it a higher level. Carol: Right. What are some other things that get in the way of organizations really managing their, the, those backend systems?. Devon: Hmm. The event is a big one. Getting sucked into like those big moments in the year. Everyone has a gala. A lot of organizations rely on their gala as their main income for revenue and that can blind people from remembering that there's more to fundraising than just the gala and events and that. It's a lot of what happens outside of those, those big moments that are important. And when you just focus on events which is, it can be great for some organizations to bring in a lot of their revenue for the year. But there's so much more potential if you utilize that, those opportunities outside of those moments. And engaging with donors and keeping track of all the information and the behind the scenes and the proc, like following the proper processes and systems really does make a difference to help you reach those goals. Carol: And you mentioned events, galas and a lot of organizations have traditionally relied on those. What are you seeing with the impact of, covid having to go virtual? Are those events coming back?. Are organizations decided to pivot away from those? Devon:. I've definitely seen them come back at least, here in New York and. I have actually had clients in other areas as well. But yes, in person is coming back, but virtual is still there. So it's maybe no longer that the main gala, the main fundraising event for the year, is virtual, but their other virtual opportunities and events throughout the year, because it's a great way to, to expand your, your network and your reach by having the virtual events. But with galas, I'm definitely seeing in person and people are excited to, to be back in person again and to really like, feel the, Importance of the organization that they're supporting by being in that room with other people and seeing, being able to watch the, the videos and hear from people on stage. Carol: So you've also worked with organizations internationally. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience? Yes. Devon: So I worked with a couple of organizations in Singapore. And it was a time when I, we had moved there for my husband's work and I had recently started consulting and I wasn't sure really what was gonna happen. I still had some clients back here in the US but luckily just through connections, I was introduced to a few organizations that needed support. And it was very interesting because, The support that they needed was different from what I'm used to here in the us. The first thing that stood out was, nonprofits in the US and charities are thought of as two different things. And usually, nonprofits are used in the broader, broader sense. And it was the opposite in Singapore. So they first think of organizations as charities, which not necessarily lessens them, but there's less of a responsibility that the community has towards supporting those organizations. Most of the philanthropy was. Through church or so, religion or through medicine. So healthcare. And then outside of that, because Singapore as a country provides a lot of support to the nonprofits, the community really felt like it was the government's responsibility to provide them with support. So when it came to fundraising for these organizations, they found it really hard. To get through to people to even understand why they should be giving. So that was very interesting to encounter. That was different from what I was used to. Carol: Yeah. I mean, here in the States it's probably flipped, right? Where Devon: Yes. We're Carol: we're overly reliant on the nonprofit sector to Yes. Deliver services, government overly reliant. That's my own editorial, Editorializing, right?. And even, a lot of organizations get supported by the government, but not to the same degree that that . There might be expectations in other countries. What other differences did you notice?. Devon: Being that it was specifically Singapore was heavily expat. It was more so that the expats, the expat community were the ones that were supporting the nonprofits. Because again, just community-wise and culture that, specifically in Singapore, that. They didn't come from the background where, giving to nonprofits was was, was, was almost an expectation. So I think that the expat community and the level of volunteerism that came from that as well, because many. In xFi communities it's usually because one of the spouses is going for work and then the other spouse, either, if they're lucky, then they are able to work. But sometimes getting those work visas is not as easy for the spouses. So they put so much of their time and energy into the nonprofits there that was, I wanna say, Not so much more, but I was very impressed and blown away by the level of time and commitment that they all give to the organizations. I mean, the couple that I worked with, the couple organizations that I worked with were fully run and managed by volunteers. Which we don't see as much over in the us. We have full-time staff, part-time staff at the minimum who are working for nonprofits, but it was almost fully run by, by the, the expats. Carol: Yeah, so it might also almost be like, we turned the clock back 60 years and, and who was running nonprofits at that time here in the United States might have been more similar. . And, and you also described them. Are described or seen as charities versus nonprofits, And, sometimes I think here in the US folks may think of that word charity in almost any, some kind of, has some negative overtones. What, what, what did you see?, what, how, how did people experience that in that context and in that culture? Devon:. I wouldn't say there were negative undertones there, there was still a need for them. There's always a need for them. But people did, they, they would respect charities versus nonprofits and, and, they, they would give, but just the word nonprofit almost wasn't in the vocabulary. It was very much a charity. And so just like you were saying, being from the US we, if you call a non-profit charity, they might be offended where, so that's what I was used to and I had to, teach myself to switch, to switch that vocabulary. But it was just more than SEMA semantics and being. The language that they use around the organizations, but they were still respected. It was just that culturally, the, because the government provides so much support, it was less of an expectation of the community having to support them as well. Carol: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's always interesting to explore those, those cultural differences and . , just how words are used and. And attitudes and perspectives, all of that. I always, I always find that super fascinating. So we had talked before about some of the challenges that organizations have when they're trying to implement or maybe, build out processes. Maybe improve their processes? What are some things that you see helping them really succeed in that, and make things work well?. Devon: I am a big believer in CRMs and Carol: say what a CRM is just quickly. Devon: It is a, you can either, some say constituents, some say client, but it's a relationship management platform. So there's. A ton of different ones out there. Razor's Edge, Salesforce, Bloomerang, Asana. There's so many now, but just a big, big believer in the importance of having a database, a system that is capturing and tracking all of your information in one central place. And being able to then, as I was talking about Using that information to help you with your donor engagement and cultivation, solicitation, all of your activities, to then be able to have a dashboard that shows you, how far you are towards your goals and how many, and that could be both, in revenue goals, but also in setting goals for, you want to, you wanna reach out to 10 people this week, you wanna make sure that you have communicated with a certain number of donors. , helping you to set those goals so you can stay on track for your week, for your month, whatever it is reminding you when you send an email to someone or an invitation you haven't heard back that is a huge that is a huge benefit to like, to lead to, to success for staying organized and just staying on top of everything. Carol: Now you used the phrase the CRM captures, but actually the, I think one of the biggest challenges that I've noticed with organizations really fully getting all the benefit of a system like that is. When the people don't do, don't take the time to make sure that everything's linked up and that email gets captured or . Going back in and saying, okay, here are a couple notes from this phone conversation I just had. Yes. That habit forming can be really challenging. Devon:. And it's also important to find the best CRM for your organization because they are not all equal in any way. for some, Salesforce might be best for some, something through Microsoft because that's already what you're using could be best. But it's definitely finding what works for you. And also, some are better for events. Some are better for emailing, so it definitely is important to take the time and come up with the best, the best platform for the organization. Carol: What are some of the things that organizations need to be looking at so that they can know, okay, this one is gonna be a good fit for us. Devon:. I'm actually doing this right now with other clients, so I can think about just the process we're taking. So first it's Understanding what your vision is. So if you were to have a crm, how would that change the work of your organization? And it could be that it's only for fundraising purposes. It could be that you also need to track your program information events, like I mentioned. It, whatever else there is. First thinking, big picture, like what is it that. You would need it for, for the organization, all the different ways that it would function. And then it's looking at the data you have and understanding what, like, from there, what your needs are. It could be that you just wanna track contact information and email addresses the most important and of course, giving information. For others it might be that you need a platform that is connected or has connectability to A search engine. So to be able to search for different capacity levels and give you that research for the different donors to be able to have it within your system. And then from there it's who is going to be managing it? Is every staff member going to have a hand in it? Is it one individual? Cuz all those things together just. Really make a difference in understanding what the best needs are for the best c r m for you. Carol: So as we come to the end here at the end of each episode, I ask each guest what permission slip they would give to nonprofit leaders or what they would invite them to consider as they work to not be a martyr to the cause and they work to cultivate a, a healthier and more productive organizational culture. What, what would your invitation or permission slip be for nonprofit leaders? Devon: First of all, I love that question. And my answer would be to give your, to give yourself permission to take a break. That it's really important, everyone, especially leaders of org, of nonprofits and organizations, can get so caught up in everything, from your goal for fundraising events, communicating with donors. But sometimes it's important to just take a break, take a step back and breathe and just take a look at everything around you within your organization and just remind yourself both of the great work you're doing and what you're, your mission and what, who you're working for and the people you're serving. But also remind yourself of what your priorities are for that moment. Like, remind yourself of, whether it's monthly or quarterly, but just. What those priorities are, are you, are the projects that you're working on, line up with those priorities, but the only way to focus on that is to take a break. Carol: I feel like so many consultants that I talk to want to give that, to organ to, To leaders. Let's, let's take everybody, take, give them that permission to, to take a break and take a step back and. Think about those priorities. So how can people find you? How can they be in touch? Devon: I. My website is definitely www.clarklawrenceconsulting.com. And you can find more information about me, about what I do. There is a form to, to reach out to me on, on my website. So yes, all are welcome to check it out. Carol: And we'll definitely have that link in the, in the show notes. So thank you. Can find Devin there. Alright, well thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Devon: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Carol: Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Devon, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Cindy Rivera Grazer of 100 Ninjas for her production support. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategic planning, mapping, & audits for nonprofits and associations. We combine left-brain strategy and analysis + right-brain wisdom about human complexities for a proven, whole-brain, whole-organization process through which every stakeholder thrives. Reach out to us for support and facilitation of strategic planning, mapping your impact, auditing your services and getting an organizational assessment. We especially love working with staffed nonprofits and associations with human centered missions. Please take a minute to rate and review Mission Impact on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps other people find the podcast. We appreciate it! And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 76 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and Erin Allgood discuss
Guest Bio: Erin Allgood helps organizations and individuals who give a damn create real impact. As the founder of Allgood Strategies, Erin helps socially-conscious organizations with strategic planning, organizational development, and leadership coaching. Her services focus on catalyzing social change at the systems, organizational, and individual levels. Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Erin Allgood: It, I think, can be really liberating for organizations to see that it's not incumbent upon them to fix everything. that they actually have partners who are gonna be doing similar work and in this, and in that are on a similar journey, but aren't necessarily that their work is complementary to, to theirs. Carol Hamilton: What is a theory of change and why should you have one? Beyond the answer of well --- our funders require us to include it in our grant proposal, there are a lot of advantages to mapping out what your theory of change is for your organization. It can seem a little esoteric and a little wonky and a little academic. And what even is a theory of change? Simply put – it is a graphic or written description of how your organization’s work moves your mission and vision forward – it helps you map these pieces and show the logic of why you are doing what you are doing. With this, you can also build evaluation systems that demonstrate your impact. Like any other strategy process – the conversations you will have to get the theory of change on paper or on a virtual white board – help create a common understanding of what you are really trying to do. And the process can reveal some gaps in your program design and process. Through the process you might be aiming to do XYZ with your vision – this is the change you are trying to create in the world. And then this is what we are doing in terms of programs and services – and by talking it through as a group, you realize that your expected short term, medium term and long outcomes from your program don’t actually move you closer to your vision. Or what has to be true for those outcomes to happen – the assumptions built into your design are not realistic – there is too much of a leap in logic from one to another – and you need to build in some more steps to move people along the expected journey or pathway. And the map is not the territory! Theories of change or logic models or impact maps simplify what is rarely simple.. They are never meant to capture all the possible permutations. Each person participating in your offerings will have their own unique experience. And they live complex lives with multiple things impacting them, their behavior and decisions. The process generates insights into which program elements and intended outcomes to focus on, and can help you demonstrate how changes are unfolding for participants—beyond just reporting how many people participated. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit holistic strategy consultant. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategic planning, mapping, & audits for nonprofits and associations. On this podcast we explore how to make your organization more effective and innovative. We dig into how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers. All for this is for the purpose of creating greater mission impact. My guest today on Mission Impact is Erin Allgood. Erin and I talk about what a theory of change is and the differences between theories of change and logic models, how a theory of change can help you make decisions between the many options and directions you might go – and your many good ideas, why each organization does not have to tackle everything – deciding what is the part of the problem that you will work on and what are you really suited to focus on – and who else is working in your space whose work complements yours is so important, and how it’s not all on your shoulders to fix – even if it can feel that way sometimes. Welcome, Erin. Welcome to Mission Impact. Erin: Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Carol: So I like to start out each episode with just a question around what drew you to the work that you do. What would you describe as your motivation or your why? Erin: I love this question and I of course like to listen to a couple of previous episodes, so I knew it was coming. I have always been somebody who has cared deeply about. Writing the injustices in the world in a lot of ways. My mom will tell you that I came out of the womb of feminist and I just have carried that energy with me ever since. And I had a very circuitous path to becoming a non-profit consultant. Mainly because I went to school for biochemistry. And hopefully this will be interesting for people to hear this, but I, and then I went and actually got a degree, a master's degree in nutritional biochemistry and was just like, this is not what I wanna do with my life. I was so interested. I realized what I was actually interested in was understanding systems. I was not actually interested in either doing bench science or doing anything like that. And so I started on a journey after all of that too. One to like to figure out where I wanted to actually like, be like in the world. And I started taking some courses on food systems and I took some courses on sustainable business and so on and so forth. And that was all while I was working for a pharmaceutical company. This was back in time like the 2009, 2010 timeframe because we were in a recession and there was no other work for me, and I had all these science degrees and I could go and do that. But what it really helped me to do is sharpen that focus on things like, I could not just have a job doing something I didn't care about. So I really needed to create what I. Wanted for myself. And that's, that was really the beginning of my consulting practice. I started in food systems and then about five years ago I broadened out to really have a much broader focus on organizations that were doing, like usually have some aspect of social justice in their work. And started doing things like strategic planning, organizational development and executive coaching . There's always little things here that come, come up here and there too, that I do a little bit of a long-winded answer. Carol: Well, it's often a winding, a winding journey to get to where you are, and especially at that beginning stage of your career where you're figuring out where do I fit? What am I really interested in? realizing, well, it's actually the systems that I'm interested in and how can I bring that systems perspective. I think that I had a similar point with my first job out of college. Working for people has heard this story before, but working for a magazine that got help helped people get on talk shows and, and coming to the point of realizing I don't wanna be promoting all comers. Hmm. I wanna be aligned with the missions that I'm helping support and helping move forward. So definitely can, can relate to that. And As you said, you and I do similar work focusing on strategic planning and organization development. And. I'm, one of the things that we, we also do, both of us is help organizations map out their impact, or sometimes it's called creating a theory of change. Sometimes it's called creating a logic model. There are a variety of different terms for that. And I'm wondering if you could just describe for our listeners what a theory of change is and, Why is it important for an organization to have one? Erin: Yeah. I love developing theories of change, talking about theories of change. So I'm so excited that this is the topic we're diving into today. I think of a theory of change as being the overarching way in which an organization creates change, or it could be an individual too. I've actually created a theory of change for myself as part of my business and we're. What I think about. When I think about a theory of change, it's really starting to identify what that real big vision is for an organization and it's broader than just obviously like their specific work in the world. I like to go really, really big picture with that. And then understand as part of that, like developing the theory of change process, where the organization fits in that broader landscape of change that they, of, of whatever that is that they're trying to bring forth. And so I think a lot of times when people develop a theory of change, it's just, it's, it's much more narrowly focused. And so I have a bit of a different take on that. And then you had mentioned logic models too. And anybody that knows me, knows me that I. Deeply, deeply hate logic models. I don't know how you feel about Carol: So what do you see as the difference between a theory of change versus a logic model? Erin: I think that, like a logic model gets really down into the weeds and it's, and it, presents things in a super linear way. And it, or it, presents how you create change in a linear way. Whereas I think of a theory of change as being It's, it's not, it's never quite that linear, right? Like we know that, like we know that change doesn't happen in a super linear fashion. We know that it's iterative. We know that like things cer, like certain things build upon one another. We know that like there's oftentimes this like squiggle, of a journey to get from point A to point B with a lot of different detours off of it as well. And so the way that I look at e Theory of change is like, it's a broader framework in which an organization is. Is what, that's helping to guide an organization versus the rigidity of a logic model where it's like, oh, here's like, here's our goal, here's our, the tactic that we're gonna take, and then here's the outcome we predict, and so on and so forth. It's, and that, that's not that that's anything. There's nothing wrong with that per se. But it leaves a lot of it. I think that what it does is it forces organizations into a bit of a, into a bit of a box in which they can't, they can't allow things to develop more organically or to emerge as they go through. And so it, and it doesn't allow them to necessarily grow as they're going through, through a process. And of course, we need to be able to like, have things and outcomes that we care about and want to map to an extent. But the way that I develop like a, when I work with organizations is I usually develop an idea of what it looks like to be successful, and that's not necessarily tied to. Like a metric, like increased participation by 27% or something like that nature. So it's a lot, the theory of change that I'll create oftentimes is a bit broader in focus. It of course has different strategies associated with it. So say an organization, one of those main strategies is gonna be education. So like, I'll often help organizations identify the big vision that will obviously go through and I, and talk about the mission and the core identity, like their values and beliefs and things like that, that underpin the work that they do. And then it will start to boil down to like what are those broad strategies that they're trying to do in order to be able to get to that vision. So for instance, one of the organizations I'm working with right now, we have identified that there's two main strategies. One is Like a focus on the individuals that they are trying to help through the work that they do. And then the other way is addressing systems level harm. So it's like really doing the on the ground work versus like, how do we fix this so that this systemic, these systemic issues aren't a problem as we, five years from now. And so underneath those, there's a couple of different programs that nestle underneath those. And then, and part of the addressing systems, Level harm. Those programs are like education and advocacy as you can imagine. And then there's the more specific programmatic work towards dealing with the individual piece of that. So that gives 'em a lot of space, in order to be able to say where they want to go from here in order to. To be able to create these kinds of change and they can use that theory of change as they move forward. It's, that's not necessarily tied to, a like three to five year strategic plan that could actually be like a much longer standing a , a tool for them to be able to use moving forward. And. It's and then it's also paired with obviously much more specific kinds of goals and objectives and priorities that I would bring into, into the actual written plan itself. But it's that broader framework that allows them to really play within those bounds and to be able to have that flexibility moving forward. So they're not, they're not super. Yeah, like backed into a corner when they have this like a super rigid plan in front of them or something like that. As you can tell, I don't write super rigid plans, probably. Carol: Yeah. And I appreciate the distinction between those different, those different things and I mean, even if you get into the nitty gritty with something like a logic model, I always want to. Tell people or help, help them bring some context that the map is not the territory. A model does not, is just a model. It doesn't define reality. It can be helpful as a tool to help you have a conversation, to come to agreement around what are the assumptions that we're, we're embedding in this, what do we think is gonna happen? How can we test that? But. Yeah, there's always a danger once it gets mapped out or in a plan that people get afraid to change it. And for me that's never the, the ultimate purpose of any of these kinds of processes, but it's more, I. Can we get stuff out of people's heads onto a page so that we can all look at it together? Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm, I'm starting to work with an organization right now and it's exactly that. It's a relatively new organization. They've got, the founder has some great ideas about what they wanna do. They're doing stuff already, but they haven't had a chance to expand things. And this. By doing one of these processes, theory of change, logic model, impact map, whatever you wanna call it. I think one of the biggest benefits will be to get a lot of the stuff that's in his head in other staff, staff, people's heads, maybe in board, if the board ends up being involved and get it out so that everybody can look at it and say, do we actually agree? On this picture of what we're, what we're trying to do together. Erin: Yeah. And I think it's, I mean that's like so powerful to be able to do that and just to make sure that everybody's on the same page and it's like the cornerstone of doing strategic planning cuz you never wanna get super far into a process and then be like, oh, we're not all on the same page at all. But it's also probably hard. And you, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this like, To get people sometimes to commit, especially especially a founder or especially organizations that are just super energized about things, to picking a path. Because a lot of the time, They wanna do everything. And I'm like, we create a theory of change so that they understand that they, they got, they start to see like the, the through line between like the work that they're doing and the outcome and, and the the vision that they're trying to achieve and outcomes. But it also helps them to see things like, oh, we can't, if we do like a thousand different things, we can't actually be super effective at any of them. Carol: Yeah, I literally said this yesterday. I was like, I have yet to meet a nonprofit staff, person, leader, board member, executive director, who did not have enough ideas. Yeah. Yep. There is always an abundance of ideas, different directions, different tactics, different strategies, all to move towards the same vision. But what are the ones that you are gonna choose? What are the ones that you are really gonna deepen and get good at? What's within your core competencies and it's, it's hard to make those decisions, especially as a group, but I think that's, that's a part of what these, these kinds of processes can help with as well to, to set some priorities and refine that. And I, I appreciated what you said about the theory of change. Also being also mapping the wider context that the organization is in, because the ones that I have seen have been a little bit in a vacuum. So I'd love for you to say a little bit more about what that looks like and the benefits of doing that. Erin: Yeah. I am so grateful that you asked that question too, cuz I love talking about it. It's, I look at , I think that when. Again, that helps them to narrow some of their focus when we start to look at the broader picture and be like, well, what are, what is the lane that you're playing in this? And what is, what is also the lane that your partners are playing in? Because it should likely be a little bit different than what they're playing in. And so I think I love the tagline for this podcast, like how not to become a martyr to the cause. Because I think that a lot of people look at it like, oh, we have to do everything. We have to do everything under the sun in order to be able to like tackle X, Y, z, whatever, whatever their, their cause actually is. And it's, I think, can be really liberating for organizations to see that it's, it's not incumbent upon them to fix everything. that they actually have partners who are gonna be doing similar work and in this, and in that are on a similar journey, but aren't necessarily that their work is complementary to, to theirs. What I also think is super important about that part of things too, is I like to help organizations really understand that they're start to break up with this idea around, White supremacy culture and like how that gets like enacted within organizations, which is so much rooted in, oftentimes you see that kinda individualism, which can play out like within the internal culture of an organization or for the organization themselves too. like, oh, we're on it, on our own. We're just doing it, we're just charging forth and we're by ourselves in this. And I help them to start to break up with that idea that they have to do it all by themselves. And that they are like the center of all of that. So it's, there's a couple of different reasons why I, why I help them see that bigger picture. But a lot of it is, starting to shift this narrative around like any one organization is, is. Going to create the change that they actually do need collaboration in order to be able to bring about these things. And we're talking about wicked problems, right? Like we're these, or like, these are like things that nobody solves on their own. And to be able to even try to say that they could, develops that hero complex that I think is, so detrimental within our sector because we don't want people out there just being like, like pomp, his assholes like thinking that, that like, they're the only reason why change create, like happens. No, it actually does. It requires many, many different people working towards the same goal, coming at a, from a bunch of different angles and and we just, yeah, we don't want that to be. We wanna start to shift towards more collaboration and less of this individualism, is one of the things that I try to help organizations do. Carol: Yeah. Helping them see how they can be complementary to the other organizations that are in the same space as them. Not competing for the same ground but, but working together to, to solve the problem. As you say, they're, they're. Most of these problems that organizations are working on are huge and complex. And, and yeah, the hero is probably the positive version of Martyr. And both of them, I, I, I mean, from my point of view or, or from my experience, it's rare. and their exceptions, but it's rarely out of a sense of it's gotta be all mine. But there is this like, it's all on my shoulders feeling. And it's like, no, it's not. I. You're one person, you're one organization. You're at one time in a whole movement of people, sector, what, whatever, term you want to use, that you're part of this larger ecosystem that's working towards that vision with you. And if you can see that, you can take a deep breath, relax a little bit, and focus on what you do best. Hmm. Erin: Yeah, when I've done this work, cuz I've done theory of change obviously as part of like strategic planning processes and things like that when I've done this also with , like I've gone in and into like teach younger, students and like college students talking about things like how do we do, how do we start to shift our practices so that we can. What did I call it before? It was like conscientious consulting, I think is how I talked about it. Like how do we shift our business practices, to be more, I don't know, probably inclusive jest, et cetera, like something of that nature. But , I think what I've, what I've heard from a lot of folks when they reach out to me, they're like, oh, I just wanna do what you do in the world, and how do we, how do I do this? , and I'm like, okay, one. It's taken me a decade to get to this place. there's no, there's no quick fix, there's no silver bullet here to just kinda like do this work. And so much of what I've, how I've done this work is just so, like, it's just developed organically in a, in a way that's really unique to who I am, but it's, I think a lot of people are so, they have such an appetite to go out and, and be those kinds of change makers and they don't necessarily have. They don't have the grounding yet to understand a lot of the things we just said, like that we don't do this, that, that it's, that we do, they don't realize that they can't do it on their own. They don't realize that they can't like that it's all focused on them. So like, for instance, I've seen I've done a bunch of, I also judged a bunch of pitch competitions before. I don't know if you've done that before. It's super fun. But I just hear like these, these students who are just like coming at these things from a place where which they're so amazing, I should say that before I dive into this, but, but they're coming at it from such a narrow perspective of like, I'm gonna solve this problem, I'm gonna do it this way. And they haven't necessarily thought about it from this broader perspective of like, you're going perhaps into like a community to try to solve this problem. Does that community even exist? Want you to solve this problem? Like, or is that really the solution? That's, Carol: Is that the problem that they want you to solve? Right. Have you talked to them? Yeah. What are their perspectives? What are their priorities? Yeah. Erin: Yep. Exactly. So like part of like the theory of change for me too is just like helping them to, for like. Especially if we're, they're doing it on an individual level to kinda like to interrogate that a bit. Like where, what are your motivations for trying to, to be quite unquote like a changemaker in the world? Like what is your motivation for trying to do this work and how do you get, and if it's really like once you've like tested it a little bit for yourself and like put it through the ringer and you come back to it and you're like, yep, this is still what I want to do. , then how do you start to build around that so that it actually, so that it has some more teeth to it, so that it actually has so that it makes sense in the broader context of what you're trying to do. And is that, and have you really taken a closer look at what the community wants too? That's, so those are some of the, the conversations I have with, I mean, with organizations, but also with individuals too, who are trying to go out there and figure out what their place is in the world. Carol: Yeah, and it could be, I've heard career advice framed in the, in the point of view of saying, don't think about what you wanna do, but think about what problem you wanna solve in the world. And so that could be a starting point, but at the same time, it's, what does the community want? What does the community need? What, what are their priorities? And then who's already doing work that you. Want to do and how can you get on their bandwagon first before you create your own bandwagon? Erin: Right, right. Because a lot of people come at something without really a depth of understanding. And I, I mean, and I'll say that, like for myself too, when I first started doing food systems consulting, I remember, I'd had training in that and I had been so excited to go out and like, Do something. And I worked with food pantries and things like that, and I was like, okay, well I'm gonna help. Like of course I sound like such a douche bag in younger me, what I mean? Carol: We'll forgive your younger self Erin: Okay. Yeah. We'll forgive the younger me, but I was just like I was, I did my master's degree at a time when obesity was like the big thing and I was like, oh, well we've got to like help. I have to help people who are food insecure eat better. And like nowadays I'm just like, they have to eat healthier. I'm gonna help them, access local food and things like that. And now I look back and I'm like, Oh, I just didn't understand the systems level issues that were at play here. Like, it's not that people can't access good food or, or I mean, well, yes, they can't access good food for a lot of different reasons, but it's not because they can't do it for whatever X, Y, Z. It's not because they're making that choices or they don't choices don't want to Carol: do it, which I think is somehow at times how it's framed. Erin: Exactly. It's like, oh, we actually have really. Bad policies in our, in, that are preventing people from being able to actually access food. We don't, people pay people living wages. We don't do X, Y, Z. And so it took me like a really long time to start to understand that like whenever I saw a problem on the surface, I. What do I mean? That there was a whole like iceberg below that of like reasons why that problem was presenting the way that it was, and that like, if I didn't start to understand the depth of it, I was not going to be able to like even start to make a, an impact like even the smallest impact or difference on that. And I think, and so that's why I, I, I always. I've, I've started to really understand the complexity of those kinds of things much more in depth. And I help my clients do that, and I help young people start to do that too, because I'm like, we can solve like a surface level problem, but if we start solve that surface level problem, who's to say that that's not going to give rise to a bunch of other problems down the road because we're not actually getting at the root cause of anything. Carol: Yeah. And I think that's where processes like mapping out a theory of change can, it basically helps you start mapping out that iceberg. Yeah. What are all the factors that aren't as obvious? And what are all the assumptions built in? What are the things that we're not, not seeing on the surface that could help really make a different or more impactful Strategy to, to address, to address those wider concerns. And I, I mean, I feel like there's sometimes in the sector a little bit of a false dichotomy between, we're gonna help the person in their, their, their immediate need versus the longer term policy, systemic thing. And to me, we need to do both. It doesn't have to be an either or. Some people will be drawn to one, some people will be drawn to the other. And, and both. move, move things forward. Yeah. And make, make things more positive for people. Erin: Yeah. Oh, I love those kinds of conversations we have with organizations though, like that depth of just starting to dive into it and starting to understand what is really like the thing here. Like what are we trying to do? And I'm trying to think of a good example to share that wouldn't violate confidentiality at the moment, but like cuz I really, cuz I would love to be able to illustrate some of this, but. Carol: Yeah, cuz it can be, I think that's what keeps people away from these kinds of processes cuz it sounds so esoteric and it's like, wow, we've got, we've got immediate, urgent work to do. Why would we wanna buy that? We're going through a process Erin: like this. Right, exactly. Like and kind. It's heady and it's just very, it can feel really abstract for people who like things to be a little bit more concrete. But I'll, like, I did a retreat with an organization and who works on it. Who does harm reduction work? So, helping folks literally by, handing out clean syringes and things like that and does a whole lot of other things as well. But what it boiled down to as we were doing the retreat was that, One, we had to tackle stigma, in order to be able to like, to help, like the big picture is to reduce overdose deaths, right? Like, and to give people everything that they need in order to live full, happy, meaningful lives ? And as we drill down more and more and more into that, it was like, oh, radical love. Is actually at the core of this. Mm-hmm. What do I mean? Like we actually have to figure out how to amplify radical love for everyone? And like, and I give myself goosebumps thinking about that. Like it's when you start to delve into that and it's, and of course there's like, there's like a gazillion more layers of which, that, that come as part of that framework, but , it's. Or how do I do it ? Part of it is like, how do we infuse that radical love into, into the work itself? Because that's such, that is like a key to being able to actually move forward with things. And to create and to actually transform our society and to one where we really like, where people who do use drugs are actually, they are treated as whole human beings worthy of respect and deserving of love. And so, for me, like I wanna get down to that level with my, with my organizations and like, so that we can start to say, now how do we operationalize that? How do we operationalize radical love? Because if we can start to figure out how to do that and to put that into place, then we will really be able to, to do unbelievable, amazing things. And I don't think that there's a lot of them. Like you were saying before, like for a lot of people to try to get to that place, they're just like, what is she talking about? What do I mean? Like what, what are you even talking about Erin? And some people just do not come along that journey with me always. But once if they can, and if they do, if they can stick with it long enough, they'll be able to see something really, really powerful reflected in the final product. And they will have, just by having asked those questions of themselves, they are going to be a stronger organization for that. Carol: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine how that. Could show up in so many different aspects of the organization, their culture, how they're treating each other day to day, all of that. If they're centering that, that, radical love and, and really putting that at the, at the center, then it ripples out in a, in lots of, lots of different ways. Yeah. That's powerful. Yeah, for sure. Aspirational, definitely. So in previous episodes, I've asked a random icebreaker question at the end, and I am, I'm changing things up a little bit. Going forward and just one gonna ask each guest what permission slip would they give to nonprofit leaders, or what would they invite them to consider as they work to cultivate a healthy organizational culture? So what would yours be? Either a permission slip or an invitation towards, I guess, that radical love that we're talking about. Yeah. Erin: I mean, I would want them to have a permission slip, I guess, to take the time out to really do that work, especially with their staff, with their stakeholders, to really ask themselves those kinds of questions because I think that a lot of leaders. And, their staff for sure too, like to lose sight of the mission work in the day-to-day. They go from task to task. They never pick their head up and get to look at the bigger picture, the, the, the real, the big vision that they're working towards. And so giving themselves an opportunity just to reconnect to that periodically, I think would be transformative. In so many different ways, and then figuring out how to infuse some of that magic, like into, into more of the day-to-day too. So like how do you keep that, how do you continue to keep that the reason why everybody got into this work in the first place, like alive and front and center for people. I mean, if they can do that, that'll be amazing. Carol: Yeah, so they can keep that high from the retreat, the enthusiasm and bring it and figure out ways. It can't, it can't just be a wish. You have to think about what are the different ways that you're actually going to keep bringing us back to our why. Erin: Yeah, exactly. Carol: So how can people find you and be Erin: in touch? Yeah, people can find me@allgoodstrategies.com and I also have my own podcast that you're gonna be on, Carol, I'm so excited, called Rise and Ruse Conversations for those who give a damn. And folks can, probably the easiest way to find that is to just go to Instagram and type in at Rise and Ruse. And so just follow me. I would love to be able to Yeah, connect with anybody and if you go to my website, you can find my contact information and all that jazz too. Carol: All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Erin. I really appreciated the conversation. Erin: Thank you so much too. This was a really fun opportunity and yeah, and I hope that it'll be interesting for folks. Carol: Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Erin, her full bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Cindy Rivera Grazer of 100 Ninjas for her production support. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategic planning, mapping, & audits for nonprofits and associations. We combine left-brain strategy and analysis + right-brain wisdom about human complexities for a proven, whole-brain, whole-organization process through which every stakeholder thrives. Reach out to us for support and facilitation of strategic planning, mapping your impact, auditing your services and getting an organizational assessment. We especially love working with staffed nonprofits and associations with human centered missions. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on your favorite social media platform and tag us. We appreciate you helping us get the word out. And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 75 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and Danielle Marshall discuss
Guest Bio: Danielle is an inclusive leader focused on strengthening collaboration among teams, leaders, and stakeholders to foster problem-solving, create solutions, and improve culture. She finds her inspiration in leading systemic change work that promotes equity and inclusion. Danielle founded Culture Principles in response to a persistent need to operationalize Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion metrics, centering REDI goals and creating accountability systems. She supports clients through her Mapping Equity Framework focused on Unearthing Knowledge, Elevating Strategy, and Transforming Sustainability. She centers her work around organizational assessment, racial equity learning intensives, and the development of racial equity action plans. Understanding that each organization arrives at this work from different perspectives, she utilizes assessment in building a customized strategy for each unique partner. Previously Danielle served as a non-profit leader for 20+ years and today works on strategy development that enables nonprofits to achieve equitable mission-driven results. Danielle holds a Master's degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Louisiana Tech University and draws on her background as an I/O psychologist in applying a racial equity lens to organizational policies, practices, and programs. She is a Certified Diversity Professional (CDP)/ Executive Coach (ACC). During her playtime, you can find Danielle traveling, knitting, and kayaking in all 50 states. Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Erin Allgood: It, I think, can be really liberating for organizations to see that it's not incumbent upon them to fix everything. that they actually have partners who are gonna be doing similar work and in this, and in that are on a similar journey, but aren't necessarily that their work is complementary to, to theirs. Carol Hamilton: What is a theory of change and why should you have one? Beyond the answer of well --- our funders require us to include it in our grant proposal, there are a lot of advantages to mapping out what your theory of change is for your organization. It can seem a little esoteric and a little wonky and a little academic. And what even is a theory of change? Simply put – it is a graphic or written description of how your organization’s work moves your mission and vision forward – it helps you map these pieces and show the logic of why you are doing what you are doing. With this, you can also build evaluation systems that demonstrate your impact. Like any other strategy process – the conversations you will have to get the theory of change on paper or on a virtual white board – help create a common understanding of what you are really trying to do. And the process can reveal some gaps in your program design and process. Through the process you might be aiming to do XYZ with your vision – this is the change you are trying to create in the world. And then this is what we are doing in terms of programs and services – and by talking it through as a group, you realize that your expected short term, medium term and long outcomes from your program don’t actually move you closer to your vision. Or what has to be true for those outcomes to happen – the assumptions built into your design are not realistic – there is too much of a leap in logic from one to another – and you need to build in some more steps to move people along the expected journey or pathway. And the map is not the territory! Theories of change or logic models or impact maps simplify what is rarely simple.. They are never meant to capture all the possible permutations. Each person participating in your offerings will have their own unique experience. And they live complex lives with multiple things impacting them, their behavior and decisions. The process generates insights into which program elements and intended outcomes to focus on, and can help you demonstrate how changes are unfolding for participants—beyond just reporting how many people participated. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit holistic strategy consultant. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategic planning, mapping, & audits for nonprofits and associations. On this podcast we explore how to make your organization more effective and innovative. We dig into how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers. All for this is for the purpose of creating greater mission impact. My guest today on Mission Impact is Erin Allgood. Erin and I talk about what a theory of change is and the differences between theories of change and logic models, how a theory of change can help you make decisions between the many options and directions you might go – and your many good ideas, why each organization does not have to tackle everything – deciding what is the part of the problem that you will work on and what are you really suited to focus on – and who else is working in your space whose work complements yours is so important, and how it’s not all on your shoulders to fix – even if it can feel that way sometimes. Welcome, Erin. Welcome to Mission Impact. Erin: Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Carol: So I like to start out each episode with just a question around what drew you to the work that you do. What would you describe as your motivation or your why? Erin: I love this question and I of course like to listen to a couple of previous episodes, so I knew it was coming. I have always been somebody who has cared deeply about. Writing the injustices in the world in a lot of ways. My mom will tell you that I came out of the womb of feminist and I just have carried that energy with me ever since. And I had a very circuitous path to becoming a non-profit consultant. Mainly because I went to school for biochemistry. And hopefully this will be interesting for people to hear this, but I, and then I went and actually got a degree, a master's degree in nutritional biochemistry and was just like, this is not what I wanna do with my life. I was so interested. I realized what I was actually interested in was understanding systems. I was not actually interested in either doing bench science or doing anything like that. And so I started on a journey after all of that too. One to like to figure out where I wanted to actually like, be like in the world. And I started taking some courses on food systems and I took some courses on sustainable business and so on and so forth. And that was all while I was working for a pharmaceutical company. This was back in time like the 2009, 2010 timeframe because we were in a recession and there was no other work for me, and I had all these science degrees and I could go and do that. But what it really helped me to do is sharpen that focus on things like, I could not just have a job doing something I didn't care about. So I really needed to create what I. Wanted for myself. And that's, that was really the beginning of my consulting practice. I started in food systems and then about five years ago I broadened out to really have a much broader focus on organizations that were doing, like usually have some aspect of social justice in their work. And started doing things like strategic planning, organizational development and executive coaching . There's always little things here that come, come up here and there too, that I do a little bit of a long-winded answer. Carol: Well, it's often a winding, a winding journey to get to where you are, and especially at that beginning stage of your career where you're figuring out where do I fit? What am I really interested in? realizing, well, it's actually the systems that I'm interested in and how can I bring that systems perspective. I think that I had a similar point with my first job out of college. Working for people has heard this story before, but working for a magazine that got help helped people get on talk shows and, and coming to the point of realizing I don't wanna be promoting all comers. Hmm. I wanna be aligned with the missions that I'm helping support and helping move forward. So definitely can, can relate to that. And As you said, you and I do similar work focusing on strategic planning and organization development. And. I'm, one of the things that we, we also do, both of us is help organizations map out their impact, or sometimes it's called creating a theory of change. Sometimes it's called creating a logic model. There are a variety of different terms for that. And I'm wondering if you could just describe for our listeners what a theory of change is and, Why is it important for an organization to have one? Erin: Yeah. I love developing theories of change, talking about theories of change. So I'm so excited that this is the topic we're diving into today. I think of a theory of change as being the overarching way in which an organization creates change, or it could be an individual too. I've actually created a theory of change for myself as part of my business and we're. What I think about. When I think about a theory of change, it's really starting to identify what that real big vision is for an organization and it's broader than just obviously like their specific work in the world. I like to go really, really big picture with that. And then understand as part of that, like developing the theory of change process, where the organization fits in that broader landscape of change that they, of, of whatever that is that they're trying to bring forth. And so I think a lot of times when people develop a theory of change, it's just, it's, it's much more narrowly focused. And so I have a bit of a different take on that. And then you had mentioned logic models too. And anybody that knows me, knows me that I. Deeply, deeply hate logic models. I don't know how you feel about Carol: So what do you see as the difference between a theory of change versus a logic model? Erin: I think that, like a logic model gets really down into the weeds and it's, and it, presents things in a super linear way. And it, or it, presents how you create change in a linear way. Whereas I think of a theory of change as being It's, it's not, it's never quite that linear, right? Like we know that, like we know that change doesn't happen in a super linear fashion. We know that it's iterative. We know that like things cer, like certain things build upon one another. We know that like there's oftentimes this like squiggle, of a journey to get from point A to point B with a lot of different detours off of it as well. And so the way that I look at e Theory of change is like, it's a broader framework in which an organization is. Is what, that's helping to guide an organization versus the rigidity of a logic model where it's like, oh, here's like, here's our goal, here's our, the tactic that we're gonna take, and then here's the outcome we predict, and so on and so forth. It's, and that, that's not that that's anything. There's nothing wrong with that per se. But it leaves a lot of it. I think that what it does is it forces organizations into a bit of a, into a bit of a box in which they can't, they can't allow things to develop more organically or to emerge as they go through. And so it, and it doesn't allow them to necessarily grow as they're going through, through a process. And of course, we need to be able to like, have things and outcomes that we care about and want to map to an extent. But the way that I develop like a, when I work with organizations is I usually develop an idea of what it looks like to be successful, and that's not necessarily tied to. Like a metric, like increased participation by 27% or something like that nature. So it's a lot, the theory of change that I'll create oftentimes is a bit broader in focus. It of course has different strategies associated with it. So say an organization, one of those main strategies is gonna be education. So like, I'll often help organizations identify the big vision that will obviously go through and I, and talk about the mission and the core identity, like their values and beliefs and things like that, that underpin the work that they do. And then it will start to boil down to like what are those broad strategies that they're trying to do in order to be able to get to that vision. So for instance, one of the organizations I'm working with right now, we have identified that there's two main strategies. One is Like a focus on the individuals that they are trying to help through the work that they do. And then the other way is addressing systems level harm. So it's like really doing the on the ground work versus like, how do we fix this so that this systemic, these systemic issues aren't a problem as we, five years from now. And so underneath those, there's a couple of different programs that nestle underneath those. And then, and part of the addressing systems, Level harm. Those programs are like education and advocacy as you can imagine. And then there's the more specific programmatic work towards dealing with the individual piece of that. So that gives 'em a lot of space, in order to be able to say where they want to go from here in order to. To be able to create these kinds of change and they can use that theory of change as they move forward. It's, that's not necessarily tied to, a like three to five year strategic plan that could actually be like a much longer standing a , a tool for them to be able to use moving forward. And. It's and then it's also paired with obviously much more specific kinds of goals and objectives and priorities that I would bring into, into the actual written plan itself. But it's that broader framework that allows them to really play within those bounds and to be able to have that flexibility moving forward. So they're not, they're not super. Yeah, like backed into a corner when they have this like a super rigid plan in front of them or something like that. As you can tell, I don't write super rigid plans, probably. Carol: Yeah. And I appreciate the distinction between those different, those different things and I mean, even if you get into the nitty gritty with something like a logic model, I always want to. Tell people or help, help them bring some context that the map is not the territory. A model does not, is just a model. It doesn't define reality. It can be helpful as a tool to help you have a conversation, to come to agreement around what are the assumptions that we're, we're embedding in this, what do we think is gonna happen? How can we test that? But. Yeah, there's always a danger once it gets mapped out or in a plan that people get afraid to change it. And for me that's never the, the ultimate purpose of any of these kinds of processes, but it's more, I. Can we get stuff out of people's heads onto a page so that we can all look at it together? Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm, I'm starting to work with an organization right now and it's exactly that. It's a relatively new organization. They've got, the founder has some great ideas about what they wanna do. They're doing stuff already, but they haven't had a chance to expand things. And this. By doing one of these processes, theory of change, logic model, impact map, whatever you wanna call it. I think one of the biggest benefits will be to get a lot of the stuff that's in his head in other staff, staff, people's heads, maybe in board, if the board ends up being involved and get it out so that everybody can look at it and say, do we actually agree? On this picture of what we're, what we're trying to do together. Erin: Yeah. And I think it's, I mean that's like so powerful to be able to do that and just to make sure that everybody's on the same page and it's like the cornerstone of doing strategic planning cuz you never wanna get super far into a process and then be like, oh, we're not all on the same page at all. But it's also probably hard. And you, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this like, To get people sometimes to commit, especially especially a founder or especially organizations that are just super energized about things, to picking a path. Because a lot of the time, They wanna do everything. And I'm like, we create a theory of change so that they understand that they, they got, they start to see like the, the through line between like the work that they're doing and the outcome and, and the the vision that they're trying to achieve and outcomes. But it also helps them to see things like, oh, we can't, if we do like a thousand different things, we can't actually be super effective at any of them. Carol: Yeah, I literally said this yesterday. I was like, I have yet to meet a nonprofit staff, person, leader, board member, executive director, who did not have enough ideas. Yeah. Yep. There is always an abundance of ideas, different directions, different tactics, different strategies, all to move towards the same vision. But what are the ones that you are gonna choose? What are the ones that you are really gonna deepen and get good at? What's within your core competencies and it's, it's hard to make those decisions, especially as a group, but I think that's, that's a part of what these, these kinds of processes can help with as well to, to set some priorities and refine that. And I, I appreciated what you said about the theory of change. Also being also mapping the wider context that the organization is in, because the ones that I have seen have been a little bit in a vacuum. So I'd love for you to say a little bit more about what that looks like and the benefits of doing that. Erin: Yeah. I am so grateful that you asked that question too, cuz I love talking about it. It's, I look at , I think that when. Again, that helps them to narrow some of their focus when we start to look at the broader picture and be like, well, what are, what is the lane that you're playing in this? And what is, what is also the lane that your partners are playing in? Because it should likely be a little bit different than what they're playing in. And so I think I love the tagline for this podcast, like how not to become a martyr to the cause. Because I think that a lot of people look at it like, oh, we have to do everything. We have to do everything under the sun in order to be able to like tackle X, Y, z, whatever, whatever their, their cause actually is. And it's, I think, can be really liberating for organizations to see that it's, it's not incumbent upon them to fix everything. that they actually have partners who are gonna be doing similar work and in this, and in that are on a similar journey, but aren't necessarily that their work is complementary to, to theirs. What I also think is super important about that part of things too, is I like to help organizations really understand that they're start to break up with this idea around, White supremacy culture and like how that gets like enacted within organizations, which is so much rooted in, oftentimes you see that kinda individualism, which can play out like within the internal culture of an organization or for the organization themselves too. like, oh, we're on it, on our own. We're just doing it, we're just charging forth and we're by ourselves in this. And I help them to start to break up with that idea that they have to do it all by themselves. And that they are like the center of all of that. So it's, there's a couple of different reasons why I, why I help them see that bigger picture. But a lot of it is, starting to shift this narrative around like any one organization is, is. Going to create the change that they actually do need collaboration in order to be able to bring about these things. And we're talking about wicked problems, right? Like we're these, or like, these are like things that nobody solves on their own. And to be able to even try to say that they could, develops that hero complex that I think is, so detrimental within our sector because we don't want people out there just being like, like pomp, his assholes like thinking that, that like, they're the only reason why change create, like happens. No, it actually does. It requires many, many different people working towards the same goal, coming at a, from a bunch of different angles and and we just, yeah, we don't want that to be. We wanna start to shift towards more collaboration and less of this individualism, is one of the things that I try to help organizations do. Carol: Yeah. Helping them see how they can be complementary to the other organizations that are in the same space as them. Not competing for the same ground but, but working together to, to solve the problem. As you say, they're, they're. Most of these problems that organizations are working on are huge and complex. And, and yeah, the hero is probably the positive version of Martyr. And both of them, I, I, I mean, from my point of view or, or from my experience, it's rare. and their exceptions, but it's rarely out of a sense of it's gotta be all mine. But there is this like, it's all on my shoulders feeling. And it's like, no, it's not. I. You're one person, you're one organization. You're at one time in a whole movement of people, sector, what, whatever, term you want to use, that you're part of this larger ecosystem that's working towards that vision with you. And if you can see that, you can take a deep breath, relax a little bit, and focus on what you do best. Hmm. Erin: Yeah, when I've done this work, cuz I've done theory of change obviously as part of like strategic planning processes and things like that when I've done this also with , like I've gone in and into like teach younger, students and like college students talking about things like how do we do, how do we start to shift our practices so that we can. What did I call it before? It was like conscientious consulting, I think is how I talked about it. Like how do we shift our business practices, to be more, I don't know, probably inclusive jest, et cetera, like something of that nature. But , I think what I've, what I've heard from a lot of folks when they reach out to me, they're like, oh, I just wanna do what you do in the world, and how do we, how do I do this? , and I'm like, okay, one. It's taken me a decade to get to this place. there's no, there's no quick fix, there's no silver bullet here to just kinda like do this work. And so much of what I've, how I've done this work is just so, like, it's just developed organically in a, in a way that's really unique to who I am, but it's, I think a lot of people are so, they have such an appetite to go out and, and be those kinds of change makers and they don't necessarily have. They don't have the grounding yet to understand a lot of the things we just said, like that we don't do this, that, that it's, that we do, they don't realize that they can't do it on their own. They don't realize that they can't like that it's all focused on them. So like, for instance, I've seen I've done a bunch of, I also judged a bunch of pitch competitions before. I don't know if you've done that before. It's super fun. But I just hear like these, these students who are just like coming at these things from a place where which they're so amazing, I should say that before I dive into this, but, but they're coming at it from such a narrow perspective of like, I'm gonna solve this problem, I'm gonna do it this way. And they haven't necessarily thought about it from this broader perspective of like, you're going perhaps into like a community to try to solve this problem. Does that community even exist? Want you to solve this problem? Like, or is that really the solution? That's, Carol: Is that the problem that they want you to solve? Right. Have you talked to them? Yeah. What are their perspectives? What are their priorities? Yeah. Erin: Yep. Exactly. So like part of like the theory of change for me too is just like helping them to, for like. Especially if we're, they're doing it on an individual level to kinda like to interrogate that a bit. Like where, what are your motivations for trying to, to be quite unquote like a changemaker in the world? Like what is your motivation for trying to do this work and how do you get, and if it's really like once you've like tested it a little bit for yourself and like put it through the ringer and you come back to it and you're like, yep, this is still what I want to do. , then how do you start to build around that so that it actually, so that it has some more teeth to it, so that it actually has so that it makes sense in the broader context of what you're trying to do. And is that, and have you really taken a closer look at what the community wants too? That's, so those are some of the, the conversations I have with, I mean, with organizations, but also with individuals too, who are trying to go out there and figure out what their place is in the world. Carol: Yeah, and it could be, I've heard career advice framed in the, in the point of view of saying, don't think about what you wanna do, but think about what problem you wanna solve in the world. And so that could be a starting point, but at the same time, it's, what does the community want? What does the community need? What, what are their priorities? And then who's already doing work that you. Want to do and how can you get on their bandwagon first before you create your own bandwagon? Erin: Right, right. Because a lot of people come at something without really a depth of understanding. And I, I mean, and I'll say that, like for myself too, when I first started doing food systems consulting, I remember, I'd had training in that and I had been so excited to go out and like, Do something. And I worked with food pantries and things like that, and I was like, okay, well I'm gonna help. Like of course I sound like such a douche bag in younger me, what I mean? Carol: We'll forgive your younger self Erin: Okay. Yeah. We'll forgive the younger me, but I was just like I was, I did my master's degree at a time when obesity was like the big thing and I was like, oh, well we've got to like help. I have to help people who are food insecure eat better. And like nowadays I'm just like, they have to eat healthier. I'm gonna help them, access local food and things like that. And now I look back and I'm like, Oh, I just didn't understand the systems level issues that were at play here. Like, it's not that people can't access good food or, or I mean, well, yes, they can't access good food for a lot of different reasons, but it's not because they can't do it for whatever X, Y, Z. It's not because they're making that choices or they don't choices don't want to Carol: do it, which I think is somehow at times how it's framed. Erin: Exactly. It's like, oh, we actually have really. Bad policies in our, in, that are preventing people from being able to actually access food. We don't, people pay people living wages. We don't do X, Y, Z. And so it took me like a really long time to start to understand that like whenever I saw a problem on the surface, I. What do I mean? That there was a whole like iceberg below that of like reasons why that problem was presenting the way that it was, and that like, if I didn't start to understand the depth of it, I was not going to be able to like even start to make a, an impact like even the smallest impact or difference on that. And I think, and so that's why I, I, I always. I've, I've started to really understand the complexity of those kinds of things much more in depth. And I help my clients do that, and I help young people start to do that too, because I'm like, we can solve like a surface level problem, but if we start solve that surface level problem, who's to say that that's not going to give rise to a bunch of other problems down the road because we're not actually getting at the root cause of anything. Carol: Yeah. And I think that's where processes like mapping out a theory of change can, it basically helps you start mapping out that iceberg. Yeah. What are all the factors that aren't as obvious? And what are all the assumptions built in? What are the things that we're not, not seeing on the surface that could help really make a different or more impactful Strategy to, to address, to address those wider concerns. And I, I mean, I feel like there's sometimes in the sector a little bit of a false dichotomy between, we're gonna help the person in their, their, their immediate need versus the longer term policy, systemic thing. And to me, we need to do both. It doesn't have to be an either or. Some people will be drawn to one, some people will be drawn to the other. And, and both. move, move things forward. Yeah. And make, make things more positive for people. Erin: Yeah. Oh, I love those kinds of conversations we have with organizations though, like that depth of just starting to dive into it and starting to understand what is really like the thing here. Like what are we trying to do? And I'm trying to think of a good example to share that wouldn't violate confidentiality at the moment, but like cuz I really, cuz I would love to be able to illustrate some of this, but. Carol: Yeah, cuz it can be, I think that's what keeps people away from these kinds of processes cuz it sounds so esoteric and it's like, wow, we've got, we've got immediate, urgent work to do. Why would we wanna buy that? We're going through a process Erin: like this. Right, exactly. Like and kind. It's heady and it's just very, it can feel really abstract for people who like things to be a little bit more concrete. But I'll, like, I did a retreat with an organization and who works on it. Who does harm reduction work? So, helping folks literally by, handing out clean syringes and things like that and does a whole lot of other things as well. But what it boiled down to as we were doing the retreat was that, One, we had to tackle stigma, in order to be able to like, to help, like the big picture is to reduce overdose deaths, right? Like, and to give people everything that they need in order to live full, happy, meaningful lives ? And as we drill down more and more and more into that, it was like, oh, radical love. Is actually at the core of this. Mm-hmm. What do I mean? Like we actually have to figure out how to amplify radical love for everyone? And like, and I give myself goosebumps thinking about that. Like it's when you start to delve into that and it's, and of course there's like, there's like a gazillion more layers of which, that, that come as part of that framework, but , it's. Or how do I do it ? Part of it is like, how do we infuse that radical love into, into the work itself? Because that's such, that is like a key to being able to actually move forward with things. And to create and to actually transform our society and to one where we really like, where people who do use drugs are actually, they are treated as whole human beings worthy of respect and deserving of love. And so, for me, like I wanna get down to that level with my, with my organizations and like, so that we can start to say, now how do we operationalize that? How do we operationalize radical love? Because if we can start to figure out how to do that and to put that into place, then we will really be able to, to do unbelievable, amazing things. And I don't think that there's a lot of them. Like you were saying before, like for a lot of people to try to get to that place, they're just like, what is she talking about? What do I mean? Like what, what are you even talking about Erin? And some people just do not come along that journey with me always. But once if they can, and if they do, if they can stick with it long enough, they'll be able to see something really, really powerful reflected in the final product. And they will have, just by having asked those questions of themselves, they are going to be a stronger organization for that. Carol: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine how that. Could show up in so many different aspects of the organization, their culture, how they're treating each other day to day, all of that. If they're centering that, that, radical love and, and really putting that at the, at the center, then it ripples out in a, in lots of, lots of different ways. Yeah. That's powerful. Yeah, for sure. Aspirational, definitely. So in previous episodes, I've asked a random icebreaker question at the end, and I am, I'm changing things up a little bit. Going forward and just one gonna ask each guest what permission slip would they give to nonprofit leaders, or what would they invite them to consider as they work to cultivate a healthy organizational culture? So what would yours be? Either a permission slip or an invitation towards, I guess, that radical love that we're talking about. Yeah. Erin: I mean, I would want them to have a permission slip, I guess, to take the time out to really do that work, especially with their staff, with their stakeholders, to really ask themselves those kinds of questions because I think that a lot of leaders. And, their staff for sure too, like to lose sight of the mission work in the day-to-day. They go from task to task. They never pick their head up and get to look at the bigger picture, the, the, the real, the big vision that they're working towards. And so giving themselves an opportunity just to reconnect to that periodically, I think would be transformative. In so many different ways, and then figuring out how to infuse some of that magic, like into, into more of the day-to-day too. So like how do you keep that, how do you continue to keep that the reason why everybody got into this work in the first place, like alive and front and center for people. I mean, if they can do that, that'll be amazing. Carol: Yeah, so they can keep that high from the retreat, the enthusiasm and bring it and figure out ways. It can't, it can't just be a wish. You have to think about what are the different ways that you're actually going to keep bringing us back to our why. Erin: Yeah, exactly. Carol: So how can people find you and be Erin: in touch? Yeah, people can find me@allgoodstrategies.com and I also have my own podcast that you're gonna be on, Carol, I'm so excited, called Rise and Ruse Conversations for those who give a damn. And folks can, probably the easiest way to find that is to just go to Instagram and type in at Rise and Ruse. And so just follow me. I would love to be able to Yeah, connect with anybody and if you go to my website, you can find my contact information and all that jazz too. Carol: All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Erin. I really appreciated the conversation. Erin: Thank you so much too. This was a really fun opportunity and yeah, and I hope that it'll be interesting for folks. Carol: Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Erin, her full bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Cindy Rivera Grazer of 100 Ninjas for her production support. Mission: Impact is brought to you by Grace Social Sector Consulting. Grace Social Sector brings you whole-brain strategic planning, mapping, & audits for nonprofits and associations. We combine left-brain strategy and analysis + right-brain wisdom about human complexities for a proven, whole-brain, whole-organization process through which every stakeholder thrives. Reach out to us for support and facilitation of strategic planning, mapping your impact, auditing your services and getting an organizational assessment. We especially love working with staffed nonprofits and associations with human centered missions. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on your favorite social media platform and tag us. We appreciate you helping us get the word out. And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 74 of Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and her guest, Veronica LaFemina discuss
Guest Bio: Veronica LaFemina is Founder and CEO of LaFemina & Co., an advisory firm supporting nonprofits and social impact businesses at the intersection of strategy, culture, communications, and change management. Veronica partners with organizations and their leaders to go beyond what “looks good on paper” to focus on what works well in real life. She is a leader, strategist, facilitator, trusted advisor, and certified change management professional with nearly two decades of experience as a senior executive at national U.S. nonprofit organizations and a high-impact consultant. Her work has been featured by Inc. Magazine, the Today Show, NPR, CNN, Capterra, and in news outlets nationwide. Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Carol: My guest today on Mission Impact is Veronica LaFemina. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit holistic strategy consultant. On this podcast we explore how to make your organization more effective and innovative. We dig into how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers. All of this is for the purpose of creating greater mission impact. Veronica and I talk about why big change initiatives often fail. We explore why a map of how to get from A to B may not be sufficient, why the role of a key leader visibly supporting the change is so key and why radio silence is a bad sign. In this conversation I really appreciated Veronica’s point that with a large change initiative the “launch day” is really the middle of a roll out – not an ending. And I appreciated what she said about preparing middle managers to answer questions from their staff. As a former middle manager, I can only think of a few times when leadership took the time to do that – to make sure we were as fully informed as we could be so that we could answer our staff’s questions. When you do not have answers – or your answer is I don’t know – it can undermine trust. And it really provides the opportunity for our brains as storytelling machines to go to town. Nature abhors a vacuum – and an information vacuum will be filled by speculation, rumor and other stories – then can become perceived as fact very easily. This is rarely malicious – it is just how we are wired – and in absence of information we will likely fill in the gaps with our story of what is going on to allay our anxieties about the unknown and to feel more of a sense of control and agency. And then we will likely believe our own stories – often not even realizing that it is just our thoughts and speculation about the situation. The example that Veronica uses through most of our conversation is a technology project – which on the surface can seem like a technical not an adaptive change. Yet even with a change in tools we have to change our habits and some of our ways of being. And while this example may seem more simple than the very complex changes to culture that many organizations are attempting in becoming more equitable and anti-racist, there are many parallels to the common challenges and things that get in the way. These include sustained leadership support, working to cultivate the conditions for success, recognizing what you are asking of people in what they will need to do to shift from one way of being to another, celebrating the bright spots and small wins. Welcome, Veronica. Welcome to Mission Impact. Veronica: Thanks, Carol I'm so happy to be here with you today. Carol: So I'd like to start out each podcast conversation with what drew you to the work that you do, what motivates you and what would you describe as your why? Veronica: It's a great question. I like to joke that service has been in my DNA. I sort of was born into it. A family where service and being involved in the community was always a really important part of our lives. And so whether that was through volunteering, whether that was through scouts or church or community projects. I have many fond memories of being involved in figuring out how we can help our neighbors' lives be better, what we can each do to make our community a better place. So how that's carried over in my professional life is I am very passionate about finding better ways of working so that we can ensure that folks in the nonprofit sector and the social impact world have the tools and support they need. And that we're really focused on getting to our goals, like on, on meeting the mission that we're here for. So, really mine is. A strong family basis and just some good reinforcement from the universe along the way that this is the right track to be on. I love that. Carol: When I talk to guests so often, there's something early on that, that set them on their, this, this path and for me it was probably being the younger sister of a, a person with a disability and just watching them having to navigate the world and, and how, Systems are not necessarily set up for everybody, and how can we make that better? How can we smooth the path for folks and make life more accessible, easier and and then, the same in, in the workplace. Like how, how can we get out of our own way to get further and closer to our mission? Veronica: I love that and I resonate with that a lot too. Just the idea that there's so much potential, right? There's so much opportunity. I feel like I really see the world in our sector as a place where so much is possible, and if we can remove barriers, if we can take away unnecessary restrictions, unnecessary boxes that we're putting ourselves in, there's just so. Much that is available to us in the form of human creativity, innovation, and the opportunity to solve some of the really big problems we have in our country and in our communities, in our world. So I love hearing your story too, Carol. That's really empowering and exciting. I Carol: Removing barriers and smoothing the way is top of mind because I was just listening to a Hidden Brain podcast interview where they were talking about how Rather than pushing actually removing barriers makes it easier for people to, to do behavior change whether that's at the individual level or or at the organizational level. And one of the things that you've worked a lot on is helping organizations. initiate those big change processes, which unfortunately too often don't go as planned. Don't end up with the results that people expected. I think the statistics are. I looked them up. They're pretty bad. That the, the, the guesstimate, I guess, or maybe it's based on research that 70% of change efforts fail. What do you think are some of the things that, that, that do get in the way of organizations being able to move forward, change that they're really, that they really want and yet somehow it's not sticking. Veronica: I am so passionate about this topic because I think in the social impact sector in particular, We get really excited about all of the ideas we have about a new program, a new way of working in our community that we can sort of dream and envision the impact of, but we don't always remember that in order to get there, we have to go through the process of going from where we're we are right now to that destination. So we sometimes think it's as simple as, well, if I just draw a map, we'll know how to get there. But that's not true. And so I have worked in communications and change management and strategy work for almost 20 years both as a consultant and in-house and executive leadership roles. And I remember that feeling of frustration, like, why isn't this working? We've, we've been thoughtful, we've planned well, we've done all these things, and I'm using air quotes here like that. Best practices tell you to do. Nothing was really working. Or when something was working, we couldn't always replicate it, right? The situation would change, the environment would change. And so it was tough to understand what is most effective about this. So several years ago I went and got a change management certification because I was like, well, I've been doing change work my whole life. Now I wanna know what these guys, they, these large training companies or research companies are saying. And it turns out that Prosci, which is where I got my certification, has been doing longitudinal research and why change fails for the past 25, 26 years. So it was interesting to me as a practitioner to see so much of my experience echoed in that research. One of the main reasons that change fails in organizations is the lack of a visible and engaged executive sponsor. And if people aren't familiar with that term, an executive sponsor is usually someone who's on the senior most leadership team of an organization who is charged with being like the face, the voice, the person who's gonna make it happen, right? They've got the authority and ideally the budget to make the change happen. And they may get really excited and come into the first couple meetings, kick off the project team, get everyone amped and ready to go. And then they disappear. And that lack of commitment and stamina at the executive level to stick with a change through its whole process is a leading reason why change doesn't work in organizations. So, a lot of times a board or. An executive director might think, oh, okay, we've got these five big initiatives we're gonna launch this year. we're gonna have one quarter. We'll each take about three months. We'll just brush our hands, get it done, and everyone will be working differently. And wouldn't it be nice if humans worked that way? But we just don't. So, so I often talk to leaders about the fact that if you are going to undertake a change, that could be something like, Implementing a new CRM or other technology that your team use needs to use, or something really big, like a cultural initiative where you're trying to put inclusion, diversity, equity, and access, like top of mind and as a part of how your organization works, how long are you willing to stick with that? Is it three months? Is it six months? What if that change takes 18 months? What if it takes, what if it takes three years? That is a really important question. Executive sponsors and the people who are stuck influencing executive sponsors need to be asking themselves, what stamina do I have to be present to be engaged, to be vocal? Because as soon as that person starts to disappear, staff automatically deprioritize. That change, they automatically say, well, if it's not that important and this leader is onto something new, then I need to shift my focus. I have to change my priorities to just follow them. So leaders, I sometimes call these leaders like hit and run change leaders where they may have great intentions, but they're not being honest with themselves about their capacity to stick with it, for the change, for the length of the change. Carol: What you said at the very, very beginning where you said, five in one year that just made me go, ugh. Right. Maybe not so much. When I'm first talking to potential folks to work with, asking them what else is going on. Because if they're gonna do something, around the work that I do, whether it's strategic planning or mapping out their impact or some other project, but they. Also are in the midst of doing a rebranding, or they're also in the midst of changing that CRM, which can be a big, actually a culture change. Huge. It's not gonna work to have it all going on at the same time. And Right. The leader doesn't have that same focus on what's most important. And then that signals to staff, again, to follow the leader. What are they prioritizing today? Veronica: And I, I think too it is normal and human to believe that we have the capacity to do way more than we can. And that's because when we think about our own lives even, right? We think about everything that we get done in a day, or everything that we get done in a year, and we are like, well, surely as a group of humans, we could do more. But actually it is the opposite, right? When we're crafting change in our own lives, we know the audience pretty well, right? We know how to make adjustments so that we're increasing our motivation or increasing our ability, making things easier for ourselves to do so that we'll actually do the behavior we're aiming for. But when we're working at an organizational level, even if your organization, if it's three people or if it's 30,000 people, We have to be aware of the needs that humans have when it comes to change and how we're probably not meeting them a lot of the time. When I talk to leaders, there are these concerns about, well, that takes so much longer. I have all this pressure to deliver and perform and my. My response to that is if you have a PR pressure to deliver and perform, right, whether, again, whether it's from your board, whether it's from a key donor or someone in, a community funder, things like that, then they should want you to be able to get it right. So the change sticks, right? So that we're not ticking a box Yes. Acquired new CRM. Like the, the aim of that is not that you turn the switch on for your new system. It's that the human beings who need to use it are using it effectively in making that a way of working for the organization. And I would say that's another big reason why change fails, is that organizations leaders are not clearly defining what success looks like, or they're picking the wrong measure, right? So launch day is the success check instead of, six months after launch. X percent of employees are effectively using this technology every day or every week in their lives, right? They're not really accounting for the fact that this isn't just something we bought that is gonna sit on the shelf. Like this is something that needs to be a way of working, and that takes time because as humans, we need practice. We're really great at understanding something intellectually and then never practicing it. Therefore, we're not sure if we're capable of doing that. Carol:, I mean, I, I'm thinking back to a, a project that I was on when I was inside an organization and the amount of time and energy and resources that were put into the, to the planning, the deciding what, and it was a technology project, deciding what features we were gonna have, working all of that through getting to launch date. But there was almost no thought or energy from the folks who were leading the project in. How are we gonna train people? There was a one day training, but then how are we gonna follow up a week later to say, have you actually gotten into the new CRM and have you tried this? Have you entered any data? Have you tried to run a report? Any of that thing to actually do exactly what you're talking about, or change in behavior. Because the behavior that we saw beforehand was that people would run reports and then manage everything through spreadsheets. So the information always was lost and disconnected, which is obviously the exact opposite of what having a system like that is supposed to do. But as you say, just having it doesn't create the end result unless you build the conditions for that. Veronica: Right. And presumably, so here's what I'll say. Like presumably we have a good reason for this change, right? Well, let's give ourselves the benefit of the doubt that it has been a really thoughtful conversation about introducing a new piece of technology. Or we do wanna be more inclusive and equitable as an organization. Like let's assume our hearts and our brains are relatively in the right place. Sometimes what happens is we treat these just as the projects that take us from Genesis to, okay, we did the launch day. We even did training. Check we did that and we didn't actually think about the fact that change management is the act of moving people, right? Moving people from one way of being to another, which by the way is something we all could be really great at in the social impact sector, cuz that's so much of our work outside of our orgs too. And so, again, it's really common to not have solid communication strategies and training strategies in place. Right? We. Sort of expect that we say it once or we announce to everybody at the same time, and that that will be enough and it isn't, right. There are reasons that we know we have to repeat things to supporters or donors seven or more times, right? For them to actually hear what we're saying. We know in the world of social media, like if we wanna get our organization seen, we have to keep getting out there and sharing the message and connecting and engaging in a real conversation with folks. But especially, I mean, it's always been true, but I would say especially in remote workplaces, we forget how early we need to start engaging the other humans who we are working with to ensure we're not missing something. Because when you're deep in the weeds, it's really easy to believe that you've designed this perfect solution. But you could get great intel by talking to people who are on the ground working with that system, or who are going to be really involved in carrying out that change. We don't always have that luxury, sometimes there are changes that are confidential in nature or, have to have some embargo date on them. But that doesn't mean that we can't then plan to have a, like we can't have an appropriate strategy for how we'll communicate and train in that situation. so often, right? Again, it's like, hey, we're doing this thing and then there's blow back, and executive leaders or board members are flummoxed. They don't know where that's coming from because they've just been thinking about and planning for whatever this is for six or nine months, and they're forgetting that this is brand new. To everyone else. And so we can't expect people to be open to a completely new way of doing things if we've spent very little time helping them understand why this change is needed, what we hope they'll do to help us make this happen. Getting ready to teach them what they need, creating the knowledge that's there, giving them time to practice, right? We practiced again, practice. Is something we're so good at as kids, and then we just like to leave it by the wayside in our grownup years. Some knowledge and time to practice, like you're not gonna get it perfect a week after training. None of us are that adept at a completely new system for the most part. And then also reinforcing it, right? The announcement isn't the end. It's actually a middle point milestone. Because, hey, we're flipping the switch on that thing, but it's all of the communication and conversation and, and really setting our managers, our people, managers up for success and to be the leaders we need them to be as we're having these conversations. I mean, nothing sets a change back more than a manager saying to their team, well, I don't know. This is the first I'm hearing of it too. And when that's the thing you're hearing around your org, you can bet that you're going to be doing some repair work, right? Really doing some work to recover, trust and recover enthusiasm or momentum toward whatever change you're looking to move forward. Carol: You're, what you're describing brings to mind a process that I was part of where in a volunteer organization we were going through a leadership change and I was on the committee that was looking for the next leader. And we had to keep reminding ourselves that we were in all of this. It was, there was strict confidentiality around a lot of it. Who were you talking to and all of that? But we were in all the details. We were starting to be able to see the next phase, but the rest of the group was not part of that conversation. And so they were gonna be in a totally different spot when we made the big announcement. Carol: And so what were things that we could do then? And I'm wondering if you talked about it being a middle phase. What are some of those things that organizations really need to think about if they really think about the whole arc? If the, if the launch is just the middle, then what, what's the second half? Veronica: Sure. So what I'll, what I'll first say, right? So if the first part is really thinking through how we want this change to go in the first place, getting clear about what the priorities are and what success looks like, right? So that we can then use that to lay groundwork or start having conversations. In the example you're talking about, Carol, we may not be able to say, who we're talking to or how many folks we've interviewed even, but we certainly can reinforce that the board is having conversations or hear, enough information to help folks come along and understand that this isn't something we've forgotten about. When we look at, after Flip the Switch day, right? And not every change has that launch moment. Some of them are, are, gradual and, and build and become more robust over time. But in situations where we do have a, the new tech is live today or that thing, there are a couple of really key things to prepare for. So one is that training your managers, right, your people managers, to be able to speak about the change with their teams really matters. We know from Prosci research and from other research out there that. Staff want to hear from the senior most level executive at the organization about why we're doing this change and what it means for the future of the organization. So, from the vision holder of the organization, that's who they wanna hear the big picture from. What they wanna hear from their boss is, how's this gonna change my job? What's gonna be different for me? And most managers? Have not been put through formal training programs about how to communicate effectively about change, right? Or how to just manage change on their teams. So thinking about what tools, right? And by tools I'm saying like what talking points? What emails, what kinds of Q and A documents can you provide to those managers? And then train them on, right? Have conversations with them, ideally in advance of the change so that when it's announced to the whole staff or when there's a big switch flip, they're able to immediately start having conversations with their team members about what's happening, what's expected of us, what this means Those tools can also include timelines, right? So things like for the next month there will be opportunities for training and here are the training our team needs to take. My expectation is that everyone on our team will complete their training by X date and we'll come together and share and ask questions so that way I can communicate back to whoever's developed our training about things we're still not sure about. It should include regular check-in communications. I think we have this perfectionistic mindset sometimes when we think about it as a launch and then we put out the big announcement that everything's gotta go perfectly. And again, that's an unrealistic expectation, right? What we want often is feedback or questions or concerns that people may have so we can then understand how to continue providing information or support. That will help address those needs. The worst thing that can happen when you announce a change is that you get no feedback or commentary. Because what that means is people aren't talking to you as the leader, but they sure are talking to each other on Slack channels or teams, channels or texting each other and saying, can you believe this? I can't believe they're adding one more thing to our plate. So really thinking through, not just that month after the new thing gets launched, but. What do you want to communicate six months from now? What do you hope it looks like and how can you continue to ensure that you as the leader, are showing up and talking about the continued importance of this, sharing some signs of success, showcasing folks on the team who've made great progress or doing great work with this change. So not just like the project team that launched it, but hey Carol, like came up with this fantastic new report that we're using in our. Area of the business because that was made possible by this new system, right? It unlocked opportunity and information. And so using all of that as a way to continue that forward momentum, get people engaged and motivated because even if they're motivated on day one, it's a lot harder to be motivated two months later when you haven't done your training requirements yet. So making it as easy as possible and providing those motivating factors is really important. Carol: And I love that point about engaging with the managers beforehand to help them prepare. It gives them a chance to ask their questions, have their visceral reaction to the plan if they, if they weren't aware of it before so that they can work through their emotions before they're then having to answer questions from their team. I think there's a lot that is really just taking that step, which, There, there's some steps there, right? That you lined out, but in, in a lot of ways, it's not that complicated. And could really make such a difference in people being ready. thinking about what are the waves of folks as you, as you ripple this out, I think of the The innovation there's a graph, I'll have to look it up on what it is when, when you go from the early adopters to the, to the, the laggard, the laggards are over here, but the people in the middle and there's this big gap. And oftentimes, to be able to, in an organization, bridge that gap would be to do exactly the, some of the things that you're talking about. Veronica: And I, I think too, one of the great benefits of the time we're in now is that we have seen that our organizations can change, right? There's been some extreme external pressure for that in some cases, but, organizations that were struggling for a decade prior to considering how they would make telework or work from homework figured it out in an emergency situation. And that doesn't mean you should keep working under emergency protocols, right? You have to figure out a way to make it part of your. Work going forward, but we have the capacity to change. And so giving ourselves, setting ourselves up for success by not, like purposely doing these things that make change fail is really important. I think this happens sometimes with executive leaders who, they're not ready themselves. Right. They might get pressure from the board. They might not believe in it. They might prefer their Excel spreadsheets to using a CRM that feels complicated. And so when leaders are not ready and are not willing to hold themselves accountable to doing the things that they ask everyone in the organization to do, they're like, your staff aren't missing that. People see what's happening. So being. Honest with yourself about, are you ready to do this right now? And if not, what would it take to get ready? What, what does it mean for you to be willing to learn something new? Honestly, a lot of the time now, that might mean that, that doesn't mean that, every single person is doing things the exact same way in the organization, but nothing like we're, the. The words I'm looking for, I guess, are like, nothing moves more like wildfire through an organization than like when someone is doing a workaround or someone is like, flouting the system and no one's, no one cares, right? Because then they're like, well, why am I spending all this time. Entering data this way or trying to be, trying to follow things. When, leadership, like clearly it's not a priority for them, right? So it's very, like I talk to, with leaders, I work with about the importance of our, of having a high say, do ratio, right? So if we're saying we're gonna do these things, then we actually need to follow through. Otherwise we're just like having the feel good moment of having addressed it verbally instead of it becoming a real way of life. And, Change management takes trade offs. It does, and I, a lot of leaders don't like to hear that. They wanna think, well, we can say yes to all these things and get it done. But really great change management requires that we say no to certain things, or we say not yet, or we say that comes next after this part gets done. It's now that we can't have multiple changes going on at once. But if we overcommit, if we say yes to everything, then none of it sticks. And that means a legacy for you as a leader of someone who had a lot of great ideas, but not a lot of true impact. And I believe we want a sector full of leaders who have great ideas that have great impact too. Carol: I just, it makes me think of the need to just integrate that and have it become normal. Right. No longer the thing you have to think of or the checkout list you have to look through and read to remind you how to do the thing. It just becomes the new, new normal and. And going back to that, the senior leader's sponsorship, but also commitment to a change. I mean, a lot of organizations over the last several years have spent a lot of time and energy focused on trying to build and reshape their cultures to be more inclusive. And I'm part of a collective that works on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Work and, and a couple of my colleagues were working with an organization and there were a lot of and mostly we, we were still at the leader level trying to move forward with them. And it just became clear. Not that they weren't committed, they had the, the say they had that, but there were some ways in which the organization worked and overworked chronically. That was never gonna really allow them to focus on it and do the things that they needed to do to make the changes. And so we ended up actually exiting out of the project and, and not working further with staff because we didn't want to be in the position where we'd raised expectations from staff without that leader's commitment. To really take the time, energy and, and fundamentally shift how the organization was working to make it possible to do things differently. Veronica: Well, and there's something really important what you said there, Carol, which is we have to be pretty self-aware as leaders in this space. It's hard, right? Because for many of us who've been working in social impact for a long time, there is a culture around. Well, we have to, we like to use the phrase we have to all the time, and I, as a facilitator, hate the phrase we have to, because if we're saying we have to, it means we actually don't have any idea how we're gonna do it. But we just think it's important to keep on our strategic plan list or peg board or things like that have to, is not a priority. That's a check box. And so many of these initiatives deserve. More time, more attention, more thoughtfulness. And if we can't give them that time and space, it doesn't mean that they aren't important, but it means we need to rectify some stuff to really be honest with ourselves about what we're capable of, right? Like we have a constant drive, like a constant productivity culture, right? Like, well, if I. Just do this one more thing for a client that we serve, or if I, I just push a little harder and launch this new program. Like us, we get so spun up in the busyness of it that we fail to recognize that we're actually preventing the change that we're wanting to make happen, happen. Like we're, we're working against human nature, we're working against how organizations work and that. Sets us up for some heartbreak, right? Like we, when our heart is so big that our hands cannot keep up with that, the appetite that our heart has created. We have to be, we have to be honest with ourselves about capacity. And that's, talking to leaders right now, I'm really heartened to hear more leaders, more executive directors and CEOs really thinking through, How am I gonna have this conversation with my board? How am I gonna have the conversation with them about how we are trying to do so much that none of it's gonna stick, right? Or that we're, attempting to like, grab some duct tape and rub a few pennies together and, and make something happen. But like, if your staff aren't well informed, if you aren't an organization that is practiced and changing the way you work. Everything else becomes harder, right? Your staff are the face of your organization to the community, to the folks you serve. And so like when they're not well informed, when they're not on board, when they're feeling insecure or stuck or out of the loop, that all really flows out into the work you do on the mission side. So, if you're, if you're a leader who's like, well, but we're like the mission and we've just gotta keep going. Well, right. Okay. But to do that effectively, we have to make sure that the people who power this organization know what's needed, know why we're doing it, and have the tools and information and support to do it effectively. Otherwise, it's just like a bunch of stats we throw in an annual report that don't really mean what we are, what we are hoping to accomplish with our impact. Carol: You mentioned the have to, we have to do it being a red flag for you that, that it's probably not actually gonna happen. Are there other things that you hear or people say that make you step back and say, oh, wait a second. Let's dig into that a little bit more. Oh, Veronica: One of my, I mean, again, another big reason. Change fails because we designate the wrong executive sponsor. Mm-hmm. And what it normally sounds like is something like, we really like diversity, equity and inclusion are part of our values. We strongly believe this is important. We wanna be an equity led or equity centered organization. And our employee resource group, right? Our culture committee. Our diversity committee, they're gonna lead that effort. Well, you. That employee resource group is often staffed by super enthusiastic, really smart, really incredible staff members who probably don't have positional or budget authority to do anything in the organization without the executive team being heavily involved. And so when we delegate responsibility for leading an initiative, that group can be such an essential part of helping us move forward with change. But it is. Super unfair to put that on the shoulders of staff who already are giving extra time already out of their like willingness and commitment and desire and their values. Like they wanna make this organization better. They're already doing that. And then you're saying, but we're not gonna give you any of the executive support or the budget or the authority to make any of this happen. So, when I talk to leaders and they're looking to delegate who that executive sponsorship will be like, it's someone without who may not be on the executive team. I could even be a board member. We have to have a really serious conversation about how well that board member understands the workings of the organization. Are staff willing to speak up to this person to tell them what they think won't work? Because if you can't have honest conversations, As you're crafting these changes, what you end up with is a bunch of people saying yes to things that won't work, and then you don't find it out for six plus months because they're so terrified to talk to the board about it because of how the power structures that exist between board members and staff. So I would say that's another big one I hear quite a lot. And, and the other one would be more, as we're. It's getting through it right as we've done our, our latch and, and things like that. It'll be people on the training end saying, well, we, we did the training. We gave the training on this particular topic. We put it together. It worked, but not like verifying. Not having those check-ins about, okay, but what are we testing for Exactly right. What is it that we were training to do? Are we just training someone how to generically use this platform? Or are we training them? How do we use it here? What that means for all our policies and processes, right? So when different members of the team get very pigeonholed, And while we, we did the training or I made a communications plan, instead of really thinking about it holistically, like we're working together to move this group of humans to a new way of working they are not being like, what I need right now as training or I could really use this piece of communication. It's all gotta work in an immigrated way. And so, when I hear leadership teams or teams being pretty fragmented right? Or pretty siloed from one another. That's another moment I take to say, like this is an all in thing. We've all gotta be on the same page. If we are expecting the whole organization, like if we can't be on the same page, it's super unlikely that the rest of the organization is all gonna be able to come together around this. So let's spend that time and energy now figuring out what's needed, but then also how we cross over, how we communicate, how we're gonna bring feedback back to the group. So that we can have the result we're looking for. Right. Which is a new way of working with this Carol: organization. And you bring up a whole other topic, which is The, the leadership team that is a team in name only, but I don't think we're coming to the end here, so I don't think we could open up that whole can of worms. But. Any, any, any other you've told us the main things. Let me see if I can name them out. The executive sponsor, you need one. They need commitment. Whoever you're working with needs, resources, and launch is just the middle. How are you continuing to support people as they change their behavior? What I'm thinking of would be like, how can you create it so it's more of just in time versus a one-time training? Yes, job aids are different, resources, the way that people go now they Google something and they look something up on YouTube for a three to three minute how to do whatever the thing they're looking for. So, What, what did I miss? Anything or is there one other important one that we need to name? I Veronica: would just say, a lot of it is do we have all the right resources, right? The right resources for a change include budget. So not just the budget we spent on the new CRM, but like the time, the train, additional training, the additional resources we may need to pull in to help us prepare and be ready to implement this change. And also the resources include. Really well informed managers, right? Like we, if we think about the kinds of leaders, we need those managers to be and recognize that very often they're not supported in that endeavor, then we can really think about like, how can we ensure that that is our primary thing, the thing we start with, instead of being an afterthought that comes at the end, like these people are the front line. Of ensuring this change happens. How can we surround, protect, and support them with the right tools and materials? And so, the switching from a project mindset of change to how humans change mindset of change is a really important way of considering change management in our organizations. And why change fails, like, Humans are not, waterfall Gantt charts. They just, they don't work that way. So how can, how, come on, why not, right? Like, how can we apply the right methodology, the right approach, the right tool to the right situation so that we're not left confused at the end of why things didn't work. Carol: You were talking, I also had the, what came to mind was the last part of a yoga class where you do Shavasana and you lie down so that you can integrate the practice that you've had from that previous 45 minutes or half hour. Mm-hmm. So make sure that you have that in your not project project. So at the end of every episode, I ask a, a, a random icebreaker question, so I've got one here for you. Who would you most like to sit next to on a 10 hour flight and why? Veronica: Oh, gosh, that is so, that's a really good one and so tricky, Carol. Okay, so I. I've been thinking a lot lately about Juliet Gordon Lowe, who founded the Girl Scouts and what she would think about the world we live in now and the position and like, and just space that girls and women take up and what leadership looks like today. So I think I would probably choose her because when you think about the movements that have truly grown and blossomed and continued to evolve over time, I really think the Girl Scouts are like a huge inspiration. An example of what it looks like to do the modern expression of your mission. So I would be curious, like to get her perspective on what, what it looks like, what does it look like to her now? Is this what she envisioned? How has it changed? And what, what change was she hoping to make in the world? Because I think. She didn't get to see all of this and what exists today. So the opportunity to talk with the founder of the movement that has become such an integral part of our society would be really fascinating for me. Carol: I'm sure that would be, that would be a fascinating, fascinating conversation. So what are you excited about? What's coming up for you? What's emerging in the work that you're doing? Veronica: I am really enjoying doing a lot more one-on-one work with executive leaders these days. So, as someone with a communications background and then moved into strategy work, I find myself continually moving upstream to say, how can we remove barriers?, what is it that's needed? And I'm finding that so many of the executive leaders I talk to are incredibly exhausted. They know that. Everyone's looking to them for their vision and direction, and they know it's in there, but they're struggling to get it out and to make time with the day-to-day chaos that goes into running a nonprofit a lot of times. So I'm really enjoying that one-on-one work. One-on-one work with strategic leaders, both, as a strategic advisor capacity and in coaching. And then I'm also really enjoying spending more time talking to folks like you Carol, on, on podcasts. And I've had a couple of speaking engagements coming up lately and, and some coming later in the year. So the opportunity to write and speak about these ways of improving the ways that we think and plan and work so that we're. Letting go of the stuff that's not working. We're letting go of the expectations of how things should be and instead being willing to embrace different ways, being willing to say, maybe we did that way, that way for 30 years, but I'm, I'm ready and willing to try something new. So that has been great for me and obviously I really enjoy connecting with folks on LinkedIn as well. Lots of great conversations over there that you are always such a great contributor to as well. So I love getting to exchange ideas and perspectives with folks who connect with me there. Carol: All right. Well thank you so much. I really appreciate the conversation and might have to have you back for another one about one of the other juicy topics that comes up through our LinkedIn conversations. Veronica: I'm here for it, Carol. Carol: Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Veronica, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Cindy Rivera Grazer of 100 Ninjas for her production support. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a colleague or friend. We appreciate you helping us get the word out. And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 72 of Mission: Impact, Carol and her guest, Lauren Brownstein discuss:
Guest Bio: Lauren Brownstein is the author of Be Well, Do Good: Self-Care and Renewal for Nonprofit Professionals and Other Do-Gooders. She has been working in philanthropy for more than 30 years as a fundraiser, educator, program manager, and administrator. She helps nonprofit organizations, philanthropists, and grant makers achieve their goals through PITCH, LLC, her fundraising and philanthropy consulting practice. As a reflection of her commitment to philanthropy and volunteerism, Lauren has served on the boards of several nonprofits and has volunteered extensively in the community. She was a certified foster parent before adopting a child from the foster care system. She earned a Masters in Teaching in Museum Education from the George Washington University and a Bachelors with High Distinction from the University of Virginia. She lives in the Washington, DC area. Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Lauren Brownstein. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I am Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Lauren and I talk about why it is so important for those in the nonprofit sector to take care of themselves while they are working towards their mission, the concept of passion exploitation, and the importance of professional boundaries Welcome Lauren. Welcome to Mission Impact. Lauren Brownstein: Thank you. Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm excited to have this conversation. Carol: I always start my conversations with a question around what drew you to the work that you do. What would you describe as your why or what motivates you? Lauren: That's such a big question and I'm laughing in part. Let's see. I started my career, started working I guess in 1992. And to be honest, I sort of fell into nonprofit work. I mean, it was like there's a recession and there's this job opportunity and fundraising, and I had a background in that work, but I always had been and continue to be Mission driven in both my personal life and my professional life. I remember when I was in college, I had to do a project about career choices. And I did something about PR, what it's like to be a PR professional, but mine was PR for a nonprofit. I couldn't even imagine not working in the nonprofit sector. I think what's kept me in the sector is this notion of. having a work life and a personal life that align along the same values. And I certainly don't think that's exclusive to people who work in the nonprofit sector, but I think for some folks that, we live in the DC area, there's tons of lawyers, for example, and I think for some of my friends who are lawyers, Their orientation is more like, well, this is what I do to take care of my family so that I can give back to my community, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's great if that's the way that works for you. For me, I don't wanna feel like my life is in these two different buckets. Like, this is what I do during the day just to support myself so that I can do the things I wanna do. I like having it more. Blended and, and, more of a partnership between all those areas of my life. And there are pros and cons, look, money wise and everything else, but I, I, I would say that's what drives me. Does that make any sense? Carol: Totally makes sense. And, and I, I think we, we've been living parallel lives cuz I started about the same time and my very first job out of college, I was working for. A small company that helped people get on talk shows and it was so , in the realm of PR and was working with lots of publicists for self-help books from New York. But that experience cuz it was a for-profit business of doing PR for all comers. When I moved back to the Washington area it sparked me to say, if I'm doing this, who do I wanna do it for? And so that's what prompted me to move into this sector. And , I I, I appreciate that alignment. And I also as I'm coming to the other end of my career, thinking about, a lot of people may segue into the sector at the end of their career, right? Having, having done that, Job that supports their family or whatnot and wanna give back later. But I appreciate those of us who've been in the trenches all long. Lauren: so Exactly. And sometimes I meet people, God bless, best of intentions, will say, well, I'm retiring and now I'm gonna be a grant writing consultant. having never written a grant in their life. So I think that the sector depends on some. It still needs to work on helping people understand that these are professions and that there are levels of expertise, just like in any other profession. Carol: , I would invite those folks who are thinking about that transition to come in with a little humility that they might have a little bit to learn. That it isn't just about applying everything that they knew from their corporate or, or legal or whatnot profession. Lauren: Or realizing that even if you've been very involved in a nonprofit as a volunteer or a board member, you don't really know the dirty, dirty of the inside probably. Unless you've actually been on the staff side of things, it's not gonna be the same. Being a lay leader and being a staff person are not gonna be the same. There's gonna be things that are better, but there are gonna be things that are different. Carol: Definitely lots of things that are gonna be different.. So you, you've, you've been in the, in the realm of, of fundraising for a long time and in the sector and, but you recently wrote a book Be Well, do Good Self-Care and Renewal for nonprofit professionals and other do-gooders. And since my tagline for this podcast is that it's a podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who wanna build a better world without becoming a martyr to cause Yes. When I saw it, I was like, oh my goodness, I need to talk to Lauren. So, what inspired you to write this? Lauren: Well and remind me to talk about passion exploitation. Oh, because please, your tagline reminds me of that. But in terms of the inspiration for the book, I mean, to be honest, I never really, although I write a ton for my consulting work's, one of the main things I do, I never really thought I had a book in me. I never do it for plenty of people. That's a dream and something they work on for years, it wasn't really on my radar. It wasn’t. Something I had written, written off, pun intended, but it wasn't really on my radar. As the conversations around burnout were becoming even more accelerated during the pandemic, I turned more of my attention to that. And on a personal level, I've been a student far from a master, but a student of various. Wellness practices and approaches for decades, whether that's meditation, yoga, my therapy is crafting like crocheting and, and turning everything in my home into an art project, et cetera, et cetera. So I, I. Had realized that I had been writing about this for years in my blog and in other settings and talking about it. And I had a collection of thoughts and tactics and micro steps that I had assembled over the years. And as a consultant, maybe you can relate to this too, I've both been a full-time staff person at nonprofits and been a consultant for 19 years. What makes that, it provides a unique perspective because I've seen how so many different nonprofits treat their staff, approach their work, take care of themselves, take care of others. So to make a long and rambling story short, I realized that I had the makings of a book that had evolved naturally and organically. So then I sat down to create something that looked and felt like me, and Reflected my unique perspective. I used a bunch of things I'd written over the years, but also added some additional content, particularly in the area of there's a section of the book called, whose Job is It Anyway, where I talk about how staying well and strong and resilient as a nonprofit professional should not just be on the shoulders of the individual professionals, but. Nonprofits themselves, the leadership of these organizations have a responsibility to create a culture that honors wellness. So I added some new content about that. I also added some worksheets and checklists and things like that. I do a lot of training as well in my consulting practice and my training based on I have a masters in teaching in museum education, which is very interactive. So my training is very interactive. People are talking, they're writing, they're working. So I knew I didn't wanna have a book that was just Words on a page. I wanted to create something that could be that everyone could customize for themselves, as their own personalized guidebook towards wellness. So I think that answers your question. Those are the things that moved me to do this and, and in short, realizing that. At the same time, there was this conversation bubbling up in the zeitgeist, in the nonprofit world. It was also so much a part of who I am and what I'd been talking about and thinking about for years. Carol: I mean the, the, the challenge of burnout of unhealthy cultures within organizations have, have, have been there for years. And then I think we're just amplified and. . I guess amplified by, by the pandemic and all the changes and the, multi, multiple stressors that were going on. I, I say that in the past tense as, as if it's over, but that, that hap , that have been happening. And so, and, and at the same time there's been so much conversation about that and, the, the many, many. it's in, in the news all the time around wellness and, and self care. And I feel like especially in the nonprofit sector, there's a lot of skepticism about it. How do we have time for it? And, and what, what are some of the approaches that you've found possible to really integrate into your routine or found particularly Lauren: helpful? you mean on a personal level? Just keeping myself the Carol: We start at the personal level and then we can, move from there. Lauren: I have always been good at professional boundaries. So , when I worked in organizations, for example, I left the office at. five 30 ish every day, which is pretty unusual in the DC area. But I also, when I work, work very intensively, so I'm not somebody who spends half their day hanging out at the water cooler. When I work, I really have my head down to work. On some level, there's a price to pay for that in organizations, in terms of personal relationships or whatever. Not that any of my personal relationships were bad, but it's sort of the same thing as , when women don't go out and play golf on the golf course with the CEO, there's missed opportunities. But for me it was worth it. I was just telling someone the story of when I used to work in this office . I like to, before I leave every day, clean off my desk, sort of put my papers and files and make my desk look neat cuz I didn't like coming into a messy office. And one of my colleagues said to me, you really shouldn't do that because people aren't gonna think you're busy. So I would purposefully leave a mess. And then you have to sort of step back and. What is wrong with us, is that this is the culture that we've created. So back to your original question: yes, I have always been good at boundaries. I also observe the Jewish Sabbath, which is from sundown Friday, the sundown Saturday, and I don't work then. So, That has always been a boundary that's been really helpful for me to, like, I, I know there's gonna be 24 hours when I don't work, and people who work with me know that. I just had a client the other day who asked me to do something very last minute, and I literally sent it to her at like 4 45 on Friday, something I was writing, and then she was gonna work on it over the weekend and she wrote back and said, oh, so were you available to work on this on the weekend or not until Monday? And I said not until Monday, and I didn't need to give her a big speech about why the answer was not until Monday. So I think part of it is setting some clear boundaries and knowing that if I don't do that, my work is going to suffer. I also sort of do as I say, not as I do, or that whole, like the cobbler has no shoes. I was feeling pretty overwhelmed about two weeks ago. A lot of professional and personal stuff going on, and then I said to myself, wait a minute, when's the last time I did my gratitude writing? When's the last time I sat down to work on a crocheting project? When's the last time I went for a walk in the middle of the day? And I realized that even after just one day of doing a couple of those things, not all of them, that I did feel better. Sometimes I worry that all of these practices become a big to-do list, right? And then they become a burden and a stressor. So I have to give myself permission to pick and choose. So I have figured out things over the years. Center me, calm me, make me feel good, and help give me the mental clarity that I need to do my work. And it's okay not to do all of them. Like it's okay if I just go for a walk today. It's okay for me, and not everybody has this freedom, but it's okay for me to take a 30 minute work break. and crochet because it really calms me and relaxes me and slows down my central nervous system. And if that means I work a little later in the evening, so be it. So those are a few of the, a few of the things that I do. And I also think I, I wonder if you find this too, at this point in my career, it's different from what I was earlier in my life. If I have a difficult conversation with a client or if someone critiques my work or just does something that annoys me, I'm able to separate that from who I am. What am I saying? So I think there was a time where, if I wrote a proposal for someone and then they sent it back to me and said, oh, I don't really like this. I don't really like that. Let's scratch this, let's scratch that. I would get really bent out of shape about it. Not to them, but like, the cartoon bubble over my head And, and now I just, oh, well that's my work. That's not. But that I think is, some people maybe are naturally like that, but I think that comes with time. What about you? What are your, do you have strategies around this? Carol: , I mean, one you mentioned was the, the gratitude practice, and a couple years ago I started using a, a daily planner that's, I think, I don't know, the company's like best self or something. And I've since adapted it and, and just use a blank one to, to to do the same thing. But I do always find that my days are better if I start with that. It takes. 10 minutes. . One step is just taking a look at the schedule. What have you got on setting your goals? Like what are the top three things you're gonna try to get done today, but then also what are three things that you're grateful for? And in reading your book, I appreciated that you went too much. You get much more in depth of your gratitude. Sometimes I'm just like sunshine, a really good cup of coffee and good sleep. And that's all I write. Lauren: I think you just hit my top three actually. Oh, add chocolate. Then we'd hit there. Carol: I think it's been easier to integrate some of these things since I've been outside of organizations. But even when I was working inside organizations and even early in my career, like the first 15 years of my career when I was a single mom, I mean, one of the things I would do was I was a very early bike commuter because it was a cheap form of transportation. Mm-hmm. It provided me with exercise. and it provided me with some, a little bit of alone time and like a transition from work, right? Mm-hmm. And luckily I've never had an accident since. There was no bike infrastructure at that time. Back in the nineties Lauren: I hope you were wearing a helmet at least. Carol: Oh, of course I was. Yes, I was doing that. But even then, just, just prioritizing. So for me, some form of exercise, some form of mindfulness, doing some meditation, even if it's just I take a, after my shower laying down for five minutes and just breathing. Mm-hmm. And then with a little more flexibility of being able to manage my own schedule I've just become much more mindful about different things. About what energy level I need for different activity levels, different activities, right. And trying to structure my time around that. I think there's a little bit of an illusion that when you work for yourself, you have complete control, but you don't, Lauren: no. It's like you have 10 bosses. Right, right, right. Carol: You're working with lots of people and their expectations and, and all of that. But, those are some of the things that work for me. Lauren: , what you're reminding me of also, and I wonder if you found this to be true. I don't like to talk about pandemic silver linings because the pandemic is tragic. But one change in my work life that I appreciate is I feel like per, maybe particularly in fundraising it's become a little less performative. In other words, when you talked about energy, how much energy to devote to things, you were reminding me of this. I don't feel like I have to be on as much. And I think the pandemic did that because everyone was at home on Zoom and you would hear things, like, oh, sorry, my baby's crying. My cat just jumped on me. My, there's a, someone at the door, my internet's not working. Well, whatever the case may be. I. I think that people have given each other a little more grace and don't feel like they have to put on quite as much of a show, but I, I don't know, maybe that's just my experience. Carol: I think that's definitely the case. It's just the, a little more acknowledgement that as you said at the very beginning, that you wanted your personal life and your work life to align that, that everybody has. and that they aren't as quite as neat and separate as we might have tried to pretend before. Lauren: . I was listening to a podcast yesterday. It was an interview with Natasha Leon, who's an actress, and she was saying that as she gets older, she realizes we're all just a bunch of buffoons on the bus. you get, you don't get as mad anymore when other people don't do things perfectly because we're all just a bunch of buffoons on the bus. We're all just trying to figure it out, for goodness sake. Carol: Absolutely. I remember when I was managing younger staff and, and I think coming out of the education system has become more and more and more structured and there's more and more support, scaffolding and rubrics and all these things. There was an expectation of like, well, the work world should be like that too, and I know we're, or, or what are the best practices? And , sure, you wanna learn those. You wanna learn from others and at the same time, Honestly, we're all making this up every day. We get up and, and live Let's just Lauren: get some stuff done. Oh, Carol: That's what's happening. That's all, it's a constant improv, right? I mean, that's essentially what life is. Oh Lauren: my gosh, that's such a good quote. It's constant improv. It really is. It Carol: really is. So one of the things you talked about that I'd love to go back to is the idea of passion exploitation. Lauren: Oof. I just heard this term for the first time I don't know, maybe a month ago or six weeks ago. And again, it feels like all these conversations are just in the zeitgeist right now. So, I don't know. Maybe I have good timing for the first time in my life, but it's this idea. Oh, you're working for a nonprofit, so you shouldn't mind if you're not paid well, you're working for a nonprofit, so you shouldn't mind if you're, overworked and you don't have enough staff people to do this job that you've been told to do, and the expectations are really unfair, and you haven't taken a day off in a month. You are getting to live your passion, so you shouldn't mind about these things. The broken Carol: chair, the computer, that doesn't work Lauren: a hundred percent and it is so exploitative and manipulative and I think people are pushing back. But I do, as much as I, as a Gen Xer, have issues with millennials, and, and younger, I think they are the ones who are standing up and saying, Uhuh, that's, this is not okay. Carol: I'd have to give it to my, my daughter's generation and, and my nieces and nephew's, generation Millennials and, and gen Z . Gen Z of . We're not, we're not gonna take this anymore Lauren: and appreciate, and the words of Quiet was that Quiet Riot or Twisted Sister. We're not gonna take this anymore. And there's just. Patience for this stuff. And I think that as people become more aware of systemic inequities, particularly over the last couple of years with the Black Lives Matters movement, even #MeToo, to a degree, there's also a recognition of. How much of that nonsense is tied up in systemic inequities and people who have always had to fight these battles of, of, of exploit. We understand more about what exploitation is and the forms, the insidious sort of gaslighting forms that it can take. Carol: I feel like I'm seeing that across many, many helping professions. there's so many pieces of systemic inequity that are built into how all of those systems work. Mm-hmm. Whether it's teachers or nurses, social workers, folks in the nonprofit sector the expectation that because you're helping people and because there's that inherent What is the word I'm looking for? Not validation, but gratification. She'll feel good about it. . . That, that, that you also then don't actually need to be paid. We only need to pay the people whose life, whose work is. Sucking the life outta them. Lauren:. Right. And I think that's really backwards. Yes. I write about this in the book too, that, yes, when you decide to work in nonprofits, I mean there's an understanding you're gonna make less money than some other people, but there's, there should not be an implicit understanding that you can't pay your kids' tuition, you can't go on a vacation, you can't buy a cute pair of shoes or get a massage. You should be able, you certainly should be able to do the basics and you should be able to do a little more than the basics, particularly if you've been in this, in your career path for a while. I think where people get a little annoyed maybe with some younger generations is when they ex, when they expect this stuff without putting in the time. I once read something about sort of millennials versus Gen X, which is me and maybe you that there is this assumption around. More vacation time, job titles, things like that. The Gen Xers in this study had more expectation around having to earn that over, bec through work result time, whatever the case may be. Whereas millennials maybe came in with more of that expectation. But in any event, You shouldn't have to give up a good life to work for a good cause. Right. And I also, something else I write about in the book is that I think the donors should care about this because if donors are supporting a nonprofit, and that nonprofit is churning through workers. The workers are overwhelmed, stressed out, quitting, quiet, quitting. Another term I heard recently was, I think it was minimum effort Monday or something like that. If this is what's going on at the nonprofits you're supporting, you should be concerned about that. And I think as organizations, I think organizations can't really say that they're being the most responsible steward. of donors' funds if they're not taking care of their staff, because by taking STA care of the staff, they are maximizing those donations. Carol: . It really goes to that overhead myth. An organization is more effective if. almost all of its funds are going directly into program, not recognizing what it actually takes to create the and support those programs Lauren:.I've seen that turnaround somewhat in among foundations over the last decade or so. I don't know about that turnaround, I don't know if it's happening among individuals. I was having a conversation with a foundation officer just yesterday. And they were telling me about an organization. I don't know anything about them. I'm not endorsing them. I've never spoken to them, but I think it's called Fund the People. And it's about spreading this message of making sure you're investing in the staff because the staff are the ones who are making it happen. Carol: . We talked about our individual approaches to self-care and, and prioritizing that. But as you mentioned at the beginning, it's not just the job of the individual, even though in. Us individualistic culture, we often have the solutions trickle down to the poor individual to take care of it all. But , I, I've heard it framed as organizations need to, there's personal boundaries that you need to set, but then organizations need to set what this personnel find their, their name called guardrails that That support those personal boundaries so that it is the norm that you're not working over the weekend or that, There's not an expectation that you're answering emails after hours or, those kinds of things, or that, the organization is investing in people's skill building, professional development taking time together to do learning and, and reflection. Lauren: . To be honest with you, I haven't seen a lot of nonprofits that do that. Well, I'd love to hear about more of them that do that. Well, one thing I think I say in the book is, Fri, it's not just Friday yoga. Like it's not enough to just slap Friday Yoga into the schedule and say, well, we're done with wellness. Not that Friday. Yoga isn't great. I love Friday Yoga, and I'm just picking on Friday yoga at the moment. But the idea is it has to be, Part of the culture. I think that the leadership, the C-suite, however your organization is organized, has to lead the way on that, as does the board. So the C-Suite has to be committed to not. Working on the weekends also. And that's not easy for a lot of people at that level. And sometimes it's not realistic. It's sort of a chicken of the egg. Like I don't have enough people on staff to not work on the weekends, but I wanna not work on the weekends, so my staff doesn't feel like they have to do that. So I understand that it's easier said than done. One thing I also talk about in the book is, and I guess it's related to the passion exploitation piece too. When you're working at a nonprofit, sometimes you can feel pretty far removed from the actual work depending on what your job is. And you need to stay connected to the cause, the work, the clients, the people. So for example, when I worked at the Holocaust Museum, People the US Holocaust Memorial Museum here in DC people used to say to me, oh gosh, isn't it a hard place to work? It must be so hard. And I would say, it's an office. We talk about recipes and share about our weekends. I'm not, my desk is not in the middle of the permanent exhibition. And, and so we worked in a separate office building than the museum, and sometimes it did feel disconnected, so I started volunteering as a tour guide at the museum. There are certain groups, like school groups and, and police groups that would get tours and it, I didn't have to take time. I didn't have to make up the time with my job. I did it. I wanna say I gave tours maybe twice a month or something, but it was during my workday and there was no problem with that. I think that was a good example. So for example, I think if, let's say a nonprofit is some sort of environmental group, I don't think it's enough for the executive director to say, To staff. Oh . You should make the time, like once a month to go and see this watershed that we're working on. It's really inspiring. No, the director and the COO or whatever should be doing that on the regular. They should be making time in the regular workday for the staff to go do that. They should be facilitating it. Carol: There's so many benefits of that. It's not only, if you do it together it's not only reconnecting or connecting people really directly to the mission, but , it can also serve as, as team building it. it gets people. Interacting in a different way. maybe bringing some cross-functional groups together to do something like that. But I think that modeling is so important. So, I mean, I think Friday, Friday yoga or Wednesday Lunch yoga is a great place to start. . As long as when , there was one organization where I was working where they did have that and they collaborated with a couple different organizations in the same building to sponsor it. So staff from all sorts of different groups were coming down, and doing it. But every once in a while you'd, you'd come back and, Have to go to the bathroom to change out of your yoga clothes. And then Right. The, senior leader would look at you like, where have few been? And I'm like, okay, that's not healthy Lauren:. Oh, I thought you were gonna talk about how you don't want your colleagues to see you in yoga pants, which I also completely understand. Well, there is that , not you particular, I mean, anybody, I. Gym is in the office. I don't want anyone to see me showering, after I go to the gym with colleagues. And you remind me of another point that makes this I think, I hate to say it makes it tricky cuz I don't wanna make it sound harder than it is. But it's something to keep in mind. For some people the last thing they wanna do is yoga with a colleague, the last thing they wanna do is participate in a brown bag. Lunch. Lunch is their sacred time. They want to eat quietly at their desk and read their book and that's okay. So there has to be some flexibility. and understanding that what fills up one person drains another person. And, either it needs to be okay for people to participate, not participate, or participate in a way that makes sense for them, and that feels good for them. Carol: , for sure. And, and, but as, as you said, it's also important to . I think that the the place where people get frustrated when they see these, top 10 lists of the things to do for self-care and, and, the eye roll start is one more thing to do, one more thing to do, or, or the creating the impression that that, that this is easy and it isn't. But I think the investment and the intention around it can really pay off in a. really important ways. . For the overall effectiveness and mission of the organization. Lauren: . I mean, my hope is with the book and just in general, that even if it doesn't feel easy to figure out how to start doing these things or to get in the habit of making time for it, it can still be done with ease. , that it doesn't feel like a burden and something else you have to do. It doesn't feel like a struggle. And what you are doing to feel. If it doesn't feel like you can do it with ease, I would suggest that maybe you could find something else. Carol: , and I think that's an important one because it's not something that is much valued in our culture. I feel like the first time I've even. interacted with the notion of having ease in, in, in anything was was in doing. And I'm not, like, people would not look at me and say, oh, I, I'll bet she does yoga. No, yoga or, or meditation where that sense of just giving yourself grace and, and, and not pushing, not you. Jane Fonda approach to . . Exercise . . . But approaching things with ease. Lauren: , . Ease. What's that? I mean, we're not, we're not conditioned to believe that that's okay. And also it gets back to nonprofit culture. ? I think there's this notion of, it's, it's really like the passion exploitation conversation. Like it shouldn't be easy. I mean, you are working on really difficult things. I'm not. That you don't work hard at whatever you're doing, but can you find a sense of ease in what you're doing, whether it's a wellness practice or just work in general? Like it, it doesn't have to be, and it shouldn't have to be torturous, and we shouldn't have a culture where we're saying, if you're not running yourself into the ground, you're not doing it right. If your desk doesn't look messy, you're not doing it right. I mean, that's the culture we need to have. Carol: , absolutely. Well, at the end of each episode, I like to play a game where I ask one random icebreaker question from a box of icebreaker questions that I have. So you literally have a box right there. I literally have a box. Yep. I love it. So what important truth do very people very few people agree with you on what, what would be an important truth that few people agree with Lauren: you? Orange juice is gross. I don't like pulp . Nobody agrees with me on that. I know it's very un-American to not like orange juice. But what can I tell you? I don't. What is something more important or valuable that other people don't agree with me on? Oh my gosh. It's hard for me to think of something cuz I unfortunately surround myself with a lot of people who tend to agree with my general outlook on life. what? I love crappy tv. I love reality tv. I love watching The Real Housewives and seeing those dingbats argue with each other about stupid. Makes me feel better about my problems, and I think some people say, oh, just rot your brain. It's the worst. You should throw your TV out the window. God, I, I just, I love it. I really do. I love it. And that is okay, and I should not have to feel ashamed about that. And I, it's also, I can love the Real Housewives and all that other junk, and I can still read really great books and go to museums and do beautiful things. In fact, my daughter and I are bringing this new show. It's not new, new to us right now called Married At First Sight. Like on some level after I watch it, I feel like I have to take a shower. Like it's unbelievable that we're watching this show, but there is something about just looking at it and, and it prompts conversations between me and my daughter. And so much of it is silly and cringey. And if that releases me from my day-to-day worries, then so be it. Carol: , it gives you a, gives you a little sense of ease, I would say. . And, and that idea that, I mean, especially in DC we can take ourselves way too seriously. So, no, no. The idea that highbrow and lowbrow culture can, can coexist in one person. I love that Lauren:. Oh, I love me some lowbrow. Love it. Carol: So what's coming up in your work? What's emerging? Lauren: Good stuff actually. I've been asked to do a bunch of training virtually with some, virtually some in person. But, the pandemic really opened a lot of virtual opportunities for me, so that's good. And talking about the book, doing some interviews around that and just lots of writing, which I love. I love doing the writing, whether it's grant writing or case statement writing or just, general. Organizational writing needs. I love all of that. So that's the latest, really. Carol: Well, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Lauren: Thank you. I loved our conversation. I'm so grateful that you invited me and included me among all your great guests. So thanks so much. Carol: I appreciated Lauren’s point around self care and wellness not just being the responsibility of the individual staff person or volunteer – it is on the organization and the organization’s leadership to create a culture that values wellness. And this can be such a challenge because it is often leaders who are modeling over work and always being on. And even if they are setting up policies to support wellness and are saying to staff – take care of yourselves. If leadership does not do it themselves, all that is for naught. We explore this dynamic from multiple angles in my two part episode series on creating healthy organizational cultures – episodes 62 and 63. I also appreciated Lauren’s explanation of the concept of passion exploitation. That we should feel lucky to work in a sector where we get to work towards our passion – where as Lauren described – her values in her personal life and work life can align. [And that] because of that we should be willing to put up with low pay, poor working conditions, and unreasonable expectations. The broken office chair and hand me down computers. Thinking about this dynamic and the fact that 75% of nonprofit workers are women. There are so many assumptions built into the sector that start with its origins. Many helping professions started with the wives of middle class and wealthy men who wanted to contribute outside the home – yet did not need to be comparably compensated for their labor since their material needs were already taken care of. This was never fully the case as Dr. Orletta Caldwell pointed out on our last episode – episode 71 – but I do believe it informs structures and assumptions that got built into the beginnings that we are still living with today. Another precursor could also be the vow of poverty many in religious orders that served the poor made as part of their religious life. The cultural assumption that money is somehow immoral and to do go, you cannot include money colors our current struggles around paying people living wages and more, in the sector. Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Lauren Brownstein, her full bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Cindy Riveria Graze of 100 Ninjas for her production support. And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. We want to hear from you! Take a minute to give us feedback or ask a question at missionimpactpodcast.com/feedback. And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 70 of Mission: Impact, Carol goes solo to discuss:
Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Carol Hamilton: Welcome to episode 70 of the Mission Impact Podcast. To mark this milestone. I'm going solo. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I'm Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. Today I'm gonna talk about my favorite topic, strategic planning. It is the main thing that I do with organizations, and I often go on other people's podcasts to talk about it, but I don't always talk about it. So one thing I'd like to start with are what are the guiding principles that really undergird the way that I approach strategic planning? The first is being collaborative. I really am looking for a way to help organizations create a shared understanding by bringing all of their stakeholders together in a meaningful way that brings their input, brings their voice into the process, and then enables a smaller group, usually the staff and board to collaborate to define what the organization's future is going to be. And that starts by, usually by looking back, taking stock of where you are currently, and then looking forward a couple years and saying, okay, given that our North star, our mission and our vision for what's different, what we want to be different in the world is this, what are the things that we need to focus on over the next couple years and put our energy towards, to move us closer to that? I also take a strengths-based approach where I'm not looking to come in and assess them on all the things they're doing wrong that naturally will come up in the conversations. People will have ideas about what could be strengthened, areas for improvement, but really helping people recognize the strengths that they have as an organization. What are the resources that they're building from? , Makes it a much more joyful and fun process, , to build on those strengths rather than only being focused on what needs to be fixed or what needs what, what, , needs to be addressed and through that participatory process. In addition to integrating that participation, I also want to focus on how we are bringing an equity lens? How are we integrating the kind, the, the notion of equity into every step of the process? And with that, also bringing a cultural humility. There's a lot of talk about people building cultural competence, but I really appreciate the concept of cultural humility more. I think there's certainly some basic competence that people can build, but you're always, there's always gonna be blind spots. There's always gonna be things that you don't know about a different culture, a different, whether it's at the, different individual. The organizational culture, the cultural context that organization is working with, the different cultures that are represented within the groups. And then with that equity lens, really making sure that, who's being represented in all of that, the gathering of information and the participation. Create space for folks who don't have as much power, may not feel as comfortable speaking up to feel safe, feel so, feel safer in contributing their perspective, , into the process. And building on that, I do wanna talk about a couple different misconceptions that I think people have about strategic planning. And a few things that I've seen organizations get. Might be able to do better with, since I just talked about being strength-based, I was talking about getting wrong, but what they might, , think about or think about differently when they approach planning. And I think one of those major misconceptions, or maybe it's not even a misconception, maybe it was the conventional wisdom, some 10, 20, 30 years ago and, and is still in parts of the sector that the. The board or the leadership team and the leadership team and the board is quite unquote the head of the organization. That's where strategy lives and I really see it as a partnership with the stakeholders of the organization. Definitely a partnership between board and staff to decide on what the future of the organization's gonna look like. And that just because you sit at the board table, just because you are part of a leadership team, Anoint you somehow with a more strategic capacity than someone who works directly, at the front lines of your organization is more of an individual contributor. I really believe fundamentally that everyone can contribute to that bigger picture. It may take some structure and some guided conversations, cuz I think it's not the natural place. Most people don't. naturally are in that strategic thinking mode, but you can bring people there through a series of guided conversations, which is the whole purpose of a strategic planning process and what a consultant can bring, to help people step into that strategic space and think longer term, bigger picture. Fundamentally, when people have a part in creating the thing, they're much more likely to want to help move it forward. So that is essentially how you build buy-in. You build buy-in by having people at the table with you to create the plan. And then I think a big reason that folks choose not to do a strategic plan is that they may have been part of a process in the past that took a long time, took a lot of resources, and then was just a plan on the shelf. Or perhaps today, more likely hidden in some folder on the computer and wasn't referenced again. It was, where's that Dropbox link to that document? , and nobody has it anymore, and, and it's not integrated into people's day-to-day work. And I did a workshop recently on strategic planning and I really appreciated some of the simple steps that participants talked about to mitigate this concern of how do we really integrate the plan into our work? How do we implement, how do we do that failure to operationalize a plan is, is, can be just the biggest sticking point to many plans. And I think the first is probably the simplest, just having regular meetings about your progress on the plan. And there are a number of ways that that could, that could show up. It could be a meeting specifically about the plan. It could be, an item on a, an agenda, , on at your regular meetings every, at a certain cadence. Maybe it's once a month, maybe it's not every, every. Meeting, but, but, at a, at a certain cadence that you agree on that makes sense for your organization. And then, another suggestion that I thought was so important is, taking the time to celebrate, celebrate Progress, and celebrate those small wins. We're such an action oriented culture. We're such a move on to the next culture that we forget to take a breath and pat ourselves on the back and say, Look, we did this thing, we checked this thing off the list. We've moved this, this, we've moved a little closer to this milestone. and let's celebrate in some way. I mean, the simplest way that I do this on a daily basis is that at the end of the day, the beginning of the day, I write a to-do list. At the end of the day, I write a to-do list. What did I do? And for those implementations, really thinking about that, you've got your bigger plan, but thinking about, creating an implementation plan that's really with a shorter timeframe. your bigger picture plan, maybe at a three to five year timeframe. Three to five big goals that you're working towards, but then your implementation plan is either in three or six months or a year, whatever makes sense for your organization. That really goes into who will do what by when. And I would add it's not just about measuring progress, it's also about having the time and space to consider what the goal means for the organizations. What are the implications? How are we interpreting? What adjustments do we make? And there are four key questions when you put that thing on the agenda, when you put strategic planning on the agenda, or you wanna have a check-in meeting. Four key questions that I would offer you to use to frame that meeting would be, what have we done that we meant to do? In other words, what can we check off the list? What, what progress have we made? What were things that we did that we did not plan to do, but we did and it had good results. The world is constantly changing and shifting. A new opportunity may have popped up. You took action on it. Celebrate that. What did we plan to do? But we don't need to do it anymore. Things have shifted. We recognize that it doesn't, it no longer fits today's realities. What can we let go of? And is there anything we need to add to our plan given today's new realities? At each point we're saying, okay, where were we? Where have we come? What's our current state? Where do we want to go and all the steps on where we want to go. Are they still fitting our current assessment of today's reality? And so those action steps that you may, may have set a year ago at that retreat, probably that's the part that's gonna get updated, on a continual basis because it will recognize that progress. It will adjust to the new reality. And you'll have that living docent that we so often talk about and so infrequently actually implement. Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me. You can find the full transcript of this episode as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/show notes. And I'd like to thank Isabelle Strauss Riggs for her support in editing and production, as well as Cindy Rivera Grazer of a hundred Ninjas for her production. And I would love it if you would take a minute or two to rate and review mission impact on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps other people find the podcast and we definitely really appreciate it. And until next time, thank you for everything you do to contribute and make an impact. ![]() In episode 69 of Mission: Impact, Carol and her guest, Jeanne Bell discuss:
Guest Bio: Jeanne Bell is co-founder of JustOrg Design. She has consulted on nonprofit strategy and organizational change for over 20 years. Jeanne curates Nonprofit Quarterly's Leading Edge Program, recruiting and presenting nonprofit practitioners advancing more equitable nonprofit leadership practices. Previously, Jeanne led CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, one of the country's premier leadership and capacity-building organizations. While serving as CEO, Jeanne also chaired the board of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management, a national association of nonprofit capacity builders and academics. She currently serves on the boards of Community Works and Borealis Philanthropy. She has a Masters in Nonprofit Management from the University of San Francisco. Jeanne loves living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Important Links and Resources:
Transcript: Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission Impact is Jeanne Bell. Mission Impact is the podcast for progressive nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause. I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning consultant. On this podcast we explore how to make your organization more effective and innovative. We dig into how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers. All for this is for the purpose of creating greater mission impact. Jeanne and I talk about how to integrate strategy and strategy implementation effectively into the structure of your organization. We explore how organizational systems, leadership, and structures can support or get in the way of implementing a strategy, why strategy isn’t just about what the organization does externally, and why having crisp and clear strategies help you be more agile, not less. Welcome, Jean. Welcome to Mission Impact. Jeanne Bell: Thank you. It's so great to be here. Carol: I'd like to start out all my interviews with a question around what drew you to the work that you do. What would you say motivates you and what, what's your why? Jeanne: My experience is that my why becomes clearer and clearer the older I get and the, and the early connections I can make to why that why was formed and how it was formed. I think I'm more conscious of them now in terms of the effect of my parents and the effect of growing up in San Francisco and the effect of doing a lot. Like class travel across class and different parts of my youth journey that I don't think I would've initially in my twenties or thirties associated with my why or my how, but now I do. But, I think the short answer is I, I grew up in a Jesuit tradition, my dad was in that. He obviously left, but was a teacher around a lot of teachers and, and around liberal arts. And by the time I got to Cal, I majored in ethnic studies and so there was something pulling me towards a justice lens and I immediately entered the nonprofit sector after college. And it just sort of organically unfolded from there. But I think the combination of growing up and growing up around. I don't wanna overstate it. I've had to unlearn a lot and learn a lot more, but, generally a justice orientation and a lot around education and teaching. And so I quickly found my way through nonprofits to capacity building and leadership development, which really feeds me. And now I do that pretty much exclusively in a justice framework. Carol: Moving into that capacity building realm. if you then have the opportunity to combine that perspective of justice. And as you said, we're all having to unlearn a lot of things, a lot of unpack, a lot of assumptions that we might have come up with, but it enables you to combine that with that education perspective and helping people build their skills and their capacity to that ripple effect that that can have. Jeanne: Exactly. I'm just, innately interested in organizational systems and processes and leadership and I'm committed to the end cause, but what feeds me in the day-to-day is helping the people who are working towards that. Carol: That was for me an interesting thing that I had to realize that, cuz so many people are coming into the sector, it's because they're really passionate about a particular cause.. And what I started to learn over time was that a lot of what interested me was. What helps people be more effective as they try to work towards that? All the things that go into making an organization work well, making a group work well together. How they're creating their strategy, how they're creating, how they're making, doing decision making, all those kinds of things. And unfortunately, probably more from all the ways in which I saw it not working, yeah, that spurred a curiosity around. Jeanne: Yeah, and I think what's especially exciting and also challenging now is that I think there's much more recognition, or at least there's a school of thought of which I'm a part, that the what we practice inside organizations really matters and that it's, it's difficult to be credible or even necessarily effective if we can't practice what it is that we're advocating for externally. So I think that. Mandate to leadership, development and capacity building, I think has emerged more crisply in the last, say 10 years or so, changed our work as leaders and capacity builders because the wall between the inside and the outside came down and, and the organization as a laboratory for personal practice, for interpersonal practice, for exploring how we can do the work differently and more consistently with our quote unquote external values and strategies. I raised the bar for all of us. Carol: That's exactly where that rub between the mission organizations that I worked for that had really ambitious and, and wonderful missions for what they wanted, the change they wanted to see out there. But then we were not at all practicing those things internally or even sometimes the exact opposite. And, the disconnect between those two is what led me down the path that I've been on for sure. I'm curious to hear from you how you're seeing those two, those two perspectives come together a little bit more. Jeanne: I've been thinking a lot in my work with clients, which includes a lot of work on strategy development. That kind of, the distinction between internal practice and external strategy is, is less and less sharp. And what I've been, honestly, I, what I've been encouraging my clients to do is not worry about that distinction and actually embrace that again, our internal practices should at least be in a through line to our external strategies, if not pretty much part and parcel of the same. I've been integrating different schools or different practices. I think people in our sector, particularly in the social justice space, really emphasize personal practice, the way in. I, I, I borrow from that and I agree with that, and I think it's important to have very crisp and clear-eyed, quote unquote, external strategies that understand the larger ecosystem and the financial resources and all those pieces. I, I pretty much call it all strategy and I think it's okay to have a list of organizational strategies, core strategies, whatever, 4, 6, 8 of 'em, where some of them may appear a little bit more internal or more about how we work. Internally, but to me, the likelihood that you're gonna be able to execute one of those bold external strategies without that internal practice is very low. So I'm not that interested anymore in sorting them out, but in looking at them as a set of strategies that, are interconnected and that make or interdependent, and make each other possible, Carol: I'm thinking about all the processes that I've supported over the last couple years and The goals, strategies, initiative, whatever you wanna call them that emerged as the big areas to pay attention to and put focus or put energy into for the organization. They were a combination of something that moved the mission forward in a specific way. depending on where the organization was or what was happening and maybe it's lifecycle stage or whatnot. There might be more on the internal that they needed to really take care of To be able to be effective externally and sometimes, other way or an, even balance. But definitely it's interesting that you're saying traditionally there's, there's been a, and I, and I did get a question recently around that from a client. I guess I didn't realize where it came from, of this notion that strategy has to be all for the outside and well, no. to me at least, it's what are you paying attention to? What are you putting energy into? I mean, there's been a lot of shift towards the notion of emergent strategy. And, and, and sometimes I feel like that ends up being an excuse to just throw all strategy discussions out the window and say, well, we just can't do that. Mm-hmm. and I feel like there's some middle ground between. This is the document that we created. We can never change it once. It's, once we vote on it and, and, and agree that this is where we're going, this is the map. And, and there's no, I mean, even when you use a G P s it, and you take a wrong turn, it tells you to, it's recalculating like that should be built in or no framework at all. And I'm curious about what you've been experiencing. Jeanne: I appreciate that a lot. And I think there is a little bit of recognition in the sector. Again, I tend to work more with organizations, even if they're service organizations who have some sort of change orientation. So I don't wanna blanket the whole sector. But I think there is some recognition that we do need to be crisp. I think the external environment, I mean, we, we can no longer keep talking about, Oh, this is particularly complex or particularly challenging, whether it's the loss of the Supreme Court or whatever. It just keeps happening, right? And so I, I think we, we recognize, or I'm seeing people recognize that actually strategy. is extremely important and, and understanding what we're trying to do to quote unquote win again, even if that's in service, right? Because service is also political. I think. I mean, taking care of people that have been structurally marginalized is, in my view, a political act, right? We can do that in a way that is quite neutral, or we can do that in a way. Cognizant of how it's connected to all the systems and structures. So I'm, I don't mean to only be talking about advocacy organizations, but I, I think in this context, we have to be clear-eyed that certain kinds of strategies have not worked. To me that means being clear on what you're attempting to do. I love your language around what we're paying attention to. That might sound soft to some people. I don't hear it as soft. I hear that as, This is the combination of ecosystem issues, cultural issues, whatever, whatever we're working on that we have to be so on top of in order to choose our four or five working strategies, they're adaptable. Of course they're agile, of course, they turn up and down. But I think the crispness is very important. And, and really what's there to be agile about if you're not crisp, right? I mean, there's nothing to even know that you're changing or testing if you don't define something. Right. Carol: Can you give me an example? So cuz we're, we're talking a bit, right. High level here. I'm, I'm curious if you could, give an example or a story that might bring that to. Jeanne: I’m thinking about and I don't wanna disclose, individual clients, but, but what I'm thinking about is, actually the Supreme Court is a great example, if you were in an organization that was thinking of the, classic legal approach to social change, You have had to think differently about that. if the Supreme Court was, was part of the solution, if getting things up to that level and changed that way was part of your solution. And I do have a client in that space. We're in a different environment, for quite some time now, potentially. And so that's what I mean about, that strategy has to now be unpacked and, and reconceived of in a very crisp way, it can't just be, we'll wait and see what happens here. This is a different environment and, and what does our legal work, what does our advocacy work mean in this context? And what I find is that, Not just that example, but what I find is that what's happening is that we're in a larger context of systems and structures not delivering the way we historically thought they would or were. Right. And so that's an example to me of a macro issue that should be affecting the way nonprofits craft strategy. That's an example of something that to continue on as if that's not the macro context would be an example to me of weak strategy.. Carol: And you've used the word crisp several times. Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by that Jeanne: is, is specific, right? I think a lot of times, again, strategy is written in very sort of neutral, ? Positive terms. And I think what, what I'm suggesting is that strategy actually has to be responsive and specific to the operating context, right? It has to be specific to the political reality, to our internal capacity, reality, to the financial realities, right? So I get excited more about strategies that are very specific to our environment, our capacities, our resources, right? Rather than just sort of global statements of. Right. Aspiration. Carol: I think there's, there's room for both, right? But labeling, which, normally I don't try to get caught up on, on what we're labeling each thing, but, but just working with a, a client recently where, for each of their strategic pillars we, we had them do a, a vision statement, which was that, what, what do we, if we succeeded, what would the world look like? Sure. And, acknowledging we. you may never get there.. But then that, that at least says where we're aiming towards and then being able to get specific and more in the here and now of what we need to do, over the next couple years to, to get closer to what we've envisioned. Jeanne: There are some things that, that, people who. in the more sort of radical part of social change are starting to open their minds to I would use abolition as an example,? Even if you are not an abolitionist organization, the work that's happened over the last 10 years and the continued violence perpetrated by police, even if you're not in the criminal justice reform space, I would argue that something like. That widening out and that that questioning of systems, that that's affecting you if you're in domestic violence, if you're in housing, if you're in, it's gotta be starting to sort of seep in that are working assumptions about these systems and structures may not be where we're gonna be as a culture or as a society in 10, 15, 20 years. So that's an example of something. You might say, well, our board's not ready to talk about abolition, and that's not even what we do. But there's a pressure coming about challenging those systems and structures that actually potentially affects, certainly NextGen thinkers,? People coming up. Young people have a very different set of assumptions. Your next program assistant or program director, may be coming in with. many different assumptions about how change is gonna happen,? And that's what I mean about are our strategies sensitive to these more, to these shifts, these seismic underlying shifts to systems and structures and policies, that all of our nonprofits really sit on top of. Carol: I'm just thinking I definitely have. experienced and witnessed and then started myself that, that sense of really questioning all those underpinnings that's up for discussion and out in the open and, anything that starts in the margins and then it eventually moves more to the center. That's, it's more centered in conversations now, than any time in my career. I was going to college during the Reagan era and so it was all from the progressive point of view, like, How, how do we survive and what's possible? Now there's just a whole different kind of, why are we taking all, all of those things as givens. what's underneath that and, and how do we start questioning that? And, and so one of the things that I, that you're working on is also just looking at different ways to work internally with organizations around decision making, around structure, around strategy and. To really create, to try to build more equity and inclusion in how the organization operates. And I'm, if you could just say a little bit about that model and what you're learning as you're working with I, I think you're in the stage of working with some different pilots around that. Jeanne: Well, thanks for asking. The process and, and, and software is called just org design and really it's responding to, to what we've just been talking about in many ways, which is that the strategy that I think is necessary, again, even for service organizations who are gonna be. honest about what's going on in the ecosystem that makes those services necessary. I'm not only talking about advocacy organizations, but I think it's, that's all of it. Strategy is inherently interdisciplinary, right? And, organizational strategy is inherently interdisciplinary. I, I think, and we are still working in very siloed departmental structures that assume that individual senior managers are taking those strategies, the real meaning and nuance and soul of those strategies in some consistent way into their silos, right? I think what we all experience is that that's not the. Right, that management teams actually spend a ton of time talking about HR challenges. At least the ones I've been on. They're not actually talking about how we stitch strategy together across multiple departments and silos. It's, it's very rare that that's what the, the driving And when you say, what are we paying attention to? Most management teams are paying attention to budget and hr, in my experience, they're not actually paying attention to how. Get a strategy to seep into everything we do, right? we need a different structural response to that rather than just saying, management teams are always putting out fires. I think we have to recognize that we need to configure people around strategy. And so what just org designed does, is say, departments are fine. Project teams are fine, but they're insufficient and we need to have not committees, not task forces. Not every five year strategic planning, but recurring existing places that are cross-functional and interdisciplinary. To really explore and advance what we mean by these organizational strategies, what we're learning, how they're seeping into the work or not, how we're developing people to accelerate those strategies to really take that seriously. So in a nutshell, it, it. It calls for and supports configuring people around compelling strategies and empowering those people to make choices. Not the little ch, not the day-to-day choices that are people's individual jobs, but the kinds of choices that get deferred because we don't have strategy tables. The kinds of strat, the choices that get deferred until strategic planning. if even then to move those and accelerate those with this, these cross-functional groups that are really tending to strategy and who are Carol: Some of the people that would be around those tables? Because I think one of the, the orthodoxies that is certainly being questioned is the idea that, Boards are the ones who have the strategic lens or leadership teams and or the executive director, that somehow by having ascended to that position or being appointed on that group, you suddenly are anointed with, with strategic talent and You can tell by the way I just said that, that I don't believe hasn't been your experience. Are you noticing different patterns? I actually, I actually find that, I find, it seems to me that people. at all levels struggle with being strategic. Mm-hmm. and, and, there's always, there's a lot of rhetoric about being strategic. But when it comes right down to it actually staying at that out of the day-to-day is really hard for folks. Jeanne: It's incredibly hard and there's some debate going on about whether structure really matters. is it more about personal practice that that makes us, and I, I think structure. Is extremely important. And I, and I think leadership's job actually, is to use structure as a lever to help people become more strategic together. I saw a blog recently called Strategy is a Conversation by a guy named Andrew Blum, and I really agree with that. The words are just words. They're our best current articulation of what we're trying to do. as you've said, and what we're paying attention to. The only way they really matter is if people are in constant conversation about them. And, and the reality is, really almost ubiquitously, they're not. They're really not, strategies are not used as decision screens, as agenda drivers, as they're not, people are using job descriptions to evaluate people. Right. I mean, I, I feel like there's so much emphasis on job descriptions and titles and as if that is going to get us to, as you say, as if that's a proxy four. Strategic, activity or thinking or alignment, and I, that just is not my experience. The reality is that we need to be in daily, weekly, ongoing conversation about what these strategies actually mean and how they're playing out and are they making our work better. So I feel strongly that you are correct, that everybody who works at the organization should be able to understand these words. The reason that they don't is cuz there's no space to discuss them. Right. So who's at the table? My current pilot client, who's a smaller organization, only has about 25 staff. What they're doing is they've put everybody at one of their key tables, right? So, they wanna have, if they're gonna have a table around one of their core strategies, They are gonna have a cross section of people there, not only the people who are quote unquote, responsible for the delivery of that strategy, but somebody from communications, somebody from develop, from development, somebody from finance even who's helping to reimagine the budget to reflect those core strategies, not just these. Old departments. Right. We've been saying all this for a long time, right, Carol? That strategy needs to be agile. It needs to live and breathe. It has to come off the shelf. But we haven't done anything structurally to enable that. So Carol: Can you, can you say a little bit more about how those tables work and how that does, how to, how they do or how you're seeing them enable people to, to really. I don't know. Work, work the strategy, if you will. Jeanne: Yeah. Yeah. And we're early, actually just yesterday. Sure. I facilitated a, a, a table meet. We call them tables. Because they're not departments and they're not even teams. Right. I mean, again, we, those are other tools. Right. This is a place. To explore and advance strategy. Right? And so what I'm seeing in the, in the buildup to these, and I'm just using yesterday's meeting as an example that lives in my mind is people feeling a sense of relief. A sense of relief. In fact, we had a one word checkout and multiple people said, I feel relieved. I feel relieved that this space now exists where I can come and say, Wait a second. We're talking about centering a certain leadership, but I don't know how to make that happen over here. Right? I don't, I keep hearing everyone say that, but we're not doing that here or, and the development person saying, I, I don't know how to position that in the marketplace for resources. I'm sure it is fundable, but people have a space. It's not just with their direct supervisor, right? Who may or may not know, but with the group of people committed to advancing that work, how do we advance this work? How do we take it off the page and make it central to all of our work? Right? Carol: And it may be that, they don't know, but they'll find a way . Right? I mean, the notion that someone knows someone there knows how to do all of this. Jeanne: No, exactly. And, and I mean, I think this is where, honestly, this is where the collective wisdom really is valuable. It's not just performative. It's not just to get buy-in, all that. Right. Where we actually need a cross-functional group of people who are seeing the work relating to different stakeholders, and, and are able to come together and say, and get a 360 on this issue. how this strategy is actually playing out, Carol: Right? Yeah. And, and two, frequently what I've seen in organizations where they bring those cross-functional groups together. The meetings, all they are are updates and they, and somehow they think that by everybody knowing what I'm doing, that somehow they'll be a through, somebody will figure out a through line on all of it. Yeah, yeah. No, this is, instead really, if I understand what you're saying. The issue, the strategy, the, whatever it is, in the, in the center. And then having lots of people to have a conversation about how we do, how do we make this real together? . Jeanne: That's right. And I found myself as a facilitator, and this takes good facilitation and, and this is a skillset, right, that we need to build inside organizations that shouldn't only be consultants every two years or three years. And, and what I'm realizing, another thing I'm realizing as we roll this out, Carol, is that that's part of what we're doing is teaching people how to host good meetings, how to have strategic conversations, right? How not to. Fall back into project updates and departmental updates, right? We have staff meetings and other devices for that. This is a space not so, I mean, it is for information sharing, but to the extent that it's in service of an ambitious prompt. Like where are the gaps now between this language on the page and what we're doing in presenting to the world, right? That's an important prompt. it's not an indictment of anybody. These strategies are supposed to be pulling us towards our best work. Where are we? Right? And people having the space, the safe or brave space to talk about that. The other thing I wanna say about it is I think that in the move to share power more to distribute decision making, more to focus on race equity more. I think a lot of executives and senior leaders are giving spaces away rather than showing up to those spaces differently. And what just org design is saying is, I want you in the room. in a 25 person organization, the executive director often is the person. with the most, at least, certain kinds of visibility into the larger market, the ecosystem, the partnerships, right? So instead of that executive director saying, what, I, I know everyone hates the management team, and I, I've been hoarding power and blah, blah, blah. So here, create a pod called, strategic vision or something. No, I, what I want you to do is show up to that table differently. I want you to show up to that table. as a strategic collaborator and hopefully a mentor and as someone who can share information, but also hear feedback from other roles and have discussions. Right. So I, I say all that to say that I think this is also about how we hold power in organizations. As you say, it is about creating more equity and giving more people proximity to strategy, which is really giving people proximity to. right? And it's creating accountability for those leaders. So rather than sending a bunch of junior people off and hoping they come up with a valid recommendation, which is what we see so much, right? No. You create a different space. You invite them to the table and educate, edify, engage, and create that strategic capacity beyond your management Carol: team. And when you're coaching leaders to help them show up differently as you're describing. What are some of the behaviors that they need to unleash? Jeanne: Well, I think there's, we can frame these as caretaking or we can frame these as more nefarious. Right. But I, I think, and it's, it's a mixture of both, as . Right. But I think that executive directors, even in social justice spaces, even people who profess to be on the journey do struggle with not being the expert all the time and not quickly. and definitively correcting things that aren't right. , there's a, there's a, a 10 a tendency, I think in executives to be, and I was this too, to be activators to be No, no, no. It's not that it's this, right? No, no, no. I just met with them yesterday. It's not this, it's that Right. To try to constantly correct the record. And, and, and I think that's part of it is, let the conversation happen. But again, bring your knowledge. but I think there's a difference between bringing your knowledge and trying to get everything in line with how it should go. Right. Carol: And that's, well, I would say the difference. Yeah. From, from groups that I've observed one of the simplest things would be for the leader at, whether they're executive director, co-director, or head of the department, or whatever it is, or, yep. Chair of the board or whatever. Just to not be the first person who talks Jeanne: some real simple tactics there. Wait. Carol: Yeah. Wait and listen. Wait. Because as soon as you've put your thing in, well, everyone's gonna glom onto it and I don't think, I don't. I think especially if you've been in a leadership role for a long time, you may forget what that position brings and the impact it has on the people around you. That's right. And, and you've gotten so used to them behaving that way. You think that you're acting as a peer when No, you're. That's right, that's right. Jeanne: And really the truth is you don't know everything. you don't know everything about, you might know everything about, who's gonna be the next board chair. , there's things that no one else knows about the organization perhaps. But these conversations are about strategy. And if your strategies are truly compelling, if they are truly pulling the organization forward, there is a lot you don't know about how to get there. Right? And if you're telling me that there's nobody on your team who can participate in a conversation about that gap, about that, unknown, about that, what's next? Well then you have a hiring problem. I mean, then, then you haven't recruited people to where the work is going. And that may very well, sometimes be the case. Part of what happens when we, when we are willing to organize conversations around strategy, is we may realize that we haven't even recruited to those strategies or those strategies are evolving. And again, our departments are stuck in sort of functional definitions of success. Did we get the donor mailing out? Did we retain 30 per, what did that mailer say ? Right. Or does it reflect where the work is going? Right. That is not always, there isn't a place always to create that accountability. And that's the accountability I'm looking for is are we all moving towards where the work needs to be going? Right. Carol: And I think that could be a recruiting issue, but I also think it can be, a, just a willingness. Develop folks. That's it. And I also think at least what I've observed is, and, and well, one, I wish I knew as much as I knew when I was 18 and 22, right? Because I knew everything then. and you were gonna forever, which I learned no less . But, but I, I also, but I've also heard a lot of folks and I've experienced this myself, of, they've been in a leadership role for X amount of time. They look out and they're like, no one's ready to be where I am forgetting. When they stepped into that role, whatever number of years ago that was, did they feel ready? That's right. Were they quote unquote ready and no, they've, they've, they're now benefiting from all that experience, all the mistakes they've made, all the wins they've had, and then somehow expecting the people that they're, that are not in those roles to somehow have that same experience. And if not, then they're not ready. That's it. That's right. Jeanne: Well, and I, I, I said a few minutes ago that I think structure matters a lot. I mean, I, I actually believe that organizational design is now a leader, I think should be an explicit executive responsibility. Our traditional structures, they don't serve. Young people, very well. They are not promoting enough people of color. They are not inherently strategic. So to me, this is a leadership problem, right? And we can't just say, oh, I'm just gonna, tweak around the edges or create some task forces now. And then I think we have a structural problem, right? So obviously that's why, that's why I'm addressing this. And I think we have to get serious about what structure we should be accomplishing. And there's a few things I think it should accomplish. I think it should literally be accomplished, getting people proximate to. So, you don't necessarily have to use my process of tables, but if your structure has 70 or 80% or more of your people not proximate to strategy, then it's not a sufficient structure in my view. Right. It should be accomplishing leadership development. If you are not able to promote from within and promote diversity from within, then people are not getting, as you just said, what they need. Which is proximate to strategy, proximate to expertise, proximate to key relationships, internally and externally. And if your structure is not delivering that to people, then it's not working right. And certainly race equity and d e i in general, if your structure is not working for people of color, right? If it's not working for young people, if it's not working for trans people, that's on you . there's something not working. And so to me, we wanna sit down and say, okay, well here's this org chart. What is it accomplishing in terms of the goals I just said, right? Is it designed just because that's what I inherited? Is it designed for efficiency? Is it designed for functional expertise, as you said a few minutes ago? Just because I'm a good marketing officer, does that mean I should be. Respect, what is on the management team? Like what does that get us? Right? What is it delivering for us? So I, that's what I want to see people do is say, what is this structure delivering for us and what feedback are we getting at? Do people like this? Is this invigorating ? Right? Do our younger people like it? Do our people of color like it? Do we feel strategically aligned and is our structure helping us get there? Carol: Yeah. And one thing with structures, I mean, I feel like over the years I, I, I can't think of an organization that hasn't had somebody say, oh, we're so siloed. Yeah. And the fix for that has to. Has been to reshuffle everyone into new teams, but my experience is usually they just end up in new silos. So how, what, with this idea of bringing multidisciplinary groups together around focused on a strategy, how often are you then thinking about, do we have the right tables? Do we continue with these tables as you're calling them? These, these groups, right. Or. Do we need a new set? Given our circumstances now, and this I can Jeanne: only predict and hope. Okay. Because I don't have enough . I'm only a year in, but my, the way we're setting them up is with an assumption of evolution. Right. Okay. That this is our best understanding of the strategic conversations we need to be having now. , just as we've been talking about, we want strategies that are clear and, and discerning. We also want them to be agile, right? And we also may realize that certain people have come to a table and they've participated and it's been productive, but maybe their time is better used. , somewhere else. Again, it's not a job to be on the table, right? You're bringing your work and your perspective to a cross-functional conversation. It's possible that people will wanna step out of that at certain periods because something else is consuming them or, so we want the table space. We want tables to be permanent. There are always tables, but not the specific tables themselves, right? There should always be. cross-functional spaces that are dedicated to understanding and advancing strategy, but what they are and who's on them, I think will be more, more agile, more dynamic. And Carol: how are, how are the groups finding the time and space to, to even dedicate to those? Because I think so. The unfortunate situation that too many organizations are in is that they feel like they're over, they're overwhelmed by what they're trying to do right now. That's so then to, to, to be doing something like this or doing it differently, really feels impossible. Jeanne: Well, you've hit on one of our, one of our major resistance sort of threads. And of course what we're trying to do here is prove a negative, right? We cannot quantify the amount of conflict and waste of time. Mm-hmm. that exists because people are not strategically aligned. Right. In fact, probably, a great deal of what people are doing when they're not doing the work is trying to clear a path for the work or figure out if they're doing the right work or figure out why that. Project is happening when they thought they were doing this, and, and we can't even quantify it. It's so much the water we're swimming in. But the hypothesis of course is that investing a few hours, every two weeks or three weeks in resetting on what we are doing? Why are we doing it? How it manifests in our key bodies of work is going to pay. exponentially in that being smoother work between meetings. Right. Again, I think we put so much emphasis on one-on-one supervision and sort of traditional HR structures that and I don't care how great your supervisor is, they cannot approximate hearing. 10 people unpack, explore, advance strategy. I mean that, that's like a masterclass every couple of weeks. That's what we're looking for, right? It has to be pr, it has to save time. How we end up measuring that is something that I'm very interested in. Right? And it'll initially be qualitative, right? Asking the table participants has this. provided more clarity, more smoothness. Has it facilitated better collaboration? have you gotten in front of things that used to blow up a lot, that's the stuff we wanna see, right? Carol: Yeah. I, I, I imagine that as, and soon this analogy won't work anymore because people won't remember having to actually turn a dial on a radio to get the signal to come in. Mm-hmm. But if you're just all static, if there's so much static in the organization, you're wasting a huge amount of time and effort just trying to. get a clear signal through all of that static. And, and I feel like when I'm, I'm typically working with groups that are a little bit more traditional, once every couple years. Big process. Mm-hmm. But the thing that they talk about as being energizing and exciting is how much they learn from other people. That's it. The kinds of conversations that they get to have in that, that they don't typically have, the connections that they see. By being in, in, in, in cross-functional groups and different groups through the whole process. So, to be able to build that into more of a regular pattern instead of just every three years for a, for a big momentous thing. I mean, there's probably a need for a little bit of both, but um, oh, certainly. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that, to, to be able to bring some of that in. to me. Yeah. I can, I can intuitively see the benefit and then it's mm-hmm. right, as you're saying, like, how, how do we help people? How do we start measuring it in a way that is compelling? Yeah, that's right. And Jeanne: I, I mean, one other thing I would add, there's a beautiful free resource actually that you can find online. Came out last year called Turning Towards Each Other, a Conflict Workbook or and I, I think we are at a time where there is heightened conflict inside organizations, and one of the points that. Workbook makes it that some of that is actually conflict about strategy. It's not named that. Hmm. But it's actually people in conflict about what we're doing, why we're doing it, whether it's credible, whether it's consistent with what we're, if we're walking our talk. That's a lot of the conflict that's going on in organizations right now, and there isn't, again, one-on-one supervision is not gonna solve that. Right. We need a space to say, Hey, there's a gap. or I'm not feeling, this communication strategy is consistent with what we're saying over here. Like there needs to be a place that's cross-functional where we can explore that. And so another thing that we hope is, is, that this is not preventing conflict, but creating a productive space for people to debate how these strategies get expressed. Carol: Yeah. So they can engage in it. I was listening to something recently about, different levels of conflict and, and when it gets to what the person termed high conflict, then people are just dug in and they're, they're in those polarizing my way or your way. I'm right. you're not right. But when you can. so then it's, it's probably the conflict that most people think of, and the one that they shy away from. And that feels very unproductive cuz it is unproductive. Right. But there is, there are, if you can create spaces for people to be able to. Not necessarily be in positions yet around one way or the other. Exactly. And explore it together. I think that's exactly, that's Jeanne: the difference. I, when I was an executive director, I, it, it was a time at the organization where we were intentionally going through a lot of change. But, what happens in change management is what you just said, is that unless there are spaces for people to debate and, and vent a little bit about the strategic dissonance they're feeling people get put into camp. right? In people's minds. There's the people who get it. There's the people who don't get it. Oh, don't even go to her. She doesn't get it. she doesn't, well, get it. There's no space to get it, and then it be, as you say, then people get labeled as either old guard, new guard, get it, don't get it. And then there's, there's so little that's possible in terms of collaborative change work. Carol: Yeah. Well, none of this is easy but inviting people in is just, just think about it and experiment with it a little bit. So I end each conversation with a random icebreaker question that I pull from a box. So one I'm gonna ask you is if you were stranded on a desert island and you could choose one person to keep you company, who would it be? The, so Jeanne: This is supposed to be like a famous person. Doesn't matter. It could be anyone. I mean, obviously I would choose my partner . And I'm not just saying that in case they listen to this. But if you want a more sort of global answer that's not a personal relationship. I would pick A poet, and I was just thinking about the poet who I always bring up, it seems like in the last few months Natalie Diaz. Yeah. I would pick somebody who could keep the world magical through their language. Carol: Mm. Okay. All right. Thank you. Well, what's coming up? We've been talking about what's emerging in your work, but what, what are you seeing over the next year or so? What, in terms of all this new work that you're, that you're doing and the, the Yeah. Projects you're working with. Yeah, I'm, you Jeanne: Now, what I'm really excited about is different. Organizational profiles, right? So it's called just org design. So it's clearly designed with organizations who think of their work as in some way in service of justice. And so, that's the large catchment that we're in. But what I'm really interested in, Carol Carol, is different profiles of that. and we also think that tables may in fact work across organizations and, and really support coalitions and collaboration across organizations because this is a software that can track who's at that table, what choices are we making, what are the agendas for future meetings, which is such a lot of work. Keeps people from doing collaboration externally well too. So, I'm, we've got a pilot client who's more of an organizing group who I think may go in that direction where it's internal, but then can also create a bridge to some of their key partnerships. So, looking for different client profiles that are under the large umbrella of justice work but have different. Existing configurations and different kinds of strategies that will benefit from really well structured and, and software supported consistency around really centering strategy. Carol: Yeah. Cuz I, there's only so much any one organization can do in any of these fields, right. So that's supporting those larger collaborative initiatives coalitions. It's where so much of the work is now happening, so that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. All right. Well thank you so much. It was great. Just enjoyed the conversation. I definitely could talk to you about this stuff all day, so we won't do that. Jeanne: Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. Carol: I appreciated Jeanne’s emphasis on the interconnection between your organization’s strategy for the external environment that supports your mission and the internal – that in fact – also supports your mission. That it is all interwoven and once amplifies the other and both sides and intentions are needed. I also appreciated her description of crisp strategy. There is a lot of emphasis on being emergent and agile in today’s environment – and rightly so. Yet by clearly defining and crisply setting your intentions, you know what you are pivoting from if you need to pivot. That the strategy is specific and clear – not vaguely neutral, not trying to offend anyone. And that they are specific within the capacity and financial realities of your situation – not just about wishful thinking. Without it you are not really pivoting and being agile – you are just spinning in circles. Another point that I really appreciated was her description of the work she is doing to help organizations integrate their strategy into their day to day work through an interdisciplinary approach. When I am working with clients and in the process of discovery, when I interview and listen to staff, board and other key stakeholders – so often the issue of silos between departments comes up. And by creating spaces for cross-functional teams to discuss specific strategies and how to show up in their daily work, it can also become more real for everyone – instead of strategy just being something we do at a retreat every couple years. That departments or project teams are fine but insufficient. And creating spaces – or tables as she calls them – to talk about how day to day choices that are constantly being made reflect and integrate the larger strategy of the organization. Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with Jeanne Bell, her full bio, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes. I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Natasha Devoise of 100 Ninjas for her production support. 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HostI am Carol Hamilton, nonprofit consultant and podcast host. My passion is helping organizations cultivate healthy, inclusive cultures that live their values, fostering learning, creativity and results. Find me at Grace Social Sector Consulting and download free resources. Archives
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