Your Team is the Best Resource You Have

Whether your nonprofit is staffed solely by volunteers, or positions at least partially paid, your people are your organisation’s most valuable asset. Your staff is the creative engine for identifying problems and finding new solutions to hard questions as well as accomplishing all of the hard work that benefits your service community. Without them, it’s impossible to create meaningful impact.

Despite their importance to achieving your goals, many nonprofit’s neglect their staff’s needs, and the results show up as a loss of worker productivity, donor engagement and your beneficiaries’ satisfaction.

To keep your staff on task and fully engaged, you must look after them, and find ways to increase the enjoyment that they experience working with your organisation. The following strategies can boost your team’s morale and keep them motivated to help your NFP meet its objectives and goals.

Spruce up the Workspace

The environment that we work in can have a direct, immediate impact on our energy levels, mood and sense of well-being. Give your team a boost by investing in quality lighting, including natural sources of light, and ensuring that they have the tools, material and equipment that they need to perform their work well.

This means investing in quality, ergonomically designed desks, chairs, computers and other hardware for office workers, and providing laptops and other mobile devices for workers that telecommute or otherwise work off-site. Invest in current software and other upgrades to ensure that your best people don’t become frustrated by hanging apps and lost data that sap willpower and decrease productivity.

Do Something Different, Exciting, and Fun as a Team

Team building exercises are great for increasing comradery and morale and helping your people learn how to cooperate and collaborate with one another. You could do something simple, such as hosting an office party or have a potluck at work, where everyone contributes a dish to a group meal, but why not make this event something to truly remember by hosting an offsite event.

If you have the budget, schedule your staff to take a joint field trip to a local amusement park, enjoy a picnic together on the beach. Whatever activity you choose, take steps to ensure that it is something that most of your staff will enjoy.

Perks and Rewards Have Their Place

While they should never take the place of just compensation that is due to your staff, partnering with third parties to offer meaningful rewards for exceptional service and dedication can help you show your staff that you do truly appreciate their effort and hard work.

To make sure that your rewards program is hitting the mark, conduct a survey to find out what types of rewards most appeal, and then work on incorporating as many of these ideas as possible into your program.

Be Flexible with Time Commitments

Another way to show your team that you understand their needs and value them for the unique people that they are is to offer schedules and time commitments that take into consideration real-world needs. Look for ways to allow team members to trade shifts and tasks to help them be able to meet their commitments to your nonprofit and their personal lives. Try to allow as many of your staff as possible to work remotely and offer multiple shifts and ranges of time for your people to have as many opportunities to work helping out at your NFP into their other obligations.

Provide Praise and Public Recognition

Everyone likes to have their hard work acknowledged and an appropriate level of gratitude expressed for their effort. Use your social media channels to give shout-outs to your team, host awards ceremonies, and otherwise publish notifications of your staff’s dedication to your organisation. In addition to these larger, more public efforts, never neglect an opportunity to “catch” your people doing something right and offer them praise on the spot.

Whether it’s a firm handshake and a heartfelt thank you spoken out loud or sending thanks in an email on a daily basis, let your team know how much their work means to you and your nonprofit! The more you can express your gratitude to your people, the more likely they will be thankful for the opportunities that your organisation offers them to help your service community!

The Keys To The Success Of Your NFP

Creating a successful nonprofit takes more than the desire to lead positive change in your community. In addition to making a genuine impact, your organisation must be able to survive over the long term and grow at a sustainable level.

The following strategies can help you lay a strong foundation upon which to build and grow a focused, and resilient, organisation that moves its mission forward.

Clearly Define Your Purpose

It’s so much easier for organisations to make real progress when everyone shares the same values and focuses on the same goals. Nonprofit leaders should set the tone and pace of their organisation by clearly defining the reason why the NFP exists in their statement of purpose and include a list of activities that they will and will not pursue in the organisation’s formal bylaws.

Recruit and Retain Top Talent

Every organisation is only as strong as its weakest link. The people on your team are your most important asset, which means that whether you're searching for a director, support staff, or volunteers for your NFP, you need to take steps to ensure that you can attract and keep knowledgeable, skilled and gifted candidates for both paid, and unpaid, positions.

To help in your search for the best candidates, create a written description for every position within your NFP, whether it’s paid or unpaid. Not only will this help you to have a firmer grasp of the traits and qualities you need, clarifying roles, duties and responsibilities, it helps all parties get started on a better footing. Make sure that you conduct interviews, as well as background checks on all potential candidates before they begin work.

Activities like training, career guidance, peer-mentoring and job shadowing can help you ensure that each person that you bring on board will have the tools that they need to make a positive contribution to your team. Establish formal policies and protocols to increase open communication and quickly resolve any conflicts that arise to boost morale and workplace satisfaction.

Set Goals with Realistic Expectations

Creating goals that do not have a specific target, start and stop date, and are not easily measured, are usually unobtainable at the start. Whether it’s increasing the results of your fundraising efforts or the number and quality of services that you provide your beneficiaries, make sure that you are setting specific goals, with results that can be measured. This will make it easier to hit your target.

Keep All Your Stakeholders Updated and in the Loop

Do your volunteers know how important they are to achieving your goals? Do you show gratitude and fill them in on the results of their efforts? What about your donors? Do they know what’s truly at stake and understand how even very small, but consistent donations, can add up over time and help you achieve greater results? Do your service beneficiaries understand what you can do to help make their lives better?

Provide all stakeholders with frequent updates on the status of your projects and drives, and their results. Look for ways to get the word out about everyone’s hard work and other contributions across multiple media channels. Explain results in human “real world” terms to increase your stakeholder’s emotional connection to your organisation. And last, but certainly not least, never neglect an opportunity to express your gratitude for everyone’s contributions to your cause.

Tips to Improve Your Funding Options

Does your fundraising strategy consist mainly of a vague idea to raise “more money than last year” and little else? Without financial clarity, and a strategy to optimise your organisation’s sources for funding, your nonprofit will find it difficult, and next to impossible to secure the monies that it needs to operate at a sustainable level and create actual impact for your cause.

The following strategies can help your organisation broaden its base of financial support by increasing the number of sources it has for funding.

Grants

Rather than relying solely on donations from individuals, consider searching for grants that are a good fit for your organisation. Grants can come from Federal or State governments as well as public and private entities such as foundations and corporations.

The applications process is typically quite lengthy, and complex, and there is usually stiff competition for these funds, so your NFP can benefit by bringing on board an experienced grant writer to help them with the proposal and applications process.

Sponsorships

Instead of trying to do everything on your own, consider reaching out to third parties for help in securing funding, and other resources, that will enable you to provide services and advance your cause.

Sponsorships and other collaborations can come from the commercial and government sectors, or might involving partnering with one more parties from the not-for-profit sector that will allow each to focus on performing the work that they do well. Groups can also cooperate and allow each to access resources that the other has to increase the amount of work that is performed by both groups.

Maximise Individual Contributions

Nonprofits can increase their funding simply by looking for opportunities to maximise the number and amount of individual donations that they receive.

To accomplish this goal, your fundraising approach should seek out ways to make it easy for supporters to give online, and give by their preferred means of payment.

Focus on encouraging repeat donors by developing a monthly giving program.

Approach board members and other key influencers that are connected with your organisation to reach out to potential big donors to support your NFP with a large contribution.

Crowdsourcing platforms can be a great way to raise awareness about your cause and encourage donations when they use storytelling to illustrate what is at stake if the issue your organisation is trying to tackle remains unsolved. Options to customise the message and share the campaign easily on social media will increase the number of folks that see your plea and follow through with a contribution.

Special Events

Standard fundraising events, such as charity auctions, galas and balls can be a good way to raise funds for your organisation, but only if they are cost-effective to host. If your NFP will not make a net profit from the event that’s worth the time and effort it takes to plan the event and hold it, you may want to limit the number and type of events that you throw as part of your fundraising efforts.

Consider Options that Increase Your Capacity for Self-Funding

While nonprofits are not designed to operate at a profit, since their main function is to serve the public good, this doesn’t mean that they should operate in an unsustainable manner. Your nonprofit can increase the soundness of its finances to look for ways to self-fund its growth. Does your nonprofit have assets that can be used to fund operations?

For example, would you be able to offer beneficiaries a higher level of service if you charged a fee for certain services? Would rents or activity fees allow you to do more good work, without compromising your core mission and goals? Is there a way to invest some of your funds that will enable your organisation to generate a passive income stream that could be used to fund operations and build capacity? Would selling some products and services allow your organisation to raise the funds that it needs while remaining in alignment with your organisations values?

While each NFP’s answer will be different to questions like these, if income generating activities don’t violate your nonprofit’s values or create another conflict, they can be a good way to raise the growth supporting funds that your organisation needs to survive and thrive.

The Importance of Social Media for NFPs

If nonprofits wish to survive and thrive, they must have support. This support can come in many forms such as advocacy, donations, and volunteering.

Increasing Support Doesn’t Have to Be Costly

At its heart, social media marketing allows nonprofits to use one of the most successful, and oldest, forms of advertising to increase its base of support: social influence, or, word-of-mouth marketing. Social media campaigns are effective for increasing an NFP’s reach because their cost can be easily controlled by scaling campaigns up or down.

Once the initial content is created, connections within various networks spread the message on their own, creating organic support and traffic without incurring additional cost. Using social media to find and recruit supporters, however, isn’t just about controlling costs. The following is a brief overview of two additional reasons why nonprofits need to be using social media in their marketing campaigns and communications.

To Stay Competitive

Competition is a key factor that affects the impact and growth of every nonprofit, despite the increase in collaborations and partnerships between third parties.

Nonprofits compete to recruit skilled, talented people to serve on boards, and as staff members and volunteers. Funds are also a scarce resource, as there are not enough grants, endowments and individual contributions to fund every need.

Research shows that if you want your nonprofit to be able to recruit enough staff, volunteers, advocates and donors, then your nonprofit must have an online presence, and be using social media to spread the word about your cause and how others can help.

According to statistics provided in the 2016 Global NGO Online Technology Report, most not for profits worldwide are actively online using multiple social media channels to connect with supporters, accept donations and spread awareness about their NFP’s mission. A full 92% of NFPs have a website and 46% blog regularly, making it easy for online users to discover information about their mission and projects.

75% email their supporters’ donation requests and other news, and 75% accept donations online. 95% have a Facebook page, 83% have a profile on Twitter, and nearly 40% use Instagram to keep their supporters up-to-date and motivated about the good work that their organisation is accomplishing.

To be effective, nonprofits must use social media to stand out from all of their competitors in both the for-profit and not-for-profit world. They should use it to firmly establish their brand, and link their brand to their cause, their vision and the work that can be accomplished with the support of others.

To Remain Relevant

It’s not just other NFPs that are online. According to data on social media trends provided by Track Maven, nearly one third of the entire world’s population will be online by next year. Global Web Index statistics reveal that most online users have about 6 social media profiles and regularly use nearly half of them.

This data clearly illustrates why it’s so important for your nonprofit to enter this space! A growing number of us no longer get our news from traditional network broadcasts and media outlets. Instead, we are leveraging our social media networks to stay up-to-date on the latest news and events. We then share those stories that personally connect with us and then like or otherwise express an opinion about these posts with our connections.

To become a part of these crucial conversations and exchanges of ideas, you must be online, and using the social media channels where these conversations are taking place. To engage with potential supporters, you must be online where your supporters are likely to be. Otherwise your cause will go unnoticed and your projects will go unsupported. To stay relevant, nonprofits need to include social media in their marketing strategies, and engage their supporters on the social media channels of their choice.  

If your nonprofit is struggling to build its base of support, this is likely a sign that your social media strategy may need some fine-tuning to return the results that your nonprofit wants and needs.