Nonprofit Challenges
Thriving in a"New Normal" World
Nonprofit leadership teams can struggle to keep up in today’s sped-up, interconnected world. To survive and thrive, the core areas of fundraising, programs and internal operations need to be reimagined and infused with new ways of working. While focusing on important objectives that you choose, we can guide your leadership team through learning and practicing these specific new ways of working for greater effectiveness and satisfaction.
Building High Performing Teams
Nonprofits typically don’t have the luxury of hiring new people and buying new resources for new initiatives. Instead, they need to work with what they already have. We can help existing teams align better with their strategic business objectives so they can more effectively deliver on their mission.
Aligning a Team for Success
Nonprofits often have a track record of failed initiatives or projects that only marginally succeed. Reduce the chance of failure by aligning each strategic project team with its project’s objectives. We can help your team build on its strengths and avoid blind spots that are specific to a team’s make-up, thereby raising the chances for project success.
Why DX?
Before launching a digital business transformation (DX) process,
a nonprofit needs to answer one question: why bother?
Welcome to the unknowable future. The fact that the world is speeding up is self-evident. It is also more interconnected resulting in an avalanche of change all around us. As a consequence, more traditional planning assumptions no longer work. Next time it may not be a virus shock but some other unexpected, jarring shock nevertheless. Today there are few certainties except that the world will never be this slow again.
In this fast-moving, highly uncertain and unpredictable world, both for-profit and nonprofit organizations must be adaptable in order to survive and thrive.
In the world of business, digital business transformation is the fastest and most effective route to adaptability. Since 2010, DX has been increasingly embraced by for-profit organizations throughout the world. Today nearly 25% of large international nonprofits are beginning their DX journey through a mixture of internal operational redesign and re-imagining their constituent journey for donors and beneficiaries. These nonprofits are seeking to dramatically increase mission impact (at least 10X) while also achieving levels of fundraising results and operational performance that are far more efficient (10% to 40%). While this may appear to be impossible on the surface, DX indeed makes this dramatic transformation possible. For a nonprofit, improving efficiency is even more important due to the scarcity of time and resources and the need to reduce stress on its staff.
So why would I embark on digital business transformation for my nonprofit? Non profits are definitely not immune from the effects of our accelerating world with complex interconnections. If we really hope to achieve greater good through greater program impact, scale, and donor support; we have no choice to evolve. The good news is that DX does not need to be massive undertaking in all areas of a nonprofit at the same time. You can start with fundraising, field programs, back office operations or a cross-functional initiative and a single high performing team. By starting small and thinking big, any thing is possible.
To be successful, DX requires executive support across key areas of the organization. While DX is often cited as a strategic goal of the Board or CEO, the hard work often falls to the COO, Chief People Officer and leaders in fundraising and programs. While it is important that the CIO be involved, when DX is treated as a task to be led by the CIO, it is likely to yield little results since culture and mindset changes require broader change management support. Tackling the DX change process is a group effort focused on getting small teams of internal leaders positioned for the future. Done right, digitally transformed teams have a more joyful experience at work and, as a result, both mission impact and efficiency are positively affected.
