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The Secret to Successful Board Meetings?

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The Secret to Successful Board Meetings? Great Facilitation.

Think back to the last time someone invited you to sit on a nonprofit board. If you’re like most folks, the first thing that popped into your mind was something related to board meetings… how many board meetings do I have to attend, how long are they, will I be wasting my time…?

No one joins a board because they want to go to board meetings; folks join boards because they want to help make the organization’s mission a reality. But, here’s the catch:

Well-attended and well-facilitated board meetings are critical to the organization’s ability to achieve its goals.

So, now, think back to the last board meeting you attended. Did you leave the meeting feeling it achieved something valuable in pushing the organization towards its goals? Did you feel your time was well-spent? Did you walk out of the meeting with understanding and agreement on what actions were needed from your colleagues and you? Were you glad you attended and proud of your affiliation with the organization?

No? Not exactly? Do you relate to the cartoon above?

If so, there’s a good chance that your organization is making a few cardinal mistakes that sabotage the nearly 11 million meetings held in the US each day:

  1. Failing to design your meeting agenda for success – a task that begins at least a week before your meeting.
  2. Failing to properly prepare meeting participants by sharing your agenda and relevant information prior to the meeting.
  3. Failing to understand how groups make decisions. Not supporting the process required for the particular action/decision your group is considering.

An Easy New Way to Connect with Grantmakers…

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Spokes Members can now connect grant research and personal relationships through LinkedIn

The most successful grants are always the ones that come as the result of a personal connection with the granting organization. But, making a personal connection can be much more challenging than writing a compelling narrative. What’s a grantwriter to do?

Never fear! Foundation Directory Online has the perfect solution for you!

Foundation Directory Online just announced a partnership with LinkedIn that will allow you to quickly and easily identify personal connections between your board members and key staff members of granting organizations. Spokes Members can simply log onto Foundation Directory Online, select a foundation, view its profile, and look for the LinkedIn logo to see who in your network knows someone at the foundation.

In order to take full advantage of this new system, be sure to establish an organization profile on LinkedIn and connect each of your board members with it. That way, you’ll be able to immediately see any connections between your team and the grantmaker’s team.

Once you do find a connection, ask the connected board member to send an outreach letter to introduce your organization to the foundation. (This is a great strategy for reaching out to foundations that don’t accept uninvited grant applications, as well.) Find a sample outreach letter here.

Don’t know what Foundation Directory Online is? It’s THE premiere grants research database with more than 140,000 grant makers profiled, including many that don’t have websites and are challenging to find. Foundation Directory Online now also includes government grants, too! A one-year subscription to Foundation Directory Online costs $1,500, but Spokes members receive free access. Call our office to reserve one of our Foundation Directory Online computer terminals in San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria or see if you qualify for a remote pass and start securing new grants today!

The Right Way to Bring New CEO on Board

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Just hired a new CEO at your nonprofit? Now, the real Board work begins.

Spring is always a time of growth and re-birth in the natural world. It seems the same is true in our local nonprofit sector with many nonprofits transitioning from a retiring or exiting CEO to a new one, and many more preparing to hire the very first staff executive in their organization’s history.

 

Finding a new executive leader is always challenging for a nonprofit board. In fact, it may be the hardest task any nonprofit board must face. To start, the board faces the daunting task of managing the organization until a new leader can be found, which is then compounded by the additional stress and worrying of trying to find the “right” candidate. And the hard work doesn’t end there. The most critical period for a nonprofit’s success comes after the new CEO starts the job as the entire organization acclimates to its new leadership.

One third to one-half of new CEOs, whether they’re hired from outside or from within, fail within their first 18 months, according to some estimates. 

At Spokes, we’re constantly talking about how critical the role of a nonprofit board’s continuing support and guidance is in helping a new CEO be successful. The topic is really nothing new. What is new, however, is an article from Harvard Business Review, “After the Handshake“ by Dan Ciampa, which offers some fresh tips and insights.

  • Nonprofit boards must find and maintain an appropriate balance between being un-involed and over-involved. CEOs routinely report that they don’t get enough transition support from their directors. Boards cannot micromanage, but there is also a danger in being too remote.
  • Nonprofit boards must set clear expectations about how much communication they expect between board meetings or in which decisions or changes they want to play a larger role. Ciampa recommends that board members can start defining clear and appropriate expectations with the new CEO by asking the following questions:
  1. “What information do you need from the board to be able to do the best job you can?”
  2. “What behavior on the board’s part would best enable us to have a trusting relationship at board meetings, between them and in one-on-one conversations?”
  3. “From your experience during the search process and in your first meeting or two as CEO, what one thing about how the board operates would you change to make our relationship all it must be?”
  • Nonprofit boards must help a new CEO build his/her relationships with key organizational stakeholders – including each of the individual board members. Every new CEO will need some help navigating the new culture of your organization.
Ciampa explains that the CEO’s first 6 months or so is a time when nonprofit board members should expect to be meeting, talking and contributing more than they ordinarily do. Read his entire article here to learn more useful insights to help your board and new CEO successfully leap into a bright new future – together.

Volunteer Appreciation

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Dear Volunteers: Thank You for All You Do! 
Did you know that 7.4 million Californians volunteer for their local nonprofits each year to contribute a total of 940 million volunteer hours valued at more than $21 billion (yes, billion!)?

This week is THE official Volunteer Appreciation Week and we want to take a moment to thank the men and women who give so generously, tirelessly, and consistently to support our local nonprofits – and, especially, those who give to Spokes.

If your organization is like ours, you rely heavily on volunteers as an extension of your human resources. The fact is, no charitable organization could exist without at least one key volunteer group – its board members – so it is impossible to overstate the value volunteers bring to the nonprofit sector.

And, it is impossible to over-appreciate them, too. But, for this week, why not try?

We’d like to rise to our own challenge by taking a moment to publicly recognize and thank Spokes’ volunteers, starting with our board members who continuously carve time out of their busy schedules and away from other obligations to champion and shepherd Spokes’ mission:

Erika Schuetze, President     John Buerger, Treasurer     Michael Kaplan, Secretary     Mark Corella                               Jami Fawcett                                 Jeff Franklin                               Lynne Oliverius                             Michelle Starnes

Spokes is also very fortunate to have more than 30 rotating volunteers who offer their professional expertise and counsel to help Spokes members improve their nonprofit management skills, solve tough problems, and achieve their goals. Following are the 22 volunteers who actively contributed to Spokes’ mission this past year. If you know any of them, please join us in thanking them for all they do to support Spokes – and YOU!

Adrienne Harris                           Bob Lucas                                Bob Shanbrom                             Carol Nelson Selby                       Erica Morrison*                          JayMe Phillips                             Jeremy Teitelbaum                        John Buerger                           Kathleen Marcove                        Ken Miles                                 Kim Austin

Leslie Jones*                              Lisa Gonzales                             Mariola O’Brien                             Michael Jencks                             Michael Kaplan                             Michael Simkins                            Rachel Cementina                       Sara LaForest                          Stacey Hunt                          Suzanne Valery                             Yvon Gresser

*Find me on LinkedIn!

We’ve provided links to our volunteers’ professional sites in case you’d like to learn more about them. If you do, you’ll soon see what an extraordinary volunteer corps they are and why we feel so very lucky and thankful! Please join us for a future workshop and you’ll soon see for yourself…

Four Steps To Prevent Stress

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Stress and burnout plague everyone in every sector. Nonprofit employees, however, seem to suffer especially. If we all spent five minutes jotting down the causes of our stress, we’d probably have fairly similar lists: emotionally draining work, constant urgency of needs, limited resources to do the work, low pay, not enough time in the day, etc. And, surprisingly, we’d all miss the only true cause of stress: rumination.

In his article, “Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn into Stress,” published in the Harvard Business Review on March 16, 2017, Nicholas Petrie explains that the “causes” we would put on our list are actually not stresses but, rather, pressures. We create stress when we choose to react to pressures with rumination – the act of rethinking past or future events while attaching negative emotion to those thoughts.

Different folks can face the exact same pressures but experience very different levels of stress because of their individual reactions. For those who are interested in reducing their stress-levels, this is great news! Your stress-level can be entirely within your control with practice and discipline. Petrie offers the following four steps to help you:

Wake up and be present. Most rumination occurs when we are daydreaming or not focused on our current actions. Try some physical tricks like sitting up, clapping your hands or moving your body to bring you into the present. Get busy and re-engage with tasks at hand.

Focus on taking useful action. Petrie suggests the following exercise: Draw a circle on a page, and write down all of the things you can control or influence inside it and all of things you cannot outside if it. Remind yourself that you can care about externalities — your work, your team, your family — without worrying about them.

Put things in perspective. Petrie suggest three strategies for gaining a healthy perspective of your situation. One is a questioning exercise in which you ask yourself:  “How much will this matter in three years’ time?” and “What’s the worst that could happen?” and “How would I survive it?”.

Let go. Petrie admits that this is the hardest step to take. It has three required components: accept the situation, learn from the experience, and take appropriate action to move through and out of your situation.

Read Petrie’s entire article here and start a stress-free Spring tomorrow!

https://hbr.org/2017/03/pressure-doesnt-have-to-turn-into-stress

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