Spokes | Resources for Nonprofits

Find Us On Social Media:

Give It A Break Already! Working too much can hurt productivity.

by

What do Americans, Japanese and Korean workers all have in common? They all come from cultures that equate working long hours with high performance and productivity. And, they’re all wrong.

In fact, Japan and Korea rank lowest worldwide for individual worker productivity.  And, the United States is ranked by the World Health Organization as the most anxious country in the world.

The American nonprofit sector tends to take this myth a step further with its chronic understaffing and a pervasive martyr-complex, which implies that creating meaningful change requires great personal sacrifice. As a result, burnout rates among nonprofit employees are rising with 3 out of 4 executive directors planning to leave their jobs within the next 5 years.

For the sake of the public that relies on the programs and services of our nonprofit organizations, it’s time for us to shift our definition of a “good employee.” Would you rather have an employee who works 60 hours in the office to complete his/her tasks, gets bored and cruises social media sites throughout the day and frequently misses work days due to illness? OR, would you rather have an employee who works 32 hours a week to complete his/her tasks and spends more time rejuvenating with friends and family and practicing good self-care?

Brigid Schulte has written a new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, about why work has become overwhelming for so many people and how nonprofit leaders can ease the burden for their staffs. Her tips include encouraging staff to take regular breaks after each 90 minutes of concentrated work. And, to stop scheduling so many meetings!

Stop Losing Productivity In Your Inbox: Delegate to an Assistant

by

In this below July 1st HBR Blog Network article How To Delegate Your Email to An Assistant, author Alexandra Samuel provides insight on ways nonprofit upper management can relinquish control and time lost in your inbox. In summary she suggests…

  1. Determining who can provide you with email support
  2. Setting up a system where they can manage your inbox collaboratively
  3. Creating rules and guidelines to make most of your delegation

How To Delegate Your Email to An Assistant, by Alexandra Samuel

In the early days of the internet, email natives loved to trade tales of executives who asked their assistants to print out emails so they could read and respond to them on paper. Now we all use email, and assistants are a seemingly rare commodity. But they can still play a useful role in managing your messages.

That kind of support is no longer limited to the lucky few who have administrative help on staff, either. Thanks to the emergence of the collaborative economy, in which people can access services on a pay-for-use model, there are more and more options for getting administrative support, whether it be using a virtual personal assistant service like Zirtual, hiring a part-time assistant through Craigslist, or having more traditional access to administrative support through your company.

An assistant can reduce the burden of email management in ways automated systems can’t, be they third-party plugins or rules and filters that you set up within your inbox. They can function as your email triage system, conduct your daily inbox reviews, or even reply to individual messages. The most effective setup combines human support a smart set of email rules and filters—so that you’re not wasting your assistant’s time on the routine job of deleting junk mail or filing missives that you don’t need. Considering how much of your workload likely involves reviewing incoming messages, replying to calendar requests and ensuring your top-priority emails get answered promptly, asking for assistance with email triage is in fact one of the best uses of administrative support.

The decision to delegate

If the idea of delegating email management fills you with alarm, know that you don’t need to give someone full access to your email in order to get meaningful help managing your inbox (more on this in the setup section below). How much of your email you delegate depends not only on how much support you have available, but also on your working style, your relationship with your assistant, and your office culture. Here are few questions to ask yourself before deciding how much email management you can delegate, and whom you want to hire for that support:

How much skill and discretion can you expect? In the most ideal situation, you’d get daily support from a highly trusted assistant who has direct access to your inbox and outbox, so they could work through calendar invitations, billing or financial admin, or other routine requests. But trusting someone with your outbox is only advisable if you trust that person’s judgment about your work and priorities, and know that their grammar and spelling is at least as good as your own. And trusting someone with direct access to the whole of your primary inbox is only advisable if you can expect that person to exercise as much discretion as you’d get from a priest or therapist. If you’re working with part-time or virtual support, you’ll need to scale back these expectations; it will be your job to decide which emails your assistant sees and addresses, rather than vice versa.

What kind of relationship do you have with this person? If you rely on a certain amount of professional distance to make your working relationship successful, it may feel awkward for your assistant to come across personal email from friends or family. If your assistant is paid by your company, rather than you personally, take care to avoid exposing your assistant to messages that could create any conflicts of interest (for example, correspondence about a possible job change).  And if you share your assistant with others, think carefully about whether managing your email is feasible in the context of your assistant’s overall workload.

What’s normal in your office? If your peers get help managing their email, or there’s a common practice of delegating certain kinds of email management (like calendaring), then don’t hesitate to do the same. If you would be the first person at your level to get email triage assistance, talk with your manager, HR team, or IT department (to ensure you’re complying with email security guidelines) before asking your assistant to help. And if you’re thinking of hiring an outside assistant on your own nickel, make sure that you only forward or share email in a way that complies with your company’s email policies.

Setting up delegation

Once you have determined who will provide you with email support and to what degree you will rely on them, you need to set up a system that will allow you to manage your inbox collaboratively. That system includes both the technical set-up that will let you share email, and establishing clear expectations about how you and your assistant will work together. I recommend:

Using delegation services: Since sharing your password is a risky proposition, it’s a good idea to share access to your email by using a delegation service like those provided by Gmail or Outlook. Delegation allows someone else to access your email using their own password; you can revoke that access at any time. Outlook even allows you to customize your delegation setup to limit which items your assistant can view.

Creating a second email address: If you’re concerned about providing an assistant with direct access to your email, creating a second email address can be a useful strategy. This can work in one of two ways, depending on how much of your email you want your assistant to handle. If you’d like your assistant to see virtually all your email, provide her with access to your primary inbox, and create a separate email address that you share with people who need to be able to communicate with you on a confidential basis. (You can also use that second email address when you’re on vacation: ask your assistant to forward only those emails you must see, and enjoy the peace of ignoring your main email address.) If, on the other hand, you want your assistant to only handle selected correspondence, set up an address you can forward incoming mail to (possibly via mail rules) and give your assistant access to that address instead.

Specifying your reply protocol: Agree on whether your assistant will reply to emails as you, or by forwarding your emails to an account in his own name, and replying from there (“Sarah forwarded your email, and asked me to find a time for you to meet”).

Drafting sample replies: Particularly if you have a new assistant, or are trying to delegate email for the first time, write a few sample replies your assistant can use as the basis for her own messages. This is especially important if you are authorizing your assistant to send messages as you. While you’re at it, create a few standard replies that you can use yourself whenever you’re forwarding an email to your assistant (“My assistant Jim Smith, cc’ed on this email, can get back to you with a meeting time.”).

Making the most of delegation

Once you have your delegation system in place, there are a few practices and tools that facilitate collaborative email management:

Timing: Agree on when and how often your assistant will review your inbox. If you have access to daily support, your assistant can review your messages first thing, and perhaps at a couple of other agreed-upon times during the day; you’ll look at your inbox after your assistant has moved all extraneous messages into a folder (or folders) that he will work through himself. If your assistant is only providing a few hours of support each week, forward him the messages you’d like him to handle, or put them in a designated folder — just be sure to also reply to your correspondents, letting them know you or your assistant will get back to them in a few days.

Flags and tags: If your assistant has direct access to your inbox, ask her to flag every email in your inbox that you should personally read or address, or conversely, tell her that you will flag any email you want her to handle. This will work best if you are using a system of mail folders, labels or tags to file emails of different types: set up a category or label (“Assistant”) that you can apply to any message your assistant should address, and one (“ReadThis”) for any message you need to read yourself, and make sure you each apply those labels as needed when either of you go through the inbox.

Forwarding: Set up mail rules that forward specific kinds of messages to your assistant, such as meeting requests or invoices. You can also set up a rule that forwards any flagged/starred message, or any message with a specific label; that way you can quickly tag any message you want forwarded, without having to manually forward each one.

Filter-proofing:  If you’ve been reluctant to set up rules that move messages out of your inbox before you see them, an assistant can provide a safety net in case things go astray. Just ask your assistant to regularly review all your unread mail (for example, by looking in Gmail’s “all mail” folder, or doing an Outlook search for all unread mail) so that if an important message gets caught by your mail filters, he can move it back into your inbox.

While I came up with most of these tactics at a time when I had a wonderful full-time assistant, they are still useful to me even though now I have only occasional, part-time help. When I hire or task someone to help me on a major project, I often include email support as part of their mandate — and use tactics like selectively forwarding email, or delegating my helper to reply on my behalf.

The biggest challenge in getting email support is making the mental shift away from thinking of email as an area of responsibility that is yours and yours alone. Email is an enormous part of the workload for most professionals. Get help with this area of responsibility, and you’ll not only find it easier to stay on top of email — you’ll find it easier to stay on top of all your work.

See the article on blogs.hbr.org.

5 ways to liberate your team from email overload

by

This story published in the June 16, 2014 issue of Fortune magazine rings true for every nonprofit we serve.  Sending clear, concise emails can help us all stay more productive. You and your employees can waste several hours a day wading through the inbox. Here’s how to say more while mailing less.

1. Quit trying to solve problems by email
Gather everyone for a 15-minute huddle at the same time every day or week. With the right people in the room, it’ll take you seven minutes to resolve issues that might otherwise lead to an hour and a half of emailing back and forth. Plus, since you all know when you’ll see each other next, you’ll spend less time messaging one another to set up other times to talk.

2. Use hyperspecific subject lines
Be nitpicky! It’ll keep everyone from wasting time searching in-boxes for lost messages. To set up a June 15 call about your budget, use the subject line “June 15 call re: budget.” If the date switches to June 17, take three seconds to update it in the subject line. And when you get an email with a vague subject line like “Two questions,” change it to something more precise in your reply.

3. Insist on extreme brevity
Keep emails Twitter-tight, and tell your team not to send you missives that you have to scroll through, advises Joseph McCormack, author of Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less. “Write them on a smartphone, for a smartphone,” he suggests. And don’t barrage employees with giant attachments. Instead, take a cue from Jeff Bezos: Read the material silently at the start of a meeting — then discuss it on the spot.

4. Ban emails with multiple parts
More than 43% of professionals abandon complicated emails in the first 30 seconds, according to McCormack’s research. “They either pause and say, ‘I’ll get back to it later’ — or don’t read them,” he says. Ask your team to stick to one topic per email and to send a new message for other, unrelated requests. And if you get a three-part message, respond to each one with a separate, accurately renamed email.

5. Close the conversation quickly
Long acknowledgments or thank-yous can lead to email clutter — but no one wants to be rude by leaving messages unacknowledged. To thank someone or answer a simple yes-or-no question, put your response in the subject line followed by “(EOM)” — short for “end of message.” Recipients will know they don’t need to open the email. Hint: Spell out EOM the first time. It’ll save you from getting a bunch of responses asking what “EOM” means.

Best management practices matter!

by

A headline article in the May 29, 2014 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy confirms that donors are willing to invest more in to nonprofit organizations able to demonstrate best management and governance practices. Specifically, the study analyzes fundraising success of accredited nonprofits vs. non-accredited nonprofits.

Three university business professors compared 102 fully accredited nonprofits with the same number of unaccredited organizations. The study, released last month, found that the accredited nonprofits raised a median $286,589 in the year they applied for accreditation, and that figure rose to $323,754 during the first year they were accredited. The median donation to the uncertified organizations declined over the same period. A complete copy of the article is available here.

While applying for accreditation can be costly, it costs nothing to ensure your nonprofit organization is employing best practices and implementing processes that meet accreditation standards. Don’t know where to start? Attend one of Spokes’ monthly “Best Practices in Nonprofit Governance” classes to learn more about accreditation standards and how Spokes can help you strengthen your operations to secure more donor support!  Spokes members may also login to our members-only website to download the Standards for Excellence Organizational Assessment and editable templates for key operational policies.

Online Giving: An Opportunity & Legal Pitfall

by

What do Blackbaud’s 2013 Charitable Giving Report, the 2013 Millennial Impact Report and the 2013 eNonprofits Benchmark Study have in common? More and more donors are donating online. All three reports announced double-digit increases in the percentage of online gifts received in 2013 over 2012. The Boston Marathon bombings, Midwest storms, Philippines’ typhoon disaster and #GivingTuesday are cited as key drivers in increased online giving, however, the trend also reflects a cultural shift in philanthropic values and donor engagement. Having a “Donate Now” button on your nonprofit’s website has become a requirement for any nonprofit that wishes to grow its donor support.

But, online donations present a unique legal challenge for nonprofits. Every nonprofit must register in any state where it conducts fundraising activities. So what does an organization do when faced with the prospect of online giving and soliciting gifts nationally – or worldwide? Do you register your organization in all 50 states?

In response to these questions and as an effort to minimize charitable solicitation fraud through the internet, a group of attorneys and state charity officials convened as The National Association of State Charity Officials (NASCO) and defined a set of guidelines for internet fundraising known as The Charleston Principles (visit www.afpnet.org for details).  The following is a summary of the principles to help determine when and where your organization needs to register:

  • Every nonprofit must register in the state identified in its principal place of business address. If you are hosting fundraising or educational events where donations are accepted or soliciting local volunteers and donors, your non-Internet activities alone require registration in your home (“domicile”) state.
  • Every nonprofit using an interactive website (“Donate Now!” button) should register, at minimum, in its home state with the assumption that most of the online gifts received will come from your surrounding proximity.
  • If your organization specifically targets persons physically located outside of your home state – either by email or website – it must register within that targeted state. Clarification: If your organization receives a handful of donations from donors located outside of your state, there is no need to register in the donors’ states. If, however, your organization later sends an email  appeal requesting a second donation from one of those donors located outside of your state then  your organization is targeting persons physically located outside of your home state and would be required to register with the donor’s state.
  • If your organization receives online contributions from persons located outside of your home state on a repeated, ongoing basis or of a substantial amount, it should be registered within those states where the online donors are located. Clarification:  As an example, if a donor from Nevada makes a $50,000 online donation to your California-based organization (a gift that represents 25% of your total annual funds received), such gift would be considered “substantial” by the Internal Revenue Service and require your organization to register with the state of Nevada.

Keep your nonprofit current with these 5 online giving trends.

Guiding nonprofits to achieve their goals through support and expert resources.

How Can We Make A Difference Together?

Spokes welcomes local professionals who would like to share their expertise in support of the nonprofit sector.

Get Started Contributing

Recent Articles