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Volunteer Appreciation Week: Clever Ways to Say ‘Thank You’

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Volunteer Appreciation Week is April 15-21! Now is the perfect time to plan to say thank you to your volunteers. If your organization is like ours, you rely heavily on volunteers as an extension of your staff or human resources. A genuine gesture of appreciation can result in a happier, more motivated volunteer. Here are some options to try out:

1. Surprise your volunteers with a kind gesture – coffee or muffins to start their day or a plant to show you’re thinking about them.
2. Show your appreciation through social media or a newsletter.
3. Send a personalized thank you note to the volunteer themselves or to their employer.
4. Use the power of the testimonial. Ask staff and other volunteers to write notes about a time that their colleague handled a challenge or made a difference. Compile the notes on a poster or book and present it to your volunteers.

Remember, a gratified and well-treated volunteer is a motivated and happy volunteer! If your organization is seeking additional support for its volunteer program, Spokes has several volunteer management classes coming up: Preparing Your Agency for Volunteers: Navigating Volunteer Screening and Recruitment on April 11 and Keeping Quality Volunteers: Volunteer Retention and Motivation on April 18. Join us!

Finding Success with a Succession Plan!

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There is change afoot in the nonprofit sector; in San Luis Obispo County and across the country, boards are seeking new presidents, and nonprofit executives are transitioning to new jobs. Even in our Spokes microcosm, the search for new leadership is on. CEO Lesley Santos Dierks is moving to a volunteer role as a board of director and consultant. Using Spokes’ carefully crafted succession plan, Spokes board and staff are reorganizing, facilitating great potential in this next phase of Spokes evolution.

Why does your organization need a succession plan? Succession planning is a discipline that enables organizations to reduce reliance on any one person or small group for critical functions, thereby building sustainability. Infusing an organization with new individuals is a healthy opportunity to expand viewpoints, diversify, and clarify the organizational vision. Considering that only 27% of organizations surveyed by the 2017 National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices reported that they had a written succession plan in place, it’s clearly something that needs to be added to the agenda.

Organizations experience leadership transition for a variety of reasons. At a minimum, best practices require regular turnover at the board level with term limits. Sometimes there is an unanticipated opening on the board or staff or a natural transition of a long-time leader. And, maybe your volunteer-run organization is hiring its first executive staff person. In each case, a succession plan is key to keeping stakeholders confident and preventing service recipients from experiencing delays. Here are tips to ensure your organization’s future transitions are as smooth as possible.

  • Create clear job descriptions and roles for all volunteer, board of director, and staff roles; monitor and evaluate successes (and failures).
  • Put policies and procedures on paper so any new volunteer and/or staff can get up and running quickly and efficiently. Start with a simple checklist, and imagine walking someone else through each step. Developing an operations manual for your processes will ensure consistency and uniformity. For details on creating these policies for your organization, click here.
  • Continually train and cross-train all volunteers and/or current staff to minimize disruption from unexpected changes. Job shadow or utilize Lynda.com to help staff and volunteers learn the new skills and technologies they need to succeed one another. Spokes consulting services can also be a huge assist!
  • Spread the wealth: make sure donors have relationships with more than one person in the organization. At your next event, make it a priority to introduce your donors to more members of your leadership team.
  • Spokes offers classes and resources to help your board and staff learn the best practices of nonprofit management. Allow us to train them on the basics while you focus on teaching them the more nuanced functions of your operations.
  • Take advantage of member benefits like Executive Director Roundtables and Board President Roundtables. At your next board or staff meeting, play Spokes Best Practices in Nonprofit Management video series.
  • And, when an unexpected transition occurs despite great succession planning efforts, remember that Spokes offers Executive Search services through its consulting program. Learn more here.

Getting Board Members to Agree

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Consensus. Harmony. Unity. These are the goals of every nonprofit board. Unfortunately, they are rarely part of their reality. So, how does a board leader honor every individual around the table while encouraging them all to move forward in agreement?

In his recent article for Fast Company, “This Is Why Your Passive-Aggressive Office Note Didn’t Work,” Shane Snow suggests that understanding each individual’s outer and inner expectations is the key to creating group agreement. Snow cites a framework presented in author Gretchen Rubin’s latest book, The Four Tendencies, that identifies different personalities and how best to empathize with and appeal to those personalities–rather than avoid them or fight them.

• Upholders will do anything to meet a work deadline (an outer expectation) and also their New Year’s resolution (an inner expectation). They’re self-starters and highly reliable, but they can be defensive and rigid.
• Questioners tend to be good at meeting their inner expectations, but they need to be convinced why to do something before doing it, this way they can decide for themselves whether it’s worth doing. They’re comfortable bucking the system but can suffer from analysis paralysis and get impatient with people who just accept things as they are.
• Obligers are motivated above all else by helping others and by following rules. They can be counted on as responsible but can have trouble imposing limits or saying “no.”
• Rebels are motivated by freedom of choice and self-expression. They don’t want to be told what to do; they want to decide what to do. They’re great at being independent, spontaneous, and creative but not at being disciplined.

Read his entire article here to learn more about your own personality type, better identify the personalities of your peers, and gain strategies to use this framework to create more true consensus in the board room, with your colleagues, and in your personal relationships, too!

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.

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.

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