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Telling the Rest of the Story

April 2, 2016 by Thomas Brendler

Stories about nonprofit organizations—particularly the ones they tell themselves—tend to focus on their scrappy beginnings, near-death experiences, big wins, and marquee moments that lace annual reports with the glow of valor.

Yet in hewing to an assumed logic of success, these stories often overlook the most critical element of the NGO life cycle: Periods of transition—a change in leadership, a shift in strategic focus, the loss of a longtime funder. These times are marked by great uncertainty—even fear—because they diverge from a predictable arc of growth and a reliable, heroic narrative. As a colleague once advised me when I was an executive director, “The true test of organizations is not how they grow, but how they shrink.” Indeed, transitions are an acute test of an organization’s vision and capacity. This is exactly why they have so much to teach.

One reason nonprofits downplay transitions is that they see them as evidence of weakness. Some fear they risk revealing fissures and points of friction that board members and senior leadership would rather keep in house, and tamped down at that. But uncertainty does not necessarily portend failure. Unquestioned assumptions about what transitions mean (and about what constitutes failure) can blind organizations to their value. Understanding and documenting difficult times—not just to satisfy a story, but to mine them for critical insights and lessons—can strengthen institutions over the long term.

Nonprofit storytelling mattersOne of the most important parts of telling these untold stories is finding people who can tell them, and providing them with the resources to do so. Organizations naturally build institutional memory over the years, through the collective experience of the individuals engaged in them. It is already there, we only need ask. Yet, documenting this knowledge is widely considered a luxury, a box to be checked off in an exit interview. Institutional memory is particularly vulnerable during periods of transition, with restructuring and changes in staff. The clock is always ticking.

How does your organization think about its institutional memory?  Have you found a way to capture it? What are some of the questions and challenges that come up for you? Let us know.  Email Thomas at tbrendler@bernuthconsulting.com or tweet him at @thomasbrendler.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits, Management Tagged With: Change Management, Institutional Memory

Organizational Change Done Right

September 25, 2015 by Betsy Garside

change-ahead-sign“Turn and face the strange…” is how David Bowie put it in the classic “Changes.” Wish it were so easy to do.

For many of our clients, the most challenging part of strategic planning is the change it generates. Sometimes a plan results in transformational, upheaving shifts. Sometimes there are tweaks to an already-good general direction. Sometimes the organization “changes” its way into a merger or a dissolution.

We’ve found that the scale of change — particularly for nonprofits — does not really matter. Be they big or small, any changes feel momentous in mission-driven organizations. This is partly the nature of a shared thread of culture at all NGOs, where the vesting of individuals in the organization is much greater than it may be at a corporation. It is also, however, because nonprofits can be really bad at directing, planning for, and communicating change.

A recent piece from McKinsey captures well what goes into a good change-management process. “The Science of Organizational Transformations”  is based on a field survey of executives. It’s a quick read; pay particular attention to the Influence Model on page 3. That idea of creating a powerful “change story” is even more important in mission-driven organizations, with those devoted and heavily invested staff members.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits, Management, News Tagged With: change, communications, McKinsey & Company, organizational

Inspiration for Change

April 7, 2015 by Betsy Garside

Our colleague Douglas Meyer has been working with The Ocean Project as part of an ongoing effort aimed at helping its partner aquariums and zoos inspire their visitors to take action for ocean conservation.

The effort has underscored the importance of asking questions and testing assumptions, as the latest finding was a bit of a surprise: seeing what an aquarium or zoo is doing with its own “green practices”  can be as inspirational to visitors as the emotional connection they feel for the animals. Douglas wrote a short piece on this latest finding in the most recent issue of the member magazine for the Association of Zoos & Aquariums.

You can download the one-page story, or dig deeper into The Ocean Project’s communications research.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits, News Tagged With: behavior change, communications, research, stakeholder surveys

The Elevator Test

November 25, 2014 by Betsy Garside

dinner partyIt happens at this time of year: You find yourself at a cocktail party (or Thanksgiving dinner, or gathering of new friends) and someone asks, “so what does your organization do?” You launch into a detailed overview of what your hard-working NGO aims to accomplish, filtered through the lens of your own piece of the work. Sometimes your audience of one lights up and asks the follow-up question you had hoped for. Often, sadly, they do not.

This is not your fault (unless you are a leader of the organization). Rather, you have just stumbled up against a question that too many organizations don’t undertake to answer: What’s your elevator speech? Said another way, why does your organization matter in the world — and to the person to whom you are speaking?

Several years ago our colleague David Williamson wrote a series of pieces about the elements of nonprofit marketing for Georgetown University’s Center for Nonprofit & Public Leadership. The first essay in the collection was about developing an elevator speech. There is a reason it was first in the series: This marketing exercise and resultant tool helps everyone connected with an organization, whether you are the assistant answering “what do you do?” or the board chair answering “is this organization a good one to invest in?”

To start, read David’s piece about passing the elevator test. And if you’re interested in really digging in to the story-telling idea, Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick makes for a good deeper dive.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits, Management Tagged With: Georgetown nonprofit program, marketing, nonprofit, nonprofit management, storytelling

Small Data, Big Insights

September 30, 2014 by Thomas Brendler

There is no doubt that the vast troves of data residing on the web—“big data” as they have come to be known—hold enormous potential to inform business strategy and boost productivity. One recent report estimates that data could generate gains of 1 to 5 per cent, seemingly modest improvements which could translate into game-changing returns. Amid such great promise, rising demand is spawning dozens of specialized start-ups, several fueled by venture capital—and an entire field of research, computational enterprise analytics.

The biggest challenge right now is how to sift efficiently through this raw information, in order to piece together digestible and meaningful trends and patterns—a process that has been characterized as “wrangling” and “janitor work.” (A task, as you might expect, that can take up most of a typical data scientist’s day.)

“The leap from the tools to the insight is the weak link,” Professor David B. Yoffie of Harvard Business School recently observed. Echoing this sentiment, University of Washington computer science professor Jeffrey Heer cautioned, “It’s an absolute myth that you can send an algorithm over raw data and have insights pop up.”

These scholars raise an interesting question: where do institutional insights come from? Is it, as they seem to suggest, a matter of the scale and the integrity of data, and the sophistication of analysis? Do more data necessarily mean bigger or better insights?

By contrast, in-depth interviews live at the other end of the data spectrum—allowing organizations to learn about themselves and their operating environments by digging where they stand. They provide an opportunity to probe critical issues with the help of people who are knowledgeable and invested. As with all forms of research there is a certain amount of mess involved, but the richness of what organizations learn from such close looking is hard to match.

These conversations can also teach big data a thing or two: they consistently reveal how vital it is to be clear about what you’re looking for from the outset, to formulate meaningful questions, and to think carefully about whom to ask them. The results may be “small data” by comparison, but the insights they generate can be far deeper.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits

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