Ways to improve selling skills for non-profit organizations

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hello and thank you for coming along to this short webinar about the nonprofit leadership had its best nine ways to make your organization better than the rest my name is Ruth Knight and I'm from the pillars of best practice for those of you who don't know me let me introduce myself I live on the Gold Coast in Queensland where I moved to from the UK about 14 years ago my background is working in health youth and education services and I've got qualifications in health counseling and also a master's of business from the Australian Centre of philanthropy and nonprofit studies which is at the Queensland University of Technology in Queensland and I'm still there just about to complete a PhD studying organizational culture and change management within the sector so currently I do a lot of training and consultancy with many different organizations and I'm also on the board of a non-profit organisation myself that I found it 10 years ago but very importantly I'm also the director and founder of pillars of best practice which is an online coaching program for nonprofit sector organisations and leaders who are creating massive influence and change in their community so I'll tell you a little bit more about pillars of best practice later in the webinar the information that I wanted to give you today was based around four questions and these are what are the common problems and challenges for nonprofit organizations what can make our organization sustainable and effective how do we determine how healthy our organization is and what should our managers and leaders be spending time on so I'm going to give you my perspective on these questions and what I think some of the answers are because if you're wanting to create massive influence in your community if you wants your organization to be successful and if you want to spend your time wisely on growing your organization then it's very important that you've got some idea about these these questions and their answers if you have any questions please feel free to email me or get in touch with me somehow and I'll answer your questions just to put some context first though just to make sure that we're all we all know that the sector that you're in is defined by your organization's purpose so at one end we've got organizations businesses mainly businesses and corporations but are founded because they want to have financial benefit to their owners or their shareholders and at the other end of the scale is organizations that are founded because they want to have some social benefit to the community so any revenue or income that comes into those organizations goes back into the organization's itself or back into the activities for the community that they're they're running or they're doing now many people call this this continuum in terms of sectors so the businesses and the fall profits are in the first sector we know that the second sector is usually government-run organizations and the third sector is where the social or the charitable organizations sit and there's many different names that are used it could be non profit sector or voluntary organizations charities there's many different names but basically they all sit in the third sector so it doesn't mean that they're just because they're in the third sector they're any less valuable or important than the first or the second sector they're all very important and to society but that's just how they've been named and you will see that I've actually got a white space in the middle and I've queried what this is and I wonder if you do know because this is potentially another sector and but I'm not going to reveal the answer just yet I'm going to tell you what it is at the end of the webinar so stay tuned and we'll come back and reveal what that potential fourth sector is in a few moments now the nonprofit sector is a very important part of our society we know in Australia that we have more than 700,000 entities and that most of which are small but they are growing so back in 1995 we only had about five hundred and twenty thousand and and now as I said we have over seven hundred thousand so we know that these organizations are growing but they provide a wide range of services you know it includes education and health and employment and counseling and legal advice and religious services there's also some really large organizations that are often hospitals or providers of aged care environmental groups churches religious and political organizations we have art galleries Performing Arts and other schools and other education providers so there's a massive array of organizations that work in this sector doing some amazing things for their community so it's really is very important what these organizations do but it's not just that they are very economically viable as well in Australia again we have about thirty eight thousand nonprofit organizations that employ staff and a further three thousand that are also deemed by the Australian Bureau statistics to be economically significant so nine hundred thousand people in Australia equates to about 8 percent of all employees in Australia so it's no small group of employees and working alongside those employees we also know that there's another 4.6 million volunteers working in the inner sector and they've worked out that or that wage equivalent of those volunteers would be about 15 billion a year so again African amount of people that are working in the sector and making it a very vibrant and economically viable now where are these people working well sand it's a little bit old it's back in 2000 and they did some research on where these people were working so we know that roughly probably probably it's similar now but back then it was community services health and education that were the biggest groups of employees employers and there's but that of course there are people working in other parts of the sector as well and just to let you know that also in America it's also a very big sector and they have over 10 million people working in the sector over there that's without the volunteers and so in America it's the third largest work force behind only retail and management manufacturing and in Australia and it our sector is bigger than the communications agriculture and tourism industries together which means that it's a huge input into the economy I'm 74 billion a year and yeah 76 billion a year sorry goes through this industry so it's a growing sector economically and in terms of size and diversity but comes what comes with that is power and influence because of course you know with that amount of people that are employed and that doing such great work and the government acknowledges the significant role that the sector plays they've said that a strong vibrant and innovative not-for-profit sector is essential to achieving a productive and inclusive Australia but we know it's much more than just about economics professor mark Lyons once said and that non profit organization students make an even more important contribution to society through their demonstration of and thus encouragement for collective action they play a central role in the regeneration of social capital and nonprofit organizations also sustain and shape a democratic democratic political system they are the elementary schools of democracy so you know social capital really refers to quality of life issues such as safety trust and sense of purpose and it also describes the changes to individual community connectedness health and well-being so nonprofit organizations give us ways to celebrate build and protect the many human values that give rise to healthy thriving communities so we really can't underestimate the importance and power of the sector and and how it works together and within our society but of course with great power comes great responsibility we need to ensure that our sector maintains its vibrancy in its economic significance we can't allow it to not be successful really if we want our community to stay successful or to build and thrive and grow so organizations that are working in this sector then I really believe need to look at two different areas that they need to focus on in they want to achieve success that they need to be both good at the systems the management and leadership required to run the organization so that's you know your efficiency your effectiveness and your engagement and how you run your organization but you also need to be very mindful about your mission your purpose and your outcomes and the impact that you're trying to create within your organization and your community so these are the two very important elements success just doesn't happen by chance anymore we need to be very focused and strategic about how the nonprofit sector is and and your organization in particular is going to grow and thrive so what are some of the challenges then that most organizations face because unfortunately the critical things that are going to gain you success are also the things that give you the biggest challenges and what I thought we'd look at very quickly is six common challenges that all nonprofits face and if you'd like to score yourself on on these these challenges I have I sent out a handout that you can use or you can contact me for handouts about these challenges just so that you can understand yourself a little bit about how you're going and and if these challenges are affecting you the first one unsurprisingly is funding and Australia for instance is a very big country with lots of needs however very interestingly the world giving index which is the first report of its kind looking at charitable behavior around the world they looked at three different types of charitable behavior giving money giving time helping a stranger and they use the results to produce the world giving in text and interestingly and very nicely Australia and New Zealand topped the list so that's really great for such tiny populated countries because they are obviously we are a very giving organized a giving country however that's balanced across you know the great needs that we have you know anything from disadvantage to disasters and and all the other needs that we have in our community to make it strong and vibrant interestingly just to let you know that study that I just mentioned also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy so the more happy we are the more likely we are to give and so it's very important that as a nation which try and stay as happy as we can so that we know that we will to help out others but the challenge is that there are as I mentioned before simply more organizations now than ever before and there is less funding to go around and that's not you know that's a world issue there's the economic crisis that's going on around the world and also you know the crisis is that are happening in our own country so fundraising can't really be an ad hoc approach anymore financially the world is changing and things are happening all the time to make give up make us demands on our money and our spending and so really as an organization that relies on funding we really need to think about you know what are our strategies and how are we engaging people to donate and give to our organizations financially a recently sport report that's just come out by Wendy Scaife and her colleagues from QUT this it's called who's asking for what fundraising and leadership in Australian nonprofits and the report suggests that the sector is in a state of flux and change and they found that while there is a lot of fundraising going on many organizations are having to think differently and develop fresh skills either to enter the fundraising market or to cope better with rising competition for community and corporate support and this new reality affects board CEOs and fundraisers like so it's going to take a lot of information about fundraising and I'm going to do that in other webinars around you know what does this mean for you as an organization and how can you make sure that you're keeping up with the new technologies and the new ways that people are giving it's all extremely important for you to know if you're going to maintain some success with raising money and working with donors and funders you can I've just put the link there if you want to download the full report and read what else he has Wendy Scaife and her colleagues have to say about that the second challenge I wanted to talk about though was BOTS otherwise known as boards of management or management committees directors of your organizations now boards have significant legal and moral duties and they have increasing compliance issues and complex organizations to manage and govern but they're normally volunteers from the local community and some of them have very little experience or knowledge about financial monitoring strategic planning governance or fundraising and and they typically don't even like to get involved in fundraising so it's quite a challenge to work with this very passionate group of people who need to keep up-to-date with the skills around governance and what their duties and responsibilities are it's very easily unfortunately for boards to become ineffective and very dysfunctional because it's such a passionate group of people with some very different ideas about how to run their organizations so there's lots of issues involved in making sure that these boards are running well and know what their duties and their functions are the third challenge is managing staff and volunteer performance and dealing with HR issues unfortunately ing to a study conducted by the Dale Carnegie Training disengaged workers outnumber engaged workers by pretty significant margin they found there only 45% of managers and supervisors and 23% of people at other levels qualifiers engaged and that means feeling enthusiastic empowered inspired and confident in their jobs so I know that was done in the in the corporate sector but I think it's probably I'm fairly confident that it's the same in the nonprofit sector so if only 45% of employees are engaged then what are the other 55% potentially doing you know what they're probably not performing to their rock or they possibly could be your biggest headache and asthma as a manager you probably know that one of the biggest challenges is trying to figure out how to address and change poor performance and most nonprofit organizations don't really have the time or the money to be spending on people with poor performance or are not very engaged or are not really producing the outcomes that they need and to be in the nonprofit sector one of the worst problems that we have within the workplace is poor communication and no wonder because about 45% of employees say they don't receive the information they need to do their job well so you know it's very frustrating for them and 65 percent of organizations experience major interdepartmental communication problems and 54 percent of employees say their performance reviews a useless so poor communication is really costing us a significant amount of time and resources to manage unproductivity low morale and poor engagement so it's one of the areas that is you know very difficult for organizations but it's also a big waste of time and money the fourth challenge is conducting good research monitoring engagement and assessing how to improve your organization's unfortunately and so many organizations just they kind of hope and pray they're doing good work and they they think they are because you know people tell them you've got a great organization but they don't really collect any evidence to prove it there's no real good monitoring or research conducted to making sure that they are getting the outcomes that they need I've spoken to organizations who don't do any surveys with their staff or their volunteers and they don't click feedback from their clients so they're not really able to assess how well they're doing or if they can improve or how they could improve their organization and what they're doing the fifth fifth challenge on from that is measuring their impact so we need to obviously understand how we're doing but we also need to understand are we achieving the mission are we achieving the outcomes and the impact that we set out to do so there's a lot of agreement about having clear metrics to measure a program success it's important you know not just to rely on subjective photos and stories but strong evaluation frameworks to measure clearly what and how much a program has contributed to society or your community where the project was implemented it's critical because it helps you understand what you're achieving and how you can get better at it I mean you'd only need to look at a profession like sport to think about you know well it would be unheard of in sport to not measure your achievements and keep refining what you do until you become better better achieving your interview impact you know you have a coach to help you look at how well you're doing and to train you and support you as you come back become better in your sport so you know why would it be any different in the third sector we are facing unprecedented challenges in our communities and we're trying to change behaviors attitudes policies and practices so we really need to know if what we're doing is working we can't just hope and pray that what we're doing is best practice we really need to know and measure that the other reason that we should be measuring our impact is because there's a lot of money going through the sector there's a lot of money and coming from grants and philanthropic TRUS etc and these people are relying on us to really give them a return on their investment and to demonstrate that we are spending you know grants and fun and donations well and there in fact there's more pressure than ever before really I suppose and to show the results of what we're doing and that we're not just you know doing good anymore but we're really doing something significant within our communities and the sixth challenge is developing a healthy organizational culture so long gone are the days where you could be an autocratic leader and expect people to you know have been motivated by autocratic leaders today we really need to think about how we engage our staff and how we support them and motivate them in really good strong ways that really encourages people to go to do the best they can you only have to look at the bullying and harassment that happens in workplaces it costs the economy about 15 billion a year because unfortunately bullying and harassment is so rife within in within our organizations so again unfortunately it doesn't not happen in the nonprofit sector it has dire social and financial consequences so really and it's not just bullying it's the culture impacts work relationships work life balance productivity employee turnover and unethical behavior so we really need to look at the whole of our organization in terms of the culture and how it's working and how its engaging our staff and volunteers and how it's motivating them so if we don't have a good workplace culture organizations will not thrive and grow in healthy ways because it's so important you know it's so dependent on how our people are doing and how healthy and then and well they're feeling there's research out there to suggest that many companies have a lack of employee engagement and this can cost you know anywhere between thirty five percent and fifty percent of payroll so you only have to look at turnover and sick days and conflicts and complaints within your organization to see this is true so if if you even have a low sense of engagement and and there's conflict within your organization then you really probably are wasting some time and resources that you don't have so if I wasn't really the sick and challenges that many organizations face and I wonder how you felt that you were going with all of those challenges are they challenges for you or do you feel that you know you've got some great strategies and approaches to making sure that you can overcome the barriers to creating some success and sustainability well I thought that what we do is just look at what sustainability means because if you are not wasting your time on conflict and poor performance then you should be out there really working on your fantastic projects and meeting your funders and making sure that your organization is sustainable so I don't have time to share all of my recommendations today but I thought I would just in the next few minutes take some really important ones that I think will make a massive difference to your organization sustainability can be different things to different people but this is my take on it I really believe that sustainability means to be resilient despite the uncertain and competitive environment within the nonprofit sector so it means capacity resilience adaptability being relevant and flourishing and doing well in everything that you're doing but it's very importantly an integrated approach between three things which is your role and responsibilities that means your your governance and your leadership team that's how they make good choices and decisions for the organization so it includes developing an appropriate and effective business model strategic planning financial management and leading staff and volunteers with vision and competence so it's extremely important that you're your governance team and your leadership team are running the organization well but it's also very importantly about relationships which is the way that you engage and develop partners now both with internal partners so or employees and your volunteers but also your external partners so your funders and your doughnut donors and thirdly I believe it's really important to look at the results so if you're able to define what you do why and what outcomes you deliver you're putting yourself in a much better place to actually gain and retain your donors and funders and develop that engagement and partnerships that you need so it's a very important three factors here which I'll go into just a little bit more about the mission driven governance if you've not heard of that term or you want to know more about that term I've actually done a practice guide that you can download from my website so you can have a little look at what that means and see if you can make sure that your organization has some idea about how you drive and how you manage your organization and keeping your mission in mind relationships so I alluded to the fact that there are two different types of partnerships and relationships that you need to concentrate on internal partnerships that's with your staff and your volunteers so their job satisfaction is critical to your organization's success because they're the people out there doing the work but there are also ambassadors for your organization and externally the partners that you need to maintain relationships with our your donors your supporters your funders the media and everybody else that supports your organization so they're critical to the long-term sustainability of your organization and and that but as you know you know partnerships and relationships don't happen overnight and sometimes you need to work at developing and nurturing those relationships which can take you know some strategic approaches and you need to take time to do that but it's really important that you communicate with your donors and with your employees and make sure that you build the brand so that people are compelled to support you and stay committed to you as you grow and thrive I did mention again that communication was a critical part of the way of engaging people and there are so many different ways that you communicate every day with people and I expect that if you worked it out what kind of percentage you spent on communication it would be a lot a lot of percentage of your time so you've got to really work out you know how influential is that communication and how well are you doing that communication could you get better at using the communication to engage and maintain those relationships 83% of highly effective organizations states that communication is an essential part of their organization's overall strategy so I wonder how important it is to you and your organization do you really focus on communication and how well you're doing that because you may find that it is critical to your success the third area that in terms of sustainability is results Winston Churchill a very great leader once said however beautiful the strategies you should occasionally look at the results but so many times we forget to do this or we only do it in a very informal ad-hoc way we don't really think about what is it that we're trying to achieve here you know what are our results you know we don't put strategies in place to help our staff and volunteers evaluate everything that they do and then help them to reflect and refine our projects and activities to make sure that we're getting better at what we do so results really do matter and in a world where nonprofits are facing greater competition than ever before in terms of attaining funding and donor support providing tangible results for your work might be the most important unique selling point and tool of leverage that you have in terms of standing above the crowd if you're able to show your results and have some evidence about what you're doing and why this really is going to put you ahead of the crowd so it's very important for funders and because you only need to really put yourself in their shoes for a few minutes to realize that if you only have so much money to spend on on donations and you're looking at all these organizations that are asking you for funding then who do you give your money to most we'll think about well who is going to give us the most return on investment or we often call it s ROI which is social return on investment now they might not actually use those words but that's social return on investment is one term given to organize or grant makers who are thinking well if I invest in this organization what type of investment am I going to get out of that and it's it's often what they are thinking now I was looking at a media press release from Perpetual which is a large grant maker in Australia one of the largest and they give out a significant amount of funding every year and their press release back in 2011 said that it could only fund about 200 of the 1,200 applications that it received so here in the press release it said that 1,135 not-for-profits applied for funding so that's up from 917 and 2010 and the amount requested also rose from 80 4.4 from 68.9 million up to 80 4.5 million so you can see clearly that the number of organisations applying for money is increasing but the amount that is being asked for is also obviously increasing as well now perpetual had a lot of people that they did not recommend for funding so people who didn't get through to the shortlist or were successful in funding and I just had a look to see why that was so and perpetual states that there's two reasons why people didn't get funded one was because there were just too many applications and not enough funding but also because applicants didn't rate highly against the assessment criteria that was set out in their guidelines they were actually selected on the basis of their ability to meet full criteria strategy outcomes capability and leadership so these are critical areas for you to think about when you're applying for money because if you are the funder and you've got to pick or choose the organization's to give your money to then you're really going to look at the ones that can show how successful they are in these four areas now mr. Thomas from perpetual said that in this competitive funding environment successful applications will have been able to articulate what success for their organization looks like and how they're achieving it funders want to know that their contribution would have a genuine impact in the community and that their dollar is going as far as possible so funders really are wanting to know what types of impact you're making and how you're doing that and they want some evidence for that it's no good just saying we've got a good idea you've really got to understand why it's a good idea and the evidence for that but also you know not to just say that it's the cheapest possible project you know it frustrates me when you know people just think they've got to put in for the cheapest amount for this activity or this service that you want to provide because I don't actually think cheap is always better you know in the nonprofit sector we often run on the smell of an oily rag really but that does a disservice to many it's not fair to our staff and our volunteers our clients or our community who need to have a very well-run and well resource sector so and although they do want social return on investment it's very important to ensure that you are providing some evidence around the fact that you're providing a good service with leadership and outcomes that you want so the first thing to realize is that you need you need to stop gambling about your chances to win a grant you've got to get serious about demonstrating your results and your commitment to evaluation and best practice because when you do that you are going to really stand out from the crowd and it's not just going to be a lottery you're actually placing yourself in a good position to win groans but the other question is about how healthy your organization is because you need to actually prove your organization's capability to run projects and run services and so just as if you were going to a doctor's and they were going to give you a health check it's you need to actually think about yourself and think about how healthy are we how much do we have the capacity to run the programs and services that we we want to run now what do I mean by healthy well what I mean by that is an organization that has good governance that is focused on the right priorities that has good strong vision and leadership and it follows best practice in everything it does within your policies and prevent practices you know how are you doing compared to other people because of course a doctor just doesn't look at you they know what the general population is and understands what healthy is compared to the average person now this is very hard in the nonprofit sector because we're such a diverse group of organizations and people but best practice is a practice or approach that represents the most efficient or prudent course of action and that is used as a benchmark and again it's very difficult and to do this within the sector because many people say well we're just too diverse how can you benchmark organizations well it's a question that I've been battling with for about ten years and and I've been trying to find ways of doing it and by sort of myself going around lots of different organizations and really working out what's working well for some and what isn't working well for others that's given me the ability to sort of write down some benchmarks and so to enable to me to put those into a position where other organizations can have a look at that I've called it the pillars of best practice and these pillars there's nine of them are aimed at guiding your discussion in your organization about how you operate and if you are a Deering to best practice because if you are you are going to place yourself in a much better position to engage your staff to engage your donors and to receive more funding now there are nine pillars but cover everything from preparation principles planning promotion people processes performance partnerships and proof and if you go to the pillars of best practice you'll have a have a look at those if you like and have a look at the goals on the outside now with under each of those goals though there are seven indicators that help you assess to see whether you are meeting that pillar so it's very important to realize there is a process to making sure that you are aligning up with this best practice and the pillars are not meant to be legalistic or idealistic they're just quite visionary standards that are very achievable but they help you be successful and they help stand out from the crowd and like anything it's good to have you know something to aim for because if you're not quite sure what you're doing or what you should be spending your time on and then you could be just shooting in the dark and it's taking far too long for you to learn the skills all by yourself so the pillars are a really good way of helping you aim in the right direction and know what you should be doing to ensure that you are achieving success I love this quote by Gerald Abraham's who was a world champion chess chess player who used to play blindfolded and he once said good positions don't win games good moves do and I love that quote because it reminds me that it's not just about what you're doing now that really counts it's the moves that you're going to make us the positioning that you're placing yourself in to make those moves that's going to determine whether you're going to be successful or not so in light of that you know what do you think your managers and leaders should be doing should they be making the moves that's going to help their organization be successful so that when you're applying for money or when you're talking to donors when you're putting in submissions you're going to be positioning yourself to achieve success John Maxwell is another great author and business coach who once said the single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development there is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people raises them up as leaders and continually develops them and it kind of makes sense doesn't it really that you you wouldn't consider building something without getting the plans right without getting the leadership and the project management rights because if you do that then everybody's going to come up together work as a team and achieve the goal that you want to so it's absolutely sure that you recruit good leaders who are going to oversee your organization and engage with your staff and your donors and work on the things that are going to make your organization's successful now if you think of yourself as a team a team that's out there to do something fantastic for your community and then you need the skills the tools and the strategies to help you do it you don't want to go out there and not work strategically otherwise you're just going to miss the ball and we're losing will become a habit rather than winning so are you positioning then yourself to get those funds you need are you positioning yourself for success because if you're not then you need to look at what the challenges are that your organization is facing and spend some time on making sure that you are or you're healthy throughout the whole of your organization and particularly in those three areas of sustainability now I do have a free guide that you can download called the ten fundraising mistakes that can be fatal to your organization so if you would like to at least start with those 10 mistakes that other people do that you need to make sure that you're aware of and that you're not undoing because really those things could be fatal to your organization if you're not aware of the common mistakes that other people make so please feel free to go to the pillars of best practice and download that free report for yourself now I did say that in at the end I would come back to this this question about what is this potentially fourth sector what is going on here what is this this place in the middle that is a hybrid I suppose between the first second and third sector well it's potentially called the fourth sector and it's considered a growing area within the within society I suppose in terms of you know it's a hybrid between the four profits and making money and beings as financially and economically sustainable but it's got some very good social outcomes and and and it's very much about what the organization is achieving and in Australia you often you might hear of the words social enterprise that's what it can be called over here and we know that the the sector has increased in in Australia by 37% over the last five years so it's definitely a growing area and I would say that if you're in this third sector you need to take a good look at this and see how it's going to affect you because more and more social enterprises are starting up every day one of them I've just put here as a as a case study is just to show you that Street is a social enterprise providing homeless youth with the supported pathway to long term careers in the hospitality industry and they run Street cafes in Melbourne so that's just you can have a look up have a look at what they're doing but that's an example of a social enterprise that are using the business like strategies of the first sector but also have some very good social outcomes and social goals as well so I'm going to be talking a lot more about the fourth sector in other webinars and I hope that you'll join me for those other ones so what did you get out of today just perhaps you can note down you know what are the biggest challenges for your organization and how can you make your organization more sustainable and effective what do you need to be thinking about in terms of your long term sustainability because it's about positioning yourself and making the right moves for the long-term success that you want to need you need to think about how healthy your organization is and whether it has the capability and the leadership skills to be able to make sure that your organization is functioning and working well and then think about what should our managers and leaders spending our time then if we're going to position ourselves well how do we make sure that we are really working as a team and knowing that we were practicing our activities and our governance as well as we can be and then you might want to have a look at the pillars of best practice and see how those nine pillars are going to help you you know will it give you some focus will it give you some idea about how to position yourselves in a much better way so be smart get your team together think strategically and don't forget to download your FREE guide ten fundraising mistakes that can be fatal to your organization and just go to my home page there and have a look at it and just make sure that you're making the right moves to win those grants or to get the donations that you need and want so what are you taking away today how did that webinar help you I hope that you've taken away some ideas and you've your head is buzzing with some thoughts and ideas and if you have any questions please feel free to email me so thank you very much for your time today and good luck with everything you're doing and yeah lots of success to you and your organization good bye