Engaging Diverse Stakeholders in the Nonprofit Sector

Lively, well-attended discussions like last week’s first Diversity and Inclusion Networking Lunch, “Engaging Diverse Stakeholders in the Nonprofit Sector,” not only reinforce the passion around diversity and inclusion, but also reveal the delicate and long process involved in transforming thought and leadership paradigms in our sector.

With an experienced and thoughtful facilitator, like Dr. Mai Moua, when the right questions are asked, the discussion takes off. It’s amazing how quickly an hour goes by. Here were key questions posed and discussed from the conversation:

• There are many variables in place when trying to make the paradigm shift needed to transform organizational and community culture. It’s a long process that requires patience, thoughtfulness, and trust.


• Leadership buy-in is key. How can staff manage upwards and influence cultural shifts when leadership is not leading on this issue?


• Many organizations are working through what it means to be diverse as opposed to “looking” diverse. How does inclusion become a core value of an organization’s personality?


• Does the nature of nonprofit work inherently hold our sector to higher standards for diversity and inclusion practices?


• Organizations and staff working towards creating a more diverse and inclusive culture struggle with measuring this progress. What are accepted indicators?


• What role does funding play in the work of creating more diverse and inclusive organizational culture?

The group engaged in energetic and meaty discussion and to continue our thinking, Dr. Mai Moua recommended these resources:

• "Influence Without Authority": A book to help staff push change upwards and get that needed buy-in from leadership. Authored by Allan Cohen and David Bradford.


• Intercultural Development Inventory: A cross-culturally valid measure of intercultural competence. The instrument is easy to complete and can generate an in-depth graphic profile of groups' predominant level of intercultural competence (facilitation by a Qualified IDI Administrator is required).

Please add your comments and share with us your experiences and go-to resources for engaging diverse stakeholders in the nonprofit sector.

Join us next month, February 16th, for a lunch discussion on “Cultural Intelligence Matters: Tools to Build Cultural Competence and Agility.”

This post is a recap of the first Diversity and Inclusion Networking Lunch—a monthly discussion co-hosted between Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and the Charities Review Council. In the true spirit of inclusion, these lunches take place at rotating nonprofits that serve diverse communities. Thanks to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for being this month’s host.

Next Steps After Volunteering

Rooted in the heart of the nonprofit ecosystem, volunteerism connects many needed services to our communities. On days like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, also widely known as the MLK Day of Service, the importance of service and volunteering in our communities jumps to the forefront of our minds. Sites like mlkday.gov and campaigns like President Obama’s United We Serve, not only encourage and reward citizens for taking part in volunteering, but actually go a step further and make the process easy through searchable databases that will match a volunteer with a local project. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages use this federal holiday to join in service projects across the country.

This is wonderful.

But it’s important to remember that the intention of days like MLK Day of Service is not to dedicate one day a year to volunteering, but to incorporate service into our lifestyles.

What steps can you take after a volunteer experience to connect those activities to the work you do year round?

• Find an on-going project. If you volunteered for a one-time project, connect with that organization and find out if they have an on-going volunteer opportunity.


• Inquire about possible openings on the organization’s board of directors (or board committee if you’re looking for a little less commitment). Just because your day job is in accounting, marketing, or IT, doesn’t mean you don’t have valuable skills to contribute to a nonprofit working towards solving homelessness—in fact, your skill set might be exactly what a board is looking for to grow their capacity.


• Become an advocate for the cause. Just because you’re not spending hours in an organization’s office or providing direct service to their constituents, doesn’t mean you can’t build awareness for the cause with your own network. Tell your friends, family, and co-workers about the organization with which you volunteered. Share articles and updates about the cause with your network via social media or word-of-mouth.
  

Nonprofit staff tremendously value the role volunteers play, but it’s important to remember the time and energy these organizations dedicate towards engaging volunteers takes a very real impact on staff capacity. Making sure your interests and the needs of the organization align is key to any successful volunteer relationship. If you take your time in finding the right fit for your volunteering goals, the return and joy from the experience will be well worth the wait. If you need help, checkout handsontwincities.org or volunteermatch.org.

It’s estimated that over 60 million people volunteer officially through an organization at least once a year in the United States. What part do you play in this movement of service?

Diversity and Inclusion Networking Lunches

If you are currently working, volunteering, or serving on the board of a nonprofit, you are invited to join the Charities Review Council and Minnesota Council of Nonprofits for Diversity and Inclusion Networking Lunches.

The monthly lunches will explore the most pressing Diversity and Inclusion topics—from how to engage diverse stakeholders to creating inclusive working environments. Each month a topic is identified around which the majority of the discussion will revolve. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, examples and insights related to the topic of the session. In addition to the featured topic, each session will include time to network and ask questions. This network is free and no RSVP is necessary. You are invited to bring your lunch, business cards, and ideas.

Please note these lunches take place at nonprofits that serve diverse communities. Locations change each month so please check the specific event listing for each lunch you would like to attend.

The first six lunches will be facilitated by Dr. Mai Moua and will be following the same topics covered in MCN’s Diversity and Inclusion Series. However, you do not need to attend the webinars to attend the lunches.

The Diversity and Inclusion Networking Lunches are co-sponsored by Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and the Charities Review Council.

2012 Dates and Topics

• January 19 – Engaging Diverse Stakeholders in the Nonprofit Sector
  


• February 16 – Cultural Intelligence Matters: Tools to Build Cultural Competence and Agility
  


• March 15 – What’s Emotions Got to do with Culture
  


• April 19 – Cross Cultural Management and Leadership: Practical Tools and Techniques to Managing and Leading a Diverse Workforce
  


• May 17 – The Culture of Inclusion: 5 Factors to Creating Inclusive Environments
  


• June 21 – The 3Rs of Inclusion: Relationship, Reciprocity, and Reflections
  


• July 19 – Best Practices of Diversity and Inclusion for Nonprofit Organizations
  


• August 16 – How to make Diversity and Inclusion a Reality
  


• September 20 – Overcoming Barriers to Diversity and Inclusion
  


• October 18 – Ethnic and Racial Diversity- Learning from Others
  


• November 15 – Generational Diversity- Learning from Others
  


• December – No December Event

Mustache to the Max Day

As you might know, this Wednesday is Give to the Max Day…but here at the Council we’re calling it Mustache to the Max Day. . . Why? Our very own executive director, Rich Cowles, has humbly agreed to sacrifice his stache-less upper lip for our Give to the Max Day campaign.

If the Charities Review Council receives 75 donations, Rich will grow a mustache.

"If you've ever seen my seedy looking mustache, you'll know what a sacrifice this is." —Rich Cowles

In this interview, Rich Cowles shares not only what his wife thinks about this campaign, but we also asked if he'd prefer the fu manchu or handlebar:

So join us tomorrow and be one of the 75 donors coming together to make Rich grow a mustache!

And on an even more exciting note, every dollar you donate will be matched up to $10,000 during our year-end Matching Gift Challenge! Thanks to a group of our strongest supporters, this Matching Gift Challenge will continue through the end of the year.

In the meantime, tune in via Facebook and Twitter as we post pictures and interviews with Rich Cowles as he prepares for the possibility of having to grow a beautiful stache, but most importantly, show your support for the Council's work around informed giving and nonprofit accountability by making a contribution to us on Wednesday November 16th.

When One Door Closes, Another Opens

I know it’s trite, but today is bittersweet as it is my last day working here at the Charities Review Council. Without a doubt, this has been the best place I’ve worked, and I’ve been honored to be connected to such a storied organization.

When I started at the Council, we were just launching the process of revising the Accountability Standards, which included getting feedback from people across the state about what they saw as the “reasonable expectations” of an accountable nonprofit. Whether it was in Duluth or Mankato or right here in the Twin Cities, I always walked away from these town hall forums amazed at the number of people who showed up and genuinely cared about making the connection between the nonprofit sector and donors stronger. For a self-professed “nonprofit geek,” I knew that anyplace that could energize that type of response was the place for me.

There have been a lot of exciting changes at the Council since then - the launching of the new Accountability Wizard (along with the revised Accountability Standards), developing a new program working with immigrant & refugee-led nonprofits, and changing the way we report review results to focus on the most trustworthy nonprofits. Through all of these changes, though, the Council’s values of transparency and integrity have shown through and it has been a great place for me to learn. I’ve appreciated building relationships with board and committee members, staff members at reviewed nonprofits, donors who thoughtfully support the great nonprofits in the area, and (of course) my amazing co-workers here at the Charities Review Council.

Despite all this, I am excited to start a new chapter at Ameriprise Financial in their Community Relations department. I know that the lessons I’ve learned here about informed philanthropy will serve me well, and I look forward to continuing to work with the nonprofit sector, albeit in a different capacity.

Thank you to everyone who has made this a great place to be. Here’s hoping our paths cross in the future again. Take care.

Martin Wera joined the Charities Review Council in March of 2009. As the Program Director, he oversaw, managed and delivered the Council’s services to nonprofit organizations, donors and grantmakers.

What Nonprofits Can Learn from Political Campaigns

By Martin Wera, Program Director, Charities Review Council (@mjwera)

I love fall. I love seeing fields being harvested, the taste of Honeycrisp apples (take that SweeTango!), and the gentle bite of cold in the air. And, I have to admit it; I love the excitement of political campaigns as they hit fever pitch for Election Day. As a self-professed recovering political hack, there’s something indescribable about that final month of a campaign.

I’m also a nonprofit geek. (What can I say, I’m a man of many passions.) And this fall there have been some great conversations happening locally about collective impact sparked in large part to the Greater Twin Cities United Way’s United Front 2011.

We’re all familiar with the calls for nonprofits to learn from the for-profit sector (and vice versa), but it struck me while I was listening to Mark Kramer describe the 5 key qualities needed for collective impact at the United Front 2011 that there are some lessons the nonprofit sector could learn from the political sector too as it relates to collective impact. (Of course, I think there are a lot of things the political sector would do well to learn from nonprofits, but that’s for a later post.)

In the interest of space, I’m going to focus on just 3 of the 5 qualities that I think most directly connect.

1. Common Agenda (aka The Win Number)
To be successful, collective impact initiatives needs to have a laser focus on one shared vision or goal. This concept is at the forefront of every good political campaign as well. It’s called the win number and, simply put, it’s 50% of the vote plus 1. A lot of complex work can go into calculating the win number, but every staffer on a well-run campaign will know this number by heart and every action taken – from how much to spend on media to where to put field organizers – has to help get the campaign to this goal. If it doesn’t, forget it.

When collaborations fall short, it’s often because we didn’t take the time up front to get clear about a shared, specific goal AND use it as the criteria for every decision. It’s not enough to say we want to reduce homelessness among children by 50%, for example. We need to use that goal to drive every decision the group and the individual organizations make in getting there.

2. Shared Measurement Systems (aka The Voter File)
Just saying you need 50% plus 1 of the vote to win isn’t enough, you have to track it. And to do this political campaigns invest heavily in sophisticated data systems to track voters at the individual level – otherwise known as the voter file. Every time to get phone call, every time a campaign volunteer knocks on your door, it gets logged into the voter file. All of this data helps the campaign focus its resources on just those voters it needs to convince or mobilize in order to achieve its win number. (I’ll let you in on a tip. If you don’t want to get any mail, calls or door-knockers from campaigns, just tell them you’re voting for their opponent. They’ll never come back again.)

Buying a data system to track voters is usually the first thing a campaign does because it knows that without it, they’re effectively shooting in the dark. They also make sure that they can track their efforts down to the individual. Nonprofits need to learn to prioritize this too. Unless we can effectively track and share our data – down to the individual level – all the good intentions of the world will not get us to our shared goal.

3. Backbone Support Organizations (aka The Coordinated Campaign)
As political campaigns reach the final month, they begin their Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts, which often means a coordinated campaign effort. In simple terms, political parties (usually) will take charge of collecting all of the voter data collected from all of the different campaigns (another reason it’s important to have a shared measurement system) and take the lead in organizing how resources are going to be used to get their voters get to the polls. This way all of the campaigns know that efforts won’t be duplicated, people won’t be tripping over each other, and (hopefully) on Election Day they get to their win numbers.

The challenge, of course, with a coordinated system like this is that you have to cede a certain amount of control. No longer are the smaller, local campaigns for state representative, for example, calling their own shots. It’s now part of a larger effort. But there’s an understanding that by coordinating, everyone is more likely to win.

Steve Boland wrote a great blog about the need to fund backbone organizations, which I completely agree with, but I also think the sector needs to get more comfortable with giving up some level of organizational control when engaging in collective impact. It’s not enough to have a backbone organization; it needs to have the buy-in from the members to depend on it, which can mean putting the individual organization’s need for control on the back-burner.



Like I said earlier, I think there is a lot that the political world can learn from the nonprofit sector – things like meaningful community engagement techniques, building long-term, trusting relationships in under-represented communities, and effective ways to leverage volunteer skills. But I do believe that the nonprofit sector would do well to look at how political campaigns can leverage money and people in short periods of time to accomplish remarkable things. I think this conversation on collective impact is an exciting one and I’d be curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this too.

What's Really Needed for Innovation?

By Martin Wera, Program Director, Charities Review Council (@mjwera)

Calls for innovation are all around us. Turn on the radio or TV, and you hear politicians calling for policy changes to spur economic growth through innovation. Read blogs or newspapers, and you see demands for schools to innovate in order to address educational disparities. And, of course, the nonprofit sector is also caught up in the wave as many are developing new, innovative programming to address social issues.

I don't have an answer for how to spark innovation in the nonprofit sector, much less anywhere else. But I do think there is an interesting conversation to be had around how to remove barriers to innovation - especially for the nonprofit sector - and allow creativity to flourish that I'd like to get started here.

Innovation and creativity
Innovation comes from the Latin word innovare for "to renew or change." This change, at its core, is a creative process. Something new is being brought into the world by the efforts of one person or (as is more common) countless people working in cooperation. And, of course, creativity is a necessary ingredient to this creative process - you need to be able to think outside the norm in order to find innovative solutions. So, if you accept the logic that you need creativity to innovate, then the question we need to ask is really how do you best spur creativity?

To answer this, we need to take a short (but interesting) detour. So, please stay with me.

Motivation and Creativity
In his book, "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," Daniel Pink posits that humans have built an economic system that works on an "if-then" equation. If you do something good, then you get rewarded (e.g. you meet your annual performance goals at work, you get a bonus). If you do something poorly, then you get punished. What research has started to show is that while this system can work well in certain situations to motivate people, it can also actually work against high performance in other situations.

For tasks that are routine, motivating people with "if-then" rewards results in higher productivity, which makes sense. If someone is paid for each widget they make, and there's just one way to make a widget, then they probably will be motivated to make more of them. However, for tasks that require basic cognitive thinking and creativity, research shows that people actually perform worse when their pay is directly tied to an "if-then" situation. In other words, if solving a problem requires thinking of an out-of-the-box solution, then motivating people with a carrot or a stick actually makes the situation worse. (Here's a short video explaining this phenomenon.)




So what does this have to do with innovation in the nonprofit sector?
A huge portion of nonprofit funding is an "if-then" scenario. Government contracts are largely designed to reimburse the nonprofit when a service is completed. Pay-for-performance grants, which are now gaining some attention, also work on a similar model. Individual donors increasingly want to fund only proven programs and none of the overhead costs to administer these programs.

At the same time, the issues nonprofits are tackling are becoming more complex and demand new, innovative solutions. But if the above research is right, then most of the funding sources available to nonprofits are actually hampering the ability of the sector to tap into the creativity it needs.

Daniel Pink outlines three concepts that the research shows are important to people not only being satisfied in their work, but also high performing. If people have autonomy, mastery and purpose in their work, they can better tap into the creativity needed to be successful. I think that there is a similar thing to be said for nonprofit organizations (after all organizations are comprised of people). Here is my take on how these three concepts would relate to the nonprofit sector.

• Autonomy - Allow people to be self-directed and they outperform others that are micro-managed. In terms of funding for nonprofits, general operating funds are the resources that allow for the greatest autonomy. I know it's very easy to say foundations, government and donors should give more general operating grants, but it's time go back to basics and allow nonprofits the freedom to best identify how to use funding. (Related to this, there's a lot to be said about engaging community about what they want the nonprofit to be doing as is articulated in this really interesting blog out of Australia.)



• Mastery - We all want to feel like we are getting better at what we do. On the flip side, we can all conjure up a time we felt like we were set-up to fail and not given the support to succeed. In translating this to the nonprofit sector, helping organizations approach mastery is capacity building. Unlike the disappearing gen-op grant, more grant makers have started funding capacity building for its grantees. However, this is still a small number and there is a much greater need. If the philanthropic sector wants success, we need to commit more resources to improving the nonprofit sector as a whole.



• Purpose - This one may seem like a given in relation to the nonprofit sector (after all, many people working in the nonprofit sector started out doing so because of a sense of purpose), but I think there is something more here. The past few years have pulled the curtain back on a number of nonprofits that were just fundraising to stay afloat rather than to address a community need. When this happens the social purpose of the organization is compromised. As a result, many of these organizations have decided to close down, merge or form strategic alliances, which helps gets the focus back on the mission - the social purpose - and away from just raising money to keep the doors open. Some funders have started to dedicate resources to helping nonprofits explore and carry-out mergers. This trend needs to continue.

I believe that the nonprofit sector's potential for innovation is greater than any one of us can imagine, but the way organizations are currently funded is counter-productive to fostering the creativity needed to break through to new solutions.

I know this is only a start, but even the biggest ideas start out small.