Nonprofit University Blog

It is funny to me when I hear people talk about being risk-averse, or hear organizations described as risk-averse.  Can anyone other than those who simply out of fear never leave their bed truly be called risk-averse?  Getting out of bed is a risk.  Will you trip going to the bathroom?  Will you start a fire with the stove or the iron or the air conditioner?  Let’s not even consider what might happen once you open the door to venture outside.  So, risk-averse individuals?  Nah, not if you are living.

But what about risk-averse organizations?  The mere act of creating an organization is a huge risk, as is trying to maintain it.  Will it sink or will it soar?  Throw trying to gain a competitive edge into the mix, and gaining ascendancy probably won’t happen without incurring a bit of risk along the way. 

So why so much risk avoidance talk in the sector right now?  Now when organizations are struggling to make it through these dark economic times?  We are all in peril due to a plummeting economy that was beyond, I think, most of the nonprofit sector’s control.  But what we do now that we are here, is in our control.

And we can—and must—take calculated risks to ensure our survival and ultimate sustainability.  What have we got to lose?  Death.  Notice I said calculated risk; nowhere have I said wanton risk.  We must be willing to let go of a program that no longer serves our mission or perhaps start one that directly serves it.  Now is the time to take a good strong broom to the board or do a first ever strategic plan.  It would be completely appropriate to spend some of those precious dollars on a bold marketing strategy to woo both clients and donors.  And the list can and should go on.  We must be willing to make changes, to move in different directions, to forsake the same and business as usual.

Stagnant organizations are dying organizations, regardless of the economic times in which they operate.  They are not progressing, they are not advancing; they are, however, to use words often found in the definition of stagnant — dull, sluggish and stale.  We must take some calculated risks to ensure our own survival and sustainability.

According to Linda Crompton, President and CEO of BoardSource, the number of nonprofit board members needed each year is 26 million.  Yup, you read that correctly:  both the size of the need and the frequency of the need.

This in and of itself is a huge challenge.  Couple this with the reality that the majority of those 26 million seats are filled each year with Baby Boomers, and the challenge becomes even greater, and more serious.  Though a nice, sizeable generation, there is still a finite—and being honest, diminishing–supply of Baby Boomers, and within that, a limited number who choose to give back and serve on nonprofit boards.

So yes, if the message hasn’t been received yet, let’s say it again:  boards need to make board member recruitment a serious priority. I’ve ranted before in this space about the importance of strategically crafting boards to ensure that a nonprofit board has the right array of talents, demographics, connections, and personality characteristics needed for the organization at that particular point in its life cycle while working on the strategic priorities of the time.  So, I am not going to repeat that rant. 

Instead, I’d like to acknowledge the increasingly inherent tension we face in recruiting board members:  the need for responsible board members who volunteer their time and commitment versus the increasing scrutiny of board performance and desire to hold them accountable.

To be honest, if all we wanted by having a board was to be in compliance with the law, it would not matter who were board members.  But if we are smart and want the best for our nonprofit, we need board members who understand their roles, who want to execute their responsibilities knowingly and conscientiously and who understand that the buck stops with them.  But the very individuals who make good, dynamic board members are the very same people who understand that this volunteer commitment comes with a set of performance standards.  And people, from Attorneys General to donors to the media to the IRS are paying more and more attention to whether boards are reaching those performance standards.

So how do we prevent the really good people from getting scared off?  How do we prepare ourselves to respond to their hesitancy, their uncertainty, their weighing of the scales of giving back on one side and risk on the other?  First, we must be honest.  Yes, there is a legal standard of performance.  Yes, there is some risk involved.  But that standard is easy to reach and that risk is greatly reduced by understanding your role and responsibilities.  So second, we teach board members what their roles and responsibilities are and we provide on-going professional development—just as we would for any other professional position—for board members.  We, as an organization, invest in our board members so board members can fully and knowledgably invest in the organization. 

As the daughter of two writers, I gained early on a deep appreciation for words. I learned early on the power of words and how subtle—and not so subtle differences—could be made by the mere substitution of one word for another.   Meetings can energize or enervate, and I worry for those who equate the outcomes.

But my worry ascends to angst as I consider all of those in the nonprofit world who are making the mistake of seeing survival as a synonym for sustainable.  They are two very different—at once subtle and quite glaring–states of being.  One easy to achieve on many levels, the other a constant work in progress. 

Events all around the country are touting themselves as providing the forum for learning the secrets to survival:  hear from the experts, learn the smartest tips, gain special insights!  And folks are clamoring to attend, eager to learn all that they can on how to survive and fearful that if they don’t attend, that will be the session that hands out the silver bullet.  

But let’s be honest:  survival is easy.  We survive if we keep our doors open, though staff has been decimated to one, the number of clients served reduced by 90% and the one remaining staff and several volunteers are burned out to a crisp.  But our doors are open!  We have lived to see another fiscal year, complete another Form 990 (though this year we can use the EZ Form; oh, what good fortune!), elect another class of board members.  We are a shadow of our former self, we threw an awful lot of people off the island, but we are alive; we did survive!  But now what?  What comes after survival?

Sustainability, on the other hand, is hard, and nothing comes after it; it is never over and done but, rather, always there.  Obviously, we cannot be sustainable if we cannot or do not survive.  But sustainability is so much more than survival.  It is having the capacity to withstand the down times without loosing the essence of what the organization is and the ability to fulfill its mission.  It is having the human resources—from staff to board members to other volunteers—who are flexible and innovative, calculated risk takers and level headed thinkers, who can strategize for the good times while including buffer plans for the bad times, all the while not compromising the mission.  It is looking not at the next month or even next 12 months hoping to just get by, but rather looking at the next 36 or 40 months with strategy for evolution.  If it is living at the edge, it is living at the edge by conscious choice, a result of that evolutionary strategy, and never by default.  Sustainability is knowing that you will be around to weather the next economic crisis because you have developed that strategy already.

Survival is a crap shoot; sustainability is anything but.  What people should be working on now—even in, or especially in, this economic mess–is not mere survival, but sustainability.

True confession:  I was not always a popular feminist, even my feminist peers.  I didn’t believe that just because we wanted to be regarded as equal to men—we already knew we were, if not superior to—that we had to be the same as men.  We didn’t need to mimic them, working ridiculously long hours, barking orders, wearing suits, being cut-throat;  but rather, we could be just as successful if we played to our strengths and did things our way, bringing our values and styles when we broke the gender barrier and glass ceiling.  But I was not heard.

I’m feeling the same thing all over again as nonprofits try to become more business like.  Absolutely, we must become more business like; but that does not mean we have to mimic everything businesses do.

It seems that a golden rule of business is that bigger is better:  everyone wants a bigger share of the market, a bigger bottom line, a bigger workforce.  Downsizing an organization is seen, at best as a negative, and at worst as a huge failure.  “Oh,” you hear the disdain dripping on every word, “you only have 20 employees.”

And so it appears that nonprofits want to do the same:  become bigger for the sake of becoming bigger and not because it will help them do a better job at delivering their missions.  And that scares me.  I recently attended a conference where nonprofits with 10 to 15 employees were described, rather disdainfully, I might add, as small.  What?  The typical nonprofit has five to eight (notice I did not say “only five to eight”) employees and a budget under $750,000.  And so what if they are small?  Does that devalue their work?

A while ago, I listened to the staff of an organization struggle over the decision of whether to accept the offer of “buying” a free building.  The conversation did not once address the question of how would having the building help the organization fulfill its mission.  No, the conversation was all about how having the building would make them bigger.  So what?  Would it help them do better at the mission?  Do they have the capacity to take care of the building? to use the building?  When I asked the question of how the building connected to their mission, I got cold silence.  They had no ready answer to the question, nor could they come up with any.  But they were quite annoyed that I might have put a break on their opportunity to become bigger.

Just because the business world thinks bigger is better—perhaps because they can give a better return to their stockholders—that does not mean that measure will work for us in the nonprofit sector.  Will our stakeholders be better served by our nonprofit being bigger?  Perhaps in some cases that will be true.  But in many instances, size will have nothing to do with how well a nonprofit serves it constituents.

In the nonprofit sector, let’s understand that size is not the measure of the organization; how well an organization serves its true mission is.