Nonprofit University Blog

During tough economic times, folks spend so much time worrying about money that all too frequently they forget to worry about people.  And yet, truth be told, the most important resource any nonprofit has is its people.  If we don’t worry about them, it doesn’t matter how much—or how little–money we have, we won’t be doing a good job of fulfilling our mission promises.

There is absolutely no question that the human resources at a nonprofit who suffer the most during financially bad times are those who lose their jobs.  That is a given.  But a close second are those who remain on payroll while their friends and colleagues are let go.  Anxiety runs high:  will I be next?  Guilt runs high:  why them and not me?  Mistrust can develop:  do I ask for clarification or will I look unqualified and rise to the top of the “next to go” list?  I have a 103 degree temperature, do I call in sick?  You get the picture.

So, what are you doing to address the turmoil?

The key rests with the supervisors—all of them—in your organization.  Are they prepared and ready?  Being a supervisor is one of those things that few are prepared to do, and once done, most hate.  Yet, for anyone who wants to rise up the ladder, being a supervisor is inevitable.  So, for the good times and the bad, we need to make sure those who supervise know what they are doing.

Without being exhaustive by any stretch, let’s think for a minute about some of the basic tasks of a supervisor, and the challenges our current economic times present.

1. Reorganize your department:  how do you determine staffing needs of a moving target?  Will you have the money to run your program at 10% of capacity or 50% of capacity? 
2. Performance appraisals:  these take on extra importance if they help inform the decision of who to let go and who to keep; if they aren’t done well, the wrong person may be kept and the wrong one let go, leading to an impact on the ability to deliver mission.
3. Foster teamwork:  how do you foster teamwork when the composition of the team is changing? when fear about job security may lead to people wanting to hunker down and do their own work and not worry about “helping the team?”  We’ve all heard too many times “there is no ‘I’ in team,” and more often than not when a superstar is protecting his super stardom rather than promoting the team.
4. Inspire people to excel:  inspiration, in general, is a hard thing to achieve when people are worried about survival.  Striving for excellence, however, means taking risks:  is A or B the better approach? And risk-taking, unfortunately, tends to go out the window when people are insecure about their jobs.
5. Motivate:  pom-poms just don’t shake as briskly in a gloomy environment.  And pats on the back go only so far when your salary has been frozen and your health benefits cuts.
6. Provide guidance:  for what future with the organization? for preparing a resume? for where to look for a job?

If ever there was a worthy expenditure during bleak economic times, it is for professional development for supervisors who can never learn enough about how to do their job—in good times and bad.

The Nonprofit Center has several upcoming full-day classes to support nonprofit staff in their desire to be more competent supervisors, among them: 

Developing Your Supervisory Skills – First Steps:  9/30/09

Supervisory Skills – Beyond the Basics:  10/21/09

Interpersonal Skills & Communication for Managers:  11/17/09

How to Lead Effective Teams – 12/3/09

Year-Round Employee Performance Management:  3/11/09

The Principles and Practices of Managing Change :  4/13/10

Americans always seem to be looking for a quick fix:  meals all in one box;  the all-in-one dusting and polishing; matching services that find you the love of your life.  Maybe these work; I honestly don’t know.  But what I do know is that they take individual responsibility out of the equation.

Let’s look at what could be used as a quick fix in the nonprofit sector.  With somewhere between 1.4 million to 1.8 million nonprofits in the United States, how do you pick which ones are deserving of your dollars?  So, okay, you narrow the choice down by the mission of the organization, but you still have thousands of organizations that help children or animals, that provide cultural enrichment or food for the hungry.  How do you choose?

Increasingly, people are being told to look to see how independent organizations rate them.  What do Charity Navigator, Charitywatch or BBB Wise Giving Alliance say?  Did some organization put a gold seal of approval on them because they met a set of cookie-cutter standards?  But if you think this is the quick fix for helping you to pick whether to give your hard-earned dollars to organization A or organization B, please think again.  Might you want to take into consideration what these organizations have to say? Sure.  But then do your own homework.

Recently, I looked up Lowry Park Zoo, an organization about which I recently (indirectly) wrote and which I know had an executive director who had been misusing organization property.  I was shocked to see that Charity Navigator had given it three stars, out of four, in 2007, and four stars in 2005.  Three stars from Charity Navigator means “good”, as defined by the following:  “[e]xceeds or meets industry standards and performs as well as or better than most charities in its Cause.”  BBB Wise Giving Alliance gives the Zoo a B-, saying it had too little information to rate it, and acknowledges that the Zoo is not a BBB accredited organization.  But a B-, going back to the frame of reference in which the letter grade system was developed, is slightly better than average.  The Zoo is not in Charitywatch’s database.  But the Zoo is accredited by its professional organization.  But like most professional accrediting bodies, it is concerned with how the organization executes its mission (i.e., the conditions, care and feeding, etc. of the animals, presentation, education, etc.) and not so much with the management and governance of the organization.  But, at least it met those hoops—I mean standards of excellence.

So, if I were solely to go on this work done by others—my quick fix for assessing nonprofits—I might think the Lowry Park Zoo was a good recipient of my dollars.   (After all, Parents Magazine did rank it the #1 zoo in the country.)  But what if I dug up some information on my own to add to that mix?  Would my opinion change or not?

There are many reasons why growing numbers of philanthropists like the concept of giving circles, not the least of which is because it allows them to pool their money, make a bigger gift as a group than could be done as an individual and, thus, hope to make a bigger impact.  But there is another reason.  They get to know the nonprofits to which they give, beyond how the outside purveyors of gold seals, stars and letter grades do.  It does take work, but so does cooking a meal from scratch or caring for your fine furniture.  But the product at the end is both better and far more satisfying.

There should be no quick fixes in determining who should receive your philanthropic dollars.  Don’t try to find them.  Your money will be better spent if you invest a little of your own effort before you write that check.

We go from the politician who seems to understand nonprofits (Dan Malloy, potential candidate for governor of Connecticut and the subject of my last blog) to those who seem pretty clueless about nonprofits. I’m speaking about the city of Tampa, which wants to reinvent the wheel. Late last year, a city audit revealed that the Lowry Park Zoo—recently rated the number one zoo in America by Parent’s Magazine—wasn’t the number one best managed nonprofit in America. Far from it.

The director was apparently taking animals and other Zoo property to his ranch and a for-profit animal park he is creating. So, the City of Tampa is up in arms because in addition to the Zoo being on City property and the animals technically belonging to the City, the City gave almost a half a million dollars to the Zoo. And Tampa should be up in arms. Naturally, it wants to strike back and prevent such maneuverings in the future by the Zoo and all of the hundreds of other nonprofits to which the City gave more than $2.8 million this year, and presumably has done in the past and will continue to do so in the future. But is its proposal the right answer?

An ordinance has been proposed by City officials that would require the following of all nonprofits seeking City support. 1. Nonprofits would have to have a conflict of interest policy prohibiting financial transaction with the organization, executive staff (how come only executive staff? why not all staff, their families, etc.?), board members and for-profit organizations (why not nonprofits?) unless there is a competitive bid process. Excuse me: having a conflict of interest policy—and one that is even more comprehensive than this—has been a best practice standard for nonprofits for—well, forever. As has having a policy of competitive bids.

The new Form 990 makes nonprofits report on their conflict of interest policy: do you have one; how many conflicts came up this past year; how did you handle them? The question of whether an organization had a conflict of interest policy first appeared on the 2006 Form 990. Wonder how the Zoo answered it! 2. Nonprofits would be required to file an annual financial report with the City’s finance department, and answer questions like how much board members have been compensated.

Excuse me: but that’s been a Form 990 question for quite some time. Nonprofits would have to adopt an anti-nepotism policy and a whistle blower policy. Hello! Anti-nepotism is one of those elements of a good conflict of interest policy, and Sarbanes Oxley, back in 2006, required all organizations—for-profits and nonprofits alike—to have a whistle blower protection policy. My point is that all of the “requirements” that the City of Tampa wants to put on nonprofits are already in place. (I hope someone on City Council knows and before time is spent and dollars wasted debating this redundant piece of legislation it is stopped.) And these requirements haven’t stopped the misuse of funds, the collusion, and the violation of public trust.

Creating policies required by funders, the IRS, etc. doesn’t make people behave better, correctly, whatever. Creating policies are simply hoops that people have to go through to be in compliance in order to make the funders, the IRS, etc., happy. It is the people who make those policies and who must enforce those policies that make a difference. If Tampa wants to see the behavior of the Lowry Park Zoo (and others doing similar things) cease, it should take some of the millions of dollars it gives to nonprofits and pay to educate the members of the boards of those organizations so that they understand the full array of their responsibilities. So that they understand it is their responsibility to create a good sound conflict of interest policy and bid policy, to have clear financial statements and to review the performance of the executive director, as a few examples.

And then, equally, if not more importantly, they must understand that they must hold themselves, staff and the organization as a whole accountable. We do not need more hoops; we need board education. Next week: More about Lowry Park Zoo and what charity reports don’t tell you.

I want to live in Connecticut.  Well, not really.  But I would like the Mayor of Stamford, Dan Malloy, who is assessing whether he will make a bid for the Governor’s seat, to run and I’d like to vote for him.  And, even more importantly, I’d like him to win and carry out his tentative campaign promises—well, at least one of them.  But before I get into why I want to vote for Malloy, I need to make one thing clear:  I am not a one issue voter.  I do not vote for or against a candidate on the basis of how s/he stands on one issue; I look at the whole package.  That said, there are exceptions to every rule. And were I a resident of Connecticut and, thus, able to vote for Governor, Dan Malloy would be my exception.  I only know one thing about him—well, three actually—and based on that one thing, I would vote for him.  What is it?  If he runs for Governor, he is going to make “real reform” for nonprofits (not of nonprofits; there is a big difference) one of his platform issues and—ready for this?—he would create a cabinet level position—Community Non-Profit (sic) Human Services!  Can you believe that?  Okay, to be fair, it was not his idea.   In fact, in 2008, both houses of the Connecticut legislature unanimously passed the bill that would have created this cabinet position; the current governor of Connecticut vetoed it!  So, Malloy has picked up the crusade. Though not yet declared for governor this time (he ran, unsuccessfully, in 2006), he has already laid out his nonprofit platform.  (I love saying that:  his nonprofit platform.  How many people have ever run for elected office with nonprofits as part of their platform?  Let me know if you know.)  First, he would create this cabinet level agency and a person to head this “whose purview and responsibility would be to serve as a representative and voice for non-profits in Connecticut’s executive branch.”  (And this is where I take heart:  the focus of the cabinet-level organization is human services, but the head of this organization is to give voice to nonprofits!  And even if the missed implication in the document that spells out this platform is that the nonprofits about which this person will advise are human service nonprofits, this is a case where what is good for human service nonprofits is good for the entire sector.  The sector will have a voice!  The sector will have media attention!  The sector will no longer be the stepchild to the rest of the important forces in the state.)   The other two components of his nonprofit platform are:  he would revamp the procedures for reimbursing and funding nonprofits.  (Do I hear a huge chorus of cheers from the suffering Pennsylvania nonprofits which not only wait months for the State to reimburse them, but which now are in their third month without any payments from the State due to its failure to pass a state budget?)  And lastly he would put nonprofit providers on the top of the list to receive stimulus dollars.  These two are important, but not why I’d vote for Malloy. I’d vote for Malloy because in choosing nonprofits he is recognizing their power and contributions.  He knows what the 300 organizations that serve over 500,000 of the State’s underserved and marginalized population (approximately 1/7 of the State’s population) mean for the quality of life for those and all residents of Connecticut.  He understands the commitment the employees of these organizations bring to their work and their clients every single day.  And he recognizes the difficulty of the circumstances under which so many do this great work.   There are many different ways to say thank you.  Dan Malloy has one idea.  May others follow his lead.