The Tray of Reading Glasses

At the front desk of the restaurant --fifth day of travel, thirteenth meal-on-the-road —sat a small tray with six pairs of colorful readers. This small gesture, aimed at helping 40+ patrons see the menu in the candlelight, was like a lighthouse at dusk. It indicated more. It promised that in the next hours, Newport’s Bouchard Restaurant & Inn was going to provide more than calories to satisfy hunger. And indeed it did.

You care about the people who come to your sites. What simple gestures can you make to let them know this? Traditionally, banks offer children lollipops and waiting areas have magazines. Can you offer something distinctive—that people need but often forget—that communicates your care for them?

The Feasibility Study - Take the Guesswork out of your Capital Campaign

Your non profit organization decides it needs to raise a significant amount of money for various projects and you want to run a capital campaign (also known as a comprehensive campaign). The cost of all the projects becomes your campaign goal. But how do you know if your goal is realistic?

One way of gauging your goal is to conduct a feasibility study. You can test various things in the study, including your case for support, your organization's reputation and recognition in the community and your campaign components and goal as well as your campaign readiness. The results of the study may surprise you.

One post-secondary institution was convinced they were ready to launch a major campaign for various projects on campus. They wisely decided to invest in a feasibility study to be as confident as possible in their decision to launch the campaign. They polled 50 prominent citizens who were top prospects and were astonished at the results.

The respondents felt they were not ready to launch a campaign, for many reasons:

- their reputation in the community was not as favourable as they assumed

- they would have had difficulty recruiting a campaign cabinet because of their community image - few wanted to be associated with their brand

- they felt their goal was 10 times too ambitious

- only 20% of respondents said they would donate to the institution.

Once the reality set in, they regrouped and spent the next 5 years turning things around. They built relationships, improved their image by investing in the community and recruited board members from leading corporations and institutions. The result? They were able to launch a highly successful multi-million dollar campaign to build new campus infrastructure and fund research, scholarships and bursaries. They continue to receive community support for their initiatives - their efforts made everyone sit up and take notice. All because they invested in a feasibility study!

Laura Mikuska

Mikuska Group

Fund Development & Event Specialists

Summer Reading: The House That Love Built

Yesterday one of my emails included this quote from Jean Monnet, “Nothing is possible without individuals; nothing is lasting without institutions.” The need for individuals and institutions and the potential conflict between them recapitulates one of the themes in The House That Love Built--the story of Millard and Linda Fuller and Habitat for Humanity.

Does it really take individuals? When Fuller was asked about how much money you needed to form a Habitat chapter, he said, “You have to have at least a dollar. It would be fiscally irresponsible to start a project with less than a dollar. But if you have dollar and you’ve got committed folks you can start and God will bless your meager resources…” Today worldwide Habitat for Humanity and The Fuller Center for Housing, which the Fuller’s began in 2005, have over 1,500 affiliates and partners—while it takes a more than a dollar to sustain them, single dollars created the initial foundations for over 350,000 homes these two organizations have built.

While the book is often a treatise in defense of Fullers, the book’s value for the nonprofit leader is the questions it raises about founders and the institutions they create. Might it have been possible for Habitat and Fuller to reach an accord without the public conflict that took place when the board fired Fuller? What might the Fuller have done differently? The Board? When might those efforts have started? How can an organization continue to benefit from the gifts of dynamic founders if and when they come into conflict with organization building? From this example, if you are a board member, what changes will you make at your organization? If you are a founder, how can you help your legacy to continue?

Summer Reading: Jumping Hurdles

The History of the Schoenbaum Human Service Center of Sarasota

In my hunt for books that tell nonprofit stories, I found this booklet. Dr. Kay Glasser, who died early this year, tells about her magnificent obsession to create a human service center. At the Center she created, nonprofits receive “free rent” and those in need receive multiple services.

The booklet’s biggest lesson is to remind nonprofit leaders of the importance of creating by-laws that serve your organization. The Center’s first by-laws called for a board of directors composed solely of representatives of the agencies housed in the Center. This resulted in two challenges. First, board members had the natural tendency to vote in their own agencies interests. Second, according to Dr. Glasser, she had to do the fundraising without board help because they were busy fundraising for their own organizations. Would the Center have been better served by creating a board of influential citizens with agency representatives serving an advisory role?

Dr. Glasser also shares the many other hurdles she overcame in the eight years or so it took to move from concept to grand opening and serving 15+ agencies. Here you can read stories of trying and trying again and finding people willing to help, especially in banks and in city government. Besides the by-laws lesson, the nonprofit leader, in this short read, will be reminded about the value of perseverance, asking for help and asking for money . . .from people who have it.

Who Should Facilitate the Exit Interview?

The other day a respected colleague and good friend, Carol Weisman, sent a copy of her latest blog post entitled, “Don’t Just Whack’em and Plaque’em: Exit Interviews for Retiring Board Members.” As all of Carol’s writings, it dealt with an important subject, was informative and had me in stitches – Carol is one of the smartest and funniest people I know. She spoke to the value of doing an exit interview and shared five excellent questions to use in such a situation. My only quarrel was that she put the responsibility for doing the exit interview on the executive director. I have always believed an exit interview should be conducted by the board, in the person of the chair or a member of the governance/board development committee.

She and I went back and forth with our arguments. She felt that the executive director is the constant – the one who will be there after the entire board turns over. I reasoned that there is no guarantee that the executive director will be there tomorrow, let alone years down the road. I know too many organizations that make that position a revolving door. But even in the most stable organizations, a lot of long-time executive directors are reaching the point where retirement is starting to look pretty good. We’re also starting to see a number of less fortunate dying with their boots on.

Carol asked me to honestly examine how many boards step up to the plate and take on this responsibility. While I concede that the job often defaults to the executive director, by accepting that role, the executive director makes it that much easier for the board to abdicate its responsibility in the future. It is the board that benefits most from learning what it could/should be doing differently to maximize, or at least improve, its directors’ experiences. The interviewer should be taking notes that can be kept in a board book for easy referral by future boards. Carol argued that future boards won’t bother to look back. I of the “you get what you expect school” retorted that debriefing should be an expected part of the job. After heating up cyber-space for a couple of days, we agreed to disagree.

However, I was like the store clerk who gets in an argument with a customer. Long after the customer leaves, the clerk is whining about that customer to everyone else she comes in contact with that day. I ran the arguments by another colleague, Jane Garthson. Jane said definitively that it was the board’s job to conduct exit interviews. However – sneaky devil! – she said she understood if an executive director wanted to conduct his or her own exit interview to learn what he or she might do differently in the future. So, this brings me to the question of the day. What, if any, are the arguments that we are all missing? If you even agree that exit interviews for departing board members are valuable, who do you want to see facilitating them? Why?

More Than A Pat On The Back Low Cost-Low Work Employee Rewards

You don’t have a lot of money or other resources, but you do want to your staff to know how much you appreciate them. Listen to this new podcast. In it, Laura Mikuska and I share a dozen inexpensive and effective ways to help you show employees your gratitude.

Quality of Your Mission: A Cautionary Tale

Amongst the many items in the storage unit from my parent’s house was a letter from 1945 from the Buffalo Evening News. It thanked my mother for helping to raise $506.43 for the “News Smoke Fund.” The letter went on to thank her and her friends for their efforts to “keep ‘em smoking”. It offered thanks on behalf of “every solider, sailor, marine, coast guardsman and others from Buffalo and Western New York.”

My mother never smoked. She was careful to provide an ongoing education to make sure her four children never smoked. Yet in 1945 before any of us existed, she helped to raise funds for cigarettes to support the war effort and those in the service during World War II.

Why is this a cautionary tale? It reminds us that:

1. Missions need to be reexamined to make sure they are current.

2. Missions need to go deep. Over sixty-five years, “Let them know we care about them” would have served better than “keep ‘em smoking”. The latter has not aged well—in fact its rather horrifying. Missions built on core values will age better.

3. Mission activities need careful planning. What else might the people of Western New York done besides “keep ‘em smoking”? Likewise, what else might you do besides your current programs?

For a related article on writing mission statements see How to Develop a Great Mission Statement.