Has the internet changed the way we think?  An article in The New Yorker on this topic recently caught my eye.  Adam Gopnik’s piece looks at books that either bemoan or celebrate the rise of the information age, and what it has done to the depth of our thought.

I found myself nodding in agreement with the authors who point out that the constant connectivity of our iPhone/Blackberry culture can also scatter our focus and degrade our capacity for intentional reflection.

I often see this dynamic at play with my nonprofit clients – particularly when it comes to strategic planning.

Focusing on the right things.

Have you ever been in a meeting and noticed the number of buzzes, chimes and lights of smartphones going off?  As a facilitator, I’ve found that this increasingly frenetic flow of information and requests can make it hard for staff and board to strategically focus and reflect on any one thing for too long.

Enter a terrific new resource for nonprofit organizations and those of us who work with them:  Nonprofit Sustainability:  Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability (Bell, Masaoka, and Zimmerman). A key point of the book is this: if you want to sustain your organization over time, you’d better be thinking about financial viability and mission impact, and the relationship between the two.

Determining relative profitability and impact.

In the nonprofit space, sometimes it’s hard to strike the right balance between focusing on financial realities on one hand, and fulfilling a nonprofit mission on the other.  But in order to strategically evaluate what we want to do more of – and perhaps more importantly, what we should dedicate less effort and resources towards – we need to assess core programs and activities in light of both factors.

The Nonprofit Sustainability matrix maps ask nonprofits to rank each core activity on relative profitability and relative impact (think the BCG matrix’s  “dogs” and “stars”).

How do your nonprofit’s core activities stack up?

Reflect for a moment on your organization’s current, key activities.

1. Which ones are “STARS,” where you can clearly see strong connection to mission impact and profitability – the program clearly covers itself financially by attracting, say, large grants or donations or charging a fee for the service in a way that ensures the program’s sustainability?
2. What about a program that might have low impact relative to your mission and is a real bear to raise money around?  Bell et al call these “STOP SIGNS,” for obvious reasons.
3. Next, do you have any activities that are highly lucrative (a well-earning golf tournament, for example), but has low impact on your actual ability to meet your mission?  You have a “MONEY TREE” on your hands!
4. 

   Image by Luis Argerich

   And finally, I bet you can identify an activity that is close to the hearts of your staff, board or volunteers because of how critical it is to your mission, but has low profitability (as seen in the constant struggle to secure revenue for it).  The authors label this a “HEART.”

Once all key activities are mapped, you and your organizational leadership team have some key data to help make tough decisions about where you’re headed.

Will it get easier in the coming years to think strategically about the questions that matter most?  I’m betting not.  But with great resources like Nonprofit Sustainability at our fingertips, I’m hopeful that Greenlights can continue to help nonprofits develop and maintain sustainable business models, no matter what is chirping in the background.