My winning horse! Photo by Dan Dry, from http://www.kentuckyderby.com/news/photos/kentucky-derby-137-winners-circle

I’m not a betting gal, but I am good at picking a winner.

In 2001, we were invited to a Kentucky Derby + Cinco de Mayo party, where mint juleps and margaritas were promised. It was the first time I’d ever watched the Derby–and possibly my first mint julep as well. However, more than the mint juleps and margaritas, I remember being struck by the interesting names of the horses in the race. I found it beyond funny that there was a horse for a then-trendy, now-forgotten cell phone called Startac. I decided to root, however, a horse named Monarchos, whose name struck me as a sign of the times with lots of noveau-high-falutingness. I picked a winner.

Since then, I’ve looked at the names of the Derby horses each year–well, most years, sometimes I forget–and I pick a winner based on the name. And every time I do it, I’m right. I remember picking Giacomo (2005) and Barbaro (2006), for no other reason than the fact that I’m a total italophile, and they had Italian names. I picked War Emblem during jingoistic 2002. I picked Super Saver (2010) when our economy was in trouble and coupons were de rigueur.

But I never placed a bet until this weekend’s Derby. Through a work event, I had (lucky) family members going to the actual Kentucky Derby. I looked at the list of horses and told them to put $10 on “I’ll have another” for me. I won. But this isn’t all about my savant abilities for picking winners base on semantics. (Although I do think it’s quite awesome and am a bit scared that stating it so publicly will ruin my streak.)

Since my evaluation of the horses is based almost solely on my feelings about the horses’ names, I spend time thinking about what each one means and playing with the words in my head. (In addition to being an italophile, I’m also a logophile.) This year’s race line-up included Optimizer, Creative Cause, Alpha, Prospective, Done Talking, and Liaison.

Six horses with decision-making or business-based names. Seven if you count the mafioso El Padrino. But that’s a different kind of business, and I digress.

What does that say about our world? Or what does it say about our world 3 years ago, when these horses were born and named, and have things played out in the way that their breeders might have hoped? Clearly that was a time of economic struggle, powerful political tides, and challenge in many ways. In the nonprofit community, our shirtsleeves were rolled up and our boots had straps (so we could pull ourselves up when we needed to). People were ready for decisions, action, and success.

We’ve heard and seen that the tide is changing in the nonprofit community though, and we’ve been part of it as cheerleaders, consultants, participants, and facilitators. Back in 2011 (when theses horses were 1), Matt wrote about his cautious optimism. And I think 2011 and 2012 have been good years, for the most part.

If I were naming a nonprofit horse this year, I’d want to capture the ideas behind the best practices and trends that I think will carry us forward through the next three years. If you know a horse breeder, perhaps you could put in a good word for one of these name suggestions:

• Strategy: Thinking things through and coming up with a well-informed plan will never go out of style.
• Prepare Pivot Thrive: With almost half of the Executive Directors in our community planning to stay in their current role for 4 years or less, organizations will need to embrace the Prepare Pivot Thrive mantra for transitions.
• Succession Success: In our recent career trends survey we also learned that about half of the organizations in Central Texas do not have succession plans. The lack of clarity when it’s time for transition has me biting my nails, and I’m hoping that in the next few years, we’ll whittle this number down.
• Merge and Conquer: We’re seeing more and more opportunities for strategic collaboration, and I think that the organizations who are taking it to the merger level have found new leverage for success.
• In the Clouds: Whether it’s through e-learning or some kind of virtual hosting, things are moving up for nonprofits who are embracing cloud strategies for sustainability, efficiency, and affordability.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever be bold enough to bet more than $10 on a race, but I am confident enough to state that continuing strategic work, preparing for leadership successions, collaborating–and even merging, and embracing new technology are winning bets for nonprofits.

Each year, Greenlights shines a bright spotlight on model nonprofits and programs at the Nonprofit Excellence Awards, but this year we’ll also give a shout out to the amazing people who work tirelessly behind the scenes of nonprofit success!  We’re shaking things up with new organizational categories and a chance to nominate a rock star nonprofit staffer!  Check out the nomination guidelines and nominate today or by May 29, 2012 at 5PM!

Nonprofit Excellence Award honorees receive a $1,000 grant award and will be recognized the evening of September 20, 2012 at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in Austin, Texas at the Texas Nonprofit Awards alongside OneStar Foundation’s Governor’s Volunteer Awards.  The event takes place on the evening of the first day of the Texas Nonprofit Summit, the premier nonprofit management conference for the state of Texas.

Nonprofit Excellence Awards celebrate Central Texas nonprofit organizations and individuals driving social change through exemplary achievements in the categories of:

Collaboration
The Collaboration Award highlights a successful partnership that a nonprofit has made with another nonprofit, business, foundation, or other entity that has resulted in improved impact and has achieved greater outcomes for both organizations because of their unique association. 

NEW!  Impact
The Impact Award honors a nonprofit organization, or one of its programs, whose notable performance and delivery to the community sets a high standard of quality and impact.  This organization can demonstrate ways in which it continually seeks to measure and improve impact.

NEW!  Innovation & Learning
The Innovation & Learning Award honors a nonprofit organization whose creation and application of new approaches or learning (from a workshop, conference, consulting engagement, book, etc.) to its work has advanced the organization and serves as a model for other nonprofits.  This new practice or approach is being, or has been, incorporated into the fabric of the organization and makes an affirmative enhancement to the operation or core activities of its mission.

NEW!  Board Excellence
The Board Excellence Award recognizes an organization for its success in fostering an engaged and effective board.  This organization can demonstrate the board’s direct linkage to the overall success of the organization, or in areas such as fundraising, advocacy, strategic planning, successful leadership transitions, etc.

NEW!  Nonprofit Leader of the Year
The Nonprofit Leader of the Year Award celebrates a nonprofit staff member whose masterful achievements in their role have directly benefited the organization’s operating capacity and impact in the community.  Individuals from all levels of employment are considered.

2011 Winners:

(pictured left to right)

Collaboration
CLEAN Air Force of Central Texas

Innovation
Capital Area Food Bank of Texas

Learning in Action
Austin Disaster Relief Network

Service Excellence
People’s Community Clinic

Special Recognition
Austin Classical Guitar Society

Check out the nomination guidelines and nominate today or by May 29, 2012 at 5PM!  Questions?  Contact Kate Smallwood at kates@greenlights.org.

So, my wife and I give our two sons (ages 7 and 5) an allowance each week that is tied to their completion of several chores (and the avoidance of certain unwanted behaviors!). Doing your homework, taking out the trash and recycling, not hitting your brother, scooping the dog poop, etc. all get tracked on a little chart on the fridge, and on Sundays we reward them with a shiny new dime for each completed task.

Each boy then splits his dimes into three containers, one for “spending” which they can use to buy anything they choose (within reason), one for “saving” which they must hold onto and eventually will end up in a bank savings account, and one for “giving” which they either put in the offering tray at church or give to one of the charitable causes we support.

So far, this system seems to be instilling in our children valuable lessons about hard work, performance, rewards, discipline, and even philanthropy. Such systems of measuring and rewarding performance worked for me growing up, they seem to work well throughout our economic system, and one would think that they would work in the nonprofit arena too.

But do they work?

At Greenlights, we’re pretty proud of the fact that we evaluate everything we do, every workshop, every consulting project, even sometimes the meetings we lead. We survey our board, our members, our clients, even each other. In fact, if SurveyMonkey had an award for “Most Use By A Nonprofit,” we’d probably win it.

Program evaluation is weaved throughout our culture and all of our programs, both the immediate, short-term variety, and the longer-term, longitudinal kind. And we do it all on essentially no budget (or at least no real designated funding for evaluation). And while we can’t say that we are “rewarded” financially (like my sons are) for achieving certain performance targets, I can say that our funders know about our performance and that many of them choose to fund us based on our demonstrated track record of impact and success.

But we also understand that many nonprofits have a difficult time tracking, monitoring, and evaluating programmatic performance. They lack sufficient funds and staff time for it, their client populations do not lend themselves well to be tracked, or they lack the expertise to design and implement good program evaluation practices. As the nonprofit sector matures, though, and as funders continue to increase their demand for demonstrable “return on investment” for their dollars, we must put aside these excuses as a sector and embrace a new level of sophistication in measuring and evaluating our impact.

To help nonprofits do this, Greenlights has engaged in a new research project to study how nonprofits do or do not evaluate their programs, and we will be publishing this research and our thoughts on it later this year. If you have not yet taken our survey of nonprofit program evaluation, please do so: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Results_and_Impact.

We have also posted several free program evaluation resources and tools to our Online Resource Library: http://www.greenlights.org/resources/resource-library/cat_view/30-resource-library/24-planning-and-evaluation .

The hardest part about our allowance system at home is when one of the boys does his chores and gets paid, but the other one does not. This results in a lot of crying and upset feelings (both by parents and child!), and while we certainly feel guilty for not paying that child, we know it is a lesson he needs to learn now and not later in life when it will be much more costly.

Maybe this is how many funders are feeling these days, with so many nonprofits asking for money, so many unmet needs, and relatively limited philanthropic capital to give away? How about we nonprofits make their decisions much easier by investing in our own abilities to demonstrate meaningful impact and programmatic outcomes.

Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling to Vancouver with 3 of my Greenlights teammates for AFP’s International Conference on Fundraising. I’m happy to report that we all returned to Austin with some new ideas and perspectives, and it was wonderful to have my colleagues there to discuss what we were experiencing, each through our own particular lens. It was also really fun to simply spend time with Amy, Kate and Katy, and to get to know them better, but that’s another blog!

Most of our discussions after the keynotes and sessions were about the apparent “split” in fund development approaches proposed by young, entrepreneurial social change leaders, like Scott Harrison, Founder and President of charity: water as compared to the guidance shared by seasoned development professionals who have decades of fundraising experience, like renowned author and researcher, Penelope Burk.

Where Harrison implored us all to tackle the world’s problems head-on, directing 100% of donor contributions to programs where donors see concrete evidence of problems being solved quickly, seasoned experts like Burk, provided important insights into what it takes to engage donors in life-long relationships with organizations and their missions.

Harrison challenged the usefulness of the traditional development department, armed with countless stories of how nonprofit organizations dilute their impact and bore today’s results-oriented, fast-paced young leaders into apathy. Burk, on the other hand, encouraged more attention to nurturing those in the fundraising profession, spurred by her research on the small number of fundraisers who know how to secure planned gift commitments that can lead to long-term sustainability of their organizations.

I attended a great session that helped me understand these different takes on affecting change by Jon Duschinsky, Founder of Be The Change, a London-based group that encourages “movements” over “organizations”. Duschinsky defines a movement as “a group of people who come together because they have a common belief system and they want to change something.” That sounds a lot like nonprofit organizations to me, but there are definitely differences. Here’s how I have come to see it (and please forgive the generalizations and over-simplification of both approaches):

For a great example of a movement, we need to look no further than the Kony 2012 phenomenon. Here the movement used social media (a key reason that today’s movements are even possible) to engage a huge number of people in easy, meaningful and very direct ways.

I believe that higher education institutions are examples of nonprofit organizations that have many reasons to be the large organizations they are. Most universities would not be effective or credible as spontaneous, bottom up movements.

I am thrilled and grateful that the “movement” crowd is understandably sick of waiting around for organizations to solve the myriad problems in our world and that they are inspiring a huge segment of our population to get involved in ways that make sense for them. I am also concerned that these new leaders are underestimating the tremendous power of established nonprofit organizations, their development teams and the donors who love them. Their donors tend to be older individuals who value the stability of an organizational structure, but they are just as passionate about changing lives.

Overall, it seems that we all agree that it’s imperative that we treat our donors like the smart, approachable, emotional, results-oriented and busy investors that they are, and that demonstrating the real results we can and do achieve together is where our focus needs to be.

What is your take on these different approaches to driving change?

image from http://thecelebration.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/bridging-the-gap/

Over the past few months, members of our Interim Executive Director pool have shared some resources and lessons through the most recent installment of our Interim ED blog series. They shared everything from thoughts on leading during a merger to working your way through Founder’s Syndrome. They shared a recommendation for framing the Interim ED position as a long-term consultant, shared a checklist of essential documents for leadership transitions, and made the case for using the transition period as an intentional pause to build organizational strength. In addition, they discussed leveraging experienced EDs as mentors and executive coaches to retain key leaders or help new ones acclimate.

Greenlights established the Interim ED program in 2007, and since then, members of the group have provided 67 months of personal leadership, support, and guidance to nonprofits in transition. Through these experiences, they’ve shared wisdom with local nonprofits on the topics above and much, much more. Because the members of our group are all former nonprofit Executive Directors and have served on nonprofit boards–in addition to many of them having for-profit leadership experience as well, they are well-prepared to enter a nonprofit in transition and apply their skills and expertise to transitioning the organization to its next phase.

They receive training and support from Greenlights to leverage their talents and perspective to organizations as an Interim ED, with emphasis on being a calming, stabilizing influence on your organization during an often complex time of transition and providing an independent, objective perspective during their placement period.

Whether your organization is working to retain or buttress your current Executive Director through coaching and mentoring, in the gap between leaders, or helping a new ED get up to speed, Greenlights and our seasoned pool of Interim ED members can help your organization through the transition with objective insights, application of best practices and resources, and confident and calming leadership. If you would like to learn more about how your organization can work with a member of this group, please get in touch with me or Tara Kirkland.