By visualphotos.com

In the nonprofit world, collaboration is more than just a kumbayah, let’s all hold hands and get along concept. It is critical to business success, a logical way to fill gaps in organizational capability, and sometimes even a long-term survival strategy. As such, we believe in a robust, well-defined, and analytical approach to collaboration, and even a differentiation between regular-old collaboration and “strategic collaboration.”

The Greenlights Team recently had the privilege of leading a group of 48 Applied Materials Foundation grantee nonprofits in a full-day “Advancement Academy” focused on collaborative learning and problem-solving, and centered around the concept of strategic collaboration and nonprofit mergers. As a foundation that is on the cutting edge of engaging their grantees in more than just a grantor-grantee relationship, Applied Materials now regularly convenes their Austin-based nonprofit partners to encourage learning, collaboration, and networking, even though their grantees work in fields as broad as education, basic needs, and the arts.

To begin the day, Greenlights laid out a central definition of “strategic collaboration” to distinguish the concept from a more common view of the term. We defined a collaboration to be truly strategic when it involves…

• Two or more organizations…
• working together in a meaningful, well-defined, and deliberate manner…
• by investing time, energy, and resources…
• to accomplish a set of shared objectives…
• that are mutually beneficial to advancing the missions of the organizations involved, and…
• that are more likely to be achieved together than alone.

We further laid out the Greenlights Collaboration Continuum, a construct that allows nonprofits to plot existing or potential collaborations on a scale ranging from less intensive collaborations to the most intensive form of collaboration, outright merger.

We have found at Greenlights, having been contracted by nonprofits to lead many nonprofit merger and strategic collaboration initiatives, that meaningful collaboration takes not just a more analytical approach than is typically afforded but also a different form of organizational leadership. Nonprofit executive leaders and boards who are leading their organizations in long-term sustainable ways are often able to embrace strategic collaboration as a core business practice, to promote it on the organization’s regular discussion and evaluation agenda, and to see it not as a distraction or something that signals weakness, but rather as a source of strength for the organization.

Greenlights was thrilled to be able to partner with Applied Materials in this way and, even more so, we were very encouraged by the high level of engagement by and very positive feedback from the many nonprofit leaders who attended this year’s Advancement Academy and who are now even better equipped to lead their organizations in a more strategic, more collaborative manner.

Greenlights Advancement Academy for Applied Materials Foundation Grantees

April, where did you go?

Was it really nearly a month ago that I was flying to Vancouver with my colleagues for the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Annual Conference? The cool temperatures of Vancouver have been long forgotten now as the reality of the pending Texas summer is upon us. I’d really like to go back, so today I am going to close my eyes, turn up the A/C, and pretend I’m back in Vancouver. Rather than go on about the beauty and charm of the city or where to find THE best Ukrainian food in Vancouver, I thought I’d reminisce about my favorite session of the conference.

The description for “Does Your Board Know how to Evaluate Fundraising Effectiveness?” referenced effective management dashboards – that’s all it took to win me over. Each month I prepare a colorful, pie-charted dashboard to report to our board of directors on the current state of our fundraising program and how our board members have been helping us meet our goals. I’ve retooled and revamped it several times, not because I didn’t think it was useful information, but because I always wonder, “Is the best, most useful information for our board?”

Session presenter, Peter Drury, definitely proved that there is indeed more useful (or at the very least- additional) information that should be shared with your board to help them evaluate your organization’s fundraising success. He referenced the “dysfunctional dance” that we can unknowingly create with our board if we only focus on the present fundraising outputs and not regularly envision the future outcomes and impact we want to achieve for our organization.

The coveted take-away Peter left us with was “The ‘Beyond Cash’ Fundraising Management Dashboard.”  For the lucky ones in the room, we received the card stock, color copied, two-sided hand-out of beauty to take home with us. Fortunately for those not in the room he has made the tool available online.

The core of his message is simple– when it comes to fundraising success there is more to measure than just cash in the door.

The ‘Beyond Cash’ indicators he shares are things that most of us already track in some form or fashion (retention rate, median gift size, number of new donors, multi-year pledges), but how many of us are keeping track of our:

• Engagement Index: What percentage of your donors are making that first gift as a result of learning about you through another volunteer or donor?
• Non-Ask Ratio: What’s your organization’s ratio of solicitation contacts to “non-ask” contacts like stewardship visits or communications sharing the impact of their gift.
• Brand Strength Rating: How many of us are biannually asking our board and staff to rate their confidence in our brand?

Put all of these together, and this dashboard certainly is a great goal setting tool, reporting and evaluation document, and conversation starter to share with your board of directors. What do you think? How are you currently communicating your fundraising success to your board?

As I mentioned in my last blog post, Entering the World of Online Fundraising: A few free tools to get you started, I’ve been trying to expand my knowledge of the possibilities and challenges associated with online fundraising.  A report released this week by Convio, Insights into Integrated Marketing Constituent Behavior, provides interesting data to suggest that organizations can increase their development success by implementing online strategies that complement their traditional fundraising methods.

Looking specifically at the experiences of a large international nonprofit, CARE, Convio explored what happens when a nonprofit transitions to dual-channel marketing or, in other words, when they work to engage people both through traditional direct mail tactics as well as through online techniques. Based on their analysis of CARE’s donor data, Convio reports that dual-channel donors are the most valuable. Specifically:

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.

“In this highly connected, always switched-on world, eLearning makes more sense than ever before,” according to Engaging with the new eLearning. The American Society for Training and Development says eLearning makes up an increasing part of the training and education industry. With innovation and learning being two of our core values, we have identified a need to offer web-based training for our Board Essentials course.

Adobe Connect offers white papers on Web Conferencing, eLearning, and Security. Here are a few best practices from Engaging with the new eLearning to consider before transitioning to web-based training:

1.       The eLearning must be perceived as useful by participants. Create a survey and insure web-based training is an immediate need among donors, members, and the local community.
2.       Make it real. Offer different levels of training and match audience’s expertise.
3.       Make it active and thought-provoking. Keep your audience involved by adding videos and games.
4.       Make it human. Have staff members record the modules.
5.       Measure and continuously improve. Ask for completed feedback and update module regularly.
6.       Make it WOW.

Finding the best web-based training for your organization may help secure the WOW factor for participants. Here are a few pros and cons of three options I have researched for our modules:

Adobe Connect: Pricing varies based on number of participants. Average user pays $2,000 – 10,000 annually. Purchase through Clarix.
Pros
- Create interactive tutorials and simulations using already created PowerPoint presentations
- Record virtual classroom session and manage course material
- Input interactive components ranging from a poll to an interactive game
- Track progress of students and data
- 15% discount for nonprofits
Cons
- Adobe Flash required
- External audio provider or teleconferencing platform necessary

GoToMeeting: Discount offered through TechSoup. Varies based on services and monthly or annual plan.
Pros
- Do-it-yourself webinars for up to 15 participants
- Integrate with Outlook calendar
- Includes unlimited audio conferencing at no extra charge
- No required annual fee – can register for one time monthly fee
Cons
- Best for live webinars – recorded sessions saved as window media player files and uploaded to a website for sharing

Slide Rocket: Discount offered through TechSoup – $24 for 1-year pro subscription
Pros
- Access online, mobile, or offline through the Cloud
- Extensive design options: Themes and layouts, shapes, tables, pictures, HD video, and Flash. Integrates with Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo!, and Twitter.
- Publish presentation URL – embed in website (online community) – no downloading software
Cons
- Adobe Flash required

In following the best practice advice above, let’s take a survey. Post a comment letting me know:

1. Have you attended web-based training?
2. If so, what was the WOW factor?
3. What was the biggest challenge for you?