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Gordon Gekko may believe “greed is good,” but in the nonprofit sector we know that “FREE is good!”  When it comes to working or volunteering in the nonprofit sector, we tend to be under-resourced, over-worked and busy as all get out.

That’s where the Greenlights Online Resource Library comes in. Did you know we have almost a hundred different articles and tools available for your FREE viewing and downloading pleasure?

Let’s take a quick tour of what’s “hot” these days.

Image from 123RF.com

By far the most popular category in our Resource Library is Board Development, with 3504 views in the past year.

What’s the most popular board resource? Check out the sample board fundraising commitment form, which has been downloaded more than 1000 times since February 2011, or the Board Member Matrix if you want to look at your current board makeup and think about top priority recruitment needs.

Another oft-visited section of the library is Financial Management, where a compilation of resources on the IRS 990 Form is downloaded quite a bit, and another favorite tool is a sample set of nonprofit financial policies.

But what about managing staff and volunteers, you say?  If you want to learn how to conduct background checks, evaluate your Executive Director, or assess the performance of staff, we’ve got you covered.  Tools for all of the above and more can be found in the Human Resources section of the library.

All this, plus resources for raising more money, communicating your story, planning for growth and more are just a mouse-click away.  And the low price of FREE is hard to beat.

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?

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?

Somehow, I missed the release of NTEN’s latest report last month, “The State of the Nonprofit Cloud.” Thanks to Wild Apricot and Lori Halley for her great write-up this morning. Her article is a helpful primer if you don’t yet have time to read the full report. If you do, however, here’s what you might learn:

Definition of “the cloud.” Basically, this refers to any software accessed over the Internet, including everything from Facebook and Twitter to customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics to broadcast email tools like Emma and Constant Contact.

Most nonprofits surveyed are in the cloud. Of the 780 nonprofits surveyed, 91% reported using some kind of cloud-based software, with staff email being the most common, at 69%.  Broadcast email tools and office software also ranked high.

Nonprofits value remote access and flexibility. Remote access was the most cited advantage in selecting cloud-based systems, followed by ease of maintenance. Not only does remote access offer flexibility for those who telecommute or occasionally work from home, but it also allows for employees who do work in the field to access software and stay connected when they’re away from a traditional office setting.

Total cost over time is the highest concern for nonprofits. While nonprofits did factor in time and cost to convert to cloud-based software and time to train staff, the total cost over time of maintaining cloud-based systems was the most cited concern. While maintenance costs are often low, one respondent pointed out that installed software can be “‘pay it once-and-done’, [but] often the cloudbased software is a subscription type of service,” requiring an annual fee at a minimum.

Security of data and concerns about privacy ranked high on the list of potential disadvantages. Nearly 60% cited security as a primary concern; however, NTEN points out that “there is little evidence…that cloud-based solutions pose any more risk than any other system connected to the Internet.” The report goes on to say that reputable online vendors often have far greater capability to safeguard against security threats than the average nonprofit.

These are just a few highlights from the report. It’s definitely worth a read if your nonprofit is considering cloud-based software or if you’re just curious what’s happening in the cloud.

Greenlights recently made the transition to Rackspace, a cloud-based email service, and we’ve been using Salesforce for several years to track data on membership, event registrations, donors, and consulting projects. We’re also using Emma to communicate with our constituents, and the integration between Salesforce and Emma has been a tremendous benefit for our staff. Next, we’ll tackle transitioning the document storage on our server to the cloud. No more server reboots! I know our tech guy will be happy when that happens.

How are you using the cloud?