It’s that time of year again when we can expect to experience some inclement weather conditions across the states. When severe weather interferes with the day-to-day operations of your nonprofit, having a plan in place for unexpected barriers to your workflow can help to keep your organization productive and or reestablish business operations sooner than later if you are forced to shut down.

Severe weather increases the risk of power outages—knocking out heat, power and communication services—and often for extended periods. Many employers find themselves dealing with a number of weather related inconveniences they hadn’t even considered until it happens to them. While there are no federal or state laws that define how a company should handle such things as notifying employees of office closures or how to handle pay for missed workdays, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a priority.

By taking a proactive approach now, you can avoid the headache later—scrambling to figure out what to do and where even to begin. You can start by creating a plan that includes policies for what to do before, during and after emergencies—ensuring that everyone in the organization has a role and understanding of the policies once finalized.

Below are some tips to help ensure your nonprofit and its employees are prepared:

• Outline an emergency communication plan
• Update your evacuation plan and practice it
• Where possible set up remote access to desktops for use during forced office closures
• Sign up for local notifications and updates from the National Weather Service (NWS)
• Understand what disasters could possibly affect your area
• Learn how to help before help arrives
• Create an emergency supply cabinet with first-aid kits and non-perishable food
• Work with other organizations in your community to strengthen preparedness
• Hold a preparedness discussion with your employees to ensure everyone understands the procedures and how to stay informed

Regardless of what weather incident you may experience, having a solid preparedness plan in place will help ensure your employees know what to expect and aid in keeping everyone informed. There are dozens of websites dedicated to helping businesses create successful preparedness plans so just remember—a little preparation now will go a long way should your nonprofit come face-to-face with Mother Nature.

In our world of online communication, nonprofits and charities are able to share and show how their organization is making a significant impact on the communities they serve through inspiring stories. This can be a challenging and overwhelming task for nonprofit professionals—they feel the pressure to create inspiring, unique and emotional stories that will set them apart from other nonprofits.

In the beginning stages of telling your nonprofit’s story, you should start by telling your organization’s “origin story.” This gives you an opportunity to explain how your nonprofit came to exist. Where and when did the idea of your nonprofit begin? How did you get to where you are today? Being able to emphatically and confidently tell your origin story will make a significant impact when connecting with your donors and volunteers.

Great storytelling is the best way to capture the attention, as well as the hearts and minds, of your supporters. While providing data on how a charity has impacted a community can be beneficial, people tend to give more when presented with a heartfelt story rather than data. Stories will help you express your mission to people who may know nothing about you or your cause. Statistics may offer some shock value, but statistics rarely get people to take action and donate to your cause.

If you and your nonprofit organization are doing things no one else is doing, it’s your job to make people aware by sharing your story. Tell your story in such a way that people won’t be able to forget it. Start by sharing how the community looked before your organization started and what the world looked like at the time. Then, touch on how the world looks now after you started this nonprofit journey. Maybe even share an example of how your nonprofit has positively impacted the community to help build your story. Using these types of examples makes your nonprofit more relatable—it allows for a more real connection and even empathy.

Empathy is also incredibly important when telling your organization’s story—there should be a moment when people see themselves or someone they know within your story. The more people can relate to your mission and your story to their own lives, the more likely they will be willing to engage and offer support to your organization.

What is a KPI? A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is “a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a nonprofit (or another type of organization) is achieving its key organizational objectives.” Most nonprofits make their data-driven decisions with the help of KPIs – using them at multiple levels to evaluate success in reaching targets.

While KPIs provide important performance information that can allow nonprofits to understand whether or not they are on track toward certain objectives, they must fully grasp how the KPI’s work and how it’s benefiting the organization’s return on investment. The executive team and board members will be looking for stats and will have questions. Such as, how quick will we see a return? Are we seeing any patterns with our donor’s behavior? Can we see a comparison year over year? etc.

The use of KPIs can help correct an organization’s course of action efficiently and adapt to the changing conditions of the environment. When a nonprofit is looking for ways to succeed and achieve its mission in an ever growing and noisy space, they need a solution to measure progress and apply their course of action accordingly.

KPIs are essential when making informed decisions. Once a nonprofit gathers relevant and sufficient data, it’s much easier to make sound decisions that are going to push the organization in the right direction. It’s common that many nonprofit organizations measure generic KPIs that don’t offer any help in understanding whether they’re progressing towards achieving their mission and to what extent.

Being that it’s crucial and challenging to select the right KPIs for your organization, here’s a list of  suggestions for KPIs that are specific to various areas of nonprofit management:

1) Donors & Growth of Donation

2) Donor Retention Rate

3) ROI for fundraising

4) Track donation conversions by channel

5) Website page views

6) Email click-through rate

Friendly reminder: Once your KPIs are set, the work isn’t over. Make sure you’re checking-in regularly, whether that’s weekly or monthly and use that data to your nonprofits benefit. Tracking these important KPIs affect donor relations, program delivery and most importantly, the ability to achieve your nonprofits mission.

From 2007 to 2016, the nonprofit sector experienced substantial growth in employment and a range of industries reaped the benefits of this growth. During this time, nonprofits surpassed the for-profit sector in employment growth with a 16.7 percent increase compared to the 4.6 percent increase in the for-profit sector. With consistent resilience and very little recognition for these efforts, nonprofits had the ability to employ nearly twice as many workers as construction, finance, insurance and transportation.

When looking at how nonprofit employment is distributed across a variety of industries, it can be helpful to see which industries benefited from this growth. Hospitals came in at the highest with 34 percent of the total, along with other health care sectors (e.g., nursing homes and health clinics) at another 21 percent. Next, is education with 14 percent of nonprofit employment then social services with 12 percent. An interesting point made in The 2019 Nonprofit Employment Report is “within the industries noted above, nonprofit workers tend to out-earn for-profit workers” and an example of this is, “an average nonprofit worker in ambulatory health earns $1,364 a week versus $1,101 for a person employed in the same industry by a for-profit firm. That is a 24 percent nonprofit wage advantage. In the social assistance sector, the nonprofit wage advantage is a stunning 55 percent.”

While nonprofits are less impacted by recessions than for-profit firms, they still face other obstacles that are unavoidable. For-profits continue to make advancements and are outpace nonprofits in a number of the traditional nonprofit sectors, such as nursing and residential care field, hospital field, social assistance; to name a few. For-profits also continue to grow in the private sector and while nonprofits are growing in the service(s) sectors, they are growing faster than the economy can accommodate.

With the nonprofit sector continuing to show resilience while battling with the many economic pressures and in constant competition with the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector continues to push on. However, attention needs to be given to the many factors that impact the future of nonprofit business models.

Performance management enables business leaders to motivate staff members and maximize worker productivity. Go-getting employees thrive on productive feedback, while others need a clear plan to boost their productivity.

While large corporations devote huge sums of money toward highly complex and feature-rich performance management software suites, these systems typically focus on standardized forms and universal rating systems. Often, this kind of one-size-fits-all management is unproductive and ineffective. Fortunately, there are newer, cost-effective performance management applications that are accessible to even the smallest organizations that do a better job of boosting performance.

With the abundance of available software suites on the market, small organizations can lease performance management applications for pennies on the dollar. Of course, business leaders must also consider the costs involved with managing these kinds of applications. As such, it makes good sense to choose a management suite that is easy to use and integrates well with existing work processes.

To learn more about how low-budget organizations can effectively achieve their goals through data and performance management, check out Rutgers University’s infographic on Using Data to Improve Performance in Nonprofits.

While nonprofit marketing metrics such as engagement, social shares, and “likes” offer insight into your campaigns—other metrics like dashboards, strategic plan reports, financial and activity reports can offer a basic yet sophisticated snap shot of your nonprofit’s overall performance. 

As a nonprofit leader, looking beyond the metrics of a simple activity or campaign and focusing on the long-term viability (appealing to users and supporters), relevance and sustainability (access to and use of funds) of your organization as a whole—offers great insight into the performance and longevity of your nonprofit.

Here are some metrics that offer valuable information around the viability and sustainability of your organization:

1) Viability and Engagement:

                a) Following the patterns of your users, such as the increase of benefits and engagement.

                b) An increase of social media followers, leading to a higher number of content shares.

2) Sustainability and Financial Security:

                a) A change in source of funding (i.e., philanthropy, government, fees) followed by observing the strengths and effectiveness of these different funding sources.

                b) A change in seeking of funding (i.e., reserves, endowment), and monitoring the status of each request and how successful the outcome is.

Measurement doesn’t just show progress or results—it shows insights and, perhaps most importantly, shapes behavior. The use of these metrics will reveal if your organization has the relevance and viability to encounter current and future challenges and the ability to make necessary adjustments.

If the leadership associated with a mission-driven organization believes strongly in the mission of their nonprofit, they will endure the struggles to establish the long-term viability and sustainability for the organization—ensuring the mission is the number one priority.

Competencies are designed to help individuals grow in their roles and their organizations. However, when competencies are poorly defined or applied incorrectly, they can undermine a nonprofit’s talent management process.

According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, 1 in 4 senior nonprofit executives will leave their organizations within the next 2 years. These departures can result in a loss of productivity and require the use of organizational resources in order to fill the position. The time and energy spent recruiting and looking for a replacement can equal an employee’s salary depending on the position. These retention rates can have an effect on the managerial level as well. Research shows that managers believe that finding employment elsewhere is the only way they will grow faster.

To reduce turnover, nonprofits can create a talent management process that defines and uses competencies that will help individuals grow in their roles and organizations. When defined and used properly, competencies can help identify particular skills, capabilities, and experiences needed for employees to perform at their best and to encourage future growth.

Here are 4 common mistakes nonprofit organizations make when defining and using competencies:

1. To use competencies properly when assessing an individual’s performance.

A performance assessment of an individual should be based primarily on how well they are doing against their agreed upon goals and target for the year. Competencies enable this performance and act as a guide for individuals to understand the skills they need to develop to improve their performance over time.  Organizations that do this right use the performance assessment to identify the competencies for each individual to work on.

2. Only thinking of competencies in relation to the work of the individual and organization.

Most nonprofits, that have identified and defined competencies, use a list of job-related competencies. These are generally relevant for everyone in the organization (e.g. communication, dependability, workload management) and can include ones that are specific to certain roles. However, many nonprofit organizations forget that they need to have a set of leadership competencies along with the job competencies — to encourage organizational success.

3. Failing to tailor competencies that are both organization-specific and future oriented.

Some nonprofits have a starter set of competencies that they work with that were either pulled from an HR website or another resource. However, most organizations have not considered if these competencies will enable the organization to achieve strategic priorities. While starter lists provide a good foundation, there needs to be a set of competencies that are specific to their work and encourages future success.

4. Not defining competencies that make them user friendly for development purposes.

While many organizations have a short definition for each competency, only a few have taken the time to create a more elaborate definition for each one. This would provide a better understanding of what it means to progress from an early stage to an advanced stage for each competency.

Nonprofit organizations that approach identifying and using competencies with leadership development in mind avoid many of these pitfalls. In addition, getting the competencies right and using them for development purposes gives nonprofits a better chance at increasing retention and job satisfaction among emerging leaders.