Changing the Conversation
As Amy Celep noted in an earlier post, “changing the conversation” can be a powerful tool toward creating the change we want to see in the world.
I was reminded of the validity of Amy’s claim during a recent lunch meeting with Jim Down, a wonderful strategic thinker who led Mercer Management Consulting until retiring at age 50. Since then he has played a critical role in the nonprofit sector, advising organizations ranging from OxFam to the Centers for Disease Control. Jim is on the board of OxFam and I asked him what he thought their most impressive accomplishment was so far. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Dear Social Sector: Did you hear the President call us to action?
In the words spoken and unspoken during President Obama’s State of the Union address, I heard three strong calls to action for the social sector.
1. Put our differences aside in pursuit of the mission.
In his speech, President Obama pointed to the military’s ability to put aside differences and focus on the mission. On many military missions, it’s life or death for those involved. For much of our work in the social sector it’s life or death, too. While there are some bright spots of organizations coming together in pursuit of a common agenda, we still have a long way to go.
The call to action for all of us, social sector or not, is to do the hard, personal work that brings our individual, unconscious biases and fears into consciousness so we can move beyond them and join with others to accomplish our missions. As I explored in my post earlier this week, those who have successfully created big, transformative social change have been skilled at finding common ground among unlikely partners. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Five Failures Causing Nonprofit Staff to Flee
“Four out of five employees of charitable organizations are eager to leave their jobs and are actively seeking new positions.”
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which conducted the survey revealing this troubling statistic, attributes this job dissatisfaction to strains caused by the economic downturn.
While those pressures are real and surely play a role, our experience working with hundreds of nonprofits since founding Community Wealth Ventures is that much of what can be debilitating about working for a nonprofit comes from self-inflicted organizational wounds, summarized by these Five Failures:
- Failure to diversify revenues.
- Failure to be accountable to specific goals that can be measured by stakeholders.
- Failure to pay talent what it is worth.
- Failure to invest in management training and staff development.
- Failure to look beyond short term gains in favor of investments that may not pay off until the long-term.
Before Fundraising, Focus on the Case for Evaluation
This is the third in a three part series of posts exploring the key ingredients for sustaining an organization’s evaluation capacity.
We underscored in our last post the centrality of culture and leadership in building an organization’s evaluation capacity. But sustaining evaluation capacity also depends on an organization’s ability to sell the value of their evaluation efforts to its stakeholders.
Effective evaluation depends on the engagement of numerous key stakeholders: you need staff to collect and use data; you need funders to support the costs of evaluation; and you may depend on community partners to collect and share their data that affects your outcomes. Unfortunately, a strong evaluation system alone does not automatically translate into greater support from these stakeholders. In particular, in our assessment of the funding environment for evaluation, we have learned that funders differ significantly in their views of what evaluation means, the degree to which it is valuable, and what it should cost. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sustaining Evaluation Starts With Culture and Leadership
In our last post, we reflected on the importance of evaluation to ensuring an organization’s overall sustainability. Our question was: what can organizations do to build and sustain their evaluation capacity?
This question has been the focus of our recent work with the Connecticut Association for Housing Services (CAHS) and CASA de Maryland (CASA), two organizations that had come to recognize that evaluation capacity was about more than collecting some good data.
As Mario Morino, author of Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity, recently noted at an Urban Institute symposium, “[managing to outcomes] is about… the people and strong leadership who have the culture and desire to collect and use information as the basis for continually improving what you are doing.” Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Sustain Your Evaluation Capacity, Sustain Your Impact
This is the first in a three part series of posts that will explore the key ingredients for sustaining an organization’s evaluation capacity.
As a part of our work studying transformational initiatives, we recently had an opportunity to speak with Geoffrey Canada, President and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), about his organization’s efforts to break the cycle of poverty in Harlem.
We were eager to learn how HCZ has managed to adapt, grow, and ultimately sustain its programs over the long term. There have undoubtedly been many keys to HCZ’s success, but Geoffrey was quick to stress one factor: Using data to drive impact is critical to achieving HCZ’s short-term and long-term goals. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Why We’ll be Thinking of our Clients this Thanksgiving
Later this week, as I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I will do so with a new perspective on the things I have for which I'm grateful. That’s because I recently had the opportunity to work with the inspiring folks at Miriam’s Kitchen.
Miriam’s Kitchen has been serving homeless men and women in Washington D.C. since 1983, but recently recast its work by putting forth a bold new vision for the organization: ending chronic homelessness in Washington, D.C. This type of compelling articulation of how the world will look different is one of the common elements we have uncovered in our research on social transformation. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Learnings from a Community of Social Problem Eradicators
The Gates Foundation recently hosted a forum in Seattle with 300 scientists from around the world to release the latest information about its campaign to eradicate malaria. The lessons this community is learning and documenting during their fight to end malaria have profound takeaways for others who are waging similarly ambitious efforts to solve social problems at the scale they exist. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Finding Courage in Nonprofit Leadership: CVNPA
Much of the work we do in the social sector takes immense courage. We have to make critical decisions in an environment of ambiguity, overcoming our natural fear of the unknown. The weight of making the wrong decision – failing those who need our support the most, being wrong about our theory of change, choosing program A over program B when there is no data to support the choice – can be paralyzing for leaders of nonprofits and foundations.
Earlier this year, I explored the courage of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in sticking to bold ambitions. And, recently, the stories of two past clients stuck out to me reinforcing this idea of courage playing an important role in the DNA of successful social sector leaders.
5 Factors of Sustainability: This isn’t your grandmother’s sustainability framework.
Across the board, nonprofit organizations are on a quest for sustainability. Despite the growing interest in the topic, confusion often exists as to what sustainability for a nonprofit organization entails. For many people sustainability means one thing and one thing only: financial health.
And we can understand why, especially in this economy.
But at CWV we believe that an organization’s financial health is just one piece of its sustainability quotient. One of five, actually. Read More & Contribute Your Ideas...
Community Wealth Ventures (CWV) is a management consulting firm that emboldens and equips leadership teams to innovate, grow and sustain organizations that build a better world.
CWV offers strategy and implementation services to nonprofit organizations and philanthropic foundations, partnering with them to design and implement innovative approaches to growth and sustainability. CWV supports nonprofit sustainability through a variety of strategies, with core expertise in
social franchising and social enterprise. CWV’s collaborative approach to consulting focuses on equipping leadership teams with the skills they need to execute the strategy.
CWV is a wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary of Share Our Strength, one of the Nation's leading anti-hunger and anti-poverty organizations.