Is your non-profit ready for the post-COVID recovery?
In the coming months, a great deal will change (again) as offices reopen, volunteers return to their work, clients come back into programs, and fundraising moves from virtual to face-to-face. While we may gain more solid footing in terms of vaccines, we will continue to face uncertainty in many aspects of our work as non-profit leaders and managers.
At the end of the Great Recession, non-profit leaders were fearful of how long economic recovery would take, how community needs would change, and how to prepare their organizations for a possibly long period of uncertainty. The same concerns exist today, along with a host of new ones.
For example, the concentration of wealth and the vanishing’ middle of the pyramid’ donor impacted US non-profits prior to the pandemic. Researchers report this trend has accelerated, resulting in even fewer people giving more.
Unlike the Great Recession, racial disparities that underlay our culture’s fabric have been laid open and lifted by racial and social justice movements. Board members and non-profit leaders have become aware of unserved and underserved groups within their communities and feel new urgency to address long-standing service gaps and assumptions.
This new awareness of external forces is a gift to savvy non-profit leaders. Most non-profit leaders assess their success in the context of their mission. When they evaluate their financial stability and program success, they assume they can influence donor and client behavior in their favor. We can, but only in the context of a much larger playing field.
Without checking, we believe that clients and funders are satisfied with our services. We believe our organization is unique, and there aren’t any alternatives to what we provide. We think our organization is the top priority for our donors. In other words, we live in an organization-centric universe.
Most non-profit leaders don’t understand a foundational tenant of business: External factors- government regulations, demographic trends, client and customer preferences, education levels, etc. – control much of our long term sustainability.
Your organization cannot control these trends. But you can put processes in place to recognize them and understand their impact on your organization. Simple routines of collecting and monitoring key indicators can create an ‘early warning system’ for your board and staff leadership.
By following external indicators of trends on a routine basis you will have access to data and information that supports nimble leadership and high-quality decision-making based on information about the environment and the organization.
What external factors impact your organization? Are they moving in your favor or against it? And how will you know in time to course correct?
Learn how to create an ‘early warning system’ for your organization in my next post: Know Your Numbers