Nonprofit Priority Matrix Focuses Limited Time

Nonprofit organizations usually struggle with two limited resources – money and time. One Street’s Priority Matrix is designed to help nonprofits achieve the most from the finite time their team has to offer. Before using the Priority Matrix, the first step is to ensure that everyone is serving in the best role for their character and skills; both staff and volunteers.

In Cures for Ailing Organizations, I emphasize finding proper roles for everyone in an organization. Those who are experts and specialists should not be expected to serve in leadership roles that require broad, long-term vision. On the other hand, visionaries with leadership skills should know that their role as leader is plenty and should not be expected to accomplish complex tasks. Some individuals will want to hold multiple roles. Just make sure these roles are distinct. By finding proper roles for everyone who wants to help your organization, you will ensure that their time achieves meaningful success. And people who see their efforts causing positive change will stay around for more.

Once everyone on your team is happy and effective in their roles, the Priority Matrix will become a useful tool toward greater efficiency. With it, you can distinguishing between critical work that the organization relies on and urgent tasks that require immediate attention. Critical work is always best done well before it becomes urgent. And urgent work that is critical must be kept to a minimum to keep stress levels low and prevent programs from being compromised.

The matrix highlights ways to avoid the critical/urgent mode by keeping your team working steadily on current tasks so they are never surprised by a deadline. Note that 100% of volunteer time is shown in the not-critical category. This is because non-leader volunteers should never be placed in a position where the organization’s success depends on them. They are still placed in the urgent section because the role of volunteers is to make current projects even better.

Post this matrix where members of your team can check it to make sure they are working effectively. Use it during planning meetings when inefficient ideas are offered such as asking staff to spend time on tasks that are not critical when volunteers are available to do that work.

This Priority Matrix is one of my favorite tools for ensuring effective use of time in nonprofits. Do you have another favorite you’d like to share? If so, please include it in the comments sections.

Sue

Confronting Dictators

Dictators come in all shapes, sizes, and roles. We see too many in the news, but the dictators most of us have to confront will never make headlines.

I’ve been working with a small nonprofit that does excellent work for their community. Recently, one of their worthy projects, a proposed community park, was derailed by a man in another nonprofit that is a necessary partner to the project. There is no logical reason for this man to block the park. He simply sees it as a threat to his authority and has no interest in leading the project himself so he has sabotaged it.

I’ve also been working with leaders of nonprofits in the Ukraine as they develop bicycle and sustainable transportation campaigns to help reunite their torn country; torn by a well-known dictator. Other front-page confrontations of dictators show similarly unnerving situations that have persisted over too many decades including some positive results from President Obama’s efforts in Cuba and few changes in the Big Man Syndrome in Africa.

Dictators come in many forms, some working from the shadows within nonprofits, others blatant and confident at microphones on the world stage. But all share these characteristics: 

• A belief that their power cannot be challenged.
• Certainty that they are the expert and have superior knowledge over anyone else.
• Treating the people they work with as their minions who must follow their commands.
• No interest in discussion of issues or alternative plans.
• Disgust of visionary ideas and seeing such ideas as threats to their power.
• A history of being rewarded for manipulative and bullying behavior i.e., elections, promotions, awards, accolades, supporters.
• Often, but not necessarily, a large physical stature and noteworthy charisma.

In Cures for Ailing Organizations, I discuss cultures of brutality within organizations that incubate such dictators. Even a bylaws document that provides ultimate power of some over others can give people with this tendency and background the greenlight to become dictators. In other cases, the organization structure itself creates a system that is easily exploited by dictators. Prisons are one extreme example of this.

In his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Dr. Philip Zimbardo describes his discovery of this phenomenon through his Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. He had encountered strange behaviors through his work as a psychologist at prisons and wanted to see if he could recreate them in a controlled experiment. He created a makeshift prison in a Stanford University basement and hired 18 young men for two weeks – nine he randomly chose to be guards, the other nine to be prisoners. By day six, the guards’ brutality toward the prisoners had become unthinkable. Even then, as the overarching authority (dictator), Dr. Zimbardo pushed for the experiment to continue. It took a concerted and relentless confrontation from his girlfriend and peers to snap him out of his spell of power and end the experiment. He writes about his experience as someone who had lost control over himself and his empathy toward others. Dr. Zimbardo has subsequently been hired to analyze similar situations that hit the world stage such as the horrible incidents at Abu Ghraib.

The Stanford Prison Experiment proved that we all have a tendency to become dictators given the proper recipe of situational support, an abusive and secretive system, and a lack of training in empathy and respect for others. If you have never bullied, demeaned, or manipulated another person, think back to your role models. How did these kind people instill in you a default of caring and empathy toward others? Now, imagine your life without these people. Wouldn’t the temptation to act on your anger be so much more enticing? Wouldn’t the fantasy of forced power where everyone jumps to your every wish actually seem comforting? How easy everything would be. How lazy and luxurious your life would become.

Dictators are humans like us, but most have never had the benefit of kind and empathetic role models. They have never known a moral compass and don’t have the slightest clue what this is. Even if they did have such role models, they have found a way to dismiss them, just as Dr. Zimbardo did when he pushed to continue the Stanford Prison Experiment. None of us are guaranteed a firm grip on our moral compass.

Such empathy toward dictators does not excuse them. All of us have a moral obligation to confront dictators if we are in a position to do so, especially dictators doing harm. Such confrontations are about as appealing as throwing yourself off a bridge, with about as much expectation of coming through the incident unscathed.

First, check your level of responsibility for the situation before embarking on this treacherous path. Most readers of this blog are leaders of an organization and we will unfortunately find ourselves in situations that give us no option but to confront – to protect our organization, to ensure the success of a project or campaign, to defend victims of abuse, and so on.

Next, gather trusted advisors, perhaps your fellow leaders or the role models I alluded to earlier. Present your concern objectively to them and see how they react. Ensure that your ego is in check and the reason for your concern has nothing to do with hurt feelings and personal anger. If your advisors agree that a confrontation is needed, start preparing.

Learn about the system and culture that supports this dictator. Find those he or she must answer to and bring your concern to them. If such a discrete confrontation does not resolve the problem, return to your advisors to plan a more public confrontation.

Confronting dictators will never be pleasant, but if we find ourselves to be the best suited for the job, we must take on this challenge. Otherwise, people who have lost their kindness, even humanness, to become a dictator will be left unchecked to trample their victims.

Are you facing or have you ever faced a situation that forced you to confront a dictator? If so, please tell your story in the comments section below.

Sue

Campaign Planning Is a Valuable Tool for Nonprofits

In Cures for Ailing Organizations I show readers how to strengthen their leadership team and organization’s structure. But I also emphasize that without accomplishments, a nonprofit cannot survive. Nonprofits are founded to make specific changes for the communities they serve. The founders saw a problem that was serious enough to go to the trouble of creating an organization to solve it.

Sometimes such societal changes can occur over the long term through ongoing programs. Nonprofits that provide services to particular sorts of people are one example where ongoing programs are the best choice.

However, most other types of nonprofits need the skills to force positive change through advocacy and proper campaign planning. The status quo is not easily changed so a good shove is usually needed. These skills enable the nonprofit’s leaders to choose the best campaigns and carry them through to success. Succeeding with a campaign is one of the best ways to grow a nonprofit because those whose lives were improved by the campaign will want to help the nonprofit accomplish even more.

A few examples of well-known campaigns that succeeded in improving lives:  

• The lunch counter sit-ins to repeal the whites-only service at Woolworths.  
• The Indian Independence Movement when Mohandas Gandhi and his team showed the British the door.

Great campaigns don’t have to be as high-profile as these. In fact, some take place in just a few meetings with the appropriate officials.

Campaigns can also be used for malicious purposes, so understanding the way they work can help nonprofit leaders identify and stop harmful campaigns before they gain momentum. One example of a malicious campaign that is particularly galling to One Street is the successful adoption of the car industry’s invention of jaywalking to criminalize those using the public right-of-way without a car. No pedestrian or bicycle nonprofits existed at that time because there hadn’t been a need. So the campaign went unchecked and to this day, anyone who sets foot in an American street is at best mocked and at worst hauled off to jail. I have to admit, it was a damn clever campaign.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of exploring campaign planning processes in detail for a very special project in eastern Ukraine. A few months ago leaders of the Kyiv Cyclists’ Association invited me to come to Ukraine to teach three campaign planning workshops in three eastern cities. The goal of the project is to help reunite the country through partnerships toward positive change, in this case, bicycle and sustainable transportation campaigns.

All three workshops had to be completed by early March in order to meet with the requirements of USAID, the funder of the project. We realized the timeframe wouldn’t work for my teaching the workshops, so we had to find a way to transfer my campaign planning workshop experience to them so that they could teach them themselves. (Read more about the project in our upcoming Jan-Feb 2016 E-newsletter).

Through several Skype meetings and many emails Viktor, Ira, and I worked through best practices and the most common difficulties of these workshops to ensure theirs would start at a high level. We also created a customized workbook for attendees, which Viktor and Ira translated into Ukrainian Cyrillic.

Teaching someone else is one of the best ways to review and learn even more about a favorite topic. I’ve posted the basics on One Street’s Campaign Planning page, but training Viktor and Ira meant a far deeper analysis. Through this project, I have been reminded of the importance of:

• Ensuring that only leaders of nonprofits attend the campaign planning workshop because only they will know what their organization can and cannot take on.
• Distinguishing between campaigns and programs.
• Choosing a campaign that is likely to win.
• Remembering that problem development is always the most difficult for attendees, so plenty of time must be given for this early step.
• Emphasizing that attendees are the experts for their unique situations and need workshop time to work through the details, so case studies from other areas are all but useless.
• Taking the time to allow attendees to fully assess who in their community has the power to solve the problem they have defined.
• Showing attendees the value of completing a comprehensive campaign plan before launching it. I like to use a favorite quote from Sun Tzu in The Art of War, 6^th century BC: “The successful strategist only enters battle after the battle has been won.”

Two of the three workshops have already taken place and the results are outstanding! See them in the E-newsletter article linked above. Most notable are the clear goals for growing each of their nonprofits through their campaigns and using them as springboards for even more positive change in their troubled area.

I’ve learned many times over the years, and especially over these past few months, that campaign planning is one of the most valuable tools for energizing nonprofits and ensuring they forge a confident path toward the mission their founders intended. Eastern Ukraine is becoming a proven model of this through this inspiring project.

If you would like more info on One Street's Campaign Planning efforts please use the comments box below.

Sue

Google Discovery Could Prevent Fractures in Nonprofits

I try not to read corporate blogs designed to squeeze more work out of their workers. Most stink of patronizing platitudes spewed out by consultants who promise output to whoever pays them for their fluff. So when a reader emailed me a link to Google’s blog for their workers, I groaned. Not only is the thing called re:Work, the home page shouts: Let’s Make Work Better. Better for who?, my cynical self asked.

But then I started reading the particular post. Some of their HR staff had spent two years studying “teams” within Google to find a recipe that could make any team effective. By the second paragraph they’d hooked me:

“…We were pretty confident that we'd find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team -- take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right?

We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. So much for that magical algorithm…”

That’s when I realized this was not the ordinary corporate blog post. These HR people had hit on something that matters to any organization, committee, or team; any group within nonprofits.  

Their most profound discovery is that psychological safety is the number one factor in effective teams. I ran this through many of my own experiences as well as those I’ve guided leaders through and sure enough it hit them all. For every organization I’ve seen fall apart, I could recall a loss of psychological safety at the start of the downward spiral. I’d never identified it this way. Rather, I’d viewed these tragedies as the fallout after factions or rogues begin working against the others.

Reading this post from Google I realized that to cause psychological safety in such groups could actually prevent factions and rogues from splitting away. As I explain in Cures for Ailing Organizations, some people truly want to harm an organization by splitting the group, but more often rogues and factions are good people who simply believe they have no other choice but to block the efforts of the group. What if they felt comfortable voicing their ideas? I wonder how many sad stories of broken groups could be avoided.

Take a few minutes to read the short post called “The five keys to a successful Google team” and see what you think. The other four keys are interesting, too, but that first one really hit home for me.

Have you discovered other traits of effective teams? Have you witnessed any of these in action? Please offer your experiences in the comments section.

Sue

Charity or Murder: Both Result from Dehumanization

The recent attacks in Paris have caused important discussions and some horrific responses. I know that it is human nature to seek revenge; for the attacked to attack their attacker. This starts from our survival instinct, but soon goes too far. Because of these murders more liberties will be taken from all of us, more civilians will be killed in Syria, more hate talk against various groups will go unchecked.

Leaders of organizations big and small face this swinging pendulum of hate more often than we like to admit. Sometimes factions form within our organization, pitting people who were once friends against each other. Other times we must turn all our resources toward stopping different groups from harming each other. I even found this in the animal rights movement, a movement not even focused on humans, as overzealous activists claimed that people who harmed animals should be harmed in the same way or even killed.

I watch the reactions to the Paris attacks with mixed feelings. Of course it’s good for people to stand up against hate. But do we realize how close we are to hating the haters?

There is an effective response, but it requires perspective, an understanding of dehumanization, and the calming of our initial reaction. I cover this response method in Chapter 3 of Cures for Ailing Organizations because unless we stop such inappropriate behavior at its very beginning, there’s no point solving the easier problems. Surprisingly, this response not only undermines hate, but charity.

The seeds of hate are planted in the same way as the seeds of charity – by making the hater or the charity giver a better being than their target. This is dehumanization.

Sometimes large charity organizations become larger than their cause needs them to be or can support. This inertia and desperation to survive at their current level helps their leaders to justify messages and images that show their constituents as helpless and unable to care for themselves – starving, flies crawling on them, dependent on the organization. This draws people longing to help without having to put in the work to understand the true situation. They ignore the fact that every human has skills, experience, and value to contribute, not only to their own well-being but the causes touted by organizations. This occurs within cities and towns where the well-to-do answer charity pleas as they imagine their assistance going to people lesser than themselves. And it occurs across oceans as developing countries have been flooded by free goods that destroy local businesses and the economies that would lift them from poverty.

What’s wrong with this sort of giving if it is well intended? Everything. The separation. The promotion of some people as helpless. The call to other people that makes them better than those presented as helpless, deficient, wretched. The destruction of the systems that would nurture sustainably and enable struggling people to tap their skills and talents to help themselves.

If your organization is derailing into such destructive charity practices, start changing it back into one that sees your constituents as the same as all of you and find ways for them to contribute to your programs rather than just receiving charity.

Okay, so charity mindsets cause harm, you might say, but at least they are well intended; no correlation to murder. I have to argue otherwise. To help someone because you believe them to be inferior to you is no better than harming them for that reason. Your charity may get them through that day or even a year, but it will establish them in that place of helplessness you intended to help them out of.

People in African countries are some of the hardest hit by this as rampant charity has undermined their locally owned businesses and encouraged them to choose the endless charity handouts over the pursuit of their dreams of self-reliance. Simply understanding that every human needs the dignity of caring for themselves would stop this destructive charity flood. Our hands would pause before dropping a coin into a hat without making eye contact and talking with that person. We’d think twice about sending a check or bag of used clothes to people we will never meet.

This “lesserness,” this diminishing other humans to an inferior level not only inspires charity, but harm. Yes, some murderers are psychopaths. But we can’t make this sweeping claim of murderers like those in Paris who were following the doctrine of their organization. They killed 129. The world is in an uproar.

As people worldwide cry out for change to stop “terrorists” after Friday’s killings, many other murders go unnoticed. This year in the U.S., 2,000 people will die from gang violence, just as 2,000 died last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Also in the U.S., each year there are over 200,000 victims of hate crimes, many fatal. No worldwide uproar. No cries against terrorists and other perceived enemies. Could it be that in these cases we have placed both the murderers and their victims below us, so inferior that they don’t even deserve a place in the news? Why are the Parisians more like us than the victims of gang or hate crimes?

The response to dehumanization is simple: Recognize it and stop it. As soon as anyone sets another person out as inferior, stop it. As soon as we realize we have dehumanized another person, go to that person and apologize; treat them with dignity. Yes, punish murderers. But the response starts far before that by preventing dehumanization that encourages murder.

This is an uncomfortable topic because it forces us to question our own judgment, our initial reaction, our “gut,” which we so like to trust. I’ve had to study this because I encounter dehumanization so often through my work at One Street. Usually I uncover it while consulting with leaders of an organization being torn apart by factions within their leadership. Other times, it’s through the campaigns I help them develop to stop injustices.

It took me some time before I could believe how rampant dehumanization is in our current society, how prone each and every one of us is to it. Here are a few of the most striking documentations of this tendency, which I hope will open your eyes to the problem: 

• Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes Experiment - In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Jane Elliott, an elementary school teacher in Iowa, asked her students if they wanted to learn about racism. When they agreed, she told them that all the blue-eyed children were better than the brown-eyed children and gave them special treatment. The next day she reversed it. Watch this video to see how the children in one of her classes responded. Then ask yourself if you have diminished anyone in a similar way. 
• 
  
• Stanford Prison Experiment – In 1971, a professor at Stanford University was curious about the striking difference of behavior between guards and prisoners at the prisons he had visited. He launched an experiment with otherwise equal students, some of whom he made guards, the others prisoners, and locked them together in a makeshift basement “prison” for two weeks. Six days later the guards had become so violent against the prisoners and the prisoners so meek as to be unrecognizable, the experiment had to be stopped. The professor had unwittingly uncovered dehumanization, not just in his students, but himself.

Experiments like these are no longer allowed in our schools, perhaps for good reason. But thanks to these courageous teachers we can learn from theirs. When we give something to someone or harm them because we believe them to be different from us, we have fallen into the very same unacceptable behavior as the students in these studies. This is not because we are bad people. None of those students were bad people. And yet they, and we, can lapse into this behavior within a matter of minutes given a few prompts from an authority we trust.

We can also stop such prompts and tell such authorities they are wrong, not meekly like the students did during the experiments, but with the conviction we should all share that such proclamations are wrong. Only when inappropriate images of charity victims are revealed to be wrong and only when hate speak is stopped at its source, authority or not, will we finally abolish the indignity, murders, and violence they breed.

I’ve done a lot of broad-brush bashing of charity organizations here. So I have to say that for every misguided charity organization there are dozens of nonprofits who treat their constituents with dignity and as their equals. There’s no need to point at the inappropriate organizations as I hope now you can pick them out. But I would like to end with a story of one that is doing the right thing against gang violence, started by former gang members who broke out of the dehumanization suck hole.

This U.S. News story seems to have begun as a general story about rising gang violence, but the people they interviewed in the video speak of hope rather than despair because they broke the chain of violence and are now helping other gang members to do the same. If any readers are still dehumanizing gang members, this story should break you out of that.

Let’s keep breaking the chains of violence and dehumanization, following the lead of former perpetrators and their victims who have already done so.

Have you been concerned about inappropriate charity images or wanted to stop hate speak against any group? Please offer your experience in the comments section.

Sue

November: Time for Work Plan and Budget, No Holiday for Nonprofit Leaders

Most nonprofits see lots of action between February and October. Whether advocating for new laws during legislative sessions or conducting important events and activities for our constituents, those nine months can wear us out and leave us longing for the lounge chair and a stack of Christmas videos.

Unfortunately, November is no time to rest. This drowsy month is our best time to set the stage for the coming year. Here are just a few reasons why:

• Results from the year are fresh in the minds of leaders, staff, and helpers.
• Disappointments can inspire improvements for the next year. 
• Participants are still engaged and are likely to offer ideas for improvements.
• Board members can still be gathered before scattering in December.
• Having at least a draft of your work plan and budget for next year finished in November will set a strong start for the coming year.

As I respond to calls for assistance from nonprofit leaders here at One Street, I’ve found that the lack of a work plan and budget is often the core reason for a nonprofit spinning out of control. Sure, I’ve seen this happen because of improper bylaws or a vague mission statement or even a malicious leader. These are all serious and traumatic situations.

But to see an otherwise effective organization derail simply because they skipped the fundamental task of creating next year’s work plan and budget is all the more frustrating. I wonder if the lull of November is responsible for this common mistake. We need to learn from this tendency, stay energized in November, and get this important work done.

Use your November board meeting for this planning activity. Let everyone know that it is a special meeting, sometimes called the annual meeting or board retreat, and will take a bit longer than a normal board meeting. You can invite others to attend or at least reach out to your partners and constituents prior to the meeting requesting their ideas. Bring a flip chart or use a large white board to note highlights from that year and capture ideas for the next. Save at least half an hour at the end of the meeting to organize these sloppy notes into your next year’s work plan and budget.

So what is a work plan and budget? Very simply, your work plan describes your programs and expected goals for the coming year. Your budget shows your projected income and expenses for the coming year; income always on top. Use as few line items as you can while still separating them enough to show where funding is coming from and where it is expected to go. A balanced budget will have the same number in the total income and total expenses lines. I recommend trying for more income than expense to cover unexpected expenses or, even better, to go into a reserve for the following year.

I want to note the importance of combining these two. A work plan is fiction without a budget intertwined with it. And a budget is just a bunch of made-up numbers unless every line item comes from a part of the work plan.

Your work plan will describe each of your programs along with the program goals you and your team expect to achieve in the coming year, who is responsible for ensuring those goals are met, and the percentage of their time needed to achieve them. Major expenses for each program are noted in the text of the work plan. These expenses match line items in the budget. The budget also includes the overhead expenses needed to be successful in all programs and to keep the organization running. Overhead expenses can include payroll, contractor fees (such as bookkeeper, web designer, and building maintenance), phone, utilities, office supplies, and travel expenses.

Combine the work plan and budget into one text document to prevent them from being referenced separately. I like to place the budget at the top since it will take less than a page and this makes it easy to find. The entire document should fit into two or three pages so include only necessary details. This is a reference document, not a literary work of art. By keeping it short and concise you will ensure that you and your leaders understand and remember its contents.

In Cures for Ailing Organizations I warn readers to keep their programs to three. Three is plenty for diversity and ensures everyone, leaders and constituents, knows what the organization does. I also emphasize this when coaching leaders on work plan development. I often get pushback from leaders of larger organization who list off many activities, campaigns, and initiatives they tout as separate programs. But even when their list seems varied and unrelated, we always find three categories to place every activity under and these become their three overall programs. Pull out administrative tasks, partner outreach, and fundraising into a general overhead category. While they are necessary they are not programs because they do not advance the organization’s mission.

By taking care of this planning and budgeting in November, you and your team will be ready to start your programs in January. By February, you’ll be full speed ahead in all the action.

Here’s another bonus for your effort: Once you’ve captured all the details of your three programs and administrative duties into your work plan and budget you will have everything you need to create an impressive year-end fundraising letter. If your organization is large and complex enough to need an annual report, this planning effort will give you the details to make it sing.

So wrap that lounge chair with caution tape, store those holiday videos, and get back to work. If you and your team do a good job with your planning and budgeting your December break will be all the more enjoyable.

Do you have questions about work plans and budgets? Does your organization do annual planning differently? Have tips to add? Please offer them in the comments section.

Sue

Opening the Nonprofit Helpline

There is nothing more frustrating than knowing you can help someone, but having no way to do so. I go through this too often at One Street as I connect with leaders of bicycle nonprofits, find out about their struggles, then lose them. They say they’ll call back. They promise they’ll follow the steps I offer, but too often I’m left with only silence.

For all the frustration, I still love being here for their calls and emails and knowing that at least I gave it a try. And for every one that vanishes, I enjoy ongoing discussions with nonprofit leaders who keep at their work to increase their effectiveness. These success stories keep me going, but the ones I lose keep me fired up to do more.

I founded One Street eight years ago to offer a safe haven where leaders of bicycle organizations would feel comfortable going for advice and assistance. Over those eight years, I have worked with our board and partners to develop resources and coaching methods for building influential organizations that never waste energy spinning their wheels. Most of these services we offer for free because helping them equates to increasing bicycling.

The idea came to me after recognizing in the bicycle movement the same patterns of infighting and wasted energy I’d seen in other nonprofits over the previous 33 years. Whether their mission was to defend the rights of animals, save a wetland, battle poverty, or offer wilderness trips to disabled people, they were all prone to the very same derailments.

I have a particular affinity to the bicycle, not only as a sleek and efficient movement machine, but as a canary that can warn of a community’s inhumanity by its absence. As I formed the idea for One Street, I realized that all this new nonprofit organization would have to do to make an enormous impact for increasing bicycling around the world would be to help existing organizations avoid these common traps. Easier said than done.

This blog is the second result of my frustration. The first was to write the book of the same name, Cures for Ailing Organizations, for any nonprofit organization. The book captures the patterns of ineffectiveness I’ve found over my 40 years of working with nonprofits. Tapping my work through One Street to define and break these patterns, it shows readers how to diagnose their own organization’s problems, then walks them through solutions so they can get back to their important work.

The problem with a book is that people have to actually read it for it to do any good. We’ve sold many copies, mostly through this office, sometimes in lots of ten or twenty. But nearly every sale comes with a note of enthusiasm about who the buyer is going to give the book to. At first I hoped these comments would be few and far between, that buyers would finally start buying the book to read themselves. Unfortunately, Cures for Ailing Organizations has turned out to be a book that people buy for other people. And I fear that a free book from a well-meaning person is not going to reach the top of the to-be-read stack anytime soon.

So, let’s try a blog!

This should be fun. I’ll have a chance to offer parts of the book in bite-sized chunks and then embellish them with stories and current happenings. I hope readers will jump in to offer their own experiences, perhaps even argue my points, and bring in other perspectives.

Blog posts are easy to read and forward. Perhaps this blog will provide the means I have been longing for to reach and help many more leaders of nonprofits, bicycle or otherwise, and offer them my hard-won experience from guiding nonprofits out of common struggles.

You, as a reader, are the most important element toward this blog’s success. Please read. Please comment. Please forward. Let’s get these difficult, yet essential discussions out there!

Thanks for taking part.

Sue