Organizational Management

You invested in a strategic planning process and everything seemed to line up—until your world got turned upside down by the pandemic and its aftershocks. These are five things your nonprofit might do to stay the course. Since you can’t rely on the old habits or the old assumptions, now’s a good time to renovate the way you go about your business.

Collaborative efforts can offer more comprehensive responses to community challenges than any one organization alone can deliver. When the muscle and know-how of multi-talented teams focus on a mutual concern, there’s a real opportunity for impact. Laying out a coordinated approach in a collaborative grant proposal is powerful and highly competitive.

Administrators and board members must make extremely difficult and unpopular decisions as they work to sustain the organization through to the other side of the storm. They have to think in terms of triage, bottom-lines, core mission, and doing the least harm.

Identifying the specific social-change outcomes you hope to achieve is challenging, but it’s critical that the outcomes you propose accurately reflect your organization’s values and views along with an understanding of how social change works

This forced hiatus from the office is an anxiety-filled nightmare of handwringing and handwashing. The worries are real, but we can’t get frozen in place, we’ve got to discipline ourselves to be productive and prepare to rebound.

Clear, strategic communication has always been the magic ingredient that promotes strong program implementation, good working relationships, and effective nonprofit management. But when a crisis crashes in and disrupts any notion of business-as-usual, the imperative for communication escalates at the same trajectory as the disruption. Don’t go quiet with panic or let the huge details of change management side-line communications.

Your organization’s board of directors may be affable and effective, challenging, or down-right difficult, but love it or not, it has a role to play in grants administration. The board’s responsibility to oversee the financial and legal operations of your nonprofit place it at the epicenter of post-award management, but the board also has a role on the pre-award side.

Funders want to hear your story–the narrative of what your organization does and how that work improves lives and strengthens the community. The story may be the hook, but unless you can back-up feel-good anecdotes with cold hard numbers your case for support won’t result in a grant.