GOOD NEWS: Miracles Happen
Good News: An enewsletter for donors and nonprofits
on strategic planning, governance, fundraising, and executive leadership.
Miracles Happen
In this season of miracles, I’m reflecting on the stories of donor and nonprofit clients that routinely generate miracles through persistent relationship building, constant communication, collaboration, courage, optimism, and yes, even a lot of fun.
It is obvious to describe the many daily miracles that are generated by most nonprofits’ direct services and donors’ investments in them. But I’ve been asking myself what are the signs that a miracle is needed or present WITHIN a foundation or nonprofit. A few thoughts:
Board Dynamics
Having attended thousands of board and committee meetings over the decades as a founding executive director, board member, and advisor to clients, it is clear to me that the single biggest challenge facing nonprofits and funders is assembling and nourishing a highly functioning board and committees. By their own admission, many boards and committees are unproductive, counterproductive or worst of all, do not meet at all.
Rather than make life easier for staff, some board and committee members stray into areas not within their purview (day-to-day operations) and neglect their primary responsibilities related to fundraising and friend-raising for the organization.
But miracles occur when governance takes the time to assess themselves (often with the support of an outside advisor like To the Good) and pledge to do better. It happens when one member says to her peers: “I believe so much in this campaign that I am doubling my initial gift and I hope you will too.” When a board member says to a peer: “That topic is not our business so we should defer to the chief executive and her staff.” Or when a committee member reaches out to his network and invites people to attend an event or even join a committee. It can even feel miraculous when these groups actually meet in person and better yet, the meeting spills over into the local restaurant or tavern where the conversations continue over food and drink. What fun!
Executive and Staff Leadership
The people charged with leading and implementing day-to-day operations are generally supremely competent and self-motivated. They do not need to be micromanaged or “held accountable” by boards that do not know enough about their organization’s operations and are themselves accountable to no one.
The only miracle present and needed among most staff is a celebration and actual rewarding of their expertise and countless relationship building gestures - big and small - that are implemented by them in service to others, too often despite, not because of the governance in place around them.
Fundraising Routines and Results
Because many of my nonprofit clients are startups or early generation entities, I often see anemic and mostly neglected annual funds double, triple or even grow by an order of magnitude. I see groups that are reluctant to tell their story for fear of seeming boastful learn to intentionally share their successes and challenges as a means to educate, enlist, and inspire supporters. Rather than send one email blast or mailing each year, I see clients organizing a year-long campaign that includes multiple electronic touches, in person friend-raisers over hot chocolate or at house parties, and galvanizing celebratory events. When done well and consistently, all of this feels miraculous to me because of the amount of energy, coordination, and follow up that is required. Again, it even can feel like great fun!
Stakeholder Interest and Participation
Perhaps the biggest and most necessary miracle I see is when ordinary people, citizens young and old with no professional or voluntary obligation to an organization, take notice and get involved with a cause when they really don’t have to. In a gilded age of narcissistic accumulation and self-indulgence, it feels miraculous each time I see an individual attend an event, subscribe to a newsletter, offer to volunteer, make a gift, join a committee or board - all amounting to making an investment in an organization with their time, talent or treasure.
While we celebrate the miracles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness during the darkest and coldest time of much of the country’s calendar, I hope you will note the miracles all around.
As Einstein famously said: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” My most successful clients seem to choose the latter so I try to do that too.
Merry and Happy Everything these next few weeks.
Stuff Steve is Watching, Listening to, and Reading
The Most Important Sentence Ever Written (3 minute watch)
"How can we do what we did after 1976 when after Watergate, Vietnam, and the riots we had a bicentennial. Maybe if we all reflect on the mission statement of our country which most of us can subscribe to as an aspirational thing - not something we have achieved or they achieved but we have to keep achieving - then maybe some of the poison of our politics can be sapped out." Walter Isaacson in conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Watch Here
Hallelujah! (4 minute listen)
"Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!"
Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, Royal Choral Society at the Royal Albert Hall
Listen Here
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America (10 minute read)
“Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200. It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000. And remember: Orshansky was only trying to define 'too little.' She was identifying crisis, not sufficiency. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at $140,000. What does that tell you about the $31,200 line we still use? It tells you we are measuring starvation." Michael Green, Part 1: My Life Is a Lie
Read Here
