Dear Association Leader

Digital Inspiration has an Adobe PDF Guide: How to Do Everything with PDF Files.

Adobe PDF is the best format for sharing documents because they are compact, the formatting is preserved and most computers / mobile devices / ebook readers can easily handle PDF files. Here you’ll learn how to do just about everything with Adobe PDF files without Adobe Acrobat.

The tools are presented in Q&A format with the Question being something to do and the Answer usually a link to a tool or website to do it.

If you find yourself need to mangle a PDF file on some way, check this list. You might find it easier than you thought.

That’s the question at US News.

“Fundamentally, there are too many nonprofit organizations in the United States. Somebody starting his or her own nonprofit ought to ask, ‘Am I likely to have the most impact by starting my own organization, or by contributing my services and money to an existing organization?’” suggests Paul Brest, coauthor of Money Well Spent.

A successful NPO is started by a dedicated leader who sees a real need and is willing to put in what it takes to get the job done. That job is not an easy one.

Some of you may remember this musical group. When you look back at the bands born in the 60’s you’ll see many flamed and burned but very few lasted. What is it about those that succeeded? What enabled them to last as an organization?

Uncle Saul describes his views on this in Be The Beatles Not The Flock Of Seagulls. The presentation is about the concept of a Core Team. The core team is that small group that founded your organization and made it go. Consider:

How many of your factors overlap with those listed below?

* Creative and flexible drive to win at all costs
* Balanced and complimentary talents
* Friendly rivalry
* Mutual respect
* Shared worldview
* Shared vision
* Constructive internal dissent - external cohesion
* Strong supporting cast

The concepts are there: mission driven, the right people, appropriate motivation, balance in capabilities and strengths, strong infrastructure, - all standard topics of ‘how to succeed as manager and leader’ seminars. Actually doing it is another thing. Here is another example to ponder.

The organization secretary is one of the three critical offices in a modern organization.

The secretary position of a non-profit organization plays a critical role in fostering communication and diligence through proper management and utilization of important records such as meeting minutes and the organization’s bylaws.

The Nonprofit Law Blog describes the Duties of the Secretary of a Nonprofit Corporation and links to resources with sample job descriptions. Do take note, though, that

A secretary will be most useful to an organization when his or her role is catered to meet the unique structure and needs of the organization, rather than filling a “one-fits-all” job description.

See also: A “Secretary of the Board of Directors Job Description” help sheet from Nathan Garber and Associates and The Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals’ article, “Corporate Secretary – Duties and Responsibilies”

The president is focused on the people and leading towards the mission and goals of the organization. The treasurer is responsible for keeping track of the financial status of the organization. The secretary sees that people in the organization have the information they need and that proper records are kept. These three officers provide the basis for proper functioning of an organization.

US News recently did a survey of occupations and their prospects. Marty Nemko’s take on nonprofit managers was not too complimentary.

The fundamental problem is that the nonprofit manager’s job often ends up with low pay, a focus on fundraising, and supervising “volunteers, who, on average, tend to be less competent and reliable than paid employees.”

The suggested alternative is to “Do what Bill Gates and Warren Buffett do: Earn your pay in the private sector, and then donate time or money to your favorite nonprofit.”

The issue is doing what you love. If you find a group of volunteers who are with you in goals and enthusiasm and you get your kicks out of spreading the gospel, then being a nonprofit manager is an entirely different occupation than that described by Nemko.

You can be a beggar sitting on the corner looking for handouts or you can be spreading the gospel and passing the hat - it is just your attitude.

Barbara Poole wonders: Is Leadership Just Another Way of Playing Political Games? at Talent Management. When the term “politics” is used in the office environment, the connotation is usually negative, but consider that, maybe, it refers to an inherent part of interpersonal relationships.

Office politics always will be part of an organization because people are people. The dynamic relationships of individuals who run a business play an important part in how the business operates: how the mission, vision, values and organizational culture are forged.

The negatives may be due to an association with the misuse of power or the use of poor ethical or moral guidelines for the purpose of influencing the behavior of others for personal reasons.

Playing the game of workplace politics for many may mean asserting their power, pushing and shoving like a 5-year-old until they get what they want. But that’s really just unsportsmanlike conduct. One of the best ways to lose power is to overtly use it. Instead, the best leaders know that power comes from influence.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll see that many of the management and leadership improvement efforts involve proper use of office politics. Effective communications, establishing common goals and focus, and many other aspects of these topics are basically political. The leader or manager is in a position of authority and power by the very nature of the job. You have to govern to focus the efforts of the organization towards specific goals. That is politics. What kind of politics depends upon you.

Tammy Erickson discusses Tips on Effective Mentoring at Business week. “Effective mentoring is a true gift. Here are tips for improving the experience for both mentor and mentee”.

The idea is about transferring culture, skills, and knowledge from those who have it in your organization to those that do not. It is often seen, in the structured approach, as an hierarchical model formal assignment of a mentor to one or more mentees. Tammy is suggesting something a bit different, a bonsai approach (wikipedia links). Some of the principles strike to the heart of volunteer or self driven motivation based organizations.

• Create a gift culture where volunteering to assist is the norm - this requires common goals and a shared vision
• Start with specific needs to focus the common goals and prompt the development of mentoring relationships as people work together
• Put the onus on the mentee to seek out assistance but help them with guidance about what is expected from them and the resources best able to help them with a task
• Make it two way so that the potential mentors recognize that they have needs, too, and may well profit from other’s advice and assistance

And I hope you’ll look for ways to share your knowledge and insights within your organization. As I explained in last week’s post, “feedback” today is becoming more about teaching than evaluating.. It pays to create a gift culture.

The idea is that the manager is better served by “Cultivation [that] includes techniques for shaping, watering, and repotting in various styles of containers.” (wikipedia) To stretch this analogy, the container is your organization and it is up to you to cultivate your human resources by getting them in conditions where they can grow and providing proper guidance to foster productive growth.

One common plaint is for an association’s web site to show up on a search engine query. This is often a rather naive request without regard for just what search terms were entered or other factors. There is a profession behind this sort of thing and it behooves an association to provide due respect to the knowledge and expertise needed to obtain good exposure.

Physorg.com cites an article in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising on Search engine marketing for non-profits that provides a good summary of the issues.

Non-profit organizations should be exploiting the strategies of online marketers to gain traffic to their websites, raise awareness of their “brand” and its aims and convert visitors into donors … Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves focusing on how well a website can attract high ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of the main web search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search. The non-profit webmaster should focus on pertinent keywords and relevant generic phrases and then edit website page titles, text and hidden meta text, as well as image tags to accommodate these keywords and phrases. The aim not being to manipulate the search engines illicitly but to ensure that the non-profit’s website provides the best answer to a given pertinent search query. Ultimately, this will increase the number of visitors to the site.

As with many projects, it is often the multitude of little things, things that are often not visible at first glance, that must be done to achieve excellence. Your website needs the attention of someone who knows about this multitude of little things and you need to support your webmaster by having a solid and well documented understanding of your organization, its identity, and its mission, purpose, and core values.

Chris Bernard describes the issues involved in A Few Good Page Layout Tools for Nonprofits at TechSoup. The basic tool you need for letters and basic correspondence has its limitations.

Word-processing software can do a lot, but it’s not really designed for complex, highly designed documents. If you find yourself working on layouts that require complex multicolumn layouts or text routing, or a high degree of control over how text and images interact, word processing applications likely won’t suffice — it becomes difficult or impossible to manage layouts to that level of control. In particular, there are a few things word-processing applications simply won’t do:

What many nonprofits, especially the small ones, miss is that they have no business trying to prepare “complex, highly designed documents” in house. They cannot afford to hire staff for this sort of work and they should not develop a dependency upon a volunteer for this sort of effort.

There are two solutions to the need for “complex, highly designed documents” in an organization. One is to get the proper help and assistance to create them and the other is to find an alternative. That alternative is to create simpler documents that will still achieve the desired goal.

In other words, you can usually simplify the task to suit the tools you have and know how to use. That helps your organization to focus on its mission and avoid distractions by such things as tool inventory, training, personnel expertise, and compatibility.

Michael Wade has an interesting collection for 6 Ways to Be a Great Listener in US News.

• Listen for a theme.
• Recognize that the speaker might not know the real message.
• Look through a window, not a mirror.
• Subdue your ego.
• Act as if you are listening.
• Let them talk and then go back over the story in reverse chronological order - an old investigator’s trick.

The key here is that what is meant is not always what is said and your own perception process will flavor how you understand what you think you hear.

Dress the part of a listener and it will help you be a listener. Look for the big picture with the assumption that you are hearing only pieces of the intended meaning and those pieces may be unintentionally selected to protect the talker. Keep in the mind that the person talking is not you and that you need to understand what is being said from the position and point of view of the talker and not from your own position.