Dear Association Leader

Tech Crunch discusses The Evolution of the Press Release and provides some good ideas for how your organization can better get the word out. Traditional, as well as the modern Search Engine Optimizing and Social Media needs are described.

A key is to save a publication effort and expense by writing a story for them that is in line with their style and focus.

there is a note of caution however, the same tools that help you expand visibility, can also set up for failure. Wire services only edit for typos, not for content. This means that you can publish a release riddled with hyperbole, spin, buzzwords, and hype that will only serve to confuse and dissuade your customers from doing business with you. It will send them to your competition.

If nobody knows what you are doing, how can you expect them to lend support for your efforts? You have to get the word out: the right word in the right way as determined by the response you expect and need.

Dennis Pointer has a website BoardFood where he provides a useful resource for governing better. The focus is on healthcare organizations. An online publication, Navigating the Boardroom )PDF) contains 40 maxims that any NPO director should consider. Check it out!

Stages of Maturity in Nonprofit Organizations’ Use of Online Technologies provides a number of criteria you can to determine how your organization is using I’net techology.

Basic means an accurate and up to date website without any frills supported by effective e-mail management and domain name.

Intermediate organizations might have an opt in e-mail newsletter and staff that participate in forums and other I’net venues. This is also where defined policies and some collaboration also start to show up.

The advanced organizations have equipped volunteers who can telecommute via an intranet. The organization maintains blogs and other interactive media. This level is where e-commerce starts to appear.

Trail blazing organizations utilize full multi-media network capabilities, handheld remote access, social networking, and ongoing online research.

An assessment tool like this is a starting point. It provides one idea about what you can do and about how to view your own efforts and capabilities. Seek out patterns that are used. For instance, one pattern in this series is timeliness. From basic being just up to date through monthly to weekly to, finally, fully interactive, this assessment considers shorter response times as more mature. Other patterns include a progression from static to dynamic and from presentation to interaction. You can use these to compare to what is really important for your organization to help you focus your efforts in advancing your organization towards its goals and mission.

GuideStar has some good points about Five Fundraising Mistakes We Make with Our Boards. The lessons are ones that apply to all of your volunteer or even staffing efforts. Blunt force with a dull blade is often not the best approach to getting things done and remaining healthy. Train your people so they know what they are doing and send them to accomplish tasks chosen so they will succeed. The theme is that your nonprofit is not a retail mass market business but rather a personal and community relationship. Don’t sell product or service. Build a community to support your efforts.

Do not send your people out to ask for money, send them out to build relationships and keep friends.

Avoid the cold call as there are not many who can handle that level of rejection.

Avoid small return efforts. The reward has to be worth the effort. If all you are after is a single sale or a small donation, the focus is misplaced. Even when selling event tickets the focus should be on making friends and developing relationships that will provide larger rewards in the longer term.

You will not need emergency fundraising if you have good long-term relationships. Friends will help you out in a pinch. Build those friends and not emergencies.

Provide training, structure, coaching, and support so your people are comfortable and familiar with what they are doing and how to do it and what to expect.

The expense isn’t what it costs to train employees. It’s what it costs not to train them - P. Wilber

It can be tough. We all want to go out and get the job done. We need money so we think the job is to go ask for it. That might be misleading. Yes, you need to ask, but you need to ask the right person and in the right way to get the best return from your effort.

It is interesting that this are exactly the same lessons being learned by a new ‘time share’ resort salesman. He was a new hire at a good company that did training and initial coaching. Success isn’t just manning a kiosk and waiting for business nor it is accosting everyone who goes by with a sales pitch. Instead it is being friendly, finding out who would actually have the interest in the free tour and bonus package - enough interest to take the time and effort to consummate the sale. That sale being not a resort sale but rather the commitment to come and see if you want to join our community.

That is what you want for organization. To have your Board members get out and bring people in, the right people in. You want to bring people in who will want to join up and participate and do what they can to make your organization succeed. That is how you do fundraising on a one on one basis.

Anne Fisher, Fortune senior writer, describes 8 ways to be a better boss: Companies increasingly want managers to act more like coaches. Here’s a short course in helping your team shine.

The coaching and mentoring model of leadership is effective in leading volunteers because it puts its emphasis on helping team members succeed and not on mechanistic job performance. Anne’s 8 basic tips reinforce many of the lessons leaders need to know and implement.

“1. It’s all in the relationship.” When you get to know your team members as individuals with tastes, preferences, and their own capabilities and knowledge, you can help them fit into team needs. When they get to know you, they can better understand the direction you set and the goals of the team as you express them.

“2. Always follow the 7:1 rule.” That’s seven pieces of positive feedback for every one that is suggestive or critical. Make it a habit to reinforce what is being done right as your primary means of developing your team. Keep a perspective about suggestion and criticism over recognizing things done well or even just the day to day competent performance.

“3. Be clear about your expectations.” This is the ‘no surprises’ rule. People need to know where they are going, how they are going to get there, and their role in the journey. They need to know how success will be measured for both their own efforts and for the team effort.

“4. Speak up when you see behavior that can be improved.” This is another view of tip 2, the 7:1 rule. It differs in that it is not a recognition of past behavior but rather a clearing of the path for future behavior. It does not critique what was done but points out what could be done.

“5. Coach people onto the playing field.” There are rules both written and unwritten. There are boundaries and limitations about what can be done and how it is to be done. Make sure your team knows the limits, knows the rules, knows how to play the game on the field, and exercises their initiative and innovation within those constraints. There is a matter of being out of the box versus off the field of play or even out of the stadium. Keep your team on the field.

“6. Focus on soft skills as well as hard skills.” The entire team can be embarrassed when a member commits a faux pas and it is particularly hard on the individual involved. Your job is to help your team members know the rules, know the implications of their behavior, know the answers, and to help them avoid putting their foot in their mouth due to ignorance, incompetence, or even sloppiness.

“Many times managers are hesitant to coach someone who is being too abrasive, too passive, not a problem-solver, or what have you, because they feel it’s not tangible enough to talk about,” Frankel observes. “But workplace success is contingent upon so much more than just doing the job.”

Your role as a coach is to help people develop all the skills they need, not just (perhaps not even mainly) the technical ones.

“7. Be a servant leader.” You have a function on the team as leader. In performing that function, you provide each of your followers a service. Ask yourself ‘How well am I serving them?’”

“8. Prepare for each coaching session.” You are the one who needs to know from the gut but lead from the mind. Think first, don’t just react. Consider what you are going to say and how it will be perceived before you say it. Avoid judgment and help others find their best path.

Human beings are compounded of cognition and emotion and do not function well when treated as though they were merely cogs in motion… The task of the administrator must be accomplished less by coercion and discipline and more and more by persuasion … Management of the future must look more to leadership and less to authority as the primary means of coordination. - Luther H Gulick

Finding the right board for your organization is one of the toughest jobs of any association leader. The perspective of a venture capitalist provides Thoughts On Choosing Board Members worth considering in the nonprofit world.

What you should look for is people who will attend meetings, attend to business, express good judgment. Your candidates must be independent enough to be able to do what is right even if there is pressure to let it slide. Despite this, they need to be able to get along with the other members of the board and be a part of the team.

There are some common attributes that should not place high on your list as well. For instance don’t just look for big names. Look for big names that contribute and lend their expertise and will function on your board. Don’t let potential conflicts of interest deter your consideration as these can be handled and managed.

A good board doesn’t just happen. You have to go out and find good prospects and recruit them to your cause. Your membership is a prime pool for this. Look for the volunteers who step forward and get the job done. Build and grow candidates to lead them to board service.

We hired the wrong people … because we were in such a hurry to fill those positions - L.T. Bignell

Get the right people for your board!

The Guru’s Handbook has a couple of entries asking Why Study if it has already Been Done? and Why Teach if it has already Been Taught?. It sometimes seems that the process of education is a futile repetition of what has been to achieve nothing new. What the Guru highlights is that training is often confused with education and neither training nor education is what we’d often like it to be.

So why teach what has already been taught? Because it has not already been taught. Not by you, to that student, today, now. Because the work is the doing, not the plotline. Because this telling — your telling — might create something new, something worth bringing forth.

Those whose profession is education, teaching, training, coaching, or mentoring need to have some way to express an accountability for their activities. They need to manage their profession and that cannot be done without some form of measuring to provide constructive feedback. To move that feedback from subjective perception to objective measure is the challenge.

As the availability of information becomes ever less expensive, broad based, entertaining, and in our faces, the simple measure of how much you know becomes less important. This measure is a competency test as is often used in state licensing for professionals. What becomes more important are skills in acquiring needed information, technique in performance, judgment, and other things that are difficult to asses in an objective manner.

You can see evidence of this conflict in many fields. The Drill Sergeant and the boot camp experience, the current discussion about the hours worked by medical interns, and the rigors of training to become a professional athlete. There is a modern effort to make all of these “kinder and gentler” and to focus on certain specified skills or knowledge rather than more subjective qualities.

Yet we depend upon those qualities. Both the Army and the surgeons find that experience with computer games can enhance to ability to fly UAV’s or perform less invasive surgery. Something more comes out of the experience than just a skill.

There is a lesson for anyone making decisions about personal and personnel development. While you may have specific knowledge or skills to impose on the subject, the fact is that the context is going to make a difference. The teacher, the time, the student, the subject and more, will influence outcome and make one effort different from another no matter how much the same they try to be. Don’t loose what could be, take advantage of the moment.

In the Family Motor Coach Association section of iRV2.com a common question was asked.

My question is “How do we get folks in their 30s, 40s and 50s, still working full-time jobs with kids still at home more involved in rallies and such”?

This is a common question in many associations. Here are some things to think about, based on common fallacies and errors often made.

1) Don’t try to buy participation. Forget gimmicks, price breaks, or other means that appeal to simple motivations.

2) Forget the obstacles such as kids, jobs, or whatever. People can be quite creative in inventing reasons for others not to participate and that creativity should really go elsewhere.

3) Hone your identity and brand. There is a reason people participate. Make sure it is clear and that your association’s behavior communicates this reason unambiguously. (this is often extremely difficult to do)

4) Optimize flexibility. Provide as many different ways to participate as you can without sacrificing your identity and brand. For rallies, provide for short term visitation and a variety of parking options. Try flexible schedules.

5) Communicate. Make sure your website has complete and full information about your events and activities. Leave no question unanswered, even the ones no one thought to ask. Use several venues of communication from newsletters to public media to personal correspondence to any other way to reach out and touch someone that you can think of.

6) Make the attitude of invite, welcome, and ‘join us’ ooze from the pores. That means rules that are ‘how to’ oriented rather than ‘you will be punished’ oriented. That means taking the initiative to meet and greet. That means paying attention to any wallflowers and bringing them into discussions and activities.

7) Make sure that everyone that does participate gets what they attended to get and leaves with a smile and pleasant memories. Make sure that they will have stories to tell that will make others wish they were there.

Have patience, take your time, pay attention to detail, and really know why you have the event in the first place and you’ll find you will have a lot of good friends to join you.

What’s not to like about a web design site that advocates goal-oriented design, learning to type, and coding web pages by hand?

Web Design From Scratch is full of lessons written by a British web design consultant.

The goal driven design articles make a number of interesting points. The entry about goals has the focus on the customer goals and notes that

Success depends on carrying a visitor all the way through to their goal being met. Getting them 99% of the way there won’t mean you’re 99% as successful!
…
Goal-oriented design is a process for creating solutions that enable people to achieve realistic goals.

All goals are important, but you may not be able to deliver them all, and you certainly can’t design for every possibility. If your web project is going to succeed, you need to know which goals to shoot for.

Goals drive behavior. Getting to the red zone is not enough. To succeed you have to make the touchdown by crossing the goal line.

What this means is that the goals you define for your website define the customers that will visit and use the website. The outcome of that for many nonprofit associations is that their website is really a three-in-one effort. The association website has one area whose focus is on the public, another for the members, and a third for governance. Each of these has their own subdivisions as well. Making a plan to accommodate all of these needs and goals requires care and attention to detail. Like the football team marching down the field with objectives to gain ground each play and achieve first down yardage to get to the goal, your website needs to have its game plan defined with objectives to meet to achieve necessary goals.That is good coaching, good leadership, and good governance.

The Wall Street Journal has ten tips for those corporations with project teams that seldom work face to face. Working Together…When Apart: As employees scatter around the globe, virtual teamwork has become crucial. Here are 10 rules for making it work by Lynda Gratton June 16, 2007; Page R1

Technically, it’s no longer a challenge to work closely with colleagues in distant locations or to hold meetings with participants scattered around the globe.

In practical terms, however, plenty of hurdles remain.

Many nonprofit associations depend upon volunteers who can operate independently yet coordinate closely with others.

A recent study of virtual teams at multinational companies — teams ranging in size from four to nearly 200 — found that many of the groups were beleaguered by just these kinds of long-distance challenges, to the point of being in continuous danger of breaking up. Other virtual teams, meanwhile, were high performers, virtual hot spots of innovation and energy.

Why does one virtual team thrive while another stumbles? What differentiates the two?

10 guidelines for creating productive virtual teams

1. Invest in an online resource where members can learn quickly about one another.

2. Choose a few team members who already know each other.

3. Identify “boundary spanners” and ensure that they make up at least 15% of the team.

4. Cultivate boundary spanners as a regular part of companywide practices and processes.

5. Break the team’s work up into modules so that progress in one location is not overly dependent on progress in another.

6. Create an online site where a team can collaborate, exchange ideas and inspire one another.

7. Encourage frequent communication. But don’t try to force social gatherings.

8. Assign only tasks that are challenging and interesting.

9. Ensure the task is meaningful to the team and the company.

10. When building a virtual team, solicit volunteers as much as possible.

In other words, start with developed relationships, provide for rich communications, seed the team with boundary spanners or those with a lot of experience and outside contacts, partition the work to be done into accountable chunks, and make sure the task is meaningful.

sounds easy, right? have you tried it?