Take back time at your nonprofit with these helpful tips and tools
As a nonprofit leader, stress and feeling stretched thin can seem like an unavoidable part of your job description. Nonprofits are dealing with a number of external forces beyond the organization’s control—from global pandemics and inflation to individual funder and board member preferences, technology advancements, and policy changes.
While external factors like these can contribute to feeling stressed—especially for folks in nonprofit leadership positions—the top causes of workplace stress can actually be internal factors that are within an organization's control. Excessive workload, lack of control or support, interpersonal challenges with leaders and peers, and insufficient training are leading causes of workplace stress, which in turn causes decreased employee engagement, more missed days of work, and lower productivity.
In the nonprofit sector, this translates into less of an impact, fewer dollars raised, and increased employee turnover.
4 practices to give time back to your nonprofit
The good news for nonprofit leaders is that it is possible to improve these internal factors. If you’re ready to be less stressed and more strategic, here are four key practices that can help.
1. Cultivate strategic clarity
Many nonprofits have a strategic plan that lays out their three-to five-year vision for their work and what it will accomplish. While a strategic plan can be a helpful tool, too often these plans read like wishlists rather than a truly actionable strategy staff can implement to achieve organizational goals.
If your team members are saying things like “I don’t know how to talk about what we do” or asking “What are our priorities?, then they’re looking for strategic clarity so they can better understand the work of your organization, and how they fit into that work.
Cultivating strategic clarity[1] enables you and your team to have a shared vision for where the organization is headed and the right guardrails to help everyone focus their time, energy, and effort on the most important work needed to advance the organization’s goals.
Establishing strategic clarity is often best done with the help of a knowledgeable consultant who can ask the right questions and help you gain buy-in from key audiences. However, nonprofit leaders can work to establish strategic clarity by identifying these key elements in a one- to two-page document that is easy for everyone on staff to read and understand.
Key components of that document include:
Who we are: This includes your organization’s vision, mission, action-oriented values, and role in your community or ecosystem. While most organizations are pretty clear on their vision and mission, few proactively identify their organization’s role in their community or industry, which can lead to misinterpretation of purpose and focus. Action-oriented values with corresponding behavior statements also help paint a clearer picture of who the organization is and how it will operate.
What we’re aiming for: This includes up to three big goals everyone is working toward over a specific time period, one to two main financial goals, any capacity investments—such as professional development or technology—and what purpose those will serve, as well as one or two learning goals that are focused on helping your organization gain more insight around something that will help you succeed (e.g., fundraising tactics).
How we’ll get there: This includes three to four focus areas that will help you achieve the goals listed above. Instead of static pillars such as advocacy or education, these should be specific behaviors or ways of working you want the team to adopt. Each focus area needs a named staff leader—this can be someone from senior leadership or another staff member who is well-equipped to champion a certain focus area—and a few specific milestones or success metrics that will show whether your work is on track.
An example of a one-page strategic plan for nonprofit organizations and department leaders from LaFemina & Co.
Cultivating strategic clarity can be done at both an organization level and a department level, and adopting this practice can help identify areas of excessive workload, improve decision-making, uncover projects that aren’t aligned with the future direction of the organization, and highlight areas where more investment is needed to succeed.
2. Upskill and train your team
Lack of training is a prominent driver of workplace stress for both staff and leaders, and professional development is often one of the lowest-funded line items in a nonprofit’s budget.
Whether you’re small and starting out, a growing midsize nonprofit, or a large national organization, prioritizing training will help you and every staff member feel more capable and confident to accomplish the work that lies ahead.
As you think about what training looks like in your organization, consider categories such as leadership and management development, technology skills, subject-matter training, and process or operational training.
Identify the training areas that are most needed right now and then get creative with offering training in those areas—even if you don’t have a large professional development budget.
Affordable ways of offering training include:
Leveraging free online learning platforms: Free and low-cost courses on leadership, management, technology, and more are available from a variety of reputable sources, including universities and state nonprofit associations. Have a group of staff members take the same course and then discuss their learnings afterward or in between training sessions to see how it applies to your organization.
Video training: Whether it’s formal training put out by technology platforms or in-house training on a process or system, leverage video to help make training accessible to staff on their own schedule. Ask your knowledgeable experts to record a training on your video call platform with a new staff member, save that recording, and make it accessible to staff so it can be used with other team members in the future.
Peer-led training: You and your team members hold a wealth of knowledge. Set up a regular cadence—such as a monthly video call—for a team member to teach on a subject they know well. This could be related to the organization’s mission, an internal process or technology, or external factors affecting the organization. Peer-led training has the added bonus of being a professional development opportunity for the staff member leading the training, helping them develop their presentation, influence, and communications skills.
Leveraging affordable training resources like these can help improve employee morale and engagement, more effectively spread knowledge about internal processes and practices, and create a multiplier effect for professional development as staff members gain the opportunity to both teach and learn.
3. Facilitate consistent communication
Lack of communication or lack of consistency in communication can increase stress for nonprofit leaders and their teams. Developing a consistent, repeatable way of communicating important news, organization updates, and key decisions can improve interpersonal relationships and efficiency.
For regular or ongoing communications, nonprofit leaders can use a grid like the one below to establish consistent communication channels and provide clarity on when and how different information will be communicated, including how staff can communicate with leadership.
Communication Vehicle | Owner or Messenger | Content/Topics | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
All staff meetings | Executive director | - Major organization updates - Strategic clarity check-ins - Mission moments - Success stories/learnings | Quarterly |
Staff newsletter | Communications director | - Organization updates - All-employee information | Monthly |
Update from the executive director | Executive director | - Inspiring stories - Reinforcement of strategic clarity - Repeatable success stories | Weekly |
Team meetings | Team leaders | - Reinforcement of strategic clarity and what it means for the team - Team-specific updates - Team wins | As needed (at least monthly) |
One-on-one meetings | Supervisors | - Clarity on individual priorities - Answering questions - Professional development opportunities | As needed (at least monthly) |
Intranet or shared folders | HR, Communications, etc. | - HR information - Onboarding content - Training information - Sensitive, protected content | Ongoing |
/ Pro Tip
The messenger matters when it comes to communication. When it comes to sharing your organization’s direction and vision of overarching success, these messages are best delivered by an executive director or senior leadership. But when the news about how a certain organizational decision or change will directly impact their job, employees want to hear these messages delivered from direct supervisors.
4. Maximize your technology selection
Effective use of technology is a critical component to success in the modern nonprofit sector, but many organizations struggle to fully maximize their technology or hold off on investing in technology that could free up significant time and money in other areas.
As you think about the technology you’ve already invested in, ask the question: “How are we using this right now and what else can it do for us?” For new technology, ask: “How can this free us up to do our most important work?” or “How can we get the maximum value out of this technology for our organization?”
To practice maximizing your technology, start small by exploring opportunities like the following:
Experiment with automation: Frequent, repeatable tasks or processes that staff members are doing manually are great candidates for automation. Your existing tools may already have functions (or compatible apps) that can help you automate this work and free up precious staff time for more complex assignments.
Master meetings: In the past few years, meeting productivity software has grown considerably. From scheduling apps to online whiteboarding spaces and team workspaces to transcription services, there are so many options for making meetings more productive, collaborative, and impactful. Ask your team to share the best features and functions they’ve found in your existing tools. As teams surface great ways to leverage the tools you have, encourage and support them in sharing these discoveries across the organization.
Uplevel your intranet: Your intranet should be a useful hub of information for staff about your organization and its work, but many organizations either lack an intranet or don’t have a great plan for the one they have. When staff have a reliable, central source of ongoing information, knowledge, and tools (instead of a sprawling and disorganized shared filing system), they save time and energy, feel confident in their ability to access the resources they need, and develop connections with colleagues throughout the organization.
Take back your time with the right tools The most important thing to remember about maximizing your technology is that it takes full adoption by your team—including yourself—to get the most out of your investments. If your team members are struggling with understanding or integrating important technology systems into their work, ensure technology training is a prominent part of your training schedule and that you, as a leader, are modeling adoption and accountability for your team.