The Right Skills and Tools

I am a creature of habit.  Most mornings for breakfast I have a boiled egg and fruit.  But until I learned how to make my perfect boiled egg, I often ended up with disaster—too hard; too soft.  It would not mark an auspicious beginning of my day.  Then I learned how to make my perfect egg (boil about 1 inch of water, put the egg in, cook or rather, steam, for 6 minutes) and mornings became mostly glorious.  Except I frequently had a hard time peeling my perfect egg (yes, I tried egg cups, but that just didn’t feel right to me).  My sister clued me in:  Always start from the bottom, that is from the wider end of the egg.  Perfection.

Having the right skills, tools, resources makes your nonprofit better.  But first you have to know what it is you want.

I wanted an egg where the whites would be firm but the yolk runny.  Then it was just a matter of researching how to accomplish that goal.  There were many “answers” but only one worked consistently for me.

What is it you want to accomplish?  If you are like most of my clients—bring more awareness to your organization, raise more money, recruit more well connected and diverse board members!

But what does that actually mean.  I wanted a perfect egg.  But my perfect may not be yours.  So first—gain clarity

One of my clients always makes the point when his board members say “We need to be better known,” that it really doesn’t matter if everyone in a particular neighborhood knows who they are.  What matters is that the right people know.

And who are the right people?  That has been a key activity for them in recent months.  To figure that out, we started having deep conversations about why they want to be known;  who matters (why does this group need to know them); what are ways we can reach out to these specific audiences?  And importantly, how can we leverage what we are doing to reach one audience to help reach other audiences.

On the surface, this seemed as if it would be an easy task:  We need potential donors and funders to know them; government agencies who might support them, clients who might use their services.But as we dug deeper we discovered that there were many other reasons to reach out to different communities.  And those outreach efforts, of course, impacted other areas.

Board recruitment, for example.  Donors and funders obviously.  And potential partners.

Start by asking what you want.  Then ask: Why?  Why do I/we think we need this?

In the 1930s, Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, developed the 5 Whys technique to solve simple problems.  Over the years, however, I’ve found it to be an excellent technique to uncover needs—and to get beyond the lack to what we actually want to accomplish.

Once you have clarity about what it is that you want to achieve, you can consider the best ways to go about getting there.