I'm working on my latest nonprofit networking installment, which I may or may not upload today. In the meantime, here's a nice mini guide to free video resources for learning from Robin Good. I haven't had a chance to fully explore it, but of particular interest to nonprofits, I think are the sections on:
Michele
Yesterday, we talked about some great resources for identifying employee strengths and using them for more effective management. Today I want to follow up with some thoughts about how career planning can be used to make that process even more effective.
Why Should My Organization Care About My Employee's Career Plans?
When individuals prepare a career plan, they must start with an understanding of themselves. What are their values, passions and skills? What are their strengths that they can build on and what are their weaknesses that they need to manage around?
This process of self-discovery can provide two major benefits for the organization:
Resources for Developing Staff Career Plans
In another post, I'll discuss a holistic process for working with staff to develop and implement their career plans. For now, I'm going to share a few resources that staff can use on their own or working with management.
Explore Values
Find Their Calling is a great article from Fast Company on how to identify and honor staff values. In most cases, job satisfaction and performance is tied to the extent to which the job and organization jibes with the worker's values. This article discusses how you can use this process with staff and describes some of the benefits.
Be Bold
The Be Bold Career Planning Journal is a nice piece geared specifically toward people in the nonprofit sector. Developed by the Be Bold Team, this workbook helps staff:
They also have an online quiz to help users figure out if they're "bold."
The advantage of this handy guide is that its focus on commitment and finding solutions can also fit in well with an organizational planning process. I'm a big believer in the idea that organizations run better when the goals of individuals are aligned with the goals of the organization. This provides a process for doing that.
If You Aren't Feeling Bold
Bold isn't for everyone, although I think it offers significant benefits when it comes to translating individual career plans into benefits for the organization. If it's not your style, though, you might want to have staff work their way through the Career Development e-Manual developed by the University of Waterloo. This great resource has been around for a while and provides step-by-step guidance for developing a plan.
We Want Your Feedback!
Drop us a line in the comments to let us know if your organization helps staff develop their own career plans. If you do, how's it working for you?
Michele
Last week I did a training/planning session with one of my Job Corps clients. This group is responsible for attracting applicants to Job Corps and then helping them through the admissions process.
These two aspects of the job require very different skill sets. The outreach piece is essentially sales--staff must be able to go out to a variety of applicants and organizations and "sell" Job Corps. The admissions component of the job is more about counseling and preparing young people for the demands of a Job Corps education.
In the course of our planning, we got into a discussion about these two disparate job responsibilities. I asked how many in the group enjoyed the admissions/counseling piece. Two thirds of the group raised their hands. Then I asked who enjoyed the Outreach piece. One third raised their hands. And there was basically no overlap between the groups. They either liked outreach or they enjoyed admissions. Only one or two liked both.
"How many of you," I asked, "spend more time on the piece you enjoy and find that you do a better job at it?" They all raised their hands.
Later I was speaking to the manager of the department. He reported that he wasn't surprised at the results. The people who enjoyed counseling applicants were the ones who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing outreach. The outreach people, on the other hand, tended to not do as well with the applicants and their families.
"Why," I asked him, "do you then split the job this way. If you know you have a group of people who love and are good at doing outreach, why not have them doing that full-time, while the others are doing what they love and do well?"
It was like a lightening bolt had hit him. Like most organizations, his has defined jobs according to organizational needs, rather than the skills and talents of the workers. But as we talked, he began to realize that he would be able to better meet the needs of his organization if he worked WITH the strengths of his staff, rather than fighting their "weaknesses."
This is a common mistake at most organizations. Even those nonprofits that specialize in helping clients with career and job search plans do nothing to ensure that their own staff have a career plan that clearly identifies their strengths. Further, even if they do, little is done to actually capitalize on those strengths.
I've come to believe, though, that if we tap into staff passions and strong points we can actually boost our organizational performance in ways we never imagined. When people love what they do and feel like they're doing what they are good at, they will naturally become your top performers. In many cases this can happen by accident, but why not be more deliberate about it?
Resources for Managing to Staff Strengths
If you're going to explore how to manage to staff strengths, your education should begin with First Break All the Rules (if you don't have time for the book, then at least try this summary). Then follow it up with Now Discover Your Strengths, which includes a free code for taking the online Strengths Finder to discover your own personal strengths.
These two books by Marcus Buckingham describe in easy-to-read terms how successful, high performing managers help their staff identify key strengths and then structure the employee's job responsibilities to capitalize on these strengths and minimize weaknesses. They give explicit step-by-step instructions that can be used by any organization to get the most out of their staff, something I think is key for many nonprofits.
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Tomorrow, I'm going to talk in some more detail on how to use a career planning process to engage staff and management in talking about strengths and engaging them in what their areas of passion. This is another way to approach the strengths process that I think is also very in line with some key themes of the 2.0 revolution.
Michele
On the long flight home yesterday, I was finally able to spend some time reading the latest Fast Company, which features their 2007 Social Capitalist Awards:
Our fourth annual Social Capitalist Awards honor these leaders, who combine savvy business models with solutions to pressing social needs in ways that challenge our assumptions about making a profit and making a difference. . .
On these pages, you'll find evidence of a movement that's not just changing the world, but changing how we think about creating change. Increasingly, we're witnessing the blurring of commerce and charity: Companies now tend to their citizenship; nonprofits hitch income-earning solutions to markets. That phenomenon led us this year to assess the most innovative corporate partnerships among our winners--alliances that represent both business value and a choice about what kind of future to create.
There's a lot to explore in this comprehensive article, not the least of which are all the ways in which nonprofits are incorporating business practices and developing deeper partnerships with business to be more effective at accomplishing their missions. Winners include:
There are also some great resources for social capitalists and a nice slideshow on lessons learned. Well worth a look.
Michele
Creating Passionate Users, one of my all-time favorite resources, is devoted to the idea that we need to meet learners where they're at. This, of course, means that we must first understand where they're at and then be able to do something about it.
Lately, I've been trying to put myself in my customer's shoes, something I'm forever advising them to do. Here are some things that I know for sure when it comes to nonprofits and using technology:
Seeing this need, I went looking for resources that could help. And while I found a ton of good stuff, I didn't find anything that exactly met what I pictured.
There were a lot of great articles and how-to's and examples, but they were spread out all over the place and they were sometimes confusing to understand, especially if you don't know the jargon of the new media. I couldn't find a good "Nonprofit Web 2.0 for Dummies," that boiled down the essence of this stuff into pieces a "regular" person could understand.
So like any good denizen of the Web 2.0 world, I went and created something myself.
Our Web 2.0 for Nonprofits Wiki is meant to give nonprofits a brief introduction to the concepts and tools of Web 2.0 and to provide them with specific examples of how other nonprofits are using these tools to engage in their basic work activities. I assumed that people would either want to know about specific tools ("what is MySpace?") or they would want to know about how to get certain tasks done. To help them, I've tried to organize the wiki by both the tools, as well as by the activities for which nonprofits might use the tools. So there are sections on advocacy and engaging volunteers and there are cross-referenced sections on blogs and podcasting.
Our goal with this is not to be the definitive resource for all things Web 2.0. There are plenty of sites that are doing this, like TechSoup. We're also not trying to get too detailed and technical. Instead, we're trying to create something that's easily digestible and understandable for most nonprofits and that organizes the information in terms that they are most likely to understand.
More importantly, we wanted to create a resource that could serve as a repository of best practice examples for how other nonprofits are using Web 2.0 to do their work. To the extent possible, we wanted to show rather than to tell.
Why Use a Wiki?
I considered putting all of this into a website, and I might do that at a later date. But the reason I chose a wiki was so that other people could add their own content and examples, making this a more dynamic, collaborative resource. One of the major tenets of the Web 2.0 world is harnessing collective intelligence and with a wiki, we can do that most easily.
Isn't This Replicating Other Work Being Done By Other People?
I thought for a while about whether or not I should even begin this project, which has taken many hours to put together. But I wasn't able to find exactly what I was looking for and I felt like this was something that was really needed by our customers. One of the best services we can provide in an information-overload environment such as ours is some simplicity, guidance and pruning back of the garden of knowledge.
Why Should I Care?
Well, like I said, the power of the web is in harnessing collective intelligence. It's also in sharing what you have with other people who may be able to do something even more amazing with it. Ideally, the wiki will at least be a place where people can get some basic information. More than that, I'd really love it if others contributed their best practices and ideas. As much as possible, I'll add new information as we go along. There's also some other work I want to take care of to clean the place up a little and to continue adding information into different sections. It's definitely a work in progress.
So please take a look and feel free to add your comments and best practices to the site.
UPDATE: Rallyfan from Random Thoughts on Life and Work is already adding some resources! He reminds me that in order for anyone to make edits, you need the wiki password, which is "nptech," without the quotes. Sorry I didn't mention that previously.
Michele
Rallyfan at Random Thoughts on Life and Work has an interesting post on how Samaritan's Purse is monitoring blogs to respond to both positive and negative postings. As Rallyfan notes, the organization did an excellent job of both reinforcing an already excited fan and doing damage control about negative messages spreading through the blogosphere.
This got me thinking about whether or not we're doing a good job of tracking what people are saying about our organizations. A few days ago I wrote about an article on MSNBC and the American crisis of faith in nonprofits. On the associated message forums, there were a lot of very negative comments from donors about how nonprofits do their fundraising and spend their dollars. If people read these things and there's no effective response from nonprofits, then the public is left with only one, unbalanced view of the situation.
Even if nonprofits don't have a strong web presence, this doesn't mean that their donor and constituent base isn't talking about them online. By not monitoring the talk, we lose opportunities to build positive brand images and to respond to negative messages. As more and more people use the Web as their primary information source, this will become a larger problem I suspect.
The Marketing Pilgrim has a great Online Reputation Monitoring Beginner's Guide that lays out some excellent strategies for keeping track of your organization's online reputation. They note:
Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry. Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch?
A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.
It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.
A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.
It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.
A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.
It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.
Substitute the word "nonprofit" for "company" and think about this in the context of your organization and you can see how shaping your online reputation is as important as any other marketing or outreach you do. Given the time, energy and dollars you devote to building your image, it makes sense that you'd want to protect that investment in every way you can.
Michele
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Last night I was playing with StumbleUpon when I found The Bridge. The Bridge is a project of The Glue Network , which bills itself as"a cooperative, transparent online community of passionate purpose-driven people" whose tagline is "love requires action."
"The Glue Network connects nonprofit organizations, brands, bands, musicians, fans, athletes, artists and young people all over the world who want to and can make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate. The Glue Network changes the way people give of themselves, their talents and their resources."
The Bridge is The Glue Network's plan to build a virtual bridge around the world that connects 24,092 people (the number of miles around the world) who care about helping others. When you add a mile, one of several Bay Area companies will donate $1 on your behalf to the cause you've selected from the 12 Bridge-sponsored charities. The nonprofits represent a range of issues, from providing education to women to cleaning up the environment.
What's interesting to me about the project is their extensive use of new media and social networking and their clear understanding of how Web 2.0 changes the charitable giving landscape. Some key features:
So what are the implications for your nonprofit? Clearly collaboration and social connection must be at the core of your strategic thinking. Your goal must be to create a community of people who want to support your cause and you do this by providing them with tools and resources that give them a common identity and an easy way to spread the word.
You'll be in an even stronger position if you collaborate with complementary nonprofits to give people choices about who they want to support. Choice is critical and if you make it easy for donors to choose, they'll reward you handsomely. Furthermore, in your marketing messages, you need to focus on the issues your organization resolves, rather than on your specific nonprofit. People respond to wanting to solve particular world problems with your organization as a conduit for doing that.
You should also look at how you can develop creative, compelling ideas that communicate a particular story and that are expressed simply and using well-designed visual images. This is where you really need to begin developing and drawing on a network of creative volunteers who can help. Retiring baby boomers want to give back and this is exactly the kind of work they enjoy doing. Stuffing envelopes and answering phones is fine, but engage them in a juicy creative project like this and you'll get something amazing in return.
You may also want to start considering how to "think small," taking the "latte approach" to giving. People and companies are willing to have smaller more frequent bites taken out of their wallet--the idea of little luxuries is a major marketing concept these days. But this requires you to come up with creative ideas at more frequent intervals. Rather than running one or two major fundraisers a year, it may be better to consider ways to run several smaller opportunities, such as this one.
To me, The Bridge represents an exciting new way of creating a community of giving and caring that has a lot of wonderful potential. It requires new approaches and new thinking, but it also represents new opportunities that I think are the future for many nonprofits.
Kathy has an interesting post on why the U.S. is falling behind in preparing math and science workers for the future. Her point is that the educational system we've set up doesn't teach people the skills that they actually use as mathematicians, scientists and engineers. There's a focus on a rote/drill and kill, problem-solving by recipe approach that has nothing to do with the kinds of right-brained, holistic, design and intuition skills that are necessary for true success in the field.
I think that what she has identified is a problem that's applicable to all workers in all fields. As she points out:
Our educational institutions--at every level--need drastic changes or we're all screwed. The generation of students we're turning out today need skills nobody really cared about 50, 40, even 20 years ago. Where we used to prepare students for a "job for life", now we must prepare students to be jobless. We must prepare them to think fast, learn faster, and unlearn even faster("yes, that drug was the appropriate way to treat the XYZ disease, but that was so last week. THIS week we now realize it'll kill you.")
The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.
This is where I think nonprofits need to be thinking differently about how they're preparing their own workforce for the future and how they use technology to do this. Reality is that we need structures in place that support knowledge management and "just-in-time" learning. Speed and adaptability are of the essence. We must be unlearning and re-learning on an almost daily basis. But the question is, how do we do create the right kinds of learning opportunities?
According to Jerry Wind and David Reibstein of the Wharton School of Business, in the new world of work, organizations must adapt their training strategies to:
So times have changed. How do we adapt? While I think that nonprofits have been at a disadvantage in the training arena for years, this is where Web 2.0 technologies can finally put nonprofits on equal footing with their private sector counterparts.
Tools such as wikis and blogs are now ridiculously inexpensive to access. A Typepad account is $15 a month. Some wikis can be had for free.
Audio and video options are equally accessible. With a $13 microphone and free recording software, I can create "just-in-time" learning podcasts that can be stored on the web and made easily accessible to staff anytime, anywhere. Decent video cameras can be had for around $200 and through free video hosting services like YouTube and VideoEgg , I can easily and quickly create simple training/learning videos that can again, be accessible to staff as they need the information.
The real issue that we're dealing with here is the paradigm shift in our thinking about learning that we need to make in order to operate in a world like this. We aren't used to thinking that we could create and share audio and video on a dime. We're not accustomed to the idea of having a wiki where staff could collaboratively create knowledge and problem-solve around their learning needs. We simply have not adjusted to the fact that we must be constantly alert to where learning needs to be happening and then considering how we can use technology tools to provide those learning opportunities as workers need them.
Our other problem is that most nonprofits and their staff have not had experience in designing effective learning experiences. Having grown up in the "drill and kill" days, they don't necessarily have the background and skills to design learning experiences that will have the most impact. But again, this is where Web 2.0 technology can step in.
The community aspects of being able to share and access solid knowledge about training and learning ACROSS nonprofit organizations is a huge opportunity for leverage that we're simply not accessing. Yes, it can be expensive to design good learning for a single organization. But why do we have to design it for just one anyway? Why can't nonprofits create learning consortia that allow them to share knowledge and skill development opportunities among many different agencies? Why, for example, can't they share a "learning consultant" who designs learning experiences and manages the tools for delivering that learning for a group of agencies that share similar skill development needs?
I think there is a lot of untapped potential that is just waiting for us to find it. The challenge we're facing, though, is less about learning the technologies and more about changing our thinking about how we use them.
Michele
