This is the question for this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival, hosted by Nancy Schwartz.

It’s a tough one because there are so many books I could choose from over what is now a pretty long career.

But if I can only pick one, I’m going to pick Stewardship- choosing service over self-interest by Peter Block.

This book looks at leadership through the framework of stewardship, a word that I use frequently in my work with nonprofit organizations and appears as one of the three major board responsibilities I highlight in my board self-assessment book How are we Doing?

I was introduced to Block and Stewardship when I was working on my master’s degree in organization and management at Antioch University New England. I started the program at Antioch a few years after I went into consulting. It was a fabulous and challenging program that gave me a new lexicon for my work – and exactly what I needed to become a consultant after years working in the nonprofit sector. I particularly relished the extraordinary amount of self-reflection leading to self-knowledge the program demanded — so essential for any leader or change maker.

Reading Stewardship didn’t actually shift my values … instead, it was a bright illumination of my own thoughts about my role in life, about governance and management, about working in organizations and about serving my community. I’ve always been drawn to a life in the social change sector. Whether volunteering, working at a nonprofit, or serving nonprofits through my consulting practice, service has always been integrated into my life, never just an appendage to the other things that I do.

Stewardship introduced me to other books by Block. Most consultants know his seminal work Flawless Consulting. I’m a VERY big fan of The Answer to How is Yes, which I require my students to read at Simmons College and which has become a norm and a mantra in my consulting.

What makes Stewardship so meaningful for me? In Block’s words:

• “Stewardship begins with the willingness to be accountable for some larger body than ourselves.”

• “Genuine service requires us to act on our own account. We cannot be stewards of an institution and expect someone else to take care of us.”

• “Stewardship is the choice for service. We serve best through partnership, not patriarchy. Dependency is the antithesis of stewardship and so empowerment becomes essential.”

• Stewardship is “accountability without control.”

Block looks at leadership, management, governance, staffing, financial management… most aspects of organizational life… through the lens of stewardship. When I first read the book, it wasn’t a cakewalk for me, raising questions if this was just another framework for employers to shirk any obligations to their employees. But Block comes to that question from a different place: he digs deeper into the relationship of employee to boss in The Answer to How is Yes.

Now that I’ve pulled the book off the shelf and shared it with you, time to read it through once again. I hope you will too and that you’ll share your thoughts with me.

“We did not hear much about what we together, as Americans, ought to expect from and do for one another and our government; we heard rather that government was a bloated obstruction which stood between us and what we should take for ourselves.

“…we will endure much conflict with little chance of collaboration if we cannot write a new social contract. The old one is in tatters – and America will continue to falter and stumble until she has a new one.”

From the speech “Toward a New Social Contract” delivered by Peter C. Goldmark, Jr. former president of The Rockefeller Foundation, to the 1991 Annual Meeting of Independent Sector, describing the landscape in the United States 20 years ago.

I’ve been saving this speech, in its little green booklet, in my desk drawer for 20 years. Who would have thought that the social contract we have adopted today is is exactly the tattered one that Mr. Goldmark described in 1991.

I finally pulled those weeds and planted the last of the veggies and annuals I’ve been staring at for the last week. I accomplished my first bike trek over 25 miles this spring on the East Bay Bike  Path — I finished 30 and even had a few more miles in me, really I did, but those two flat tires within minutes ended the trip for me. Thanks to instant service from Legend Bicycle,  a mere $11.60 for a new tube,  rim tape and installation and I’m back in the saddle.)

Throughout the weekend I’ve been using some of my leisure time to catch up on the stack of magazines and newsletters piling up at home and in the office. And in doing so I’ve been reminded why it is so critical to take time out from the work. What applicable gems of information I’ve been missing!

The Spring/Summer magazine, Land & People, of the Trust for Public Land led with a fascinating story about an innovative collaboration among five conservation groups inspired by two of their donors. The groups have come together as the Northern Sierra Partnership to share “strategy, leadership –  and most unusually donors and funding — to prioritize and execute conservation projects across a five-million-acre swath mountains.”

I’m always on the lookout for examples of great collaborations, with a special eye for fundraising partnerships.  These groups believe that by working together they will raise more money than any of them could on their own — in this case, $100 million to leverage $300 million additional dollars in public funding to protect 100 million acres. They seem to have overcome the inevitable question of how to distribute funds jointly raised by assigning value to each parcel and flowing funding to top priorities.

The newsletter also reminded me that TPL is masterful in developing funding strategies — giving me some new ideas for a business & funding plan I’m working on for one of our clients.

The June 2010 issue of Fast Company is just chock full of inspiration. It’s their Special Issue “The 100 Most Creative People.” I’ve been drooling over the list, and couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have committed to more than 2 weeks as a math major back in college. (I wiped out 2nd semester of Calculus 2 freshman year. Geography called me instead. A great major, really, it’s where I learned systems thinking.)

I’ve been especially mulling over the implications for the way nonprofits do business from a quote from Drop.io’s 26 year-old Product Lead Soraya Darabi: “I get my information from my peers.” (By the way, after struggling for days to get Google Docs to share documents as promised with 149 conference goers, Jon suggested Drop.io which was a piece of cake to use.)

Juxtapose Ms Darabi’s insight on social media with the growing popularity of a crowd sourcing approach to charitable giving ( also discussed in this issue in the profile of Kimberly Davis, President of JPMorgan Chase Foundation), and I think we’ve all got some incredibly serious thinking to do about how we relate to and educate future donors about our charities.

As someone who never won a high school popularity contest, I feel the pain of the corner duster nonprofits doing vital but not so flashy work. But we ignore promotion in the digital landscape at our peril. Just a troll through these pages makes that perfectly clear.

And I haven’t even had a chance to crack open the latest Wired yet.

Maybe the innovation factor in US enterprises would increase dramatically if we had mandatory three-day weekends every week.

Staff or directors of nonprofit organizations come to us every day seeking our help to improve their functioning. And while I would never discourage anyone from that, I also encourage my clients and prospective clients to do some reading on their own. (Maybe it’s because one of my best friends and my next door neighbors are all librarians!)

I happen to learn a whole lot from reading. It’s one thing that I wish I had much, much more time to do. Thankfully, with Twitter, I now have hundreds of helpers who are out there looking for good reads that they can recommend to their followers. (You can follow me @gaylegifford)

I often start retreats or planning sessions I facilitate with a good discussion about an interesting article that the group was asked to read in advance of the session.

There is lots of really, really interesting stuff out there. So  let me just share a tiny few this Monday.

Founders.

I jut got off the phone with the founder of a relatively new nonprofit organization. While the conversation had little direct connection to founder-ness, it did remind me of two of my favorite articles about founders. Both are written from the perspective of colleagues who really honor the extraordinary role of founders, unlike some of the other pieces I’ve read that treat founders as a disease to be cured.

• “Founders and other Gods,” by Deb Linnell, Director of Programs for Third Sector New England and
• Founders Syndrome, Who Me? by Hildy Gottlieb of the Community Driven Institute.

Nonprofit Funding and Financial Issues

There is so much to recommend here, but take a look at anything from Clara Miller of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. I find myself frequently recommending ” The Looking Glass World of Nonprofit Money.”

I’m also very much transfixed by The Bridgespan Group’s study “How Nonprofits Get Really Big” that raises lots of questions about the doctrine of diversification of  nonprofit revenue sources.

Program Planning

If you haven’t yet, you’ve got to take a look at The Stages of Change model developed by James O. Prochaska, Ph.D. et al at the University of Rhode Island. While I could have titled this section Making Change, I really think that anyone designing programming should take a look at this five stage model of change before leaping in.

Okay, just a few of my favorites for a Monday. Care to share some of yours?

(Or course, we’ve got a whole library of reads in the Articles sections of our website.)

Thank you so to my colleague and friend Jane Arsenault of FioPartners for forwarding this report.  (If you are interested in nonprofit alliances and haven’t read through Jane’s 1998 book Forging Nonprofit Alliances, you’ve been missing one of the pioneering works on this topic).

“Outsourcing back-office services…” is a study conducted by the Management Assistance Group for the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation of Washington, D.C. It confirms through a study of Meyer grantees, industry experts and other literature what many of us have been thinking about, wishing for and experimenting with for a number of years.

Among the findings:

• Outsourcing may present an opportunity for small organizations to improve their back office.
• There may be new for-profit business opportunities in providing these services.
• Because of their small size and lack of spending on any back office, outsourcing doesn’t offer immediate cost savings for most small organizations. But the report goes on to say that it could help free time for more focus on program and strategy.
• Outsourcing needs to be approached cautiously by both organizations and their funders.

Large nonprofits and nonprofit networks have been outsourcing many back office functions for years. In our experience, small nonprofits haven’t been profitable enough for for-profit businesses to service. The lack of money to be made providing these functions has been a real barrier to the development of many services from which small organizations could benefit.

And small organizations simply haven’t had the time, expertise or money to solve this problem for themselves.

Across the country, larger nonprofits are stepping up to provide some of these services. All types of creative arrangements have been developed that don’t force small organizations to merge and thereby dissolve the important, close constituency and localized advocacy work that so many of our smallest nonprofits provide.

With the current economic crisis and a renewed interest in exploring nonprofit joint ventures, the time may finally be right for a thousand flowers to bloom in this area.

• Does each nonprofit have an obligation to our whole sector to create satisfying experiences that regenerate volunteers?

• Are poor volunteer practices not only driving people away from the offending organization but also souring volunteers against any volunteer service in the future?

These are some of the questions provoked by an intriguing article in the article “It Ain’t Natural: Toward a New (Natural) Resource Conceptualization for Volunteer Management” in the August 2009 edition of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly .

While the title screams academia, the ideas raised by the authors  Jeffrey L. Brudney of Cleveland State University and Lucas C. P. M. Meijs of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, deserve serious discussion and wide exposure within our sector.

Citing a a study done by the Corporation for National and Community Service, Brudney and Meijs warn that “a staggering one in three Americans evidently dropped out of volunteering between 2005 and 2006.” They note that other studies document similar problems in other countries.

The authors suggest that nonprofits in general are too preoccupied with recruiting volunteers and don’t pay enough attention to retaining them.

I’m sure you’ve heard someone lament (and maybe even have said it yourself): “we can’t find enough good volunteers.”

What if, the authors suggest, instead of treating “volunteer energy” as a resource with an inexhaustible supply, we  perceived volunteers as a resource that could actually run out?

How would our behavior need to change?

I find this concept incredibly intriguing, especially because it fits very nicely into my”we’re all in this together” framework of civil society.

Imagine that you are a first time volunteer. You’ve been thinking about doing something good for your community so you’ve found your way to a volunteer job through family, friend or volunteer center.  You’re excited, but a little unsure of your role and how you might contribute.

It’s likely that it may take quite a while before you hear from the organization at all. Or, they contact you quickly but they don’t really have any volunteer needs right now. No one takes the time to find out what skills you have or what else you might have to offer.

Or maybe they have a job, but in reality it is pretty undefined. You are assigned to a staff member (or another volunteer) who simply doesn’t have the time to train you and makes you feel as if you are in their way. You never really get a good idea of what you should be doing  or how to do it successfully.  And you just have this gut feeling that the job they handed you probably isn’t very important if no one can take the time to get you started.

Maybe your experience is somewhat different. Maybe you are a pretty secure self-starter who doesn’t need a lot of direction. Or maybe you arrived as part of a larger group. You can jump right into the task and successfully complete your assignment with minimal supervision. And you feel pretty good about what you’ve accomplished and are ready for the next task.  But once you’re done with that assignment, it’s as if you’ve never been there. No thanks. No call backs. End of connection.

What would you do if this described your volunteer experience over and over again? My guess is that you’d likely give up on volunteering and go do something more personally satisfying, like spending time with your family or shopping with friends.

When one organization treats a volunteer badly, they are likely to lose that volunteer. But imagine what happens when thousands of  volunteers have negative experiences at organization after organization. Eventually, it’s simply not worth volunteering any more. No reward. Been there. Done that. Over.

I love that the authors challenge us to rethink our  attitude about volunteers. They suggest that each organization has a societal obligation to keep volunteer energy flowing, to ensure the sustainability of the resource, to “attract people into volunteering and keep them volunteering over the [course of their lives].”

Volunteers are not put on this earth to be used and discarded by one organization.

Each of us are responsible to each other for the volunteers who come under our umbrella. Though our own organization may only need a volunteer for a particular assignment, our society needs that volunteer to keep volunteering over their lifetime.

In the authors’ world, a truly “regenerative” approach to volunteering produces fruitful outcomes for nonprofits and creates rewarding volunteer experiences that matter to our communities and keep volunteers volunteering. Who can’t sign on to that!

Gayle

P.S. Now, to really get your blood flowing, imagine applying this same concept to our board recruits.

The Sustainability Formula is based on an analysis of TCC’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool.

The formula is:

Leadership + Adaptability + Program Capacity = Sustainability.

I really liked this framework (though I think there might be a few missing pieces of the definition, for example, how about something around longevity? Or resilience as in – the ability to bounce back from adversity).

I’m working on a project now with the Rhode Island Foundation’s Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence that enlists an organization assessment tool by the Marguerite Casey Foundation that is framed around the 4 Core Capacities developed by TCC. So I was particularly interested in reading this report.

But my really amazing discovery was captured in one small paragraph at the bottom of page 2. It talked about nonprofit lifecycles and offered a framework that I hadn’t bumped into before. The stages went like this:

“Stage 1: Core program development

“Stage 2:  Infrastructure development for the purpose of taking programs to scale

“Stage 3:  Impact expansion which is defined as community leadership that changes the systems and policies that affect an organization’s ability to achieve its mission.”

I was floored, I have to admit it. One of those AHA! moments.

Some people have AHA! moments by finding the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor. I have them when I discover amazing new organizational frameworks or research nuggets that challenge our sector’s core assumptions. (Or when I eat some really fabulous dark chocolate)

This was SO MUCH MORE VALUABLE than the typical “Start Up, Growth, Maturity, Decline/Renewal” lifecycle model I see so often. This was a lifecycle framework that was MISSION-focused.

Be still my beating heart.

As someone who tries to pay attention to new literature on nonprofits, I kept scratching my head on how I could have missed this gem. So of course I went on a Google journey to find more details about this model.

After a nonproductive search on TCC Group’s own website (though there are lots of interesting publications there), I ended up on The Philadelphia Foundation’s website where I found the article “Characteristics of High Performing Nonprofits based on Organizational Lifecycle.” Which I spent time reading.

That article referenced a 2005 BoardSource publication, Navigating the Organizational Lifecyle: A Capacity Building Guide for Nonprofit Leaders I had seen the book as a subscriber to BoardSource but I never ordered it because I figured it was just the same old same lifecycle framework. That will teach me to assume!

Yes, you may be asking about now, other than alerting your readers to all these great resources, what is the point of this blog entry?

Okay, here it is.

I regularly encounter individuals, usually good-hearted souls, who have done little research on best practices about how to build a great nonprofit. Or how best to build effective programs that address the problems or needs they’ve taken on. I’m always curious, when there is such great stuff out there usually for free, why they didn’t take the time to look.

Maybe they’ve taken to heart the old adage about curiosity killing cats and been scared away?

My problem is just the opposite. I rarely have difficulty finding really valuable information – besides Google, I’ve got great colleagues and Twitter to keep me busy.

No, my problem is trying to tear myself away from the next great read.

So, a word of advice: Try some research. You can learn a whole lot by looking, to paraphrase the great Yogi Berra.

I had to stop my car so as not to miss all of Terry Gross’s interview with Anderson on NPR’s Fresh Air Wednesday, July 8th.

Now bear with me as I share a bit of my un-edited thinking as I was listening to the interview. (Why is it that I can’t resist exploring complex analogies on Friday afternoons?)

Anderson described how businesses are making money on the Internet by giving things away for free. I was particularly enthralled because the strategy he was describing — give the basic level away for free and then charge for the premium model — seemed to align with the radical museum membership program envisioned by Beverly Sheppard and John Falk in their 2006 book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New business models for museums and cultural organizations from Alta Mira Press.

In their book, Falk and Sheppard ask why museums (and zoos, et al) discount prices for repeat users and thus receive the least proportional revenue from their best customers. In the commonly used nonprofit membership model, you contribute the membership fee and receive unlimited visits, visitors, discounts on merchandise, first serve on tickets to special exhibits, and more.

What if instead, they posit, the more of the museum that you use, and the more people in your group who use your membership, the more you pay for? Instead of continuing to increase revenues by increasing first time visitors, they suggested that the idea was to convince a “core group of the best customers to come repeatedly … and to pay full price each time they came.” The member pays more, but gets much better value for their higher price by their ability to access enhanced, highly personalized programming and services.

Reading this just three short years ago, the idea seemed both incredibly bold and incredibly fantastic.

Surprisingly, this is precisely the business model Anderson attributes to many successful Internet companies. As a customer, you get to sample the basic version for free online, but you only get the larger, better, bigger premium model for a price. The more you use, the more bells and whistles you grow into, the more you pay.

Anderson says this model works for two reasons:

1. It recruits such large (very large) numbers of free users that a sufficient and profitable number of them convert to paid use.
2. The free users have to love the product so much that they are willing to pay for it. That is, the product has to really deliver great value.

What do you think? Does this model have an application to our nonprofits?

Are you already making it work out there?

In some ways, the “Free” model does bear a resemblance to giving societies which are widely used methods of upgrading nonprofit donors. Give at higher levels and get rewarded with special events, preview parties, and more attention.

Downsides to these clubs can be costly benefits that are hard to maintain, or hard to deliver or do little to deepen the philanthropic intent of and connectedness of our donors to our institutions. Great models deepen donor understanding of mission and cost little more than time and personalized attention. Another danger is devoting your love to the high payer and marginalizing the smaller donor.

Ideas? What lessons have you taken from Internet business models and applied to your nonprofit?

Let’s say your mother came to you for advice:

“Dale, you’re well off, your sisters don’t need my help. I’ve decided to leave what money I have to charity. What do you think of my giving it to the group you’re involved with?”

When deciding what to say to your Mom, you would probably ask yourself two questions.

1.  Is my organization worthy of such a big gift?

You can spot a worthy organization pretty easily:

• It has passionate and competent leadership who turn dreams into reality
• The cause really matters and the programs change lives.
• It invests its money well — where it generates the greatest impact.

While worthiness is critical, it isn’t enough to meet the Mom test. You can probably think of a few worthy causes but you’d never give to the organization because you don’t trust how well they are managed.

That brings me to the second question:

2. Is this an organization that my mom could trust to use her gift well?

Trustworthy organizations take their stewardship commitments seriously. They want their donors, their clients, the public and the media to know that their trust is well founded. Trustworthiness means that you:

• Place stewardship and ethics above all else.
• Deliver on your promises.
• Avoid conflicts of interest and always make decisions in the best intereste of the community and people you serve.
• Consider every dollar and every asset a precious resource that must be used wisely.

When your board or staff are evaluating how well your organization is doing, it helps to think about your mother. Because if you don’t believe that your organization is a wise investment for your mother, it really isn’t for anyone else’s mom (or dad or sister or brother) either.

Chapter 9, How are We Doing? A 1-Hour Guide to Evaluating Your Performance as a Nonprofit Board.

You can order the book at Contributions Magazine. Just click here.

My friend and colleague Janet Hedrick, CFRE, writes about gratitude in her book, Effective Donor Relations.

Gratitude is sincere. It is being truly thankful. It embodies a deep human connection.

Last night, my bedtime reading was the May edition of Inc. Magazine. The magazine isn’t typically a place where I expect to be inspired by articles about gratitude.

But the article Everybody Loves Zappos in the May 2009 issue of Inc. Magazine had an amazing story about gratitude and deep human connection.

In the article, CEO Tony Hsieh tells one of those legend-making tales about extraordinary customer connections.

In the story, a customer service rep was handling a return of boots from a woman who had ordered them for her husband. She was returning the boots as her husband died in a car accident before he received them. Without asking permission, the call center rep ordered flowers charged to Zappos and had them sent to the woman for her loss. Hsieh says “not only was she a customer for life, but so were those 30 or 40 people at the funeral.”

I think the story struck me so strongly because just hours before I was having a discussion with the students in my class at Simmons College that seemed so contrary to the Zappos example.

All semester, my students have been working on graduate service learning projects. Their teams have developed communications plans to support organizational changes for seven nonprofit partners.

One group has been working on a project for an arts nonprofit. The organization had recently made a number of changes to its volunteer programs. In particular, volunteers were now required to pay membership dues before they could participate in various tasks. Most of those volunteers were over 60, most fairly well-off, and a number had been volunteering for the organization for many years.

A lively discussion centered around the reason for this change. Even though the organization had seen shrinking revenues, was it a good strategic decision to reward years of volunteer service this way? How did the short term need balance against long term good will and volunteer loyalty?

Fortunately, my students designed a communications plan that really emphasized ways the organization could express sincere gratitude to their volunteers.

How would you rate yourself on the gratitude scale? What could your organization do today to increase its donor gratitude quotient? What have you done? I’d love to hear your stories.