Cleaning out my files the other day, I stumbled on those tips and realized just how influential they have been to my work in  strategic planning.

Here’s what Mason shared in the article:

1. Know exactly what you want to solve
2. Research deeply
3. Call in help
4. Practice problem-solving
5. Sketch it out
6. Churn
7. Go see a movie
8. Keep your space clear
9. Know when to walk away

In an interview for the book Diamond Power: Gems of Wisdom from America’s Greatest Marketers, Mason says

“It’s really not that complicated.  The creative process is trying really hard to solve a problem.”

Isn’t that the essence of strategic planning?

While our missions aren’t necessarily problems, the goal of getting from where we are today to realizing our mission can be seen as a big puzzle that we are trying to solve. (Puzzle = problem).  Whether we’re ending homelessness, or ensuring our kids graduate from school ready for success in life, or challenging and inspiring others through art – we are all seeking the best path to achieve our mission.

Finding the best path is what strategic planning is all about.

Start strategic planning by getting all of those big questions out in the open. What’s holding you back from reaching your vision?

Research is essential in any strategic planning process, and one that I find is too often neglected. How can you really understand the community need and your role in it without data? How do you know what might work if you don’t know what’s been tried before?

But don’t stop with “book learning” (or Google). Go ask others for their advice. Think of 25 people to talk to who know or should know something relevant to your mission. Go talk with them. You’ll learn a lot by listening (and they’ll learn something about you as well.)

Write down everything you are learning as you go. What might start as disconnected conversations begins to make sense when you articulate your theory of change and your logic model;  that is, the why and how of the path from the problem to the vision. (Mason says: “Invention is logic.”)

Make sure you brainstorm.  Keep thinking about what will actually create the breakthrough you are looking for –even if it seems like the most impossible idea. Then imagine how to get there.

I advise never trying to craft an entire strategic plan in a one day retreat. Like Mason, I’m convinced there has to be time for ideas to gel and reflection between planning sessions. And opening the door to inspiration from unexpected places.

As Mason suggests in Tip 9, sometimes there are too many other issues that need to be addressed first before you jump into strategic planning (like lack of commitment to really being strategic among staff or board leadership). So know when the time is right.

P.S. Apparently Stan Mason was locked in the principal’s office because he colored outside the lines in third grade. I remember practically falling off my chair when one of my son’s elementary school teachers told me that “following directions was the most important lesson for job success” after he used colored markers rather than crayons in a school assignment.  “What lost world are you preparing him for” I remember thinking at the time?

So that’s my approach to strategic planning.  What’s yours?

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Related readings:

Discovering great ideas in new places

Questions to jump start your SWOT

Increase innovation: mandate three day workweeks

Because I think about SWOTs as a systems scan, I like to start strategic planning by getting out and onto the table all of the issues that my client has been thinking about. A grand purging of ideas, if you will.

(Don’t worry. I have clients study data and interview critical community informants to reveal issues they haven’t thought about yet).

But to get the ball rolling, I often ask the board members and staff, and sometimes informed volunteers or recently departed (off the board that is) board members, to complete an online questionnaire.

I’d thought you might be interested in seeing some of the questions I often use to get started:

• What do you like to brag about when you talk about your organization? (Alt. What makes you most proud of your organization?)
• What are the three most critical issues facing your [clients/community] that you need to respond to over the next few years?
• Why are these issues important to you? To your [clients/community]?
• If you could change anything about the way that you serve your [clients/community], what would you change? Why?
• What operational investments (e.g. staff, technology, facilities, etc) would significantly improve the impact you can have on your [clients/community]?
• What one thing would have the biggest impact? Why?
• Looking into the future, what worries you the most?
• What makes you most hopeful?
• If all your dreams could come true, what are your greatest dreams for your work? For you organization?
• Who do you need to talk to? That is, who has information to share, who really knows or cares a lot, has resources to share, perspectives you need to hear, or  partnerships to offer?
  

I tweak the questions to customize them for my client. These are the generic form of the questions.

I pop the questions into one of the online survey applications, like SurveyMonkey, to make it easy to respond. With a paper or email response option for those who don’t have access to or can’t navigate the online survey (Yes, it’s true. Not everyone is wired yet).

Once we’ve gotten a critical mass of responses, I compile the answers, looking for common threads as well as outlying opinions.

I then review the compilation with the people who answered. First and foremost, this confirms that I’m reporting the ideas correctly. Second, the discussion helps everyone understand what everyone else is thinking (and the survey format provides needed cover to make sure sensitive issues can get on the table.)  Then we can dive deeper into the responses.

Throughout the development of the plan, I’ll keep going back to the responses to make sure we haven’t forgotten any ideas or worries.

Is this helpful? What questions do you start with in your SWOT?

As I do at the start of working with any group, I spoke with the strategic planning committee about how we could best work together. I shared the rules for behavior that I find essential for successful strategic planning. After we discussed each rule and how it would work, the team added a few of their own. Then the planning team adopted the ground rules as a guide for their own deliberations.

I thought I’d share the rules I use with you. I’d love to hear what works in your groups.

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Gayle’s Ground Rules for Effective Strategic Planning

In order to make our work together effective and meaningful, we agree to:

1. Keep a razor-sharp focus on articulating a vision of the impact we wish to have on our community.
2. Remember the answer to “how” is “yes.” * (GG: No matter how amazing the plan, it can’t be successful without your strong commitment)
3. Act in good faith. Assume good faith on the part of others.
4. Make decisions by  ____________________. (GG: Use a decision-making rule that generates the level of commitment needed. Will majority vote be enough? A supermajority? Consensus? At what level of support?).
5. Share responsibility for creating a plan that matters and makes a difference for our community.
6. Use evidence and confirmed data to guide our decisions.
7. Regularly seek out ideas from our key stakeholders.
8. Keep critical constituents (e.g. board, staff) informed of the status of our deliberations.
9. Share all information that we may possess that is important and relevant to our discussions, even if that information may be difficult to hear.
10. Make decisions in the best interest of our community and our organization, not our personal interests.
11. Keep discussions confidential until authorized otherwise by our committee.
12. Discuss un-discussable issues.
13. Remain respectful of others and their perceptions.
14. Focus on interests, not positions. Explain the reasoning behind our statements, questions and actions when they are not obvious to others.
15. Keep focused on the topics being discussed.
16. Attend meetings – prepared and on time.
17. Complete our assignments.
18. Put away our “e-gadgets” during discussions, unless the team requests otherwise.
19. _____(GG: what else do you need?)__________________________________.

*From Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes.

A number of the ground rules I use originated from the expert facilitator Roger Schwartz. His book, The Skilled Facilitator, is a classic for your book shelf. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

These are the five elements that make up strategic thinking as described by Dr. Jeanne M. Liedtka, a faculty member at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business and former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation.

I’ve never met Dr. Liedtka, but I’m madly in love with her elements of strategic thinking.

One of the frustrations I’ve had with most of the definitions of strategic planning is that rarely is the concept “strategic” or “strategic thinking” well-defined. (I feel the same way about the use of the term “policies” which is why I’m drawn to the framework for policy creation as espoused by policygovernance guru John Carver)

In many definitions, strategic planning is defined as a process that employs “strategic thinking” or “strategies.” I guess the definers believe everyone inherently knows strategy when they see it. If only that were so.

I learned a great word in school many years ago: “tautology.” No it’s not a fish (that’s tautog).

A tautology is an explanation that uses the same or similar terms to explain what it means, like calling strategic planning a planning process that creates strategies.

Apparently Dr. Liedtka was also frustrated by these definitions, so she wrote an article* to explain what it meant to think strategically.

So what are these five essential elements of strategic thinking that she identified?

1. Intent focused

Dr. Liedtka says: “Strategic intent provides the focus that allows individuals within an organization to marshal and leverage their energy, to focus attention, to resist distraction, and to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal.”

This concept implies both having an overarching goal or direction (you might call that your vision) and making that goal a conscious focus or, in this wonderful definition for intent I found online “the act of turning your mind toward” an outcome or object.

In my approach to our sector, this intent is the change that we want to see in the world. A change that we are completely passionate about, that channels our every action for the future.

2. A systems perspective

Think ecosystem.

An exercise I do with my graduate students that you can try for your organization is to describe all of the various systems in which you exist. Their answers start with the classroom and move beyond to the higher education system, to legal, natural, family, or body systems, to global economic and financial systems — and they operate in all of them.

So does your organization. So, to get good at strategic thinking, you need to try to understand the way your world works and how that affects you. Because you can’t really know everything, you’ll have to take your best shot at gathering the right information and prioritizing the components of systems that are most likely to affect the way you work now and into the future.

It really does help though to be curious about just about everything.

While you might be an expert in interpreting the particular “business ecosystem’  in which you operate, how well do you understand what is happening culturally or politically that might also influence your future?

Read a lot. Explore new things. Talk to people outside your organization and outside your discipline as well as the people who know your system the best.

3. Thinking in Time

Liedtka suggests strategic thinkers ask this question:

“Having seen the future that we want to create, what must we keep from our past, lose from that past and create in the present to get there?”

When you think strategically, you are always connecting the past to the present to the future. You learn from the past and use that learning to make predictions. You look at the present to assess the gap between where you are now and where you want to end up.

While your focus is always on the future, you can only act in the present.

This concept always makes me think of H.G. Wells The Time Machine.

4. Intelligent Opportunism

Remember the old exercise the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.)

Well, SWOT thinking never ends for strategic thinkers. Strategic thinkers are able to spot and react to great new opportunities as they arise. They understand that the world is dynamic and they are open to change to reach their vision.

Intelligent opportunism also implies that you dig deep into your organization to hear from many perspectives. Ideas and knowledge are valuable wherever they exist — but you’ll need to look and listen to benefit from them.

5. Hypothesis driven

Finally, Dr. Liedtka says, “strategic thinking mirrors the scientific method… it is both creative and critical in nature.”

As strategic thinkers, we create hypothesis, those questions that start “What if…?”  or “If… then?” — questions that enable us to imagine multiple scenarios, analyze them as best we can based on the knowledge we’ve accumulated and then test the best hypotheses (experiment). As we act, we learn from our experience to create new hypothesis for future action.

Thus, strategic thinking dissected and explained.

Thank you, Jeanne M. Liedtka, for your article and an extraordinary framework to articulate what strategic thinking is all about.

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* The article is “Strategic Thinking: Can it be Taught.” You’ll find it in the Feb 1998 edition of the journal Long Range Planning (another interesting journal I’ve just discovered).

I’d also like to recommend a wonderful short paper from 1999 called Strategic Thinking: A Discussion Paper. It was prepared by Lawrence Eton for the Public Service Commission of Canada and is readily available online. It summarizes much of what is in the original article and also relates strategic thinking to strategic planning.

I’m still thunderstruck by a concept that I bumped into a few years ago. I found it in a  paper whose title is a mouthful: Supporting Financial Vibrancy in the Quest for Sustainability in the Nonprofit Sector. It was authored by Marilyn Struthers of The Ontario Trillium Foundation.

In the paper, Ms Struthers poses that we build financial vibrancy in our quest for organizational sustainability. The article outlines six capacities that contribute to financial vibrancy and the creation of resilient and adaptive organizations rather than merely stable ones.

But tucked away in all this very compelling analysis,  under a box four pages into the study, was the sentence that left me speechless:

“Financial vibrancy is the capacity of an organization to make the transition from one sustainable moment to the next.”

I experienced a moment of ultimate clarity, marveling at the purity, the honesty of that statement.

When I share this marvelous saying with the participants in my workshops, I can see a great burden of guilt fall from their shoulders. Smiles emerge.

Nonprofit organizations exist in an incredibly dynamic world. The ground is shifting even as I write, with great uncertainty about the economy, about the future of employment, about cuts to government funding, unending technological innovation, coming shifts in our ecosystems, and even about our very security and survival.

“Experts” glibly chastise nonprofits for so many wrongs — chasing grant funding, for not having diverse revenue streams, for scorning individual giving, for lack of board fundraising. Yet, the reality is that there are no best or right answers for any nonprofit. Each must craft its way, unique to its own circumstances and opportunities.

I share the pain of my nonprofit colleagues, having shouldered that  Sisyphean task of revenue generation myself. I marvel that there are any strong spirits left at the end of the day.

Me, I’m still humbled that given all the financial handcuffs nonprofits wear that so many have carved out, no matter how awkwardly, business models that enable their work to continue, some for decades, others for centuries.

The PBN article quotes the visitors to BatchHaus, many of whom work alone, expressing their appreciation for the opportunity to meet similar techies and make connections. Some of those connections have led to business leads, but overall, the camaraderie helps to create a stronger tech community, which is important to these new entrepreneurs. I was intrigued by the idea.

Then, the very next day, I was at a meeting with colleagues. I reported on the progress of multi-stakeholder learning teams I was using to do the environment scan for a strategic plan for a colleague. (for a future blog).

The colleague I had recruited to facilitate one of the learning teams mentioned that a number of the stakeholders had never visited each others’ facilities, even though they often referred clients to each other. So site visits were put on the agenda.

There are many encouraging reports of the wonderful benefits to co-locating nonprofits. But you don’t have to jump all the way to permanent rental arrangements. Like the BatchHaus folks, hanging out together can be good for your organizational health.

A past employer of mine, Save The Bay, built a fabulous new facility a few years ago right on our urban waterfront, a place that most Rhode Islanders hadn’t visited and thought of as an industrial wasteland. Save The Bay rents their board and conference space to any community nonprofit to use for trainings, retreats and other activities (for a small fee).

The BayCenter is incredibly popular for its amazing view of Narragansett Bay and great training facility. (I was preparing for a training there one winter morning and was rewarded with the acrobatics of a rambunctious harbor seal).

Not only environmental groups use the space. I’ve facilitated or participated in workshops with disability rights activists to the local chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. All who attend meetings there are amazed that the waterfront could be so gorgeous — a real win for Save The Bay which has not given up on restoring any part of the Bay, even its most impaired urban waterfront.

The buzz is all around about the need for more collaboration and joint ventures in our sector. But most successful collaborations require trust and good faith in addition to mutual benefit. Collaborations don’t jump all the way to trust, they build up to it. What better way to get to know each other than by coming together in unstructured, no pressure places to share ideas, see new things, make connections and maybe get some feedback from a colleague.

It’s time for more organizations to open their doors and treat their colleagues as friends they’d like to know better, rather than competitors. I’m convinced there are great opportunities in the making.

So how about inviting new people to your office to hang out with you for a while.

But a conversation yesterday brought back to me a dynamic that I’ve been observing for many years: the role of boards as conservators.

A little background.

Yesterday I made my bi-annual trek to life portfolio company New Directions to discuss life in the nonprofit sector with their clients. New Directions clients are accomplished people in business or the professions who are designing the next stage of their life journeys.

My portion of the conversation was “The rewarding and confounding world of the nonprofit sector,” which is partly nonprofit 101 and partly DEEP THOUGHTS.

A fellow “interpreter of the sector” was the Executive Director of a capacity building (smallish, $500K budget) nonprofit. He mentioned that for the last two years he had been a co-executive director, a leadership team that resulted from a merger. He mentioned that the other ED was winding up his term and he would soon be the sole ED. When I asked how the co-directorship worked for him, he shared he really liked the arrangement, but his Board just wasn’t comfortable with the shared leadership model.

Boards as Conservators

At first a bit surprised by this tale, it reminded me that many boards are naturally suited to their role as conservators.

Here I’m using conservator in its definition as someone who conserves or keeps safe. Like a custodian, guardian, or protector.

The words we use to describe board duties — like prudent, loyalty, care, fiduciary — imply moderation and caution. Another word I might use would be  “conservative.”

In my experience, most Boards of Directors are loathe, and rightfully so, to take big risks. In their conservator role, boards put the breaks on reckless spending. Because boards usually reflect the mindset of the communities they serve, they often restrain choices, decisions or actions that could put their organization ideologically too far in front of the constituencies and communities they serve. I’ve seen boards wisely put the kabosh on ill-conceived public policy actions that could threaten public good will.

When conservator = ill-conceived road block

Too frequently, however, the conservator role of boards holds back innovation.

Staff often find themselves far ahead of their part time leadership volunteers when it comes to mission implementation. As the professionals, they interact with their peers and seek out new research and best practices. They are immersed every day in the work, thinking what comes next, how can I do this better (or at least we hope they are).

But their board members aren’t. They have other lives, other jobs, other concerns that take precedence. Few, if any, are traveling in the same professional spaces. They only know what is, and may have no clue about what might be and why that is important. So when staff bring forward these big new concepts, it takes time for board members to digest them.

Many years ago I was Director of Development and Communications at Plan International USA. During my tenure, we launched a soul searching strategic planning process. For a number of reasons that included maintaining our standing among our peers and funders, a commitment to fostering better international understanding, and our need to deepen the global understanding and thus the retention of our donors, staff were interested in expanding our fledgling development education programming and making it an important, though always small, part of our program mix.

A small cadre of academic board members were extremely resistant to the idea that we could educate donors through such a populist (for lack of a better word) approach to development education. After many frustrating conversations, the Board chose to delete development education from the strategic plan, sending it back to committee for discussion and reconsideration at a later date. Needless to say, staff were extremely frustrated (angry?). Ultimately, after many more months of give and take, we finally found a compromise that enabled us to proceed forward, albeit in very tiny steps. (Outcome: Our new, grant-funded development education program was hugely successful and achieved the strategic objectives that underpinned our initial reasoning).

Now, more than ever, we need our boards to look forward with vision, radical rethinking, insatiable curiosity, and the judgment to know when conservatism is called for and when disruption is essential.

While more organizations are ripening to the idea of doing business somewhat differently, I’m still finding too many boards oblivious at best and resistant at worst to newer ideas — like  joint ventures with other nonprofits. While due caution is needed for big changes like mergers or subsidiary relationships, others –like outsourcing financial management or the case I described above of co-directors — seem to be resisted for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately, these dynamic and perilous times require us to reconsider all historic assumptions and brutally question every aspect of the way we do business. Now, more than ever, we need to maximize the energy and resources that go into serving our communities and constituents. We can no longer assume that something that worked well enough in the past has any hope of surviving the future.

I don’t know if this is possible. Do you?

The workshop will focus on how this climate presents unique opportunities for this sector to become more intentional about strengthening the nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructure.

As a few of the grantmakers have been overly focused on mergers as the solution in these tough economic times, the discussion will highlight other opportunities shy of merger for collaboration and consolidation of management services.

Last Thursday I was chatting with a consultant colleague whom I’ve recruited to be on the panel.  She was recounting her own work facilitating mergers and how these experiences have left her convinced that mergers are often not worth the time and expense that goes into them. She was pointing out that mergers usually require costly consultation and legal services and amazing amounts of time and energy from the staff and board. Rarely did they result in more income to the new entity. While eliminating program and operational redundancies were positive outcomes of some mergers, there are other methods of achieving those same results.

I was agreeing with her that different types of consolidations — e.g.  parent/ subsidiary arrangements or the development of management service organizations — offered more opportunities for nonprofits to increase time and energy devoted to mission while improving the quality of financial and administrative services, and maybe even reducing costs  (or at the very least, decreasing inefficient or ineffective deployment of skills to task). We’ve both been participating in efforts here in RI and elsewhere to get the word out to nonprofits of all sizes of the other options worth exploring.

Barely do I hang up the phone when another colleague forwards me a copy of David LaPiana’s latest article, Merging Wisely, published in Stanford Social Innovation Review.  In the article LaPiana makes the case that funders shouldn’t necessarily be putting pressure on nonprofits to merge. Other forms of partnerships, including parent/subsidiary integration, management services organizations, joint ventures, might be much more effective.

I’ve personally been asking many of my strategic planning clients to at least imagine the possibilities these partnerships might present. I think you’ll find the article worth reading.

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.

I hadn’t thought about kaleidoscopes in years until I received one as a gift for presenting a workshop at a fundraising conference. Instead of creating designs from shapes embedded in the kaleidoscope itself, this one made fascinating patterns out of whatever you were looking at.

So what do kaleidoscopes and great fundraisers have in common?

Both are really good at creating many beautiful new designs from one starting point.

In this challenging economic climate, nonprofit fundraisers have to be as resourcesful as they possibly can be to make better and stronger connections with donors. As fundraisers, we are always on the lookout for donors whose dreams and desires are a perfect match with our organization.

Sometimes that match is pretty straightforward, as when a loved one is stricken by a disease and family members give to the organization that is working to find a cure. Or the guidelines of a foundation are a perfect fit with our programs.

Often, however, the match isn’t immediately obvious and requires us to do some mental stretching. A very philanthropic individual I knew gave money to a figure skating association, a community service organization, a library, and other seemingly unrelated institutions. Was there a common thread? Yes, he loved young people and gave to programs that helped them flourish.

Resourceful development professionals have the uncanny talent of making lots of successful matches – from the easy fits to the mental stretches. The ability to see the many facets of our organization and our donor’s interests – like looking through a kaleidoscope – can open many more donor checkbooks.

Here are a few tips for developing your own kaleidoscope vision.

1. Listen to see what your donors care about.

I can’t say enough about listening. When we get too wrapped up in pitching our organization, we can’t hear what a donor wants.

The executive director of a youth service organization wanted to upgrade a corporate donor from a modest in-kind gift to a major sponsorship. At an exploratory meeting with the CEO, the executive director spent the better part of five minutes pitching the organization and one particular sponsorship opportunity.

He wasn’t igniting any interest.

The development director then asked this corporate CEO a simple question: “What community projects are you working on?”

The CEO opened up. He explained how his company was exploring the idea of building playgrounds in inner city neighborhoods – something the youth service organization had a history of doing, but hadn’t mentioned. Suddenly, a match seemed inevitable. The company was excited to provide a corporate sponsorship that included building a city playground – and eventually went on to become one of the organization’s biggest supporters.

2. Look deep into your existing programs.

Just like a prospective donor, you’ll be more passionate about your organization if you see the work first hand. You’ll be better informed too. It’s hard to comprehend the complexity of your organization if you don’t get up close and personal with your program staff, your projects, and especially the people you serve.

A successful fundraiser I know recently took a position as the major gifts director for a hospital. In her first few weeks on the job, she arranged an intensive training program for herself:

“I wanted to meet everyone and see EVERYTHING: operations, autopsies, the emergency room, even the kitchen. I asked hundreds of questions so I could know how we made a difference and what our needs were. Not only did I feel more confident I could explain our work to a prospective donor, but I also knew I’d be better at finding giving matches. An added benefit — because I showed that I cared, I made lots of friends on our staff who are now willing to help in fundraising when I need them.”

3. Look beyond the usual funding suspects.

Arts groups look for arts funders. Senior groups for donors to the elderly. But sometimes it makes sense to look beyond the category in which your organization falls.

A small neighborhood organization heard that the Environmental Protection Agency had funding available for urban environmental projects. As they weren’t an environmental group, they easily might have dismissed this particular funder.

But with some research, the group discovered the EPA had funded vacant lot clean-ups similar to the programs they were already running. With a bit more detective work they discovered that garbage dumped in vacant lots frequently contained materials that the EPA would consider pollutants or even hazardous waste.

By understanding that vacant lot dumping was as much an environmental problem as it was a community development one, they were able to get funding from EPA to develop a more comprehensive program to prevent illegal dumping and clean up vacant lots.

4. Be creative about seeing the connections.

If your vision is too narrow, it’s easy to overlook opportunities.

A statewide organization located in the capital city ran a number of fee-based education programs for school kids. A prospective business donor only funded projects in the northern town in which it was located.

At first glance, there didn’t seem to be the opportunity for a match. But with a little more exploration, the business was pleased to donate the program fee and busing costs of a local school so that three fifth-grade classrooms were able to participate in this education program.

5. See where you fit in the big picture.

Locally-based organizations and nonprofits in small population states often have a hard time attracting regional or national funders. But if you can put your work into a much bigger framework, you may open doors that looked closed at first.

For example, an AIDS service organization from a small east coast city was alerted to a request for proposals from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Five grants would be awarded nationwide for prevention work with young people in minority communities.

At first this organization didn’t think they had a chance competing with major population centers like San Francisco or New York. But they knew they had one of the highest HIV infection rates in the U.S. and that many immigrants from countries with high incidences of AIDS settled there first before heading to big cities like NYC. By articulating their connection to the bigger picture, they were able to win one of the five grants.

6. Look at yourself through someone else’s eyes.

Have you seen the optical illusion of two faces and the vase? If you look at the image in black, it forms two profiles looking at one another. But if you look at the white space between the faces, you can see a vase. Some people see the faces right away but have a hard time seeing the vase. For others, it’s just the opposite.

A senior center had a small, drab thrift shop that didn’t raise much money. While it was located in a college town, the center never really considered it would be of interest to college students so it never bothered to connect.

When a new director was hired, she was able to see the possibilities in the thrift shop. She approached the fashion merchandising program at a local college and offered the thrift shop as a class project. The students were excited at the chance to gain some real merchandising experience and volunteered their time to design attractive new window and floor displays for the shop. (And of course, college students love second hand bargains.)

Not only did the thrift shop start raising a lot more money, but the students recruited their friends for other volunteer work at the senior center.

7. But don’t make it up.

While I urge you to be creative about finding new connections between potential donors and your organization, don’t try to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. It never benefits your organization, your donor or philanthropy to misrepresent the work you do. Don’t try to pass a program off as something it is not.

Your success in fundraising ultimately depends on your reputation as being worthy and trustworthy of support.

So get out those kaleidoscopes to start finding the possibility in your organization.

We invite you to share you stories of how you successfully reimagined your giving opportunities.

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A version of this article first appeared in Contributions Magazine.