How to Fix a Broken Nonprofit with Nicole Gagliardi
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Does your nonprofit seem to be just scraping by, even though everyone is working harder than ever? It's not just your organization. The nonprofit sector is in crisis, facing issues like shrinking revenue, chronic underfunding, staffing struggles, and increasing demands from the community. In this episode of The Small Nonprofit, strategic consultant Nicole Gagliardi examines the broken model and warns that the sector needs a major overhaul.
Nicole brings over 18 years of experience working in and alongside nonprofits. She offers a sober view of the sector's challenges and provides actionable insights on how organizations can start adapting. Whether you're a board member, executive director, or a dedicated staff member, you'll gain powerful knowledge to help you navigate the current nonprofit climate.
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Key Episode Highlights:
Don't sleepwalk into crisis: It's easy to become complacent about the challenges, but the sector is facing serious threats. Acknowledge the problems and be proactive about finding solutions.
Understand the big picture: Don't just focus on your organization; study wider sector trends to inform your approach.
Your budget is your strategy: If your strategic plan doesn't align with major shifts in your budget, it's time to reassess.
Small steps are still progress: Embrace "radical incrementalism" – make meaningful changes over time to drive deeper transformation.
Collaboration and shared resources: Consider pooling resources with other nonprofits to cut costs and improve services.
Don’t forget to become a supporter of our show!
Watch this episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/ujVXfd7qfmM
Links and Resources:
Connect with Nicole Gagliardi on Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolegagliardi1/
Connect with Maria on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mariario/
Support the show: https://www.buzzsprout.com/208666/supporters/new
Transcript:
00:00:00 Nicole: I think that the nonprofit governance structure can sometimes dilute the kind of bold leadership that we need, right? So when you have a board of 9, 10, 12, 15 people, it's really hard to get the kind of momentum that you need to drive change and to champion change in any kind of meaningful way. Like it's just everyone is coming from very different perspectives, has different sort of personal orientations and personal values may or may not be setting that aside at the organizational level. And so I think sometimes our leadership structures can hinder more than they help.
00:00:41 Maria: Hi friends. Ever wondered how you could turn your big ideas into results? I'm Maria Rio, your go-to guide for helping small nonprofits have real world impacts. Together, let's reimagine a better sector, tackle systemic issues, and yes, raise some serious cash. Welcome back to The Small Nonprofit, the podcast where your passion meets action.
00:01:12 Maria: Hi everyone, welcome back to The Small Nonprofit, or if it's your first time here, then welcome. If you're new, I post a new podcast episode every single week, and I talk to some of the most amazing guests in nonprofit. Today I have a really cool one for you, just like always, to talk about the sector as a whole, what we're doing well, what we're not doing so well, and I would love them to introduce themselves. Nick, can you introduce yourself, please?
00:01:41 Nicole: Hey, I'm Nicole Gagliardi. So I'm a governance consultant. I'm based in Ontario. I work with organizations right across Canada and the US. And I'm here to share some, I don't know, Maria, what is it, like some interesting-
00:01:59 Maria: Tips and tricks.
00:02:02 Nicole: Yeah. Some like really good insight around the issues nonprofits are facing, I think. It's a specialty.
00:02:08 Nicole: Well, today I kind of feel like this is my profit of doom message. This is like the message I share with a lot of boards and I always feel kind of like a big downer about it, but I think it's important to talk about.
00:02:21 Maria: Sometimes you need to, you know, be transparent with boards so they understand what's going on instead of just feeling like everything's good, approve the budget and not really understanding what's going on in the sector. But before we jump into that, I'd love to get a little bit more insight on what you do, how you do it, and how you started your nonprofit journey.
00:02:43 Nicole: Okay. Well, I've been doing governance work in different capacities for 18 years now, I realized. I joined my first board when I was 18. So you can do the math there. And I guess I started it in the nonprofit world, yeah, early in my career. I've been there for most of my career with little, little jaunts into the public sector. And I worked, early in my career, I worked in small organizations, back when everyone was sort of jumping from trillion contract to trillion contract, and I had about three part-time trillion contracts at a time after I came out of grad school.
00:03:22 Nicole: And then at some point, you know, I saw just the challenges of community-based organizations in accessing the resources that they need to do really important work. And so I made the decision to take a leap into philanthropy. And so I joined a community foundation and I stayed there for about eight years, which was a really interesting place to be because it allowed me to work with a large amount of organizations over a big, a big geographic region and to really understand what those organizations were dealing with and the kind of capacity building support they needed. That was mostly my role.
00:03:59 Nicole: And it also allowed me to work with other folks in the community foundation sector across Canada who were doing similar work and to really see some of the patterns in the sector, right? Some of the really common challenges that we sort of just take for granted and we just accept that these are just the way things have to be in the sector. And so that kind of gets into my brain a little bit. And keeps me up at night. And so eventually I decided to move into independent work and to try and deal with some of those more structural issues in a different way with organizations to help build capacity.
00:04:43 Maria: I find that so interesting because when I've been in-house, I'm always like, I'm going to stick out all these horrible issues and I'm going to force them to change somehow. Like either by tying a grant to a DEI initiative or stirring up shit at the board level, you know, just like really trying to get them to see like what you're doing is either harmful or just not going in the direction that we publicly say we're going. So I wonder if this, I guess, top down approach, like working right with the governance from a consultant perspective, makes them listen more.
00:05:23 Nicole: I mean, yeah, there's definitely times when I work with organizations. And I'm just, you know, I'm saying something that their ED has said to them 10 times, but it hits differently when it comes from outside, right? So that's just, I mean, I think that's has more to do with human nature than the sector in general. But yeah, I think there's so many people and I was one of them too, who I think the friendly term is intrapreneur.
00:05:50 Nicole: The not so friendly term is shit-disturber, I guess. But like people who are in inside organizations, agitating, working really hard to change the way things work. And I think that's so, so, so important. But I also think it's unfair to expect individuals and organizations to carry that burden, right? We, at some point, we need to be looking a bit broader and certainly governance is where that accountability lies.
00:06:15 Maria: So you've worked with a lot of organizations and I'm sure a lot of the trends and issues that you've seen are not gonna be news to people. But it might help to hear what those trends are, just in case people feel a little bit alone in facing some of those.
00:06:31 Nicole: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty stark out there right now, right? And I think the fact that we've been talking about them for a long time, I think has sort of inoculated us to the seriousness of what's happening in the sector right now. I think we've become kind of just complacent. We're like, oh yeah, it's always hard to get revenue, and oh yeah, people are always underpaid and overworked.
00:06:53 Nicole: But I think that the sector is really at a crisis point right now. And we see it. There's data coming out of organizations like Ontario Nonprofit Network, Imagine Canada and Canada Helps had a report recently. They're really ringing an alarm bell, like using really strong language like the ONN is talking about massive nonprofit closures in the next few years to chime in the Canada Helps report basically called for a wake up call. He was nicer about it. He said, he said, we need a healthy dose of realism, and a little less optimism.
00:07:30 Nicole: But what we're seeing is that it's harder and harder for organizations to get revenue, and particularly sustainable revenue, particularly for smaller organizations, right? So not only is the pie shrinking, but larger organizations are taking more of the revenue pie right now. And I don't mean that in a like a, there's nothing wrong with taking a piece of the pie. And anyway, I don't want to come at that from a scarcity perspective, but that's the reality for small nonprofits.
00:08:302 Nicole: We're seeing on the staffing front, a massive exodus, I think, out of the sector, which we're not capturing with FATA, but I see it happening anecdotally all the time. We know that we have massive equity issues with exploitation around like racialized, particularly racialized women and immigrant women in the nonprofit sector. We're underpaying people, we're overworking them. People are dealing with really toxic work environments.
00:08:27 Nicole: Organizations can't find people to do the work, so the people who are there are doing even more work. And then we look at what's happening on the demand side where community needs are becoming more complex. Demand is going up. The way that people live their lives has shifted pretty rapidly. And so their expectations for charities and nonprofits have changed.
00:08:52 Nicole: And so what all of this kind of like, you know, you can pull out all the different stats and some of them really are quite alarming, but what it all kind of boils down to is just that the business model that we've been using for the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years, as crappy as it was, it's now like, I think broken, it's done. It's not going to work anymore.
00:09:13 Maria: I think all these like rising pressures end up being like a triple or a quadruple edge sword because like you have more pressure on your expenses as people want higher salaries due to inflation, as cost goes up because of inflation and more people turn to you for services. And then on the revenue side, you have your smaller donors who have less and less disposable income and then your major donors who... they don't want to sell their stocks right now. They don't want to donate their stocks right now. Like they're not going to get the same tax advantage as if they wait and sit on it, right?
00:09:56 Maria: And additionally, we have the opportunity for drafts, right? Where people can just get a tax receipt right away, but still plan for the future and a legacy when right now our sector and kind of the world is more than a little bit on fire. I just don't know where we can go from here as a sector. Like it's kind of really frustrating and it makes me feel a little jaded. But it's hard to kind of get out of or like really get a grasp of why some of these things are happening.
00:10:26 Nicole: Yeah, I think it's, I mean, we could have a really long conversation about what some of those whys might be. Ultimately, I think what we need to do is acknowledge that it's going on, right? And I think one of the problems I'm seeing out there is that particularly boards don't have a strong sense of sector trends and what is happening in the sector. So organizations are not prepared for this context. So they're kind of struggling along doing sort of the same stuff.
00:10:59 Nicole: And I think that a lot of organizations are going to be in trouble. But I think we need to acknowledge that, yeah, this is happening. And there are no easy answers. But we actually, you know, we're not helpless. Right? Like we have agency, and we have agency as organizations, and we have agency as individuals, and we have agencies as sector too. And so I think, you know, the first step is just taking heed, like listening to that wake-up call. And the second is sort of like acknowledging like, yeah, this is messy. This is complex. We don't have to fix it all, but we do need to figure what we can do and make sure that we're doing those things.
00:12:11 Maria: I almost like I get really mad at board members, but also, I understand why you wouldn't understand this. This isn't your sector. You don't have any lived or professional experience here. It's like me walking into a doctor's office and then trying to run it and it doesn't make any sense because I don't know anything about medicine. So, I do get really frustrated because it is a very large legal and moral responsibility.
00:12:11 Maria: But one that they don't really understand, like even from the get-go, like they don't understand the like, well, not everyone, of course, but like a lot of them don't understand what is a working board versus a policy board versus your responsibility as a board and how involved you should be in operations versus not. So that's a little bit frustrating as well. But I do like your point of at least talking about it and getting it, acknowledge would be a start.
00:12:11 Nicole: Yeah, and I think we've done such a terrible job of preparing board members for their roles. There are people who come to boards, and they've worked in the sector, or they have a lot of experience in governance elsewhere, you know, and they have a better sense of what is what, but we have this widespread practice of just inviting people onto our boards, not giving them the training that they need, not giving them the support that they need, and then getting frustrated with the fact that they're not giving our sector the leadership that we need.
00:13:17 Nicole: And I think there's a lot of criticisms that are very fair when it comes to nonprofit governance. But I think that we also, you know, to my point about our agency, I think we also need to accept that we could do a lot better in supporting people to be able to fulfill their roles effectively.
00:13:38 Maria: Is the chicken and the egg situation, because the board chooses the ED and sometimes they just pick directly from the board to be an ED and then that ED of course fails because the board didn't know what to look for and cannot train future board members. So is it a chicken and the egg situation?
00:13:59 Nicole: Yeah, I mean, it is in some ways, like what came first. Right? Poorly supported boards or poorly supported organizations. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, we just need to acknowledge it's not working. And how do we like, just interrupt that? Right? How do we make sure that boards have, you know, like we can be more intentional about how we bring people onto boards. We can be more intentional about how we support people. We can stop kidding ourselves about the level of knowledge or experience that people have or need.
00:14:37 Nicole: And we can also expand governance beyond the board, which I think is a really important piece too, right? We put so much pressure on boards when a lot of governance already does and could be happening outside of boards as well. So yeah, chicken or egg, to me, it's like, doesn't really matter. We just need to, we just need to like raise a hen, right? That's a weird analogy.
00:15:02 Maria: Picking, raising their hands. But okay, so we have the board as an issue, and then we have like staffing and expenses and all these other pieces. It is hard not to feel a little bit overwhelmed and know where to start. So what can organizations do to kind of get a grasp on maybe their specific, you know, what issues are in your backyard and then in the broader sector?
00:15:30 Nicole: I think the first place to start is by looking at what are you already noticing in your organization? So I think most organizations are already feeling so many of these forces at play because they're struggling to like they've got vacant roles or they have staff who are probably going to leave because they haven't had a raise in 10 years and they were underpaid to begin with. You know, or they're donor revenue is becoming more expensive to raise money, like these sorts of things organizations are already dealing with.
00:16:07 Nicole: So I think it's important to notice where you're feeling those pressures and to take the time to step back and look at the big picture, right? So every organization is trying to deal with all of these things on their own. And we need to understand, you know, if you're an organization that's starting a fundraising program for the first time. You really need to understand that a package of best practices from 2015 isn't going to work today because the landscape is so different.
00:1641 Nicole: So look at the landscape, understand what's going on, look at the trends, and then you need to look at it from two perspectives. You need a risk management perspective, right? So like worst case scenario, what might we be facing? And then you need a problem solving perspective. So what can we do? To actually run a workshop for nonprofit leaders who are like, trying to make important leadership decisions in the face of complex issues.
00:17:09 Nicole: And what I found is really helpful is that we break it down into sort of three layers of governance, right? So you have your structural level, you've got your organizational level, and then you've got your personal level. And you will feel those constraints or those forces that play in each level, right? So
00:17:29 Nicole: But you also have agency at each level. So we actually go through a structured process of looking at like at the personal level, at the organizational level, at the structural level. What are like brainstorm all of the possible approaches that you could take? What are the levers that you could pull to either deal with the issue or to position your organization in a better way? And then you can, from there you can actually look at, okay, well, this is feasible, this is feasible. That's maybe not something we can do right now and build out an action plan.
00:18:00 Nicole: So it takes that really complex, big external issue that you're like, oh, nonprofit compensation, it just sucks. And there's nothing we can do about it. And you actually, you get into a level of analysis, informed by that landscape where you can say, actually, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this, or we could do this. And these two things we think are going to be most effective right now. So it's not pretty. Like I said, there's no easy answer.
00:18:29 Nicole: And I think sometimes we think if we can't just fix it all, then there's nothing to be done. But I think there's something to be said for small steps, and to continually just make a choice, take action and keep moving forward.
00:18:46 Maria: Something that I've heard you say before that I love and want to share with the audience is if your strategic plan is not accompanied by a very different budget from previous years, then you're not exactly doing it right. So maybe you can say the phrase right and then chat about that as well.
00:19:04 Nicole: Yeah, I'm terrible at quoting myself, but basically, yeah, your budget is your most important, I call it your most important policy and strategy document, right? So if your budget doesn't change after you write your strategic plan, then you've just wasted your time, right? So your resources really, really need to align with the direction that you want to go in. And so many organizations go through strategic planning. This is a whole other conversation we could have, Maria, but they start strategic planning, but they don't actually want to change anything.
00:19:40 Nicole: And so if you look at your budget before you start planning and you say, what can we actually change here? And the answer is nothing. Then I really think you need to be thinking deeply about, you know, I mean, there are strategic changes you can make even with a status quo budget, but the budget lines themselves will need to shift for sure. And I think that, yeah, it's that whole resource alignment piece is really important.
00:20:08 Maria: I just wanted to name it because it is something that is within people's scope, right? That is something that you can change to actually make an impact in the organization on compensation or increase demand or anything like that. I also feel like there's some people who are definitely aware of the issue, whether that's our listeners, for example, I'm sure, but board members as well. Other donors, you know, other stakeholders in the community. Why is there such a little lack of urgency around this?
00:20:49 Nicole: I think part of it is what I mentioned earlier, where we feel like we've been living this reality for a long time. But you know, it's like, what is that? The frog in the coal. I don't know. Something about boiling a frog, right? If things sort of happen slowly, it's easy to get used to it. It's easy to get used to it, right? And you lose that feeling of urgency.
00:21:12 Maria: Yeah, I think I know what you're talking about. It's like the frog doesn't know that it's in trouble until after the water is boiling because it's slowly the temperature is changing little by little.
00:21:19 Nicole: Yeah, anyone who hears this is gonna be cringing.
00:21:25 Maria: Sorry.
00:21:26 Nicole: This is too literal of a conversation. Yeah, anyway, I'll turn out to use metaphors. So I think part of it is that we're just used to it. And I think the other piece is that it feels disempowering, right? There aren't easy answers. There will be some organizations that will, even if they, you know, try different, like, transition their organization to different revenue models, different impact models, different staffing models, there will be organizations that have to shut down. That's going to happen. That really sucks.
00:21:58 Nicole: The point is, it feels overwhelming. How do you, you know, how do you find more money for your staff when all of your expenses have gone up, your insurance costs have gone up, your office costs have gone up, your program costs have gone up. And you don't know even if you could find the money this year, are you going to find it for the next 10 years, right? To increase your... Like that's a real conversation that nonprofit leaders are having. And it's really tough.
00:22:27 Nicole: So it feels disempowering because you think there's nothing I can really do. And that's where I bring it back to that agency piece. Even in that situation where you genuinely don't and cannot find the money, you can give staff paid time off, right? You can maybe find money for benefits. You can focus on boosting, you know, bringing their job title in alignment with what they're really doing so that they're better positioned to move on somewhere else in their career, right? Like there's a lot of things when you actually start pulling it apart, there's a lot of things you can do. And so not being able to fix it all is a really bad excuse, but it's really hard to see past that.
00:23:07 Maria: I love that example because when I think of, you know, like, we don't have a fundraising, anything, we don't have any structure, we don't have a staff person, we don't have anything, right? While you're not going to have a fundraising structure in portfolio and donors by next month, maybe not even by next year, but what are the small steps so you don't get completely overwhelmed at the challenge that you're facing.
00:23:33 Maria: So maybe you start collecting emails, maybe you create a website or ask someone to run an event for you that doesn't require additional staff capacity. So yeah, I love the incrementalism of it, but I wonder if there's something that sector leaders, so like maybe big organizations that are well-funded that have a lot of political attention that, you know, are one percenters, what they could do more of to support the sector more broadly.
00:24:10 Nicole: Yeah, I think that, thank you for mentioning that, because I think it's really important that, you know, organizations can do quite a bit. But again, these are issues that are bigger than any one organization, right? So when I say that we have agency, it's like we have agency as a sector too, and we really need to think about it from that perspective. So I mean, large organizations, I think, could be leading the way in changing expectations for donors, for example, around messaging and giving, right? Like unrestricted gifts and that sort of thing.
00:24:47 Nicole: I think I'm always hesitant to go back to, I think we very quickly go, oh, if only funders would blah, blah, blah. But the reality is like, yeah, funders have a role to play. Funders, they know what they need to do. We don't even need to talk about it. I've been in that world. There's so many, so many very quick changes that could be made that would be total game changers. So that's, you know, that is what it is.
00:25:19 Nicole: But I think we could see more organizations doing really innovative things like around sharing costs and around shared thoughts and around collective fundraising and these sorts of things that, again, like the models we've been using aren't going to keep working. So what if we looked outside of our organizations and looked collectively for new models? I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
00:25:41 Maria: I actually don't understand why we don't like have an HR department for three organizations. Like it just makes so much sense.
00:25:54 Nicole: Yeah. I mean, there's, you know, governance tendencies in the sector where everyone wants to own their own thing. And we could get into conversations about risk and all of these things. But ultimately, I think these are the kinds of solutions we need to figure out because, you know, I work with organizations that tend to have five, 10, 15 staff. They don't have HR people, they don't have HR expertise, right? They've got really amazing staff, but, but that piece is missing. And it's a really critical piece for any kind of an organization. So how do we, yeah, how do we do that in a way that is, like, feasible for this for the sector?
00:26:37 Maria: Any of this has to do with kind of the resistance to change? Like is it interwoven here as like, paralysis, like it's so big, I don't know where to start. Or is it, you know, I don't know enough to know that I don't know something. Or what is it that keeps people in that, oh, we don't want to change mentality?
00:27:01 Nicole: It's a good question. I think there is, in many cases, an unspoken conservatism in the sector, right? Like we're a charity mindset sector. And so change is about risk and innovation. It's about adaptation. It's about exploration. Those are not those are luxuries in the nonprofit sector. That's how we look at it, right. So I think there's a permission piece, like we don't give ourselves permission to do that. And we accept those constraints really readily.
00:27:37 Nicole: I think that the nonprofit governance structure can sometimes dilute the kind of bold leadership that we need. Right? So when you have a board of 9, 10, 12, 15 people, it's really hard to get the kind of momentum that you need to drive change and to champion change in any kind of meaningful way. Like it's just everyone is coming from very different perspectives, has different sort of personal orientations and personal values, may or may not be setting that aside, you know, at the organizational level.
00:28:10 Nicole: And so I think sometimes our leadership structures can hinder more than they help. And I, yeah, just I think as a sector, culturally, we're just... we're too focused on doing and we like doing is the most important thing always. And we really kind of, we don't value thinking and reflection in a way that I think we probably should. And not to say that doing isn't important, of course it's important, but I think we put too much emphasis there. And so we don't stop to think and plan as often as we need to.
00:28:46 Maria: I think that's a really, really, really strong point, I'm sure felt by many. Because I've thought about that before, it's like in corporate or in other sectors, like people will shut down for a full day to do a staff retreat and talk about what's coming up and plan and do things together. In a nonprofit, we might have some informal staff gatherings where you're grabbing drinks after work or whatever, but when does the organization shut down their programming to collectively think about what do we want to change? What do we need to do to actually move towards our mission? Is the mission still relevant?
00:29:29 Maria: And are we still actively moving towards it? To think about those broader issues, like even with a gift acceptance policy, for example. I know it sounds really small, but it's something that can have a huge impact, not only on your fundraising, but on the way that programs perceive their role at the organization and their relationship to community and their relationship to fundraising and the board. So these are conversations that I feel need to be had on a broader scale to bring people along in.
00:30:01 Maria: Also get their ideas because when you're just having these conversations at a senior leadership level or board level, you're not getting everybody's input and they might have some really good solutions. But also to just build that camaraderie-ship.
00:30:20 Nicole: Yeah, it's something I'm hearing from boards a lot recently, actually, that there's a lack of, not that there's, I don't want to come out from a deficit, people really want to have that sense of connection and that sort of like team vibe. We don't always have enough boards and even in organizations where, and I work primarily in organizations with small teams, even when you have...You could have five people working together every day and still not have that sense of collaboration or trust or transparency and reciprocity simply because people's heads are down all the time.
00:31:05 Nicole: People are going full out all the time. And how can you survive that way? How can you survive without rest? You can't, and organizations can't. And when I talk about we need new business models, we need models that create space for that. I think that's one of the most fundamental things that we can shift in our organizations.
00:31:30 Maria: Something that I was thinking of while you were talking about, you know, that connection piece is connection, good culture, high staff salaries, your ED being well-rested. Those things don't happen by accident at any organization. So it's not like you walk in, you get a new role and everybody's well paid. And that's always been the case there, right? Like it took someone actively moving the needle for it to be that way. So yeah, it's not by accident. It requires a lot of work and it requires probably some pushback on policies or people who may not be as far along as you are, but I just want to name that as well.
00:32:18 Nicole: Yeah, you mentioned use the word incremental or incrementalism earlier. And I think that's another thing that kind of gets a bad rap, you know, because we're always, we wanna talk about radical change. And we think that radical change means sweeping fundamental all at once, rapid change. But radical change is just change that gets to the root of an issue. And you can have radical change that is incremental.
00:32:46 Nicole: And in fact, when we kind of like, when we start to feel like, oh, we can't do it incrementally, then we're creating a barrier for ourselves because humans are not capable in most cases of rapid wholesale change, systems and organizations aren't equipped for that either. So we need to embrace what I think of as radical incrementalism, right? It's like, you know the heart of what you're trying to do, but you're willing to do it step by step. Even then it's not perfect, but you're moving in the right direction.
00:33:22 Maria: I think our sector is in such a state of crisis that even stepping towards the right direction is radical, which is hard to stomach, but it's true. Like making sure that you have a really, you know, well-rested ED, for example, that's pretty radical. Like most organizations are not thinking through that lens of like staff burnout or retention or this person is a whole person and should be treated that way. They're not just something I can exploit until the next ED comes along. So I think that that can actually be quite radical on its own.
00:34:08 Nicole: Yeah, and I think we have this sense of like, so much of nonprofit culture is sort of moralistic, right? So when we have these conversations, we're like, Oh, wouldn't that be a nice thing to do for someone? Like, oh, it would be if we could do that, that would be so nice, because that would be a nice right thing to do. But unfortunately, we have to be, you know, prudent governors, and therefore, we cannot. And so when we focus on that sort of moralistic bent, we forget that actually it's really good for your organization to have, you know, to let your ED of 10 years go on sabbatical for three months and to pay her.
00:34:45 Nicole: That would be really, really good for your organization because the cost of not doing that is going to be worse, right? It's going to be damaging for your organization. And so, yeah, we just don't bring that perspective often enough. It's the, you know, it's good to do things for the right reasons but we don't even need the right results because we have a really strong business case for making these changes in the sector.
00:35:14 Maria: So we talked a little bit about trends earlier when it comes to donors and fundraising and governance, but I think those trends are less new, but again, like people are used to it now. But a new trend that I'm seeing now is how many MTED positions there are. Like people are completely burned out, even if they've been there for eight years, they can no longer do it. Even if they've been there for like one year, many of them are past the breaking point by then. So I wonder if you've seen that as well and your thoughts on that.
00:35:49 Nicole: Yeah, typically I don't end up working with organizations that don't have an ED, just because that's usually a crisis situation that boards are trying to deal with and they're not going through. Strap planning or governance capacity building at that point. But I work with a lot of organizations who have just gone through a challenging process of recruiting a new ED. So I see it from that side, where often there is interim leadership, because the board wasn't prepared for an ED exit, right?
00:36:21 Nicole: So, you know, you have people who've been in their roles for many, many years, and the board had no succession in place. So they're caught off guard. So they end up slapping together some kind of interim leadership. And then they have to go through the search process. And boards are just not well equipped for that kind of intensive HR thing. I've talked to a couple of board chairs recently who've been doing this process. And they describe it as a full-time job. And they already have full-time jobs. And the stakes are really high. It's really hard to find leadership.
00:36:56 Nicole: And I think more and more people who are coming up in the sector who would have maybe naturally been stepping into those roles are saying like, oh, no, no, no, no, thanks. I can't tell you how many of my own contemporaries have, myself included, left executive level roles because it's a raw deal, right? No, I can't have the impact I want to have. I can't have my health or my well-being or my mental health. I can't have decent compensation to support my family? Like, no.
00:37:30 Nicole: So yeah, I think we've been talking about a leadership crisis in the sector for a long time. And we always looked at as a demographic issue. But it is absolutely a culture issue. And you know, compensation is a part of that. But I think compensation follows culture. So I think we're going to see more and more of that. And I think we'll see more and more of it at the board level, too. I think there's fewer and fewer people who are willing to do board work.
00:37:55 Maria: That's true. Board members are also completely burned out.
00:37:58 Nicole: Yes.
00:37:59 Maria: Okay, I want to say something positive.
00:38:03 Nicole: Yeah. I told you I would be the prophet of doom.
00:38:05 Maria: No, no, no. It's just what happens when you put us in a room together. It's like, what is happening? But I want to say something positive. I'm actually doing a training that a corporate sponsor of a bunch of nonprofits approached me to run so that their nonprofits are actually better equipped to do community-centric fundraising.
00:38:28 Nicole: Amazing.
00:38:29 Maria: And I love that because it's the funder taking initiative because they've actually hired someone who used to do fundraising and was an ED. It's the funder taking initiative to better resource the staff in a different manner that isn't just giving money, which of course giving money really helps. Please give us money. But like that piece of skill building, knowledge sharing, bringing them together to solve some broader issues outside of their own organization. I thought that was really interesting.
00:39:02 Maria: And I think it's largely because this person was in the nonprofit sector and then came to corporate. So I just wonder if there was like more opportunities that we took to educate our donors and talk about innovative solutions like that where, Hey, we really need, you know, for example, a fundraising coach. And this is an idea my partner had for my business. He's like, you should get a whole bunch of food banks together from across the country. And then maybe you can actually support all of them with our fundraising strategy because they have such similar–
00:39:40 Nicole: Yes, yes, yes.
00:39:41 Maria: And they don't have to compete or feel, you know, feel like they're competing or feel any sort of way. And I'm just so interested in those kinds of innovative new things that people are doing. And this corporate really inspired me. So I just wanted to share that as a feel good moment.
00:39:58 Nicole: I love that. And I think that's the kind of thing we need more of, right? Because we can't expect every organization to do it on their own. And yeah, I mean, I mentioned at the get go, I worked in the community foundation world. There's like over 200 community foundations in Canada. And it builds capacity, just having a network in and of itself builds capacity, right? Because you have that shared starting place and you can share resources. Like you don't need, every organization doesn't need to come up with their own, like, yeah, donor resources or comms materials or whatever, right? We don't need that. So I think there's better ways we can leverage networks. And I think it's a really important place for us to be looking.
00:40:44 Maria: Something that we did at a pastoral too was our team met with a competitor orgs team to talk about how we were implementing community centric fundraising principle by principle. So like, what are you doing well? What can we learn from you? And what are we doing well? What can you learn from us to push those internal policies and donor relations where they needed to be? And that was really good too, like that collaboration and working outside of your organization to actually move something forward. It felt great.
00:41:19 Nicole: Yeah, that's fantastic. And I think we often talk about things in this abstract way, like here's 10 principles, right? Implement them. And we don't always give people the opportunity to or the support to understand what that means tactically. And so I know in my work, I really tried to. I use a lot of theory in my work, it is always married to tactics, right? Because the two have to go hand in hand. And so everything that I do has very practical implications because it's not enough to tell people, oh, you need this approach to governance. It's like, you need this approach to governance and here's how you're gonna do it step by step, right? And sharing that, you know, sharing that work, that burden of figuring out the how-to is so important.
00:42:11 Maria: I think if our to leave message would be to share as much as possible outside of your own nonprofit, because they can only get better for us as a sector. What about you? Any final thoughts?
00:42:24 Nicole: Yeah, I'll just, I guess I'll just go back to, I mean, I've already said it a few times, but just that idea of agency, right? Like we have more agency than we give ourselves credit for in the sector. And I think we really need to be thoughtful about putting that to work.
00:42:39 Maria: Nic, where can people find you if they want to continue the conversation, pick your brain?
00:42:44 Nicole: Yeah, come on over to LinkedIn. That's where I hang out. That's where we all hang out.
00:42:50 Maria: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Thank you for all your insight and for sharing the trends that you're seeing, but also challenging us to be a little bit more innovative and a little bit more creative in solving those in our organizations and as a sector.
00:43:07 Nicole: Yeah. Thanks so much, Maria. Always happy to chat with you.
00:43:09 Maria: And thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Small Nonprofit Podcast. As always, you can see our lovely faces on our YouTube channel. And yes, go out and share with different organizations, promote an abundance mindset, and let's see what we can do to address the issues that we've inherited in a lot of cases. But thank you again for listening and bye for now.
00:43:37 Maria: Thank you for listening to another episode of The Small Nonprofit. If you want to continue the conversation, feel free to connect with our guests directly or find me on LinkedIn. Let's keep moving money to mission and prioritizing our well-being. Bye for now.
