Have you ever wanted to move up in your nonprofit, but seen that people with MBAs seemed to be getting the top jobs?

WHY IS THAT?

This post will tell you why. And what happens when people with no nonprofit experience try to do nonprofit executive level jobs.

In the last two jobs I had, the nonprofits were RUINED by two managers with MBAs who came from corporate backgrounds with absolutely NO nonprofit experience.

One Executive Director with an MBA (coming from the insurance industry) came on and fired EVERYONE, going through 32 employees in 2 years like a combine harvester. Then because there were too few people working at the agency, one of the confidential domestic violence shelters turned into a brothel.

Another nonprofit CEO (coming from the compliance sector in the healthcare industry) with a brand new MBA stole $2,000 from the agency, lied and said he didn’t know what he was doing, then he hired and fired another fundraiser, and then another fundraiser, and then stole $44,000 from the agency and finally stepped down, after destroying all of the credibility the agency had built up from its LAST scandal.

Aside from lying and stealing, these “leaders” had never been on the ground with programs, and to compound that they were distant from programs, never visiting the program site, or working to become closer to program staff. They also did not have passion for the mission or strategic vision on where the nonprofit should go. They did not approve budgets. They were paranoid and lashing out at people to the point that they would miss meetings with you for 5 months and you would actually be grateful that you didn’t have to deal with them. The people they DID meet with would come out of their office looking tearful and would lock themselves in the bathroom to cry.

My boss used to ask me to write down everything I did during a day, and to write down all of my contacts, and used to say that “everyone is replaceable”  which naturally made me afraid that they just wanted to replace me, and eventually they did just that.

So basically, now if I hear someone has an MBA and wants to go lead a nonprofit with no nonprofit experience, I’m like:

Does this sound familiar? Has this ever happened to you or someone you know?

Maybe Your boss has Obsessive measurement disorder

I was talking with my friend Sabrina the other night and ranting about the new MBA nonprofit leaders with no nonprofit experience and how they want to reduce everything to metrics, reduce people to digits on the bottom line, to treat everyone and everything as replaceable.

She works in state government, and she said, this new corporatism is happening in government as well, the MBAs try to measure things, but they don’t have the academic background to do it. They really don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t know how you cannot measure certain things that matter.

“But Sabrina!” I said facetiously. “Surely, if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter!”

And she said “RIGHT.”

What’s the solution? Well, she said, when they start to bug you about measurement, you need to tell them, “EXCUSE ME, Do you have a statistics and program analysis background? No? Then don’t try to tell us what to measure, chump!”

The new managerialism, OR Why your boss has an MBA and NO nonprofit experience

Alison Bernstein writes over on the National Endowment for the Arts blog writes: “New managerialism” appears to be the catch-all phrase to cover a shift that transforms knowledgeable leadership into decisive managing.

What used to be a prerequisite for a candidate—namely, knowledge of the company or the sector—is now a liability. It’s not an advantage to know the terrain or the people who inhabit it. If you do, you are likely to be less, not more, effective as a manger.

You won’t be able to make hard decisions that could affect the lives and livelihoods of your employees. Or, if you know the field and have been a part of it, you are regarded as “part of the old guard,” too tied to the past to make the proper, tough reform decisions. New managers are often prized for their outsiderness to the culture of the institution so what used to be a liability in a search process (what does he/she know about whatever the topic, public education? nonprofits? philanthropy?) is now a marker of independence and the ability to see things with a fresh eye.

This phenomenon of choosing managers from the business sector for key philanthropic leadership roles has been growing in the past few years.”

So, as if you weren’t mad already, I give you the culmination of all of this creeping corporate efficiency. You can’t get ahead in your nonprofit, NOT because you’re not good at your job, but because you’re not inexperienced enough.

You’re not an outsider! That’s what’s wrong with you!

You didn’t work in the corporate world.

Therefore, you’re unfit to lead a nonprofit.

WHAAA? This is the kind of crazy logic that allows you to have a boss without any nonprofit staff experience whatsoever.

What can we do to combat this disturbing trend? Should we insist on having a staff advocate on the board? Should we unionize our nonprofits? Should we make sure that we follow the adage, nothing for us without us? meaning, people that you serve should be on the board too?

What do you see as the solution? Please leave a comment.

Oh, so now you been passed over by someone with an MBA originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 17, 2012.

But on the grant requirements page, you see that they want statistics on a whole range of things that you have no way of measuring. Now they tell you that if you can’t measure it, they can’t make sure you’re using their money wisely, THEREFORE you won’t get the grant.

Why this is wrong

If a kid gets an A in math, even though you tutored him, can your nonprofit really take credit for that? No, because, as I’ve written before, there’s too much noise in the system. So many other things could have caused that. His parents could have given him a homework space. He could have formed a study group with friends. There are lots of things that could have affected why his grades improved.

If you clean up a stream, you can say, “We cleaned 5.6 miles of stream” and a grantor might deem this a useful activity. But what if you don’t categorize the type of waste you dredged up? What if you didn’t weigh it and measure it enough? And what about the rest of the stream? Is it really going to make a difference to clean this section of a very long stream? Aren’t you just putting a bandaid on the problem unless you also do a public awareness campaign about not littering? But where is the money to market that public awareness campaign? Foundations don’t fund marketing!

If you help a woman escape from a domestic violence situation, you cannot measure the ripple effect it has on her children, on her family, or on her future. Your typical domestic violence agency cannot keep track of what happens to its participants 3-4 or 5 years down the line. They don’t have the resources to keep checking in with people. And again, too much noise in the system. What if she got a job but then went back to school? What if she went back to her abuser? Can your nonprofit take the blame or take the credit for any of that?

What I’m trying to say here is:

Real, lasting change cannot be reduced to a single metric like overhead or numbers of people “served”. Changing a culture or an institution is typically too sloppy, random, never-ending, and elusive to be captured by a mathematical formula or metric.

This post is a response to Alison Bernstein’s Metrics Mania post over at the National Endowment for the Arts blog. Alison has a fantastic writing style so I am going to be quoting liberally from her article here. She works at the Ford Foundation, and she talks about current trends in grantmaking, what she’s noticed, and the historical context of grant makers trying to solve social problems. And everything she says is true.

So, how does this relate to you?

Alison writes:

“Coercive accountability” . . . is the idea that an organization and its grants can only be effective when it arrays all the data that are known or can be measured by a metric and make decisions based on that metric. But the metric by its very nature only measures what can be measured and thus it is a proxy or an incomplete indicator of what is actually happening.”

Want more things to get mad about?

Okay.

Ever heard of Coercive analytics? Alison Bernstein says:

I want here to focus on the process applicants are being asked to undertake to get a grant. This new process requires them to draft and re-draft proposals so that they fit the philanthropist’s sense of what works or should work in any given setting. As one grantee anonymously put it, “Foundations have become more focused on developing pre-set portfolios of projects, managing risks, and producing outcomes rather than listening to communities… with their new strategies and staff, foundations are increasingly treating NGOs like ours not as innovators but as contractors who are hired to deliver donors’ visions of what needs to be done.”

So, basically, funders are going to tell you how to solve the problem, with NO on the ground experience. They will tell you what outcomes you should be looking for, and what to measure, so their investors can feel like they invested in the right thing. This is BEYOND wrong. And this is where grantmaking is going.

You know, I won’t front like I’m better than that. I did this too, BEFORE I KNEW BETTER.

Hold up.

I was volunteering in Indonesia in 2003. I volunteered in mobile health clinics in the poorest slums of Jakarta. I had NO IDEA what Indonesians really needed, but I decided, before I got there, that they needed condoms. But when  I got there, on the ground preparing medicines for people in the clinics, I saw what was REALLY hurting people was lack of access to clean water. That was where all of their diseases were coming from. Grantors and funders who wish to give top-down dictums about what the problem is and how it should be solved are making the same grave mistake that I made, except MUCH MUCH BIGGER.

As I’ve written before, this is why strategic philanthropy is insulting. It’s saying that we, the little people, with the immediate experience of the problem, do not know what it is, nor how to solve it, as well as people who live 1,000 miles away from the problem, and maybe cracked a book once that talked about it.

Here’s what I suggest.

If you REALLY want to measure nonprofit effectiveness, measure how well the nonprofit is treating its workers.

What is the turnover rate? What is the employee retention rate?

What steps do leaders take when they find a subordinate has made a mistake?

Who is allowed to make mistakes?

Is there a budget for employee education?

How do the staff feel about working there? Do they get health insurance? Do they get paid time off?

Do they stay for a year and go somewhere else because of senior leadership or bad pay?

When we measure this, we are measuring impact. Suddenly, charity leaders realize they are being watched, and will pull up their socks.

It’s cruel to expect nonprofit workers to work as hard as for profit workers with far fewer resources and absolutely no job security or any pay for performance bonuses.

What do you think?

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Are you being forced to measure something unmeasurable? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 14, 2012.

Get Schooled! In online Fundraising!

Thanks to Claire Kerr (@snotforprofit on Twitter), I met Noelle and Laura at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. They came all the way from The SickKids Foundation in Toronto, Canada for the conference. I was hugely curious about their jobs, what they’d learned so far, and measurements for their success in online fundraising. One of the things I learned right off the bat is that it’s actually illegal to sell mailing addresses in Canada. So they have different constraints than American fundraisers do. Also, their tax codes are different, so people often have different reasons for giving.

Without further ado, here’s the interview!

1. How did you get into fundraising/social media for nonprofits?

Noelle: SickKids Foundation is my first foray into fundraising. During my maternity leave, I decided that I wanted to find a role that would help combine my experience and passion for marketing with my desire (as a new mom) to help kids. SickKids fit the bill and I haven’t looked back.

Laura: I started my career at SickKids Foundation as an intern in the communications department. I managed the publications portfolio for my first three years and then transitioned into a digital role. The foundation of social and digital storytelling is based on the same principles of traditional communications – it’s another channel, and one with some unique and exciting challenges.

2. What metrics measurement tools do you use for your social media campaigns?

As a non-profit, we have to be particularly mindful of where we invest our donor dollars. To date, we use free social media monitoring tools. like Facebook insights, channel stats from YouTube, the Flickr pro account stats and several Twitter tools like Hootsuite and Twilerts. We always use Google Analytics, too.

We’ve been given the opportunity to test the Sysomos tool for a month, which we are testing with our new Healthy & Happy campaign -www.dothehappy.com.

3. What are some issues you have with donor acquisition and retention?

As a not for profit, we are constantly challenged with driving new donor acquisition at a reasonable cost per dollar. We carefully evaluate the ROI on all of our programs to ensure we are bringing in donors that will deliver value and ultimately support our mission.

In terms of retention, we have invested in a sophisticated database to help us segment donors into different streams of communication so they receive content that interests them most. It’s a Blackblaud donor relationship management system. We’ve affectionately nicknamed it KYDs – Know Your Donors

4. What have you found is the best strategy for identifying and cultivating donors online?

Acquisition in the digital space is something we are still learning. We are testing new strategies to acquire warm leads to build our email lists and then we eventually hope to convert these individuals to donors. We are trying some engagement tactics followed by a series of introduction emails. We are also planning on testing some gaming and contesting.

As part of our most recent campaign (www.dothehappy.com), we are gathering email addresses through: story submissions (video, text, photo), lunch purchases and free education event ticket sign ups.

5. What are some email marketing strategies that you’ve found that helps people give?

As with all of our marketing strategies – test, learn, then tweak. Our approach is to continually optimize by applying a test and learn strategy. Test subject lines, asks, copy, images etc. to drive increased donations.

Email software: We are currently investigating different email deployment options.

We have certain limitations with our current email system, which is why we are exploring new options. Our learnings in this area are minimal. We have noticed that any email subject line or header in an e-newsletter that offers a value-add to our readers has a higher click-through rate. A recipe always performs well.

6. Do you personally give to charity? Which charity, if so?

We both make regular contributions to SickKids Foundation. The cause, children’s health, is inspiring. When anyone at the Foundation has a rough day, we make an extra effort to walk the halls of the Hospital and see the bravery and courage of the children within. It reminds us of our vision: Healthier Children. A Better World.

We both also donate to other causes.

7. What advice would you give to people who want to get more money through email or social media for their charities?

Same answer as #5. Try lots of new things on a smaller scale and roll out on a larger scale when you find success. Don’t be afraid to try new things and don’t be afraid to fail.

We’ve discovered social media isn’t a great fundraising tool but it’s a great communications channel to speak about fundraising initiatives. While you might not collect donations through the actual social media channels, you are building valuable relationships and those relationships do result in increased engagement and donations.

Bios
Noelle: At SickKids, Noelle is responsible for the planning, development and execution of the Foundation’s acquisition marketing activities. This includes traditional fundraising programs, digital acquisition, symbolic giving and the SickKids Lottery. Noelle has been at SickKids for four years.

Prior to joining SickKids, Noelle spent nine years at Bell Canada in a variety of senior marketing positions. She has broad experience in mass advertising, direct & digital marketing, product launches, events & sponsorship and CRM.

Noelle moved over to the client side after spending the first four years of her career at Grey (Advertising) Interactive. Noelle is an active member of the Canadian Marketing Association. She currently sits on the NFP council and has been a judge of the annual CMA awards for the past six years.

Laura: Laura Bradley is a cause-focused communicator and marketer specializing in digital communications and publications. With a background in communications and journalism, and an interest in innovative ways to tell stories, working in the digital space seemed like a natural choice.

Laura is the digital communications specialist for SickKids Foundation, a Toronto-based non-profit that raises funds on behalf of The Hospital for Sick Children. In this role, she is the subject matter expert in digital communications and provides counsel and guidance to her colleagues to support fundraising goals and campaigns. In addition, she oversees content creation and community building for the Foundation’s websites and social media channels.

It’s a privilege for Laura to work for an organization that is committed to improving the health and well-being of children. She is excited to continue to support the Foundation’s fundraising goals and the implementation of its digital strategy. When she steps out from behind her computer or smartphone, you can find Laura in the downward dog position or trying not to burn down the kitchen while baking.

Hope you learned something about online fundraising that you didn’t know about before, and if you have any further questions for Noelle or Laura, just leave a comment!

[INTERVIEW] 8 Questions Answered about Online Fundraising! originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 10, 2012.

You’re writing a grant.

You’re stuck.

How do you show the funder the magnitude of the need?

Read on!

Or what if you’re the communications person?

If you serve vulnerable populations and you can’t put pictures of the people you really serve in your annual report?

You’re stuck for pictures to put in your annual report,

Well, here’s a free source of stats and maps to make your cause more compelling.

What is this tool?

It’s called Texas Connects. Obviously it’s not available everywhere yet. But if you’re one of the 75,000 nonprofits in Texas, you’re in luck!

If you’re working at a community foundation, you might consider putting together something like this for your state, combining 2010 census data and google maps to show areas of greatest need.

It will help your grantees make their case to other foundations and it can help your program officers and boards make more educated decisions as well.

Homeless shelters (marked by dots) and Median Household income in Dallas Fort Worth

I went to #NTCATX in March, 2012. At this mini-conference, there was a panel discussion on collaboration and community mapping. The speaker that impressed me the most was Erin Brackney, the Research Evaluation Manager for Texas Connector at the OneStar Foundation. I was honestly blown away.

I wish every state in America had this tool.

The Texas Connector aims to bring interactive mapping to nonprofits and funders. It visually demonstrates areas of need in our communities and the scope of nonprofit resources available in those areas. Using Census data, you can see the areas where there is high unemployment, low median income, and see where the food pantries and homeless shelters are.

Unemployment and homeless shelters (red and blue dots) in Fort Worth, TX

Unemployment key

You can also see what nonprofits are there, and what their service area is.

If there is a gap in service, this can be good for funders to talk with nonprofits about filling the areas of greatest need or addressing duplication of services.

And it’s also good for nonprofits to be able to use this data in their grant reports. You can drill down to the actual statistics on poverty.

The data there will be current with the 2010 census as of this month.

Check it out at texasconnects.org

If you know of a tool like this in other states, please leave a comment!

If you’ve used this tool already, what do you think of it?

Big Data hits Nonprofits! POW! originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 8, 2012.

So sometimes I am lucky enough to meet one of my e-newsletter subscribers, in person! Last year, I got a chance to meet Lisa Kelly Zuba. Lisa Kelly Zuba is a Major Gifts fundraiser and owner of BiZZantik, a nonprofit consulting firm. She was swinging back through Austin on a whirlwind trip and we managed to get 45 minutes together. I relished every moment of our meeting, and realized that she brought some useful knowledge to the table, namely, how to get major gifts! Since that’s not one of my strengths, I asked her to write a series of posts about major gifts. Today, we have the first one! Thank you Lisa!

How can you be more like this Wild Woman?

You’ve heard it before: major gift fundraising is an art, not a science. But, how can you create the art that brings in larger gifts to your organization? It’s not in paintbrush, but it’s all about the language that you and your donor speak.

Communication is the foundation to successful major gift fundraising. It will make or break a relationship. And, building a relationship is at the crux of fundraising – especially in major gifts. Your reason for wanting their gift is almost always different from their reason for wanting to give. Since they are the ones with the money, their reasons matter the most. You will build a deep relationship with your donors if you learn to speak their language. But first, you must know your own.

What Language Do You Speak?

Language is not just about the words that come out of your mouth, but also about your mannerisms and knowing when to be quiet. It’s about body language and how you comport yourself. The nonverbal accounts for two-thirds of all communication. Developing your personal style counts more than almost anything else you can do as a major gift fundraiser. In other words, you can’t fake it.

Know Your Style…It’s More Than Words

Speaking

• Do you talk fast or slow?
• Do you use jargon?
• Do you know what you’re talking about?
• Do you speak with passion?

Listening

• Can you hear what’s not being said?
• Do you interrupt when the other person is talking?
• Do silences make you uncomfortable?
• Are you thinking about what to say next when your donor is speaking?

Understanding

• Are you relaxed around people different than you?
• Are you observant of your surroundings?
• Do you truly care about what’s good for your donor?
• Have you attached yourself too stridently to a desired outcome?

How To Shape Your Style

Discipline isn’t a dirty word. No one ever got good enough without practice — so practice. Do your research and know your strategy. Script and record conversations. Practice being comfortable with silence. Be aware of your body language and nonverbal signals you send.

Invest in yourself. Make a commitment to learn something new every single day. In order to be interesting to others, you need to know what’s going on in the world. It’s good to have opinions, but know when to share them and when not to. Developing your own interests and hobbies expands who you are as a person and makes you more interesting to your donors.

Discipline and investment bring confidence. Having confidence is fun! You can’t speak your donor’s language until you know your own.

Successful major gift fundraising depends on the art of speaking the right language.

Stay tuned for Part 2: How To Speak A Donor’s Language

Thank you very much Lisa! Looking forward to your next post!

If you have any questions about major gifts, please leave a comment and we’ll make sure to address these in the next post.

Sign Up to Mazarine’s enewsletter and Receive a Free ebook, 50 Fundraising Secrets in your email!

Now You Can Learn The Secret to Major Gifts Fundraising: Much Ado About Language originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on May 3, 2012.

It happens. In fact, some of us are even encouraged to ask for deals on the part of our nonprofits.

“Can you give us a nonprofit discount?” we wheedle into the phone. Or, “What do you mean you’re charging $100 an hour! We can’t afford that! We’re a nonprofit! Give us a discount!”

Sure girl, I’ve been there too. Before I knew better, anyway.

Well, now, today, you know better too.

Pamela Grow has written extensively on nonprofits who have the “free” mindset“.

Here’s what the unspoken dialogue is.

“Help us because you believe in the mission, not because you want money! What do you mean you want money? How SELFISH of you!”

I’ve got news for you. We all care about your mission. We do. Whether you’re ending hunger or helping the homeless. We care. And we still need to make sure we eat and have a place to sleep too. If that makes me selfish, then I’m fine with that. My starving does not serve the world. My thriving, continuing to teach fundraising, give webinars, workshops, and speaking engagements, WILL serve the world.

Dr. Laura Otten wrote a post on the Nonprofit University Blog, and it went a little something like this:

“As a nonprofit, I would never presume to ask someone for something for free.  I respect the hard work that others do.  And no matter how nice I might be and no matter how much someone might “like” me, I know that others are running a business on which they depend for paying bills, supporting family, paying other employees, etc.  Am I more important than all of that that I should presume upon their time and business model?  And do so simply because I am a nonprofit? Hardly!”

Our staff has repeatedly encountered rather irate people who don’t understand why we won’t help them for free.  What is wrong with us, they ask, directly or indirectly?  Why won’t we help them?  Truth is, by this point, we’ve more often than not already given them hundreds of dollars of free consulting.  Funders have told me of applicants yelling at them if they don’t like the answers they are getting from the funder, are turned down for money, and more.  What is wrong with these pictures?

The truly disturbing part of this sense of entitlement is that more often than not it leads to nonprofits trying to take advantage of other nonprofits, imposing on other nonprofits or those whose career it is to help nonprofits. 

And lately, it happened to Pam again. Someone got so irate with her that she wanted to charge $50 for an ebook, that she had the AUDACITY to ask someone to pay for her knowledge, painstaking research, graphic design, and energy and time she put into making the book. I know. CRAZY, right? It’s almost like she’s a single mom, with a business to run, bills to pay, and two daughters in college.

My story: When I moved to Austin, I was approached by a church to fundraise for them. But even though they had an executive director, they didn’t seem to think they needed to hire a fundraising consultant. No, they’d rather have someone fundraise for free. It was interesting to me that they saw the need for someone to administrate their church, as a full-time paid director, but not to fundraise for them. So I asked them, “Do I ask you to be a medical administrator for free? No? Then don’t ask me to do MY job for free, okay?”

Now, when people ask me to fundraise for them for a percentage of the proceeds, or for free, I simply tell them, “You can read my blog and subscribe to my e-newsletter.”

Fundraising isn’t easy. It isn’t intuitive. Dollars don’t just come rolling into your lap. It takes

• Time.
• Relationship building.
• Training for your staff.
• Training for your board members.
• Training for your executives.
• Continuity.
• Processes.
• A good development plan.
• Outreach, CONSTANT outreach to your community.

And then, after a few years, you start to get real money.

You’re getting this advice for free. This is hard won knowledge. And I’m giving it to you, for free. I blog every week, for free, to help the nonprofit community. To help charities understand fundraising, or their nonprofit careers, or workplace rights. I also have a free newsletter. Some people have paid newsletters. I give out tons of free advice. And resources on Scribd, and even here, on my store page. I give out fundraising checklists for PRACTICALLY free for Android phones. I don’t give away everything for free, because I need to eat too.

What do you say to a nonprofit who wants everything for free?

If you are part of a nonprofit that expects you to get everything for free, how do you push back?

If you liked this post, you might also like:

Are You Consulting For Free? ORLY?

Do you have any thought-terminating Cliches? Are you sure?

Why are Nonprofits Asked to Fight with One Hand Tied Behind Their Backs?

Are you new here? Welcome! Sign up for my newsletter and get fresh nonprofit fundraising, management and career ideas monthly!

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Nonprofits should get stuff for free? Are You Kidding Me? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 30, 2012.

Who run the world? GIRLS!

But actually, if I may say, it’s elderly women who control the charitable checkbooks?
http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/news/top-stories/wealthy-women-control-charitable-checkbooks

Doesn’t exactly slip from the tongue as easily, does it?

In fact, we don’t run the world. But we are going to get there. If we all work together. How are you supporting a local girl? Are you mentoring her? Giving to a girls empowerment organization? Giving to women on Kiva.org? What can you do to empower more girls or women today?

I'm also a donor to women

Yeah, I’m not just telling you to donate to women, I actually do it, too!

Enjoy your Friday!

Girls! Run the World! Thanks Beyonce! originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 27, 2012.

Lisa Taylor, Founder, Challenge Factory

Are you ready to transition into another job or career?

Are you a boomer who is looking for a take-two career?

Are you a recent grad who is wondering what to do now that school’s over?

Are you in the corporate world looking to transition into the nonprofit world for greater meaning in your work? If you are any of these things, this interview can help you.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Lisa Taylor earlier this month. She’s the founder of Challenge Factory, a Canadian career transition agency that helps people define their values, motivations, and transition into their new career. They occasionally work with Canadian and American companies to help people get hired, but primarily they help people figure out where they want their career to go. (Follow Lisa @changepaths on Twitter)

Why did I interview her?

Because she really cares about what makes us nonprofit professionals tick! No matter what age we are.

How did she get interested in our sector? Lisa Taylor was a corporate manager, ran a consulting business unit for HP in Canada, and worked with counterparts in the US, as well as around the world, and noticed a real trend among her staff and people around her people had a sense that they wanted to transition in their careers, but they seemed a little stuck, the actual act of taking the steps felt too daunting, too risky.

Mazarine: Lisa, why did you start your agency, Challenge Factory?

Lisa: I kept having this discussion with staff over and over again, and I found a real gap in the marketplace, to find ways to help people make changes in their career, that didn’t seem risky, that didn’t just say follow your passion. People are more conservative in Canada, and they like to know things are organized before they make a big career move.

I came up with a methodology that is appropriate for new grads, people who are mid-career, successful but not satisfied, as well as for boomers who typically would think about retirement now, but are starting to realize that’s a little ridiculous, there’s still 20 to 30 years of their lives to go, and that’s too long for a permanent vacation! I was looking around and noticing that there wasn’t good research based methodology to help people make these transitions in these various stages of their lives.

Mazarine: Lisa, what’s the difference between the Canadian and American job markets?

Lisa: In Canada, there are differences in the ways that careers shape themselves, as well as the ways people go about looking for work.

We also don’t have the recession that you have right now, because we didn’t take away the regulations between banking and financial speculation. However, because Canada is America’s biggest trading partner and vice versa, we are still taking an economic hit because Americans can’t buy Canadian goods as much as before.

In terms of looking for work online, people still use Indeed.com in Canada, but we also use a website called Workopolis.com, run by one of our major newspapers.

The main difference is that the cities are smaller, and the industry bases are smaller, and while it’s important to network online, the power of personal networks are amplified because there are fewer people. If you’re going into a particular niche, it’s easy to network your way into that niche.

People in the US joke that everyone in Canada knows each other. Not really! There are many thousands of kilometers to cover, but to figure out where the key industry players are, we just have fewer centers. The thought leadership, knowledge, the leaders in that sector are really consolidated.

In Toronto, where I am, for example. we have a lot of thought leadership around head offices of nonprofits and social service programs. The consolidation is driven by needs in the economy here.

Toronto is the largest economic and population center in the country. There’s the most significant funding for different types of programs. But there are different niche programs in different parts of the country. There are nonprofit activities that are driven by the industry that’s happening around them. In Alberta for example, the environmental agency and focus there will be significant, it’s a good location for thought leadership and programs in the natural resources space.

Mazarine: Tell me something I don’t know about the Canadian job market.

Lisa: 90% of Canadian population live within 2 hours of the American border. With that comes a need to concentrate around city centers.

Mazarine: What’s the process for how you help people decide what new career they would like?

Lisa: In addition to giving people a test to assess their values and motivations, they will spend a day in the life of the career they’re considering, with a person currently in that field. They will have a chance to ask their questions, see what the day is like.

For example, we talked with Paul Nazareth, and did an expose with him last June about what it’s really like to be a professional fundraiser.

We hold events and our events are never just coming and sitting and listening, people get to EXPERIENCE what it’s like to be in the job. There were about 40 professionals there, thinking about fundraising as a next step. Our session got them active in the types of skills and activities they’d have to use. Paul gave them the raw goods about what’s good and not good about working in fundraising. He told them what does the nonprofit world want private sector people to know about the sector. Ever wanted to be a Foundation President? They have an interview with someone who is doing that. And here’s an article about being a nonprofit fundraiser in Canada. Or how about being a nonprofit recruiter?

Doing this session has gotten us to become much more familiar about career transitions to the nonprofit sector. We also help people get out of the sector and into a career that will still fulfill their need to make a significant contribution to the world. They have a different mindset, and some of them assume that moving out of nonprofits moves you over to the dark side.

Mazarine: Tell me more about your first stage, when you work with people. What is the psychometric assessment?

Lisa: We help people figure out what they value and what motivates them. What would you put as a higher value than something else?

• For some people the value is that economic return.
• For other people it’s the relationships they’re able to build.
• Others value aesthetics, they value BEAUTY. They have stylized pens. Style and Aesthetics and design matters to them, even if their job has nothing to do with it.

There are these deep seated values that keep you motivated and happy. And when you have a career that aligns with that, that’s what keeps you happy.

Our programs are all demographic based. Our demographic piece is important to us as a company. It’s tied to the way the sector is segmenting.It’s not stuck at platitudes though, like Gen Y is like this and Boomers are like that. No, it’s more in depth.

Mazarine: What do demographics mean, to you?

Lisa: Demographics for us means what’s different about each generation. You might think about it as changes in donor patterns, changes in volunteerism. But this applies equally to careers. People of different generations are struggling with career decisions. People in the nonprofit space understand these differences better than anyone else, because they’re always thinking about how to engage different types of people, different generations. Corporate people still have to think about what volunteer manager think about, for example:

• How you build community?
• How you make changes?
• How you can motivate people to try things they haven’t tried before?

Mazarine: Can you give me an example of how you work with a particular demographic?

Lisa: Let me tell you about our process with recent graduates. When we’re doing work with recent graduates who are starting their careers, we’ve taken a look and said, “When have companies had to encounter people who have a different style of communication, different norms, expectations of how teams will work, how timing and scheduling work, different expectations of leadership?” We’ve come to view Gen Y as a completely different culture because of how they interact with technology.

Canada has the most multi-cultural workforce in the world (because of immigration for work, it’s the way their country grows). Canadian companies are exceptional at integrating different kinds of people that respect where people came from but creates a cohesive corporate culture.

Because technology has changed so much, in terms of distributed leadership, access to information in the last 10 years, the students who are coming out now come with a whole different paradigm than anyone else before. We treat them like a totally different culture. That’s a better approach than just going for platitudes. The results are far more successful.

Thank you so much for this interview Lisa! I learned a lot! If you’d like to take Challenge Factory’s psychometric assessment, and see where your values and motivations lie, just give their website a look at http://challengefactory.ca.

If you want more tools to manage your career, I am teaching a FANTASTIC webinar called Moving On Up in Your Nonprofit Career on May 1st.

BE THERE!

More resources for YOU!

Feeling stuck?
Are you feeling stuck in your career?
What is your root?
Fire the Assholes, and the company culture will change
How to recover from a toxic workplace
How to respond when a manager yells at you

Looking for a new gig? Get some help!
But they all want 5 years of experience! What to do
10 fundraising interview questions to help you succeed in your career
How can creating 5 what-how-wow stories help you get that job?
CASE STUDY: How do you negotiate your nonprofit salary?
3 lies about moving on up in your nonprofit career, and 3 truths
Are you managing up? Where does that come from?
Do you need to hire a development director?
Are you consulting for free? ORLY?
Have you ever been fired? Was that awesome or WHAT?

Try a new nonprofit career on for size
Do you want to be a nonprofit consultant? Read this interview with Desiree Adaway
Try on a career as a recruiter for the nonprofit sector
Try on a career as a professional fundraiser
How you can become a nonprofit executive director
How to become a chief development officer

INTERVIEW: Lisa Taylor of Challenge Factory Talks Your Career Transition originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 24, 2012.

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this: you’re 53 years old, you’ve been in prison from 20 to 26, you didn’t finish high school, and you have a grandson who you’re now supporting because your daughter is in jail. You’re lucky, you have a job at the local Wendy’s. You have to fill out a renewal form for government assistance which has just been moved online as a cost saving measure (this isn’t hypothetical, more and more municipalities are doing this now). You have a very limited idea of how to use a computer, you don’t have Internet access, and your survival (and the survival of your grandson) is contingent upon this form being filled out correctly.

Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. Forget trying to form grass roots political activism by creating a society of computer users, forget trying to be the ‘people’s university’ and create a body of well informed citizens. Instead I helped people navigate through the degrading hoops of modern online society, fighting for scraps from the plate, and then kicking back afterwards by pretending to have a farm on Facebook (well, that is if they had any of their 2 hours left when they were done). What were we doing during the nineties? What were we doing during the boom that we’ve been left so ill served during the bust? No one seems to know. They come in to our classes and ask us if we have any ideas, and I do, but those ideas take money, and political will, and guts, and the closer I get to graduation the less and less I suspect that any of those things exist.
From CodaCorolla on Metafilter

OKAY! Five Fundraising Ideas for YOU, NONPROFIT LIBRARY!

1. Take down the names of everyone who checks out a book at your library. Mail them once a year, at Christmas time, and ask them to give to support your library.

5. Partner with a local tech nonprofit and allow them to hold computer classes in your library, do some joint spring fundraising together to acknowledge the new role of libraries in enabling low-income people to use technology.

Do YOU work for a library? Have any other ideas? Please leave a comment!

Libraries, what are they for? A Story & 5 Fundraising Ideas for Libraries originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 22, 2012.

Do you have the Birth Order Blues?

What’s that?

Here’s a funny sort of coincidence: When I was in an elite tiny liberal arts college, I went around the room to all of my friends and I said, “Were you the first child in your family?” And everyone said YES. Were we all kind of overachievers? Hyper-intellectual? A bit over-responsible? Yes.

Birth order theory is the idea that when you are born in your family matters.

In shorthand, Oldest children are responsible “little adults.”
Youngest children are “comedians” and
middle children are “forgotten.”

In The Birth Order Blues, the authors say oldest and youngest children get along because whenever the oldest child gets too serious the youngest one is there to jolly them up. And then the oldest child can be there for the youngest and teach them responsibility. Or so they say. And middle children feel like they never get enough attention, resentful.

Recently Dan Pallotta wrote an article called “Nonprofit Pathology” for the Harvard Business Review where he blew my tiny mind.
Read it, go on, it won’t take long.

Okay, now we’re back.

Now, remember the article that you just read, where Dan Pallotta said,

“Maybe people get into the compassion business full-time not because they’re more compassionate than others but because they’re codependent. Maybe the driving force is really inverted narcissism — an unhealthy and unexamined addiction to care-taking or to self-neglect.”

Then he says,

“I was the oldest son and the oldest grandson in an Italian family. That produced an unhealthy dose of the “hero child” syndrome, as psychologists describe it, where I felt more responsibility for the world’s problems at age nine than maybe a kid ought to. I remember sitting at the family dinner table on Sundays listening to my uncles and grandfather and dad talk about all the world’s woes and quietly adding each one to my list, thinking, “OK, I have to solve that one too.”"

Wow! Talk about something I had no idea about! I was the oldest grandchild and oldest daughter in a large family too. That produced “hero child” syndrome in me, where I felt more responsibility for the world’s problems as well!

So, I didn’t know what a hero child was. I had to look it up. Here’s the definition, maybe you’ll recognize yourself, nonprofit professional?

“The Hero, who is usually the oldest child, is characteristically over-responsible and an over-achiever. The Hero allows the family to be reassured it is doing well, as it can always look to the achievements of the oldest son or daughter as a source of pride and esteem. While the Hero may excel in school, be a leader on the football team or a cheerleader, or obtain well-paying employment, inwardly he or she is suffering from painful feelings of inadequacy and guilt, as nothing he or she does is good enough to heal his family’s pain. The Hero’s compulsive drive to succeed may in turn lead to stress-related illness, and compulsive over-working (Oh, have I been writing about this lately? I think I have). The Hero’s qualities of appeasement, helpfulness and nurturing of his or her parents may cause others outside the family to remark upon the child’s good character, and obtains him or her much positive attention. But inwardly, the Hero feels isolated.” From: George Boyd at the Mudrashram Institute of Spiritual Studies

I told people on twitter about this article and got back a lot of “WOW!” and “OMGs” so, I think this has struck a chord. So if you’re involved in nonprofits AND if your family was dysfunctional, join the club! There seem to be a lot of us.

If you don’t recognize yourself as the hero child, there are other kinds! Maybe you are a Scapegoat? A Lost Child? A Mascot? An Enabler?

From the same article by George Boyd at the Mudrashram Institute of Spiritual Studies:

“The Enabler protects and takes care of the problem spouse, whom Sharon Wegscheider refers to as the Dependent, so that the Dependent is never allowed to experience the negative consequences of his or her actions. While the Enabler feels angry and resentful about the extra burden that is placed upon him or her by the Dependent’s unhealthy, irresponsible and antisocial behavior, he or she may feel powerless to do anything about it. The Enabler feels he or she must act this way, because otherwise, the family might not survive. While the family is afforded survival by the Enabler’s responsibility, the Enabler may pay the cost of stress-related illness, and never have his or her own needs met, in effect, being a martyr for the family. The paradoxical thing about the Enabler’s behavior is that by preventing the Dependent’s crisis, he or she also prevents the painful, corrective experience that crisis brings, which may be the only thing that makes the Dependent stop the downward spiral of addiction.

The Mascot child is manifested by clowning and hyperactivity. The Mascot, often the youngest child, seeks to be the center of attention in the family, often entertaining the family and making everyone feel better through his or her comedy and zaniness. Inwardly, the Mascot experiences intense anxiety and fear, and may persist in immature patterns of behavior well into adulthood. Instead of dealing with problems, the Mascot may run away from them by changing the subject or clowning. The Mascot uses fun to evoke laughter in his or her circle of friends, but is often not taken seriously or is subjected to rejection and criticism. The Mascot also may fear turning within or looking honestly at his or her feelings or behavior, so he or she may be out of touch with his or her inner feelings. The frenetic social activity that the Mascot expresses is in fact often a defense against his or her intense inner anxiety and tension. If this inner anxiety and desperation is not addressed, it is not uncommon that a Mascot may slip deeper into mental illness and become chemically dependent.

Only children don’t escape the birth order blues either.

A special case is the only child. An only child in an alcoholic family may take on parts of all of these roles, playing them simultaneously or alternately, experiencing overwhelming pain and confusion as a result.

This is the most chilling part of the article for me.

Sharon Wegscheider notes that the longer a person plays a role, the more rigidly fixed he or she becomes in it. Eventually, family members “become addicted to their roles, seeing them as essential to their survival and playing them with the same compulsion, delusion and denial as the Dependent plays his [or her] role as drinker.” -From George Boyd at the Mudrashram Institute of Spiritual Studies.

SO, WOW. Are you wearing a mask right now and you don’t even know it? Does this remind you of some of your siblings or some of the people you know at work?

For me, this explanation resonated on multiple levels. I felt like finally, okay, there’s a reason for why I work so hard all the time. And why different people in my family are the way they are.

So, okay, we’re save-the-world stereotypes. But there’s community in this. We all have the same mask. What if we took it off? How could we begin to take it off? What would we look like underneath? Who are we, when we’re not saving the world? Who do we have the potential to be? How can we lighten up and make the world better at the same time?

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Hey Nonprofit Professional, Are You A Hero Child? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 20, 2012.