Business Week just published their annual customer service rankings. The theme this year in the accompanying editorial is the role of service during a recession. They make the case that in these times holding on to your customer base is critical to survival. In efforts to trim budgets, many companies are cutting back on service and thereby risk losing their core revenue.
This strikes me as good wisdom for nonprofits as well. Do you cut back on programs and therefore make them less effective, or do you cut out some programs entirely and focus on doing a few well?
The challenge in the nonprofit sector (and the main reason nonprofit management is harder than corporate management) is that it is unclear who the customer is that you are working to retain.
Do you need to invest in serving your paying customers better (e.g. foundations, corporations, donors, government, etc.) or the recipients of your service (e.g. the hungry, sick, kids, etc.)? Not serving the latter will end up hurting your relationship with your funding partners but that lag could take years, and by then the economy could be stronger. On the other hand, how could you maintain your integrity increasing service to donors while cutting service to clients?
These challenges aside, Business Week offers four great tips to increase customer service during these times that translate well to nonprofits:
1. Cross train employees so they can play multiple roles and flex based on market need. None of us can afford to have employees that are only able to do one job. We need problem solvers who can pitch in helping internal and external clients if needed.
2. Invest in simple technology that improves touch and responsiveness. There may be small investments that send a powerful message.
3. Identify your most loyal stakeholders and make sure they know how important they are to you and the organization. It is more important than ever to give public recognition to the people that enable you to keep your doors open (e.g. employees, donors, volunteers, board members, etc.).
4. After trimming your staff, find ways to pamper your remaining team, and they will pass on that attitude to your stakeholders.
I would also add one:
Even if there are no jobs out there, never treat your employees like they have no other employment options. If you want them to treat your stakeholders as royalty, you need to first make them feel that way. You need to win them over every day.
As the article outlines, the bottom line is that we all need to 'keep the front lines strong'.
I am not good at social hugs, and I have made it a personal goal to improve in this area of social etiquette because as the leader of a nonprofit this feels like a real shortcoming. So I am trying understand the nature of social hugs.
1. When do you hug?
For example, two members of our team who work in San Francisco were both working out of our NYC office this month for a day. When they saw each other in NYC they hugged. I asked if they hugged every morning in San Francisco and they said that they didn't. Why now?
2. Where do you put your arms?
You go for one arm up and one down and they go for two up or two down. Feels like a junior high school dance. I have been watching this and there is no real rhyme or reason to it.
3. Finally, who do you hug?
For many, it seems that anyone you have met before becomes a candidate. First meeting: handshake. Second: hug. Really?
We met with Mayor Bloomberg's office this month at City Hall. They described the massive volunteer surplus the city is experiencing. 100,000 New Yorkers have responded to a combination of a brutal recession and Obama's call to service to create what is likely the largest human capital investment opportunity in the city's history.
They are seeking advice on how to engage this tsunami of interest in service. In a city that has few funds to spare, engaging a football stadium full of people in meaningful service is...well...more than an overwhelming challenge.
This pool of talent represents a tremendous asset in human capital. There must be good ways to leverage these people to help us dig ourselves out of the recession and help those most in need.
We offered a few of ideas:
For every New Yorker receiving some form of welfare, appoint them a personal board of directors. Many of us who grew in upper middle class homes have de facto personal boards of directors but for others they need access to people who can serve as mentors and connect them to the working world. Get them a lawyer (advocate in the legal system), marketing manager (coach on how to market themselves), HR manager (career coach), IT manager (tech mentor) and accountant (financial advisor) who can help them navigate their lives in this challenging time. Ask each member of their board to meet with them one-on-one and then occasionally as a team.
Create a crowdsourcing website for the city. Have each department list 20 challenges they face that prevent them from achieving their goals. Invite all New Yorkers to post their ideas for how to address the solutions. Host an event to celebrate the best ideas and put them into action. This would enable all New Yorkers to serve without having to manage them directly.
Challenge corporations to use the skills and talents of their employees to support the coming wave of nonprofit mergers that we are going to experience due to the recession. Create a city office to coordinate accountants, HR professionals, lawyers, marketing professionals, management consultants and others who are needed to help integrate existing agencies.
Those were the ideas we shared. What additional ideas do you have that we could pass on to the Mayor's office this week?
On the subway to work each day it seems that at least one woman in my car is reading Eat, Pray, Love. It was published eight years ago and yet is still the literary accessory for women in New York. Frankly, I am tired of seeing it and am a little annoyed in general with books or magazines that are read 99% of the time by people of a single gender.
The other night I got sick of watching the infinite loop on CNN and FoxNews and decided to see if Ted.com might be a new source of evening entertainment for when I'm under house arrest making sure nothing burns while my children sleep.
On the site they offer images of speakers who you can click on to hear them give a short talk. Some of the faces are recognizable, like Bill Gates, but most are not typical household names or faces (at least, not in my household).
I first watched one about "Shiftables", which was exactly what I expected from Ted. Some engineer was showing off a new technology that we'll likely see for purchase in some form in a couple years. The crowd--largely gadget lovers and technology groupies--ate it up. Perhaps it's better than CNN but still not really my cup of tea.
I decided to give it another chance and picked a second face, which I selected using my stereotypes about people by guessing it would not be a tech demonstration. I clicked on the face of a middle-aged, blonde woman named Elizabeth Gilbert that Ted.com marketed as being a talk on creative genius.
Within a few seconds she shared that she was the author of Eat, Pray, Love, and I sighed. 0-2. MIT techie and now US Weekly-esque writer.
I love it when my assumptions are wrong. Her talk turned out to be really interesting and thought-provoking.
Here is the summary in bullets:
She wrote a wildly successful book
She realizes that her "greatest success" is now likely behind her
She sees the torment that many creative professionals have who are faced wrestling with the creative process and then the notion of success related to their creative output
She looked for better models from history and found that prior to the Renaissance, genius was seen as being channeled into people from other sources and the "author" was only a vehicle to create the output
She likes this model and shows how many artists and writers talk about hearing voices or other out-of-body forces that provide them with inspiration
She suggests that we should go back to seeing everyone as vehicles rather than sources of genius and not project so much glory/failure on mere mortals
She suggests that we all "just do our jobs". Sometimes we will channel genius and other times we won't, but since it isn't up to us, all that can be said is that we did our job.
It is a nice notion. Certainly makes the creative process less stressful if you don't own the result. That should open the door for more people to pursue creative careers and activities.
My creative outlet is designing and building organizations and programs. It is an interesting notion to apply to my creative craft. Currently, our work is judged rationally by being based on metrics. We are accountable to outputs like budgets and client impact.
What if we used Elizabeth's paranormal model for assessing performance? What would it mean to be an effective manager? How would we design an annual goal-setting and performance-review process?
Reading between the lines in her talk, I would assume that we would structure the goals, assessment and coaching of someone based on three key variables:
Did they create opportunities to be touched by genius?
Did they listen to that force/voice and capture it or just let it float by them?
Did they do their job and effectively channel genius to enable others to experience it as well?
Now, "genius" doesn't need to manifest as a novel, song or even new program design. In my experience, any action can either be inspired or it can originate from our inner robot. The latter is our model for operating on auto-pilot, when we rely on rational thought and known solutions to deal with similar challenges or opportunities.
We all do at least some of our work in auto-pilot mode. It would be too exhausting to work solely in a mode of inspiration. I fear, however, that many people spend 99% of their work hours on autopilot. This too is an exhausting routine because of its repetitiveness, but is also even worse because it is career-limiting and -deadening.
I end this post wondering how we can use pro bono service to break up the routine of a career and challenge professionals to be open and available for the moments of genius that will inspire their creativity. Can pro bono service provide an opportunity for people to turn off their robot and to open up to changing their assumptions and approaching challenges in new ways? Can it help us all find the genius that is trying to get in?
Have you visited a national park recently? They are national gems that represent some of our earliest conservation efforts and are a symbol for our environmental values. They remind us of the importance of nature and the impact of fresh air on our physical and mental health.
And yet, when you step into a lodge on any national park you are served food that you would expect at a ball park. It is unhealthy, not fresh, not environmentally friendly, and tastes like crap. Frankly, modern ball parks have evolved beyond the fare being served in our national park system.
From what I learned from the folks at Food from the Parks, a nonprofit based in California, the Department of the Interior wants to make this change but the lobbying from the institutional food suppliers makes it nearly impossible.
This would be a symbolic way for President Obama to show that he is changing the way Washington works. Have our national parks set the bar for fresh, sustainable and healthy government food. Serve food from local farmers. What a natural partnership.
Who knows, it might just lead to changes in our school cafeterias and then we would really be talking about a powerful change.
Perhaps this is the kind of change the new White House Office on Social Innovation could take on. Not exactly innovative...but perhaps for DC it would count.
Or, the Administration could create another office to focus on 'duh' policy changes like this one. We could call it the 'Homer Simpson Office for Innovation.'
There has been significant discussion in the national service field about the need to build the capacity of nonprofits to utilize pro bono services. This is an important question, but not in the way it is intended.
The question is being asked from the frame of traditional service such as using volunteers for serving food at soup kitchens or painting a house. For this type of service, there is a need for a nonprofit to be able to recruit the volunteers, interview them, orient them, manage them and thank them. This requires staff time (i.e. capacity). This is a lot of work and exhibits why the service field tells us we can't call Americans to serve without ALSO providing funding for the staff needed to support the volunteers.
These same people calling for capacity building of nonprofits look at pro bono service and see a huge gap in the skills needed to manage volunteers at a soup kitchen versus those needed to recruit, orient, manage and thank a team of pro bono consultants. They wonder what training is needed for a staff member to do the latter or if an entirely different person is needed for that role. Anchored in traditional service programs this is a logical question and comes from a great place--wanting to make sure nonprofits are set up to take advantage of this growing resource without being overwhelmed by it.
If you ask this same question of a partner at a consulting firm or ad agency you will get a very different answer.
Nonprofits shouldn't be building the capacity to recruit and manage pro bono consulting or outsourcing teams. They should instead be building the capacity to work with self-managed consulting and outsourcing teams as a CLIENT. This is the core skill they need. They also need the skills to secure a pro bono commitment from an organization (much like fundraising). Finally, they need to have the capacity to thank and reward the team, but that usually comes naturally for most nonprofits.
These are the areas where investment is needed to build the capacity of nonprofits for leveraging pro bono services.
The biggest capacity building need may be on the provider end. The organizations providing the service need to learn how to control the scope without using dollars to set boundaries, serve an organization working in a more complex sector, and to identify the right projects and organizations to serve in the first place.
As odd as it sounds, we need to invest in corporate capacity building to really ensure nonprofits can take advantage of the opportunity.
There was a Michael Crichton book that came out a couple of years ago that spoke of the need for nonprofits to scare the public to drive donations. The theory was that fear and anger were great motivators to rally support for a cause. This theory often led charities to spin issues irresponsibly to maximize donations.
Last week, I met a friend who currently works at the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). As has become the norm when two nonprofit professionals meet these days, we both inquired about the financial health of our respective organizations.
He shared that the downturn was hard but the bigger challenge has been the loss of their biggest donor--George W. Bush. Having arrived on a red-eye flight that night, the joke didn't register with me right away. It took about 15 seconds.
Then it did. Their fundraising for the last eight years has been about scaring Americans about the impact of Bush on the environment. Now with Obama in DC, who needs the NRDC? All of our bad environmental policies will be reversed and the EPA will finally have teeth. In the past they might have directed their campaigns at large corporations, but now even companies are signing the green song.
They lost their villains.
From a distance, it seems like they have three options. They could decide to scale back their efforts, ceding efforts to the EPA. They could find a new enemy (much like James Bond who went from fighting communists to capitalists to terrorists in order to keep up with the times). Or, they could take on the challenge of shifting their message to be: yes we can.
I would vote for a combination of the latter two options. The message would be: now is the time. It shares a sense of hope and the need for urgent action today while making it clear that this is a window of opportunity. We need to make sure we don't waste a minute as this window will close again when politics swing back to the right. Hope and fear.
The NRDC is not unique in this challenge. Many nonprofits made millions from rallying people against Bush.
This will be a defining moment for the sector. Can we convert the negativity and scare tactics into a voice that can be equally successful selling hope and optimism?
I think we can. It is a natural transition from Boomer leadership to Generation X leadership. We are going from 'fight the power' to 'be the power' and our generation tends to already be of this new mindset and ready for the challenge.
Two weeks ago the leadership team of Public Architecture won the prestigious Designer of the Year award from Contract Magazine, a publication in the commercial design field.
This is the 30th year of the award whose recipients are the who's who of the design and architecture world. John Peterson and John Cary of Public Architecture were the first to be recognized not as designers of interiors or buildings, but as designers of a movement in the field.
This is clearly a win for Public Architecture, but it is also a significant milestone in the pro bono movement. Pro bono service is now being recognized as having arrived by the institutions that write the history of the design and architecture professions.
Congrats to Public Architecture for being recognized for their leadership in the design community and pro bono movement. You are the models for the other professions to follow.
Business Week just published their annual customer service rankings. The theme this year in the accompanying editorial is the role of service during a recession. They make the case that in these times holding on to your customer base is critical to survival. In efforts to trim budgets, many companies are cutting back on service and thereby risk losing their core revenue.
