How to increase your nonprofit's capacity

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Capacity and Operations

How to increase your nonprofit's capacity

Where most nonprofits struggle

Most nonprofits are organized with a lot of heart, which is to say, that many are relatively disorganized. When they are “organized” we find the issue of silos forming with communication and collaboration divides between departments or administration vs. non-administration. There can also be entire functions that are missing from an organization resulting in stagnated growth and diminished impacts. Without the right kind of organizational structure for your nonprofit, you are bound to feel overwhelmed, wear too many hats, and struggle with delegation.

The solution is to focus on the outcomes that your nonprofit needs to achieve to run well and then destribute decision making power amongst your people with a focus on achieving those outcomes.

Unlike a traditional organizational “org” chart that displays a hierarchy of who’s in charge of who, you need a chart that displays the key outcome based functions that make your organization operate.

What are the benefits of using this approach?

-increased capacity
-true accountability
-self-reorganization
-better communication
-less overwhelm
-address the core elements your nonprofit is missing

To help you get started building a blueprint for your nonprofit, I’ve created a handy template that you can edit directly.

You need to know 3 things to get the most out of this model:

#1 The core functions of a nonprofit

There are a few core functions that every organization needs in order to function effectively. Below is a brief summary of these functions however, be sure to learn more about each function before implementing so that you can maximize impact and efficiency on your organization.

The functions are:

• Finding the future of the orgnization

• Optimizing speed and capacity

• Having a highly effective team

• Ensuring risk is optimized

• Resources are leveraged (financial, physical, and digital)

• Finding and serving clients or whatever you make an impact on

• Finding and retaining funding

#2 A paradigm of accountability

The second thing to learn is about shifting to an operating paradigm of true accountability. That means that each person who’s attached to a function of your organization needs to understand that they own that seat. At the end of the day, they need to ensure the work gets done and they need to be empowered to make the final decisions on the things they are accountable for. It’s like the comic book hero saying “with great power comes great responsibility”. True accountability is two-sided. Once this is established, you can have your team reassess the things they are currently doing and either re-confirm that they are truly accountable for them or find a new owner for them using the blueprint as a guide.

#3 Focus on the functions not the job descriptions

You need to let it sink in that the boxes represent functions of the organization and not a person’s job description or title. Start out by building your boxes without putting any specific person’s name in them. Watch out for the trap of naming a box the title of a position. Always label the boxes with something that describes the key functions.

Once you do start assigning people’s names to boxes, that is the time to start thinking about someone’s job. You may have one person assigned to only one box, and that’s their job, but more likely than not, you will have people who have their names in multiple boxes. Plan this strategically so you can build a job that makes sense in terms of people’s skill sets and superpowers. And don’t be fooled by industry standard job titles like “Chief Operating Officer” or “Finance Director” or even “Executive Director”. These titles may appear on your business cards but they don’t exist on the blueprint and they will not help you gain any of its benefits.

Also, when it does come time to put names in boxes, although a single person can have their name in multiple boxes, you can only have one name per box. Why? Because when two people try to own a single function, you undermine the power of true accountability. There are two pseudo-exceptions… First, if your organization has a role like direct care worker, program director, or, teacher, where there are multiple seats with the same accountability, but each serves a different group of clients, then you may simplify your blueprint by making a single accountability box that defines the function and key accountabilities as they are the same across groups. You can choose to list names in here if there are only a few or you can leave the names off entirely. You can find an example in the template I made for you. Second, if you create a function that is so big that one person can’t do it on their own, then it’s time to break that box into sub-functions or re-distribute some of the accountability so that one person can take accountability for that full function.

So what do you need to do next?

Get help setting up a Leadership Blueprint for your organization! This is one of the many capacity building activities we do in our THRiVE Program for nonprofit CEOs and the first step is EASY! Just to apply to see if your organization is a good fit. APPLY NOW>>

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