How Coaching Can Transform a Nonprofit

There was a really interesting interview last week in the Nonprofit Quarterly with Bill Ryan, author of Governance as Leadership, who recently led a study on coaching in the nonprofit sector. Coaching is a form of management consulting where a leader is given one-on-one strategic guidance.

An executive director can be coached to grow an organization, to build a stronger board, to revamp their financial model. Or as Ryan puts it, coaching answers the question: “If my organization wants to get to Point X, what do I, as a leader, need to do to build on my strengths and manage my weaknesses to help it get there?”

The concept of coaching is fascinating to me because, as Ryan points out, in corporate America coaching is much more commonplace than in the nonprofit world. If a CEO needs management counsel, they are encouraged to find a coach, whereas coaching for nonprofit leaders is often deemed a luxury. But, I think coaching is even more necessary in the nonprofit world. Nonprofit leaders, unlike their for-profit counterparts, often lack a management background having made their way to the top through program expertise.

The reality is that coaching for a nonprofit executive director can be absolutely transformative. It can make the difference between a program that is just getting by and a program that becomes financially sustainable and grows dramatically, with an engaged, committed board behind it.

Such is the case with ACE: A Community for Education, a nonprofit early childhood tutoring program. I have coached ACE Executive Director, Mary Ellen Isaacs for over a year since we completed an ambitious strategic planning process. They are now working to triple the number of students they serve and diversify and grow their financial model.

Here’s what Mary Ellen has to say about the coaching experience (or if you are reading this in an email click here to watch):

I believe coaching can be hugely transformative for nonprofit organizations, helping their leaders build the skills they need to grow their solutions far and wide. If you’d like to learn more about how I coach nonprofit leaders, check out the Coaching page of the website.

Photo Credit: wikimedia

Tags: coaching nonprofit leaders, growing nonprofits, nonprofit capacity building, nonprofit coaching, nonprofit consulting, nonprofit management expertise, nonprofit professional development

Overcoming the Loneliness of the Nonprofit Leader

Being the leader of a nonprofit can be incredibly lonely. You have a million demands on your time, countless people to keep happy, ambitious (if not impossible) goals to achieve, and few resources with which to achieve them. It can be an overwhelming place to be.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. I have found that if a nonprofit leader has someone to confide their challenges and concerns,  strategize solutions, brainstorm new approaches, and hear about alternative options they can emerge with greater confidence, inspiration and energy.

I believe there is a tremendous need for this kind of coach for the leaders of the nonprofit sector. That is why I’ve begun offering nonprofit staff coaching services.

I coach executive directors to:

• Create a more effective, engaged board of directors
• Structure your staff to better meet your goals
• Implement and monitor your strategic plan
• Establish or strengthen key external relationships
• Better communicate with and engage staff
• Develop dashboards for reporting progress to board and funders
• Raise growth or capacity capital
• And much more

And I coach development directors (and executive directors who also wear the development director hat) to:

• Create an effective annual financing plan
• Launch a major donor campaign
• Engage your board in fundraising
• Use social media to recruit donors
• Develop compelling fundraising letters, proposals and materials
• Streamline donor cultivation and stewardship
• Develop more efficient and effective back-end fundraising systems
• And much more

I provide phone, email, and in-person coaching to nonprofit staff to help gain new perspective, try new ideas, get unstuck and move their organization forward. You can download the Coaching one sheet here.

The duration and price of coaching depends on the level of counsel your staff needs. You can purchase a package of coaching hours to use over a month, several months, or a year. The more hours you purchase, the lower the hourly coaching rate. Coaching prices range from $250 for a single hour of coaching to $10,000+ for 50+ hours of coaching.

If you want to see Social Velocity Coaching in action read the A Community for Education or the UT School of Law case studies.

And if you’d like to schedule a free consultation to learn more about how coaching might work for your nonprofit, email info@socialvelocity.net.

Photo Credit: JPtHart

Tags: coaching for executive directors, coaching for nonprofit leaders, fundraising planning, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit challenges, nonprofit coaching, nonprofit consulting, nonprofit strategy

Coaching a Nonprofit Leader to Success

I’ve been talking about strategic planning a lot lately (here and here) because I think it is so critically important to the success of a nonprofit organization. But it’s not enough to create a great strategic plan on paper, you have to implement and monitor it. This is why I insist that the strategic plans I help create have a detailed, measurable operational plan that describes the day-to-day work that will bring the strategic plan to fruition.

But sometimes a strategic plan calls for so much change to a nonprofit organization that they need follow-up staff coaching to make the plan a reality. This was the case for one of my clients, ACE: A Community for Education.

ACE is an early childhood literacy tutoring program, with a proven model that really works to get children to grade level in reading by 3rd grade. The outcomes of the program were so impressive that they wanted to expand it to many more schools. But, the program was a well-kept secret. A small advisory board and limited external connections left the organization struggling to build the kind of community, funder, and school district support they need to dramatically grow.

ACE hired me to create a 3-year strategic plan for growth. ACE assembled a working group of staff, advisory board members, funders and other key stakeholders, and I led them through a 5-month process analyzing the internal and external environment, creating the goals and objectives of the strategic plan for growth, determining the projected budget required to get there, and creating a detailed annual operational plan to bring the plan to fruition.

But ACE realized that their strategic plan was so ambitious that they would need some guidance and regular coaching to make it a reality. So once the strategic plan was created and adopted by the advisory board and other stakeholders, ACE hired me to coach their staff on:

• Restructuring the advisory board to lend more strategic support and expand community connections to ACE
• Expanding their fundraising efforts in order to support the new goals of the strategic plan
• Growing the staff and program infrastructure to implement the plan

So over a 10-month period I met regularly with the Executive Director and the Development Director to coach them on:

• Restructuring the advisory board
• Creating a major donor fundraising campaign
• Implementing the strategic plan
• Using the strategic plan to filter future decisions
• Effectively using staff resources

The result is that ACE has moved quickly to grow their program. They plan to triple the number of students served by the program by 2016. They have already secured a significantly increased financial commitment from participating school districts to do so. They have also completely restructured their advisory board and expanded its membership. They have hired new staff positions to make growth a reality. They have begun involving the advisory board in their new major donor campaign efforts and have already enjoyed new and renewed interest from funders. Staff and advisory board are energized and focused on their plans for growth.

As ACE Executive Director Mary Ellen Isaacs put it recently:

“Our work with Nell has been critical to developing a viable growth strategy and plan for ACE. The process helped us clarify our core competencies, engage stakeholders, and articulate exactly how and why ACE should grow. As a result of Nell’s strategic planning and follow-up coaching, my staff and I, and our advisory board, have the tools and confidence to reach our larger vision for ACE. This was one of the best investments we have made in ACE!”

If you are interested in learning more about how I coach nonprofit staff to strengthen or grow their organizations, check out my Staff Coaching consulting service.

Photo Credit: VarsityLife
 

Tags: executive director coaching, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit coaching, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit growth, nonprofit strategic plan, strategic planning