By Alexis De Sela

As your organization’s leader, it’s incumbent on you to select the most qualified staff with the right fit based on your organization’s needs and culture to build your nonprofit “dream team.”  Consider these steps as you undertake your next search.

What do employees value?

In any successful workplace, the positive interaction between employees and their leader is essential.  We’ve learned that in their relationship with supervisors, most employees value:

• Trust
• Positive feedback
• Two-way communication
• Clear expectations
• Providing information
• Goal-setting
• Input into decisions

At the crux of this relationship, open and honest message is the key.  Helping employees thrive in your nonprofit workplace through your clear, unambiguous messaging is an important launch pad to success.

In addition, our experience in both the nonprofit and for profit world has shown that in their daily work, the majority of employees value:

• Sense of accomplishment
• Doing challenging work
• Recognition for good work
• Making use of their abilities
• Pay
• Feeling of achievement
• Feeling of personal worth
• Sense of competence
• Doing meaningful work
• Promotion and advancement

It begins with recruitment

As with any successful undertaking, hiring your very best team starts before you talk to anyone.  First you need to understand your organization’s unique culture and examine it honestly.  In other words, before you can fill any empty “seats on the bus” you must consider your nonprofit’s strategic needs and then work diligently to identify applicants with skills to address those specific needs.

As you begin to interview candidates for your open position, consider these important points:

• Assessing a candidate’s skills takes approximately 10% of the interview.
• Figuring out the fit with your culture takes 90%.
• Yes/no questions are not productive. Ask questions that allow the candidates to describe how they have handled specific challenges.  “Give me an example of a time when…”
• Ask culture questions: “How do people you have supervised or managed describe you?”
• Know which questions you CANNOT ask.
• Ensure that key leaders have an opportunity to meet candidates and have buy-in.

Once you’ve found your dreaml candidate, it’s important to make the offer in writing.  The offer letter should be clear and include salary and benefits information (vacation, sick leave, computer use, etc.)  A clear, unambiguous offer letter is an important first step in communicating your expectations and your goals for the successful candidate. 

Successful onboarding

Now that your dream candidate is now an employee, your work as his/her boss is not over.  We have found that too many bosses fail their employees by not continuing to demonstrate that employee success is essential.  These important steps will help ensure that your great new employee gets off to a great start and remains at your workplace as long as you both remain satisfied.

• Job descriptions must be updated and accurate, outlining clear goals.  Start your new employee with a clear outline with a 90-day plan.
• Schedule performance evaluations throughout those first three months and use the first 90 days as a tool to assess compatibility.
• Align the new employee’s goals with your nonprofit’s strategic plan.  Be sure they’re realistic and ongoing, and then meet with the employee to achieve mutual agreement on those goals. If you don’t set goals or they are unrealistic, disengagement will begin quickly.
• Ensure a smooth handoff. Allow new employees to learn and feel comfortable in their new environment

Ongoing engagement

We all understand that not everyone will stay with your organization forever, so how can you foster mutual growth while your “dream team” employees are with you?  Here are some strategies to making that happen:

• Relationship with supervisor is key, so be available to your team.
• Schedule regular one-on-one meetings with your staff members.
• As the Executive Director, meet with your board chair twice a month at a minimum. Ensure that your Chief Development Officer meets with you at least once a week so that critical issues get shared.
• Remember the Golden Rule:  Praise in public and address issues in private.
• Give staff the tools they need to be successful.
• Over communicate.
• Provide flexibility when possible. Sometimes working remotely can be a win-win situation.
• Conduct a brief Performance Appraisal at the six-month mark and a comprehensive Performance Appraisal at one year.
• Keep track of staff activity AS IT HAPPENS.  Encourage your employees to send you their successes/challenges for their files.
• Allow employees to complete self-evaluations:  Ask them to evaluate you as a supervisor first.  Ask them, “Have I given you the tools you need to be effective?” and then have them do a self-evaluation.  “What have been your challenges?”

Recruiting, hiring, onboarding and ongoing employee engagement is a challenging assignment for employers, whether you’re an experienced Executive Director or a brand new CEO.  But, with careful consideration of the issues we’ve outlined, you’re on the way to building a nonprofit team of your dreams.

By Alexis De Sela

Your Development Director just handed you her resignation. It takes you completely off-guard. You thought this was “the one” who would stay because she was 14 months into her tenure. You had no idea she was looking at other opportunities or that she was unhappy in any way, and this will be the third Director of Development to leave in the past five years. This revolving door potentially costs the organization $360,000*

It has been my experience that many organizations don’t realize what it costs them to lose staff, especially key staff in Development. After all, these are the professionals primarily responsible for bringing in the funding needed to advance your mission, and to help it become and remain sustainable. While costs associated with turnover and replacement are high, indirect costs can be even more expensive, damaging, and lasting to your organization’s reputation.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates turnover costs to be between 100% to 300% of base salary. The Center for American Progress estimates the following costs for turnover:

•16% of base salary for high-turnover, low paying jobs (earnings less than $30,000)

•20% of base salary for mid-range positions making under $75,000

•Up to 213% for highly educated, executive positions, and those with special skills

According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Penelope Burk’s research estimates direct and indirect costs to find a replacement fundraiser is $127,650.

According to Deloitte and SHRM, turnover costs include:

•Replacement Costs (recruitment, selection and hiring) – If you recruit in-house, you will bear the full cost of recruitment, including time and cost for placing ads, receipting and scanning résumés, initial screenings, in-person interviews, reference and background checks, relocation costs, etc. If you decide to use a firm, the cost can range from $8,000 to 25% of the position’s salary. There may also be costs associated with hiring a temporary employee or consultant to fill the gap.

•Onboarding costs – These include training time and cost for the new employee, and management time to ensure the new employee is assimilating successfully into the organization.

•Loss of productivity – It may take 1-2 years for someone to reach full productivity. This involves learning the database, policies and procedures, navigating organizational culture, and developing relationships with key stakeholders (within and without the organization). The loss of productivity can be insidious if the employee disengages before they decide to leave, and certainly while they are actively seeking employment elsewhere.

•Loss of engagement – Turnover affects the rest of the workforce; when others see high turnover, they tend to disengage and lose productivity.

•Increase in errors and decrease in customer service – When employees have to cope with the additional workload after a colleague leaves, quality suffers and, ultimately, mission delivery suffers, affecting the clients we serve.

•Training costs – Over the course of 2 to 3 years, an organization invests in employee training and development, at a cost that hovers between 20% to 30% of salary.

•Loss of institutional knowledge – This is especially difficult when longer tenured employees leave. In the absence of well-crafted documentation or procedures, many organizations scramble to understand why things were done a certain way. In the Development Office, institutional knowledge as well as understanding of your organization’s donors and funders may be hard to replace.

•Cultural impact – High turnover may cause funders, stakeholders, and community leaders to wonder what is happening at the organization.

Analyzing and understanding the impact of turnover will help organizations adopt retention strategies to minimize voluntary turnover. These retention strategies should be discussed regularly at the Executive staff and Board levels because they directly affect an organization’s sustainability.

Over the course of my 27-year career in Human Capital Management, I have gained a deep understanding of what causes employees to leave, and I have implemented successful strategies to increase retention. These strategies saved an organization where I worked more than $1 million in a single year. Here are some of these successful strategies to increase retention in your organization in general and within your Development department specifically:

+Ensure an optimal organizational fit when hiring a new employee, especially a Director of Development or CDO. The Executive Director and Board will be spending a great deal of time together and it will be essential to have a good working relationship; fit is critical.

+Provide a phased onboarding process. Allow new employees to learn and feel comfortable in their new environment.

+Provide an updated job description that describes the job accurately.

+Set realistic goals and achieve mutual agreement on those goals. If you don’t set goals or they are unrealistic, disengagement will begin quickly.

+Hold regular 1:1 meetings to discuss goal achievement progress and any issues that may be impeding progress.

+Conduct a 90-day performance review and always do a yearly review. Allow the employee to review your performance as a leader.

+Praise in public and address issues in private.

+Give staff the tools they need to be successful.

+Over communicate.

+Provide flexibility when possible. Sometimes working remotely can be a win-win situation.

Development professionals should think about the reasons you have sought new job opportunities. I suspect your boss had almost everything to do with your decision, and that many or all of the components of optimal fit listed above were absent.

If you have the privilege of leading people, do what you can to avoid making the same mistakes that lead to your decision to leave. Turnover is costly and, as tight as resources are in the nonprofit community, it is incumbent on us as managers, executives, and board chairs, to understand these costs and to embrace employee retention as a key organizational sustainability strategy.

Lee+ Associates provides consultation in Human Capital Management and can help your organization with Leadership Coaching, retention strategies, improving employee morale and productivity, and building top-performing teams.

* $80,000 per year X 150% of base salary = $120,000 X 3 staff = $360,000

By Karen Kegg

If you are like many of us, you did not set your sights on working for a nonprofit organization when thinking about a career. Many of us learned about nonprofits by volunteering for an organization dear to our hearts, while others became interested in using their skill sets to make a difference in the world. Today, however, there are many people with a strong desire to make a move from their for-profit careers to a position in a nonprofit organization. Like any change, it can be overwhelming.

All of us at Bacon Lee & Associates have previously worked as staff members for a variety of nonprofit organizations, and want to offer a few pointers to those interested in a career in the profession and how to find the nonprofit that’s the best fit for you.

1. Volunteer. Volunteering is the best way to see how a nonprofit organization runs and how it uses its resources. It gives you the inside scoop on the staff and constituent base. Volunteering also assists in gaining exposure to showcase your skills as well as valuable experience for your résumé. You can then decide if you are an events warrior, a direct mail guru or a relationship builder. Maybe you’ll discover that you are all three and should be a Development Director!

2. Invest in professional development. A prime example of this is your local chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). This organization provides education and networking opportunities each month for its members and others who are interested in the profession. AFP also lists job opportunities on its local website. You may also have a nonprofit resource center in your community that offers seminars and workshops. Take advantage of what you can find locally and, if there is little to be found, look for webinars and courses online.

3. Do your homework. Research nonprofits whose missions appeal to you and speak to where you think you’d like to utilize your time and talent. Look at their websites, investigate their yearly reports, and develop an understanding of how they achieve their mission. You can learn a lot by visiting guidestar.com and reviewing the 990 tax forms that nonprofits are required to submit.

4. Keep current with the nonprofit sector. Read articles online or in professional magazines about fundraising and nonprofits. The AFP national website is a valuable resource for newcomers to the profession. In Texas, txnp.org is another useful site for articles relating to the field. And there is the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Times, both great resources for learning more about the field.

5. Ask for help. Get to know individuals who could help you find the job best for you. Begin to network by having ‘informal’ interviews of professionals who have been in the nonprofit arena for a number of years and who can answer the questions and concerns you have. They are the best resource!

Lastly, don’t worry, this is a fun process! I find everyone in the nonprofit world to be helpful and willing to share information to make our world a better place. And, remember, that we will always need passionate and dedicated people in the nonprofit sector.