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Monthly Archives

January 2022

Jan 31

Does your ‘consultant’ always know best?

By Sponsor Insight

by Jan Breiner Frazier, owner, Planning Plus

At some point, nonprofit organizations will find the need to use a consultant, whether it’s to assist with strategic planning, fundraising, board orientation, executive search, marketing or event planning.

If you do, a good question to ask is “Does your consultant always know best?”

While we would like to think so, the answer is “not always.” True, there are many consultants out there with a lot of experience. However, success is often based on connecting with a consultant who is right for you.

There is a different consultant for every type of organizational need, assisting companies that don’t have the expertise, personnel, funds or quite simply the time to really uncover and solve problems on their own.

Our team at PlanningPlus has successfully delivered outcomes in strategic planning, board development, and organizational culture and design for more than 30 years. We have responded to numerous RFPs, interviews, and requests for information, most of which ask for a sampling of past projects, processes, and proposed approaches to a perceived problem the potential client has identified.

While we have both won and lost bids, our most successful outcomes have been achieved when we have worked with clients that are open and committed to developing a true partnership and who share our organizational cultures and values.

When interviewing with a possible consulting partner, regardless of who that might be, make sure to consider the following in your discussion:

  1. Pain point and root cause. When a leader is thinking about bringing in a consultant, they usually are faced with circumstances that require problem-solving. When determining if the consultant is a match, consider whether the consultant has asked enough questions to identify the real pain points of the organization. Often, clients conduct a self-diagnosis to pre-determine the solution to their problem — without getting to the root cause. A seasoned consultant will be able to identify the REAL root cause of your challenge and present options to achieve your identified definition of success.
  2. Past projects. Too often, in RFPs, respondents are asked to provide an overview of successful consultant projects, based on their own definition of success. Be sure to “talk to” the consultant’s clients to ask what worked and what did not, if they would bring that consultant back, and what they would have liked to change. Most of you probably do that anyway but try to get the client on the phone as opposed to email. Very much like tracking down references for employees, you really want to “hear” how they respond to your questions.
  3. Processes. We have seen several consultants who use “templates” — one-size-fits-all — to incorporate into their work. Was this work developed by the consultant or pulled off the Internet? What have been the challenges in adapting off-the-shelf products? What is proprietary to them? The answers to these questions can determine if the consultant will be able to customize an effective solution for your organization.
  4. People. Understanding the consultant’s level of engagement with clients also is important to explore. Has the consultant ever been a hands-on practitioner? And can they demonstrate success? We know that formal education doesn’t fully prepare one for the weird and unusual situations with many clients. Those who have weathered the actual day-to-day challenges you face in your company generally have a fairly large toolkit developed from such experiences.

While this only covers the very top line areas to consider in selecting a consulting partner, this is a good start to begin refining your process in 2022. With the unique challenges we have all faced over the last few years, here’s to starting off the New Year with new energy.

Jan 24

Looking back to move forward in 2022

By Feature

With an unprecedented demand for services, the Urban League and Coburn Place outline plans to support critical community needs, employees and partnerships

by Shari Finnell, editor/writer, Not-for-profit News

“Unprecedented.” That’s the word that immediately comes to mind for many Central Indiana nonprofit leaders in addressing the new challenges in carrying out their mission in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And many of those experiences are now critical in shaping how nonprofits are shaping plans to operate in 2022, including new ways to approach donors, addressing employee burnout and collaborating with other nonprofits, according to two local nonprofit CEOs.

The Urban League of Indianapolis, which promotes economic empowerment among underserved communities through education, job training and workforce development, unexpectedly entered into new terrain during the pandemic, according to Tony Mason, CEO and president. 

“At the onset of the pandemic, we started receiving calls from the senior living communities who were concerned about how their residents were going to get food,” Mason recalled.

After connecting some of the senior living communities to Gleaners, Second Helpings and other food banks, Mason assumed that request had been fulfilled. The team continued to focus on how to shift its operations to a virtual format. 

“But the calls kept coming in,” Mason said. “And they were coming from citizens. We had to do something.”

As a result, the Mason conferred with the rest of the Urban League team about launching a plan to operate as a drive-through food and resource distribution center. Assuming that the drive-through operations would only last a couple of months, the team decided it would serve as a good opportunity to engage and connect with the community while meeting an urgent need, Mason recalled. 

However, by the end of 2021, the Urban League  had continued to provide the service for more than 80 consecutive weeks, at times distributing food to up to 900 households each week, Mason said.

For Rachel Scott, president and CEO of Coburn Place, those challenges included serving an increasing number of victims of domestic violence, a trend that was reflected nationally and globally in response to lockdowns.

“We were inundated with new clients due to an unprecedented increase in domestic violence,” Scott said. “This meant not only hiring and training new staff, but redefining how we serve survivors. We were already set up for mobile advocacy, but suddenly that was all we had. Our staff had to be creative. They did intakes by phone with abusers in the next room because meeting at a coffee shop wasn’t an option.”

Adjusting to growing domestic violence needs

At the same time, Coburn’s development team was forced to turn away donations.

“For the development team, the in-kind donations we rely on to furnish safe homes for families disappeared because we could no longer have people dropping off items in our building, and of course, we couldn’t accommodate our regular volunteers,” Scott said. 

“We produced volunteer opportunities people could do virtually and found other ways to make up for the loss of in-kind donations. We found that many of the things we did because we had to are things we will continue — creative advocacy, engaging volunteers remotely, virtual support groups and new partnerships.”

The team also relied on innovation to meet needs.

One of the answers to meeting the needs of domestic violence survivors was to develop individualized housing safety plans during the lockdown, Scott said. “We worked with other organizations to create solutions for survivors, like hotel stays so they could get to safety immediately,” she recalled. “Our support groups went to a virtual format.”

While delivering programming is critical, it also is important to focus on internal needs, Scott said.

“Nearly every nonprofit organization that provides direct services to the community was pushed to the brink of its capacity in the last two years. We need to prioritize the well-being of nonprofit staff so we can continue to give our best to the people we serve,” Scott said. “That likely means addressing the mission creep many of us have experienced during this time. We all need to step back and make sure we are the best option for clients and, if they would be better served elsewhere, work with other organizations to make sure their needs are met.”

From the perspective of the Urban League, one of the most critical developments from the pandemic has been the formation of collaborative partnerships, Mason said.

“We established partnerships with some of our neighborhood-based, grassroots organizations, such as CircleUp, MD, Before You Fall, Purpose of Life, and Ministries of the Street,” he said. “We had about 10 to 12 organizations which would, from week to week, would come and would also pick up resources and take them back to their congregations or to people in the neighborhoods. We recognized that everyone can’t come down here.

“In some ways, it became an important part of what we’re doing because it positioned us to where we were collaborating more and with emerging and existing grassroots neighborhood-based organizations that would have probably in the past not considered being connected to us.”

Mason said those relationships will continue to be instrumental in meeting the needs of the community in 2022 and beyond.

“It allowed me and my team to better understand who else is out there on the ground doing this work, people who are committed to it,” he said. “People need help 24/7. It doesn’t change. We have pockets of poverty all over the city. Poverty is everywhere. So it’s important to have  this level of connectivity and be in relationships with groups that are doing this work all over the city.”

Scott also said it is important to be transparent when talking to donors. “See and speak the truth about where you are as an organization — not just what seems impressive,” she said. “What a donor wants is tangible ways to help and partner, not just have their own egos inflated. Be candid with your closest donors and supporters. Let them partner more deeply by letting them in on the areas where you need help.”

Jan 10

Empowering nonprofit employees can lead to much needed innovative solutions in 2022

By Feature

CICOA’s CEO Tauhric Brown

by Shari Finnell, editor/writer, Not-for-profit News

When Tauhric Brown took on the role of president and CEO of CICOA Aging & In-Home Solutions in January of 2020, a top goal on his agenda was the empowerment of the organization’s employees to dream and innovate.

Based on his previous experiences in a combination of for-profit and nonprofit roles, Brown said, he knew that would be one of the most strategic approaches to continue successfully fulfilling CICOA’s overall mission — making the dream of aging in place a reality for many older adults.

Brown acknowledged the challenges that faced him. Even in normal times, it can be difficult to inspire employees to envision how to do things differently. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, further challenges developed as the organization followed stay-at-home orders and remote work schedules

“Many of us have tunnel vision. We see our work, day in and day out, and that’s really all we see,” Brown said.

However, opportunities can develop when leaders are able to help employees develop peripheral vision — recognizing the ways in which their individual roles, such as what a person does as a care manager, impacts the entire organization, Brown said..

“You really have to unlock that potential that lies well inside of each and every one of us,” he said.

As a result of that innovative focus on problem-solving, CICOA launched an innovation studio in 2021, an intrapreneurship model to encourage staff and partners to ideate, prototype and launch new solutions to meet the needs of older adults, people with disabilities and their caregivers.

One of the first products of the CICOA Venture Studio was the development of Duett, a for-profit start-up organization with a mission to streamline the process of matching people with service providers through technology solutions.

Innovation as an ongoing model

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is approaching its two-year mark in Central Indiana, it is even more critical to challenge nonprofit employees to discover new solutions, according to Brown, who anticipates that few nonprofits will be able to continue to be successful without incorporating changes that can equip them for long-term sustainability.

He began the process of introducing innovation early on. “When I first started in my role here in January of 2020, I just started having conversations with people,” Brown recalled. “It wasn’t the CEO talking to the care manager. It was just Tauhric to Sherri — getting to know people on a personal level, and then really challenging them to see their work differently.”

Conversations included looking at goals and determining creative ways to respond, Brown said. “How do we begin to develop some additional programs or social enterprise concepts that might help us for decades to come?,” he said. “In other words, not just for this scenario, but for a more efficient, effectively run nonprofit organization that benefits the consumers you serve for years?”

Problem-solving also could involve determining how to deliver more services with fewer resources.

“For us, that was the primary opportunity we saw — and have been capitalizing on pre-COVID because innovation is part of our culture, part of our DNA,” he said. “That spirit existed here pre-COVID.”

In some ways, the pandemic fueled interest in generating problem-solving and innovative ideas, Brown noted.

Since implementing the innovation studio, Brown said, an increasing number of employees have been actively proposing potential solutions for challenges the organization faced during the pandemic, which forced many organizations to do things differently.

“We’re starting to see more staff bringing additional ideas and concepts forward that may not have been presented without this public health emergency,” he said. “Some of those ideas are now being teased out as potential social enterprise concepts that we can take to market down the road.”