Are You Ready for the End?

After a year of everyday being Blursday, the longer, warmer days and changing season bring hope. But bringing even more hope is the increasing availability of COVID-19 vaccines, and the expectation that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the pandemic of 2020.

With a return to open restaurants and museums, those of us involved with nonprofit management need to be planning for our own reopenings. Many of our organizations have been running with skeleton crews, or have shut down entirely in a year-long hibernation. Even organizations that have been able to continue their work need to consider what changes may be necessary as the “new normal” starts to come into effect.

There are four major areas that every nonprofit leader will need to consider when planning a reopening strategy. They are:

• Maintaining Community
• Clients and Mission
• Staff
• Fundraising

Maintaining Community means ensuring that all of your stakeholders understand what your organization is doing, and why. Hopefully you have maintained at least occasional outreach in the past year, to enable your supporters and clients to know what your organization has been doing.

Remember that your community includes all of your stakeholders. These include your Board, your clients, your staff (and perhaps, former staff), your funders, both individual and institutional, your partners and collaborators, local officials, and anyone else who cares about and needs to know your status.

The most important aspect of maintaining your community is regular communications. You have to let people know where you’re at and where you’re going. During this past year. I found that the constituents of the nonprofits I worked with were very concerned with those organizations’ ability to survive and to continue to provide for their constituents. Many people offered to help, both with financial contributions and in other ways, including in one case, volunteering at a well attended outdoor event.

Clients and Mission refers to what you do, and for whom. Many organizations have been forced to reexamine their mission and to look for new ways to serve their clients. If your clients can’t come to you, you may need to go to them. Your leadership team should be considering how your client’s needs have changed due to the pandemic, and what you should do about those evolving requirements. How can your organization adapt to serve the people who need the help that you can provide?

This may also be a good time to reconsider your mission, vision and needs statements. It is a good time to look for opportunities and to prepare your organization to move into the post pandemic environment. The mission that was important 18 months ago may now seem less important. Your clients’ lives have probably changed, and your organization should be aware of those changes and adjust to them.

Your Staff may need to adjust to new roles and responsibilities as we move into the next era. The leadership team should be looking at every job description and aligning those jobs with changes in the mission or operating procedures that are necessary to move forward. This is a good time to talk to your current and former staff members and get a sense of how they are and what they’re comfortable doing. How eager they are to come back to work? Have they gained any new skills during the lockdown? As you evaluate how you how to move you forward in your revised mission — including how to best serve your clients — you’ll be reevaluating each job description to see how well it fits the work that you will be doing.

As you identify each role and the skills required to accomplish it, you will want to look at current and former employees, and consider how well they will fit in the new org chart. Some may need additional training. Some will have new jobs they want to stay with and some may not fit well with the organization’s new direction. Evaluating these factors is not always easy, but it is necessary to enable your organization to step up to the new realities of the post-pandemic world.

Fundraising is changing in the brave new world that we are entering. Obviously for the past year we haven’t been having large fundraising events or opportunities to bring people together. That’s not going to change instantly, but it is going to change fairly soon. For example, it may be possible to have a fun run or other outdoor events, though likely with fewer people than you used to have. You certainly are not going to rush into having a large banquet or indoor event, but it may be possible to have smaller functions, especially if you feel comfortable checking people’s vaccination status as they enter.

Stakeholders are more than eager to support the nonprofits whose missions they care about. During the pandemic, I was able to help a group I was working with raise more money than they ever had before, both from donations and an all-time high level of gift card sales. I’ve heard from other nonprofits that their fundraising has also been fairly successful. Foundations, and institutional donors have stepped up, knowing that they have to help the nonprofits survive in order for them to continue their important missions after the pandemic. Government assistance has also been substantial and relatively easy for many nonprofits to obtain. While some of that money is loans it still has kept them afloat during the difficult times.

These are some of the important issues you are facing as a nonprofit leader. What else is high on your priority list? Want to talk more about these ideas? Join us on LinkedIn or our website to share your thoughts and ask questions of your peers in the nonprofit world.

I also will be presenting a small workshop on this topic. Use the CONTACT form to let me know that you're interested. I'll be sure you get an invitation to participate.