7 Paths Blog Smart and friendly systems path
Archive for the ‘Smart and friendly systems path’ Category
Nonprofit to help people find ways to help the world
Monday, March 22nd, 2010 by richfossChecklists to the rescue
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 by richfoss“Fundraising books all make it sound so simple,” a director of development said to me when I was consulting with her organization.
“When you combine 792 simple things combined you have is complexity,” I said.
I’m deep into writing a 200-page ebook—Green Light Fundraising: Your guide to raising $50,000 to $500,000 a year to light up the eyes of people you serve. Through the book I’m teach a system to make it possible for smaller nonprofits to put into place sustainable fundraising.
To be effective the system requires the organization to be highly organized in order to use volunteers. I’ve been looking for a way to keep the development staff of the nonprofits from becoming overwhelmed with the complexity of sustainable fundraising.
I think I’ve found a way through a New Yorker article on Intensive Care Unit in hospitals. The Israelis did a study and discovered that the staff in an ICU has to perform 178 distinct steps each day with an average patient.
With 178 steps to be performed in ICU each day missing even one or two steps can be the difference between life and death. In 2001 a physician, Peter Pronovost, who works full time in the Johns Hopkins ICU, began to wonder if a checklist would help the ICU to do a better job. Covering everything in a checklist would be impossible so he started with a regular source of infections in ICU, inserting lines in a patient.
He mapped out the five steps commonly taught to prevent infections while inserting lines. Then he had the ICU nurses check to see how frequently physicians followed the five steps.
At the end of one month the nurses documented that the doctors missed at least one step in more than a third of the patients.
The next month Pronovost persuaded the administrators to authorize the nurses to stop the doctors if they missed a step on the checklist.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.
If checklists can help ICU doctors execute their plan, I think checklists will be an excellent way to help nonprofits execute sustainable fundraising. I’ll supplement Green Light Fundraising with free, downloadable checklists.
A tale of two schools
Saturday, November 14th, 2009 by richfossI am endlessly fascinated by how organizations treat people on the edges of our communities, those people who don’t fit the norm. It’s partly personal–I became disabled when I was a teen and have used a wheelchair a lot since then–and partly professional because I’m passionate about helping organizations thrive that work with people on the edges of our communities.
Here’s an amazing personal story by a Texas Baptist preacher–Part 1, Part 2–that portray how two organizations with the mission of educating children respond to the same child in very different ways.
In praise of chores
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 by richfossStarting in fifth grade I began milking cows on our family farm at 5:00 a.m. and again after school. By nature I am a morning person and I have good memories of getting up early to do the milking.
As I do my work of leading with Evergreen Leaders and our Plow Creek communal group, much of the leading is doing chores. Each Monday I write Monday Morning Coffee, a one page e-mail report to the Evergreen Leaders board. Each week I prepare the agenda for our weekly Plow Creek communal meeting. I like the rhythm that comes with systems, with the repletion of chores.
Getting up at 5:00 a.m. to feed the cows, milk them, clean the barn, and fix the fences has given me a life time appreciation of the rhythm of chores.
Of course, organizations do not thrive on chores alone. You also need breakthrough vision.
If you haven’t subscribed to the 7 Paths e-letter, do so today and enjoy this week’s article, “In praise of chores and breakthrough vision”, when it is published on Thursday:
Click here to subscribe to 7 Paths.
1st published 3/4/08.
Move the road
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 by richfossIs your organization spending too much time fixing the way it gets a crucial task done?
Organizations develop ways of doing things that can seem as permanent as a road. Sometimes they pour a lot of energy into upkeep of the road when they’d do better to take a step back and think about moving the road.
In the early 1900’s when someone homesteaded the land that eventually became our family farm, they carved a road though the woods to where they built the house, barn and other out buildings.
By the time I was born in the 1951 there were fields and pastures that had been cleared but our driveway still went through the woods. That was a problem because the road had a low spot and every spring when the snow melted the driveway was muddy, filled with ruts, and a place where it was easy to get stuck.
When they were first married and purchased the farm Dad and Mom hauled dirt to raise the road in the low spot. It helped some but it wasn’t enough. Plus a road through the woods took longer to dry after rain.
Finally Dad decided to create a new driveway in the field along the edge of the road. It was easier to put a ditch and culvert in the low spot to drain the snowmelt and rainwater. Also, the road dried faster since it wasn’t hidden from the sun by trees.
Dad effectively moved the road and it’s served he and the farm well ever since.
Sometimes it’s easier to “move the road” rather than to keep fixing an old one. What are the old roads in your organization that are eating up time and energy?
1st published 2-26-08.
What frustrated donors want
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 by adminSmall business owners are tired of being hit up continually for donations. The topic came up in a conversation I had today with Illinois State Senator Gary Dahl. “There’s a golf tournament almost every day during the summer,” he said.
What’s the alternative?
Annual campaigns.
Four years ago I helped a nonprofit stop doing special events (yes, they did a golf tournaments, dinners, and a dozen other events) and launched an annual campaign. Dahl served as the first chairperson of the campaign.
The organization kept their popular Christmas appeal and then organized volunteers from the business and professional community to meet in person and ask the person for a pledge for the year.
In four years, the nonprofit doubled it’s income from the face to face solicitation phase. And the business and professional people were delighted because they knew that at least one major nonprofit in the community was going to ask them only once a year.
The principle of the the thing
Thursday, September 6th, 2007 by admin“There is no policy in the handbook forbidding a supervisor from living with someone he or she is supervising,” the young supervisor said.
She was right. She was also inadvertently pointing to the flaw of using policies as a management tool.
The supervisor at a community nonprofit faced a housing crisis and she faced who solved her housing problem by moving in with a male staff person whom she supervised.
When the program director discovered her living arrangement, she transferred her to other department so that she would no longer supervise the staff member she was living with. The supervisor objected to the transfer and pointed out she was violating no policy.
That’s the inherent weaknesses of running an organization by policies. You can never create enough policies to cover all the crazy things people will do. It would be better to have a few principles, one of them might be, avoid conflicts of interest with anyone that you supervise.
Here’s a quote that expresses what I think about principles and policies:
A principle is just a commonly held guide for thinking, behaving and making decisions. You can manage a process or a machine with regulations, rules, and procedures, but if you want the best chance to capture people’ latent potential, then you start with principles that people “own” and help create.*
Fundraising as a mangement function
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 by adminWhile taking a break from revamping the Evergreen Leaders website, I check out other nonprofit bloggers. I recently discovered Rosetta Thurman’s blog, Perspectives from the Pipeline.
Two of the principles mentioned in a post from fundraising school caught my attention:
- Fundraising is essentially a management process.
- Whoever spends money in your organization should be involved in raising money for it.
The revamped, interactive EGL website will be both a resource for nonprofit leaders and fundraisers. At first I saw them as two different foci but as I’ve worked on the site I see how much they fit together as Thurman pointed out.
I chuckled when I read “Whoever spends money…” It takes leaders and a system to apply that principle.
Fervently calling a soldier a hero
Monday, June 4th, 2007 by adminOne day several year ag0, shortly after America began a policy of torture as part of its response to 9-11, I suddenly had a sick feeling in my stomach. What will this do to the men who do the torturing? What will it be like when they return to the USA?
Now this Washington Post story describe the tortured lives of torturers after they return to the USA. Torture, it turns out, is not a smart a friendly system that brings about the treasure of democracy.
It seems to me that one way we as a country deal with our guilt over sending young men and women to distant lands to kill and maim and be killed and maimed is to fervently call our soldiers heroes. The story aptly described that when you are suffering for what you’ve done in war, being called a hero doesn’t help.
A humble man does not cut a soldier off by calling him a hero. He istens.
Doing more for a cool planet
Monday, May 21st, 2007 by adminTo produce a treasure you need a smart and friendly system. Seth Godin rightly points out that humans have a powerful impulse to do more. So what’s a smart and friendly system to get us humans to produce less carbon emissions to reduce global warming? Here’s Seth’s take:
- let’s figure out how to turn this into a battle to do more, not less. Example one: require all new cars to have, right next to the speedometer, a mileage meter. And put the same number on an LCD display on the rear bumper. Once there’s an arms race to see who can have the highest number, we’re on the right track.
Seth is on the right track. We need to put in place smart and friendly systems to achieve the treasure of a cool planet.