Quick Guide: Culture-Building for Nonprofit Organizations

 

Nonprofits face unique challenges, including fundraising, programming, volunteer management, and more, all of which are affected by external pressures from the economy, community, and politics.

 

A strong internal culture brings immense but easily overlooked benefits to any organization, making it much easier to overcome many of these challenges. Without a robust culture, negative developments are more likely to create harmful ripple effects.

 

For example, employee turnover can become extremely costly. One study estimates that it takes an average of four years for fundraisers to reach their full potential in a role. The departure of a senior fundraiser can ultimately cost the organization as much as five times their salary in lost revenue immediately following the departure and after, as the role is either left vacant or filled with a new team member who needs time to grow and succeed.

 

A robust internal culture that minimizes employee turnover bolsters the entire organization and its effectiveness.

 

But in the day-to-day rush of nonprofit work, actively building a stronger culture is itself a challenge: Where do you find the time and resources? Where do you start making changes?

 

Let’s examine the four key categories of fundamental ongoing practices that organizations can integrate into their normal work to foster stronger connections and culture.

 

Communication

 

Communication is the bedrock of a high-performing organizational culture. When all team members, from leaders to casual volunteers, know they’ll receive the information they need to do their jobs and be heard when they have something to share, the entire organization benefits.

 

How do you make effective communication an ingrained practice for your organization?

 

• Prioritize transparency. Transparency takes many forms, but it often boils down to whether rationales are provided for decisions. Team members should have a shared understanding of your organization’s current state and strategic direction to ensure all daily operations run smoothly.

 

• Ask for and give plenty of feedback. Giving productive feedback, both up and down the reporting chain, increases everyone’s visibility into the effectiveness of the organization’s practices. Consistent feedback to directs also ensures that staff members fully understand how their performance is being judged.

 

• Ensure tech isn’t getting in the way. Technology can both help and hinder communication. Review how your team currently uses technology to communicate internally and share the information they need to do their jobs, and then implement improvements. Are there gaps or silos that create frustration? Are too many unnecessary communication channels distracting team members from key priorities?

 

Communication supports everything your organization does and often in easy-to-miss ways. It’s particularly important as organizations and their work become more complex, for example, in the cross-department workflows of healthcare fundraising. However, any organization can benefit from auditing its communication practices and seeing where changes could help improve job satisfaction and efficiency.

 

Management

 

What people-to-people practices does your nonprofit employ to shape the employee experience? Are staff given the structures, guidance, and resources they need to thrive in their roles? Consider these effective management essentials:

 

• Have an intentional performance management process. A clear structure and cadence for discussing performance makes everyone’s job easier. Establish a schedule for formal performance reviews, then back it up with ongoing feedback, transparency, and frequent check-ins for direct reports to bring any discussion items or concerns to their managers.

 

• Set goals for teams and individuals. Goal-setting is an integral part of effective performance management because it creates shared expectations and makes growth a concrete priority rather than a moving goalpost. Establish goals based on organizational priorities and past performance. Just be mindful of limiting factors that are out of the organization’s or individual’s control, particularly for fundraisers. For example, suppose a private school sees a drop in enrollment and subsequently increases its reliance on raised funds. In that case, school development staff might easily be overburdened if their goals are not set thoughtfully. Keep the bigger picture and individual capabilities in mind.

 

• Establish career paths. Graham-Pelton’s employee retention guide highlights that a perceived lack of upward mobility opportunities is a major contributor to employee turnover. Stronger, more engaged cultures emerge when employees understand their long-term options with an organization. Take the time to clearly define what promotions look like and how and when they occur for various roles, then communicate these details to your teams. Make career growth a regular point of discussion between direct reports and managers.

 

Your organizational culture will ultimately be more satisfying when it’s supported by shared expectations. The best way to establish these shared expectations is to be explicit and intentional. By concretely defining success at all levels, staff members’ performance should never come as a sporadic surprise to either them or their managers.

 

Mission Reinforcement

 

Your nonprofit’s mission guides everything it does—but how top of mind is it for staff in their day-to-day work? It can be easy to lose sight of the overarching purpose of your work, but reinforcing your mission goes a long way to strengthen culture, satisfaction, and overall effectiveness. Consider these practices:

 

• Establish organizational values. Clearly define the values that guide your organization’s work and that clearly relate to the mission, like respect, decisiveness, inclusion, and innovation. Then, walk the walk by using these values to anchor all your employee engagement and communication efforts going forward. Recognize and reward employees when they demonstrate key values. Create organizational goals or fun challenges to bolster how you put them into practice.

 

• Actively talk about the mission. The most surefire way to ensure your mission contributes to a unified, engaging culture is to explicitly discuss it. Each individual and team should understand how their work contributes to your organization’s big-picture purpose. A shared guiding vision can reduce feelings of drudgery in the day-to-day and ultimately help employees feel more engaged and purposeful in their work. Mission drift is a real concern, and it can quickly sap employee enthusiasm!

 

• Make your impact real. You likely collect impact stories and statistics to share with funders and donors, but what about with employees? Tangible details bring the purpose of their work to life, reinforcing the mission and your shared goals. For example, a university development office is a busy place where mission drift is likely to occur. However, by talking about successes in student outcomes enabled by fundraising and the school’s tangible plans for the future, the organization can keep its mission front of mind. Impact stories can infuse internal interactions and filter down into conversations with donors and partners, creating a more robust culture that attracts engagement.

 

It can be easy to take your organization’s mission-driven nature for granted; after all, you’re a nonprofit organization. However, your mission needs a guiding hand to become a true asset for your work rather than just a slogan. Actively prioritize and talk about it to infuse your whole team’s experience with deeper meaning.

 

Employee Engagement

 

Communication, management, and mission-related practices help you build the framing to support a stronger culture in the long run. Employee engagement is how you fill in and expand on that framing to create a dynamic, pleasant lived culture on the day-to-day level.

 

Employee engagement strategies take many forms and are interwoven with many of the other practices used by effective organizations. For example:

 

• Employee recognition tactics. Recognition concretely demonstrates for employees your organization’s values, communication habits, and approach to goals. When you establish organizational values, recognize employees for embodying them. When employees exceed their goals individually or as a team, make sure the whole organization knows about it. Using a spectrum of easy recognition practices, ranging from casual shout-outs to more formal spot bonuses when appropriate, goes a long way to not simply reward employees but show them that the organization pays attention and values their contributions.

 

• Training opportunities. In addition to establishing clear career paths and talking about career growth with direct reports, take steps to actually provide the resources employees need to develop their skills. Stipends for continuing education courses can be a low-lift option if your budget allows. You might allow employees to shadow other teams for a day to learn how other aspects of your organization work. Even simple book clubs or discussion groups related to your mission or internal priorities, like developing management skills, can engage employees and reveal those who are particularly motivated to grow in their roles.

 

• Ongoing feedback collection. In addition to giving and receiving feedback between direct reports and managers, your organization should seek to collect feedback from employees more broadly. Create an open line of communication for feedback and suggestions, or create a cadence of open-ended surveys to collect thoughts and ideas for how your nonprofit can improve its operations and strategies. As you collect feedback, actively talk about it, explaining to employees why or why not you act upon certain suggestions.

 

There are many ways to boost employee engagement. As you identify strategies to try, consider how you might give them a peer-to-peer structure. For example, offer the ability for employees to easily send each other quick shout-outs for embodying values and helping solve problems. Or, you might encourage employees to plan casual events and meals using a quarterly budget. This level of horizontal engagement (versus purely top-down interactions) can foster stronger feelings of inclusion and team coherence.

 

The Big Picture of Talent Strategy

 

As you read through the tips above, you likely noticed that they overlap quite a bit. Implementing one new strategy can have positive ripple effects across the entire culture as workflows run smoother, employees see more meaning in their day-to-day experiences, and the shared vision of your mission comes into sharper focus.

 

This is why many HR professionals rely on the broad concept of “talent strategy.” Rather than laser-focusing on specific problem areas such as engagement or retention, it’s helpful in the long run to understand all the interconnected elements that come together to create and reinforce a productive, satisfied work environment.

 

For your organization looking to make quick culture-building improvements, that’s great news!

 

The holistic nature of a talent strategy means that you don’t have to revamp your practices from the ground up. You can (and should) take an iterative approach to improving your culture. Nonprofits of all sizes, from huge charities dealing with organizational complexity to small neighborhood ministries trying to grow their reach, can build world-class cultures with their teams.

 

Using feedback and data, take stock of what’s working well in your organization and identify immediate areas for improvement. Starting with the fundamental areas described above will likely be a good choice, although every organization’s journey is different. The keys to success are to stay aware of how the different elements of your culture and organizational practices interact, maintain transparency, and keep improving over time.

 

This post was generously provided by the experts over at Graham-Pelton.