Let’s Burn Down the Haystack

Let’s just be blunt. The nonprofit industry is as exhausting and overwhelming as it is exhilarating. I have spent almost two decades working in the nonprofit industry and know that it is hard. We all want to save the world only to find out that we are managing large businesses. We face the difficult need to navigate legal, ethical, and financial realities, while we also work to drive forward our mission.

So, let’s talk about haystacks and needles.

Bear with me…I promise this metaphor works. Let’s start there. What does it mean to burn down the haystack. I would argue that it depends on what you are trying to find, but in essence it means leading with honesty and forthrightness to reach out to our connections and network to ask for support, and openly utilize opportunities to share our resources with our competitors and collaborators to drive mutual success. In other words, it means building coalitions to support your goals.

In my field of work, I spend a lot of time looking for needles in haystacks. Anyone in nonprofits does. We search constantly for the right funders, board members, solutions, and connections. We navigate haystack after haystack, while we desperately have our eyes peeled for that needle. And we do this with limited resources that leave us feeling depleted.

So here is the problem…

Needles are sharp and they aren’t always safe to play with.

We can all think of the board members, clients, and funders that weren’t the right fit for our organization. We can think of the solutions that we spent weeks, months or years searching for that turned out to be a bigger problem than when we started. Sometimes when you pick up the wrong needle it pricks you. And when that happens, because we insist on protecting our own haystacks, unwilling to allow the competition in, lest they find a needle before us, no one is there to warn us about a needle that will just prick us. ?There is just too much hay out there to efficiently or effectively find the right needles alone.

That left me wondering what if we burned down the haystack? As I was reminded recently in an article I read, straw burns. Metal doesn’t. If you burn the hay, the needles will remain left behind, allowing you to study them, sort them and select the right ones for you and share the ones that aren’t. And because its easier to find the needles, its easier to share them.

But it takes guts and an openness to risk to light a fire. It can easily burn down the entire field of hay if you are not careful.

When COVID-19 was in its very deadly infancy in March of 2020, I helped lead a small nonprofit serving young girls in a community with many immigrants. Suddenly, our girls could not attend school. For them school wasn’t just about education. It was the place they received food for themselves and their families. It provided childcare. It offered social services and counseling, and it watched out for abuse. All these services disappeared from our girls’ lives. How could our organization talk about empowerment when our girls didn’t have food? And so, the organization swiftly switched focuses to ensure that we were helping to meet the more pressing immediate needs. What we learned as we did this, was that we were not alone. But it was a difficult situation. Every nonprofit was terrified of losing funding, staff, and resources. The immediate and natural response was to turn inward and become self-protective. However, in that moment, we knew that turning inward was not the solution.

So, we burned down the haystack.

We led the formation of a coalition of nonprofits in the region, so we could share resources, ideas and supports. We united with a few of them to build out a joint fundraising campaign that was solely focused on food services, an area none of us had ever worked in before. We brought in experts who guided us all through the financial realities of the time. And we did this with our competition. The result was the discovery of multiple needles, some that fit our organization, some that fit others. And some that were thrown away because they weren’t useful to anyone.

We led with honesty, acknowledging our own weaknesses and united with others who were willing to do the same. And because of this, we all drove forward our individual successes, while working collaboratively to achieve joint success.

I often think back to those days as we have moved forward over the past few years. What lessons have we learned that we have taken with us? For me it is this.

I don’t want to keep digging alone. I want to take risks. I want to see what happens if we rid the playing field of the hay and start to sort out the needles together.

How can we look at one another and not see the competition, but see a potential collaborator, even when we are talking to the same funders, potential supporters, and staff. There are 4 simple steps that I follow in that process.

1.?????? Determine who else shares your goal. Not everyone is a good fit for this. Lead with self-aware honesty. Know your strengths and weaknesses and be willing to share both even with your competition. This will lead to open conversations that direct us to find those that are also ready to invest in this process and share your definition of success. Look outside of your industry as well. Think about corporate and government entities that have a stake in your mission as well. Think about nonprofits in other fields, who still may see the value of your goal to their mission.

2.?????? Build strong working relationships. Find your people. You know what chemistry feels like. They say there are strength in numbers, but numbers come in big and small sizes. Selecting the right partners is more important than having a large coalition with people and organizations with whom you don’t synergize.

3.?????? Understand everyone’s self-interests and translate those into group interests. It is ok to have self-interests, and we should respect them. Know what your partners need to accomplish so that the coalition will be responsive to that. Their success will help them support yours and drive forward the ultimate success of the coalition.

4.??????Develop cohesive tactical plans. Coalitions take time. No one will want to join this party if they find it a waste of their resources. Be direct and strategic in outlining your plans including the time it will take to lead or join this effort, so that you can define and achieve joint success.

I’m not saying that you should never have your own fields of hay. What I am saying is that when we take the risk to invite others into our field, and when we do so with thoughtful intentionality and shared focus, we may just find we have more needles than we ever thought possible.

You know…stop digging for needles and invest in some matches instead.

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