Signs Your Nonprofit is Failing

Field of Dreams is considered to be one of the best sports movies. It’s known for a scene in which Kevin Costner’s character hears a whisper when walking through his cornfield, which says, “If you build it, he will come.” Eventually, long-dead baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson shows up to play catch.?

In business terms, it means that your organization will succeed if you work hard. Hollywood scripts and sports ghosts are no match for good old-fashioned facts and data. Is your non-profit failing? Here are four of the top signs...

Your organization is getting suboptimal outcomes if it isn’t tracking data changes from year to year.

1. Operations - You’re relying on intuition rather than data and not monitoring a dashboard of key performance indicators like the retention rate, donor acquisition cost, average gift size, and total number of people reached. Here’s the data on data according to NonProfit Hub: About 80 percent of nonprofit leaders are too busy to focus on data, and only about 57 percent of organizations are using data to help manage donors. How much of that time is spent running in circles doing the wrong thing but expecting different results? Your organization is getting suboptimal outcomes if it isn’t tracking data changes from year to year. Solution starter: There are loads of no or low-cost constituent record management (CRM) tools to help track data and analyze how well your messages are landing. ?
2. Fundraising - You send the same email message with the same ask to everyone in your database. Neglecting donor segmentation leads to decreased engagement and retention. This can manifest as a barrage of unsubscribes, lower database numbers compared to last year, a lack of potential volunteers reaching out to see if they can help, or people just asking questions about your organization. Forrest Gump tells a great story, but not everyone likes it. Solution starter: Switch up your story and tone by separating donors based on their giving history and amounts, their shared interests, their connection to your cause, and demographics. Creating a few personas of the types of people in your community is great for understanding how to communicate with them.
3. Communications - Your inbox is overflowing with emails from teammates, or you see them only once a week at the staff meeting. There’s this trend right now: "don’t have a meeting about something that could be an email.” Time is a finite resource. No one wants boring meetings, but when there are misunderstandings, no one gives feedback, or the work volume is so high that it causes tension and distress, you’re not meeting enough. Busy nonprofit staffers juggle many tasks, and we absorb information differently. It is sometimes necessary to say the same thing seven times in seven different ways to be “heard.” Solution starter: Practice inserting, “What I think I hear you saying is…” and build a culture of overcommunicating the most important things to each other and everyone’s roles and responsibilities within those topics.?
4. Innovation - You say, “We’ve always done it this way.” Dixon Ticonderoga is one of the oldest corporations in America. It was founded in 1795 as a mining company until the founder decided to bake some of the graphite he pulled from the ground with clay and water before pressing it into wood. That’s how we got the No. 2 pencil. Now, the company sells classroom and art supplies. Our causes demand innovation and experimentation. ArtistShare only sought ways to help artists in 2001 when their fan-financing ideas led to crowdfunding. Finding new ways to help your community can challenge how the industry thinks and operates. Solution starter: Make sure to schedule innovation. Put it on the calendar. Listen to stakeholders and collaborate on small pilot projects to test new ideas.??

Jamie Bearse is a 22-year nonprofit CEO and executive, a change agent, and an innovator who helped pioneer the prostate cancer movement by building ZERO Prostate Cancer. He's the founder and principal of Build a Better NonProfit, an agency that helps nonprofits succeed.