How do you visualize viral?

We've heard about going viral for a long time now. Or at least it seems that way. Here is a pretty good infographic that helps visualize the phenomenon.

Is you nonprofit ready to be disrupted?

Are we ready? Are we ready for someone else to disrupt us? Can we disrupt ourselves?

These are essential questions for all nonprofits today. The ability to disrupt our business is a reality to be considered. Do it ourselves or have someone do it to us seems to be the issue to think about.

Maybe we need to consider that we are not the only ones who can deliver our mission. In this day and age, others can, perhaps cheaper and better. It is something to think about. 

One of them -- who self-identified as a Gen Yer who had recently received $15 million in funding for his startup -- explained to me that the cost of disrupting has fallen so low that he doesn't even think people like him need to go for the big funding anymore (not that he refused it when it came!). He said, "Especially in software, it only takes $30,000 to build anything in software today."

Are You Ready To Disrupt Yourself? | Forrester Blogs

Why should I invest in improving the Constituent experience at my nonprofit?

It is reasonable to ask, if my nonprofit invests in the constituent experience, will it work? If you are in the C-Suite, that is the question.

I only know of one nonprofit that uses something like the Forrester Customer Experience Index to measure things so I don’t have any benchmark data. I would love to learn there are more nonprofits using this measure and I would give anything to analyze the data. Here is what we know from the for profit world.

This question drove Watermark Consulting to evaluate the macro impact of customer experience excellence. They’ve accomplished this over the years by studying the total returns for two model stock portfolios comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publicly traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Index ranking. The results are stunning.

For the 6-year period from 2007 to 2012, the Customer Experience Leaders in their study outperformed the broader market, generating a total return that was three times higher on average than the S&P 500 Index. Furthermore, while the Customer Experience Leaders handily beat the S&P 500, the Laggards trailed it by a wide margin.

Keep in mind, this analysis reflects more than half a decade of performance results.  It spans an entire economic cycle, from the pre-recession market peak in 2007 to the post-recession recovery that continues today. The Customer Experience Leaders in this study are clearly enjoying the many benefits that happy, loyal customers deliver:  better retention, greater wallet share, lower acquisition costs and more cost-efficient service.

And the Laggards?  They are being crushed under the weight of high customer turnover, escalating acquisition costs and an uncompetitive cost structure that is inflated by each customer complaint and avoidable inquiry.

 

Do you want to be a leader or a laggard?

" It's easier to focus on one number than it is to focus on a life." ~Seth Godin

Here is the context.

Measuring without measuring

 

As an organization grows and industrializes, it's tempting to simplify things for the troops. Find a goal, make it a number and measure it until it gets better. In most organizations, the thing you measure is the thing that will improve.

Colleges decided that the SAT were a useful shortcut, a way to measure future performance in college. And nervous parents and competitive kids everywhere embraced the metric, and stick with it, even after seeing (again and again) that all the SAT measures is how well you do on the SAT. It's easier to focus on one number than it is to focus on a life.

"The genius of leadership is its humanness and heart." ~Lolly Daskal

"The best advice that I can offer you is to learn the language of the C-Suite when making the case for what it is you believe is the right thing to do." ~Brian Solis

"Some bosses say 'but I’m not paid to be a shrink.' There’s a great pair of words to describe such bosses: Ignorant. Ineffective." ~Tom Peters

Guest Blog: Deborah Kerr - Nonprofit Talent Management

Deborah L. Kerr, Ph.D. is a performance measurement expert and a co-founding partner of Affintus, a pre-employment assessment company based in Austin, Texas. Her work in performance measurement and management has been written about in Financial World magazine and has been cited as “best practice” by SHRM. Her approach and success with organizational measurement were featured in Paul Niven’s 2002 book Balanced Scorecard Step by Step and Mohan Nair’s 2004 book Essentials of the Balanced Scorecard. Deborah led the development of the one of the nation’s first public sector balanced scorecards and in 2004, that measurement system was recognized as one of the world’s best when it was elected to the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame. She is on the graduate faculty of Texas A&M University where she teaches management, public policy theory, and organizational performance measurement. Her teaching has been recognized with the University’s 2008 Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching (based on nomination and support from current and former graduate students) and with the 2009 Silver Star Award given by the Class of 2009 for outstanding service and dedication.

Nonprofit Talent Management

Employee costs generally make up more than 50 percent of a nonprofit’s budget so nonprofit talent management is critical to the health of every nonprofit’s “bottom line”.  This will be highlighted as the economy continues to grow and nonprofits face two major workforce trends:  the need to add staff to meet demand and the reality of losing experienced staff to retirement or “better” jobs.

Adding nonprofit staff has been a trend for the last three years.  Nonprofit HR Solutions’ 2013 survey of 588 nonprofits found that 40 percent added new staff in 2012 and 44 percent plan to create more new positions this year.  Turnover is expected to remain at 17 percent in 2013, the same as 2012, but voluntary turnover and retirement now account for 11 percent of total turnover.  This may grow as the economy’s recovery leads to more job options for good employees.

After hiring, retention of good employees is key to sustainability, but in the Nonprofit HR Solution study 90 percent of respondents reported they have no retention strategy even though they see it as a challenge.  Losing good employees is expensive.  Writing for www.philanthropy.com, Raymund Flandez found the average tenure of a fundraiser is only 16 months and the direct and indirect costs of replacing that fundraiser add up to a staggering $127,650!   For other employees hiring costs range from 25 percent to over 100 percent depending on the job and responsibilities.

Here are strategies that work to improve hiring decisions, reduce voluntary turnover, and improve workforce retention.

Hire the right person in the first place.

Most organizations have made at least one hiring mistake in the last 12 months and report spending thousands of dollars to fix it. Hiring mistakes are not only expensive, they negatively affect the morale of other employees and can damage donor relations.  Hiring the right person, on the other hand, results in 10 percent - 50 percent higher productivity and revenues.

Why is hiring so hard?  Most nonprofits base hiring decisions on resume reviews and interviews.  Yet over 50 percent of resumes contain erroneous information and applicants can be coached on interviewing tactics, so decision data may be flawed.  The best way to get objective, accurate talent data is to use pre-hire assessments - candidates can’t “fake” assessment responses as they can fake interview responses or experience on a resume.  Be sure to use an assessment validated for pre-hire use, one that matches job requirements with applicant preferences and strengths.

Pay attention to pay

In a 2012 study, Penelope Burke of Cygnus Applied Research surveyed 1700 fundraisers and 8000 nonprofit CEOs.  She found that good fundraisers begin to be recruited away after only three to six months in a position!  She reports that it would cost about $46,000 to keep a good fundraiser happy by providing better salaries and other benefits like more vacation... a bargain compared to $127,650!

The best pay strategy is to match the market rate for the job whenever possible.The closer pay is to the market rate, the less likely an employee will think about quitting.  When employees find the work interesting and feel valued, most will not look for a new job as long as the pay is competitive in their geographic area and the industry.

Pay is not the most important factor in most decisions to stay in a job or to quit, but it is one of the top reasons employees choose to stay when they are offered another job.  Fundraisers are an exception – most report that higher pay is the number one reason they leave current jobs.  Helping someone decide to stay rather than take a new job saves money every time.

Be flexible

Research has repeatedly found that a flexible work schedule is a key reason for staying with the current organization when an employee is offered employment by another organization.Flexible work schedules improve employee satisfaction and productivity while helping to reduce absenteeism.

Let managers to handle employee scheduling requests on a case-by-case basis or permit cross-trained employees to “trade” hours as needed to meet both business and personal demands on employees.  The key is to be as flexible as possible while meeting the needs of the business.

The bottom line?  Talent management is an increasingly important driver of nonprofit sustainability and every investment in hiring and retaining good talent goes straight to the bottom line.  With projections for increased service demand in 2013, nonprofits must continue to grow the workforce while trying to hire and retain high performers. Now is the time to review talent practices and make the changes needed to reduce costs and improve bottom line performance.

Cool Friend: Debra McKnight

Recently I caught up with my cool friend Debra McKnight who agreed to be interviewed for my cool friend series. I've know Deb for over 10 years. She is currently serving as Director of Affiliate Technology Services for the American Heart Association. I consider her a great friend and truly value her insights.

So Deb, what single project would you consider the most significant accomplishment in your career so far?

This is a pretty hard question. ANY Project that that really transforms the culture of an organization for the better or helps a non-profit’s mission move forward is the project I love at the moment and value as significant. Providing technology to help staff help AHA save lives just rocks my world. Technology is so cool because it’s so broad in scope… everything from designing donor and volunteer-facing web portals and planning mobile app strategies to moving around infrastructure in field offices, it’s all great fun. Probably the most significant focus I’ve had over the years however was not so much around technology tool, but rather trust. I was asked to lead the first charge in building the organizational trust needed to centralize our IT services from regional self- governing groups into a true corporate IT organization. With the help of a lot of great IT and business folks, it worked out great and now we can leverage our enterprise size for even more impactful gains for AHA’s mission

What do you think is cool? Why do you think that?

The technology at the moment I think is pretty cool is definitely three-D printing’s application in the health field. It you haven’t seen the TED video of the researchers printing a human bladder, find it and watch it. This technology will continue to mature and save lives by disrupting the current lousy supply chain for human organs. People are dying today because we have more demand than supply – this technology is going to ultimately fix that. And, as an aside, I would have paid good money to be there when the initial innovator had that first thought. “ Hmmm, I wonder what other media I could use with this ink jet printer…” And in the not so distant future, some percentage of us will have three-D printers in our homes for generic use. Devices with a sub $2000 price point are already in the mainstream marketplace.

What is your favorite book?

Oh, gosh; that’s an impossible question. My favorite “just for fun” genres are historical fiction and science fiction, just for the entertainment of experiencing human behavior in different cultures and time periods. Ken Follett and Isaac Asimov are at the top of the list. It seems that our intrinsic motivators and basic human nature really never change over the centuries. I’m not sure what to think about that, actually. My favorite management books (for their concrete impact) are “Who Moved My Cheese”(actually changed jobs after reading it), “FYI: For Your Improvement” (a great coaching book for anybody responsible for developing staff) and of course the classic “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (rules to live by.)  I can’t help but add “Six Thinking Hats” and “Please Understand Me,” too. Please don’t ask me to just pick one!

So thanks to my cool friend Deb. You can connect with Deb on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Why can't Amazon make a profit?

Why can't Amazon make a profit? The answer is, they choose not to. Now to some extent this defies logic on several levels. First, they are a publicly traded for profit corporation. Second, you would think the stockholders would demand it. Yet, Amazon has been one of Wall Street’s darlings in the past decade. Amazon’s stock price jumped 234 percent in the past five years alone, giving the company a valuation of around $120 billion.

In those five years, Amazon’s sales have tripled to more than $60 billion a year, while its profits stayed remarkably flat. The reason for Amazon’s stagnant profit is its founder’s notorious commitment to long term growth. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994 and has lead the company ever since, has a track record of investing everything his company earns right back into it. Defending his investment strategy in his latest letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote:

  “Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas.”

This way, Amazon became the largest online retailer in the world and in the same way the company is now striving to become a dominant force in the distribution of digital media.  So far, investors seem to believe in Amazon’s long term success, but some day the company is going to have to proof it can turn a sizeable profit.

It is as Bezos recently noted:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine. We’re always working to build a heavier company.”

Can you BLUF?

We all spend a lot time in meetings, sending and responding to emails and talking with others on the phone. More and more we need to cut through the clutter and get to the point quickly in meetings - and in messages.

Let's take a lesson from the Navy. We could all take advantage of BLUF. That’s the acronym they use in the military for Bottom Line Up Front. In a military setting, BLUF communications allow people to grasp the essence of a situation immediately and seek details only as necessary. It’s like a Cliff Notes for every situation.

Here is another nifty list, also from the military. Always describe:

• What’s what.


• So what.


• What next.

If you’re in a meeting that is focused on getting to the bottom of an important situation, these are great guides. Encourage people to cite their headlines from the start. It not only saves time, it ensures the communicator has a point in the first place.

Are we creating heartfelt experiences at our nonprofit or not? Is that experience stunning?

There comes a time where we have to make a decision. What will we invest in? It is a serious question and not a budget exercise. If we are going to be intentional and proactive, we need to make an investment. At first that may be just time. Eventually it will be about people, our processes, our strategies and our technology. If we don’t become intentional in our approach to our digital constituent experiences we will continue to be haphazard in our approach; reacting, responding, solving toxic experiences in real time. This intention however must be about heartfelt experiences. It must create a passion for our mission.

There is of course, a very real cost to reacting. Scrutinize your budget and you will see that most of our fixed expenses are reactionary. What if we invested in proactive and intentional experiences of the heart up front? Could we radically reduce our reactionary and bloated fixed expenses? In fact, my guess is the reactionary expenses vastly exceed proactive expenses. I know nonprofits that are ramping up their expenses in reactionary engagement and relationships. The good news is that they are succeeding in shifting the negative to neutral or even the positive.

So what is the outcome of taking a negative and balancing it with a positive? Is it engagement or damage control? So what is the cost and value of neutralizing the negative? Shouldn’t we start with the amazing? What is the return on that investment in the stunning? What is probably most concerning is that most nonprofits are not measuring much of this. And why are we struggling to raise more money? Now think about that question. Why is our revenue flat? Why are donors not engaged and renewing their contributions?

Is the experience we are creating wonderfully sharable? If not, what is our investment over the next 3 months going to be in changing that? We must invest in not only a positive experience but an experience that screams out for our members, volunteers and donors to share it with everyone they know. That encourages others to join in. It also offsets any negative experiences anyone else has shared. Think about it. We all read the ratings and comments. If there are 100 over the top ones we can ignore the one that is virally negative writing it off to a weirdo.

What is the biggest deal? Trying to offset the negative experiences or proactively creating amazing ones? Creating amazing ones is everything. That is not an exaggeration. You know, from your own experiences that it is true. The cost of reacting is always eclipsed by the upside of the stunning.

Think of what you want. You are a consumer. You are the constituent who wants something from your nonprofit. Are you looking for the ordinary? No, you are looking for an experience, no, the experience.

Any nonprofit that recognizes you, remembers you, and gives you an amazing service experience will win your heart. And it is all about your heart. You will be loyal to them no matter what. That is what we know as relevance. A passion of our heart that transcends anything else.

And so, that heartfelt experience is not just a so-so something. It is everything. That kind of vision is the father of innovation. Who needs the mother of invention in that kind of world?

Collaboration gone wild?

Is this what collaboration looks like in your organization?



The CEO and the C-Suite can set reasonable limits on what can feel like collaboration gone wild. For most decisions, a form of RACI, decided up front, can help. The key is discipline to stick with it.

R - Recommend (Who, hopefully an individual, makes the recommendation)

A- Approve (Who, hopefully an individual, approves the decision)

C - Consult (Who needs to have input before the decision is made)

I - Inform (Who needs to be notified of the decision)

Is your nonprofit ready to join the lean start up movement?

Are you starting a new program and want to use the lean start up process. Be prepared for lean's consequences. Your nonprofit business model eventually leads to a set of implicit rules, norms, and metrics that govern its operation. Following the lean start-up methodology can require making rapid decisions about funding a particular venture; quickly killing ideas that hit too many roadblocks; or launching an idea before it has gone through the typical quality control process.

Nonprofits with rigorous annual-planning processes or ones with very deliberate, consensus-based decision mechanisms (warning to most nonprofits) will struggle to truly embrace the lean start-up approach because it will run counter to many of these systems. Leaders have to carefully ensure that their resource allocation, portfolio management, and incentive systems encourage the rapid-fire experimentation that characterizes a lean start-up.

The lean approach can help launch a new program. Is your nonprofit ready?

Your desk job makes you fat, sick and dead ...

Podio co-founder Jon Froda along with panelists Cali Williams Yost, CEO and Founder of Work+Life Fit Inc, Kate Lister from Telework Research & Richard Leyland, Founder of Worksnug explored the potential of ‘workshifting‘ and how working from anywhere has immense possibilities when it comes to productivity & work-life balance.

[slideshare id=17140312&style=border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px&sc=no]

Will you shape the vision?

IT is like business engine, CIOs are accountable for critical part of business that is constantly changing and evolving. Contemporary CIOs should be capable of evolving leadership skills to not only match pace with the changes in technology and the pace at which organization can effectively manage these changes, but also proactively drive changes in business transformation.

Shape the Vision: CIO and his/her team can play a large role in shaping a vision of the firm as a place where passionate individuals want to connect with and learn from one another. CIO offices also have a significant responsibility to choose and deploy the IT that will help their firms realize the vision. Simply put, IT can no longer just be about numbers and algorithms; it has an opportunity to be a significant catalyst for passion and a tool for encouraging questing and connecting the innovation dots.

Ignite Passion: The range of technologies have emerged that can help foster a deeper sense of connection and purpose in employees, ignite latent worker passion and bring together disparate parts of the organization. But these new tools also necessitate a new way of thinking, a creative way to do things and a flexible way to work smartly.

Set Evolution: The emergence of the CIO coincided with the birth of the PC and end user computing. That role certainly matured as the Internet age unfolded. Now, it’s social, mobile, consumerization of IT, Big Data and a major shift in how IT services are delivered (cloud). These changes are inspiring spiritual conversations around the role of the CIO, these are all evolutionary and in some ways even predictable.

Hirable like me?

Most managers would like to think they base their hiring decisions on candidates’ skill. But new research suggests that once a candidate passes through an initial HR screening, a bigger factor comes into play: how similar the interviewee is to the person doing the hiring. Kellogg School of Business assistant professor Lauren Rivera spent nine months embedded in a professional service organization and noted three key reasons why this takes place: the "Will this person fit in?" question; the fact that people define merit on the basis of their own experiences; and that managers get excited by candidates who have similar passions and interests. Hiring managers forget that "there are other ways people can a) be likeable and b) be socially skilled other than being a mirror image," Rivera says.

More here: Hirable Like Me (Kellogg Insight)

What is your new ecosystem?

The need for change is obvious. The CIO as change agent not only touches his/her own function, but also need make influence on entire organization and business ecosystem as well, it takes strategic planning, methodology and practice in orchestrating such transformation. This is a big deal. If the business isn't strategic it will be impossible for technology to be strategic as well.

Define Roadmap: In fact, the required changes, at the most fundamental level, need be well documented. A clearly defined roadmap is available, and industry best practices are in place to serve as a framework upon which the solution can be implemented over time. The transformation to a more proactive service/solution delivery organization with repeatable management processes in place of the 'crisis of the day' leadership model, can be a reality, but only if the CIO is the proactive, visible and charismatic sponsor.

Optimize Process: Meanwhile, to compete, business unit leaders need IT to ensure the availability and reliability of their business process automation tools/technology, so their staff can function as efficiently as promised, back when they justified the tool purchase. In fact, many organizations have little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. They have no idea where they are spending their money on and often assume it is mainly being spent on items which are actually much lower on the list. Every IT finance group can capture costs but the challenge is to have visibility and traceability between costs and the assets consuming those costs. The leadership team needs IT to be the business process optimization expert for the company, to find creative sources for competitive advantages, to better compete.

Ask for Help: One of the first things a CIO must do in a transformation initiative of this magnitude is to ask the business for help. The effort will fail if the business units are unwilling to invest resources and accept a "period of pain" where service levels may be adversely impacted. CIO can envision themselves talking with business unit leaders, selling them on the challenges and the vision for the future. Will CIO be open to new perspective, willing to adapt the new skill set to the demands of evolving technology or adapt their role to the evolving business requirements for technology? Will CIO be learning agile to understand business ecosystem and connect innovation dot cross-functional, cross-industrial and cross-cultural border? It takes both attitude and aptitude.

Will you transform the culture?

Many IT departments are still reeling from the "slam it in and fix it on the fly" approach that was required by the rush to automate all core business processes (late 1990s & early 2000s). A reactive, crisis-driven and internally focused 'systems management' culture evolved as a result, such culture becomes barrier for IT to reach higher level maturity.

From “Heroic effort” to “Collaboration Effect”: IT department-wide culture is maintained by a 'Heroic effort' reward system, a value system that is proving to be nearly intractable. Along with the Hero mentality, expertise silo evolved a non-collaborative, finger-pointing culture that renders truly effective SLAs impossible to measure & enforce. A fundamental change in the heroic effort rewards culture is required to put an end to the reactive, crisis-driven and technology systems focused role for the IT department, and shift to business-driven, collaborative IT mentality because the business requirements for technology management have changed. The rapid push for offering ‘cloud-based’ services and the need to retool IT to centrally manage these, is certainly a perfect opportunity to rethink the role of IT and make a cogent case for a service-level driven rewards and recognition culture

The transformation journey must start with the CIO. However, very few CIOs are willing to step away from the existing IT management paradigm and hero-based rewards culture to adopt a new role as a culture change transformation sponsor. This has not been a required leadership skill-set for the CIO role to date. It is a dramatic change in skills, priorities and rewards tactics. Can veteran CIOs who came up the ranks accept this need for a dramatic change in IT culture? Will they have the required skill set to sponsor such a change? Do they have the charisma to achieve buy-in from the current IT staff. Or will it take a crisis? CIOs must drive the elimination of the heroic effort reward culture. This is the principal challenge for current “up through the ranks” CIOs. Recognizing the need for this fundamental change has not been easy for most veteran CIOs.

Be Change Agent to retool Organizational Culture: Culture is perhaps the most invisible, but powerful fabric surrounding organization, the toxic culture like water, which can sink the enterprise ship, IT is also at unique position to well align people, process and the latest technology to empower talent, enforce communication, enhance governance, and enable cross-functional collaboration, to retool organizational culture for achieving high business performance potential.

 

Will you be the Change Agent?

Change is the second most popular word in 21st century. Why change is so tough and what really keeps (C-suite) executives from embracing organizational transformation is FEAR: fear of letting go of heroic leadership, fear of losing control, fear of navigating through uncharted territory, fear of chaos.

But change is inevitable, due to the CHANGE nature of technology, CIOs shouldn’t get pushed for change, they are actually at better position to play such a role as change agent in leading organizations’ transformation.

Will you be the change agent?