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Prioritizing Pay Equity

By Carolyn Rhodes, Senior Associate. Prioritizing pay equity may seem like an additional task for nonprofit leaders and board members to tackle, but it can have significant benefits for both the organization and society. By promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, nonprofit leaders can create a positive impact on their employees, stakeholders, and the community they serve. Pay equity ensures that all employees are compensated fairly and equally, regardless of their position within the organization, gender, race, age, or ethnicity. Prioritizing pay equity can foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace, which can attract and retain talent, improve employee morale, and advance the organization's mission. Additionally, pay equity is a critical component of social justice, promoting equality and fairness in society. To ensure pay equity, nonprofit leaders and board members can take the following steps: Establish clear and [...]

Keep Doing The Work.

By moss+ross Team. moss+ross approaches each client engagement as an opportunity to ask: are we doing the work that recognizes diversity and builds inclusivity and equity? What does this look like in our day-to-day work, in our strategic visioning, and in our reflections on current events as well as history? We only get better as we work together – and keep doing the work. Our clients are doing the work, day in and day out. The moss+ross team works alongside our clients, learning from one another, guiding strategy based on our experiences, and understanding what it means to be accountable. We support our clients as they do the work, including these examples: Many nonprofits are lifting up Black History in ways that are authentic to their missions, including the Durham Sports Commission and UNC Athletics which are [...]

Transitions Create Opportunities

By Lizzy Mottern, VP of Talent. Transitions are part of every organization’s life cycle. The good news is they are incredible opportunities to rethink, adjust, and become even stronger. We join clients in times of transition in multiple ways: providing interim contractors through m+r interim solutions, helping boards find their next great leader through our Executive Search services, and providing counsel during succession planning, assessments, and strategic planning work. Specific to staffing needs, moss+ross has provided temporary placements since our founding in 2009, and we formalized this service as our m+r interim solutions division in 2018. Our contractor database has a strong pool of 200+ highly-qualified, local nonprofit professionals who understand the Triangle and take great pride in adding value to the important work of nonprofits. These hand-picked contractors work side-by-side with clients, offering their professional experience [...]

Living Lived Experiences

By Carolyn Rhodes, Senior Associate. As a Black woman gaining momentum in the non-profit sector, I used to begin every new interaction with my lived/living experiences. It was something I felt like I had to do in order to be connected to mission-driven work. I have grown to understand that my lived/living experiences do not have to be my identity and only need to be shared as I choose to disclose them. My lived/living experiences can help organizations see or do things differently in the communities they serve, but it is my skills and experiences that will help make long-lasting change in the organization. I believe you need both. And I recently sat down with some amazing leaders who felt the same way. At the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits Conference earlier this month, my colleague Jeanne [...]

Fresh Eyes from Trusted Partners

By Kate Hearne, VP Corporate Services Many of you count yourselves among our more than 230 clients, some with 10-12 different contracts (THANK YOU!) At moss+ross, we begin each client relationship with a base of mutual trust and respect, and through our expertise, bring fresh eyes to each and every engagement. How do we bring fresh eyes after consulting on thousands (literally!) of projects over the past 14 years? The answer is simple: each client is an opportunity to make a difference. As I speak to prospective clients and develop proposals for partnering with them, I look for ways our team approach can be fully customized to each new project. It is exciting to match a client’s needs to what we bring, namely: Creative thinking - With each engagement, we challenge ourselves to think beyond traditional approaches, consider [...]

Tips for Retaining Talent

By Lizzy Mottern. Your search was successful, and you have hired an amazing new member of your team -- congratulations! Now you want them to stay. Retaining employees requires thought, planning, and creativity -- and has dramatic payoffs. One is financial: it costs about 33% of a new hire’s salary to replace an employee, and for highly skilled jobs, costs may be up to 150% of the annual salary (source: the Society for Human Resource Management). Finances are just one type of cost: employee turnover can mean lost momentum on projects, your organization’s inability to accept new work, and a toll on morale as other employees step in to cover duties of a vacant position. Once you find a person who makes your organization shine, take two proactive steps that help them choose to stay for a while: [...]

Servant Leadership and the Usher Protocol

By Kimberly Moore. My first experience with servant leadership was watching my grandmother serve as an usher in our small rural Baptist church in Gibsland, Louisiana. I am reminded of that usher protocol through moss+ross’ work in executive search, strategic planning, and fundraising counsel as well as my service on nonprofit boards. Through my grandmother’s example as a servant leader, I witnessed her preparation, setting of the tone, and anticipation, and can trace it through all the stages of organization engagement. Preparation My grandmother spent a few hours each Saturday washing and ironing her uniform – a starched white dress with matching stockings, shoes and gloves. This first step in her process was a labor of love to meet the crisp uniform standard. Similarly, when the moss+ross team assists an organization with executive search they come to [...]

2022-05-25T10:46:19-04:00May 25th, 2022|All Posts, Team Expertise|

Volunteers Bring Magic to the Mission

By Mary Moss, Founding Partner. April is National Volunteer Month, and we are celebrating the strengths and talents of volunteers with our clients and in our social media. Volunteers are not supplemental, or nice to have; they are essential and foundational to a nonprofit’s mission delivery. In 1981, my first fundraising job was to recruit student volunteers at Duke University to fill 18 slots a night throughout the year for the first Dialing for Duke telethons. Duke’s Annual Fund grew exponentially from this personal touch from students to alumni. Four decades later, I can report that every effort I have led as a staff member or volunteer, or guided as a consultant, has found its success through committed volunteers. The real magic happens when you build a strong staff-volunteer partnership with shared goals resulting in a cadre [...]

Help Us Help You: Three Tips for RFPs

By Kate Hearne, VP for Corporate Services. Like many of you, our team is feeling the pace of business activity approach pre-pandemic levels. At moss+ross, this means we are seeing multiple Request for Proposals (RFPs) each week. Campaigns that were being considered in early 2020 are being revived; strategic plans and development plans need adjustments to incorporate new ways of delivering programs and engaging with donors; and clients are assessing staffing needs for an increased level of activity. As we determine our capacity for responding to campaigns, searches, assessments, or other consulting projects, the quality of the RFP helps guide those decisions. The best RFPs have three things in common: A deadline date. RFPs with defined deadlines for submission and selection will help your organization get to your real goal – starting the project! We have seen RFPs with [...]

Talent Makes it Happen

By Susan Ross, Partner. The media is calling it a “resignation revolution,” but when it happens in your shop it’s just painful. Executive Directors, Directors of Development, and other nonprofit staff leaders play an integral role in a team’s ability to deliver the services clients expect, and stay true to the promises made to donors. In both large and small environments, a vacancy or two can wreak havoc on the remaining staff’s ability to perform as they scramble to keep up with an increased workload. We have seen a huge uptick in clients needing executive search services this fall, and no signs of it slowing down. Whether or not this is related to the pandemic, the need for experienced, mission-focused leaders is very real. At moss+ross, we are poised to help with interim professional placement to keep [...]

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