Planning

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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 [...]

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 [...]

Next Gen Board: Recruiting for a New Day

By Susan Ross, Founding Partner. If your Board nominees look like mirror images of your current board, perhaps it’s time to try a new approach. Most of our nonprofit clients are actively seeking ways to embrace Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging. A stated commitment to DEIB is a good step, but it needs to be followed by actions and outcomes. Nonprofit leaders need board members to be their trusted advisors on strategic questions. If your whole board has the same perspective or the same skillset, you won’t get the best guidance. Board members play important roles as ambassadors and outside eyes, for which you need multiple networks represented. Our clients tell us that they know their boards need new blood, but they don’t know how to find new people. Great candidates are all around us, but it [...]

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 [...]

Welcome Normal Days

By Susan Ross, Partner. I’ve kept a newspaper column for many years called “Learning to be grateful for life’s normal days.” Encouraging us not to overlook their beauty, Donna Britt writes in the Washington Post of their “magnificent mediocrity” and says “those are days worth loving.” Never was that more true than during the 2020-21 pandemic-related upheaval of our normalcy. Nonprofits did what they could. Some hunkered down while others geared up, and most of those who continued fundraising just closed one of their best years ever. Our advice, shared through every Zoom call and e-newsletter over the last year, was not to wait it out but instead to continue to do the hard work of asking people to support the mission. So now as you begin to plan your 2021-22 fiscal year, how do you account [...]

The Five W’s of Development Planning

By Elizabeth Hopkins, Brooke Jenkins, and Lizzy Mottern. The summer months are a good time to refresh and renew our enthusiasm for the important work we do – and to create a Development Plan for the year ahead. The Five W’s of Development Planning will help you focus on the important elements of your plan. Why Plan? A plan provides common understanding of what is being done, who is doing it, and by when. Development plans: Secure resources for your organization Keep donors connected, informed, and feeling appreciated Ensure the development team works efficiently and effectively. When to Plan? For many organizations, the summer marks the end of one fiscal year and the beginning of another, making this an ideal time to assess what worked well last year and plan for the year ahead. Start early and [...]

Strengthening Our Abilities

By Mary Moss. For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.  African Proverb The past six weeks have tested all of our abilities – personally, professionally, and societally. By almost any measure, the blow of this virus has been mitigated by the selfless response of people and nonprofits that have stepped up in ways unthinkable two months ago. What have we learned? While we and our society have changed forever, we can be ready when the cloud lifts, as it surely will. Before you miss the moment, stop, think, document, and act on what you have learned. This new knowledge will make us stronger. Review the following five …abilities to assess what has happened and how you can be stronger in the future. Capability – You have now seen what you are capable of [...]

2020-04-22T16:17:44-04:00April 22nd, 2020|All Posts, From The Partners, Special Topics|

Dream Big, Plan Well, Execute to Perfection by Mary Moss

Those are three phrases that I use to guide many facets of my personal and professional life.  I did not grow up knowing how to do any of these things with respect to advancement (or much of anything else).  It is through 35 years of practice that I have become more seasoned in these areas. With respect to planning (i.e., the focus of this issue), in my very first development position, I was asked to write a plan on how to increase totals aggressively in a relatively new phonathon program.  Terrified does not even begin to describe what 25-year old me felt. I had no clue what the vice president of this university wanted to see or how to begin or why I had to do it.  My first step was to ask my peers what they thought should be in [...]

Strategic Planning: An Art, Not a Science by Chuck Fyfe

For many years, organizations embarking on a strategic planning effort followed an organized, pre-set process that grew out of a desire to justify large capital expenditures to investors.  Many books were written on the subject, and a generally accepted process was the norm.  Plans were populated with such elements as vision and mission statements, competitive analyses, SWOT analysis, risk assessments, resources analyses, etc.  And the plans were developed using similarly structured, replicable and defined processes. Chuck Fyfe, Senior Associate But in today’s world, and especially in the world of nonprofits, more attention must be paid to the specific needs of the organization in designing the process.  Unlike in the business world, nonprofits do not have the same set of performance measures such as net income, earnings per share or return on investment.  Often the goals are less tangible, [...]

Making the best of unexpected circumstances by Mary Moss and Susan Ross

Perspectives on change and the unexpected from moss+ross co-founders and partners Mary Moss and Susan Ross... Over the course of our consulting careers, we have worked intimately with more than 100 organizations. Some embrace change, planned or not, while others grit their teeth and hope they make it through. Our perspective is that change can be a wonderful catalyst for leaders to step back and rethink, reorganize and restructure operations for the best. And in the 21st century, change is a given in almost every environment. An organization that is not changing is probably withering. Sometimes forced change offers opportunities that were not there before. Maybe you have an unspent salary to invest in strategic planning or an assessment you know you need. Perhaps you have been organizing your staff workload around a person’s strengths or weaknesses, and the change [...]

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