• Home
  • Work with me
    • Design Your Organization's Future
    • Additional Services >
      • Do you have the right program mix?
      • Impact mapping
      • Create New Offerings
    • Results >
      • Catching up on growth
      • Focusing on the right things
      • Learning from one another
      • Emerging from a crisis
      • Building shared leadership
  • Goodies
  • Podcast
  • Learn More
    • Carol Hamilton
    • Contact
Grace Social Sector Consulting, LLC
  • Home
  • Work with me
    • Design Your Organization's Future
    • Additional Services >
      • Do you have the right program mix?
      • Impact mapping
      • Create New Offerings
    • Results >
      • Catching up on growth
      • Focusing on the right things
      • Learning from one another
      • Emerging from a crisis
      • Building shared leadership
  • Goodies
  • Podcast
  • Learn More
    • Carol Hamilton
    • Contact

Mission: Impact podcast

Step One in Assessing Sustainability of Your Business Model

10/31/2017

 
Picture
​Assessing the sustainability of your organization’s business model has two key aspects for associations and nonprofits. The first is assessing how much each of your programs and services are moving your organization’s mission forward.  The second is how the program or initiative is contributing to your organization’s bottom line. Is the program profitable? Break-even? Burning through considerable resources? Mission-driven organizations often fall into the trap of considering one or the other of these two key factors rather than looking at how they intersect.

Is it moving your mission forward?

​Let’s dig into the first of these. How are your programs and initiatives contributing to your organization’s mission? This moves beyond an impact program evaluation.  A program evaluation looks at an individual program and tries to establish whether and how it is achieving its desired impact.  The impact assessment as part of an organizational sustainability assessment looks at all your programs and evaluates them with common criteria.  Thus you are able to get a comparative look across initiatives for how they are contributing to your organization’s mission.

Defining Assessment Criteria

​Deciding on the criteria you will use is key.  This is a useful step to widen the circle and involve key stakeholders to define what criteria you will apply.  According Jeanne Bell, Jan Masaoka and Steve Zimmerman in the book Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decision for Financial Viability, there are seven benchmarks that are useful to consider in this process:

7 Benchmarks

  1. Alignment with Core Mission – This is the most basic and fundamental standard. How well is the program or initiative aligned with your organization’s core mission?
  2. Excellence in Execution – How well does the program or initiative do? Is it a core competency of your organization? Is the program past its prime? Are there other organizations in your space that do this type of program better?
  3. Scale/Volume – How many people are impacted by the program? How many participants do you have? Are the numbers growing or declining?
  4. Depth – How deeply are people impacted? Does it engage an important or influential market?  Many programs that are more intimate have more depth but do not involve high numbers.
  5. Filling an important gap – Think about whether this is filling a gap in the market place – not just any gap – but a gap important to your mission.
  6. Community Building – Does the program or initiative create connection? Build engagement? Does it provide a compelling experience?
  7. Leverage – Does the program build connection for future engagement? Does it have a marquee value for organizational branding? Does the initiative create tools that can be repurposed or used in other programs?

You will likely have other criteria that are important in your context. This list gives you a starting point for thinking about how to assess the mission impact of your programs and initiatives.

Next Steps

Download Four Things to Consider before an Organizational Sustainability Audit.
Learn more by listening to my webinar on Organizational Sustainability.

Want to talk about how you might apply this at your organization? Book a coaching session.

Book review: Standing in the Fire: Leading High-Heat Meetings with Calm, Clarity and Courage

10/2/2017

 
Picture
I am a big reader and will occasionally share reflections on the books I have recently read.
 
 “Fire is often the best indicator that people care about the issue with which they are struggling” (Dressler, 2010, p. 10).   Meeting leaders often shy away from conflict, controversy, emotion or other human items that are not on their neatly organized agenda.  Dressler describes how all of these messy parts of human interaction can add to a greater whole if a meeting leader has developed the capacity to hold the moment in order to be able to facilitate the group finding common ground.   His book, Standing in the Fire: Leading High-Heat Meetings with Calm, Clarity and Courage, describes how meeting leaders, facilitators and conveners can cultivate greater capacity to regain their balance when surprises knock them off their equilibrium.

Six Ways of Standing

​Dressler describes six “ways of standing” that are key to leading high-heat meetings.  These include standing with self-awareness; standing in the here and now; standing with an open mind; knowing what you stand for; dancing with surprises; standing with compassion.  He then describes ongoing practices to help cultivate one’s capacity to embody these “ways of standing.”  These include physical centering, mindfulness meditation, compassion journaling and breathing, affirmations.  He describes practices for day of readiness, in the moment practices and culminating practices to leave the meeting behind and harvest the learning from it. 

Increasing Your Capacity to Choose Your Reaction

​By using mindfulness and reflective practices regularly, meeting conveners can increase their capacity to choose their own reaction to high heat situations during the meetings they lead and participate in.  Dressler describes in useful detail the essential elements of being a “nonanxious presence” for a group and how to cultivate that aptitude within yourself.  He does not shy away from describing times from his own personal experience when he was emotionally “hooked” or handled a situation with less than grace. He also makes it clear that you do not simply come to the state of being able to embody these “stands” and stay there but rather continue to grow into you capacity to stand in the fire this way.  He provides tools for analyzing instances where you are triggered emotionally and to learn from these instances; describes how the brain habitually reacts to stressful situations by escaping into worries about the past or future and how to use attention and stillness to bring yourself back into the here and now; how increasing your open-mindedness includes embodying humility, suspending judgment, and inviting curiosity.

Accessible and Straightforward

​The book is very accessible, provides useful examples and lays out in a very thorough and logical fashion how to enhance one’s capacity to create and hold the emotional space for a high-heat meeting.  By describing both the ideal and “how we burn ourselves,” Dressler makes the concepts he is discussing straightforward.  Dressler’s reflective exercises help bring what he is writing about to life.  I would recommend this book to anyone who regularly convenes meetings where important issues are being discussed.

    carol Hamilton

    My passion is helping nonprofit organizations and associations have a greater mission impact.

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017

    Categories

    All
    Advocacy
    Associations
    Audience
    Awareness
    Board Development
    Book Review
    Branding
    Burn Out
    Business Model
    Change
    Change Leadership
    Communications
    Community
    Community Engagement
    Conflict
    Consultant
    Content
    Culture Fit
    Customer Centered
    Data Gathering
    Decision Making
    Decision-making
    DEI
    Delegation
    Design Thinking
    Digital Transformation
    Diversity
    Education
    Equality
    Equity
    Evaluation
    Executive
    Facilitation
    Funding
    Fundraising
    Grants
    Group Process
    Health
    Hiring
    Inclusion
    Influence
    Innovation
    Leadership
    Leadership Transition
    Lean Start Up
    Learning
    Lobbying
    Marketing
    Meetings
    Mentoring
    Messaging
    Mindfulness
    Mission Creep
    Money
    Nonprofit
    Nonprofit Life Cycles
    Nonprofits
    Online Meetings
    Online Organizing
    Operations
    Organization
    Organizational Culture
    Organizational Sustainability
    Organizations
    Pandemic
    Partnership
    Pause
    Poc
    Podcast
    Productivity
    Professional Development
    Reflection
    Reorganization
    Research
    Resolution
    Results
    Self Care
    Self-care
    Social Media
    Social Sector
    Somatics
    Storytelling
    Strategic Planning
    Strategy
    Strengths
    Succession
    Team
    Team Building
    Team-building
    Technology
    Transitions
    Trust Building
    Values
    Vicarious Trauma
    Virtual Environment
    Virtual Meetings
    Volunteers
    Wellness
    Workforce Development
    Workplace

    RSS Feed

    Picture
    Grace Social Sector Consulting, LLC, owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of the Mission: Impact podcast, as well as the Mission: Impact blog with all rights reserved, including right of publicity.

Home    Work with me     Goodies     Podcast      About    Contact            


Telephone

301-857-9335

Email

info[at]gracesocialsector.com
Grace Social Sector Consulting, LLC, owns the copyright in and to all content in, including transcripts and audio of the Mission: Impact podcast and all content on this website, with all rights reserved, including right of publicity.
  • Home
  • Work with me
    • Design Your Organization's Future
    • Additional Services >
      • Do you have the right program mix?
      • Impact mapping
      • Create New Offerings
    • Results >
      • Catching up on growth
      • Focusing on the right things
      • Learning from one another
      • Emerging from a crisis
      • Building shared leadership
  • Goodies
  • Podcast
  • Learn More
    • Carol Hamilton
    • Contact