Do you know what stage of growth your nonprofit is in? At the Non-For-Profit Leadership Summit VII, Don Crocker and John Brother of the Support Center for Nonprofit Management explained the stages:
Idea Phase: Imagine Inspire
Start Up Phase: The Labor of Love
Growth Phase: Ground & Grow
Maturity Phase: Produce & Sustain
Decline & Turnaround: Review & Renew
Terminal: Merge or Close Gracefully
They first discussed typical characteristics for each stage. For example, in the Idea/Startup phase, organizations are seeking to build a board, including forming a steering committee as a first step, producing an initial event to attract people, and leveraging members’ social networking.
One of the most compelling challenges for all nonprofits is in marketing and branding. Here’s a short list of key challenges:
- Differentiating your organization from others.
- Investing in fundraising and marketing infrastructure.
- Using the internet to build your nonprofit’s brand, create visibility, attract a donor base, and develop a community.
They suggest that it is possible to work with other organizations as resources towards addressing these challenges.
Then we learned more details on the profile of each stage in a nonprofit’s lifecycle, in the areas of Operations, Governance, Leadership, Obstacles, and Opportunities. I better understood the needs of organizations in the Growth/Maturity phase, which is a typical client of ours. Some characteristics include:
Operations: 7- 20 years in operation
Governance: Board turnover policy and strategy is in place, and power is shared between Executive Director and board
Leadership: Since there are many managers on staff, Executive Director must possess good management and communication skills.
Obstacles: Remaining client-centered rather than policy-bound, keeping staff motivated around mission, building strong financial footing from endowment or reserve, maintaining a programmatic edge, based on a continued relevancy
Opportunity: New staff and board introduce new ideas, organization is known in community, adequate resources enable some risk-taking
WAKE UP CALL: Understanding your organization’s lifecycle stage can help you head off issues before they become major problems and to leverage your strengths to take advantage of opportunities.
Thanks for citing. One of the things to remember about the Lifecycle is that during tough times you can be expedited through a stage quickly and therefore it is very important to make sure that you are building infrastructure at all times.
Good point. As is evident in my blog postings, I am a big proponent of building nonprofits’ capacity and urge them to think about it all stages. I am posting today (6.8.09) about a union that apparently was not good at building their infrastructure – more specifically, their relations with management and their public, and now they are on the decline and in a defensive position.