Finding Your Inner Hulk: Uncovering the 80/20 In Your Association

The Pareto Principle can apply to more than just to revenues. It can apply to other areas of your association as well. Marketing efforts, fundraising, sponsorship...Of course it doesn't apply everywhere and the breakdown is not always 80/20...but it does give some interesting food for thought.

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Find Out What Nonprofit Boards Look Like In Canada! Have You Completed Your NFP Pulse Survey on Board Structure Yet?

How do Canadian nonprofit boards recruit and retain board members? How big are they? Do they use a skills matrix? What governance model do they use?  These are just a few of the questions we are looking to gain insight into in this month's NFP Pulse on Canadian Nonprofit Board Structure.

Please take 7 minutes right now to participate by clicking on the link below.

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE SURVEY

For more information on the NFP Pulse, click here.  Or, if you'd like to download free copies of our reports on previous editions of the NFP Pulse, click here!

Survey closes on Wednesday! Please provide your input!

Get Your Free Highlight Report: Social Media and Canadian Nonprofits 2011

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Are Canadian nonprofits continuing to dive into the social media scene? Are they investing resources in this new technology? And most importantly, are they seeing any ROI?

This edition of the NFP Pulse surveyed 121 Canadian nonprofits on their current and planned use of Social Media. This is a continuation of our inaugural NFP Pulse survey on social media conducted 18 months ago. 

Click here to download the highlight report - it's free!

Help us provide the Canadian NFP community with research they can use! 

If you like getting free research on top-of-mind nonprofit trends and issues, we really hope you will subscribe for email updates to our site or sign up to participate in future editions of the NFP Pulse. 

Coming up next? Canadian nonprofit governance! Stay tuned for more info....

The Association Resource Centre’s Not-For-Profit Pulse is an initiative where we will conduct regular short surveys of non-profit organizations on the topics, trends, issues and benchmarks that matter in today’s not-for-profit sector. The purpose of this research is to engage the not-for-profit community in discussion and to provide a resource that will help organizations position themselves in the evolving association landscape. In addition to sharing results with survey participants, this research will be a regular topic of discussion on The ARC Blog.

NFP Pulse Survey on Revenue Streams: Participate and Get Free Results!

 

It is no secret that the economic downturn over the past couple of years has left its mark on the not-for-profit sector. Among the many impacts the recession has had, membership levels have taken a hit in many professional, trade and industry associations, while deep government cutbacks have drastically reduced not-for-profit access to funding.

Increasingly, not-for-profits are looking at creative ways to provide value to their stakeholders while simultaneously bringing in diverse streams of revenue critical to keeping their organizations operating smoothly.

This edition of the not-for-profit pulse looks at current trends in not-for-profit revenue stream generation. Specifically, we will examine some of the ways different NFP's are generating the funding necessary to run their organizations, as well as what is working and what is not.

Please take 5-7 minutes right now to participate in this valuable initiative. Your input will be analyzed along with the results of other not-for-profit professionals with the subsequent analysis shared back with the not-for-profit community on the ARC blog.

Your responses will be kept strictly confidential and, as thanks for your input, you will receive a complimentary PDF copy of the highlight report in early December.
 

Please click here to participate

Please complete no later than Tuesday, November 30:


So that you can see for yourself how valuable an initiative this is, please accept with our compliments access to previous editions of the NFP Pulse highlight reports by clicking here

What Keeps You Awake At Night Part 4: Engagement Equity Erosion - What the Heck is it and How Can Nonprofits Avoid it Through Volunteerism?

According to our recent NFP Pulse on volunteerism, volunteer levels are steady or are on the rise for many NPO's across Canada. Speaking with ED’s from across Canada on the trends and issues that are affecting their associations confirmed this trend.

So what’s the problem, you might well ask?

Well, a few of the ED’s I spoke to have admitted to having developed the opposite challenge:  As one individual aptly put it, “we have volunteers coming out the yin yang.” 

Why?  Volunteers benefit from experience, networking and the ability to actively roll up their sleeves and help their NFP achieve its’ goals.  It let's them be "part of the group" and helps them to feel engaged with the organization and what it is doing. 

In many professional and trade associations in particular, the networking benefits are an even greater draw.  The fact that many employers pay membership dues and allow employees to belong to and be active through volunteering in professional or trade associations doesn’t hurt, either.

So the issue in this context is, in fact, too many volunteers and not enough opportunities.

In some ways, this is a great problem to have, but there are inherent challenges as well. Specifically, the individuals I spoke with are having a hard time finding the best possible people to fill the roles that need to be filled without alienating the other would-be volunteers and potentially eroding their desire to engage with the association. 

In other words, they are risking having would-be volunteers feel "left out" and/or unimportant...a big no-no in the nonprofit world.

If you wanted to be fancy about it, one might call this phenomenon Engagement Equity Erosion...Yes, I thought of it myself ;).  What I mean by this is that engagement is a asset that can be built up or diminished over time depending on the choices and actions made by an organization.

One of the ED’s I spoke with is addressing this challenge by asking would-be volunteers to undergo an application process which allows for individuals to be matched to the opportunities best suited to their experience and goals. Another individual emphasized the importance of putting extremely specific terms of reference when advertising a given opportunity to encourage a would-be applicants to weed themselves out...

But I'm not convinced that taking these steps will prevent engagement equity erosion from occuring. 

Are you? I would love to hear from anyone out there that has run into a similar issue:

Engagement is at the core of the value proposition for most associations – How do you avoid engagement equity erosion through volunteerism in your nonprofit?

Photo thanks to charamelody on Flickr