Which organizations are you watching to see what work they're doing and how they're doing it?

They could be organizations that share your served community, your mission or issue area, your geographic area - or sometimes they could be organizations with an entirely different mission and position than yours.

When I was leading communications and marketing teams, one of my fantastic team members used to call these our "brand crushes." They were brands we tracked and learned from across many areas of our work.

Identifying the organizations you admire and want to learn from is an important part of developing your team's strategic thinking.

it’s time we had a serious talk about our Leadership Infatuation.

Leadership is a huge topic of discussion and exploration in the nonprofit sector. On LinkedIn, #leadership has more than 3.2 million followers. And in industry media sources, leadership is a seemingly constant source of content that gets shared, supported, and celebrated.

Leadership is important. Full stop.

But I fear we’ve fallen so deeply in love with leadership - with the way it’s portrayed across social media and in thought leadership articles - that we’ve nearly abandoned another skill set that is critical to the advancement of our sector.

In the nonprofit sector, change is constant.

And yet, building our skills and capabilities to effectively lead and manage change often gets left off our capacity-building priority lists.

If you've heard the term change management but could use help understanding what that means for your organization, I've got you!

In my first guest contributor piece for Capterra - I'm sharing:

• an intro to change management and how people move through change

• important research and methodologies from Prosci that point to what matters most in managing change successfully

• some of my practical tips nonprofit leaders and team members can start practicing today to boost their chances of managing change well in the future

When was the last time you celebrated?

Maybe it was someone’s birthday, or a friend got a great promotion, or a baby was born.

What did it look like?

A cake and decorations? Gifts and story-sharing? A Zoom dance party?

Whatever the occasion, you did something special to mark it. Something that made it feel like a celebration.

How about at work?

Are you celebrating small and big wins on a regular basis?

Celebration is not frivolous or optional, it’s necessary.

This is especially true in the nonprofit and social impact sectors where we are often inundated with messages about how much work still lies ahead of us to fulfill our missions. And while celebrating can feel difficult in times of crisis or hardship, the psychological benefits of celebration can help us find renewed strength and purpose in recommitting to our work.

In this post we cover 5 tips to make cultivate celebration as part of your team culture.

Strategy gets confused for a lot of things. When some people hear the word strategy, they think of big-picture brainstorming or 40+ pages of detailed, ambitious plans. For others, it’s all spreadsheets, revenue projections, cost analyses, and impact measures. And for others, strategy is seen as THE ANSWER – the singular right path to your organization’s success.

But strategy isn’t any of those things.

At its core, strategy is an interconnected set of choices about what you will and won’t do so you can accomplish your goals. Put another way - it’s a set of decisions you believe will help you achieve your vision.

Smart, well-designed, and well-executed strategy can make a significant difference in whether your organization achieves its desired mission impact, revenue goals, and operational sweet spot.

As a leader, honing your ability to provide a clear vision and direction and to make strong decisions that enable your team to focus and align their time, energy, and resources are essential to increasing the chances your strategy will succeed.

As children, practicing new skills is part of our daily lives. But as adults, we often forget how important it is to practice new skills, techniques, approaches, and processes.

Humans are learning creatures. We’re built to explore and test our environments and then adapt our approach based on the results of our experiments. Our first tries usually fail or fall short, which gives us great data for trying again, finding a new way, or continuing to practice a particularly tricky thing.

To get really good at what we do, practice matters.

But over the past few years – when the emphasis has been on pivoting to deal with “unprecedented” times – even organizations that typically embrace taking the time to practice, refine, and improve their approaches may have struggled to get back into that rhythm.

That’s because when you are constantly pivoting, practice becomes impossible.

In this post, we explore how to get out of the cycle of endless pivoting and into a culture of practicing the skills, approaches, and processes that will advance your organization, your strategy, and you as a leader.

In the social good sector, “who” is one of the most powerful questions we can ask and answer for ourselves and our organizations. And yet it’s one we often gloss over, make assumptions about, and generally just don’t spend enough time contemplating and clarifying.

Our “who” matters because our work, in almost every circumstance, is about people.

Without understanding the people we serve, our organizational identity, and the many people and partners who power our organization, we are unlikely to solve the issues our “why” seeks to address.

Lack of clarity around our “who” hampers our impact, frustrates our dedicated staff and volunteers, and loses us supporters. It also puts us in the perpetual tailspin of having to prove our value without having a clear understanding of what that value is – since value is in the eye of the beholder.

The exercise in this blog post can help you and your organization identify 5 critical “whos” to help inform your strategy.