How are you calculating Return on Investment (ROI) in your organization?

Standard ROI calculations focus on the financial gain received from a particular expense or investment. This metric was designed for the for-profit sector, where profit is the main objective.

Many established nonprofits also look at the mission impact to be gained from a particular expense or investment. This is an important lens, but it can be tricky to calculate if you don't have enough long-term, reliable data to reference.

Both of these measures are both important.

But they're also insufficient.

Here are 4 key ROI metrics you should be tracking as a nonprofit leader.

Here’s a simple equation for more productive days.

Nonprofit leaders - consultants are giving you exactly what you ask for - and that might not be a good thing.

When you're making the decision to pursue a consultant or outsource work, you've probably already identified:

• a need to address or problem to solve

• some idea about what you think you need to solve it

You may also have discussed:

• What success looks like when your need is addressed or problem is solved

• How much you're willing to invest to achieve that success

This next part is where things can go a little sideways.

Here's how to get better help on the projects you hire out.

Have you been doing strategic plans the same way since the beginning of your career?

How well have they worked for you?

Nicole Gagliardi has put together a list of common mistakes she sees in nonprofit strategic planning work. If you've been in the sector for a while, many of these will look familiar - I know I've seen many of them throughout my career.

Here are 3 additional problems with strategic planning I'd add to her list.

What's the legacy you've been given and the one you'll leave behind?

In her closing remarks during Leadership Triangle's THRiVE Leadership Summit earlier this month, Kristine Sloan shared the concept of the 200-year present.

Coined by sociologist, poet, mother, and influential peace researcher Elise Boulding, the concept of the 200-year present is a useful tool for those of us working in social good spaces and a powerful exercise for leaders from any sector in establishing strategic clarity.

Here's a quick summary of the concept and how leaders can use it to create more strategic clarity for themselves and their teams.

Where do breakthrough ideas come from?

And how can we harness them to drive more impact for our communities?

I recently joined Julia C. Patrick on The Nonprofit Show to talk about how breakthrough ideas build community, grow engagement, and even create new markets and opportunity for corporate partnerships.

The people who power your organization - your staff and close volunteers - are one of your most important assets.

If you’re a nonprofit leader, here are 3 big staff-related risks you need to be thinking about - and planning for - and how you can start addressing them right now.

Nonprofit leaders spend a lot of time developing strategic plans. But there isn’t always the same kind of effort spent to figure out how the plan will be executed - and what risks are involved with that.

I recently joined risk management expert Sabrina M. Segal JD MIP CFE on her podcast Tolerable Risk: Opportunities and Threats in the 3rd Sector to chat about managing risk during strategy formation and implementation. Some key questions and discussion points we cover:

• What is the modern expression of your organization's mission?

• Consensus v. buy-in - what's the right way to frame decision-making?

• The 85/15 approach - why planning for 100% is never a good idea

• One of the main reasons strategies fail is because they are un-executable. How can we avoid this threat?

Culture is a big buzzword, but what does it take to create a culture that improves employee well-being and performance?

Heather Burright and I had a candid conversation on her podcast - Learning For Good - about how culture influences employee performance and what leaders can do to establish strong culture.

We talk about:

• Four essential habits for improving culture: clarity, internal communication, training, and accountability

• How organizational culture influences performance and success

• The main elements of organizational culture and how defining your organization’s identity, clarity, process, and vibe fosters a healthy work culture

• The one element of organizational culture that impacts performance the most

Does it ever feel like your executive team keeps having the same debates over and over again?

There can be lots of reasons for this, but there's an important one hardly anyone talks about.

It’s not clear, well-established priorities - though it's critical to be on the same page about what the organization is focusing on, and what that means when you need to make tradeoffs.

It’s not improved team dynamics - though this is an essential investment because a dysfunctional leadership team has tremendous ripple effects.

It’s not even clear, documented decision-making processes - though, as I've written before, these can really help your organization go from stressed to strategic.

It’s that you aren’t aligned on your organization’s role.