When a crisis hits, you and your organization are in danger of over-reacting, under-reacting, or mis-reacting. That’s because we are emotional animals. Crises hit us in the gut and provoke emotional responses.
So what keeps us sane, calm, and on a wise track? Data. Good data. The right data. The time of crisis is not the time to abandon fact-based decision-making. It is the time to embrace it more closely than ever. Response to a crisis can have a huge impact on the trajectory of a nonprofit, for good or ill.
You need to know exactly how the crisis is impacting your charity. How it’s impacting your income, your expenditures, your capital, your donors, your board, your leadership, your workers at headquarters, your field workers, your mission, your assets, and your liabilities. This is true whether it’s an external crisis, like the pandemic, or an internal crisis, like board differences that morph into board strife that foment a hostile split of the whole organization.
What numbers do you collect, look at, and monitor, on an on-going basis? What’s on your dashboard that allows you to see constant trends in organizational health, mission progress, or mechanical problems, where something is over-heating or about to burst? You want to have good monitoring systems in place, developed, tested, and refined, before the next crisis hits.
A good consultant can help with this. In my experience as a research-based nonprofit consultant I used to ask leaders, “What do you wish you knew?” – with the expectation that I could then show them how to find those answers.
I don’t use that approach anymore. I found leaders didn’t know the best questions to ask. They didn’t see what they didn’t see. They failed to understand the value of the right kind of additional knowledge.
So now, instead, I learn about the organization; I learn about its mission and programs; I learn about finances and personnel; and perform an organizational data audit. It takes the form of a report on what data it is presently collecting and seeing, and how that could be upgraded, often dramatically.
The moral of this story: consider getting an organizational data audit. Before you face your next crisis.
love, joy, peace … Michael
www.michaeljaffarian.com. Michael is a freelance consultant to nonprofits, with an emphasis on research. Contact him for a free, one-hour consultation. emichaeljaffarian@gmail.com.
Vol. 1 No. 2
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