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Nonprofit Lowdown
#316- Burnout Breakthrough: The 4-Step Framework Every Nonprofit Leader Needs to Save Time and Maximize Impact
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Hey you, It's Ria Wong. If you're listening to Nonprofit Load On, I'm pretty sure that you'd love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning, you get updates on the newest podcast episodes, and then interspersed, we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only and fundraising inspo because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone. On top of that, you get cute dog photos. Best of all, it is free. So what are you waiting for? Head over to riawong.com now to sign up.
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Foreign welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong. Hey everyone, Ria Wong. Here it is, another edition of Nonprofit Lowdown. It is December, y'all, and we're winding down. It has been a year. Are you tired? I'm a little tired, so I'm looking forward to some time off at the end of December. I hope you are also getting some time off, but I wanted to address an issue that I think a lot of us face in the nonprofit sector, which is the question of burnout. Now, as a former executive director, I know firsthand that it just feels like you're running in place frantically, just trying to keep your head above water. If it's not one thing, it's another. There's something happening all the time, fires happening. You're dealing with many crises and dramas all the time. And when things go well, it's just a matter of time until that other shoe drops. You feel me on this, or is it just me? I know you feel me. I talk to a lot of EDs out there. In honor of this end of year ish edition of nonprofit Lowdown, I wanted to share some ideas and resources to help you organize your time better. Because here's the truth. We know burnout is real. We know people are leaving the sector in droves. And the reality is they're leaving because what they're asked to do in the time that they're asked to do it with, the resources that they're asked to do it with are simply unreasonable. And yet we need to hold on to you. Because people are what make this sector work. People are what make the sector great. And if we are burning out people at a very high rate, and if people are leaving in droves, there's nobody that will be left to do the work. What I want to offer you is a couple ideas about how to manage your time in order to prevent burnout. Because the truth of the matter is the more time you spend in fundraising, the more resources you're going to bring in, which means you which Means the more people you might be able to hire, which means the more resources you have, which means the more time you have to do what you want to do. It's this vicious little cycle, but it all starts with bringing resources in the door. So if you're an executive director or development director and you're out here listening, please listen to this very carefully because it will help you to unlock talk what I think is a framework for how to think about your time. And look, the truth of the matter is you have too much on your plate. I know it, you know it, your board knows it. Everyone knows it. The point is, that will always be the case. There will always be more things to do than there are hours in the day to get done. And I had this realization the other day that it does not matter how many hours in the day I have, I will still have more stuff to do. In fact, I will have a full inbox even when I'm dead. Think about that. You're going to get emails even when you are dead and gone. It's just not realistic to assume that you can get everything done in a day. Now, what I think is more important is where am I actually spending my time? On the highest leverage resource. Because the truth of the matter is, and I am guilty as charged, so I am not throwing stones in my little glass house here. But the truth is, all tasks are not created equal. And I would often find myself at my desk answering emails because it was just a little bit easier to do than the thing that I didn't really know how to do or the thing that I was really dreading doing, which was often fundraising. And so if I'm really real with myself and you're really real with yourself, are you actually spending the time to move the needle in the ways that are most important for your nonprofit in terms of getting resources in the door? And if I'm really real with myself, we also have to acknowledge that it's about 20% of the things that we do that create 80% of the outcomes. And so if we're focusing on the 20% relentlessly, then I think we'll actually see more movement. But what I'd like to invite us to do is to think about 2025 as the year that we collectively focus on the 20% that will move the needle forward. So I want to talk about a framework that might be helpful to you. It was certainly helpful to me. Now, the first thing to do is I actually have a free download below. Get this worksheet. There are four quadrants on this worksheet. The first quadrant is what we call strategic revenue generating activities. What that means are things that you do in order to bring money in the door. So things like a major donor meetings, it's submitting grant proposals, it's talking with your donors, it's doing direct solicitations, things of that nature. So those are strategic revenue generating activities. Then there are strategic non revenue generating activities. Those are things like working on your strategic plan or talking with your board or managing board committees or budgeting. Though I could make an argument that everything is related to fundraising. We're going to call those strategic non revenue generating activities because they are not directly responsible for bringing revenue in the door. Then we look at operational revenue generating activities. So what are operational revenue generating activities? These are things that are a little bit more behind the scenes. I like to think of it as back of house versus front of house in terms of revenue. So those are things like cleaning up the database, sending out gift acknowledgment forms, sending out the email newsletters every week. So things that are revenue generating that have to do with the money but are not necessarily frontline fundraising. And then finally the final quadrant is operational non revenue generating activities. This is where I'm guessing a lot of you get stuck. So these are things like answering your emails, going back and forth on scheduling meetings. I know some of you are out there doing things I know you shouldn't be doing like ordering pizza for your after school program or fixing the printer. I know. Guilty as charged. Okay, so now we have our four quadrants. What I want you to do, and again this is just, you got to be honest with yourself is over the next three or five working days, take a note of all of the activities that you're doing. So what does that look like? It looks like when you start your day, I spent an hour checking email. Don't get super granular. Like I don't need to know about the 10 minutes that you're, you're going to the bathroom or whatever. But try to be as granular as you can be within reason of how you're spending your day. Then when you are done with the three or five days, you plot all of the different activities in the quadrant that is in the quadrant where you think it belongs. Then you take a step back and you say where am I spending my time? I'm going to guess that you are not spending nearly enough time in the strategic revenue generating category. I'm going to touch on this in one other second. So let's Put a pin in this. But what does that mean? What that means is that we have to think about how to manage your time and efforts. So when we look at quadrant one, which is your revenue, strategic revenue generating activities, we want to increase the time as much as possible. Quadrant 2, where we're looking at operational, where we're looking at strategic non revenue generating activities, this is where you as a leader may need to be spending your time. But I would try as much as possible to minimize the amount of time. And then quadrants 3 and 4, so operational revenue generating activity, I want you to eliminate, automate or delegate as much as possible. And absolutely the same for quadrant four, which are operational, non revenue generating activities. Now you might say to me, but Ria, I don't have anybody to delegate to. Yes, I too have had this problem. However, we live in this wonderful world of the Internet. You can find help, you can find smart interns, you can find, you can find people who are very reasonably priced to delegate to. So even if it looks like finding an extra 10 hours a week that you can delegate your scheduling to and your email to, imagine you could then use that 10 hours to generate more revenue. So the way that people are able to maximize their time, the really successful people have a higher ROI on their time versus other people who have a lower ROI on their time. I once heard this story, which I thought was pretty interesting. It was just a random guy and his wife and somehow both of them had lost their jobs at the same time. So you could imagine in this situation that they would do as much as they possibly could to tighten their belts. What was really interesting to me though is that he decided that no matter how belt tightening that they were getting, they were not going to let go of the woman who cleaned their house. His reasoning was this, that the two or three hours that he could free up by not cleaning his own house were two or three hours he could use to make more money. And so I want us to apply that kind of thinking, which is simply this. You as the executive director are the most valuable asset that we have. And the most valuable asset that you have as a person is time. We can all find more money. Money is a renewable resource. Time is not. I don't care how rich you are, you are going to die. However, we can buy ourselves a little bit of time by throwing money at it. And so what I want you to think about is when you're spending your time, where are you spending your time with the highest roi? And for those who don't know roi means return on investment. So simply put, the only difference between a janitor and Jeff Bezos is simply that Jeff Bezos has figured out how to make his time ROI much higher than that of a janitor. The lesson that I think we can take from you is that you as a leader, as an executive director, as a development director, or what have you need to maximize the ROI on your time by delegating out, eliminating or automating that which is a lower roi. Now let's move to quadrant one, which is the strategic revenue generating activity. Now, you might be out here saying, okay, Rhea, fine. What are we supposed to do though? Because here's the truth of the matter. When I was an ed, I spent all sorts of time wasted in stuff I should not be doing, like ordering pizza for the after school program or answering my inbox because I wasn't even sure what I should be doing. So if you don't know what you should be doing, here's how to think about it. When we think about how to scale up our Nonprofits, there are four areas that we can look at. 1. Traffic. Are there literally enough eyeballs on us and on the work that we're doing? That means do we have enough email subscribers? Are we engaged on social? Do people know about us? Are we getting in front of different audiences? That's what we call traffic. Two, conversion. Are we converting those eyeballs into donors, into volunteers, into supporters, into raving fans? Three, are we increasing the donor lifetime value? Which is to say, are we doing the most that we can to ask to upgrade asks? Are we asking in different ways? Are we asking for different projects? How are we engaging these people such that they increase their the amount that they're giving over time? And then four, retention. This is where I see a lot of folks have a hard time. So if you are, I'm hoping that you're tracking data. But first of all, you should track your data. Secondly, once you track your data, you should be thinking about what your retention rate is. Because as I've said a billion times, it is cheaper to to fundraise from somebody that you've already fundraised from versus trying to fundraise from a new person. If you ever change your donors anything less than 50%, my first recommendation to you is focus on donor retention. So when you're in, when you think about being in quadrant one, which is your strategic revenue generating activity, you can use these four things as a tool to step back to think about where in the revenue generating activities should I be spending my time? Most likely it is probably retention. If it's not retention, then it might. Then the second place I would look is traffic. Where I see a lot of nonprofits fail is that they actually have not built up a big enough base of support or an email list that there literally are not enough people who know about them. They're probably the best kept secret in filling this fill in the city to their you have to have more people know about you. Well, then the question becomes, okay, re up. Sounds great. How do people know about me? I'm so glad you asked. There are a number of different ways. One, you have your current donors, your current volunteers, your friends and family, your board members, all the people who are in your universe. All roads lead to the email list. Two, social media. I'm sure y'all are out here doing all of the viral videos on whatever platform you're on. What I would suggest is for those of you who are limited in your staff capacity, choose one or two platforms and go deep on those versus trying to do all the platforms. But the idea here is that you want to take your social media and you channel it all to your email address. The reason being that ultimately you do not own your social media followers. So I don't care how many social media people you hack. If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up with wild hair one day and he decides to shut down your account, all of those people are gone. Your email list is your asset. So all roads lead to the email list. So those are here a couple sources. Your volunteers, your donors, your board members, your staff members, et cetera, et cetera, your social media followers. Three, if you do anything like cross promotions with other nonprofits, maybe you're on a panel, maybe you get some local news coverage, maybe you are, maybe you do a joint presentation. Those are other ways that you can build your email list. Now here's the other thing that I would say when you're building an email list, a couple of things to keep in mind is that when people visit your site, you have to have a value exchange. So there is usually what we call a lead magnet. Some kind of. Some kind of resource or white paper or research or some reason that you're going to give me to give you my email address in exchange. The other thing I would say is when you're thinking about trying to attract your perfect ideal donor, start with the ones that you already have. Do an interview with them. Find out why they give to your organization. What's their reason, what's their why and how. Have you as an organization given them value? And I don't mean swag, I don't mean stupid pen giving them a sense of purpose and mission and importance for who they believe they are. And then you just do more of that to attract the right kind of people. Remember, specificity is better than generalities. Other places that you can look for potential folks to be your donors, if you're doing, you can just do direct outreach. So personal friends and families on your social media feeds, you can do cold outreach. Generally, this is not necessarily what I would recommend as your first strategy, but we've all received these cold email outreaches. But before I do that, I would also think about doing social media posts that offer significant value to donors. And once they engage with you, you start a conversation to get them on your list. Finally, the fourth thing is Facebook ads. Now, generally, as a strategy, I do not recommend Facebook ads until you've really maxed out on all of the other strategies. The other thing I will say is when we think about a warm outreach strategy, oftentimes we think we've sent one email and that's enough. That's not enough. In fact, a lot of people could really benefit from doing things like texting and picking up the phone and leaving voicemails and doing videos. There are a million ways to get in touch with people that we haven't even scratch the surface of. That is really different than just sending out a mass email. So that is traffic. Then the second piece is around conversion. So conversion usually happens in one of, let's call it three ways. One, you do a direct campaign of some sort. So this looks like an end of year campaign or a spring campaign or a giving Tuesday campaign. So you're trying to convert all of the people who you've brought into the funnel into being a donor. Two, there's usually an event of some sort, so a gala, a walkathon, it gives people a reason to give. And then the third reason is more of a major donor consideration, which is you're working closely with a small group of high capacity donors towards a very specific goal. So maybe it's you're, you have a capital campaign, maybe it's, you're, you have a special project. So those are three big chunks. And then of course, you have your grants and so forth. Those are the ways that we get to conversion. But the conversion mechanism is really around direct solicitation. And the direct solicitation and conversion is better when you have provided significant value to these, to this audience before you ask them for money. And then the third piece is increasing donor value. So what we want to be thinking about is how do we take those those top donors and upgrade them into bigger gifts? How do we take those mid level donors and upgrade them into bigger gifts? How do we ask, perhaps we ask more often how do we take those small dollar donors and upgrade them perhaps into monthly donors or mid level donors? So we're always thinking about how can we increase the gift and then how do we hold onto them. So again, how are we retaining them so that they keep giving again and again year after year. So that is a lot. So to recap where you are spending your time is where you are spending your days. The first thing is to track your time to figure out where you're spending the bulk of your time. And then over time and maybe this becomes like a weekly practice for you. You track your hours and notice the correlation between the amount of time that you're spending in revenue gener spending in strategic revenue generating activity and how that directly translates into the amount of money that you are bringing in. Second point if you say gosh Riya, I just don't know what I should be doing. Within the strategic revenue generating bucket there are four things to consider. Traffic Are there enough people who know you conversion? Are there enough people who are converting from knowing about you to being donors or somehow otherwise engaged in your work? 3. Donor lifetime value Are you maximizing and making sure that your donor lifetime value is as high as it can be? And fourth, are you retaining your donors? And again, if you're retaining at anything less than 50% that is where you should be spending your time. So that is a mouthful. I'm going to offer the template down below in the show notes for you to look over. And the final thing is let me know if you like these solo podcasts. In 2025 I expect to be doing more of these quick bite sized actionable content that will hopefully help you to do your job better and not get burned out. So hit me up. Let me know in the comment section if you like these solo episodes and if there are any topics that you want me to tackle. And the last thing I want to let you know is on December 12th we will be hosting a free webinar called why Major Gift Fundraising Sucks and what to Do Instead. So go to my website, check it out, enroll. I think you might find it quite elucidating and I will talk to you all next week.
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