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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
BONUS AUDIO TRAINING: Reverse Engineering Successful 7-Figure Nonprofits
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Brooke Richie Babbage
Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage. I've been in the social impact game for 25 years as a social justice lawyer turned two time nonprofit founder and leader turned growth strategist and coach for leaders around the country. I grew my nonprofit from me and an intern in a tiny closet to a high impact seven figure organization. And along the way I learned so so much about how to build an organization that has real and how to do it without burning out. In this podcast I share the nuts and bolts of all of it so you can do that too. We dive into the mindset, strategies and tactics of how to scale a high impact organization and how to do it in a way that's truly sustainable. So it is 2 o'clock. I am a Virgo so I like things to be on track. So we are going to dive in. As you are joining, please continue to share where you're joining from and you know, like Elizabeth did, why you're here. What's the sort of why that brings you here and if you want, I always love hearing about organizations, missions and just what you're doing in the world. If you've been in a workshop with me and some of you have, I saw some of the names in the signup list that I recognize or if you've listened to my podcast, then you know that I am a nuts and bolts kind of gal and I believe that you are far more likely to get where you want to be in if you are clear about where you want to go. Hi, from Texas. Oh, that's great. Great to see you Nicole. Hey. Hey IO So in that spirit, this is one of the questions that I like to start with right at the top of time that I'm doing. Sort of facilitated time. What are three words describing how you want to feel in a year? It's really easy to get caught up in the sort of grind of where we are right now. But I really love to future cast. Right. We are going to be talking about growing sustainably and what it looks like to be in a place where you are having the kind of impact you want to have and you are sustaining that impact without burning out. And so just close your eyes for a minute and imagine what will that feel like for you. I am going to aim everything I can in this workshop at giving you the framework for how to get there. I'm going to pull back the curtain on the core elements that successful seven figure nonprofits consistently point to as the reason they were both able to grow and able to sustain seven figures. And by the time of our end of our time together, you're going to know what it takes to scale and how to begin to integrate these elements into your own growth plan. I love that I'm seeing peace and peaceful, not overwhelmed. I'm seeing that a lot. Relaxed. Love that. Me too. I that's always spacious is a word that I always have on my list. So that's what we're aiming for. This workshop is for organizations that have goals for next year, goals that are around growing your impact, doing more the right way without making costly mistakes, and organizations for whom those goals feel urgent. Right. The work that we do, social work, social impact work, social justice work, social change work, there's an urgency to it. And so I'm assuming that if you're here, it's because you want to get to those goals faster and easier without the overwhelm in a more relaxed way. And you don't want to make mistakes. So if that sounds like you, then you are in the right place. And that's what we are going to do today. Now, before we start, I'm going to recommend, highly recommend, that you turn off your phone and grab a notebook. We're going to cover a lot of meaty stuff and I don't want you to miss it. There is a replay, but I find sometimes I'm sort of old school and analog. Taking notes is really helpful for me to suit to like retain things. And if you stay until the end, I really encourage it. I'm actually giving away a copy as a bonus for folks that stay to the end to my entire board Fundraising Training and Toolkit. There's a workshop, there are trackers, there's a guide. There's an entire sort of bundle of resources to work with your board around fundraising. So that's for folks who stay to the end. And you'll have a chance to share your email with me and snag the whole thing for free. Awesome. Yay. I love all the Y's and the Yay. Fantastic. So just a little bit of context about how I came to be here. Many of you are new to me and so as a way of introducing how I even came to be talking about this topic, I've spent the last 25 years deep in the nonprofit and social impact space. I started as a social justice lawyer. I've been a nonprofit founder and leader for many years and most recently over the last decade, a strategist and coach. In partnership with foundations and corporations around the country, I've launched and grown Multiple high impact nonprofits and social impact initiatives here in New York, where I live in Boston, in the Midwest, in the south and on the West Coast. And I've spent over a decade researching and teaching social entrepreneurship, nonprofit leadership and social impact strategy as a law professor and as a graduate school professor here in New York City. So I share this because this stuff is in my blood. As a strategist and a coach, I've helped hundreds of organizations just like yours build the right strategies and systems to raise millions of dollars, build strong teams and boards, which is really, really critical. This issue of team and who's under the tent with you and to scale their impact quickly and without burning out. That is a big focus of my work. So I focus on growth, but I focus on sustainable growth. All of this is to say my journey has been long. 25 years feels like a long time to me and it's been deep and I've learned a ton. And that's how I came to be here with you today, bringing this topic to you. I focus on helping organizational leaders build institutions that can sustain incredible impact without the constant overwhelm and the threat of burning out. Yes. The slides and the recording will be sent post. Wonderful. I'm so glad, tj. They will be shared. So with that end in mind, with that, let's start with what we're actually talking about. Right? What do these seven figure, successful, sustainable, healthy nonprofits look like so that we know what we're aiming for? They have consistent revenue month to month. So the idea of the beast or famine is what I call it. And when I was growing my second organization, actually both of my organizations, early on we'd bring in money from a grant or we'd have a really amazing event or a campaign and then we'd sort of spend it down, right? And sort of get to the point. Often it was around April. I still remember it because that was a painful month for the early years in my organization where we'd be sort of scrambling to bring in the next big wave of money. But these sustaining organizations have systems that allow them to bring money in month after month after month consistently. It's like a flywheel. They also have funding that increases steadily year over year. So they are seeing steady, sustainable, careful and intentional growth. And when we talk about funding that increases, it's not funding for the sake of funding, it's funding because that's how you support impact. So they're seeing funding grow and they're seeing impact grow. They have a strong bench of leaders that gives you Time to strategize and to grow. And we're going to talk more about that, right? They have a leadership team that's my friend Kemi used to say, holding top with them. They have a cohesive and engaged board, the right board members, right? Not just sort of fancy names or people that we think have money, but actual thought partners, actual ambassadors and cheerleaders who are building your capacity to bring new people into your network as donors, as supporters, as partners. And that's a big part of how they're working with their board. And they're having real impact. They're having impact that is changing their communities, the people they work with, the world that we live in. And that's ultimately, you know, why, why we do this. Right. I'm so excited to share that I've opened the doors for enrollment into my next level nonprofit Mastermind. It's the way that I provide hands on support to leaders of small nonprofits that want to grow without the constant overwhelm and threat of burnout. The program is really awesome. It combines private coaching, group coaching, professional development for your entire team, live training on core areas of nonprofit growth and sustainability, intimate access to sector leaders, and exclusive access to a carefully curated Rolodex of consultants and short term staff support to make sure that you don't get stuck in the idea phase because you simply can't find people on your team to execute. We've got you covered. And more than the features that I'm obviously really excited about, it's just a wonderful, powerful community of peers. The other coaches and I love working with the leaders inside the program. And if it sounds like support you could use, you can apply@brooke ritchiebabbabbage.com NextLevel Nonprofit. The problem is, or the thing is, the reality is that there's a lot that gets in the way of getting to that place. Right. They didn't just sort of roll out of bed, start an organization or join an organization, snap their finger and they've got this consistent seven figure revenue. So tell me if any of this in the chat resonates with you. Maybe you are actually at a place where you feel like it's hard to focus on growth. You want to grow, you want a bigger impact, more money, bigger team, but you're constantly putting out fires and you, you can't catch up, right? There's no time. You spend all day, every day in meetings. And so how are you going to do this sort of big picture thinking in that sense of overwhelm? Absolutely, Lindsay. All of this Right. That overwhelm comes from constantly being in the weeds. This funding piece is very real for a lot of the organizations that start working with me inside my programs before they get to the consistent funding. Their funding is lumpy and it feels uncertain. Right. So even if the money's in the bank, Right. A lot of these organizations are at a million, maybe even more. So they see the money, but they don't trust it. Right. They don't necessarily know that it will be there a year from now. So it feels uncertain. A lot of the organizations, most of the organizations that I work with feel that they are at this inflection point, this moment where they are really poised for growth. They have the pieces, but they don't quite know how to put them together the right way. They're afraid of aiming their resources or their time at the wrong thing. A big piece is they're not always sure they have the right team. Right. Maybe they grew with a team and they're wondering, are these the right people to get where we want to go? And they're not able to actually transform their board into a governance board. So they're at this moment where growth feels possible, but they don't quite know what the right next step is. And this is a big one. And I've seen this in the chat. There's a real risk of burnout. Right. You're driven and you have the money. You're doing all the work. You and your team are doing it. You're having impact, but you're maxed out. Right. You're beyond capacity. Yeah, absolutely. Somewhere in between, some combination of. All of these are where organizations come into my world to work with me, inside my programs. They are at what we call a growth stage. Right. So I do a lot of trainings around organizational development and the stages of organizational development. And the teenage years, teenage and young adult years correspond with growth stage. Right? You are growing. You are. You have the pieces. And now it's about optimizing them and putting them in place in the right way and sort of getting through that awkward, messy middle of growth so that you can get to adulthood. It's a really common stage. Right. And a lot of what organizations are experiencing is that they are still sort of cobbling together fundraising strategies that used to work, got them to maybe 800k, 900k a million, but somehow are either not working or just are so hard to sustain at the higher level. They're cycling through, hiring the wrong people. And for most of the folks that I work with, the organization, the leader The ED is carrying the lion's share of key decisions on their own backs. We do not want to stay in this place of cobbling things together and cycling through and where growth sort of outpaces your capacity. Capacity, right. Your money. We don't want to stay there. That's where the overwhelm comes from. Where we want to get is adulthood, right? This is where the consistent revenue, the revenue growth, the strong team, the values aligned impact, this is where that happens, this zone of maturity. And this is how that feels, that place feels. Remember I asked you sort of how do you want to feel in a year, right? Or 18 months? When I talk to the folks that I work with, the ones who have gotten this right, here's what they say it feels like to run a sustainable, successful organization. They feel confident, they feel excited, they feel supported and energized. They are proud, they are hopeful. And I see a lot of those words that you guys shared in the chat. So what I've done is I've reverse engineered this final result and I'm going to break that down for you today. The four core elements that these high impact, sustainable, healthy organizations have in common. I'm going to walk through each one of them and then show you seven strategies you can use to actually begin to integrate them into your own organization. Okay, first, one, first essential element, investment in a highly qualified leadership team. For 100% of the organizations and executive directors that I've worked with and researched, when they are feeling like they are able to sustain seven figures, and there's a difference between growing to seven figures and staying at seven figures in a healthy way that doesn't cost you your mental health. Right? When we're talking about organizations that are successfully sustaining it, every single one of them has a strong bench of leaders at the director or C suite level who truly own the work. This is a must have if you are going to sustain that revenue and that impact. Now, the key here is not just that they have a leadership team, it's not just that it exists. It's not enough to just have directors on your team. What you want to focus on is what that team looks like. And the problem, and I've seen this in so many instances, is that if you just focus on the existence of the team, it can actually lead organizations that are growing to take the wrong steps, right the wrong actions. You don't just want to hire people and give them the title of director. Actually, one of the women in my coaching program has been very frustrated. She is a very wonderful woman. That she hired about seven months ago onto her leadership team, who has a lot of content expertise, but actually is not prepared in terms of competencies and skills to be a director to own work, the strategy and the vision. So the title didn't actually make this person a good director. Right. And this has happened time and time again with a lot of the organizations that I work with. It also doesn't mean promoting people that are currently on your team to a leadership team because you know, you need a leadership team. Right. And sort of aspirationally you want to be able to delegate to people. You want a smaller number of people that, that you're actually managing. And so you sort of create this leadership team without paying real attention to the roles that you need and the competencies that the organization needs. It's also not looking at the people who are on your leadership team, let's say you have directors or C suite and assigning them work that you need them to do without proper delegation, without training and development so that you're filling the gaps in competencies and skills that they have. And without, and this is a big one we're going to talk about is another one of the pillars that we're going to talk about, systems to support real accountability. Right. So just the existence of people on a leadership team doesn't work. And I've seen this time and time again. What happens, you don't get this right, is that the Executive Director becomes a real bottleneck. The ED can't focus on high leverage revenue and impact generating activities because they're holding all of the decisions. It's just too much of a mental load. There isn't enough mental space. There are way too many people reporting to the Executive director and there's no time to actually do the strategy and the visioning and the thinking and the planning and the relationship building. All of the stuff that the Executive Director is supposed to be doing, particularly as you enter and move your way through seven early seven figures, 1 million, 2 million. The executive director is supposed to be looking up and out, but if they're constantly in meetings, they cannot do that over time, what you'll see is that opportunities get missed. Opportunities for funding, opportunities for relationships. You will also see that the entire team will burn out. There's frustration because the people who are on the leadership team don't seem to understand what's being expected of them. Right. That clarity isn't there because the accountability and maybe the OKRs and the systems of support weren't put in place. They have the title of director but they don't really have the tools, organizational tools, to support them in that role. And that leads to real frustration. So not having the right leadership team causes real organizational friction and ultimately burnout. Here's what this essential element actually looks like. Here's what it really means when you pull back the curtain about of sort of what these organizations are doing. The director level roles themselves are actually aligned with the organization's strategic objectives. So that means that the specific leadership team you have, the constellation of leadership roles, needs to depend on what your organization wants to do in the next three to five years. So you have a strategic plan, you have a set of priorities. Where are you growing to over the next three to five years? And you need your leadership team. It's a little bit of an art and a science, a little bit of a dance. You have to future cast. You need your leadership team. You need to build the team that's going, that will take you to where you want to go. Right. It isn't as simple as we need to have a program director, we need to have an operations director, and we need to have a development director. And actually, I've seen the biggest problem around things like a development director. Everyone looks at other organizations and thinks they should have the same staffing chart. But that's not what these successful organizations are doing. That's not how they approached building this bench of support. They started with the question, what do we need to get to where we want to go? When I was the ED of my organization here in New York, I was part of an incredible mastermind of seven other women eds. We actually met every first Wednesday of the month for eight or nine years. And eventually all of us have sort of cycled off of being an ed. But we were, we shared resources, we taught one another, we supported one another. It was an incredible sort of brain trust. And one of the interesting things that I just saw firsthand was that as we grew, we were all pretty small when we started meeting and all well over seven figures by the time we stopped. I was at 2:50, 250k when we started sort of coming together and at 1.7 by the time I stepped away. One of the things that was really interesting was how different our leadership teams looked. My organization was focused on the integration of law and practice. So I had a policy director on my leadership team right alongside my program director. Because the program director and the policy director needed to actually hold different areas of strategic thought. One of the other organizations in the mastermind was doing arts and social justice work and they had an artistic director on her leadership team to work with her program director. Another organization was actually building a think tank. So they had a thought leadership and strategic communications director. I never had a strategic communications director. I didn't really need one. Right. That role could be folded into another workflow. So what we looked like at the top looked really different. And that was a direct outgrowth of our strategic priorities. The second thing is that there are systems in place to support true ownership by your leadership team. This means proper practices around delegation. And one of the interesting side things that outside points that I'll note is that a lot of the organizational leaders that I work with as they have grown, have actually invested in their own coaching around delegation. Right around what it looks like to lead and manage through layers. Because it is a different skill, right? Delegation isn't just saying, I trust you, you have authority and autonomy, go forth and do good work. I wish it were that simple. It is not. So building proper practices around delegation, it also means things like instituting and sticking to standard operation, operating operating procedures, SOPs. Right. And other management structures that support information sharing in ways that don't rely on meetings. As you grow, you cannot just share information synchronously. And so really mapping those out, it means being crystal clear about goals and agreed upon key results. Most of the organizations that I work with have clear OKRs, outcomes and key results that are owned by the leaders, not by the executive directors. This is what sort of empowerment looks like in practice and autonomy looks like in practice. Now a final part of what a strong leadership team looks like under the hood. And this is almost universally true for these organizations. It's not true in every instance, but almost universally true. Building a strong leadership team requires that the board believes in and has a board culture to support spending money on organizational infrastructure. It can be really uncomfortable for boards to sign off on a budget where there's a real investment in sort of higher salaried people. It looks like you're getting less bang for your buck, right? You're spending more and you have fewer people as opposed to spending less in getting, you know, three coordinators. But that's actually the the opposite way to grow, right? You actually need to invest. And this is what this essential element is about. Invest in a team that can own entire workflows. So ultimately, in most of the organizations, the board approved budgets that actually allowed the ED to make an investment in the leadership team. Right? For stem from dance, their strategic plan outlied priorities around massive national scale. When we talk about the aligning of the team with the strategic priorities. This was something that was really, really big in their last strategic plan. And their new team structure included leaders who could own entire workflows. It meant that Yamile, who's the founder and executive director, was actually able to be out in her space building relationships with new national partners, which was absolutely critical if they wanted to grow. In order to do that, they had to get clear about roles, right? They needed people to own thought leadership, marketing, strategic communications. This was different than when she first started the organization. Those were not the roles that she had contemplated, but when they thought about what it actually meant to operationalize a priority of national scale, those were the workflows that needed to be owned. It also meant that they had to get really clear about how they hired people. They needed a much more robust hiring rubric and process. They needed to clarify their organizational values and the competencies that they were looking for in their leaders. And they needed to standardize and systematize that so that Yamile could actually trust that the people she was hiring could own and share the vision and the strategy with her. By investing in this leadership team, they were actually able to double their revenue to close to $2 million and expand to two new cities in the first 18 months after making this change. At the same time, a lot of this is also about the personal shift, right? So for Groundswell Mural Project Robin, the executive director there for many years, the impact has been both organizational and personal. Investing in the right leadership team for Robin meant that she had people she could truly grow the organization with. We mapped out who she needed to bring on to the team and how she could uplevel the skill of her current team. So for Robin, there was much less external hiring that needed to be done and more rethinking the role of people on her team so that they could step in real ways onto a leadership team into director level roles. And for her, she stopped feeling like she was constantly drowning. She was not constantly overwhelmed. Within the first six months of building her new team structure, she had actually had the time to get her board on board with her organization's first strategic growth plan, an aspirational growth budget that was bigger than they had passed before. She was actually able to take the time and she had the mental space to think through, present it well, and get buy in so that her board could help her raise this new budget. So there was both an organizational and a mental, personal, psychological reality to building this new team. So the second essential element is about fundraising. It is having an Integrated and strategic fundraising system. And you're going to hear me use this word system a lot because it is different than a fundraising plan or even fundraising strategy. What I mean by system is this. A fundraising system is a connected, integrated approach to fundraising where all of your efforts work together. They inform and build off of one another, rather than acting as sort of a constellation of standalone activities. The key here is that both the nature and the structure of fundraising changes and it becomes far more intentional and far more interconnected. So what this isn't. And this can be really tricky. And I highlight this because every organization on this webinar does fundraising. And for many of you, you have had fundraising activities and strategies that have been successful. And so one of the points of friction that organizations that want to sort of sit comfortably in the seven figures, whether you're talking 1.5 million or 3.5 million, there is a shift that happens. Not that you get rid of things that you've done, but that you think differently about them. So I want to highlight some of the things that this that a fundraising system is not right. It's not just making sure that you have the basics covered. Right. How do you bring in new donors and funders, how do you cultivate donors and funders, holding cultivation events, making sure that you have annual events, some combination of annual events and campaigns, and asking for money. These are must haves, absolutely. But they are the 101 of a fundraising system. And so just staying there and making sure that you have a robust phrasing calendar is important, but it's not enough. Another thing that trips people up, big galas as a way to bring in new donors, you cannot focus on that. That's going to cost more as you grow. And so the return on your investment is going to shrink as you grow. Relying on this is a big one. Relying on single year funding and program funding, which is restricted. Organizations that sit comfortably in seven figures have multi year unrestricted or general operating support funding. And this very often means having different kinds of relationships with funders and really stepping into the individual donor pond, which can make organizations uncomfortable as they grow, but is really critical for most of the organizations that are sustaining a bigger budget. All of these things are important. But if you just pull together the different activities and you don't have an intentional coherent strategy, that feeling of feast and famine, that feeling of feeling like you're starting from scratch every year or every few years, or maybe not starting from scratch, but definitely not feeling like you are sitting on a comfortable, consistent system of revenue that's where this comes from. This sort of fragmentation as you scale will feel fragmented. When you don't have a system and you just have the activities, you cannot rely on what will come in. Psychologically, you feel like you are having to rethink, reimagine this starting from scratch feeling all the time. And that's draining, right? This overwhelm that we feel is very tied to this. If you feel like you're constantly having to find new donors, figure out who the new funders are, figure out, okay, so last year, our year end campaign made this, what can we tweak to try to double it? That leads to decision fatigue, right? At a macro level and you don't actually grow, right? You cannot take a step back and have your fundraising do that, sort of follow that path that we saw, the consistent fundraising. What you actually want and what this essential element looks like behind the scene teams is a set of intentional choices about where you look for funding, who you talk to and who you don't talk to, which type of activities are actually best suited for your organization, and how you can leverage one piece of your fundraising world to actually ramp up your impact in another piece of your fundraising world. So what do I mean by that? First, this means making sure that your strategic plan, your true cost budget and your fundraising plan are all talking to one another. They are aligned, they are telling the same story, right? If you think about a storybook, on one page are words and on the other page is a picture, but they are depicting, they're telling the same story. That's how you want your strategic plan, your budget and your fundraising strategies and plans to be. You want your fundraising strategy to grow out of and reflect your strategic priorities and your strategic goals that are in both your long term plan and your annual plan. That's how you're going to know which foundations to reach out to. That's how you're going to know which types of donors to target. Because you don't want to target everybody. That is a waste of time and money and it is very, very deflating. You're going to know what to say in your outreach because of your strategic plan and because of your true cost budget, you're going to know how much it actually costs to implement the vision that you have, right? Everything from the staffing costs to the infrastructure and tech costs. That's how you have investment level conversations with funders and donors. That alignment this element also means developing multi layer strategies for how to maximize gifts at all levels, not just sending a campaign and sort of Seeing who will give. Right? Organizations with fundraising systems have plans, intentionally crafted plans for how they're going to identify, cultivate and activate every level of donor, from major donors to the middle of their pyramid, all the way down to their lowest level. And because they are strategic about looking at all levels, they can actually think carefully about where to aim capacity to get the most leverage. This is things like building an ambassador program to bring in minor and mid level donors, or using automation at lower levels so that you're freeing up your mental space and your and your staff's time to focus on upper mid level and major donors. Right. You're able to sort of see the whole chessboard. My, my kids play chess, and so I, there are a lot of chess analogies and references in my life, but this idea of looking at the whole chessboard as a whole chessboard allows you to see, okay, if I move my rook here, what is the ripple effect of that? That's how you want to think about your fundraising. And finally, this, keeping with the whole chessboard analogy, this means setting up differentiated donor funnels, right? So that one action actually triggers a whole series of related actions that move people smoothly to an end result. As the executive director's fundraising role becomes more relational, right? As the gifts get bigger, you need the gifts to get bigger. And this requires a shift from transactional to relational fundraising. Then the ED needs to be prepared and able to craft different tailored cultivation and activation strategies for different segments of donors and funders. So asking who are the ideal people to bring into our world? Who are the people that have really deep points of affinity? How do I find more people like that and bring them into our world? When you hear fundraising becomes more relational, this is what that means. Individual fundraising becomes less about just knowing an individual's giving level and finding ways to ask and more about identifying individualized ways to create a journey for each segment of your community. Right? So that one action triggers all of these other actions that guides a donor or a funder smoothly from learning about you to making a gift. It's personalized, it's tailored, it's strategic. This core element is perhaps the most direct link to unlocking revenue growth. It's really about building a revenue engine that over time propels itself. Right? That's really where you want to get to a system, or I like to call it a flywheel. So that you put in the effort, you build it up front, it takes some work and some thought, and then you have mid level donors set up in a way that they bring in new Mid level donors, that what you're learning about your mid level donors actually gives you insight into potential major donors. So there's a flow there, there's an ease that starts to happen when this integration at the chessboard level, when you sort of think at that level. One of the most exciting calls, conversations I've had with a funder was actually Lefrae, who's @Willie Mae Rock Camp here in New York City. And the strategic alignment piece unlocked her first six figure gift from a single individual. She called me this time last year about a conversation she'd had with a family in her community. They had seen her speak at a conference and they'd reached out to learn more about her vision for STEM and music, which is what Willie Mae does, where she was going and not just her programs. Like, what was her vision? What was she trying to accomplish with her girls? She was able to talk in a real way about her tenure vision, her three year priorities, her one year plan. There was a, a synergy between all of the things that she was describing and she could tell them what it would cost at each milestone along the way. And they wound up funding an entire year of exploring a new program. That synergy allowed her to tell a story, that deep alignment. She could describe the whole chessboard and then say, and actually, if you give us this, we will move the rook and this will happen, right? That's really powerful. That unlocks next level gifts. For Toya, there was a strategic alignment at the mid level of her donor base that allowed her to double her budget in a year. When I first started working with Toya, she was in a really exciting but precarious position. She had been growing her budget. She had a great team, but she was really afraid to hire, she was really excited, afraid to expand. She liked where she was in terms of the people she had, but they were all at capacity and they were very much at risk of burning out. But she'd been burned by a funder who had promised a grant and it hadn't come through. And she knew all too well, as so many of us do, how even though she had the money in the bank, it may not be there next year. And that sense that I pointed to, of sort of lack of certainty, right, that was very real for Toya. So what we did was we stepped back and we looked at all of the fundraising she was doing, all of the things that had worked in the previous two years, and we built a less scattered and more coherent system over six months. We focused on her mid level donors These were people who she could see had either given multiple times in the year and actually could be leveled up into a single or multiple mid level gifts. These were people in her community that she'd never really built a deep relationship with, but had been. Her consistent givers were often her ambassadors. And so we crystallized this, right? We transformed two or formed two micro communities and formalized them into self perpetuating donor circles. They give quarterly, they give like clockwork to her organization. She was able to rely on that steady stream of money and felt much safer adding to her payroll. So the systemization, that's where the consistency comes from and the trust and the feeling like, okay, I can step out on this budget and build the organization that I need. Another really exciting example of this was opening act. So opening act actually sort of created this really amazing type of micro gift campaign. And the it strategically activates the bottom of their pyramid, right? So whereas Toya focused on the mid level donors. What's really interesting and exciting to me about this was that they used their data to look at who was in their community and their patterns of engagement. And then they used an ambassador based peer to peer campaign to bring in $160,000 from gifts, all under $100 in a week. And they did that year after year. It was the infrastructure, it was the system, not some flash in the pants or flash in the pot, I don't know what the metaphor is. Strategy that just sort of worked because they happened to have one person who loved them that year. They built out the strategy and they used data to be intentional about which levers they pulled to bring in money from the people in their community. So the third essential element is all about systems. These organizations have stable, healthy investments in operations and systems, not just programs. I'm going to say this again, real investments in operations and systems, not just programs. So the myths and mistakes here are legendary, right? This is, this is a real glaring sort of hole in a lot of organizations for many reasons that make a lot of sense, right? Boards can be really uncomfortable investing in things that seem so not tied to programs. That's, I think, the biggest concern and what I always work with my leaders to do is reframe things for boards and honestly, sometimes even for themselves, to understand that this dichotomy between operations and programs is false, that there really is no difference when you are building an institution between investing in a program and investing in your operations. Or I should say more, more precisely, when you invest in strong operations, you are strengthening your programs. So some of the Mistakes that organizations make. Small nonprofits in particular will hire a single administrative assistant or a single operations manager to handle everything. Payroll, donor data entry, hr, setting up systems. And that sort of counts as checking the box for operations or investing in an admin. But this overloads one person and it's not actually building a system. It's not really providing institutional support support. It may work for smaller budgets, but as your organization grows really beyond mid six figures, a single sort of admin assistant isn't actually building a set of systems or an infrastructure that will scale. Another challenge that organizations sometimes have is they will double down on often manual and always time consuming processes. So they know that they need donor data to be organized, but they will do it in a spreadsheet. Right. Or they will manually enter program data or communications logs. So the result here is both inefficiency and a lot of. Yep, absolutely. That's Emily, that is so common. Don't feel bad. It's really, really. It's so common. It is a core part of my program. I mean of my, of my presentation. Yeah, yes, exactly. Chantelle, you are doubling your work that the system is there, right? You have the spreadsheet. Maybe it's even, you know, I worked with a leader who came and she was so proud that her evaluation data, like when you press, when you clicked one thing, other things changed. In the Google sheet, it was very impressive and it had clearly taken a long time to set up and it's not scalable. And so setting that, maintaining that she needed to find somebody on her team to plug in the data and then if it went wrong and how were they going to share it? It just isn't a scalable. It's an ad hoc, not a scalable solution. Another one, and this is, I will say Salesforce is huge for this. The number of organizations that show up on our sort of weekly coaching calls inside the program and ask about whether they should invest in Salesforce. It's really amazing. But at the same time that you don't want these sort of manual time consuming processes, you also don't want to put the cart before the horse and invest in expensive project management or donor management or CRM tools. I said Salesforce comes to mind. Before you have the underlying systems and workflows in place. Right. If you don't set aside meaningful time to create processes that work, ways of sharing information, naming conventions. If you don't have the underlying systems and then you try to layer technology on top, they simply won't stick. Right. Your team just won't do them. They won't use Asana or they won't use Monday.com or they won't use Notion or whatever the beautiful tool is that you have. It will not work. Yes, that sort of messy middle of going from the spreadsheet to software can be messy. And one of the and the seven strategies that I'm going to talk about sort of slowing down and actually asking what are the systems we need and therefore what is the right software can be a way to do that. And I will put in the chat at the end. There are great two podcast conversations that I've had with folks where where we actually walk through this sort of how to get through this messy middle. So what I will say about this one is it's really, really critical. It's not sexy. It's like the opposite of saving a baby seal, which is always what I say about operations. It's the opposite of sort of a really, you know, amazing program launch. It feels like there isn't as much rubber on the road. You're not going to get sort of the pats on the back. You can't really put any of this in an impact report, so it can feel like you're not going to get credit either from your board. It can be hard to see why you're doing it. But here's the thing. This is where it does show up and why it's so critical. As nonprofits grow, they must have strong bones to support that growth. They have to have strong systems. As you hire more people, you have to have new ways of sharing information that don't involve meetings. As your programs become more impactful, you have to have ways to track and collect and analyze data that don't require hours of someone's time. As your finances get more complicated, you have to have financial tools that allow you to use the reports and the data to make decisions, not just look at a cash flow statement for the sake of looking at a cash flow statement. And when these things aren't an area of focus, right? When they don't have their own bucket inside your organization, it will hold your organization's growth back in a big way. It's not the outfront way where you've lost money. It's this slow, draining, painful way where you just won't grow, right? Tasks like donor management and managing budgets, maintaining systems, they get overlooked. They are inefficient. Your team's capacity to take on new initiatives is just shrunken, right? Your team spends time and resources fixing small problems, updating data Sheets, I see a lot of this here, you know, playing catch up. Which means that the executive director and this leadership team we talked about are not spending time expanding programs, securing bigger funding, building for the future. Without solid operations, there's little room for proactive growth. Right. It slows everything down. And really, interestingly, this was a statistic that I became aware of really recently. It's one of the leading causes of staff turnover. Two times the staff turnover rate in organizations without dedicated operations teams of at least two people. So going back to the first mistake of just sort of one person, what research is finding is that that actually doesn't relieve, it doesn't address these issues. And so that burnout that people doing things that are outside of their job or doing too much and setting up the systems, that doesn't go away. I just talked to one of the leaders in my program last week because the board, she was very excited. She texted me, she said our board approved a $1.5 million budget for the first time. And when she started working with me, they were struggling. They were very nervous to even approve a $350,000 budget. So it's been a really exciting journey. So excited. Then she showed up in the coaching call and she said, other shoe dropped. They actually won't, as part of that budget, approve her hiring of a second operations person. Right. So she has an operations manager and she has seen all of the things that I pointed to. Her team is burning out. She is spending way too much time on operations details. That person that she hired is tapped out and actually isn't a finance HR tech person. Right. They are a systems person, but that doesn't mean that they're good at all of the things. And she's really concerned, and I think she is rightly concerned. And we talked about how to go back to her board and share this, bring them along, that she won't hit that $1.5 million target without the operation support. And what we found is that the Stanford Social Innovation Review actually did this study. Nonprofits that don't have robust operation systems had almost half as much success securing multi year donations. And like I said, you're not necessarily going to your board or your funders or your supporters won't necessarily attribute that lack of funding, the lack of program growth to this operations piece. But that's very often what is at the foundation or what it's at the core. So what you do want to do, what this does look like, true investment, is about building systems that can grow with the organization. This is things like automating your donor segmentation. So a number of organizations use these don't have to be complicated. Mailchimp or ConvertKit for example. So I talked about building your tech on top of your systems that already work, right? If you are already sending emails, you can set up your email service provider mailchimp to automatically segment your donors based on links that they click on in your emails, right? So you're, you're using your tech to do something you're already doing to do it better. So augmenting or automating donor segmentation and communications so that you can do the outreach to the segmented funnels like we talked about without it having any manual component, right? This is things like. So thinking about automation is huge. This is things like hiring specialized roles. So again, instead of one person who wears many hats, invest in specialized operations roles. Like people who focus on finance, database and technology, hr, not generalists who can get overwhelmed. And going back to the leadership team essential element we talked about, look at your strategic priorities. What are the areas of work strategically, the kind of impact you want to have, what are the systems that they will need? You may not need a dedicated finance person if your finances are fairly simple, right? You can outsource that. You may not need an HR person if you have a fairly flat or fairly simple team. I never needed a dedicated HR person, but I did need a data management person, right? I needed somebody who was very, very good at taking in data, organizing data, analyzing data. So that my director of programs was not a data specialist, who is an amazing program designer and curriculum designer and community builder. She was very good at that thing I hired her to do. We had somebody else do the data piece, right? Take that off of her plate. And then we also had a director of operations who the data person reported to, who oversaw all of our systems. She set up our naming convention. She was the one that, because this was her area of focus. This is the part of the chessboard she's looking at, the part of the soccer field that, you know, if you play soccer there are zones. The zone she was supposed to be looking at was operations. So she could say, I'm noticing that there's a lot of friction between the data and the program's person, right? We're not getting the data we need. Maybe we need this other system, this other workflow, right? So we had these two people. And then finally things like outsourcing key non mission tasks. Making smart investments can mean taking things outside of the organization that are not core mission centered activities, right? This Leaves your team, your leadership team and the people that report to them to really focus on the complex program and impact specific work that they need to do. So things like payroll, it. A lot of folks use peos for hr. So really thinking, and again, this is going to depend on your organization really looking at where do we want to be in three years and what are the systems that will help us get there, where do we need to invest in house and where can we outsource? Those kinds of strategic chessboard level questions are how you build a strong operations infrastructure that will scale with your organization. For Rebecca, the investment in a dedicated OPS team was actually one of the first investments she made. As they started to grow. She had one program person and two OPS people at a particular point, and I've almost never seen that. And for her, that also meant someone to focus on finance and someone to focus on tech and data. And what that did was it transformed how she and her program person were able to work. She realized that as they grew, they were going to want to partner with various government entities. Some of that meant government funding, but a lot of it meant being a vendor, being a partner with the state, with the city. And so she needed somebody who was really good at the finance piece and she did not. That was not her right, but she was really good at the strategy. And so she had a finance person and she had the data person. And together she and her program person could focus on the program goals and outcomes, right? Communicating the cost and impact at a higher and more strategic level. And ultimately the con, the combination of the OPS and the integration of the OPS into the way that she was able to talk about her programs meant that they were able to secure their first state partnership. Right? She could show up for the conversations leading up to that partnership with program data, with impact data, knowing that when she got back to her office, someone who was really good at the things she hired them to do could take everything she was seeing and give her information that allowed her to be strategic and talk in a strategic, high level way with the people that she needed to partner with. So the fourth essential element is about the executive director's time. It's about a calendar with high leverage activities emphasizing leverage. This is about being able to prioritize the type of work that's going to drive your organization's growth, revenue and impact. That's what I mean by high leverage. You're working on your organization as opposed to just in it. So without this, without meaningful time for high leverage activities, you spend way too much of Your time in the weeds doing low leverage stuff, harried. Your week is filled with a flurry of meetings, constantly putting out fires. There's a lot of like lower level management work that executive directors do. This is often tied to the leadership team. Even if they have a leadership team, they find that they're sort of in the weeds, helping people figure out how to do their work. There's no time for reflection on what's actually working, responding to what's not, visioning strategic planning, expanding networks, who to meet with, which group, working groups to join, where to pursue partnerships, where should I be speaking? What stages should I be on? These are the kinds of future casting questions that organizational leaders, as they grow, need to have time to think about. These are the high leverage thoughts and areas of work that organizational leaders need to hold. And without real protected time for high leverage activities like these, scaling is just impossible. Right? Because the leader is always in the organization, they cannot work on expanding it. So, practice point, what does this mean? You want your calendar? It's just like, how do I change my calendar? So you want your calendar to be at least. At least 40% high leverage activities. Right? Various research. I was fascinated by how much research has been done on this particular issue, one of the most informative ones, and I'll share the link for anyone who's interested. McKinsey & Co. Reported that leaders who spend at least 40% of their time on strategic activities and high leverage activities drive significantly higher growth rates compared to those who only focus on these sort of weeds in the operations and meetings. And this is particularly true for organizations where scaling or growth is. Is a goal. Right. Is something that they're focused on. In my own survey of the 75 organizations that I sort of surveyed at the beginning I referenced them, 80% shared that they attributed their success in growing and staying stable in large part to this factor. 80% said that this was one of the key deciding factors in their ability to grow. Shifting how they changed how they spent their calendar. Right. They focused on high leverage activities. So this doesn't mean blocking out thinking time, but not actually using it. Right. Or blocking out thinking time and not using it for high leverage activities. That's another big one. Right. We block out thinking time and then we spend it on emails. That's not going to get you where you want to go. Right. It defeats the purpose of truly focusing on growth and future strategy. Right. That's not. When you want to catch up on your admin and review reports, you want to protect time for deep work. I like to call it. This also doesn't mean doing things like attending external events, speaking on stages, meeting with potential partners. But you don't have a goal, right? You're not doing it with an aim towards something strategic. Right. It just adds to the noise. It's just more meanings and it can add to your sense of being overwhelmed rather than driving your growth. Conversely, it doesn't necessarily mean saying no to smaller projects, right? So I'm not saying that all of your emphasis on high leverage means you don't do some of the smaller projects because they might seem like you're not staying focused on big picture. If you know your priorities, your strategic priorities. For those of you who have worked with me in the past, you might know I'm really, really bullish on strategic plans and in particular the priorities and the goals within those plans. So once you have the priorities, where do you want to be in three years? Where are you guys going in a year? Then you're able to see which bigger picture, partnerships, relationships, conferences, stages and pages which are aligned with your priorities and which smaller projects and opportunities might also be aligned with your priorities. So we don't want to get. We don't want to conflate high leverage with like big picture all the time. It just means work that when you spend sort of an hour on this activity, the return on investment in terms of money or impact is outsized. That's what high leverage looks like in practice. What it does mean, how you can actually shift to focus on high leverage means delegation. Right? Here's that word again. Delegating low leverage tasks, leaning on the leadership team we talked about and the ops and systems that we've discussed, these things all go together. If you have these other essentials, people you can trust and systems that will support your work, you can actually step out of the weeds, right? It means protecting your time for deep work, not setting up meetings, not doing ops work, making the time so that you're not available and actually spending it on visioning, planning and strategizing. It means thinking about things like relationships and partnerships, right? Thought leadership, network expansion. These are things that propel the organization forward. So making sure that you have time in your calendar every week to think about how you're going to get your amazing work in front of more people in ways that activate and energize them to support you and to work with you. The role of the executive director becomes this sort of forward future casting, future pacing work. And then finally, your role internally is about building internal culture, right? How do we work Together, how do our values integrate into our work? This shift is a game changer and it unlocks so many of the others. You go from this kind of calendar, staff meetings and putting out fires and rushing around and checking emails to something that looks more like this. This is what your week can look like when you're focused on high leverage activities and you've brought all three or all four of the elements or three of the other elements into balance. Right? It's planful, it's balanced, it emphasizes the things that will help your organizations grow. And each of these boxes, they're going to be configured differently in your organization, but they're the core high leverage boxes, right? Deep work, right? Setting the course for how your organization will grow and move through the world. Network expansion and fundraising. Who are the people you should be bringing into the organization and what do those relationships look like? Board and stakeholder engagement. Working with your board, really getting them inspired, leveraging them as advisors and partners, identifying other advisors and partners, and finally management and culture building. That's the blue right? There is still, you are still meeting with your team, you are still managing your team, but it looks different, right? Because you are not putting out the fires and having lots of staff meetings and check ins. Your leadership team is doing that. You are meeting with your leadership team. You're holding top for you, your, for your whole full team maybe once a month, maybe maybe once a week, maybe every other week. But most of your time is these other deep work boxes, right? For Mike, this shift in his calendar is what actually freed up his time. There was like a one to one correlation between that and transforming three single year grants into multi year grants with funders because he actually spent, spent more time out of the office, more time in relationship with funders. He was actually able to have deeper conversations with them and bring them into his vision for where he wanted the organization to go. Which meant he could say, it's amazing that you've given us this gift for the year. Let me tell you where I plan for us to be three years from now and how if you were to give the same amount every year for the next three years, it would help us get there with more, you know, certainty and with more safety. That's a really powerful conversation to be able to have. The relationship needs to be there, right? You need to have time to think about that and to bring people in. Right. I'm also just in terms of the, the kind of impact that doesn't seem like it's necessarily happening, but it is absolutely happening. Kemi was the executive director of the Laundromat Project. And her time, her deep work time, her relationship time, was spent becoming part of the water that arts and social justice organizations swam in. Right? She hosted convenings with partner organizations so that they became sort of the thought leaders in the space. She made sure that she was participating in strategic working groups right alongside philanthropic leaders here in New York and around in key places around the country. She had time with her leadership team and her board to strategize about what it meant to broaden their footprint and have deeper impact because they became a go to the go to organization here in the city and in key places around the country in the arts and social justice space. Given their model, they were primed to receive and did receive this $2 million MacKenzie Scott Award. So it's very, very exciting. Now, we talked about why each of these elements on their own is powerful. These are the core drivers of sustainable growth. A strong leadership team, an integrated fundraising system, investment in operations, and emphasis on leverage. Ultimately, all four of these, everything we've talked about is about impact. You want to create a stronger, more beautiful, more just society. That's why we do what we do. And that only happens if you have a strong infrastructure and the right strategy. That's why planning for and building these elements becomes so important. Your funding comes in so much more easily when you have time to build relationships and when you have the systems to support strategic communications and cultivation and stewardship. You have more time when you have a strong leadership team to hold top with you. It's much easier for your team to click when the systems are in place to support information sharing, right? All of these pieces build on and feed one another. Now, you must be thinking, okay, sounds great, but how does this actually work? Right? How does this work in my organization, the good news is it's 100% doable. You already know the core elements. And when I tell you that I have seen organizations grow from all of the mistakes that I mentioned to strong, healthy, sustainable organizations in six months, in 12 months, in 18 months, when I have seen hundreds of organizations do this, I'm telling you it is. This is not magic, right? There is a method to the madness. It is 100% doable. The key is you can't think of each of these elements as separate, right? Separate organizational elements. They actually all grow out of the same foundation. Intentional design. And by this, I mean that these successful sustainable organizations all focus first and foremost on the health of the institution itself, separate from the programs. And in doing so, they craft intentional, careful plans for every aspect of their institution. They don't wing it. Right. One of my favorite quotes by Albert Einstein, he said that it's impossible to solve a problem from the same level of awareness that created that problem. Now, the key to integrating these elements into your organization and your plans is to change your level of awareness. And you do that by taking the time to be strategic and to plan for each element of your growth. It's like building a tower of blocks my kids are really into, my youngest in particular is really into building with Jenga blocks, I think because they're tiny and they, and you can sort of be really creative with them. But if you build a tower that has pieces missing, it's like scaling without investing, right? Intentional planful energy and strategy into getting to these elements. You may get bigger, but you will constantly be in danger of toppling. So let's talk about how you actually bring these elements into your plans. I'm going to walk through the seven strategies one at a time. Walk briefly through them. So, and like I said, the slides, you'll get the slides. So you'll see all of these. So the first is to design your leadership roles in ways that explicitly build organizational infrastructure. You want to make sure that part of your leadership in all of your leadership roles are explicit about how they will work with your ops team, how they will set up and manage systems and processes and create scalable, efficient workflows. This means that as you're building your leadership team, you are ensuring that your infrastructure, how everyone on your leadership team can thinks about systems, thinks about the bones of the organizations, it's being built in tandem with your programs, right? You're keeping your organization strong, the backbone strong, as you scale. So as you're designing your leadership roles and your leadership team, be explicit about how they will intersect with and inter and integrate organizational infrastructure. The second is you want to establish systems for accountability and strong workflows across levels. Right? You want to, if you haven't already, start, start today when we get off of this workshop. Creating SOPs and goal setting frameworks like shared outcomes and key results or OKRs. Identifying KPIs that embed accountability into how you communicate with your leadership team. And, and this one's really important, how your leadership team communicates with the people that report to them. You want to make accountability and strong communication across levels part of what it means to be a good director or leader in your organization for your leadership team and for yourself. This will not only minimize your reliance on meetings, but it Builds habits around information sharing up and down within the organization. This means that whether you are at 1 million or 5 million, you have built a set of systems that allows you to stay informed without constant check ins. That allows your leadership team to get information from you, share information with one another so that you can move forward without friction. It builds a strategic infrastructure, infrastructure for leadership so that they can own their work right from the beginning. So building these systems. Third, you need to cultivate board support for infrastructure investments, right? This means encouraging the board to see budget allocations for operations as a strategic investment. So you know it's budget season for a lot of organizations. As you think about your 2025 budget, think about how you will make it clear to your board that you are investing in operations. What will that look like? What is the team that you're investing in? What are the systems? What is the tech? How will that show up in your budget? And how can that be a foundation for conversations with your board about how operations are essential for stability and for growth, rather than just as overhead? So this budget piece and the board buy in is really critical as you integrate what we're talking about into your work. Work. There we go. That's fourth one. As you're thinking about your fundraising plan for the year, notch up, right? Zoom out and think about how you can align your fundraising strategy for the coming year with your strategic priorities and goals for the year. Right? Use your priorities and goals from your strategic plan to identify key funding needs, for identifying your key funding targets, your donors and your funders, and for organizing what you will say for each of those targets. Start now to craft a structured and planful approach to funder and donor engagement. Think about your segments and your funnels and think about how you will activate and leverage capacity and revenue at each of your levels. Your major, your mid level and your recurring. So sort of zoom out and begin to think, how do the pieces of my fundraising strategy inform one another and build off of one another? Next, invest in systems that scale, right? Build systems that are designed to scale from the beginning. Think about where you're going and build systems for that reality. I've seen a few of the comments sort of talking about being in that space now of what are the system like, what are the operations that we need? Sit down with your strategic plan and ask yourself, if we are going to be an organization having the kind of impact we envision three years from now, what does that mean we need to look like on the inside? What is the team that we're going to need, how will we need to share information? What kind of data will we need? What will we need to automate? If we keep things manual in this part of our, you know, in this part of our organization, for example, and then we add $500,000, what will break? And that's a great way to, to back into this. When you get to the point where you're like, oh, that's the thing that will break, that's a really good indication that it's time for a system, right? A system that will allow you to scale. So here you want to think not just about implementing basic tools and trying to find the right tech or the right, the right, like project management software or CRM. You want to identify the systems that your organization needs and then back into the kind of tech, the kind of automation, the kind of analysis capabilities that will support that, right. Ultimately you're looking to reduce manual tasks and support growth. But use where you're going as the North Star and then reverse engineer the systems that will get you there. And be comfortable with the fact that your systems and your tool and your tech may look, really will probably look very different than other organizations. That's okay, right? You want the anchor for your organization, just like in designing your leadership team to be your strategic priorities and your strategic goals. Think about creating specialized roles that support long term stability. So that may mean in the short term that may not. It may not be possible for you to have, you know, different directors or director of finance or. And you may never get to that point, but you can think in small ways about hiring professionals with expertise in core areas of your organization, like finance, like technology, like project management. One of the organizations that I work with just hired a part time temporary systems expert. Basically someone to come in and work with them for six to nine months and just sit in their meetings, talk with their leadership team and help them design, basically reflect back to them. Here is the project management. Here are the project management tools that will best fit you and I will set them up for you. Because part of what he realized was we need some of this specialized expertise. I am too in the weeds, I'm too in the systems to know why I'm not able to get my team to use Asana. It seems like it should be really easy. Nobody's doing it. What are we missing? And so this investment in these specialized roles, sometimes I mean building them into your team and sometimes I mean thinking strategically in shorter and intermediate terms about bringing specialized expertise onto your team to achieve specific goals, right? As you're thinking about these four essential elements, particularly in the area of fundraising and the area of ops, right? So pillars two and three and then finally, and this is a big one, and this will lay the foundation for almost all of the other, the other work, dedicate and protect time blocks, provisioning and network expansion and partnership, right? Make the deep work and the high leverage work part of the organization's infrastructure. The expectations that the leadership team has for themselves and for the executive director by building that into how the organization structures that time, how the executive director's calendar looks. Everybody understands that Wednesdays are no meetings and every morning before 10:30, it's deep work time for the organization, for the executive director. And that is protected, that is sacred time, right? Making that part of the water that everybody swims in so that every week the organizational leader and over time, hopefully also the leadership team have time to focus on high level strategy, relationship building and thought leadership. These structured blocks ensure that strategic planning, stakeholder engagement are built into the regular workflow. So let's recap. You learned what sustainable organizations look like. Consistent revenue, growing revenue, a strong team, coherent and a cohesive board impact that's actually changing our world. You learned the four elements that are at the core of this. A strong leadership team, an integrated fundraising system that's relational and aligned with your core strategic vision, priorities and goals. You learned about real investment and how important real investment in operations and systems is. And having a calendar that emphasizes and protects high leverage activities. You saw how they all build on the same foundation. The organizations that grew to and are sustaining without burning out seven fingers of revenue and impact are extremely intentional about their strategies and about their plans. They don't wing it. And you know how to think about these elements in the context of your own organization. The reality is none of this happens overnight, right? I presented a few slides, but I don't want you to think, or I want you to, to remember that nobody, no organization goes from 0 to 100, right? And you don't cobble your way there. It's exhausting, it's time consuming trying to sort of piecemeal and figure out what's what works and it's not necessary, right? As an executive director, you already have so much to figure out. This does not have to be one of those things, right? Growth is not one of those things. It doesn't work to try to reverse engineer a plan from the outside because it's impossible to know what we don't know. You can't see the strategy and the nuance and the ups and the downs that are happening below the surface. When you look at an organization that's, you know, $2.2 million, $1.5 million, the budget doesn't really tell you what's happening with their new staff workflows or the coaching that the executive director is getting, or the CEO days that the executive director takes, the hiring rubrics that they had to work, the board governance training that they've invested in. You can't see the tiniest details from the outside and behind the scenes, right? And these are the tiny things that make such a big difference. Now, I said in the outreach at the beginning that I would share a little bit of information about how I can support you in building these elements into your organization. I have done this myself multiple times and with hundreds of clients and I love showing people the roadmap to grow growth. So if this is where you are, and I said at the beginning, this is a great training for organizations that have these growth goals and that want to get there without making mistakes, without feeling overwhelmed. If that feels like you, I would love to invite you to apply to work with me inside the Next Level Nonprofit Accelerator. There is literally no other program like this that is so deeply and sharply focused on giving nonprofits the roadmap, the cheat codes to sustainable growth and helping you build the internal systems and infrastructure you need to grow your budget and your impact sustainably. Next Level NonProfit is a six month high touch coaching program. It's for nonprofit leaders of established nonprofits that want more revenue, more impact and a stronger organization in the next 12 months. And when you answer the application questions, and the link is right there when you answer the application questions. You'll also have an opportunity to hop on a strategy call with me and we can just talk through where you are and see if this is a good fit. So I will also put the link right now. Next Level Application in the chat. This is not just a bunch of training videos, right? I'm not going to make promises that I can't keep. And for any of you who is any of you who have consumed my content, my podcast, my newsletters, worked with me, I'm a no BS kind of gal, right? I am very nuts and bolts on what works and getting you to actual concrete results. You need the right plan and hands on support to guide your growth. And my goal is to cut through the noise and complexity and the confusion around growing so that you have the intentional design and the smart strategy you need. Not just to grow your budget and your team and your impact, but to do it without burning out. At the end of our first six months you will have a stronger organization and everything you need to scale your budget, to develop a strategic fundraising system, to work in a more cohesive way with your board, to build a stronger team and better workflows, and to set up the systems and automations that support scaling. So here's how it works. You start with a deep assessment of your organization's infrastructure and systems where you are. You get real insight into where you're strong and the often hidden low hanging fruit opportunities for growth. And based on that, my team and I develop a personalized clear concrete growth plan 12 month growth plan so that you know exactly where to focus your time and money and energy in the next 12 months. You also get a step by step roadmap and a curated curriculum for hitting those growth goals that's for you and your team. You then get hands on support through a combination of group coaching with me and one on one executive coaching with my executive coaches in residence. Live masterclasses that give a deep dive into some of the more complex parts of growth. We did one two weeks ago on KPI tracking. We did one last month on how to actually use financial reports for strategic decision making and not just sort of look at the numbers. We've done a mini series on delegation. In addition to the coaching and the live Masterclasses and the 24 hour available asynchronous coaching via a private slack coaching community which all are available to your whole team, not just the executive director. You also get lifetime access to the full library of next level nonprofit resources. That's all of the video workshops, all of the micro trainings, the audio micro trainings, every recorded masterclass. We also have a library of our coaching classes, our coaching calls, so you can look and see what I've said about other things. We have a extensive ready to use template library so your whole team gets lifetime access to that. I am a very strong believer that one person should not have to carry all of the growth for their organization. As you can see, I've talked about systems and a leadership team and so part of what comes with the program is live professional development for your team as well as governance training for your board so that it's not just you carrying all of this on your back. And because implementation can often be the bottleneck, you get access to a Rolodex of vetted consultants and sector experts and virtual assistants including discounts on services like copywriting, marketing and automation setup. I love when the leaders that I work with experience clarity and growth like these folks. Easier fundraising that comes from deep strategic and values alignment, smoother operations, 2x 3x even 10x growth and impact if that's what you want. And for that reason I've designed the program to be holistic, to be comprehensive and to be really easy to engage with. We meet you where you are and we give you the real time support you need to build a strong organization from the inside out. Any questions, you can pop them in the webinar chat and I am happy to answer them. Thanks so much for joining me this week. If you enjoy this podcast I would love for you to leave a rating and a review. I read every single one and they really do matter. I also share extra tidbits and resources building on what we talk about here in my newsletter Leadership Forward 321. You can sign up by texting the word IMPACT to 66866 and finally, definitely check out the links and resources that I mentioned in this episode@brooke richiebabbage.com podcast see you next week.