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Brooke Ritchie Babbage
Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast. I'm Brooke Ritchie 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 impact 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. There are a lot of reasons that nonprofits can hit growth ceilings, but more often than not it comes down to a rock and a hard place scenario that keeps organizations stuck. I see the same patterns over and over, so I want to share the most common ones and the hard but necessary shifts that you need to make to move past them. Fair warning, the alternative to not doing these is just as hard. It's stagnation, it's underfunding, it's overwork, it's spinning your wheels. It's burnout. So just because we don't necessarily see the hardness of what we're currently doing, and we do see the difficulty or hardness of making the change, doesn't mean not making the change isn't hard. It's just hard in a different way. So what are the five most common patterns that I see? First, talking to too many audiences. Answer. Clarify your message. Get really clear what you're saying and who you're talking to. It's really tempting to try to talk to everyone. All donors, all funders, all your different potential community members, potential corporate sponsors, anybody who might remotely be interested in your issue. But when you try to talk to everyone, no one actually listens because they don't think you're talking to them. What you want to do instead is focus your message on the audience that moves the needle the most. Your people. This doesn't mean ignoring other stakeholders, but it does mean being clear about who your core message is for now, I know that this is scary for some folks because it can feel like you're narrowing your reach. Right? I've heard this a lot. I don't want to leave money on the table. I get that. But the reality is you're making it way easier for the right people to find you, to engage with you, to give and to Become champions for your work. Okay, second pattern underfunding overhead. Answer. Create a true cost budget for what it really takes to achieve your vision. This is a big one. I am often on this soapbox. Too many nonprofits underfund overhead because they're afraid of looking bloated to their board, to their funders. But we all know anybody who has run a nonprofit who's been on a board of a healthy nonprofit. Running a nonprofit requires overhead. And trying to do it on a shoestring budget doesn't mean you're efficient. It means that you're exhausted. Means that you are underfunding the muscles of your organization. You are starving your organization. If you don't invest in things like systems and operations and a strong, effective leadership team, then you will not be able to sustain your impact. You have to be transparent with your funders and your donors and your board about what it actually costs to run the organization well. And that will require non direct program expenses. You want to build your but your budget around sustainability, not scarcity, not what can you do it for. And have conversations with funders and your board that help them to understand and embrace the full cost of impact. Okay, third pattern the wrong team. This is a big one. You just don't have the right people in the right role. And the fix here is you have to hire for where you're going, not where you've been. I see this so much all the time because the organizations that I work with inside my next level nonprofit coaching program are growing organizations. They are growth stage organizations. They are nearing a million and they are sort of crossing the threshold from one type of organization into a different type of organization. And that is a tricky place to be. It can feel uncomfortable because so much of what you have built and done, what has worked in the past to get you where you are, is going to stop working. And that almost always means that the team that was exactly right when you hired them and was exactly what you needed when your organization was smaller, some of those people are not going to be the right people for where you're going. And if you're hitting a wall, it may be time to ask, do we have the right people in the right roles for our next stage of growth? Holding on to outdated roles, skill gaps, misaligned leadership, people who are really awesome humans, but not necessarily the right fit for the organization. It's going to stall your organization and eventually lead to burnout because the actual work that does need to be held and owned isn't. More people are doing things that they're not supposed to be doing right, that they aren't supposed to own or entire roles, entire areas of work are being left undone. And honestly, a lot of times that means the executive director is going to pick up the slack. The hard but necessary move is to assess where your team is today, get clear on what's needed for the future, and make the shifts. Whether it's restructuring roles or upskilling or bringing in new leadership or new people so that you can move in the direction of your goals and your vision. Growth simply won't happen without the right roles in place, without the right team. Okay, fourth pattern, overextended operations. And the fix here is to simplify, streamline, and stabilize. This is all about the unsexy stuff, folks. This comes a lot when organizations have grown quickly. New programs, maybe funding to expand their staff, bigger, bolder goals. But the internal infrastructuring capacity hasn't kept up. And as a result, everything feels just a little stretched too thin. If your systems and your staffing and your operations, if the bones of your organization can't sustain what you're doing, you either need to fix the gap or pull back. One of the things that I always talk about my coaching program, or I wouldn't say always. It comes up pretty frequently, though, is that growth is not a constant sort of uphill movement. Right? If you look at a picture of growth, it's not just a line going up to the right, that it goes up and to the right and then it flattens, and then it goes up into the right and then it flattens. That you have to take time for pause, for reflection, for assessing where you are now, what growth stage are you in now? What has changed, what has gotten broken, what has evolved that you didn't expect? If you don't do that, if you don't bring your systems and the internal infrastructure along with you, and sometimes that means flattening for a minute, then you are essentially building, and I use this metaphor pretty often, like a Jenga tower, right? You're adding blocks to the tower, but it's just getting wobblier and wobblier. So instead of pushing harder and faster every year, year over year, growth year over year, you want to pause, assess what's working, and tighten up your infrastructure as you go before you add more growth. Right? Sustainable growth happens when you have a strong foundation, strong bones, not when you get to the point where you feel like you're constantly playing catch up. Okay, so this is the fifth one, fifth pattern that I see that often under is Sort of at the root of organizations feeling stagnant or feeling like they're hitting some kind of wall. Too many priorities. I saved the best one for last. Trying to do too many things. And the answer here is you have to cut something. And I say this with gravity in my voice because I am someone who is loathe to cut or pause on anything that I am excited about or want to do. But the reality is, if you have too many priorities, you will not succeed at any of them. Not every opportunity is the right opportunity for now. Doesn't mean it's a bad opportunity, it doesn't mean it's a bad priority. It doesn't mean it's a bad goal. But you cannot do all things all the time at once. New programs, new funding sources, new partnerships. These things might seem like growth, but as you grow, more and more things are going to pull you away from your core mission and stretch your team too thin. And you're going to look around and you're going to ask why you've been in the same place for two or three years in a row, unintentionally, right? Not one of the intentional pauses. You've wanted to grow your budget. You've wanted to have more impact. And you're not, and you don't know why. And the hard truth is that it may be time to let go of certain programs, initiatives, areas of focus that aren't actually fueling the impact you want to have. Pruning can feel like a loss in the short term, I know that. But it isn't in the long run, which is what we're all aiming for. We are playing a long game. We want short, intermediate and long term outcomes. But ultimately your mission is a long game. And in the long run, pruning and being laser focused on the right priorities at the right time will give you and your team the focus and the bandwidth you need to scale what actually matters. So those are the five sort of patterns that I see over and over. This sort of rock and hard place scenario where we're not really loving where we are, but we need to make some changes. And just to recap the changes, the shifts that I see organizations do the hard work to make are clarifying their message and talking to the right people, making sure they have a true cost budget for what it really takes to grow, hiring for where they're going, not where they've been, simplifying streamlining and stabilizing their operations and making sure that they are pruning along the way so that they are laser focused on the right priorities. I hope this overview has perhaps given you some, I don't know, some food for thought for your own organization. And I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. 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@brookerichybabbage.com podcast. See you next week.