Hi. I’m Haila Yates, the new Marketing and Outreach Manager for Greenlights. I bring with me a five-year history of professional communications experience from two Austin nonprofits: Helping the Aging, Needy and Disabled, Inc. (formerly Services for the Elderly, Inc.) and Girl Scouts of Central Texas. I’d like to tell you about my introduction to Greenlights through the application and interview process because I think making quality hiring decisions is one of the first steps to doing great work.

The process was clear, intentional and collaborative, and highly focused on ensuring that I would be a good fit in the Greenlights’ culture.

I found the job posting in a tweet from @kerri_qunell (thanks Kerri!), which took me to the TANO job board and eventually led me to Greenlights’ website. The job description was very clear and, beyond position requirements and expectations, it included an application deadline, which informed me of when I could expect to hear back regarding an interview.

After submitting a resume, cover letter and three writing samples, I was contacted to schedule my first interview – a phone interview. A couple days before the interview, I was sent an introductory survey to further identify my strengths related to the position, my preferred work environment, and to ensure I would be comfortable with the salary and benefits being offered. The phone interview took only 30 minutes and focused on how I saw myself as a good candidate and a good fit at Greenlights. I followed up with an informal thank-you email.

Following the third interview, I was contacted to schedule a second interview in which I would meet with the management team. A couple days before the in-person interview I was asked to complete a behavior analysis using the DISC assessment. In case you’re wondering, I’m an S with high levels of C and I; very low D.

In the third interview, I met with Matt Kouri, Tara Kirkland and Kim Wilson to further discuss my approach to specific challenges, my communication and behavior styles, and what I expected to get out of the job. I also shared my portfolio, which put the interview at an hour and a half. I followed up this interview with a more formal thank-you email that elaborated on concerns I picked up on in the interview, and further emphasized my sincere interest in the position and passion for Greenlights’ mission.

Following the second interview, my references were contacted and I was invited back for a third interview with the entire staff. Admittedly, I was thrown off by the prospect of a third interview and intimidated at the thought of being questioned by the entire staff (which I believe was around seven at the time). The team interview also told me that collaboration was truly valued at Greenlights, which was something I was looking for. This final interview didn’t require follow-up, as I was offered the position the same day.

Though the process felt intense at times, it also felt much like a courting. We took time to get to know each other before making an investment that would help further our success mutually.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I wanted this job, it was the Greenlights mission, vision, values and beautifully outlined 2008-2010 strategic plan that really hooked me. If you’re looking for a job, I recommend reading tips on improving your application pieces first in “7 Reasons Why Your Application Went to the No Pile.”

Nonprofit folks have long claimed to be underpaid compared to their contemporaries in the for-profit and government sectors. Anecdotal evidence has seemed to support this claim, and some relatively loose salary survey data we’ve seen has been somewhat supportive of this claim but also largely inconclusive on the whole. And we’ve found that the reality certainly depends on the organization, as many nonprofits are able to offer relatively competitive salary and benefit packages.

And, many of us who work in nonprofit do it for more than just the money – we get “paid” both in dollars and in the “emotional and spirit-feeding” income we receive from knowing that the fruits of our labor each day are helping people in need, enriching our community, and providing a valuable public service.

Some new data (thank you Jan Masaoka and Blue Avocado!), though, might give you the fodder you need for that next conversation with your board/boss about a bigger salary, and the data might even be useful for your next grant application too. Check it out at: http://www.blueavocado.org/node/460.

Greenlights held its annual Crossroads Conference for Nonprofit Excellence about a month ago, and I had the honor of choosing the background music while folks were milling around the exhibition hall. One of the first songs that came to mind was “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang. You know what I’m talking about. But in case you don’t, check out this video to refresh your memory:

I love this video. There must be 12 or 15 people on stage, all celebrating and having a good time together. Why this song? For me, Crossroads was a way of celebrating our success. I met countless current and former clients of Greenlights and heard touching stories of how we’d impacted their organizations. The conference created a venue for the nonprofit community in Central Texas to come together and celebrate its success as a sector, and that was a pretty special thing.

Celebrations don’t have to be big, though. You could… Start your team meetings with highlights of your work. Take time to celebrate the completion of a major project. Take time to celebrate during your projects. Heck, take time to celebrate the beginning of a major project! Resources are scarce for many of us, and as a result, small victories aren’t so small anymore.

How does your organization celebrate its success? Personally, I value the importance of taking time for yourself as a way of celebrating. In that spirit, I’m off to celebrate at Big Bend for a few days.

Happy trails!
Taylor

In order to be a nonprofit consultant, you have to be quick with metaphors and truisms. Whether you’re meeting with a client, facilitating a staff retreat, or presenting to a board, it’s handy to use a metaphor, quote, or familiar saying to make a point or better convey information for easy consumption. I’ve used the ones about the straw and the camel’s back, the trees blocking the view of the forest, and the bird in the bush.

As a nonprofit consultant, you also learn the truth in some of those expressions through experience. The one that hurts sometimes is “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” That’s the one that I console myself with when we’ve made some insightful observations and recommendations to an organization that decides to not use them for one reason or another.

That’s why I sometimes describe my job as a nonprofit consultant as a water filtration system. A much less folksy metaphor, sure. I think of my role as making sure that the water looks as enticing and inviting as possible, make it hard to resist. That means spending extra time on presentation, conversation, and explanation as I work with an organization so that they have all the information they need to not just take a sip but to dive in.

Being a nonprofit leader by definition means you will have to make difficult decisions – and even more so in a down economy. We make decisions about who gets served and who doesn’t. Decisions about how much (or how little!) your staff will be paid next year. Decisions about which programs grow and which need to shrink. Even decisions regarding difficult staffing changes.

Despite having a surprisingly strong year so far from a financial and impact perspective here at Greenlights, we have nonetheless had to make our fair share of difficult decisions this year, some related to the economy but most just in an effort to continue to excel and to be good stewards of the community’s resources. As we’ve navigated these waters, we’ve found that having adequate, accurate data to inform those decisions has been one of the keys to our success.

This year more than ever, knowing your numbers (be they financial, program performance, or others) in an intimate way is required for solid decision-making. We recently completed an incredibly enlightening exercise here in which we meticulously allocated all of our costs (salaries, benefits, rent, supplies, etc.) across each of our activity and program areas (consulting services, workshops, conferences, fundraising, marketing, admin, etc.). The exercise gave us a very good idea of what share of organizational resources all of our activities are using. We then allocated all  of our income (grants, fees, donations, etc.) across these same categories, which gave us new insight into what things we do are truly “covered”, and which things we do are “subsidized” by other programs or unrestricted revenue. This exercise is enabling us to make much smarter decisions about how to budget for 2010, where to invest, where to pull back, etc. To learn more about this and similar financial analysis techniques, please sign up to attend a workshop I am leading on October 29^th called Financial Management in Difficult Times.

We’ve been in something of a hiring frenzy here at Greenlights over the past few months.  When the dust settles, and the printer cartridge gets replaced, we’ll have reviewed almost 300 application packages to bring 3 new, fantastic hires on board.

Having reviewed almost all of those nearly 300 candidate info packets (and I’ve got the eye strain to prove it), I’ve seen a tremendous number of “who is this again?” and quite a few “what were you thinking?!?” applications in the mix.

Perhaps effectively applying for a job in the nonprofit sector is a lost art?  I don’t know, but I was struck by how many folks neglected to do the basics, like:

1. Use your cover letter to sell your self
2. Connect your skills, experiences and passion back to the job description
3. Structure your resumé so it clearly shows off how your work and volunteer experiences match what the organization is looking for

Turns out I’m not the only one bothered and bewildered by the lack of effective candidate presentation in the job applicant pool these days. 

After a recent hiring process, my colleague Amy Price, Grants Manager at Bat Conservation International, decided that rather than quietly kvetch with her co-workers, she’d actually offer those candidates some feedback, in the hopes they’d find more success in the future.

She shared her letter to candidates with me, and I found it so powerful I’m excerpting her seven main observations in full:

1. “When I send a grant application (you want a job, I want funding…so there is a lot to learn here) I try to address any obvious challenges/obstacles in my cover letter.  If I’m sending a request for funds for a project called “Bats of Mexico” to a nonprofit in Missouri—I suspect their first thought is, “Not our area—move along.”  My opening line will address this—because I know there’s a gap. 

 Dear Foundation Director,

I know that an application called “Bats of Mexico” will, at a glance, seem like a reach for your trustees to consider—as the bulk of your funding is spent on projects that improve the lives of residents of Missouri—but the bats of Missouri (critical to pest management for regional farmers and nurserymen and a vital part of many of Missouri’s diverse ecosystems) winter in Mexico.  Without urgently needed conservation efforts on the other end of YOUR BATS’ migratory corridor—there may come a day when many bats fail to return to Missouri to provide their unique services.  The pest management that bats offer reduces the use of toxic chemicals on the landscape, chemicals that seep down into the water systems enjoyed for recreation, consumption and tourism dollars.”

See what I’ve done?  I’ve anticipated the question, “Why?” and answered it as fast as possible.  When I read some of the cover letters and resumes that came to me it caused me to ask “Why?” quite often.  If someone has decided to leave teaching (based on a resume with a lot of fantastic teaching credentials) I wondered why?  If someone has put the time and investment into securing a Ph.D. level education in a field—and they applied to work in my seemingly non-related office, I wondered why?  What link do they see that I don’t?  Telling me (or any reader) the answer to the obvious contradiction can make a WORLD of difference.

2.  Typos.  I make them.  We all do.  Still, do you want them in a cover letter and (worse) in a resume you send to a lot of readers?  Emails are always a risk because I may not have spell check in place.  This being said, many of the typos were GLARING and made me wonder, careless or poor speller?  I set aside a larger stack of “possible interviews” to share with my colleagues for input—and more than one person marked typos.  As simple as this seems—it can really cost an applicant in a job market like this one where there are so many candidates.

 3.  Layout.  I know we don’t all have the best computers (I work in a nonprofit office—my computer is older than some of you!) and the different places we send materials will open them on their computers—so you should print out your materials and see how they look.  I had resumes that didn’t print properly—the margins were so wide that everything was thrown off and I had to really struggle to find things.  Same with unique fonts.  If I don’t have that font, my computer goes with something basic that may not look so nice.  With more than 80 sets of material to review, I found myself spending the most time and attention on those that looked the neatest.  This has nothing to do with the cost of what you sent—I printed everything on plain white paper.  Still, the tidiest materials were my favorites.

4.  Using a cover letter or resume template.  Hmmmnnn.  Well, I suppose it can be a great way to start getting accustomed to sending materials, but at some point you might want to trust yourself to send something from the heart.  I hope “objectives” are clear in your letter, so telling me you want to bring your skills to my workplace seems like canned language.  Take a chance and tell me what you really want. 

 5.  Previous employment.  2 of my top 5 had virtually none.  There’s value in education, employment and any combination of these.  BUT IF YOU ARE GOING TO TELL ME YOU WORKED SOMEWHERE, GIVE ME A START AND END month and year.  I don’t need dates—but if you just put 2008 I wonder if you were there for such a short time you don’t want to put it in writing.  A short stay can always be overcome with an explanation in an interview, but you may not get an interview if it looks like you are trying to blur lines on a resume.  We are all human and have interesting paths that bring us places, and I think the absence of a few dates is more of a negative than a positive.

6.  Email addresses.  This was something new for me to consider—people who used an email address that was a little “personal” for a business letter.  You have every right to use what suits you—but think about what total strangers (and possible employers) might think about an application from someone who uses an email like lovetheboys@aol or kissyface@aol or yummybooty@aol–think about it.  Workplaces have to be careful to maintain professional and appropriate behaviors to avoid anyone’s discomfort—or a lawsuit.  I have to wonder just how much “workplace etiquette training” will be needed for someone who asked me to contact them at an email address that looks like it belongs to a preteen or a porn star.  I think anyone can register for a free, professional email account at yahoo or other service provider.

 7.  The extra mile.  The job posting only asked for a cover letter and resume—but there were a handful of applicants who sent a letter of reference as well.  Two even sent a second letter, with more personal information, during the gap when I was out of office.  This created some internal conflict for me—I was impressed in spite of myself but didn’t want to do anything that might not give full credit to those applicants that followed the exact instructions.  After thinking for 24 hours, I decided that the candidates that did something EXTRA that I liked (the transcripts did seem a bit much…) were people who REALLY wanted to catch my attention and that’s what I want in a colleague.  So this is something to know—if everyone posting jobs is getting as many great candidates as I did—this might be the time to go the extra mile and send something more.  Two of my five interviews had done so.  It might not have mattered for one of them, but for the second it was so earnest that it got someone from the big stack to the short stack and in the door.”

What do you think of Amy’s 7 observations?  Do you have any other tips, words of wisdom, or horror stories from the land of hiring, or job searching?

It’s October.  For those of us whose fiscal year follows the calendar, it’s planning and budgeting time.  I was preparing for a Development Committee meeting, on the agenda of which was to start strategizing our priorities for 2010.  As I thought about how to frame the conversation with this group of dedicated volunteers, but volunteers nonetheless who are not actively involved in our development efforts day-to-day, so as to get useful feedback from them, I decided to start at the beginning – i.e. the goals and strategies we had laid out for 2009, and to update them on how we were doing.  This required me to actually go back to the plan and see how we were doing relative to it.

This is not to say that I haven’t been working toward goals all year long.  I’ve been quite cognizant on an almost weekly basis of how we are doing relative to our financial goals, as well as project-specific targets throughout the year, but this was the first time I’d gone back to our overarching development plan and checked in on the extent to which we had incorporated the strategies we’d laid out, gotten our board engaged as initially forecast, and so on.

This was an eye-opening exercise in and of itself, and speaks to why it’s important to take time to step back from the day-to-day grind of getting things done, and take time to evaluate whether everything is going according to plan, and if not, whether anything should change… either what we are prioritizing day-to-day or the plan itself.

And the committee members provided some very insightful feedback as well, including:

1. It’s all about being realistic.  We can set a ton of goals around cultivation of a certain donor segment, public visibility, engaging our Board members…. But if we lack staff capacity where it is needed, these goals will not be met;
2. Areas where it makes the most sense to focus our fundraising efforts next year; and
3. Ways to further engage our Board and other volunteers.

The process of preparing for this meeting, and the committee’s input, clarified for me the tweaks we should make to our plans for 2010, and left me feeling more prepared than ever for our budgeting process.

We have a Board / Senior Staff Retreat this Friday evening.  A secondary goal for me of today’s meeting was that this core group of board members would be aligned on, and have thoughtful input to give about, Development priorities for 2010 at the retreat.  I feel like it might have, and am very interested to see what transpires on Friday.

If you have read this far…, what do I hope you have gotten out of this blog?

1. Some motivation to take time to periodically evaluate of your plan throughout the year;
2. Maybe a fresh idea or two about how to effectively engage your board / committee members in planning efforts; and
3. Increased energy around the idea of starting your planning efforts for 2010.

I’m a big fan of GOOD. Figuratively and literally–I’m a “fan” on their Facebook page. It has good information, good writing, and good graphics. All of which keep my attention.

On Facebook today, they posted a link to “The GOOD 100,” which they describe as “100 (or so) ways to get inspired.” I dutifully clicked through to the article and found myself inspired. I didn’t find 100 things, but I enjoyed what I read and got some new ideas.

What good ideas have you seen in Central Texas nonprofits that could inspire others?

500 Nonprofit professionals, board members and funders

16 parts innovative educational sessions

12 Nonprofit Excellent Award Finalists

4 Nonprofit Excellent Award Winners

1 Nonprofit Excellent Awards Luncheon

23 Crossroads session presenters

1 Jan Masaoka, Conference keynote speaker

1 part all day Exhibitor Hall

1 part all day free consulting

1 part all Resource Swap

1 part Austin Convention Center

Add passion and enjoy, learn, connect, and share.

For more information about the 8^th Annual Greenlights Crossroads Conference, click here.

Less than 3 weeks to go until Conference Day!  There will be many exciting educational sessions to choose from -  one of which is entitled “It All Adds Up: Maximizing Volunteer Engagement”, led by Meg Moore and the RGK Center’s Sarah Jane Rehnborg. 

Here’s the inside scoop from Dr. Rehnborg on what the session is all about:

Perhaps one of more highly touted, but under-utilized competitive advantages of the nonprofit sector are its volunteers.  In fact, a recent study commissioned by Deloitte Consulting found that fully 57% of nonprofits say they do not have the infrastructure in place to support an influx of volunteers.  But all volunteers are not necessarily equal.  This doesn’t mean that they don’t all deserve to be treated well, or that all volunteers aren¹t valuable, but it does suggest that there are a range of ways to engage volunteers in the work of your organization.  Just as there are a range of ways to engage volunteers, there are also options when it comes to infrastructure and program design. 

Utilizing the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service’s newly published Strategic Volunteer Engagement Guide, the session presents The Volunteer Involvement Framework and examines management considerations germane to various options available for community engagement.  The Strategic Volunteer Engagement Guide is the product of a multi-year research project that engaged executive directors in an analysis of their concerns about volunteer engagement. 

Participants in this session will have the opportunity to share concerns and ideas and will come away with a number of suggestions for more effectively incorporating volunteers into mission-critical tasks aligned with available staffing support.

We hope you’ll join us to learn more about maximizing volunteer engagement and much more on September 24^th!