How will you carve out time to learn and reflect? Photo: US Army (Flickr/Creative Commons)

Need professional development, but don’t have a budget for travel or tuition? Here are a bunch of free or relatively affordable upcoming trainings we’ve spotted recently – ones you can join from the comfort of your own desk or couch.

Special thanks to Ben Hastil for his contributions to this roundup.

Telling your organization’s story

• Creating Compelling Member Stories as Part of Your Outreach and Recruitment Strategy: A free webinar from the National Service Inclusion Project (NSIP), Jan. 25 from 3-4pm EST.

• The Four Keys to Pitch-Perfect Messaging: Nancy Schwartz brings you this free webinar, Feb. 7 from 1-2pm EST.

• It’s Not You, It’s Your Stories: How Your Fundraising Appeals Can Tell Better Stories: Presenters from M+R will share insight in this free NTEN webinar, Feb. 8 at 2pm EST.

Show me the money

• Grantseeking basics, fundraising planning, nonprofit sustainability…find trainings in these topics and more at your nearest Foundation Center.

Social media

• Social Media for Social Good events: Heather Mansfield of DIOSA Communications and Nonprofit Tech 2.0 has lined up one-day intensive social media trainings in conjunction with the launch of her book. They aren’t free, but they do benefit local nonprofits in the host cities.

• Using Social Media to Build an Active Base of Donors: Another from NTEN. This one is Jan. 26 and costs $35 for NTEN members, $70 for nonmembers. NTEN has several upcoming webinars at this price point; peruse the whole list here.

• Social Media for Nonprofits has events coming up in seven cities.

Become a better manager

• The Management Center’s upcoming “Managing to Change the World” trainings are sold out, but you can access tons of free worksheets to strengthen your delegation skills, hiring practices, organizational culture, and more.

• Management Assistance Group offers several publications, including free-for-download workbooks such as Advancing Your Cause Through the People You Manage.
  

Last week we were very fortunate to be able to bring together our whole staff for a retreat in one of our home cities: Portland, OR.

Almost the whole team.

Before the retreat, we laid out seven goals. They included: Break out of our normal day-to-day work and recharge; challenge ourselves to think in new ways and learn new things; celebrate our successes; reflect on the past four months; look ahead at the next four; go in-depth on topics and projects that have organization-wide significance; be together and have fun!

A typical day in Portland: our site developers look at a list of upcoming projects in order to prioritize them.



On the final morning of the retreat, we got out of the office and into the fresh air. (Pictured: Mike, Craig, Josh, Minnie, and Enzo.)

We surveyed the whole staff ahead of time to get input on the agenda and goals. People from every team led sessions on everything from knowledge sharing to agile software development to volunteer recruitment and appreciation.

Amy, facilitator extraordinaire, helped us develop ground rules for the whole retreat; Josh's wiki-like brain was put to the test during a trivia game.

Other highlights included visits from Holly Ross of NTEN and Suzanne Bader of Mosaic Consulting. Thank you both for your time and wisdom – you definitely helped us with the second goal, “challenge ourselves to think in new ways and learn new things”!

During a break, Diana even found time to teach her fellow Community Moderator, Kim, to ride a bike. Talk about being together and having fun:

Go Kim go!

Now that the retreat is over, we have a ton of planning and work to do – and that includes reflection about how to make future in-person gatherings even more effective.

What does your organization do to reconnect? If you organize staff retreats, I’d love to hear…

• Is the emphasis on big visioning, nitty-gritty work and decisions, or something else?
• Does your staff facilitate it, or do you rely on others to help lead your reflection and planning?
• What other things do you take into account?

Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, a new book edited by Darian Rodriguez Heyman, features a foreword by our founder and executive director, Ami Dar. With Darian’s blessing, we are sharing that foreword below.

Want to learn more? NTEN is hosting a “Meet the Author” webinar (free for members) with Darian on May 12. It’s a chance to learn more about the Social Media for Nonprofits project, plus Darian’s new www.Nonprofits101.org website and his Advancing Social Impact blog for the Skoll Foundation.

Darian Rodriguez Heyman (left), Ami Dar (right).

Without further ado, here’s your sneak peek:

When Darian told me about this book and asked me to write a Foreword, two thoughts immediately came to mind. The first was, “Really? Another introduction to the sector? Do we really need this?” But then I saw the list of authors that Darian had assembled – many of whom I’ve known for years – and it was clear that he couldn’t have found a better group of people to write this.

The second thought was more of a wish: the wish that when I started Idealist.org in 1995 I could have had this amazing group of people whispering in my ear, and stopping me from making some of the bigger mistakes I’ve made over the years.

So in thinking about this Foreword I decided that the most useful thing I could do was share some of those mistakes with you, and then encourage you to read this book in the hope that you can avoid repeating them.

Learn more at nonprofits101.org

Here then are my Top Ten Lessons from the past fifteen years.

1. Focus. Focus! Mission creep is Enemy #1. Once you know what you want to do, do that and nothing else. Resist temptations, especially from funders who have their own agendas and who can blow you off course with a sweet-sounding grant. If the grant is not for something you want to do, the money is not worth it.

2. Build a good board, but first decide what “good” means for you. More or less engaged? More or less supportive? More or less meddlesome? The key here is that serious people who take on a task usually also want the authority to do it well. And so you need to decide: Do you want a board that does a lot but then also wants a say in how the work is done? Or do you want a board that is more hands-off, but gives you and your staff more freedom? What you should avoid at all costs is the worst of both words: a board that meddles but doesn’t help.

3. Hire good people. Skilled and smart, of course, but what I really mean is people you like. You’ll spend long days with this group, so hire kind and interesting people who make you laugh.

4. When you make a hiring mistake, and you probably will, try to fix it as soon as possible. There is one test that usually works well. Think about your entire team once in a while, and ask yourself, “if that person resigned, would I be upset or would I be relieved?” If the answer is that you’d be relieved, you should probably not wait for them to resign.

5. Learn some accounting. Money is the fuel on which your organization will run, and you should always know your numbers. Some people start nonprofit organizations as a way of avoiding what they see as the money-centeredness of the corporate world. But the truth is that money is at least as important in our sector as in any other, and you should know enough accounting to always know how your organization is doing.

6. Use free stuff; there is so much of it now. Blogs, Google Apps, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Salesforce licenses, and much much more. We run our whole organization on Google Apps, for example, which means that all our email and office software is free, and there is no reason why you should pay for it, either.

7. Build your network. And I don’t mean by “networking,” going to conferences, and exchanging business cards or Facebook connections. What I really mean is to try, wherever possible, to treat people the way you like to be treated. If you do this, over time you’ll have a real network of people who will be there when you need them most.

8. Collaborations, coalitions, alliances, mergers… Before jumping in, can you imagine a way out? Working closely with other organizations can be both good and necessary, but exactly at the point when the collaboration seems most tempting, stop for a moment and see if you can imagine a way out in case things go wrong. If you can’t, and the thought makes you queasy, it might be worth looking at the whole thing again.

9. Be careful with your time. Fight hyperbolic discounting! “Hyperbolic discounting” is a fancy term for a tendency that many of us have to make choices today that our future self would prefer not to make. For example, someone invites you to attend a conference across the country five months from now. It sounds good, and it’s easy to say “yes” at that moment, but when the day arrives and you have to take the trip, you find yourself regretting that quick “yes.” Most of us do this with all kinds of commitments, but these days, having regretted a “yes” once too often, I make a conscious effort not to commit to doing anything in the future without trying to imagine myself then.

10. Think big! Having said all this, what’s the worst thing that could happen if you fail? Think big, and go for it! Some days will be challenging and frustrating, but if you are doing what you want, they will never be boring. What more can we ask for?

Good luck!

Ami Dar

Idealist.org

–

Thanks for reading. Want a copy of the book? It’s available now on Amazon.

Recently, our nonprofit careers mastermind Amy Potthast wrote a piece called Seven Tips for Techies in a Nonprofit Job Interview for the NTEN blog. (If you’re trying to break into nonprofit work, it’s a great read even if you’re not a techie.)

When we tweeted the link yesterday, @SponsorChange tweeted back to ask if we could also offer strategies that nonprofits can use to retain “top techies and interns.”

Why yes, yes we can.

I shared the question with Amy and with Hannah Kane, who co-directs our website team. Hannah’s reply:

• Pay competitive salaries
• Provide professional development opportunities (e.g. technical conferences)
• For web developers: Consider implementing an 80/20 program where 20% of the developers’ time is spent on projects they’re personally interested in. I like Kiva’s “Innovation Iteration” model.
• Include technologists at the management level

Amy also pointed out that our web team appreciates “Donuts…massages…and strong project management including respect and willingness to listen to limitations.”

And I would add “have really good hiring practices!” to that list; you’re probably going to have a hard time retaining someone if you’re not confident that you hired the right person. Read NTEN’s Finding the Right People: Strategies for Effective IT Hiring (or their book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission…or their articles on planning…)

What about you? How do you communicate with and show appreciation for the techies who help your organization run?

Panelists from the "Free Agents" session. Photo via Beth Kanter (Flickr/Creative Commons).

Elise and I went to NTEN‘s annual conference in Washington, DC last week. It was great to meet many of you there! Here are some of the takeaways we’ve spotted thanks to the still-buzzing #11NTC Twitter stream…

Change doesn’t have to be scary

• NTC Plenary: Dan Heath, Flip the Switch (Beth Kanter, NTEN blog) offers Cliff’s Notes to the opening plenary by Switch co-author Dan Heath.
• “Switch” the Way You Ask for Action – 11NTC (Kivi Leroux Miller, NonprofitMarketingGuide.com): How can we apply lessons from Switch to our daily work to make change less scary?

Online fundraising

• Five Lessons for Digital Fundraisers from 11NTC (Claire Kerr, Nonprofity.com). Are you using data and segmenting your email messages? Are you grudgingly or eagerly working mobile phones into your communications strategy? Here are some bite-size tips about these topics and more.
• Raising Money When Your Cause Just Isn’t Sexy (Raymund Flandez, Chronicle of Philanthropy) recaps a session led by Susan Gordon from Causes.

Kudos for transparency

• Measuring Impact in Human Rights Work: A Look at WITNESS’s Dashboard (Jenni Wolfson, WITNESS.org blog). Measuring the impact of human rights work is hard. WITNESS is doing it anyway. Here’s how.

Be nice to your tech people

• Maybe I just have it easy? (Bailey Kasten, Wish You Worked Here). At the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, muses Kasten, “operations and technology have a voice.” She offers some advice to the folks in workplaces where that’s not true.

Storytelling through specific channels

• DoGooder Video Awards Announced at NTC! (Maddie Grant, SocialFish.org). Thinking of incorporating video into your organization’s communications strategy? Check out the winners of “best thrifty organization video,” “best small organization video,” and more categories.
• Using Location Based Services for Your Nonprofit (John Haydon, SocialBrite) recaps a session about how services like FourSquare can be included in your strategy to raise awareness and money.

And these are just the beginning!

• NTEN Announces Launch of New Publication for Nonprofit Leaders (and it’s free!) (Annaliese Hohling, NTEN). Holly Ross, Executive Director of NTEN, “joked” that you might want to secretly sign your boss up for this quarterly online journal.

Are you blogging about your 11NTC experience? Leave a comment below with a link!