Understanding the Sustainability Formula
Peter York
Senior Vice President & Director
strategies to achieve social impact
Agenda
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The Organizational Effectiveness Framework
Lifecycle discussion
Study Findings
Q&A
Leadership Discussion
Adaptability Discussion
2
Defining Organizational Effectiveness:
The Four Core Capacity Model
The Four Core Capacities Model
Leadership
Capacity
Adaptive
Capacity
The ability of all organizational leaders to create & sustain the
vision, inspire, model, prioritize, make decisions, provide direction,
& innovate, all in an effort to achieve the organizational mission.
The ability of a nonprofit organization to monitor, assess, and
respond to internal and external changes.
Management
The ability of a nonprofit organization to ensure the effective and
Capacity
efficient use of organizational resources.
Technical
Capacity
The ability of a nonprofit organization to implement all of the key
organizational and programmatic functions.
4
Core Capacities
Model
5
Organizational Lifecycle
Impact
Expansion
Infrastructure
Development
Core Program
Development
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Organizational Lifecycle
• Core Program Development
• Leading, managing, learning about, adapting and resourcing
an organization’s core programs
• Infrastructure Development
• Leading, managing, learning about, adapting and resourcing
an organization’s operations and infrastructure to take the
core programs to scale
• Impact Expansion
• Leading, managing, learning about, adapting and resourcing
the efforts to create mission- and vision-centered community
change that the core programs cannot accomplish on their
own
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Lifecycle Stage Discussion
• What milestones would indicate that a school has
succeeded with respect to its core program
capacities?
• What milestones would indicate that a school has
succeeded with respect to having the infrastructure to
effectively serve more students and families?
• What milestones would indicate that a school
succeeded with respect to expanding its community
impact beyond what it can do inside the school?
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Sustainability Findings
The Challenge of Defining
Sustainability
• Financing
• Mission progress
• Effectiveness/Impact
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CCAT Dataset
• CCAT has been administered to 2000+ organizations
• Confidential, anonymous survey of all staff Leaders
and 1-3 board members
• Measures Core Capacities – Adaptive, Leadership,
Management, and Technical – and places
organizations along the lifecycle continuum
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ORGANIZATIONAL RESOURCE
SUSTAINABILITY OF CCAT
ORGANIZATIONS
Challenged
30%
Strong
28%
Satisfactory
42%
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The Sustainability Formula
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The Sustainability Ingredients:
The Sub-Capacities that Matter
Internal Leadership
Program Staffing
Applying a mission-centered,
focused, and inclusive approach to
making decisions, as well as
inspiring and motivating people to
act on them
Making staffing changes as needed to
increase and improve programs and
service delivery
Fundraising Skills
Developing resources necessary
for efficient operations, including
management of donor relations
Empowering
Promoting proactivity, learning, and a
belief in the value and ability of staff
and client
Leader Vision
Formulating a clear vision and
motivating others to pursue it
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Effective Leadership
There’s More to Leadership…
• Advancing effective communication of mission and vision to internal
and external stakeholders
• Engaging internal and external stakeholders in planning
• Taking decisive action when faced with challenges
• Making decisions anchored in cost-effectiveness
• Demanding accountability that includes demonstrated success with
those being served/targeted
Only one in four nonprofit organizations are well led…
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Leadership Accountability
Matters
Four domains of leadership accountability:
1. Financial leadership
•
•
Finance
Fundraising
2. Programmatic leadership
•
Cost-efficiency vs. cost-effectiveness
3. Operational leadership
4. Community leadership
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Adaptability
It’s About Relationships & Learning
There’s More to Adaptability…
Financial Adaptability (24%):
• Influencing leaders and stakeholders to believe in, invest in
and gather resources for the organization
• Developing long-term relationships with community leaders
and institutional grantmakers
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The Key to Leading Is Learning
The following set of organizational learning behaviors are significantly
and singly the biggest predictor of organizational leadership:
• Creating sophisticated financial, operational, programmatic and
environmental data-gathering and learning processes
• Spending time leveraging evaluation data for making meaning,
decision making and planning, storytelling, not primarily for
accountability or validation
• Infusing learning into ALL planning, anchored in program success
• Taking immediate and decisive action, particularly at a human
resource level, as indicated by evaluation findings
Only one in four nonprofit organizations are effective learners…
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Learning: What It Is & Isn’t
Learning Is Not…
• Evaluating
• Assessing
• Managing Knowledge
Learning Is…
• Making Meaning
• Explaining
• Challenging and Changing Assumptions
The Prerequisite for Leading is Learning!
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A Field Recognized Definition for
Evaluation
“The systematic collection of information about the activities,
characteristics and outcomes of program use by specific people
…through what intentional learning process?…
to reduce uncertainties, improve effectiveness and make decisions
with regard to what those programs are doing and affecting.”
Michael Quinn Patton
“Evaluation Essentials for Small Private Foundations”
Or, a method for finding out what happened, how & why…
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Effective Program Capacity
An Issue of Management
There’s More to Program
Capacity…
Only 14% of all CCAT organizations scored well on
program capacity. So, what distinguished the best
from the rest?
• Effective “program staff” recruiting, hiring and firing
practices
• Infrastructure growth to match program growth
• Continuously improving program delivery skills, tools
and practices
• Continuously improving program management tools,
processes, systems and practices
• Facilities
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Top Ten Recommendations for
Achieving Sustainability:
1.
Unpack success metrics for programs, operations and community
leadership
2. Construct cost-effectiveness measures
3. Train board on vision, mission, and success measures
4. Set resource generation goals for individual staff and board leaders
5. Engage in learning with funders/donors
6. Assess and address finances and business model
7. Carve out time for many “learning meetings” around programs,
operations, and community engagement efforts
8. Formally and intentionally gather program, operational, and
community data
9. Improve program management practices, particularly quality
assurance
10. Develop program delivery performance metrics
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Questions,
Answers & Dialogue
Break
Digging Deeper Into Leading and
Learning
Leading
Strengthening Leadership
1. Strengthen organizational learning
2. Strengthen organizational planning
3. “Unpack” cost-effectiveness to strengthen
accountability
4. Peer exchange/learning
5. Executive coaching
6. Develop staff and board leader assessment tools
and processes
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A Refined Leadership Tool
Strategic Planning Framework
Strategic
Leadership
Strategy
Management
Mission
Adapting
Resources
Strategies
Short-term
Outcomes
Vision
Long-term
Outcomes
Impact
Learning
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Guiding Questions
• What do some of the “positive deviant” school
leaders you know do that others do not?
• What resources do schools need in order to enhance
their leadership?
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Learning
The Core of the Problem:
The Nonprofit Sector’s Lack of Investor-toInvestee Outcome Synchronicity
Do Investors Hold Nike
Accountable for Improving
the Social Status of the
Wearer?
NO…and Nike is empowered to learn
because they don’t!
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Why Aren’t Nonprofits Learning
• There’s no outcome synchronicity between the
investor and investee
• Effectiveness and accountability must be viewed
through the measurement of proximate effect
• Proximate cause-and-effect is the only way!
• Learning requires understanding the cause, not the
effect
• There’s no Research & Development for
programs/initiatives
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Program Learning Behaviors that
Facilitate Sustainability & Growth
TCC found six program learning behaviors that explain why some
organizations grow at or greater than the rate of inflation, while others do
not. Specifically, organizations are significantly more likely to grow faster
if they engage in the following behaviors:
1. NOT evaluating to decide if a whole program works or has value, but
instead, learning which specific program design elements worked
and for whom.
2. Using data gathered directly from program recipients to refine and
improve programs, rather than data provided by the program
implementers.
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Learning Behaviors that Facilitate
Sustainability & Growth (cont.)
3. Engaging key leaders and staff in making meaning from client-derived
data.
4. Developing program management practices and tools that prioritize the
consistent delivery of “what works” over non-programmatic human
resource management needs.
5. Determining appropriate client outcome measures by listening to “onthe-ground,” individual, success stories, rather than population-wide
social impact stories, desired by those not living with the problem or
condition (i.e., funders).
6. Design leaders assessing the resource feasibility of program
improvements/fixes/re-designs.
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Program Learning Facilitates
Sustainable Growth
Nonprofits where
leaders engage in
learning behaviors
are 2.5 times
more likely to
grow faster than
the rate of
inflation.
(Mean Per Year, Based on Three Consecutive Years of Data)
Average Annual Growth Rate
41% of nonprofits
grow faster than
the rate of inflation
over a three year
period
Average Annual Growth Rate
7%
5%
4%
2%
Conducting All Conducting
Conducting
Conducing Conducting NO
R&D Behaviors Many R&D
Some R&D Very Few R&D R&D Behaviors
(0% of all NPs) Behaviors (5%) Behaviors
Behaviors
(25%)
(45%)
(25%)
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Strengthening Learning
Leaders Need to Conduct the Following:
• Programmatic/strategy-centered data-gathering to identify: what works;
for whom; under what conditions; and with what resources.
• Organizational and programmatic leaders analyzing program data in
order to strengthen, repair, refine and/or re-design program
elements/components/practices, in order to maximize achievable
success.
• Acting on lessons by changing program and organizational policies,
operations, procedures and processes
• Monitoring program quality/best practices
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Guiding Questions
• How do “positive deviant” school leaders engage in
program learning?
• What resources do school leaders need in order to
enhance their program learning?
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The End