Category Archives: Further Resources

Further Reading on Communications for Nonprofits

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Here are some useful links to help you get started on nonprofit communications:

Further Detail on Capability Maturity Models (CMM)

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Okay, I know you think I’ve completely lost my mind for talking about Capability Maturity Models (CMM) and nonprofit governance in the same sentence.  (And there I go doing it again.)  As I explained in Growth through Governance (p. 269), software engineers will very likely think I’ve lost my marbles for talking about CMM in 2016 at all.  You’re not going to apply for or achieve CMM certification, so let’s forget that and move on.  But I devote a lengthy essay in Growth through Governance to CMM because CMM provides a framework for a useful way of thinking about nonprofit capacity.  As I explained in the case of the two organizations with identical bottom-line (tactical) results but with very different capacity (p. 272), the idea of capability maturity helps us see vital information about nonprofits that budget statements can’t provide.  And, I submit that a capability-maturity way of thinking offers major advantages over the blundering charade of currently prevailing capacity and efficiency “metrics.”

In Growth through Governance, Chapter 10, I explain how I believe a CMM framework of thinking can inform fresh, relevant ideas about nonprofit capacity and efficiency that would offer a breath of fresh air in a sector too often dominated by bogus numbers such as “overhead” (see p. 277).  I think the explanation in my book probably suffices for managers and fiduciaries wishing to think about their organizations through a CMM lens.  This blog post is for readers who wish to have more in-depth information about CMM as it is currently used in industry.

First of all, I was mistaken in the book about the date of CMM’s appearance: this Carnegie-Mellon University report on CMM version 1.1 by Paulk, Curtis, Chrissis and Weber is dated February 1993.  What I got right was the date of their publication in book form, 1995.  In any case, CMM became popular in the mid-1990s and, in my opinion, sort of jumped the shark in the mid-2000s, as I explained in Growth through Governance (p. 269, see footnotes).  Essentially, the introduction of CMM Integration led to the proliferation of new CMM adaptations for particular process areas.  That enabled publishers to sell books, but — to my mind — unfortunately obscured the clarity and universality the original model had going for it, to the point where we found ourselves talking about how to build airplanes well, or how to build software well, or how to deal with people well, or how to do a confusing myriad of other things well, instead of how to do processes well in general.  It seems to me that a paradigm worth learning ought to last a while, so I really just base my thoughts on the version published in 1995 and cited in my bibliography.

In a way, the drawbacks of CMM help us understand the intention and value of CMM.  By showing where CMM falls short of its vision, the parody Capability Immaturity Model (CIMM), in addition to being hilarious and instantly recognizable by most of us, helps us see both the vision and the difficulty of achieving it.  CIMM, in fact, was introduced in a humorous but serious academic paper by an author who worked in the U.S. military.  In some ways, inasmuch as it is instantly recognizable, CIMM actually helps put in focus the topic we’re trying to talk about, that of doing processes well.

Greater depth on CMM is provided by Select Business Solutions as well as the Wikipedia article.  Finally, Karl Wiegers of Process Impact presents a concise, spot-on paper addressing common misconceptions about CMM; although it has a software focus, the misconceptions Wiegers addresses seem much more broadly applicable, and he introduces his paper with a brief, readable introduction to the five CMM levels.  (You may need to know that KPA is an acronym for Key Process Area.  For the purposes of Growth through Governance, never mind that; it’s too specific.  Application to nonprofits is more to be found in the general worldview of CMM than in the lower-level particulars of how it has been implemented and assessed in software companies.)

A Couple Sample Procedures

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So I’m actually the guy who mostly maintains the website and sends out the blast e-mails for my longtime teacher, Rabbi Natan Margalit over at Organic Torah.  Organic Torah, Inc., is a small nonprofit organization centering around Rabbi Natan’s teachings, including his “organic torah” (click over there to read more) as well as courses he teaches each year on rabbinic text with a focus on the “organic” structure of Mishnah.  It’s a typical startup nonprofit situation.  As I progressed toward my own rabbinic ordination, and especially during my year of study in Israel, it became necessary for people other than me to maintain the website and send out blast e-mails.  So, I developed a couple of procedures — as I explain in the Documentation essay within Chapter 10 of Growth through Governance — to help someone unfamiliar with the process carry out the periodic tasks on the website that need doing.

Click here to view two of the procedures I made for Organic Torah.  The idea of procedures is to use quite a lot of detail, but to use plain English and explain any jargon terms.  A procedure should be useful to a reasonably intelligent person who has no prior experience with your organization or the software products it uses, beyond basic ability to use office software.  In this case, my procedures were designed to be useful to Natan in case he needed to do his own website updates, but also to a brand-new volunteer who may not have seen our website in depth before and may not be familiar with Natan’s specific teachings.

What do you think, are these procedures useful, or is anything unclear?  If you desired to volunteer for Organic Torah, do you think you’d be able to complete a blog post or a change to a widget just by reading these procedures?  The point of organizational knowledge is for you, me, or anyone to be able to pick up a procedure (that’s explicit knowledge) and do the task, and learn by doing through iteration to become good at the process (that is, to create tacit knowledge in our heads).

Further Reading on Agile/Scrum

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I’ve curated these links on Scrum because the Web is now chock full of consultants and explanations — most of which are pretty good, but most of which are really directed toward software developers and aren’t going to be very helpful to readers of Growth through Governance.  The following are some good places to start.

I very seldom have time for videos, but I really liked the Scrum Alliance’s very brief, helpful video.  I appreciate the Scrum Alliance’s perspective — which I share — that “Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but it works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless.”  If they’re right, then you and I are on the right track.  I’d start here to get further information about Scrum.  The video does, however, unabashedly use scrum terminology without explaining it, so the video will make more sense after you’ve read my explanations of the terms on pages 241-247 of Chapter 9 of Growth through Governance.

Some of the information out there is very software-directed, so if you do your own search, don’t be intimidated away from trying Scrum because of that, but just know that it’s an emerging discipline that has not yet been systematically applied beyond its origins in engineering.  The Wikipedia article provides quite a lot of helpful detail, but it is pretty software-focused, so you might have to use your imagination when reading it.  Scrum.org offers nice graphics and friendly explanations — friendly, that is, if you’re a software person.  They’ve made it accessible at a level that makes sense for their intended audience (see Chapter 11 of Growth through Governance on that topic).  Again, if you venture over there, you might need to use your imagination a little bit more.  You’ll also need their principle of “courage,” appearing on their “Scrum Values” poster, which, by the way, I love.

As a new field, the scrum community’s rough edges haven’t been polished off yet, so the quality out there varies.  For example, ScrumMethodology.org starts right in with a nonsense polemic about the alleged “failure of the dominant software development project management paradigms.”  As a general rule, certainly with application here but also with application far beyond here, stay away from people who talk like that, especially if they don’t explain just what it was that failed.  No, honey, the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) — which is the subject of Chapter 8 of Growth through Governance — has not collapsed in failure.

Rather, as I explain throughout Chapter 9 of Growth through Governance, PMBOK-style project management and scrum-style practices are complementary, each offering advantages the other lacks.  What I call project management (Chapter 8) came first, by just a few years, and certainly presented certain deficiencies that were addressed by what I call productivity management (Chapter 9), including Scrum.  But it isn’t a contest which one is better.  I recommend nonprofit leaders learn both sets of practices enough to decide when their organizations need to borrow specific practices from either or both of these disciplines.

Mathematical Derivations of the Three-Point Estimate

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I’ve explained the mathematical derivations in brief within my Project Management Spreadsheet workbook; click here to go directly to the explanation page.  You may copy the file and use it yourself; please respect the open-source license (you may not sell it, and the attribution must be kept intact).

While I’ve been happy with the 1996 edition, the latest edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge and pertinent professional training opportunities can be found here, at the Project Management Institute (PMI) website.  In-depth mathematical derivations can be found there.

My best effort to explain in intuitive, non-mathematical terms why three-point estimates work appears on pp. 214-215 of Growth through Governance, during the discussion of the concept of variance.

For those who wish a little more depth on these derivations than what appears in my book, but who don’t want to read mathematical equations, here goes.  A project consists of many subtasks, which all share a couple important core statistical characteristics, even though they may differ broadly in their particulars.  Every subtask has a shape describing the likelihood of results in time or cost, with a hump or point in the middle, where the likelihood is highest, and a lower likelihood out at the tail ends of the best and worst cases.  In between those outlying cases, the likelihood generally gets higher as you proceed toward the middle, and lower as you proceed toward the outlying edges.  These shapes are called probability distributions.

Of course, there will be tasks whose probability distributions don’t actually fit this basic shape: they might be bimodal (having two most-likely peaks).  An everyday example is how long it takes me to get to work on the bus.  If the bus comes every 20 minutes, and the bus ride is 10 minutes, and I’ve looked at the bus schedule so I can try to be at the bus stop 3 minutes before the bus, you’ll see at least two peaks in the probability distribution of how long it takes me to get to work: one peak at 13 minutes, and then another smaller peak at 33 minutes, in case I miss that first bus.  The probability distribution will reach a low at 23 minutes, between the peaks, corresponding to a time when the bus is not scheduled to come.  Regardless of this and other cases where the single-peak distribution doesn’t quite fit, the single-peak shape turns out to be a pretty good model, and deviations from it in practice tend to average out.

So, project managers have found through experience that it’s a best practice to simplify the probability distribution of subtasks down to a “most likely” estimate at that peak of likelihood, as well as a low-likelihood estimate for “best case” and “worst case.”  We then draw a model of the subtask’s probability distribution as a triangle between those three points, or as a bell curve with a hump in the middle and low-likelihood tail ends at the best- and worst-case estimates.  The exact shape of the distribution doesn’t matter a whole lot, certainly not for the purposes of the relatively small projects Growth through Governance is mainly intended for; again, little discrepancies tend to average out.  (By “small” projects, I mean that you’re more likely to be planning a community event than building 100 airplanes.)

Note that this method, while mathematical, is imprecise.  It’s imprecise in a mathematical way.  The underlying math gives us a pretty good sense of just how imprecise it is, and it’s a good sight less imprecise than traditional one-point estimates.  I’ve found three-point estimates to be a powerful tool, an admittedly heavy tool, but one that has consistently worked for me for over 15 years.

Jewish Teachings on Workplace Ethics

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First of all, as I said in my book, everyone should read Rabbi Hillel Gamoran’s concise, friendly and content-packed book Talmud for Everyday Living, Book 1: Employer-Employee Relations.  While you’re at it, also pick up Rabbi Gamoran’s Talmud for Everyday Living, Book 2: Insights into Buying and Selling.  Rabbi Gamoran makes the original sources so approachable that I recommend his book as a gateway for serious Jewish managers into a strong traditional foundation for workplace ethics.

For a briefer, encyclopedic overview, Rabbi Jill Jacobs at My Jewish Learning offers a high-quality, friendly and scholarly introduction.

Emma Goldberg at Shma Now writes specifically about the issue of maternity leave in Jewish organizations.  She offers an insight so important that I want to quote her here.  Jewish managers and fiduciaries would do well to memorize her words:

It’s all too easy for organizations furthering important causes to forget that their work begins at home, in their interactions with employees. Jewish schools and non-profits can grow so caught up in their big-picture mission statements that they forget how much of an impact they can have even within their own workplaces.

Goldberg helps us see the essential connection between our mission and our workplace practices.  No silver trumpets sound for the ethics of the many managers — way too many — who are better to work with than for.  Judaism, at least, requires us to do better than that.  A Jewish workplace must not forget Goldberg’s call to mission consciousness at home.  For those who need a bean-counter reason to be ethical, I think Goldberg correctly diagnoses mistreatment of workers as creep away from mission consciousness, and ultimately an organization that gets away from its own mission is not going to succeed.  For a somewhat more hard-nosed look at this issue, see my comments on the Level 2 vs. Level 1 organization in Chapter 10, page 272 of Growth through Governance.

Finally, Jewish workplaces must not discriminate, so, especially to the extent we incorporate Jewish text, culture, or even optional ritual into the workday, we are required to be vigilant not to maintain the highest respect for those whose religions are not ours.  I recommend this fine article by Joan Reisman-Brill at TheHumanist.com for an atheist perspective on this boundary.  As a former two-term member of the Seattle Human Rights Commission, I take situations like this very seriously.  It is the employer’s responsibility — through sensitivity, clear communication, and training — to make sure they do not occur.  The situation does not jump out at me as actually discriminatory, though it could be.  I agree with Reisman-Brill’s advice to the questioner as to next steps.  Regardless of that particular case, Reisman-Brill gives us a good brief silhouette of issues we need to be aware of as ethical and law-abiding employers.

People Give More, and they Give More Often, When They’re Asked to Give by Someone They Know and Trust

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Grassroots fundraising is the discipline of raising funds through myriad small donations, generated by social networks.  My grassroots fundraising motto is: people give more, and they give more often, when they’re asked to give by someone they know and trust.  That’s why grassroots fundraising works.  And ti definitely works.  Grassroots fundraising has two origins: in online “-a-thon” fundraisers early in the 2000s, in which athletic participants sign up to raise significant amounts of money from their friends and family, and in Democratic Party politics circa 2004, with the founding of ActBlue.com by Matt DeBergalis and Benjamin Rahn (who teaches us about technology management in Chapter 11 of Growth through Governance) and the rise of Howard Dean and his grassroots-centered political methods.

The idea of grassroots fundraising is not new.  It is not different from what happens when board members buy a gala table and ask their friends to buy a seat.  That’s grassroots fundraising right there, because the friends would not have attended the gala had they not been asked to give by someone they know and trust.  Those friends went to the gala not because the organization was otherwise high on their personal list, nor because they travel the metropolitan area looking for every opportunity to sample prime rib, but primarily because they were asked to give by someone they know and trust.  In turn, those peripheral donors might become primary donors as they find out about the organization.  Or they might not.  They might be back next year to sit at their friend’s table, or they might just be one-time supporters.  But the sum total of all the money from all these friends’ donations accrues to the organization, and that’s why organizations do galas that way.  So the idea of grassroots fundraising is not new.  It’s just that in the 21st century, technology has progressed to the point where we can do grassroots fundraising at much greater scale much more efficiently, involving a wider range of dollar amounts (which results in a giving pyramid whose center of mass is in two-digit gifts), and not necessarily even having to bother with the prime rib.  But for those new to Internet grassroots fundraising, it’s important to remember it’s just a new application of the same old underlying principle we all know and use all the time.

I was right there for the birth of grassroots fundraising in politics.  As the Director of Technology at the Washington State Democratic Party, my whole job was to turn data into votes and into funds for our candidates.  I went on to serve as CEO of ActBlue’s software company for the 2008 election, its first year at current scale.  Several months ago, ActBlue surpassed one billion dollars raised, by allowing individuals to create their own fundraising pages and support the candidates of their choice.

Now, never mind the politics and the candidates; we’re learning about a fundraising methodology.  However, one of the most fascinating things about ActBlue is that Republicans never managed to duplicate its success.  They tried every year, and while I haven’t looked recently, for several biennial political cycles there, Republican earnings from grassroots fundraising was consistently paltry.  I recall Slatecard.com, a long-defunct Republican version of ActBlue, raised $300,000 the year we raised $85,000,000.  I say this not to make a political statement but to point out a fascinating question I don’t know the answer to.  Since 2008 I’ve been trying to get the attention of a political-science academic to study this question.  Grassroots fundraising is very new and very successful, and I suspect that academic inquiry to the highly differential results of the two major parties will teach us a lot about how marketing works in this new field, and may help us increase the effectiveness of grassroots fundraising by learning how to appeal to folks who apparently sat out those political seasons.  This is an emerging field, and I’d like to know why we saw such differential results.

In any case, from Dean to Obama to Sanders, politicians have raised unprecedented amounts of money through grassroots fundraising.  All the while, those athletic “-a-thons” were getting bigger and bigger.  I participated in the Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic with Team in Training in 2005 (my second of three years in the Classic), where I signed up to raise what was to me a huge amount of money for a medical cause which, while a good cause, I had no personal connection to.  I don’t think either I or my friends would have given 1% of the funds I raised that year to leukemia research had it not been for the bike ride.  So I can attest from two different fields of work that grassroots fundraising works.

From my perspective, these two fields — athletic “-a-thons” and political grassroots fundraising — merged into one overarching professional discipline around 2005-2006.  As web technology improved, it became possible to present very professional and appealing “thermometers” (which are now almost a cliché but were and are essential to creating buzz), to offer donors small incentives, and to raise money for causes around the world by bringing donors into virtual contact with the people they were helping.  As a result, grassroots fundraising grew beyond its fields of origin as general nonprofit fundraisers began to borrow what had worked best from those first “-a-thon” and political experiences.

Today, grassroots fundraising is a very big business.  In Democratic politics, it is now probably the single most important determining factor in national contests — in concert with which, ActBlue has for almost a decade been the nation’s largest source of political funds.  (Would Bernie Sanders have had any impact at all without these practices and the technology that makes them possible?)  In 501(c)(3) fundraising, at this point, if you’re not into grassroots fundraising you’re clearly missing out.  Grassroots fundraising is inexpensive, although there is a learning curve.  There’s no longer any question that people give more, and they give more often, when they’re asked to give by someone they know and trust.  If your organization isn’t yet tapping into the grassroots, it’s time.

  • My 2008 video (and audio podcast) “Welcome to Internet Community Fundraising” is quite as relevant today as it was back then, when I was just starting a software company to bring ActBlue’s best practices to the nonprofit sector.  (That venture didn’t work out, by the way, I think in retrospect because I wanted to be a rabbi, but I still think to this day there are grassroots fundraising best practices from politics that current nonprofit vendors aren’t using, and I’d welcome a chance to consult for any new startup venture that wants to explore this.)  The video’s purpose is to introduce a specific technology that is not currently available, but its introduction to the general concepts of grassroots fundraising is still as relevant as ever.
  • My former company’s “Idea Book” is going to be helpful.  Again, its goal was to sell a product that isn’t currently available, but it’s 6 pages full of best practices, many of which your organization could start doing tomorrow.
  • I like FirstGiving.com’s Resource Library.  I also prefer FirstGiving’s approach to the governance structure behind grassroots fundraising — that might be too obscure a topic for this blog post, but if people are interested maybe I’ll make another post about that.
  • Speaking of ethics, in 2011 I was twice invited to speak at the National Association of State Charity Officers – National Association of Attorneys General on the topic of regulating grassroots fundraising in the 501(c)(3) sector “beyond the Charleston Principles.”  If you’re an ethics buff, ask me to talk about that when you have me over to speak.  You could hear a pin drop in that room when, during my first presentation, one of the state deputy attorneys general asked me, “Why shouldn’t we just ban this practice?”  Here is the outline of my first presentation, and the slides for my follow-up appearance six months later, where I co-presented with Bob Carlson of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office.
  • Unlike most listicles, which are little more than link farms, these “17 Fundraising Ideas to Raise More Money” from GiveForward.com are solid.

Contemporary Thinking on Synagogue Dues Policies

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So now that we’re off the book and onto the Internet, I’ll go ahead and tip my personal hand: I think Rabbis Olitzky & Olitzky are right in their book New Membership & Financial Alternatives for the American Synagogue: that is to say, I think we should move away from dues and toward donations.  Check out this article about Olitzky & Olitzky’s book.  Dues are donations, anyway.  Pretending they’re somehow required is behind the times.  Guilt doesn’t work anymore: our younger liberal Jews just walk away into the open arms of secular life, of other religions that make them feel better about giving money, or into the very open arms of charismatic ultra-Orthodox movements.  Dues have always been donations.  Let’s just get on with raising donations.

Rabbi Michael Knopf, writing in Haaretz, offers a different perspective.  He agrees that our prevailing dues structure needs an update, but, describing his own synagogue’s process of reconsidering dues, he explains why they broadened the scope of their self-critique rather than making a tactical change in policy.  And Hannah Dreyfus over at The Jewish Week explains why some New York synagogues are deciding to stick with mandatory flat-rate dues.  (Some of those numbers in the article, though, heavens to Betsy.)  Also offering a “yes, but” to reimagined dues is Nina Badzin at Kveller, who writes that “Expensive Dues Aren’t the Only Thing Keeping People Away from Synagogues.”

Rabbi Mark Greenspan at The Rabbinical Assembly offers a perspective very different from my own, although I agree with many of the points he makes along the way.  Rabbi Greenspan argues enthusiastically and eloquently for conceptualizing dues as “a tax” placed on all members, which he compares to the half-shekel of silver every Israelite contributed to the Tabernacle (Exodus 38:26-27).  Rabbi Greenspan’s work is certainly an eloquent endorsement of the “taxation” idea.  But in addition to not being objectively a very good example of what most fundraising professionals would consider to be best practices, Rabbi Greenspan misses the important point that the half-shekel is not a huge amount of money.  As Rabbi Eliezer Posner explains, it amounts to about five dollars in today’s currency.  The half-shekel is therefore not a suitable source text for Rabbi Greenspan’s endorsement of the “taxation” model.  (I don’t know that I’d even oppose assessing every member a $5 flat fee.  That might be a positively good idea.)

Among the many who are reimagining dues without removing them, the Reconstructionist Movement offers a helpful white paper summarizing several creative alternatives, while Houston’s Congregation Beth Israel offers a thorough explanation of “Fair Share” dues.

Finally, I think Synagogue Strategies Group asks exactly the right question about synagogue dues: “Can’t It Be More Personal?”  Yes, it can!  And yes, it has to be.

Further Resources on Nonprofit Revenue

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There are so many fundraising resources available that it’s hard to know where to begin.  Quality varies.  For every wise, generous mentor out there sharing advice, there’s a huckster and a link farm (one of those annoying websites with no actual content, which makes money from ad revenue by getting you to keep clicking).  Here are a few suggestions, and please let me know if you have a favorite resource to add to this list for others to see.

 

Policies on the Handling of Funds

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Interestingly, my online search of policies on the handling of funds turned up a large number of colleges and universities.  Perhaps the higher-education sector has encouraged schools to adopt and publish these policies.  If you’re looking for ideas on money-handling policies, here’s some reading to get you started.  Some of these are going to be overly bureaucratic for a lot of readers (case in point, your organization may not have a “business office”) but they’re still good reading if you need to get started.  How can your organization implement these best practices in a way that is appropriate for your situation?  Remember, as always: what you really need is advice from a professional who can tailor their advice to your organization’s specific situation and needs.

  • Northwestern University and The Evergreen State College, among many others, have publicized their policies on the handling of funds.
  • In Wilkes County, North Carolina, an incoming athletic director initiated a review of the school district’s cash-handling policies.  I was impressed by the thoroughness and integrity of Chris Skabo’s initiative, especially because it didn’t seem from the article that anything untoward had happened (though of course I don’t know).  The effort sounds laudable to me in any event, but all the more so if it happened not to follow a theft-of-funds incident.  I say kudos to leaders like Skabo who value clarity, transparency and precaution even before a bad incident happens.
  • The Evangelical Christian Credit Union offers a helpful guide to funds handling tailored specifically to ministers and houses of worship.
  • The court system of the State of Delaware has publicized its own policy on funds handling, for quite a different perspective on the same best practices.
  • Ciel Cantoria at Bright Hub has a fine article on the concepts and best practices underlying funds handling.

I know there are many other high-quality resources out there, including many from the Jewish community specifically.  If you’d like to share your organization’s policy on the handling of funds, please let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to add it!

Resources on Surveys and Focus Groups

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When it comes to focus groups and surveys, I thought the Wikipedia articles were excellent.  They should probably be your first read to get up to speed on these research methods.  As with most of the terminology in Growth through Governance, there are many good online resources freely available, but when it comes to surveys and focus groups, search results tend to be littered with a lot of ads from automated survey software products and consultants who want you to hire them to do focus groups.  Those may be fine choices, but if you want to get started, I suggest starting with Wikipedia on focus groups and surveys.  For a lot of additional detail, Wikipedia’s article on survey methodology is thorough and accessible, while including links to additional reading that delve into the mathematics of ensuring sound results.

One key issue to consider is the value of quantitative vs. qualitative data.  I address that question at some length in Chapter 10, and apply data science to communication and organizational strategy in Chapter 11 of Growth through Governance.  Focus groups offer qualitative data, while surveys offer mainly quantitative data that can sometimes be of a qualitative nature.  I do caution against the temptation to use greater quantitative precision than the situation justifies.  Surveys give us a lot of numbers, but we can’t afford to forget to consider the reliability of those numbers.  Suppose you ask people to rate something on a scale of 1 to 7.  In statistics, there is no such result as 4.  But there is such a result as 4±1, and these is such a result as 4±0.1 — and those two results are not the same at all.  If your sample size (number of people participating) is too small to justify the use of precise numbers, then you might really be better off collecting qualitative data.  Personally, I think we sometimes get too enamored of numbers and tend to forget the elastic, simple, honest value of qualitative data.  Just something to think about.  At the very least, I think every organization should be collecting data that consists of ABCs as well as 123s.

Do turn to chapters 10 and 11 for more on this topic.

Resources on Active Listening

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Of the many free online resources available on Active Listening, I enjoyed John Grohol’s helpful, readable article, which touches on the several aspects of this essential modern-day skill in a point-by-point format.  The U.S. State Department also has a fine, brief summary; I liked the State Department’s emphasis on the use of silence — which, in contrast to Grohol, does not always need to be a comfortable silence.  Sometimes a slightly uncomfortable silence is the best way to encourage a person to say more.  Finally, the University of Colorado Boulder returns with a useful article including many links for further reading.

I recommend a study of Active Listening to every professional who deals with people.  Active Listening is an essential skill set for therapists, teachers, diplomats and police, but even if your job doesn’t center around listening, Active Listening skills come up constantly in all of our professional and personal lives.

Integrative Negotiation: Positions and Interests

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The first resource on integrative negotiation, positions and interests should be William Ury, Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton’s classic Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In.  A close second would be Ury’s sequel Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations.  I strongly recommend these two books to the professional library of every negotiator.

Free online explanations of interests and positions are plentiful and can be found with a search.  Among the better articles I came across are these by Cinnie Noble, the University of Colorado Boulder, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Watershed Associates; I liked the latter’s many helpful charts.  Note the ubiquity of the orange story (and the lack of citation of it — if only I knew who originated it!).

Common Open-Membership Committees

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There is a wealth of resources available online for common open-membership committee definitions.  Here are just a few that I found and thought were helpful.  If you have a favorite online resource, please share it in the comments!  I’ll gladly add it to this post.  As with all external resources, use these as food for thought — generating options and ideas to make sure you haven’t overlooked anything important, but not copying them verbatim.

Finally, specific to synagogues, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism offers a very good, very broad list of common synagogue committees, each with a link to a detailed description.

Resources for Sample Bylaws

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The Web is full of links to sample nonprofit bylaws.  You always want to check with a lawyer because bylaws are not one-size-fits-all.  I recommend considering these links not as a “nonprofit in a box,” but rather as food for thought about your own bylaws.

It’s useful even for established organizations to look at samples periodically: have you forgotten something?  Alternatively, do any of these samples strike you as too restrictive for situations where you’d prefer to be more open?

Also, remember that specific requirements or structures may vary by state, so don’t just copy template bylaws from another state.  Get legal advice to understand your particular obligations; beyond that, these decisions are your organization’s to make.

Did you find a good resource online that you’d like to share?  Let me know in the comments, and I’ll gladly add it to the list here.  With the exception of BoardSource, all the resources on the list below are free for viewing or download.

Advice & Ideas

Samples & Checklists