June 6, 2011

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By Samuel J. Fanburg

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is inviting public comment on issues and frequently asked questions regarding Form 990. Issues for comment include a consideration to eliminate a section asking to report activity codes, reporting compensation to management companies and leasing companies owned by an organization’s leadership, and thresholds for reporting compensation to key employees.

The revised Form 990 was extensively redesigned in 2008 to “promote tax compliance and increase transparency,” and once again is coming under public comment as in 2009 and 2010 to make the form “easier to understand and complete.”

Things change and stay the same and change again, and so on. Looking back on things that have changed and stayed the same since she started working in volunteer management, Susan J. Ellis recently reflected on management of volunteers.

Ellis noted that several concerns going back to her earliest days remain concerns, and dealing with them successfully can be a help to nonprofit operations. Those concerns are:

* Overcoming barriers of control, confidentiality and risk management, most of which are based more on fear and prejudice than on fact.

* Lack of executive support, despite lip service to the value of volunteers, shown by inadequate resourcing, low status of the leader of volunteer involvement and non-engagement by top managers in assessing the role and impact of volunteers, thus cheating the organization of a wide range of talents and making it hard to recruit the best volunteers.

* Limited vision about how powerful volunteer involvement can be, leading to limits on what volunteers are asked to do.

* Rare understanding that there is a correlation between how to work with the volunteers who serve on nonprofit boards of directors and best practices in partnering with direct-service volunteers.

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The need to share knowledge is a common challenge for organizations, and there’s no simple way to solve it. What do you need to share and with whom? Are they inside your organization or out? Each nonprofit’s needs are different, but the following options can help:

Blogs or Wikis. Ask staff members with knowledge in a particular area to manage a wiki or blog to share information and resources with the rest of the staff.

Virtual group collaboration tools. Collaboration tools can help bring geographically-separated people together. Working teams or interest groups could hold meetings via a conference call, online chat or online meeting tools.

Intranets and shared document spaces. Consider providing areas where teams or experts can upload resources for others to use. These areas might take the form of an organizational intranet or shared document spaces in a group collaboration tool.

Create and distribute FAQs. The most obvious, and often very effective, way to address this goal would be to itemize the most common questions, answer them in a document, and then distribute the document to staff.

Consolidated status emails or documents. At a basic level, it can be helpful to ask key staff members to provide periodic status reports that include the key metrics and information you’ve defined. These reports could be weekly, monthly or quarterly, and might take the form of an email or a document saved to a central location.

Online dashboards. If you automatically create an online version of the summary sheet described above, it’s called a dashboard. Dashboards typically pull information from a number of different sources and provide an overview via charts, tables and indicators.

Start by diagnosing your actual issues and identifying practical goals. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but with a little investigation, you’ll find one that works for you.

Management...
5 factors of using influence well

It might be lonely at the top, but those below the senior management level often feel as though they are talking to themselves, time and time again.

In an article “Using Influence to Get Things Done,” which appears in the Spring 2011 issue of the Booz and Company publication “Strategy + Business,” Perry Buffett, a senior associate with Booz and Company wrote there are five factors that executives have been able to employ to use influence well.

* Build up your courage to raise difficult problems. People don’t want to jeopardize their careers, but people can lead from within if they are willing to identify problems they have found.

* Leave your personal agenda at the door. Personal success is a by-product of serving the organization well.

* Rise above the game, but don’t ignore it. Executives who have developed influential competence are expert advocates who enlist the support of their bosses.

* Engage the group using emotional intelligence. Be humble and fact-driven and prove the potential costs of the current situation. Actively solicit the thoughts of the group and listen respectfully to them.