10 Ways To Keep Your Nonprofit Agile As Community Needs Evolve

Nonprofits that want to achieve long-term success need to stay alert and responsive to the evolving needs of their community. Amidst changing demographics, economic conditions and social challenges, your organization must constantly evaluate and adjust its offerings—an undertaking that requires a highly agile organizational mindset.

To help you do this, 10 members of Forbes Nonprofit Council discuss how nonprofits can remain adaptable in their programs and services. With these strategies, your organization can successfully meet evolving community needs and continue to make a meaningful impact.

1. Establish Open Communication Channels With The Community

One critical thing that nonprofits can do is to create communication channels that enable the community you serve to provide regular insights to your team. It’s important to hear what’s working, what’s not, what keeps them up at night and what new challenges they are facing so that you are adapting in real-time to their needs. We build feedback loops into everything we do, including “rate and review” opportunities online, a help desk and ongoing emails that invite input, as well as our dedicated research arm that conducts focus groups and online surveys. Asking for and acting on that input—and communicating what you heard and how you are responding—creates more practical and effective solutions, strengthens your relationship with the community you serve and elevates your impact. – Kyle Zimmer, First Book

2. Eliminate Any Roadblocks To Program Delivery

There are two important keys to agility: Alignment and simplicity. Managers and directors need to ensure that their programs, products and services are aligned to their stakeholders’ needs and wants. In addition to proper alignment, leaders need to ensure all roadblocks that affect the delivery of the programs, products and services to the stakeholders are eliminated. These roadblocks are often the result of gradual complexity that creeps into an organization as it evolves. The more mature the organization is, the greater the complexity usually. – Alan Thomas, Association for Materials Protection & Performance

3. Partner With Other Community Organizations

Actively seeking feedback, keeping an open mind and truly listening to stakeholders, which includes the target audience, are paramount to evolving and adapting programs and services. In health care especially, the industry evolves quickly, and individuals’ health care needs evolve with it. It’s important to continually seek input on how the community is accessing your services to identify gaps in programs. The information gained should be used in an effort to address those items within your organization—and potentially as a joint effort with partners who can work together to better fill those gaps. Building strong partnerships and expanding your network with other community organizations is crucial to amplifying access and leveraging additional resources to adapt to changing needs. – Tiara Green, Accessia Health

4. Seek To Discover New Insights From The Field

A nonprofit that provides direct services needs to think of itself not only as a “deliverer” of research-vetted programs but also as a “discoverer” of new insights from the field. Service-based nonprofits sit at the nexus of expertise and innovation, and they must institutionalize frequent opportunities to receive, review and act on feedback. At our organization, we hold weekly informal spaces for students and volunteers to share feedback and administer a formal pulse survey every six weeks. Because we are always in front of people, we get to leverage a practitioner’s lens to constantly observe for impact, iterate to incorporate real-time information and roll those data points up into insights that help us prioritize our community’s stated needs ahead of any pre-existing programmatic design. – Irene Shih, Minds Matter Bay Area (MMBay)

5. Allocate Resources For New Approaches And Evolving Challenges

Fostering a culture of innovation within the organization is crucial. Encouraging staff to experiment with new approaches, allocating resources for pilot programs and creating cross-functional teams to tackle evolving challenges keeps nonprofits dynamic. Avoiding change for the sake of change, as innovation must be bound by the organization’s mission and purpose and reinforced by measures of improved time-to-delivery, constituent satisfaction and/or resource utilization. – Steven Rhines, Noble Research Institute

6. Ensure Your Board Represents Your Constituents

Stay in touch with stakeholders’ needs by ensuring that your board represents the diversity of your constituents. When board members bring their community insights into strategic discussions about programs and services, they ensure that resources are allocated where they can provide the greatest impact without drifting into micromanagement. – Laura MacDonald, Benefactor Group

7. Approach Everything With An ‘Innovation Mindset’

Nonprofits would be well served to embrace the same proactive attitude toward change as tech leaders do. Cultivate innovation as an essential catalyst to drive internal change and as a key strategy for responding to communities’ and donors’ needs. In other words, treat innovation as a basic survival and service skill. Approaching everything you do, from donor engagement and solicitations to strategic planning, with an “innovation mindset” will ensure you remain relevant and successful in your community and among donors. Doing this will remove the phrase “because that’s how we’ve always done it” from your organization’s vocabulary. – Karen Cochran, Philanthropy Innovators

8. Be Honest About The Need For Unrestricted Funding

Nonprofits should always be honest with donors about the critical importance of unrestricted funding. Funds that allow organizations to retain or seek new talent, upgrade technology, pursue innovation and engage with their community to define needs and solutions are imperative to longevity and success. Nonprofits need to be unapologetic about sharing that need with funders who might prefer to restrict their dollars to specific programs or projects but who ultimately want to see the organization sustain itself and continue to serve. – Kristin Salkil, Black Women’s Health Imperative

9. Use Technology To Improve The Volunteer And Community Experience

The most important thing my nonprofit has done to ensure we are agile and adaptive in our service delivery is to secure new technology to provide multiple ways for volunteers, youth and families to work with us. I added a volunteer journey CRM to ensure volunteers have a positive experience while completing enrollment, online form software for digital signatures and application completions and new fundraising software that directly integrates into our donor database to ensure I am leveraging my donors and sponsors. New technology added within the last year are all fully integrated into our database for better tracking. This has increased the yield rate by 25% for volunteer enrollment and boosted retention in the past 12 months. – Erin Davison, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwest Louisiana

10. Leverage The ‘Power Of The Personal’

It is important to bring the “power of the personal” into organizations to ensure that the work we are engaged in is tied to our mission and that communities’ lived experiences are driving the work. In a society that oftentimes can become “us and them,” it is increasingly important to work inside of the community in partnership to listen to their needs and remain ready to serve. At the heart of any nonprofit’s work is the desire to connect deeply to people to understand their lived experiences and ensure we are supporting their vision for their community. – Libbie Sonnier, Louisiana Policy Institute for Children

Source:  Forbes