Mapping out NGO Workflows

Think about something that is strategic for your organization, like writing a grant or preparing the end of the year mailing list. These are multi-person workflows.

1. The group worked alone together on listing strategic goals for the organization which might involve multiple people. Each of these was written on its own sticky note (as is The Way).
2. They get together with another person to talk through and compare, expand - it should be clear to anyone else reading it.
3. Consolidate the ones that overlap through group organizing.
4. Vote on the ones you're most interested in. These are the ones the group will focus on adding the more detailed steps into.

Image of example workflows

Examples of workflows

Website management, web development and management, weekly forward stance, hosting a lab, weekly check-run, union member grievance process, employee deprovisioning, hiring people, new hire orientation, establishing a CRM for membership orgs, getting people over the "fear" factor of new tech, running a legal clinic, creating an outreach plan, membership database, creating a program centered budget, jail/direct action support, making an annual plan or project plan, event management, planing an event, project management, membership drives, create institutional memory, server migration, sharing passwords for core systems, prepare funding pipeline, writing a blog post, prepare report for donors, grant reporting, publish a video news story, write case study white paper, managing online marketing campaign data, digital marketing campaign, turning people out for a community meeting, assembling a group of partners/allies/community members for a strategy session, product development, product launch, identifying gaps.

Collaborative document editing

Select your tools, write table of contents based on needs, write first draft. This involves one person.

Then lots of people do iterations, feedback, etc. Know about rules of engagement, who is in which timezones.

One person should make a unified voice across the doc once it's "done." Then there's still formatting the document.

image of this workflow

Social Media campaign

What does it mean to do a campaign? Pick sticky notes are the actual processes/nitty gritty of things, involved a lot of people. The bigger issues were the context for the flow (Funding, content creation, wrap up tasks). Red were the feedback loops about if things are on track or not. Did someone forget to approve the budget?

Noted that a lot of this thread (the teal ones) overlap a lot with the other workflows.

image of this workflow

Onboarding new employees or volunteers

Executive team decides that it's ok to hire someone, notifies HR. HR does the associated paperwork and payment structures. Ops coordinates IT and Facilities (desk space), let the new hire know about schedules meetings etc.

There isn't a feedback loop moment in this one. There isn't an evaluation of their experience. Who is doing the acculturation?

image of this workflow

What's next?

We'll be doing another session about the tools which fit with these workflows, and it might fit in nicely into a session on network/consortium coordination.