Nonprofit operations

Nonprofit operations

• Operations is a vast bucket

• Number 1 mistake - placing the kitchen sink under an Operations role

• Operations needs a seat at the cross-departmental decision-making table - it is the foundation of the organisation and requires a "bigger picture" lens

• Visibility is key - others need to understand what Ops is and what it does. Ops knowledge needs to be socialised - show people how everything is connected.

• Importance of humility - to navigate the beadth of the ecosystem - acceptance you will not know everything - ecosystem of peers hugely valuable

• Issue of "tech envy" - focus on tool rather than problem. Change and problem-solving requires stakeholder mapping - waht is each person going to extract and put in? Identify redundancies.

• "Managing up" is often a big part of it

• Documentation management:

• Simple docs summarising and linking to necessary policies/finding aids

• Bookstack tool for documentation management

• BambooHR or other similar platforms for documentation

• Ops problem-solving key elements:

• Change Management

• Communication

• Adoption

• Updates and changes to systems:

• How is feedback collected?

• When is feedback analysed?

• How is change decided/actioned?

• Managing the breadth of Ops:

• Outsourcing

• Relationship with leadership

• Delegation (across the organisation - get others involved, don't do everything yourself even if tempting)

• TechSoup resource

• Operationalising values:

• map values against day to day tasks, processes, goals

• Values workshop idea - every couple of months -

• "when have you felt cognitive dissonance between values and practice?"

• "how was 1 value shown up in my work this week/month?" either resonance OR (importantly) dissonance)

• looking at HR topics e.g. salary transparency

• Importance of back-ups! Test frequently to ensure working. Always keep your own back-ups.

• Facilitative leadership a key practice.

• Resource: superlabs blog - walking the talk (superrr.net)

What questions do we have around operations? What brings us here?

• I’m at a nonprofit where I’m at a senior org level, meaning being more in communication with ops and HR. Not an ops person but I get into these convos more often, want to be more aware of how it works.
• I come from a technical perspective. Brought into ops team, my first instinct was let’s automate it, clearly not always the solution. I wonder what the best methods are to make things more efficient.
• How can we make our internal practices reflect our mission and values. How do our operations practices perpetuate what we’re fighting in our programs?
• We have all kinds of systems and we’re negotiating the tension between security and convenience.
• Tiny new nonprofit. As I make a new gear stack, everything needs money. Here for recommendations for systems.
• Org is six years old, went from 2 founders to 6 members. I am operations, I’m the bottleneck, I hate it and don’t know how to fix it.
• I push us to use open source and this can be challenging (security/ethics vs convenience)
• Int’l digital rights org, here to learn more

What’s coming up?

• Capacity
• What tools to use

Operations has many nodes (finance, HR, IT, etc - All the unsexy work in one bucket). Balancing the tension between putting all of these in one position vs. capacity to staff. Let’s talk what to outsource, what to keep in-house, how to delegate, and how that impacts the org culture and how operations is seen. Finance is the area where integration is most challenging with the other systems in the org. See a lot of orgs try to fit this into CRM, dev-ops, etc. Key questions to ask: How important is this particular thing to integrate? Potential recommendations:

• Contact relationship management (CRMs)
  • CiviCRM
  • Spark
• Documentation management systems
  • Bookstack – divided into shelves, books, chapters, pages
  • Making a finding aid and index for folks to look at – one document to refer to them all
  • BambooHR
  • HelpScout
  • MKDocs

Steps to follow:

• Make sure everyone who needs to be in the room is present from the start. Make sure ops is included early in the conversation.
• Take a holistic approach to problem-solving. And also be aware of project goals so there’s no scope creep.
• Having documentation is key.
• Change management
• Communication
• Adoption – takes a year, standard
• Test backups and automation on a regular basis to make sure they’re working and that backups can be restored

Important operations skills

• How to research solutions to new topics
• Build a network of people to call on
• Know when you’ve hit your own limits

Other resources

• Aspiration used to have a list of nonprofit software (is that still there?)
• Tech Impact – analysis reports
• iecology.org
• superrr.net
• cloud68.co

Operationalizing mission and values

• With clients: here are your values, how does this show up in the ops work you do?
• Internal communications – practicing transparency and how culture manifests in values
• Explicit periodic feedback about times when we’ve been asked to do work that’s inconsistent with our mission and values
  • Flip: what have I done in the past few weeks that’s consistent with our mission and values?

Lesson learned from new finance system

• We implemented a new finance system, which was fine
• We trusted the system, did an update, then lost all of our data