With the first blooms of spring comes our annual opportunity for renewal. Time to clear out the old and make way for new growth!
In this solo episode, I’ll share my best tips for spring cleaning every aspect of your NPO – from refreshing stale programs to pruning unengaged contacts.
Get ready to plant the seeds now for a fruitful year ahead!
Here’s what we’ll cover:
✅ Breathing life and inspiration into your impact data with impactful storytelling
✅ Pruning and cleaning your email, communications, and database
✅ Cultivating supporters with strategic messaging
✅ Planting the seeds for efficient systems, processes & database moving forward
✅ Sprinkling your day with tasks that energize you and removing the ones that zap your energy.
And because we lead best when we lean into self-care, I’ll also share my recipe for a quarterly mental vacation to blossom into the healthiest version of you!
Whether you need serious weeding or just some strategic fertilizing, let this episode seed a sustainable way forward. Now get growing by tuning in! 🌱🎧
Important Links:
https://go.rheawong.com/big-ask-gifts-program
Episode Transcript
RHEA
Hey you, it’s Rhea Wong. If you’re listening to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m pretty sure that you’d love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning, you get updates on the newest podcast episodes, and then interspersed, we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only, and fun raising inspo, because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone.
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Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, podcast fans, it’s Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today is another solo episode, which I’m digging, but I love the combos too. I am sitting here. It is February, but spring is around the corner. I can just feel it in the air. So I thought it would be fun to do an episode about how to spring clean your nonprofit.
This comes to a special request from Harry Kennedy. So Harry. This one’s for you. So I got some tips for you. And for those of you who are magic school bus fans, three is the magic number. So there are three topics I want to cover today. One, how to spring clean your nonprofit, especially when we have funders who are always looking for the new and looking for scale.
Two, how to spring clean your fundraising and three, how to spring clean your own mind. So let’s get into it. The first, how to spring clean your nonprofit organization. Now, I think the challenge that a lot of us face is that we are constantly thinking that we have to give. Our funders something new. This is particularly true of foundation funders who may want to see growth, they wanna see scale, and so that puts pressure on us to constantly grow.
There’s this idea that we either grow or we die. I just wanna challenge this a little bit because I do think that even though you may be running the same program year after year, and there may or may not be growth in it, there are. Evolutions that you’re seeing. So what I want to challenge you to do as you’re thinking about refreshing or spring cleaning your program, a couple of things here.
The first thing I want to recommend that you do is take some time and think about what are three things that have gone really well, so three proof points, three impact numbers, three things that are really. impactful that you can wrap a story around. Then I want you to think about three things that you learned this year.
The reason why your success stories and lessons learned are really impactful is it, it creates a really nice narrative to be able to present to funders about why you’re not doing the same thing over and over again. So even though you may be delivering the same program. Chances are you’re not delivering it in exactly the same way.
What funders really want to see is change in growth and learning. Even though you may be impacting the same number of people overall, chances are, you’re probably not doing it in exactly the same way, based on things that you’ve learned. And then the third thing I want you to think about is. Are there goals for this year?
Maybe there are three goals. I love it. Three, but what are the goals for this year? And how can you tie the goals for the year back to the story of what went well and what you’ve learned. And then finally, as far as your program. Spring clean, take the time to think through some really good success stories.
I’m going to choose three, three success stories that you can really build stories around to present, because at the end of the day, when people fund you, what they’re really funding is outcome. They really want the story. That they tell themselves about the hero in their mind. That loop needs to be closed.
And the loop is closed when you share a story of transformation, when you share a story of the impact of your work and how their resources made that possible. Actually, it just gave you four ways to spring clean your program. Let’s talk about your fundraising. Spring is a great time to spring clean your email list.
Now, if y’all haven’t done that in a while, this is a perfect opportunity to do this. Why? Number one, assuming that you’re sending out regular communications to your audience, there’s some number of people on your list that don’t open your emails. that probably shouldn’t be on your list. Maybe you don’t know how they ended up on your list.
So, I’m gonna tip my hat here to my friend Jess Campbell, who’s a big fan of spring cleaning your list. Take this opportunity to purge the list. You can send out an email, and if you have any kind of email program, platform, like MailChimp, you can see who’s actually opened your emails. If you do a search for, say, I don’t know, People who haven’t opened your emails in the last three months, you can send an email and basically says, Hey, haven’t seen you in a while.
Let us know if you still want to be on this email list. Click here. If they do, they’ll click. If they don’t, they just get purged because the reason they’re sitting on your email list, you’re paying for them to be on your email list, but they’re not actually in your network. They’re, they don’t want to be on your list, so they shouldn’t be on the list.
So we need to stop paying attention to the. Vanity numbers and really look at the number of people who are. opening our emails and clicking on our emails. So when you purge your list, your open stats and your click through stat should actually get much better. So that’s one way that you can spring clean for the year.
The second thing I want you to think about is spring cleaning your communications. So this is a perfect opportunity to look at your communication metrics. How many people are actually opening your emails? How much traction are you getting on your social media? This is a great time to take a step back and look at what are your best performing posts?
What is your best performing email opens? Wherever it is, identify any similarities or commonalities and double down. Do more of that. And then the third thing that I want you to do is spring clean your database. What do I mean by this? And y’all know you got some dirty data out there. No shade, but I know it’s probably true.
You are probably sitting on Messy data. What I mean by that is any number of things. Donors that have multiple entries. Donors whose gifts are not affiliated with their contact. Names that are not capitalized properly. Names that are, that don’t have uniform salutations. Addresses that are messed up.
People whose emails are bouncing. Phone numbers that are bouncing. This is the perfect opportunity to clean up your list because you want it as clean as a whistle. So a couple of things that you should be looking at, you should be looking at salutations. You should be looking at names and if they’re capitalized properly and that are merged properly in the right fields, you should be looking at addresses.
You should be looking at any email that has been bounced back to you. You should be looking at phone numbers. All of these things are really important and obviously you should also, to the extent that you are able to, verify that all the GIFT information is properly inputted. That means also, and this might be a really fun thing to do, is create naming conventions and data input conventions for the nonprofit.
So what I mean by that is at some point you’ll have folks who are inputting data. You want to make sure that data is inputted. In the same way for consistency. So spring is a great opportunity to do that. I know it’s not sexy. I know it’s not fun, but it is very necessary. And then the third thing I think you could do to spring clean your fundraising operations, take a step back and look at your operations.
Look at all of the processes that you have for each step of. the donor process. Have you written these things down? Do you have standard operating procedures? Have you mapped out a process? Because oftentimes, and I find that this happens mostly with founders, is it all just lives in your head. I used to call it the, if I get hit by a bus manual, but then I decided that was negative and I didn’t want to put that kind of energy in the world.
So I now called, called it the, when I win the lottery and move to Bali manual. It should be a manual that has all of the things that live in your head down. There are lots of platforms that you can use. Notion is one that I’ve seen used successfully. You could just use good old word and put it down in a document.
But the idea here being that as a founder, you. or any leader, you have lots of things floating around in your head about how things are done, why they’re done this way. What’s the context for it? How do we know that we’re successful? Spring is a great opportunity to start to put those things down on paper.
Because if they live in your head, They might as well not exist. And then the final thing I want to talk about with spring cleaning is your own mindset. Now as leaders, it’s tiring out there. And actually I’ll cite a Harvard study which shows that burnout is not actually related to the amount of work you have to do.
It’s actually directly correlated with how lonely you feel at work. And so as executive directors, and I know I’m talking to my executive director, people out there, it is a lonely job. It’s lonely at the top. There are often things that happen in the nonprofit that nobody else can know about. Maybe stuff you can’t talk to your board about.
Maybe it’s stuff you can’t talk to your funders about. Maybe it’s stuff that you can’t talk to your staff about. I understand. I have been there. So what I want you to do is to encourage you, and I. actually encourage you to do this as a quarterly practice is to write a couple things down. Number one, Write down three things that are energizing to you.
So these are things that you’re good at. These are things that give you energy. These are people who give you energy. Those three things down and then write down three things that drain you. These are things that you’re not particularly good at. These are things that make you feel tired. And then the, these might be people or relationships that are going nowhere.
And I want you to then take those three things. The three things are good out and on purpose, make time in your calendar to do more of that. And then the list of three things that drain your energy, either delegate. Automate or eliminate them. You do this enough times with the end of the year, you will have successfully boosted some of your energy in order to do the things that you need to do in order to give you more energy to do your work.
The last thing I’ll suggest, and I’ll tip my hat to my friend, Burke Ritchie Babbage on this one, is give yourself some time because oftentimes as an ED, even when you’re not working, I find that you’re carrying so much of the emotional and mental heft of running the organization. And as you go, so goes the organization.
So if you’re running on fumes, if you’re running on empty, if you’re feeling burnt out and uninspired, how can you expect to run your organization? So what I want to suggest to you, and this seems radical, but I think it’s a good practice, is carve some time. At the end of every quarter, one week, and it should be a week where you’re not having any meetings.
It should be a week where you are not answering emails, or in meetings, or phone calls, or meeting with your team. Have a week where you are in deep thought. And the deep thought can be anything that fills your bucket. It can be Reading, it can be writing, it could be thinking, it could be visioning, it could be planning for the next quarter.
It can be thinking about how to engage in activities that bring you more energy. But what I’m suggesting is, is you make time on purpose to refill your cup, because if you are depleted, how can you expect to run an organization? And I’ll tell you quite honestly. I’m speaking from my own experience. I made this mistake for many years.
I was running on empty and I just grounded out. I was like, I got to hustle harder. In retrospect, I see that I was not only creating trauma for myself, but I was likely creating trauma for my team because I was coming from a place of being completely depleted and burnt out. And so I was probably snappish.
I wasn’t my best self. I wasn’t coming from a place of generosity and abundance. I was coming from a place of. fear and scarcity. And so because of that, I think a lot about this concept of burning clean energy. If you burn clean energy, you’re able to go farther, you’re able to perform better. But I was burning dirty energy.
The energy I was burning was based in just feeling fear and hustle and grind. And I don’t think that that. Fed my soul and it certainly did not feed my team. And so I would say to you that if you give yourself a week at the end of every quarter, and maybe you’re saying to yourself, Rhea, I can’t do a week.
Take a couple of days, take three days where you’re off email, you’re not taking meetings, you’re not taking phone calls, and you’re just giving yourself time to think. I always think about Bill Gates. Every year, I think it’s every year gives himself a week. He calls it a think week and he goes off into the woods somewhere and he brings a bunch of books and he just thinks.
And I would say that practice of reflection and just thinking is in part, probably why he’s as successful as he is, because we need to be able to refresh our brains and refresh our spirit to think and to lead and be the leaders that we want to be in the world. So I know it’s a radical idea. But, oh my gosh, imagine how much better all of us would be if we took the time to not only refresh and replenish ourselves, but also model to the people around us that this is what it looks like to be a balanced leader, to take the time that you need to be at your best, to feed your own soul.
Let me reiterate. The first thing you can do is refresh your program. Think about the things that have gone, think about things that you’re going to do differently. Think about, A goal that you have for the year and think about three success stories that you can share. And once you can articulate that, you can share that with funders.
Because really what funders are looking for is not necessarily growth, though some of them are. Not necessarily scale, though some of them are. But what they’re really looking for is, have you learned? Are you contributing to the body of knowledge about the work that you’re doing and how to do it better?
And what they want to see is not necessarily growth in the, in terms of numbers, but growth in terms of the evolution of how to do this work better. Because as funders, essentially what they’re buying is an outcome. They’re buying some kind of impact in the world. And if you can demonstrate that you are reflective about how to deliver that impact better, that is a really compelling story.
Second thing, fundraising operations, clean up your email list, clean up your database, clean up your, your communications. Take a moment and really reflect on what is working and what’s not working. And while we’re at it, take a moment to sit down and think about your SOPs, even when, if they’re super basic.
So you should be thinking about an SOP for how do we prospect donors? How do we qualify them? How do we cultivate them? What’s involved in solicitation? How do we steward these things down? You can always iterate it, but it’s really important to just start writing them down. Also, don’t sleep on naming conventions to make sure that everyone is entering data in the right place.
way in the same way. And then finally replenish yourself. Think about things that you’re really good at. So let me go through that again. Things that you are uniquely qualified to do, things that give you energy, things that you’re really good at list of three, then the next three things, things that.
You’re not that good at, or that other people are better at. Things that drain you, relationships that are going nowhere. Then you take that list of three things that you’re really good at, put it on your calendar, make time to do those things on purpose. And the three things that really drain you, eliminate, delegate, or automate it.
Make sure that you. Stick to that for the next quarter. And then finally, radical idea, take some time to reflect, to think, to replenish, to read, to just get in touch with yourself because that is essential as a leader. I’ve done yoga for over 20 years now and every changing of the season during every season, because every season your body needs something different.
In the winter, it’s when you’re hibernating. So it’s rest and renewal, but in the springtime, that’s growth and change. And so that’s when we have to change our practices and really get in touch with the season, get in touch with the season that we’re in and to get in touch with being the leader that we all want to be.
If that was helpful to you, I would love if you would consider. Putting a review on Apple podcasts and make sure to subscribe to my newsletter for more insights on how to be a better leader. Thanks so much. See you next week.
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