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Does your agency act as if it’s in the 21st Century? 

Weather, travel, and disability can hamper volunteer participation in governance and service.  What does your agency do to mitigate the effects and enhance its utilization of volunteer willingness to help and their power? 

How do you use technology to ensure that the “meeting goes on” so progress towards your governance goals occurs?

Prioritize stewardship, invest in capacity, energize operating appeals

Published in Issue 4 – 2009 of the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine

View or print column as a PDF

These are daunting times for most child and family service providers. My agency, like many others, has had significant revenue reductions that may result in program or staff retrenchments.

It is too easy to allow ourselves and our agencies to be defined by these cuts, shortfalls, and the sense of resource depletion. Yet, hope and positive energy remain the lifeblood of our agencies and are critical to ultimate success.

Managing the mood, mitigating the fear, and providing a positive vision of tomorrow is essential to sustain and nurture the morale of the staff and volunteers who make mission a reality.

Strategies to Achieve Social Impact

The TCC Group announced the results of an analysis of the factors that predict sustainability for approximately 700 nonprofit organizations that were surveyed using its Core Capacity Assessment Tool (CCAT). The CCAT is an online survey taken by an organization’s senior staff and board members to assess an organization’s leadership, management, adaptive, and technical capacities, strengths, and challenges. The Sustainability Formula a new paper by TCC Group Senior Vice President and Director of Research, Peter York, highlights the factors that predict a nonprofit’s sustainability. “Sustainability is not just about fundraising,” says York, “but strong, motivational, and vision-centered leadership combined with financial adaptability, effective learning practices, and good sense.” York discusses The Sustainability Formula in his recent podcast produced by The Foundation Center. 

The Alliance’s RDS program has been in existence for more than a decade. Begun in 1998 with a planning grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the RDI program (or “Resource Development Initiative,” as it was called at the time) was organized by a volunteer committee of agency CEOs and fundraising staff plus professionals from the development field who recognized and understood the need for nonprofit child- and family-serving agencies to become more sophisticated in their fund development efforts.