For Purpose Live

Have you done your 2023 strategic planning yet? I know a lot of nonprofit leaders are overwhelmed by the strategic planning process and for good reason. As nonprofit leaders we want to make sure we are spending our time on high ROI activities and the old way of strategic planning just seems, well kind of pointless. I know you think you spend your time on things that matter, but you HAVE to be able to articulate that to stakeholders and funders, and the way you do that is through a strategic plan…or a document that says exactly what you are trying to do, why, for who, how you’re going to measure success and the exact key activities you’re going to focus on to get you there. Every year you need to state your intended goals and key activities to get you there, so at the end of the year you can prove you did what you say BUT you don’t need to be a slave to the old strategic planning process where you spend 6 months dissecting every piece of your existence, the industry landscape and developing a 20 page document. As someone who has founded a nonprofit myself and been a nonprofit consultant for years, I HATE spending months or even weeks on planning and talking just to have the plan sit on a shelf. It ends up being more of a philosophical document than a practical one. So I have reinvented the strategic planning process to one that require less talk, and is all about more action so we can make BIG impact. I call this reinvention an IMPACT ROADMAP and you can create yours in a day and be ready to kick 2023 off right

What breaks my heart is that there are people who stepped out in faith to follow a calling to serve this world and now they are overwhelmed, burnt out, questioning the sustainability of their organization, wondering if they’ve done more harm than good, and just completely confused to why they’d be given a calling to step out in faith if they weren’t going to be supported in that decision. This breaks my heart because this was me. And after going from struggling nonprofit developer to scaling my program nationwide and now consulting, I find common themes among founders, so today I want to break down the top three barriers for nonprofit founders and ways you can overcome them.

There are so many online courses out there now and if you made it through the the COVID era without developing an online course, then you may find yourself irrelevant pretty soon. Maybe not, but we all know people’s attention spans are less and we have to find fun and creative ways to get our message through. People are getting used to online learning and because of this, other ways we used to get our material across is becoming well….ineffective. Aint nobody want to read about your research….sorry but its true. Creating ecourses for your nonprofit can breath new life into the cause that you stand for, while keeping community members engaged and bought into your brand. Today I talk to you about the two platforms I have used Kajabi and Thinkific. Check out a more detailed analysis at https://www.kotulo.com/learn

There are so many online courses out there now and if you made it through the the COVID era without developing an online course, then you may find yourself irrelevant pretty soon. Maybe not, but we all know people’s attention spans are less and we have to find fun and creative ways to get our message through. People are getting used to online learning and because of this, other ways we used to get our material across is becoming well….ineffective. Aint nobody want to read about your research….sorry but its true. Creating ecourses for your nonprofit can breath new life into the cause that you stand for, while keeping community members engaged and bought into your brand. Today I talk to you about the three ways you can use ecourses to set your nonprofits ON FIRE Check out the platforms I like https://www.kotulo.com/learn Free trial of Thinkific: https://bit.ly/3QepBlX Free trial of Kajabi: https://bit.ly/3B9PJKA

Lots of nonprofits develop their own programming, because they have an idea to serve a population in a unique way and they have to come up with what that will look like. Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot of sharing that goes on because even though we are all looking to serve people, there is still ownership issues, intellectual property issues and even ego when it comes to the nonprofit world. Program developers and nonprofits should be sharing their innovative ideas but you don’t have to give it all away. You can license your program model which allows you to keep ownership, while serving potentially the whole world with your model and you can bring in a nice revenue from it. Maybe its because I’m a global thinker but I LOVE licensing and in this video want to convince you that you should also be sharing your secrets and serving more people.

If you do any type of strategic planning or program development or even you run a program, you should have KPIs. They’re so important because we all need goals - but we don't need goals just to have goals, we need goals that help us determine whether or not we are working toward accomplishing our mission. In this episode, I’m going to walk you through a free worksheet to develop meaningful KPIs so you can start measuring what matters. Get your free worksheet at: https://www.kotulo.com/metrics

I know a lot of grants ask for a theory of change and people get really overwhelmed by this…like a deer in headlights - i’ve seen it, but you don’t need to be overwhelmed. What’s super cool is you already know all this information, you just need to get it down, and once you do you’ll feel so much lighter and have more clarity. In this episode, I walk you through a quick exercise to map out your theory of change and then condense it down into a 250-word paragraph, which some grants ask for. This is good because not only can you use this to look good when applying for grants you’ll have a meaningful elevator speech to use anytime you are promoting your program. Get your free editable theory of change template at: https://www.kotulo.com/theory

As organizations grow, and start hiring team members they usually assign a whole bunch of nonrelated tasks to different people. The same person who answers customer emails may manage social media. Or the person who handles accounting writes blog posts and manages events. It happens because you don’t have enough budget to hire a dedicated staff and once you find great people you want to involve them in everything, but as your org grows and you will need to make more hires. Ideally, your staff would have expertise in their dedicated role. There comes a time when you need to pause, understand what everyone is doing, and more importantly, what they should be doing so you can be intentional about your hiring and make sure everyone is in the right seat on the bus. One tool to help you do this is a skills and interest assessment and in this episode, I walk you through exactly how to do that. Grab your free skills & interest assessment at https://www.kotulo.com/skills

Whether we like it or not, we’re going to run into problems and, as a leader of a nonprofit, we can’t ignore these problems. You may have a couple things you can think of right now where mistakes were made, or an event happened and you haven’t quite known how to address it. Today we’re going to discuss root cause analysis as a formal process you can take anytime something goes considerably wrong. This process should help you feel confident in attacking issues and making sure they dont happen again. Get your root cause analysis guide here: https://www.kotulo.com/rca Join our facebook group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kotulononprofitacademy

If you haven’t read Atomic Habits by James Clear it’s a must read - simply because we all have habits and we should understand how habits work. This book not only covers the psychology of habits and why most people have things they want to do but don't do them, but also gives you super practical action items to build positive habits and break negative ones. Nonprofits just like individuals have habits that either over time lead them to accomplishing their mission or derail efforts and in this episode I talk about how the principles in the book can be applied to your nonprofit and ultimately get you where you want to be quicker.