Whenever I sit down to talk with a not-for-profit about technology, more often than not, I am inevitably met with the same talk-tracks:
And while all of these concerns are valid and real, I always encourage people to at least think about the technology that they might benefit from. This is a good way to start the conversation, and it can open so many doors. The right technology supports not-for-profit leaders to do their best work and achieve greater mission impact.
Through a four part blog series with Vantage Point, Keela will be providing insights on how and when to find technology that will have lasting positive impact on your organization.
So let’s start at the beginning. How do you determine whether or not your not-for-profit needs technology?
Step 1: Define your Technology Challenges
The first step is to look inward. Define the issues you’re trying to overcome with technology. And most importantly, determine whether or not you already have those resources available to you. The last thing you want to do is to purchase a tech solution when you already had the means to solve the problem at your fingertips. (I know. It’s weird to hear a tech company tell you NOT to buy tech, right? But it’s all about making sure you can increase your impact and do more, with less).
Some great questions to guide your conversations would be:
What are we trying to accomplish?
Step 2: Think About Implementation.
Once your team has come to a consensus about what your organization requires, it’s time to look at how you can implement the technology if you were to purchase it. Every organization is different and going through this stage is critical to determine which route is best for your organization. Giving space and time to talk out the implementation leads to more informed decision making, while saving time and money down the road.
Have a serious discussion about what steps you can practically take to get your team to start using the technology. Take note of any hurdles that you would likely come across when it comes to adoption. When you have a clear picture of what it would look like for your team to actually start using the technology, you have a better idea of whether or not to take the plunge and buy that technology.
Here are some great questions to guide that discussion:
Step 3: Do Your Research, but Avoid the Noise.
This is an important point, and it speaks directly to the work your organization does. When it comes to buying technology, there are tons of options out there. Each one will have pros and cons. The most expensive is not necessarily the best option. But neither is the cheapest. It all depends on how your organization will use the technology and what you’re trying to accomplish.
So it’s important to do your research, read reviews, and get suggestions from other organizations. In fact, if you skip this step, you’ll be taking a major risk. But our advice is to start with yourself.
These steps are all about your organization – about what you want to accomplish, and how your team will actually use the technology. Use these as your parameters when it comes to filtering out what technology to buy. In part 2, we delve deeper into how to find the right technology fit for your organization!
Vantage Point was featured in the Vancouver Guardian.
The Vancouver Guardian asked us about how we’re supporting non-profits across BC and our mission to strengthen BC’s non-profit sector through leadership, development, governance, organizational capacity building and more.
Join Vantage Point on September 17 in Terrace for the BC Non-Profit Network: Northwest BC Leaders Gathering. Deepen relationships, learn about what is happening in BC’s non-profit sector, participate in practical learning, and contribute to the next stages of growth for the BC Non-Profit Network (BCNN).
Vantage Point was founded as the Central Volunteer Bureau of Vancouver in 1943 to provide volunteer services throughout the city. We were initially charged with mobilizing women for the war effort and providing accommodation for children evacuated from Britain and for those whose mothers worked on the assembly line. We are proud of our heritage and our contribution to the amazing power volunteerism has in our community.
Our journey from 1943 to 2018
The year 1943 marks the beginning of the Central Volunteer Bureau of Vancouver, which became Volunteer Vancouver, and now Vantage Point. Fast forward to 2018 and we are incredibly excited, and humbled, to celebrate our 75th anniversary.
For more than 60 years, we were a volunteer centre, focused on promoting and celebrating volunteerism and connecting volunteers to Vancouver’s ever-growing not-for-profit sector. Around the year 2002, we noticed people were becoming less and less interested in filling traditional volunteer roles. They wanted to contribute their knowledge for a finite period in exchange for a meaningful experience. Not-for-profit organizations could not find enough volunteers with the more traditional skills sets they were accustomed to, while more people were seeking meaningful opportunities that engaged their knowledge and expertise.
As a result, we began to seriously question the value and relevance of continuing our traditional role as connector between volunteers and organizations. We recognized that the environment in which not-for-profits operate is quite different than 1943 – even 1993! If we were actively promoting volunteer roles that were no longer a fit for individuals looking to contribute, were we doing a disservice to volunteerism – and our mission?
Vantage Point grew out of a desire to address this changing paradigm of volunteerism. In 2009, we adopted our current name. We realigned all our programs and services under a new direction – building strong not-for-profit organizations that can effectively engage today’s abundant supply of talent, including board members, the diversity of community volunteers, staff, investors, and others. We moved away from the word “volunteer” in favour of “talent” and “knowledge philanthropist,” the latter a term coined by one of our own strategic volunteers.
We learned that not-for-profit organizations can achieve their goals – and achieve long-term sustainability – by changing the way they view people engagement. Transforming how they engage people can ultimately lead to greater impact on the communities and causes they serve.
From my own journey with Vantage Point, what stands out as most exciting piece to celebrate is this enduring aspiration to engage people (and ALL their talents!) to positively transform our communities through an effective and impactful not-for-profit sector.
Share Your Story
As someone involved in BC’s not-for-profit sector, what do you feel is worth celebrating about the last 75 years of community impact?
Whether you are a past, current, or future client of Vantage Point, knowledge philanthropist, staff member, investor, board member, partner, or community member we encourage you to share your journey, contributing to a story gathering project we are undertaking to grow our understanding of what to celebrate!
Celebrate with Vantage Point
This fall we will be celebrating our anniversary and looking forward to the next 75 years with wine, entertainment, and great conversation. Join us on September 27, 6-9pm - the evening before our annual leadership conference: BOSS 2018!
Maria Turnbull
Maria Turnbull brings over 20 years of leadership experience in staff and director roles within the not-for-profit sector, both here in Canada and in the UK. With a BA in International Relations and MBA, Maria is a skilled facilitator and consultant in board governance, organizational development,...
Vantage Point was featured in the Vancouver Guardian.
The Vancouver Guardian asked us about how we’re supporting non-profits across BC and our mission to strengthen BC’s non-profit sector through leadership, development, governance, organizational capacity building and more.
Join Vantage Point on September 17 in Terrace for the BC Non-Profit Network: Northwest BC Leaders Gathering. Deepen relationships, learn about what is happening in BC’s non-profit sector, participate in practical learning, and contribute to the next stages of growth for the BC Non-Profit Network (BCNN).
In celebration of National Indigenous History Month, Vantage Point reached out to a governance expert, Kinwa Bluesky, for her thoughts about not-for-profits and Indigenous governance.
Kinwa works as a consultant to organizations and leaders in the areas of strategic planning, organizational development, fundraising, and project management. She is also a legal researcher, policy advisor, human resource consultant, and contract manager. Kinwa is a doctoral student at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. It is an honour to have her share her thoughts with us.
Please tell me about your work within governance as it applies within organizations with a social mandate.
I am an Indigenous consultant – working with Indigenous communities, Nations and with local, provincial, and federal government. This is one way that I can be more engaged and more connected to the people. My background is in law, and I use it in terms of understanding legislation and policy, and then how these create impact. I try to work from the top-down and bottom-up -- hopefully we’ll end up creating change somewhere along the middle for everyone involved.
Everybody is committed in some way to have Indigenous peoples be more self-determining, working towards more self-governing structures & frameworks in all areas of governance. Everyone is working towards what reconciliation means and how institutions can be more proactive in trying to implement various different tools and frameworks, such as UNDRIP as well as the call to action through TRC. Most recently, I’ve been working in the province implementing Jordan’s Principle, ensuring First Nations children and youth have access to social, education, and health services when they need them.
What have been the greatest influence(s) to governance as you practice it?
The ideal is that people have self-governing bodies, so then they are able to make laws and policies based on their own self-determining desires. Because I work a lot with governments, I feel like funding impacts significantly the kinds of opportunities that can be achieved moving forward. This can sometimes be a blessing and also something that has to be reckoned with as well, as funding seemingly comes and goes. For all First Nations organizations and societies, funding is very unstable, but I’m hoping in the future we can look at various different funding models that allow our peoples to become more financially secure in being able to offer the kinds of services and programming to fully meet the needs of their communities --- as they should be met.
What are some key steps not-for-profit boards can take to implement more diverse and particularly more Indigenized representation? And what about governance approaches?
Representation is a very interesting topic. I end up going to a number of Indigenous events and conferences, and still there are high numbers of male chiefs present. Women are not fully representative in a 50/50 -- the numbers are very high in terms of male leadership, and if we look at business,the trend would likely the same. In human resources, health and social services, women appear to be more dominant within those areas of leadership, which is refreshing and nice to see. I would like to see diversity flipping so there are more Indigenous female Chiefs, CEOs, Founders and Operators, and Chairmen of Boards – because we are present, doing good work, and we are rising through the ranks.
As for Indigenizing approaches, that’s part of the work that I do in my academic research looking at how Indigenous law can become more active– not just on an individual level, but guiding the laws of our communities, our governments, organizations, societies, and programs. So that our laws are being more fully reflected in our policies and not something we think about as, “Oh right, traditionally this is what we used to do!” It’s active and present and we are all agents of legal change, fully enacting and being our Indigenous laws. I’m constantly looking for ways to do that – and we are doing it! It’s in how our relations are built, how we conduct business, how we provide services, and most recently, how we prioritize our children and youth and women. We are creating ways of change.
What is your biggest hope for your broader work in 2018?
There are areas that are building up momentum locally with Chief Ian running for mayor – that’s exciting and might change some of the work that I’ve done in the past for City of Vancouver, recognizing Indigenous women and being proactive to create spaces for missing and murdered Indigenous women girls and their families while the Inquiry was going on here. We’ve done some work with the Mayor’s Task Force on Mental Health and Addiction by taking into account the needs of our members in the Downtown Eastside. There’s been quite a lot of reconciliation work, led at the time by Ginger Gosnell-Myers. It’s nice to see the steps taken for reconciliation – the work is now opening up space for leadership. I think even provincially, various ministries are open to creating change, specifically around First Nations children and youth and around mental health, with the creation of the new ministry (Mental Health and Addiction).
“Abundance” is a principle value at Vantage Point. How do you bring an abundant viewpoint to your day-to-day work?
When I was in Ottawa working at the archives on my dissertation research recently, I came across something that my great-grandmother Angenik Kaponicin had written. This was captured in the early 1900s. She said that when it came to our territory -- I’m Anishinaabe, from around the Ottawa region-- “we were just free, to go wherever we wanted,” and then she talked about how there was enough food to feed everyone. And I just thought, “that’s such a wonderful mindset to have been living in.” She acknowledged that this had changed. She was born in 1880s and had seen the transition of being able to roam free to living on reserves. Initially the environment there was able to provide for the health, wellness, and food security for everyone involved. That’s not the case now. What an empowering view to behold – and how can we maintain that today? How can we build towards this abundance for everyone and all who roam freely across these territories?
Vantage Point was featured in the Vancouver Guardian.
The Vancouver Guardian asked us about how we’re supporting non-profits across BC and our mission to strengthen BC’s non-profit sector through leadership, development, governance, organizational capacity building and more.
Join Vantage Point on September 17 in Terrace for the BC Non-Profit Network: Northwest BC Leaders Gathering. Deepen relationships, learn about what is happening in BC’s non-profit sector, participate in practical learning, and contribute to the next stages of growth for the BC Non-Profit Network (BCNN).
Charities and other not-for-profit organizations are often created to address society’s most persistent challenges (e.g. homelessness, hunger, poverty) – those that neither governments nor for-profits have historically been able to solve.
According to the latest research, changing demographics and an aging population, is significantly increasing demand for charitable services while available funding is set to decreasei. Therefore, it is a critically important time to build the capacity of not-for-profit organizations.
In folklore, a silver bullet is often the only effective strategy to ward off werewolves, witches, and other monsters. It is a metaphor for a simple, seemingly magical solution to a complex or persistent problem.
So, we have to ask ourselves, is there a silver bullet that could create additional capacity in the sector without additional funding? Vantage Point has been talking about the concept of the abundant not-for-profit for many years – the opportunity to move our missions forward through knowledge philanthropy.
I would like to propose another opportunity – let’s work to resolve the issue of restricted fundingii and the Overhead Mythiii. The Overhead Myth posits that spending on programs is good and spending on overhead is bad. As a result of the Overhead Myth, many governments and foundations provide direct funding for programs and heavily restrict spending on overhead expenses and capacity building.
All – and I mean all – of the research that has ever been done on overhead spending has come to the opposite conclusion. The research is best summarized in the following quote from the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Projectiv (sponsored by the Ford Foundation, the David & Lucille Packard Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brother Fund):
“One of the important findings of the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Project is that overhead, far from a “necessary evil,” is the basis for mission effectiveness.”
Through over 20 years of research, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) has long been advocating for fewer restricted grants and more grants specifically for capacity building . They have arrived at the view that organizations have generally been forced by funders to spend too much on programs today and not enough on building strong, sustainable, efficient, effective organizations. They are also of the view - supported by all of their research - that investments in capacity buildingv result in significant returns on those investments and result in higher levels of mission achievement. As organizations become more efficient and more effective, they can grow and deliver more services.
So, is there a simple, seemingly magical solution to creating more capacity in the charitable sector? Absolutely. The silver bullet is unrestricted funding and funding available to build organizational capacity.
Even without increasing funding available, funders can create more capacity in the sector by reducing restrictions on their funding and allowing organizations to invest more in leadership, governance, technology, financial management, higher salaries and more training for staff. This will allow organizations to become more efficient and more effective. It will allow them to grow and provide more services to more people.
i Emmett, Brian. “The Social Deficit: How Much Faster Will Charities Have to Run to Stay in the Same Place?” Imagine Canada, 18 Oct. 2016, www.imaginecanada.ca/blog/social-deficit-how-much-faster-will-charities-....
ii “What Financial Challenges Do Nonprofits Face?” Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, 5 Mar. 2015, www.geofunders.org/resources/what-financial-challenges-do-nonprofits-fac....
iii BBB Wise Giving Alliance, et al. “Moving Toward an Overhead Solution.” The Overhead Myth, overheadmyth.com/.
iv Urban Institute Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, and Indiana University Center on Philanthropy. “Nonprofit Overhead Costs Project.” Aug. 2004.
v “How Can We Be More Supportive of Nonprofit Financial Sustainability?” Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, 5 Mar. 2014, www.geofunders.org/resources/how-can-we-be-more-supportive-of-nonprofit-....
Vantage Point was featured in the Vancouver Guardian.
The Vancouver Guardian asked us about how we’re supporting non-profits across BC and our mission to strengthen BC’s non-profit sector through leadership, development, governance, organizational capacity building and more.
Join Vantage Point on September 17 in Terrace for the BC Non-Profit Network: Northwest BC Leaders Gathering. Deepen relationships, learn about what is happening in BC’s non-profit sector, participate in practical learning, and contribute to the next stages of growth for the BC Non-Profit Network (BCNN).
Serving on a board should be fun and engaging. At Vantage Point we’re passionate advocates for governance that goes beyond oversight. With a focus on impact, there are some great practices organizations can use to support meaningful governance In our work we often come across organizations that have developed or adopted unique governance practices that are aligned with their values.
Many of these practices also foster a board dynamic that is engaging, fun and grounded in community impact. Two great examples are Exchange Innercity and HUB Cycling.
Here are some of the practices these two organizations have in place to make their governance awesome!
1. Make information accessible before the meeting
Exchange Innercity is a community economic development organization comprised of individuals and community groups in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The organization prides itself on taking direction and leadership from the membership as a whole. All members are invited to attend committee meetings. However, with a diverse and broad membership, ensuring meeting attendees have sufficient information to participate effectively is no small task. In order to achieve this, the coordinator makes herself available for 3 hours per month (1.5 hours on the second and third Wednesday of every month) at a local community centre where she provides printed meeting packages. Participants who don’t have access to a computer or email can get the information they need prior to any of the meetings.
HUB Cycling, uses a consent agenda. This tool requires a reading package to be sent out at least one week in advance, so that key information items are not reviewed at the meeting itself. Board members arrive prepared to delve into discussion.
2. Define “consensus decision-making” and dedicate time to “discursive” items
HUB Cycling has identified that board meetings are most effective when they allow for discussion and dialogue (instead of using meeting time to share information). To ensure this happens, the meeting agendas include a standing ‘discursive’ topic section, where rotating board members bring forward innovative, generative and diverse topics for dialogue at the board level. These items are for discussion only - decisions are not typically required - which opens up the meetings to generative reflection, discussion, and engaging new ideas at board meetings.
When it does come to making decisions, some groups use a ‘consensus-based’ decision making model. However, trouble arises when this is not defined; consensus means very different things to different people. To mitigate this challenge, Exchange Innercity proactively created a governing document that defines precisely how they can achieve a decision and the procedures to follow in order to empower members to raise and deal with conflicting viewpoints.
3. Mission first
For both organizations, keeping mission top of mind is a key feature of how they’ve structured governance practices. At the beginning of HUB board meetings a rotating board member will outline the mission and priorities of the organization, as they understand them. This grounds the subsequent discussions in what the board is there to achieve.
At Exchange Innercity, a key part of their mission is empowering individuals and organizations in the Downtown Eastside. They’ve given much thought to meeting processes as well as clear definitions to the roles of the staff, the executive committee, and committee members to ensure members have ample opportunities to contribute in different ways - which is a critical part of their mission.
How do your governance practices reflect the values of your organization, or the mission? Are there governance practices unique to your organization?
Vantage Point was featured in the Vancouver Guardian.
The Vancouver Guardian asked us about how we’re supporting non-profits across BC and our mission to strengthen BC’s non-profit sector through leadership, development, governance, organizational capacity building and more.
Join Vantage Point on September 17 in Terrace for the BC Non-Profit Network: Northwest BC Leaders Gathering. Deepen relationships, learn about what is happening in BC’s non-profit sector, participate in practical learning, and contribute to the next stages of growth for the BC Non-Profit Network (BCNN).