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Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
Scaling Nonprofits: Navigating Challenges and Driving Sustainable Growth
Ever wondered why scaling in the nonprofit sector feels like an uphill battle? Join me and Doug Paul, managing partner at Catapult, as we unpack the complexities of scaling nonprofit organizations and reveal the secrets to surmounting these challenges. With over two decades of experience, Doug provides invaluable insights into crafting a vision that is both aspirational and grounded in reality. We delve into the fascinating practice of "assumptions mapping," which helps identify potential pitfalls, ensuring all stakeholders share a clear understanding of the organization's starting point and objectives. Learn how to navigate distributed power structures and tackle the unique fundraising hurdles necessary for sustainable growth.
Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org
As a nonprofit, it's hard to make a difference in the community when your finances are holding you back. With Maxis by FreedMaxic, you can navigate complex challenges with the right people, processes and technology. Learn more about Maxis and schedule a complimentary consultation at Maxis by FMcom slash nonprofit. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub podcast. I'm your host, megan spear, and joining me today is doug paul, who's the managing partner at catapult, and we are digging into what I think is going to be a fantastic discussion, especially as we're winding out 2024 and digging into planning for 2025 for organizations who are looking to grow and scale and have some big plans for 2025, I think this is going to be a really great discussion around the idea of what is stopping your nonprofit from scaling and what are some of those barriers look like. So I'm excited to dig into it. Doug, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me Excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So by way of introduction tell the audience a little bit about yourself and kind of your journey with nonprofits.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have over 20 years of working in this sector, have led four different nonprofits and then almost tripped into organizational development of nonprofits in around 2009, 2010. And so I've scaled up and down between doing full-time organizational consulting for nonprofits, which is what I do now, and actually leading them myself. So I'm kind of used to being on both sides of the table, if you will.
Speaker 1:Nice. It's very helpful, I'm sure, in those discussions to have that experience to draw from.
Speaker 2:It really is. This isn't just theory. I feel like so many times people think if it looks good on a piece of paper or whiteboard it must work in real life, and if you're listening to this, you probably know that's not true.
Speaker 1:Yes, how many of us have a five-year strategic plan sitting in a really nice binder on our shelves?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Gotta love a good dust-filled strategic plan.
Speaker 1:Yes, just because you can put it on paper doesn't mean that it's actually going to happen. So one of the things that I think you and I touched on a little bit before the discussion here today was this idea that, like it's really nice to sit around in a conference room and dream big, and we can put 17 big dreams on the wall, but then those things tend to not take shape. So talk to me a little bit about maybe the beginning of what is the first thing that stops nonprofits from scaling, and how do we make the pie in the sky dream a little more practical? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the things that we do when we're working with a nonprofit is really try to help them develop, not just like a strategic plan for scaling or strategic plan for growth, but to develop a vision that has teeth. And when we say teeth, the thing that we're really talking about is, as you think, about your unique contribution in the next five years, what's actually achievable? Look, there is probably nothing more than I like than being in a conference room with a whiteboard preferably like Florida, just Florida ceiling whiteboards where we can just mark four walls of it up, and I think that makes us feel good about the possibilities, but that doesn't mean any of it's going to work. And so I think the thing that we are always coaching people that we're working with executive directors and CEOs of nonprofits is you have to have a reasonability filter, like is it reasonable to think that we could actually do this? And so part of that is when people are putting together a vision or they're putting together a strategic plan or something like that.
Speaker 2:We have this one exercise we do, called assumptions mapping, which is like what are the assumptions that we're making that, if we're wrong about, will undermine the entire effort and most people who are leading nonprofits and this is no shade on them, because I've been there, done that and probably I'm still doing it now think that because we have an idea and we feel it in our heart that it must be true and it will find its way into reality. And I think it's really important to just pump the brakes a little and check some of the assumptions that we might have and then we can start building with perhaps just a clearer eye towards what reality actually is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so to that end, I think something that I have seen repeatedly is that you can't scale until you understand where you are Right. So having an actual eye on not just where you want to go, but on where you are, and being honest about where the organization is tends to be, I think, a step that gets skipped a lot. Has that been your experience? How do we get honest about that?
Speaker 2:Well and I think this is, I think, megan one of my presuppositions going into this is I think leading a nonprofit is probably the hardest job in the world, in a way that I think most people just can't wrap their minds around. If you're leading a nonprofit, it's kind of assumed that you're raising your own salary. I mean, you'll never find a business person that says that or a government person that says that, or a teacher that says that. I mean, your income is coming from somewhere else. But just the starting point of your difficulties leading a nonprofit is you got to raise your own salary and PS everyone else's.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So I think a piece of that that makes it difficult, in addition to things like that, is how distributed the power centers are. It's never just like one person who holds all the power. It's really spread out. So, whether that is the board or a specific person on the board, or a key influencer or a key donor, all the power is spread out. And when you're talking about reality and a starting point for scaling, it's really important to understand that everyone has to have a shared picture of reality. You're not the only one who can see it clearly and you're going to have blind spots. So how do we get the right people, the right constituents in the room to have a shared picture of reality? Because if you're going to scale, you have to have everyone aligned in the same direction, and if we don't agree on what point A is, we're never going to actually get to point B, because we're going to be starting in different places, so that the shared picture we have found is a really important key to that important key to that.
Speaker 1:So let's say somebody finds themselves in a position right now where they're looking at 2025 and they're going. Yeah, my staff and I are all aligned, we understand where we are, we understand where we want to go and that differs from the board or that. We have maybe that as the conflict point. What do we do if we find ourselves in that kind of position where there is maybe it's a key stakeholder, a key donor, somebody, the board chair who is the actual barrier to you guys moving forward?
Speaker 2:I think you got. You probably have more than two options, but I'll give you two things that we regularly are doing when we're working with leaders in those situations. Number one is pump the brakes and figure out a way to get that group of people on the same page and actually deal with some of their objections and some of their barriers. There is probably at least a kernel of truth in what it is that they're saying, and so how do you actually deal with what it is that they're saying in a way that is constructive and helpful? Obviously, you know your board, your chair of the board, better than you or I do, so that might be a possibility. The other way and this is one where we found a little bit more leeway and flexibility is in having conversations with that person.
Speaker 2:The thing that you might ask to do is to try something for a time-bound period of time. So try and experiment, rather than like, hey, we're going to pivot the entire thing towards this new thing, say, hey, over here on the side, we want to try something and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but we are going to funnel a certain percentage of our time, our energy and our resources into this thing for this amount of time and let's see what happens and then we can have a second discussion. Almost always, people are up for a good experiment. I think a lot of people, particularly people on the nonprofit board side, are oftentimes folks who are really needing safety and security. They're really risk averse and so if we can risk, mitigate what they see as the possibility of damage to the organization by doing it on the side. It usually deals with a lot of some of the unspoken uncomfortableness they have about some of the things you might be bringing to the table.
Speaker 1:That's a really interesting point, and I think it's very much how the for-profit world functions right. Nobody just launches a new product off the bat right Like it's an experiment over here and I think I guess I hadn't really thought about it before. But that is maybe a model that the nonprofit hub world has shied away from thinking that it has to be all in all or nothing or we can't move forward with it, when that is not at all how the business world works.
Speaker 2:Or almost any sector. Yeah, there is. If you're looking for a little bedtime reading, you can read two pages at a time and it'll knock you right out. But Nassim Tlaib has written a bunch of books, but one of the ones that we've used a lot is a book called Anti-Fragile, and he talks about this theory called the barbell theory, and I won't go into all of the details of it, but this is what he's proposing.
Speaker 2:He's saying, like, when you look across all sectors whether that's the economy, the social sector, business sector, government sector, arts and entertainment, whatever it is there is this thing where, when they want to find a new innovation that is worthy of scaling thing, where, when they want to find a new innovation that is worthy of scaling, they do it to the side and they make sure that it's protected and the things that are the norm of the existing organization are not actually affecting the thing that's over here on the side.
Speaker 2:And so on one side you have like almost radical conservatism around protection of the thing that exists, but over here on the other side you're doing radical experimentation and you are expecting it to fail, but you're trying to like fail fast and iterate even faster from the learning that you've got and that's quite honestly. That's where a lot of the work that we're doing with nonprofits is right now, because so many of the models that have existed in nonprofit work, that have existed for 25, 30, 50 years, they're not working nearly as well as they used to but we haven't necessarily, like raised up a group of leaders who have been trained how to do that kind of innovation and scaling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, more than most sectors, nonprofit is very susceptible to well, that's the way we've always done it. Yeah, this is our model. This is what works, this is the way we've always done it, and it is a much harder ship to change course on.
Speaker 2:It really is, and I think this is where, a little bit going backwards to a question, you asked about reality, one of the things that is. I think we feel the undercurrents of this reality, but we haven't been able to name it yet. But what sociologists have pointed out is that culture is now reinventing itself every 18 months, and it used to be every 18 years, so we're squeezing 18 years worth of generational change into 18 months, and that is happening to nonprofits as well, and so, in the same way that businesses are having to like, think about how they're going to have to tweak and change and iterate to keep up, nonprofits have to do the same thing, and that's just the name of the game now, for leading anything is how fast things are changing.
Speaker 1:That's a really interesting. I had not heard that before, but we were having a discussion on the podcast a couple of days ago with someone about some of the generational challenges that workplaces are facing. And this actually ties in very nicely to that right, because we used to talk about a generation of people being a 10 to 15 year span of time, and now one of the things that they were talking about is like even somebody who's 22 has very little in common with someone who's 25. But that makes so much more sense when we're talking about these generations changing so quickly and having that much change in a shorter amount of time change in a shorter amount of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's so. As a leader, it's really challenging because there has to be this almost like admission, like it's not, no one can keep up with that, like it is impossible to keep up with that.
Speaker 1:That's not sustainable.
Speaker 2:It is not sustainable. It's not sustainable for one month, much less 18 months, like you can't do it. And so there has there's this tension between acknowledgement of I can't keep up, but we still have to change, and so it's finding for your organization and the constituency, the people that you're serving, whatever your mission and vision is like, what's the right amount of change in a certain period of time that's sustainable. And so I think that's a different way of thinking about it, and in that there will always be tension. There'll be times where it feels like you're changing too fast and times where it feels like you're not keeping up enough, but it's in the balance, I think, in threading that needle that leaders are going to have to find themselves.
Speaker 1:So let's talk. Let's maybe micro it down a little bit and talk to leaders of maybe not the executive director a little bit and talk to leaders of maybe not the executive director, somebody who's not leading the whole org but who runs program or who runs development or who runs volunteer management, each of these kind of individual departments. Are there exercises that those folks can be doing with their team to start leading their team and maybe starting organizational change within one department, or is this something that really needs to be top down? We're embracing this as the whole. Every department is moving towards the same thing. What is your take there?
Speaker 2:The best case scenario is that you've got a culture that is thinking around innovation and how, when we trip onto the right innovation, we might be able to scale it. That's the best case scenario, and so if you're a department leader or program leader within that, then you're just drafting off of the water. That's already going in a certain direction. If you're not and I think there might be some leaders who are listening to this who are not I think that's a fair assessment. I think regularly, like you can't you can set some distinctives to your department, but I think it would be unwise to try to change the entire culture of your organization. That's going to be undermining of your own leadership with the people that are above you in the org chart, so to speak. But there are two things that I think you can regularly do with your team, two questions you can ask that'll be really helpful when we're talking about navigating some of that tension. The first is around assumptions, which we talked about before, and so a regular question you can be asking your team I mean, let's think about programming for a second is what are the assumptions that we are making right now as a team? That may no longer be true. Let's just challenge it, let's be open to the fact that it might not be true. So let's say we've worked with a neighborhood nonprofit that serves under-resourced kids who are struggling with literacy, and so there is a way that we've taught kids to read for a very long time. But what if that way isn't working anymore? We might assume that it is, but what if there's a better way out there? So we need to like create space to push up against some of those assumptions, and that's okay.
Speaker 2:The second one is around, is on the opposite side, and it's around sameness, and it's what is always going to be true that I can build on. And so I think one of the things that we can tip into is, if we're hearing like culture is reinventing itself every 18 months, is to tip the other direction and to say, like everything is always reinventing itself. That's not true. Like we, human nature is generally the same. Sure, what are the things that we believe are those truisms and how do we build on those things to make this thing steady and sustainable? And so, on one side, assumptions and another side, sameness, and then even at a programming level that allows you to like really have what feels like a more safe conversation about changes or tweaks or iterations you might want to bring to the program itself.
Speaker 1:I love that Mostly because it is really easy to get caught up in the overwhelm of everything changing, but there are some things that are just going to be true no matter what, and so I think it's wise counsel to balance those two.
Speaker 2:One of the first people that ever mentored me had this great quote. This might be the only quote of his I can still quote. Like exactly, and he's like human beings are creatures of overreaction, that we are constantly like, pivoting from one ditch to the other. And if you've ever read the book, oh, I can't remember. But the idea of, like the non-anxious leader, what does it look like to find yourself in a place where things might be chaotic around you but you are not? And I think part of that is the tension that we're trying to name around assumptions and sameness is we're not going to be pitched too much to one direction or the other based on either the last news cycle we read the last TikTok video, we watched the last board meeting we had. We're actually going to absorb that and try to navigate that in a way that is more balancing than it is around making drastic changes.
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Speaker 1:Nonprofit Is there, I think, a lot of times nonprofits have a tendency to be very siloed in terms of their departments. Right Half the time, marketing doesn't know what program is doing and donor development doesn't know what's going on. Over here. We tend to be a little siloed For something like scaling or moving the organization forward. Obviously we need all of the departments to be working together. Is there a tipping point where there's too many cooks in the kitchen? Is there a tipping point where there's too many cooks in the kitchen? Is it possible to have too many people involved in the scaling, or who needs to make sure that they're at the table and who might be better served to not be?
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's necessarily about how many cooks hooks there are in the kitchen, but it's more about process, like at what point are we getting feedback? At what point are we doing ideation? At what point are we making decisions and how are we then going to get what are the feedback loops to figuring out, like, once the decision's been made, how it's going? And I think it has more to do with people are not necessarily used to particularly in a nonprofit leading a process for how those things string together, and so it can feel like it's all happening at one time. We're making the decision while we're brainstorming, while it is that we're field testing it, while it like and it's not actually like, hi, for these next 30 days, it's all about feedback and then we're done. The feedback is going to be on pause until we tell you when the next thing is, and everyone we're a big thing on this like everyone gets to participate in feedback, because whoever helps create the plan feels ownership of the plan. But what we have to do is to create a way that we can actually silo not the departments but the feedback loops as well as the decision, like how do people know who's making the decision and how Is that clear? And then if they feel like they can look at the plan and see their fingerprints on it, we've got a real chance of this thing working and scaling. But we have to have a process-oriented approach for that to happen. I don't know if that makes sense or not.
Speaker 1:Makes sense in my head as I'm saying yeah, no, I think that's super helpful. Within that, between with the feedback and ideation and decision-making and moving it forward, where do you see the process break down most often? Which of these is the biggest barrier to actually scaling?
Speaker 2:Wow, what a great question. I think part of it is people have different definitions. I think people there are different ways that things scale, and so when we don't drive into the details of when I say scaling and you say scaling, are we saying the same thing, and so that oftentimes, like just the language that we're using around, it is a barrier in and of itself, because we're actually having two different conversations Interesting, we're having the same one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So when we're working with an organization around growth or scaling or strategic planning or whatever it might be, we're actually very careful to say, like at the beginning almost here's a glossary of terms Are we saying the same things you keep using?
Speaker 1:this word.
Speaker 2:Does this word mean what you think it means?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So I think that's one of the most significant barriers is just like are we saying the same things even as we're making the plan itself? And then I think, like with all things, if we are not planning for something to be more difficult than it probably is on a piece of paper and not factoring that into the plan, that is oftentimes a big barrier in the nonprofit sector, Because people are like, hypothetically, if you're in the nonprofit sector, you could be making a lot more money somewhere else and you're in this for the mission, You're in this because you've got a big heart, and sometimes the heart of that puts rose-colored glasses on us to make us see that things will end up in a positive direction. And so again this goes back to like we really got to challenge the assumptions on some of those things.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Okay, so let's say we're coming into the new year, leadership comes back in January and we have big dreams and big plans and big goals. Or maybe we've even spent some time this year putting forward a strategic plan and now we're about to embark on doing it. Embark on doing it right Could be either of those phases what happens when the plan fails, or maybe you're in the middle of a plan that has failed. Do you have some theories or advice on how we regroup? Yeah, because I think to your point at the top of the show. It's very easy for boards to look at one failure and say, yep, nope, that's it, we're going back to the way it was no more innovation, we're just staying here and be adverse to trying again. So if somebody is either in the midst of a failure and trying to regroup or it doesn't end up going that way, what's your wisdom for them?
Speaker 2:I think first things first is like take a beat, take a deep breath and when you're having those conversations with your close team that you have around you, and then even as you go wider, like just bring your best self to that, Don't bring a reactive or emotional self, which is very difficult.
Speaker 1:That's so hard, though, so hard.
Speaker 2:Totally get it Cause it's not like I'm not reactive. I we've got a team meeting tomorrow morning and I'm sure I will. There's something going to be come up and I'll be reactive to it and I could use my own advice. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is just do a post-mortem, Like why did this happen? I think that's one of the like we can name some of the elements that are at work and why something doesn't work.
Speaker 2:But it's really important to drill down into, like why didn't it happen? And what didn't we see when we were making this decision that kept us from knowing that it was going to go in this direction? Because if I can't do that, then I'm going to repeat that failure. And this is the biggest thing that when we're working with boards, like there is absolutely nothing wrong with failure whatsoever, Because failure should be stepping stones to break through, unless we aren't learning from it. And so the biggest question is not whether or not you failed, but whether or not you're learning.
Speaker 2:And how do we introduce the new learning into the new thing that we're going to do?
Speaker 2:And so for some of it, it might have been like we could have found out much sooner if we had tested some of our assumptions, like with some very simple 90-day goals, that would have allowed us that within 90 days we would have known that it wasn't going to work and we would have saved ourselves a year or two or three years worth of time and resource and investment into this by actually chunking it out and really building up and laddering into a plan that's like every 90 days, what have we learned, what worked, what didn't? And we're going to iterate as we go rather than thinking about the plan as, like this, one giant thing and it either all works or all fails. It creates a zero-sum game. So some of it is also like what's the kind of plan that you're using? Is it one that allows it to be flexible, to learn as you go and to adjust things as that learning is coming into place, whether you succeeded or not in those 90-day goals?
Speaker 1:I love that Is there, because we talk a lot on this show and in Nonprofit Hub world in general, right, about donors and fundraising. How much of the scaling message right? Because if someone's going to give you their money, their hard-earned dollars, and they're committed to your cause, how much of that message goes back to donors, right? Do we support the idea that, like I'm going to tell them that we failed, or does that cause too much, maybe mistrust or doubt that you can fulfill? What does the messaging look like on the donor side when you're trying to be an organization that's growing and scaling?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when you've had a significant misstep, it is how you frame it to a donor. If you have a high net worth individual who's given you a lot of money, there is a very high likelihood that they have had a significant failure in their life, like a significant business failure in their life. They put money in a wrong investment and they bottomed out. They are used to people not winning every time, like that's normal, and so the question is can you get inside their mind and see what they see around failure? And it's always about learning and it is. I would encourage us not to go to them with like, hey, we failed and we don't know what to do now. That is a losing proposition. Don't do that.
Speaker 2:I would say like, hey, here's what we tried, here's what didn't work, here's what we tried, here's what didn't work, here's what we learned, here's how we're pivoting. Can you give us some of your feedback on that? Because I think what a high net worth donor and again, you've had people on that have said this all the time they don't just want to open their checkbook. Sure, they act like they made their money some way, and it was usually using their brain, and so it's not just their money that they have to give, but it's also their expertise. How do you use their expertise? So if you invite them in as opposed to like keeping them at arm's length, you have a much, much better chance of them continuing the kind of generosity that we're hoping will fuel the growth that you want to see.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, as we wrap up, if somebody is maybe thinking about scaling, they have some big dreams. They want to take their organization to the next level and they wanted to talk to you or Catapult about that. How did they find you? How do we connect with you? Tell us a little bit about the work that Catapult does.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so number one, we have a whole book and we will give it to you for free. So it's a PDF book. We have a hard copy of it as well. We will not give you that one for free, but we'll give you the PDF one and it's called Scaling Nonprofits, and so I think I can probably send it over to you, megan, and maybe you can put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can put the link to that.
Speaker 2:That's a great place to start. There are three sections in that, each of which are incredibly helpful as we're thinking about scaling and growth. I think that the second way is you can just go to our website, wearecatapultorg, and we do a lot of work around leadership development. We do a lot of work with strategic planning, run innovation and then some custom work around marketing and program development and things like that, but the majority of our work is all around scaling, innovation and strategic planning.
Speaker 1:Perfect, I love it. Yes, we will definitely link to all of that in the show description, so make sure you check that out, Doug, thank you so much for joining us today. I think this has been a great discussion. I'm excited to see what people take this advice and run with it in their planning for 2025.
Speaker 2:That'd be great. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about all these things and love all the listeners who are listening. Good luck in 2025.
Speaker 1:Yes, excellent. Again, my guest has been Doug Paul, who's one of the managing partners at Catapult. Thank you so much for joining us, doug. I really appreciate that and we will see you all next time on the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast.