Things like getting your HR house in order for both staff and board. Are your job descriptions, performance processes, succession planning & professional development current and relevant – do they even exist?
If you work with a volunteer base, whether a few key people, or hundreds of people:
- Are your policies and procedures current, documented and accessible?
- How about your onboarding processes, engagement and recognition programs?
- Do your volunteers feel appreciated? Do they know what is expected of them? These questions apply to staff and board as well.
Strategic plans, well-aimed mission & vision statements and guiding principles are all important elements that contribute to your organizational identity. Are yours reflective of who you are as an organization today? These items all help keep you on track, can ease decision making and are really the backbone of your organization.
Though all of these areas are critically important, they rarely move to the ‘urgent’ category unless there is an incident or an emergency. When that happens, you are then working from a position of weakness, scrambling to solve problems, rather than from the strength of being proactive and organized.
- Board Governance
- Financial Accountability & Transparency
- Fundraising
- Staff Management
- Volunteer Involvement
Each of these five areas is further broken down into smaller and more manageable specific focus sections that makes it easier to work through in a systematic way.
Having accredited organizations is valuable and important for our nonprofit/charity sector. And, I know that we are often stretched thin and may not be able to undertake a formal accreditation process. But by paying attention to all the ‘stuff on the back burner’ we can keep our organizations moving on the right path.
This gap analysis tool from Imagine Canada highlights the way. It breaks down the five key areas mentioned above into manageable steps in a workable format. Have a look here to get your free copy and begin to move some stuff off of the back burner!
