Latest / Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits / Nonprofit Leadership: Getting Back to the Fundamentals That Create Stability and Momentum
Transcript
- Matt Stockman (00:00) When a professional athlete hits a slump, the coach always brings them back to the fundamentals. If a pro basketball player suddenly can't hit a three pointer, the coach doesn't tell him to practice spinning the ball on his finger. Rather, they break down the fundamentals, stance, elbows, eye focus, repetition of the basics. And that same principle applies to nonprofit leadership. When parts of your organization feel harder than they should, When every solution just seems to create two new problems, it's a fundamentals issue. And getting back to fundamentals means identifying what is holding your nonprofit back and doubling down on what actually creates health, sustainability, and momentum. And as the leader, that responsibility falls on you. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through three leadership behaviors that I really want to encourage you stop doing in 2026. And then three strategic shifts that I think you should start doing you want your nonprofit to become focused, effective, and able to hit three-pointers all day long. Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong, sustainable foundation by providing clear frameworks and practical tools and the real world guidance that you need and you can actually apply. I'm your host, Matt Stockman. I'm a nonprofit growth coach. And here at Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every successful nonprofit has to be operating at peak performance across six key areas. Those areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations and finances. So on every episode of the podcast, we focus on a topic that is core to at least one of these six areas, helping you create lasting impact without unnecessary complexity. Now, before we dive into today's episode, if you or somebody you know is still in the dreaming phase of launching a nonprofit, I've got a special freebie. It's a PDF resource that I built called From Dream to Action, Your Nonprofit Pre-Launch Checklist, 10 Essential Steps for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to impact. This tool will take you through 10 easy first steps to move your dream for a nonprofit toward a launch plan that gets your dream off the ground. It's a checklist that walks you through your why, considering your first teammates. In other words, your board, honing in on your beneficiary, choosing your nonprofit name, your IRS application, and a lot more. And there's an easy to do action step for each of the 10 things to consider that will bring your dream for a nonprofit into a whole lot clearer focus. once you've completed it. If you'd like the free PDF from Dream to Action, your nonprofit pre-launch checklist, 10 Essential Steps for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to Impact, you can email me at matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com or check out the website nonprofitlaunchplan.com to get it there as well. So let's jump in. The first thing I want you as a nonprofit leader to think about stopping doing in 2026, is chasing random dollars without a fundraising plan. If you stop listening after this one point, but you took it to heart, I'd really consider this episode a success. Because no matter where you're at in your nonprofit journey, this one thing is crucial. It's one of the more common and damaging patterns that I see in small and growing nonprofits. And it happens pretty naturally. A lot of times we can drift towards chasing dollars in a few different scenarios. especially if you're first starting out. Any money in that scenario is more than what you currently have. And as soon as you get some and you immediately apply it to programs, you right away are setting yourself up in the cycle of sort of hand-to-mouth subsistence. Or money comes in, money goes straight to programs. Or maybe the typical revenue streams are starting to dry up a little bit and you start chasing dollars to make up the difference in somewhat of a panic mindset. Or although less common, it does still happen, somebody, figuratively speaking, waves a big check in front of you. And you mentally begin to dream of all that you could do with a grant or a donation like that. This is why the lottery has such a powerful hold on people. Because in the time between when we buy a lottery ticket and when we find out that we didn't win, we spend all of the money in our minds dreaming of all that we will do when we do win, which is kind of like a drug for all of us. It's very human nature. The result is a patchwork of revenue streams in your nonprofit that makes you feel busy, but never makes you feel stable at all. So a fundraising plan is a clear decision about how your organization is designed to be funded. It defines what percentage of revenue comes from which sources and what types of funding you're going to intentionally pursue or decline. And if you can't explain the high level of your fundraising plan in one paragraph, there's a good possibility you don't actually have one. And without a plan, everything you do as a leader and as a nonprofit becomes reactive. And financial planning is impossible. So this year, your funding has got to be designed not improvised. So that's one thing to stop doing. The second thing I want you to consider stopping doing is the leader of your nonprofit is confusing activity with leadership. In other words, do not confuse you as the leader doing things as leading things. Many executive directors of nonprofits are working incredibly hard, but their organizations are under led. And let me say this, you're not the leader of the organization because you have the longest to do list of everybody on your team. That is not a requirement or a prerequisite of being a leader. But especially early on in the life of your nonprofit, you can easily allow yourself to be the one to take everything on, which can mean either you've got staffing challenges. In other words, maybe somebody on your team leaves and you're having to temporarily pick up the slack, which that happens, but more common. is when you feel like you've got to take everything on because there's no one else to do it, that is actually a signal that you're probably doing too much. Leadership is decision making and direction setting and system building. And if your executive director role could be done by an operations coordinator, then you're focusing on the wrong things and your nonprofit is not being led at the level that you can lead it and the way it needs to be led. Your organization grows only as fast as your leadership and your leadership structure. And there's no amount of personal productivity, I don't care how much you can get done in a day, that can compensate for missing leadership systems. So the thing I want to encourage you to stop doing right away is confusing you being busy as strong leadership. That's number two. So the third thing is to stop letting your calendar run your organization in this coming year. Let me say it again. The third thing I want you to stop is letting your calendar run your organization. Your organization should control your calendar. The calendar is where your strategy gets executed. So as the leader, if you're always reacting to your calendar, and here's what I mean by this, you're always feeling like stuff is kind of sneaking up on you. Your organization is always going to be in reactive mode. If your calendar is filled with urgent requests and endless meetings and constant interruptions, there's actually no space left for the work that moves the organization forward. So let's do this exercise. I want you to look at the last full calendar month. And if you're listening to this podcast or watching this podcast in real time, the week that I dropped it, you'd be looking at December of 2025, but look at the last full calendar month. Look at the whole month of calendar time. and categorize everything that you did in that month as one of four different things. One is leadership work, meaning stuff that only you as the leader of the organization can do. Two is management or operations work. Three is administrative work, and four is firefighting. And if leadership work is anything but the largest category, that's something that I want you to consider focusing on and changing that. in the coming year. All right, so that's some things to stop doing in the coming year. Let's talk about some things to start doing. And the first thing I want you to start doing is designing the organization that you actually need. Start building or maybe rebuilding your nonprofit with the future in mind. Most nonprofits don't start this way. Most kind of get it accidentally designed. They grow based on immediate needs and short-term decisions and survival mode. which is why the vast majority of nonprofits fail and sometimes even cease to exist in the first few years. So let's take some time right now to get super intentional about dreaming about your nonprofit 10 years from now and take steps towards designing the nonprofit that you'd be proud to lead in 10 years. That means we think about the impact that you could be realistically making in 10 years. How many people is that going to take? How much money will that take? What technology or real estate might you need to accomplish that? And then we start building backwards, reverse engineering from that 10 year vision. A lot of nonprofit leadership, hiring, processes, strategies, are all reactive, meaning we need something or someone to solve a problem that we didn't anticipate. It's really hard to grow a healthy and a sustainable operation in that reactive mode. It's sort of like never having the chance to get healthy or do anything preventive to take care of your health if you're in the ER all the time. And as the leader, this is the role that you specifically have been created for. So it's your work to do. You can involve others on your board and on your team to help. In fact, I would encourage that, but you've got to be the one to drive it. So let's start thinking about the future in designing the nonprofit for the future right now. The next thing I want you to start doing, the second shift, is doing less, but doing it exceptionally well. I had a coaching call today with the CEO of a nonprofit this morning. They reached out to me originally because they've got about a $200,000 deficit gap in their budget. And they need some help and some outside thinking to lead them through some creative strategies to close that gap. So in our session, We sort of brainstormed list of a lot of pretty quick wins that they could have in the next six months. But I was very quick to say, one of the things that we need to make sure we do is to transfer the responsibility in this situation of some of these ideas to the members of the CEO's team, because the CEO trying to take on all of it would be detrimental to him and to the organization. But I bet that most of us didn't start 2026 by saying, what does my nonprofit need to do less of in this year? Overextension is the enemy of stability financially and otherwise too. And a lot of nonprofits are running too many programs, too many initiatives, ideas on too little funding, and many of them likely just added more onto everyone's plate in the coming year. Strong organizations rather are the ones that are laser focused organizations. So starting right now, I want you to start thinking about how to narrow your organization's focus in order to strengthen your foundation. Do ever notice that when you go to visit an amusement park every year, oftentimes there's one or two rides that aren't there anymore. They were there last year, but then they're replaced with some other ride. And you're sort of like, whatever happened to that one ride? That's because Most amusement parks have limited space and they want guests staying in the park as long as possible. So they regularly survey what everyone's favorite rides are and whatever ride or rides are at the bottom of that list. In other words, everybody's least favorite rides. At the end of the season, those are the rides that are typically the ones you won't see in the new season. They've replaced it with something that they hope will be more exciting for people. Now how this applies here is the two big barriers to growth that you have in your nonprofit, just like the amusement park, their biggest barrier might be money, but it's probably more than anything real estate for you and your nonprofit. Those two big barriers are time and people, even more so than money, I think. So often I use the amusement park analogy for nonprofit leaders for every program, identify its true annual cost, its funding source. and its measurable impact. Then ask yourself the hard questions. If we took this away, would our financial position improve or worsen? What would be the net effect of those that we're serving? If this went away, could we focus more intentionally with time and resources in a more positive and impactful way? less just doing stuff means more of doing the right stuff. And that means better overall health and better outcomes for your nonprofit. So the third thing I want you to start doing right away is closely connected to another one. And that's running the organization from dashboards and from your metrics and measurables, not feelings. Envision yourself for a second trying to fly an airplane solely on feelings. It feels like you're going fast enough, but in reality, you may not be maintaining enough velocity to stay in the air. It feels like the landing strip is somewhere east of here, even though you're completely in the clouds. It feels like I'm flying in a straight line when reality, you're sort of on a slight bank to the left the whole time. The dashboard in your car or in an airplane or in your nonprofit is crucial. leadership requires you being able to see the reality of the health of your organization and to know what you're looking at. And every healthy nonprofit needs some simple dashboards that show cash flow and runway, donor growth and retention, your program outcomes and the cost per impact, your marketing pipeline health and some other things. And if you can't answer, how long your cash will last or what your donor retention rate is like this month, then I think your systems are under built and we need to do some work there. guessing and winging it are not leadership. So spend the time right now to invest the time and training either for yourself or some people on your team and potentially the financial resources so that you always know where you're at and where you're headed. Again, the season that this episode has dropped is the beginning of 2026, but no matter when you're listening, it's a great time to evaluate. This next season in your nonprofit does not require you to work more hours, but it does require you as the leader to lead at the highest level possible. So my challenge to you is this, super simple. You don't have to, like I gave you all these different ideas. I just want you to pick one stop, one thing you're gonna stop doing, and one thing you're gonna start doing from the list of things that we went through today in this episode, and implement these two things, one to start, one to stop in the next 30 days. That single decision can change the trajectory of your nonprofit organization this year. And if you want some help building these systems inside of your nonprofit, that's exactly what we do at Nonprofit Launch Plan. I would love to be able to book some free time with you. You can do that on my website right now at NonprofitLaunchPlan.com. It's free. Just click the book a call button on the home page. Now, before we wrap up this episode, again, if you or somebody you know is still in the dreaming phase of launching a nonprofit, Don't forget about the PDF resource called From Dream to Action, Your Nonprofit Pre-Launch Checklist, 10 Essential Steps for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to Impact. With the easy to do action steps for each of the 10 things for your nonprofit, it's going to bring it all, that dream that you have into a much clearer focus once you've completed it. If you want it, From Dream to Action, Your Nonprofit Pre-Launch Checklist, you can get it by emailing me, Matt. at nonprofitlaunchplan.com, M-A-T-T at nonprofitlaunchplan.com, or check out my website, nonprofitlaunchplan.com. That's all for today's episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. Thank you so much for tuning in, for listening and watching. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button and do all the podcast things so you don't miss out on the next episode. And if in some way or another you found this helpful, Would you consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader who either you work with or who you know that you think might benefit? And until next time, thank you for being here and keep making a difference.