New Wine in Old Skins: Attracting the Next Generation of Nonprofit Leaders

       P   O   S   T   E   D       B   Y       A   L   B   E   R  T

Attend any earnest discussion of nonprofit issues and there’s frequently an elephant in the room.  On the issue of how to attract and retain the best nonprofit talent, the room that houses all those elephants in the room is, in my view, the chronic and significant undercapitalization of nonprofit organizations. 

“Undercapitalization” is a fancy way of saying that nonprofits are always madly scrambling for money.  This undercapitalization leads to fundraising burnout (figuring prominently in both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead  reports*), underinvestment of time and money in staff capacity, lack of attention to new staff, and an impoverished organizational infrastructure.

But chronic undercapitalization also exacerbates something I’ll call the nonprofit “frump factor.”  That’s frump as in “frumpy.”  Think Roz Chast doing a cartoon about a bake sale for the local 4-H Club.

A friend and I were watching a film about the making of Cloverfield, one of those big budget summer blockbusters featuring extraordinary special effects: thirty-storey monsters tearing off the head of the Statue of Liberty and hurling it down Broadway—that kind of thing.  At one point my friend, a veteran of nonprofit work, turned to me and asked, “Why can’t our sector do anything as cool as that?”

His question gave me pause.  You’ll have investors lining up to get a piece of the Cloverfield franchise, but few who’d expect to make a buck by housing the homeless.  To my friend’s point: there is something yawn-inspiring about the way we describe our work and communicate its impact to would-be employees and other audiences.  We invite the idea that nonprofits are pokey, unglamorous, 19th century places to work, mired in process and wed to outdated business models.

A widespread misunderstanding and undervaluation of the sector contributes to the nonprofit frump factor.  We tell our parents we want to be environmental advocates, and they roar back, “What the hell kind of job is that?”

In this country, we’re not for-profit organizations; abroad, we’re not governmental.  We’re the in-between sector, the neither-this-nor-that sector, the invention of IRS lawyers and policy wonks.

We’re the sector that does things nobody really wants to pay for.

In the Ready to Lead study, we saw significant “sector agnosticism,” the notion that a person could contribute to the public good in any sector.  And I increasingly run into people who wish we’d save ourselves the embarrassment by simply dumping the term “nonprofit” altogether.

Yet I also remember what attracted me to the sector years ago, and what keeps me committed to it.  I know that each day tens of thousands of nonprofit workers in my city are getting out of bed to do somebody an unambiguous good.  I’m convinced—foolishly perhaps—that after great art and literature, nonprofits are the last remaining civilizing force, this function having been long ago been abandoned by government, business, and the media.  I believe strongly that nonprofit work is the glue that keeps us bound together as a society.  And I believe that nonprofits and the foundations that fund them are the last institutions capable of shaking a fist at government and business when a fist-shaking is called for.

We can do much more to make this work appear less frumpy.  But we’d be challenged to make it any more meaningful.

_____

* Full disclosure: I was one of the authors of the Ready to Lead report; my foundation funded and helped create both the Daring to Lead and Ready to Lead reports.

Comments

[Ashley Cecil]

I work for a nonprofit and outside of my 40 hour work week, I devote another 20/hrs to similar endeavors. My experience has been that my peers (young 20-something professional NP administrators) come into this sector of fire about an issue and work like dogs for hardly enough to get by. Within a few years have their flame stomped on by bureaucracy and a stagnant baby-boomer staff resistant to change. I know how to make the program I coordinate sexy. I can pull at heart strings like it's going out of style. I can pitch to anyone, from any walk of life. The infrastructure needs to change to embrace the next generation's enthusiasm to pass on the corp world to invest their time in altruistic careers. Sorry about the rant, I just get frustrated about the claim that NP workers don't know how to sell like for-profits. My generation does not fit that mold.

[Albert]

No need to apologize. I think we need more honest back and forth between the generations rather than less. And when I run that film forward in my mind, I see Baby Boomers admitting that they could have been less bureaucratic, among other things, and Gen X-ers confessing that they might not have fully understood all the requirements of managing an organization. We'll all give a little. Then what, I wonder? What will any of us, of whatever generation, have to say to the world about what it is that unites us in a common enterprise? Why should anybody care about our intra-necine disagreements? Why should we?

Love your art, by the way.

[shailushi]

i agree wholeheartedly!

i've much preferred the term "community benefit organization" to "nonprofit" because CBO actually describes what an organization is about, rather than its tax status.

using the phrase "community benefit" also makes everything seems a lot more attractive--pulls at the heartstrings and conveys a sense of values that "nonprofit" doesn't.

[Amy Sample Ward]

I think it's an interesting place to be caught: between the rock (passion to work on some of the most difficult social problems) and the hard place (burn out because of work on some of the most difficult social problems). It isn't just frump, in my opinion. It's more than frump. It is changing not just the way nonprofits talk about their work but the way everyone talks about their work. At the end of the day, that hard work which you say is so meaningful is viewed so 'frumpy' by everyone. So, how do we change that? How do we make some of the most meaningful work star-studded? (If that is the opposite of frumpy.)

Thanks for sharing these thoughts!

[Tidy Sum]

Maybe someone could write a style section for the Chronicle of Nonprofit Strategery.

We could start by sending out free pairs of Bono sunglasses to all WCT readers as part of a new LessFrump campaign.

I put on a pair and feel like a new man.

The style issue could start with virtual makeovers of the great do-gooder frumps in History. Jesus, Ghandi, Buddha, Fonda, Mother Teresa... talk about fashion don'ts, people!

Would it have killed them to accessorize?

Frumpage in the sector is the tip of the iceberg lettuce.

Half of nonprofit organizations seem clinically depressed. It is no wonder that their socks don't match.

Last month I asked the director and staff of a small nonprofit organization: "What do you do for fun?"

There was a pause of fifteen beats and a stammered change of subject.

I felt sorry for them. How could they inspire their consituency, donors, friends, and staff?