How to Establish Best Practices within a Non Profit Organization

There are many reasons why you might need to establish best practices within a nonprofit organization. A manager might leave the nonprofit organization suddenly, and the management practices are gone with the employee. Contributors to the nonprofit organization might demand examples that their contributions are being used in an efficient manner. Of course, attaining the stated goals of the nonprofit organization is always a great reason to establish best practices. When best practices are established in a nonprofit organization, the stated goals of the nonprofit organization are more efficiently achieved, which can often lead to greater monetary contributions.

Instructions

1. Decide on the organizational level at which you’re going to establish best practices. This can be an organizationwide level, but more often than not, it’s easier to start with best practices at the departmental level.

2. State clearly and succinctly the inputs and outputs of the level for which the best practices are being developed. For example, a department that is responsible for soliciting funds would have an input of requests from management for funding levels. The output of the department is the amount of collected funds. Remember that an input is what is expected from the department, and the output is what the department produces.

3. Write down the specific steps that the department performs in taking its inputs and turning them into outputs. If there are several methods used, write down all of the methods. Follow up with the outputs these methods achieve.

4. Brainstorm with employees on different methods to achieve better results with the output. In the fund-raising department, this could be different telephone pitches, letter-writing campaigns or corporate visits.

5. Assign different employees to follow the different methods. Record the results of these methods. Don’t be afraid to tinker with the methods based on employee input.

6. Evaluate each method or practice after a prearranged period of time to see which one produced the best result. Meet with all employees, and agree that the one that produced the best result will now be the nonprofit organization’s best practice.

7. Try different practices from time to time to see if they produce better results. For a nonprofit organization to have best practices industrywide, the organization must always use the latest technologies and ideas to improve their methods.

Tips & Warnings

• Communication is often a key to ensuring that all employees understand what the best practices are within a nonprofit organization.

• There will always be naysayers to any particular practice within a nonprofit organization.