Nonprofit management best practices

Management is not something people are born knowing how to do well. It’s not a talent to be nurtured in childhood. It isn’t something only certain types of people can do. No matter our sector, management best practices are learned, not in-built.

Nonprofit management best practices are a suite of knowledge and skills that you develop. Like music or writing, you learn the fundamentals and the basic rules, then apply them to your own creations over and over and over again with greater ease.

Good managers had help

Effective managers had help. If you are starting your management career or feeling overwhelmed at your current level, remember that managers can learn from the people who went before them.

There are not enough days in a lifetime to learn everything you’ll need to know for your work through trial and error. It would take too long to experience every possible scenario, and the stakes are also too high to experiment unnecessarily.

If you want to be a good manager, get a boost from trainings, mentors, workshops, and tools created by and for management and nonprofit professionals.

Willing to learn

Management gets an unfair bad rap. In North American culture, we tend to celebrate “leaders” and “visionaries” who have ideas about how to change the world. Meanwhile, we speak critically of “middle management” and “bureaucracy” when we talk about how those visions come to life.

But, how you manage an organization is ultimately what determines its success. Management is how ideas become reality, which makes it both important and challenging. When you manage, you no longer have the comfort of an unchallenged vision — you have to respond to other peoples’ needs, develop systems to get the work done, and harness the resources to do it.

Management practices weren’t developed to annoy you. They reflect issues and problems that arose in the past. Those issues are common enough that many organizations adopted similar solutions, and that’s how they became “best practices”. If you don’t learn these solutions or choose to ignore them, then governance, equity, or financial management problems will arise.

You don’t know what you don’t know

Anyone committed to social impact work should have a general understanding of nonprofit management best practices:

• If you are a leader, you have to do the management work
• If you are applying for jobs, you want to focus on organizations worth your time
• If you are a board member, you are responsible for ensuring the organization is well-run
• If you are a donor, you want to direct your funds to organizations that will spend it wisely

That said, it’s hard for most of us to know what a well-run organization looks like. We don’t generally cover this in public school or talk about it over the dinner table with our families. We depend on others to guide us.

One of the best free nonprofit management best practice resources: The Imagine Canada Standards Gap Analysis Tool

One of the best guides around comes from the folks at Imagine Canada. It’s the script you can follow to learn what you need to learn — it’s literally a checklist of best practices for organizations of all sizes.

The list of standards covers:

• Mission and Strategy
• Recruitment, Compensation, Succession Planning
• Risk Management, Insurance, and Legal Compliance
• Communications and Consultation
• Policies for Privacy, Complaints, and Whistleblowing
• Board Terms and Meetings

If you want your organization to be well-run, making sure you’re following the recommendations on this list is a natural place to start.

If you are considering working for an organization or supporting it, this also gives you a check list of things to look for. You shouldn’t have to guess if an organization is being well-managed, they should be able to show it.

The Standards Program has an annual certification process, but the checklist is available to anyone for free. It’s an amazing learning resource.

Forget what you’ve learned

The adage about forgetting what you’ve learned doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means learning the words and music so well that you can put down the script, belt out the lyrics, and dance your heart out.

Three hundred years ago, the Haiku poet Basho wrote:

“Abide by rules, then throw them out!—only then may you achieve true freedom.”

The purpose of learning nonprofit management best practices isn’t to follow checklists and do things “right” all the time. The purpose is to develop the governance, management, and communications practices that are key for long-term impact.

Great managers and truly innovative organizations will find ways to make techniques their own over time. Checklists dissolve into habits. Skills and knowledge evolve into culture. Instead of thinking so hard about management techniques, you’ll find yourself dancing through the work, bringing others along with you, and creating change that lasts.

Deeper Dive

• Explore The Imagine Canada Standards Program for non-profits
• Compare your organization to The Standards Gap Analysis Checklist