[Wade R (forum moderator)]

What challenges do you have in your organization in terms of business model and what might be some takeaways from our webinar that may help you?

[Stephen]

I took away four major things from the webinar.
1. Confirmed that leading many nonprofits is highly complex. More so than most for-profit businesses.
2. There are many ways to achieve our mission goals. I used to lead a nonprofit that is highly complex and that worked very well for us to fund our growth.
3. It has been my experience that because so many nonprofit leaders come from the nonprofit world, they are not well equipped to handle the complexity. This is my personal experience and I would enjoy a conversation on the topic with others.
4. Organizing in a hybrid world is very difficult.

[Wade R (forum moderator)]

Thanks for joining Stephen! I agree, coming from the finance side of nonprofit management, that the complexity of funding our organizations is off the charts compared to a for-profit entity of a similar size. I’d love to hear more from others about your point on nonprofit leaders, especially those in smaller organizations, and their handling of this complexity. How do we incorporate this acumen into the overall skill set they need to succeed?

[Ruth McCambridge]

I actually have a different experience of the ability of nonprofit leaders to face complexity of their financial strategies head on – I think many do it astoundingly well but we have few ways to recognize that because we don’t keep track of the successful strategies taken so that others can learn from them, The failures – of course – are also valuable learning moments that we should not all have to repeat. They may, in fact, reflect good ideas that hit a wall we should all keep track of so we can keep innovating.

What else resonated for you yesterday? I will invite Hilda in also to hear what you are talking about as more participants sign in!

[Wade R (forum moderator)]

Good point Ruth. In fact, a comment you made the other day referred to the endless creativity that nonprofit leaders have in facing these complexities. I just met with an Executive Director who told me she is very weak in her finance skills but then proceeded to explain in great detail the financial challenges she is facing and the nuances of her organization’s accounting system. Perhaps it’s a question of naming that intuitive and experience-based ability over the standard skill sets we typically refer to.