Archives For value

The high cost of seeking product perfection

November 26, 2011 — Leave a comment

Today I almost let perfectionism get in the way of improving my health.

I came across the Jawbone UP, an electronic bracelet that tracks your movements and displays fitness graphs and goals on your iPhone. It’s $99 and thus lies within that magical impulse purchase zone (for me, at least). So I almost impulse-purchased it, but then …

… perfectionism reared its purple head. Just moments ago, I was browsing with increasing glee UP’s drool-worthy features list. To wit:

  • Vibrating inactivity reminders. When I’m sitting too long and not taking breaks, as I am wont to do, it will gently remind me I should be taking better care of my spine, mind, and other important bits.

    • Continue Reading…

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Why I’m recommending Charting Impact to my client partners

June 22, 2011 — Leave a comment

The Charting Impact logo.Here’s a promising activity for your nonprofit board’s next strategic thinking agenda slot:

  1. Write down what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and how you know you’re making real change.
  2. Get a reality check from your stakeholders on the above.
  3. Publish the results for the whole world to see and compare with other nonprofit organizations.

Scary? Not at all, thanks to a new(er) and free resource from the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, GuideStar and Independent Sector: Charting Impact.

Charting Impact is a common framework for strategic thinking and a way to share with stakeholders the change you’re making. According to Diana Aviv, president and CEO of Independent Sector, it’s simple, elegant, easy to understand, and anyone can use it. Charting Impact:

  • Encourages people to invest their money, time, and attention in effective organizations.
  • Helps your organization highlight the difference you make.
  • Helps your organization sharpen your approaches to making a difference.
  • Positions your organization to work with and learn from other organizations.

You do this through concisely answering Charting Impact’s Five Questions: Continue Reading…

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Avoid energy-sapping value threats to your Big Hairy Audacious Goal

February 15, 2011 — Leave a comment

Performance expert Tony Schwartz.

A note to leaders: You, yes you, are human, and you therefore carry and transmit emotions that sap your own and other people’s ability to create value. You create *reverse value propositions* that slow your progress toward the Big Hairy Audacious Goal you want for your organization and yourself.

What drains productive energy from you and others? Feeling devalued, or devaluing others. That’s according to performance expert Tony Schwartz, whose “How your value is critical to creating value” webinar I watched today so I could create some value for my professional coaching clients.

“Value” is getting repetitive here, no? Let me clarify that we’re talking about two kinds of value:

  1. *Being* valued (feeling accepted, acknowledged, respected, worthwhile); and
  2. *Creating* value (e.g. ending hunger through work at a nonprofit organization, or satisfying hunger through work at a for-profit food company).

Being devalued is like staring down a lion

Tony says energy drains from you and others when you feel devalued (not accepted, acknowledged, respected, worthwhile) because: Continue Reading…

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Count outcomes, not outputs, in creating public value

November 1, 2010 — 1 Comment

Jay Connor.

It turns out my sophomore-level public policy students could teach some nonprofit professionals how to count.

Or rather, what to count. As donors demand accountability for results, should nonprofits count services delivered or lives changed? Definitely the latter, according to nonprofit collaboration expert Jay Connor, founder of The Collaboratory for Community Support and author of Community Visions, Community Solutions: Grantmaking for Comprehensive Impact (St. Paul: Wilder Publishing Center, 2003), which lucky Midlands Nonprofit Summit-goers (including yours truly) got for free at his inspiring morning keynote hosted by the Nonprofit Association of the Midlands.

As Connor writes in that book (please bear with the lengthy excerpt, it’s good stuff):

To respond to the problem of measuring impact, the nonprofit, philanthropic, and government sectors have turned to “outcomes” evaluation. This is a step forward from previous approaches to evaluation, which simply counted activities—the number of people attending a job-training class, the percentage of county land set aside for parks, the number of kids participating in an after-school arts program. Recognizing that these tallies do not tell much about whether services are changing people’s lives for the better, funders have begun to request that their grantees provide them with measurements of the outcomes achieved–the attitudes and behaviors that change as a result of grantee services, not just who uses the services (p. 11). Continue Reading…

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