The Right Directors Build a Winning Team
There is a lot of concern about executive leadership in the nonprofit sector – recruitment, transition planning, onboarding, etc. Less discussed, but frankly every bit as important, are your nonprofit’s director-level leaders. These are the integral mid-level managers who keep the wheels turning, moving your organization toward its goals. Their expertise in functional areas ensures effectiveness in fund development, programming, communications, and systems. They develop and activate the teams that execute your strategic and operational plans, providing guidance to lower-level staff and volunteers.
Director positions are designed to relieve the Executive Director’s or CEO’s administrative burden, operating independently and complementing the chief executive’s efforts. Functional directors complement the expertise and activities of each other as well, creating a well-rounded team. With a solid corps of directors in place, a CEO is free to focus on strategic development, high-level donor cultivation, and board relations.
In short, directors bridge the gap between strategic goals and operational reality. Their performance can make or break a chief executive’s ability to achieve a nonprofit’s vision. Why, then, are these high-stakes roles so hard to fill?
The reasons are clear.
Recruiting is Exhausting, and Expensive
The prospect of crafting job descriptions, placing ads, reviewing endless streams of resumes, and performing time-consuming interviews is enough to make any busy chief executive groan. And we haven’t even gotten to onboarding! An extensive search that drags on for months drains staff time, puts pressure on those who are asked to pick up the slack, and places critical tasks at risk. And even after all of that, searches do not always end with a positive, lasting outcome.
Search consultants can take on a good portion of search responsibilities, but this presents an additional cost to the organization and still requires involvement from the chief executive and search committee.
Good People are Hard to Find
It’s true. The competition for top nonprofit talent remains fierce. In its 2024 report, State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need To Know, the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that “About half of surveyed nonprofit leaders report having had some to a lot of difficulty filling staff vacancies in the last year.”
Which means it is more important than ever that you avoid outsized expectations for staff roles. I see a lot of job descriptions that are more suited to hiring a unicorn than a real-live director-level professional. Trying to find one person to cover everything from data management to major gift fundraising is a recipe for failure. If you hire on the premise that someone “can learn” an unrealistically wide range of functions, you are setting them up for failure. On the off-chance you happen to locate that one-in-a-million individual, an impossible workload sets them up for burnout and, well, you get the idea.
Budgeting for Staff Positions is Concerning
An inadequate budget for a position will starve your efforts as well. It’s not just about offering competitive salaries. You must make sure the position has the budget and resources to be successful. For example, the best fundraising professional in the world will struggle if they do not have a well-managed and accurate database, a travel and expense budget, supplies, and administrative support.
There is a Better Way
Cheer up! There is a flexible, budget-friendly solution to getting the director-level support your nonprofit needs. With a fractional staffing approach, you can seamlessly engage exactly the functional expertise for exactly the time and duration you need. Gone are the endless rounds of resume reviews and interviews. On-boarding and off-boarding are a breeze.
You may need a communications director, but for only 20 hours a month. Or perhaps a data management expert for only six months, to clean up your systems and train your in-house team. A nonprofit virtual assistant can enhance overall productivity by relieving the burden of too many administrative tasks shouldered by director level professionals.
Fractional staffing is the ideal strategy for growing your operation because you can easily adjust your fractional team as your nonprofit’s needs change. With fractional staffing, you can fulfill your precise needs for director-level knowledge and experience at a price you can afford.
A Winning Team is a Phone Call Away
Ask me how a fractional approach can take your nonprofit from “getting by” to “scaling up.” We can help you take an objective look at where you are and where you want to go and recommend an initial fractional strategy to get you there. We stay in touch to ensure that our clients have the team they need as needs change, and we are always just a phone call away.
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