Non-Profit Management is Key

Once, again welcome another special guests - my close friend, former college roommate Itzel!

Hi there! My name is Itzel and I’m a recent Harvard college graduate from the beautiful state of California. I’ve had the privilege of working for a few non-profits in Latin America these past four years, some of which were health-focused.

I just came back from a 3-month stint with a Peruvian non-profit called Alianza Arkana (they’re awesome, be sure to check them out!). And one of the many lessons that I’ve learned is that how a non-profit is managed is of the utmost importance.

And yea, it might seem strange that this is one of the things I took away from my time in Latin America, but hear me out.

Non-profit management is key.

That is, the combination of strategies, rules, and methodologies a non-profit chooses to follow are of vital importance, because it ultimately determines how successful they’ll be.Although a non-profit might have an amazing vision, or millions of dollars of funding, or a beautiful website, it means nothing if the day-to-day operations are a mess.

For example, when you’re working with vulnerable and/or disenfranchised populations anywhere in the world, you NEED to provide a detailed orientation for every person involved in the non-profit. This might seem obvious, but in my experience, a thorough, culturally sensitive orientation has been hard to come by. An orientation needs to make clear what the expectations are for the new volunteer or employee and explicitly state what this new volunteer or employee can expect from the non-profit. An orientation sets limits and helps new members navigate the cultural differences that might exist in the communities they are working in. Plus, orientations let new members know what sort of support systems they can rely on when doing their work. When you have a thorough and culturally sensitive orientation, your volunteers or employees can do their job better, because they’ll have a decent sense of what is in store for them, and they’ll know who to go to if they need help. Hooray!

Non-profits also need transparent decision-making structures. Like, who decides what projects the non-profit takes on? Or which volunteers to bring in? Is it a group making these decisions for the non-profit, or is it just one person? These strategies should be explained to everyone in the non-profit (in an orientation for instance). Speaking from personal experience, clear decision-making is a necessity. In a non-profit I worked with, none of the volunteers really knew how decisions got made and we felt unqualified to make organization-wide improvements. This made it nearly impossible for the non-profit to move forward and make positive changes in the communities they worked in.

And lastly: evaluation strategies. Every non-profit should have them and actually pay attention to them. Take volunteer and community feedback very seriously and act on their suggestions. There is no “perfect” non-profit; these organizations should be constantly striving to better themselves so that they can provide the best services possible to the communities they serve.

There are hundreds of other examples of how necessary effective non-profit management is, the points I’ve discussed above are just a few observations I have made recently. And again, the points I’ve made might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at the number of non-profits that have issues with these basic organizational structures. Effective non-profit management is easier said than done, but that’s what makes it all the more important.