capacity building

5 Pillars of Capacity Building

Strategic Planning

Capacity-building strategies facilitate the development of organizational infrastructure and assets needed to efficiently and effectively advance an organization’s mission long-term. Capacity building is not a short-term process. It is future-focused and ensures the organization can continue to generate social value and produce positive community outcomes well into the future. 

Capacity-building efforts can include the following five focus areas: 

Personnel development which equips all members of the team with the training and resources needed to complete their tasks. Building team capacity also includes leadership succession planning to explore the organization’s future needs and begin mapping out a strategy to prepare current staff or recruit new staff to fulfill these roles. 

Technological development ensures that the organization has access to the hardware and software available to serve their community, measure program impact, and report the results through multiple channels of communication. 

Community engagement can be a powerful, multi-faceted capacity-building tool to ensure that the organization maximizes social and human capital. Often nonprofit leaders overlook untapped talent in our communities such as senior residents with valuable knowledge and life experience or professionals that offer quality pro bono services. Community engagement can also create a future board or workforce pipeline and create opportunities for grooming future leaders and team members of the organization.

Board development can ensure that each board member has a specific role that is clearly defined and aligned with their talent, resources, and interests. Each board member should have a performance rubric for tracking and progress reports. 

Finally, as the pandemic and other recent crises have demonstrated, capacity building strategies must include disaster resilience.  Any organization serving vulnerable populations such as low-income families, seniors, or special needs communities should assess organizations capacity scenarios during pandemics, cyberattacks and natural disaster emergency operations. This preparation might include using your facilities as a shelter or staging area for emergency personnel, preparing non-perishable foods for distribution or purchasing generators or solar panels as back up during power failures. Obtain access to multiple buildings and vehicles across a wide radius in case your main facilities are inundated or compromised during a significant storm event or other natural disaster. Coordinate with other organizations, businesses, and building owners in the area to ensure access to multiple locations for sheltering displaced populations and for, storing and staging food.

Based on our experience, these are five of the essential capacity building focus areas that organizations must consider. Depending on your organization -the people you, serve as well as emerging trends in politics and demographics – there may be variations on the strategies presented here. 

Capacity building efforts should begin with a meeting with your team, your core constituency and key stakeholders to discuss concerns about the present and future needs of your community.

 

A Recruitment Plan for Uncertain Times

Resources

For most organizations, recruiting the right leader is a grueling process. A poorly designed recruitment process will yield applicants that aren’t the right fit and prone to turnover if hired. Making the wrong choices can be very expensive and time consuming. Not to mention the headache and stress of having to manage the termination process. 

The average cost of firing and replacing nonprofit executives is 10%-20% of the annual salary or the position or $10,000 -$50,000. Yikes! This cost includes losses in productivity, loss of contracts, staff time, hiring expensive consultants to fill gaps and recruitment, hiring and onboarding costs. If you run a small to midsize nonprofit organizations this cost represents a large portion of the operations budget. Having to repeat this process within a short time frame can deal a huge blow to your budget. 

Beyond finding the right fit in this moment, our team at ILE urges leaders to recruit with the future in mind. This includes hiring candidates that will expand organization capacity long-term by bringing new competencies, skills and industry connections, while demonstrating potential for future leadership succession -you also want to ensure that the candidate will stick around long enough to see all of this to fruition. 

To ease the process for leaders immersed in recruitment, ILE has created a series of worksheets that can be used to design effective and efficient recruitment strategy and processes.

Below, we’ve shared one of our worksheet that outlines competencies and corresponding behaviors. 

We suggest selection committees focus on specific behaviors and outcomes when evaluating candidates’ stated competencies. For instance have candidates describe examples of how they have demonstrated any competence or skill listed on their resume and the specific successes and outcomes yielded as a result of their actions.

Selection committees can use this worksheet to rank the top competencies required for short- and long-term goals; develop job postings, generate interview questions and questions for references. 

Our list of competencies is not exhaustive nor ordered. So use this worksheet as a reference. Share it with your team, constituents and stakeholders. Add additional rows and rank  competencies and behaviors based on order of importance for your organization and your community. Use the last column to evaluate the candidate on each competency and relevant behavior. You may decide to edit a few sections to suit your organization’s needs. 

Competencies

Behaviors

Rank Top Skills & Explanation

(Complete this section for each candidate) 

Critical Thinking

Connecting the dots, consistent reflection, applies data and knowledge in the right context.

  

Talent Management and Development

Efforts result in good hiring and retention outcomes.Onboard, train and directly coach and mentor personnel or effectively assigns mentorship. 

Keep inventory of expertise and skills, effectively and efficiently delegates responsibilities, able to evaluate personnel performance and provide guidance on professional development.

  

Communication

Manage the production of internal reports for staff and stakeholders. Can produce publications and presentations for diverse audiences (clients, stakeholders, general public, founders).Communication promotes/reinforces organization brand and vision.

  

Organizational Skills

Plan, prepare and prioritize day to day operations and special projects. Anticipate problems and preemptively develop solutions.

  

Quantitative skills

Benchmark and quantify operations and program issues. Can balance the use of qualitative and quantitative data.

  

Technology

Direct or train staff on technology needs. Establish policies on the appropriate use of software applications. Proficient in three or more software applications commonly used by nonprofits for productivity, project management, database management, web content management or social media.

  

Regulatory processes/compliance

Direct and manage staff and consultants in completing reports for fund and contract compliance, state and federal reporting and filings.

  

Information Management

Direct and establish procedures for compiling and safeguarding, distributing and deleting organization information, files and artifacts.

  

Creativity

Marshall resources toward their most productive use. Foresee and plan for the future. Effectively communicates vision and successfully oversees its implementation. Demonstrates agility, converts challenges to opportunities.

  

Growth Mindset

Embraces challenges. Focuses on amplifying assets within a community or organization to overshadow and mitigate deficiencies.

  

Systems Thinking

Maps internal and external systems and the interplay between the two. Maps systems interaction and impact on organizational practices, people, policies and vice versa.

  

Change management

Manage culture shift (behaviors, practices, rewards and repercussions) required to facilitate change. Establish benchmarks and metrics to track progress and impact.

  

Collaboration

Practices shared leadership, shares decision making with others. Values diverse voices. Seeks consensus and compromise wherever possible.

  

Personal Growth

Practices reflection and personal goal setting, constantly pursues formal and informal professional development. Pursues coaching and mentoring. Effective at work-life balance.