Tackling Your Non-Profit’s Backburner Projects During COVID-19 Downtime

First of all, I hope you and your family are safe and healthy. We have all experienced great disruption over the past few weeks and unfortunately, we will need to continue navigating new professional and personal paths for the foreseeable future.

A client of mine reached out to me recently and shared the struggles her non-profit faced with COVID-19. She mentioned that not only has the crisis impacted programs, services, revenue and staff (to name just a few), but it has exposed gaps in all areas of their organization - from front line operations, right up to their board. Many of these gaps were due to projects that were put on the back burner. 

A small silver lining for some organizations will be that this disruption will result in some downtime in the next while once the bulk of the COVID-19 fires are out and we wait for things to return to “normal.”  If there is downtime for your organization in the coming weeks, it is a great opportunity to regroup and tackle filling those gaps and to focus on projects that have been on the back burner. 

These projects could include revisiting your strategic and risk management plans, cleaning up your operational and governance policies and processes, better understanding your organization’s strengths and weaknesses and getting overdue training for your staff and volunteers.

I know for myself, I will be using this time to explore creating podcasts, writing articles, and refining my service offerings - I am ready to accept the challenge!

I’m always here to support my non-profit community, so please don’t hesitate to reach out - I can provide some governance advice or be a virtual shoulder to lean on during these challenging times. 

Yours in Good Governance,

Heather

July 2020