A great presentation could help your nonprofit land that transformative grant, find a new partner, or kick off a strategy that will energize your team. Most nonprofit professionals will give presentations during their career, but few receive training on how to present well. Presentations can be a huge source of anxiety, but they also provide a powerful way to connect with people and spark ideas and opportunities. Here are some tips to improve your next presentation.

Before Your Presentations

Know your audience. If you’re speaking to a group of fundraisers about how to build strong donor relationships, research the biggest challenges fundraisers currently face. What are their pain points when it comes to building donor relationships? What will they most want to learn from a presentation on this topic? Design your talk around that.

Decide where to start and end. Your presentation should tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and ending. Choose an opening that gets people’s attention, and an ending that will leave them with a vision and ideas for how to get there. With those building blocks, you can choose the steps to keep the momentum going in the middle of your presentation.

Simplify your concepts. Place only your main points on your slides. Choose compelling imagery to accompany your slide text, and make sure you use only images that are owned by your nonprofit or available for use, license-free.

Include an itinerary. At the beginning of your talk, give the audience an overview (three or four bullet points) of the main areas your presentation will cover. This keeps the audience invested in where you’re going and makes your presentation more accessible for people who are neurodiverse.

Practice. Practice delivering the text of your presentation in coordination with advancing your slides so you can adjust any places where they don’t match up. Have someone else proofread your slides for typographical errors, readability, and accessibility.

During Your Presentations

Reframe anxiety as excitement. As you prepare to go on stage, tell yourself “I am excited!” instead of “I’m so nervous.” This simple reframing can make you feel more comfortable and confident in your skills and preparation.

Remember the audience is rooting for you. If you stumble over a question, the audience won’t automatically tune out. They took time out of their day to listen to you—maybe they even paid to attend. They want you to succeed, too.

Smile and make eye contact. If your presentation is virtual, keep those eyes on the camera!

Breathe. Presentation jitters can make people talk faster than usual. Take deep breaths from your stomach, rather than shallow breaths from your chest. This will slow your speaking rate.

Involve your audience. Give people opportunities to participate in your talk, not just listen passively. Ask your audience questions. Take a poll through a show of hands or invite virtual attendees to respond to questions using the chat feature or glyphs.

Leave plenty of time for Q&A. If done well, this is the most valuable part of presentations for attendees. Structure your presentation so your audience has time to ask questions. Have a few extra talking points or poll questions prepared in case your audience holds back—but they probably won’t.

After Your Presentations

Reward yourself! How do you like to celebrate a job well done? Whether it’s a cookie, a caffeine jolt, a walk around the block, or a yoga class, do something that makes you feel good after your presentation’s over. Even if you had technical problems or half the audience left early, congratulate yourself on doing something challenging, and learning things you can apply to your next presentation.

Resources

• How to Give a Good Presentation – BetterUp
• Tips for Giving a Great Presentation – Indeed
• Turn Anxiety into Excitement – The Atlantic

We’ve all attended unproductive or pointless meetings. Why am I here? When will this end? Why am I feeling frustrated and confused? But done well, meetings can bring emerging issues to the forefront, catalyze exciting ideas, build consensus, and form a sense of connection and partnership. Here are some ways to make your next nonprofit meeting a productive one.

Before the Meeting

Question whether you need to meet. One of the most important questions to ask is: “Could this meeting be an email?” Be selective. Ask: What issue do I want to explore? Is there a problem I want to solve during this meeting? What is the best possible outcome?

Gather the right people. Don’t invite everyone just for fear of hurting somebody’s feelings, but don’t keep the group so narrow that you miss key perspectives. Consider whose input and knowledge are essential to reach the goals of your meeting.

Consider sharing a simple agenda or overview of the meeting goal and key topics. When you share the goal or purpose of the meeting and the topics that will be addressed, you give people the opportunity to brainstorm ideas on their own in advance. This can be especially helpful for introverts, and allow the group to focus its time together on fruitful discussion.

During the Meeting

Order up! Start with the meeting goal and follow with the most important items. Resist the inclination to tackle the easy items first.

Make time to connect. We meet to get work done, but we really meet to connect, and the pandemic years reinforced the importance of connection. Allow a few minutes at the beginning of a meeting for teams to share responses to a question — even something as simple as “What are you most excited about right now, personally or professionally?”

Start and end on time. Waiting for late participants disrespects people who arrived on time. (If you’re running the meeting, plan to be there 5 minutes early, so even if you’re late, you’ll be on time.)

For larger meetings, consider inviting people to accept specific roles. It’s helpful to designate or seek a volunteer facilitator as well as a note-taker. In some instances, asking someone to serve as a ‘devil’s advocate’ can be helpful. The devil’s advocate identifies possible challenges or gaps in consensus solutions or strategies. Ideally, ask meeting participants to volunteer for these roles. 

Ask open-ended questions. If you already know the answer, it’s not a good question. Open-ended questions lead to fruitful, generative conversations. A few to try: “What resources would we need to do that?” “How can we get better at this task?” “What might we need to do differently to help our clients at this time?” “What are we seeing on the horizon that we should be thinking about?” 

Let others share their ideas before you do. In some team cultures, if the leader expresses a strong view first, others will simply follow the leader. If you’ve already made up your mind, it’s probably too late to ask others for their opinions. If you truly want to hear different points of view, listen before sharing yours.

Give everyone an opportunity to speak. Invite thoughts from people who don’t tend to dominate the discussion by going around the table or virtual meeting room. If someone starts to dominate the conversation, ask them to take over recording notes. That will shift their focus to listening.

End with an action plan. Leave the last few minutes of every meeting to discuss the next steps. Communicate who will make the final decisions on what was discussed at the meeting, when they will do so, and what everyone else’s role is.

Resources

• How to Run a Team Meeting – Calendly
• How to Run Effective Virtual and In-Person Meetings – Slack
• Better Meetings Are Possible. Here’s How. – NPR
• 9 Ways to Make Your Meetings Matter – Forbes

Many workplaces are experimenting with some version of a four-day workweek to help address issues around work-life balance, burnout, and employee retention. Research on four-day workweek trials looks promising, but also identifies challenges. Here are some things to know if you decide to explore this option.

Variations on a Four-Day Workweek

The 32-hour, four-day workweek: Results from trials in which employers cut a full day of work from their schedules, without making up the hours elsewhere, look promising.

The 40-hour, four-day workweek: Workers put in 40 hours a week, typically over four 10-hour shifts rather than five 8-hour ones. The employer gets the same number of hours worked as it would in a five-day workweek, while employees have a 3-day weekend every week.

The 9/80 work schedule (also known as the “nine-day fortnight”): Over the course of two weeks, all team members work a total of 80 hours across nine days. Employees get a 3-day weekend every other week. The work happens through a combination of 9-hour days and 8-hour days. Employees might work nine hours each Monday through Thursday. On the first Friday, they’d work eight hours. They’d get the day off the next Friday and the cycle would begin again.

How to Plan, Test, and Iterate a Four-Day Workweek

Set a strategy. Why is your nonprofit trying this? What goals do you hope to achieve? How will you know if the experiment’s working (or not?) Consider productivity and success metrics before you experiment!

Ask, don’t assume. Ask employees how they would feel about variations on a four-day workweek, what they’d hope to gain from the change, and what would be a dealbreaker for them. Discuss basic questions like these in conversation, rather than endless or anonymous surveys.

Obtain legal advice. Adjusting the workweek may bring labor laws into play in some states. Check your state’s regulations for overtime and how many hours an employee can work per day before overtime pay is required. Under California labor law, for example, a compressed workweek with shifts of more than 10 hours may require that non-exempt, hourly employees be compensated for overtime.

Sync schedules. Most experts advise giving knowledge workers the same regularly scheduled off days and times, so people aren’t pulled into off-hours messages from those on duty. Many experts say working a Tuesday-Friday schedule is most productive. Involve every team or department in planning your workweek schedule to sync up as well as possible.

Pare back tasks and meetings. Some tasks will need to fall by the wayside, especially if you’re shifting to a 32-hour workweek. Look for places where team members unintentionally duplicate each other’s work; those are tasks you can cut. Conduct a one-question pulse survey at the end of meetings to check on the value of the meeting. Cancel regular meetings for which there is a minimal benefit. If you can’t bring yourself to cancel meetings, make them shorter. Consider how you can make decisions in an inclusive way without calling a meeting.

Communicate. Let clients and other constituents know your new working schedule, how to reach team members in emergencies, what constitutes an emergency, and how they can troubleshoot on their own when your team isn’t available.

Shift gradually. The shift to a new, more flexible schedule can often take six months. There are many ways to do it, but some organizations begin with a bite at the apple, taking a weekly half-day.

Prepare to iterate. Talk regularly with employees about how the shift is going and what adjustments need to be made. The shift will likely result in some stressful “cram times” to fit necessary tasks into the new schedule. Prepare employees accordingly. Make sure supervisors are equipped and prepared to have these conversations gracefully and effectively; this effort may require skills they haven’t been required to use yet.

Resources

• 6 Lessons for Businesses Considering a Four-Day Workweek – Insider
• How to Move to a Four-Day Workweek – LinkedIn
• The Smart Way to Shift to a Four-Day Workweek – Bloomberg
• What Leaders Need to Know Before Trying a Four-Day Workweek – Harvard Business Review

No matter what your role at your nonprofit, on some days you’ll have to deliver bad news. You might have to tell an employee they need to improve their job performance. You might need to share with a client that the state has cut the benefits available to them through your agency. Or you might have to tell your board that the construction schedule for your new facility has been delayed—again. Here are some tips to help you deliver difficult news in any circumstance.

1. Prepare.
Gather all the necessary information you’ll need for the conversation. Make sure everything you plan to say is accurate and has been confirmed by any third parties necessary (for example, if your boss has to approve a fix for a client issue, confirm they’ve done so.) Consider how your audience might react to the news, and prepare some possible responses for multiple scenarios.

2. Get the timing right.
Don’t share bad news before you have the basic facts, as that will cause fear and worry. But once you know the facts, don’t wait; a delay could erode trust. 

3. Get to the point.
The first thing your listeners need to know is what’s happening and how it affects them. Focus your preparation for the conversation on the first few sentences of your message. Convey the problem clearly and concisely.

4. Explain.
Share context and background for why the situation arose, and how you’ll learn from it for the future. Avoid blaming other parties for the problem.

5. Keep it simple.
Avoid jargon. Use language your audience will understand.

6. Don’t joke.
Humor at work can be a wonderful thing, but it’s not appropriate to joke when you deliver bad news to a colleague or client.

7. Offer solutions.
Have a few alternative solutions ready for your colleague or client. Make sure to write down the options in advance, so you can help them find a solution even if the conversation gets heated.

8. Hear your listeners out.
Make sure the people you’re talking to get a chance to be heard in full. If it seems like the conversation could continue productively, offer them the opportunity to elaborate on their reaction and share any additional concerns. If the person you’re talking with gets very upset, offer to schedule a time for a follow-up conversation to discuss further.

Resources

• 14 Tips for Delivering Bad News to Customers or Employees – Forbes
• The 8 Dos and Don’ts of Delivering Bad News – CNBC
• 7 Things Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Do When Delivering Bad News – Fast Company
• Giving Bad News Early Has Benefits for Relationships at Work – Radical Candor
• 6 Tips to Successfully Deliver Bad News in the Workplace – U.S. News

Your nonprofit’s executive director just notified the board that they will leave the organization. How do you know if you should hire an interim executive director? Here are some signs that an interim ED could be the right fit for your nonprofit.

High Stress
Your nonprofit is experiencing—or is recently healing from—internal turmoil.

Role Confusion
It’s not immediately clear what skills your nonprofit most needs in your next executive director.

Suboptimal Capacity
The staff struggles with capacity, cohesiveness, or both.

Objective View
The board seeks an objective assessment of strengths and weaknesses.

Blurry Lines
The distinction between governance and management is unclear.

Major Transition
The departing executive director is a founder or has served in the role for a long time

Resources

• Questions to Ask When Your Nonprofit Needs an Interim Executive Director – TSNE
• Understanding the Role of an Interim Executive Director – Harvard Business School

Your nonprofit works hard to build trust with the people and communities you serve. To maintain that trust, you must safeguard the data that clients, constituents, partners, website users, and others share with you. Many nonprofits don’t have an on-site cybersecurity expert, but creating and applying some simple data security principles can make a big difference. With that foundation, your nonprofit can continue to improve its data security as best practices change. Here’s how to get started.

Take inventory. What personal or confidential data does your nonprofit currently have? Whether it’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), or confidential information, where and how do you store it? What user data does your organization possess that it needs to keep private? Who do you need to protect that data from? What are the consequences if you fail? What safeguards do you have in place, and are they sufficient? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a guide that can help your nonprofit explore these questions in detail.

Limit data collection. Don’t collect data your organization doesn’t need or use. Hackers can’t steal data your organization doesn’t possess.

Nail the basics. Require strong passwords for internal and external system and site users. Set up multi-factor authentication, which requires additional information beyond a login and password (like a code sent to your cell phone) to access systems. Require your nonprofit’s vendors to take steps to protect data.

Get encryption. Make sure your office’s network is encrypted and secure. Never use public networks to access your nonprofit’s data. Store any financial information or other sensitive data, including donor and client names, in an encrypted database. Never store data like financial details or passwords in plain text.

Limit internal access to sensitive data. Give employees access only to the data they need to perform their jobs, and make sure only authorized users can access sensitive data. Limiting access allows you to spot any unusual activity more easily.

Don’t snooze software updates. Updates often contain critical patches for security issues. Regular updates are especially important if your organization’s website is built on WordPress, as many nonprofit sites are. WordPress’s popularity makes it a frequent hacker target.

Be transparent. Clearly and prominently describe what data your nonprofit stores and what you do with it. Create privacy policies covering all your services that show what donor, participant, or site visitor information you record and why. Allow website users to opt in to data collection, rather than requiring them to opt out. Give them the opportunity to request a copy of their data. If your nonprofit uses algorithms to make decisions, explain how and when you do so.

Consider limiting or turning off user tracking on your website. If you don’t know what tracking your site uses, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger browser extension can show you.

Avoid data sharing whenever you can, and limit it in all cases. Before your organization shares data with anyone, set guidelines on how the data can be handled. Create a policy on what kinds of data you will share and with whom.

Think about data retention. Your organization may want to automatically delete data as often as it is reasonable.

Resources

• Online Privacy for Nonprofits – Electronic Frontier Foundation
• How to Keep Your Donor Data Safe – Nonprofit Hub
• Data Policies Your Nonprofit Needs – NTEN
• Data Protection: 7 Proactive Ways to Protect Your Organization – North Carolina Nonprofits

At some point in their life cycle, many nonprofits will have to lay off employees, restructure their operations, or make other budget cutbacks. Here are tips to help you communicate the news to employees in the most humane and helpful way possible.

Before Conveying Difficult News

Make a plan. Determine how and when you will communicate the news to employees, as well as other key constituents like funders, vendors, and partner nonprofits. Settle on the timing and process you will use; if you must lay off employees, decide now how much notice you’re able to provide, and when to conduct exit interviews, collect organizational property, and provide referrals to job-placement services as well as references.

Prepare emotionally. You might want to talk with other leaders who have had to lay off employees or announce other cutbacks. Make sure you are prepared to stay calm and remain empathetic in the face of employee reactions, which may range from anger to shock or tears. Consider talking with mental health professionals to address any stress and anxiety you feel.

During the Conversation

Have the discussion in a private place without distractions. News of layoffs should be delivered by the affected employee’s supervisor. 

Team up. Have a second member of your team in the room to take notes on what was said.

Get to the point. Let the employee know right away what’s happening and how it affects their job. Briefly explain the reasons for the decision. Repeat the message if necessary.

Identify next steps. Describe the assistance your organization will offer. Review logistics like when the employee’s computer access will end and how they will turn in their organizational property.

Listen. Give the employee the opportunity to express how they feel. It’s OK to show empathy, but don’t say anything that could be construed as flip-flopping on your decision. Don’t say you know how the employee feels, or that this is as hard for you as it is for them. The most important role you can play is to listen and communicate essential information about what happens next.

After the Conversation

Debrief with the colleague who joined you to deliver the layoff news. The two of you should reflect on how the conversation went and what you might do differently in the future. Hopefully, you won’t have to deliver news of layoffs often, but what you learn from this process can make you better and more compassionate managers and leaders.

Take time to process. Although the conversation wasn’t as hard for you as it was for the employee, it was hard. Give yourself time and space to process that. Ending someone’s employment is a very difficult decision. It merits a moment to breathe. Acknowledge the many emotions the conversation may have brought up for you, and the lessons those emotions may have to teach you for your future as a manager.

Resources

• Communicating About Layoffs – University of Southern California
• How to Tell Someone They’re Being Laid Off – Harvard Business Review
• How to Terminate an Employee (and Be Decent About It) – Nonprofit Risk Management Center

The concept of work sabbaticals has existed for a long time. It’s gaining popularity in nonprofits as organizations work to stem turnover and address work-life balance. A sabbatical gives an employee a designated period of time to disconnect from work and rest, recharge, and focus on other aspects of their lives. If your nonprofit wants to offer sabbaticals, here are some things to consider.

Lay the Foundation

Set standards for eligibility. Historically, executive directors have most often been eligible to take sabbaticals at nonprofits, but many experts urge organizations to extend eligibility to all long-tenured employees eligible. You’ll need to decide how long someone has to work for your nonprofit to be eligible, and any other criteria you wish to establish (such as good performance reviews.) You’ll also need to determine the duration of sabbaticals. For small nonprofits, a sabbatical length of 3 weeks or one month will allow employees to recharge without overstressing the organization.

Determine employment parameters for sabbaticals. Decide whether you will offer full or partial salary to employees on sabbatical leave, and whether and how you will continue their benefits. Make sure that you don’t commit to an overly-generous sabbatical policy that will put stress on your nonprofit’s financial bottom line.

Create a policy and process. Put the criteria to qualify for a sabbatical in writing, to avoid any perceptions of unequal treatment. Remember that if your nonprofit is small, a simple policy is best. For example, you may want to require that employees provide 6 months’ notice of their intent to take a sabbatical.

Get Ready

When an employee has been approved for a sabbatical, take these steps.

Decide who will cover the duties of the person who’s on sabbatical. In a small nonprofit, it may make most sense to divide the employee’s duties into two buckets: the first are duties that can be temporarily suspended while the employee is on sabbatical, and the second are duties that will be performed by a designated back up.

Create a one-pager covering key issues related to the employee’s absence. Make sure to include where to find crucial information like system logins, and make sure the employee’s email, voicemail, and other communication systems have outgoing messages saying they’re on sabbatical, with information about who to contact in their absence.

Provide training to cover new duties. Anyone covering for an employee on sabbatical should be given ample time to learn the tasks for which they will be responsible.

Debrief and Learn

Encourage them to ease back in. It can work well for an employee returning from sabbatical to come back midweek as a transitional period before jumping back into meetings.

Debrief with your whole team. What did they learn during their team member’s absence? How was the sabbatical rewarding and enjoyable for the employee? What did they love about their time away? Miss? This is a great opportunity to share insights the organization could use for the future.

Resources

• Do-It-Yourself Sabbatical Guide for Nonprofits – Durfee Foundation
• Sabbatical: A Viable Tool for the Nonprofit Sector? – Center for Nonprofit Advancement

Wellness experts tout “walking meetings,” in which participants walk while they talk. Movement brings health benefits and can catalyze creative thinking, offset boredom, and even help foster connections among participants. But not everyone has the same level of physical ability. The Nonprofit Technology Education Network (NTEN) encourages “strolling meetings,” welcoming to walkers at all mobility levels and wheelchair users. Here’s a guide to inclusion in strolling meetings.

Most of us weren’t born knowing how to help other humans reach their potential in their careers. Here are some ways to learn to become a better manager at any stage of your journey.