Manatee Community Foundation, Manatee County Government and United Way Suncoast are partnering to help investors in our community make better funding decisions based on nonprofit results.

On Thursday, December 7, outcomes guide and Manatee County Government consultant Hal Williams led a “results-first” workshop on behalf of the three organizations to help nonprofit board and staff members with practical steps to better define, track, verify, and communicate results of their programs and services.

Download the PowerPoint slides here.

Here are great guiding documents mentioned by Hal during the workshop:

1. Describing Work: The Job vs. The Result gets you into result descriptions with examples I think you can use to try this approach in your organization. Begin with yourself!

2. Targets for Meetings is something you can start in a day. Don’t call a meeting to discuss this. Just do it! And build on what works.

3. Sparkplug leaders for projects amplifies the slides on key characteristics of effective persons. Note how many are about attributes vs. knowledge or even skills.

4. The Energy in Organizations article drills down on the factor I think is most predictive or organizational and personal accomplishment.

5. Strategy and Planning gets to the core of “strategic” and suggests options to the plan as a document to be wordsmithed. You can follow this guide for your own “planning” and discover that real strategy is far more insightful and far shorter than most discussions on the topic.

6. Definition by Achievement. An example. See how short results are. This group started getting a lot more money when they traded in a long report for this brief on what they accomplished. I note that putting results on your website and in your elevator speech was the Number One response to the question of what you want to do with what sticks with you.

7. Collaboration vs. C-Three was not discussed but in terms of Results First it is critical. Note how different collaboration can and should be from cooperation and coordination.

Finally, here is the application for the Results-First Leadership pilot being offered at the beginning of 2018. Please complete your application by December 20, 2017 at 5:00 p.m.