Operational effectiveness requires intentionality, effort, and technical skills. A pervasive challenge in the nonprofit sector is that funding for building a core business foundation is often constrained, requiring difficult financial tradeoffs.

Op-er-a-tions

(noun)

An organization’s structure, staffing, and business practices, including:

  • Annual planning & budgeting 

  • Communication & decision making

  • Diversity, equity, & inclusion

  • Facilities & remote engagement

  • Financial management & accounting

  • Human Resources

  • Information Technology

  • Risk, legal, & compliance

Why Operations Matter

An effective operational infrastructure is foundational to an organization’s ability to advance its mission, enabling:

  • Financial management strategies that drive sustainability and build trust and relationships with staff, boards and finance committees, and partners;

  • Effective communication practices that foster alignment across teams and empower collaboration and decision making;

  • People-centered practices that boost retention and organizational culture; and 

  • Operations staff that feel valued and see a direct connection between their work and impact.

It’s all too common to find founders, program staff, and volunteers spending time piecing together these systems, which require skills very different from what makes them effective leaders, fundraisers, and program builders. Many organizations never make it out of this lifecycle stage. For those that do and eventually hire staff or external support, they find themselves spending significant time and resources playing “catch up” to build a reliable operational foundation.

This inefficiency perpetually weakens the nonprofit sector, harming organizations’ effectiveness in solving our world’s most challenging problems, contributing to burnout among nonprofit talent, and creating unnecessary redundancy as each organization works to solve similar challenges absent expert guidance.