What Breaks First?

Here's a question I think nonprofit leadership teams should be asking themselves right now: If demand for your services increased 20% next year—while revenue stayed flat and operating costs continued to rise—what would break first?

Not because I think we need another doom-and-gloom forecast. We certainly don't.

But because the conditions surrounding community-serving organizations are changing. Families are feeling higher costs. Organizations are feeling higher costs. Funding isn't guaranteed to grow at the same pace as need. And, we don't really don't know what's going to happen next.

So I think it's imperative, that we make sure we're setup to not only withstand the shifts that may be coming, but fortified to meet the demand.

To get started, here are a few questions I'd start asking my team:

• Where are our systems lacking? What processes become bottlenecks as volume increases—and where could better systems help us move faster or create capacity?

  
  

• What does our staff need to be fortified? If the answer to increased demand is simply asking good people to do more, that's not a sustainable capacity strategy.

  
  

• What resources are we underutilizing? Are there partnerships, volunteers, technology, community relationships, physical assets, funding relationships or other resources already available to us that could provide supplemental capacity?

• And perhaps the most uncomfortable, but critical question: If we do nothing to prepare, what would actually break first? The answer determines your priorities.

Sometimes resilience starts by looking honestly at the organization you have today and asking: If more were asked of us tomorrow, where would we need to be stronger? That's a question worth asking before you need the answer.

Rooting for your success,

Robin