Connecticut Commercial maintenance
A workbook for the seminar presented by the Connecticut Library Consortium, May 11, 2007
Nonprofit Facilities Planning and Management
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CONNECTICUT COMMERCIAL MAINTENANCE
Nonprofit Facilities Planning and Management
For more information contact:
Kevin Galvin
President
Connecticut Commercial Maintenance, Inc.
485 New Park Avenue
West Hartford, CT 06110
860-523-1028
http://www.ConnecticutMaintenance.com
Kate Busch
Strategic Management Consulting
860-232-3398
http://www.StrategicManagementConsulting.org
November 3, 2006
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Table of Contents
Facilities Help Maximize Your Organization’s Mission 2
Facility Management Basics 11
Preventative Maintenance 11
Budgeting and Planning 28
Security and Safety 29
Working with Contractors 32
Ten Things 38
Nonprofit facilities planning and management
Chapter
1
Facilities help maximize your organization’s mission
Your management of your facilities is as mission-focused as the rest of your organization – your programs, your management style, your fund development approach and your public image.
Customer-Focused Facilities Management
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s defined by consultant Peter Drucker, a primary customer is the person whose life is changed through our work. Those for whom we do what we do. Those who must be satisfied in order for our work to be a success
This article from the May 31, 2001 issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy provides another way of assessing “who is the customer?”
Who, Exactly, Are the “Customers” of a Nonprofit Organization?
1
By Mark Kramer
Profit-making corporations have it easy: they know exactly who their customers are. For nonprofit organizations, things are considerably more confusing.
No organization can develop an effective strategy without knowing its customer. But who is the customer of a nonprofit group?
Unlike profit-making companies whose income is derived from their customers, serving the “customers” who are identified in a typical nonprofit mission statement doesn’t ensure that the organization will survive. Without donors and volunteers, most nonprofit organizations cannot sustain themselves financially. Therefore, a nonprofit group’s strategy cannot be derived from its mission statement alone.
Donors ensure survival, and in many ways nonprofit groups treat them as their primary customers. Nonprofit chief executives often spend the largest proportion of their time with donors. Strategic plans are frequently built on fundraising targets, and new programs are frequently attempted because they fit the priorities of particular foundations or major donors.
But acknowledging the donor as the “customer” is a double-edged sword. Few nonprofit organizations would accept a strategy the catered to their financial supporters instead of serving their social mission. Nonprofit groups, therefore, must simultaneously meet the needs of their clients and donors – two very different constituencies that interact in unexpected ways.
Customers, for example, usually determine pricing; a company can’t spend more on its services than its customers are willing to pay. But how much can a nonprofit organization spend to serve its clients?
The clients who benefit are usually not the ones who pay the primary cost. And the donors, who provide financial support, may never have first-hand knowledge of the services they are paying for.
If the donor pays the bill, however, then it must be the donor who sets the price. Nonprofit organizations are left with the paradoxical situation of being able to spend as much on their clients as the value donors place on their service.
That may be why nonprofit groups that provide services that donors themselves value – an Ivy League education or an exhibit at an art museum – can spend much more on their clients than a social-service organization filling a need most donors have never experienced.
Organizations that depend on volunteers have still another group of customers to consider. The estimated value of volunteer hours contributed annual to nonprofit groups in the United States exceeds all cash contributions combined. Besides, given the difference between for-profit and nonprofit wages, one could argue that almost all nonprofit employees are partly volunteers too. And the needs of volunteers are entirely different from those of either donors or clients.
The fact is that every nonprofit institution has three indispensable “customers”: the clients it serves, the donors who support it, and the volunteers or staff members who help get the work done. The failure to serve any one, while tolerable in the short run, will sooner or later undermine its survival.
Each of these customer segments represents a market in which nonprofit groups compete. As much as we may like to think that nonprofit organizations don’t compete, the facts are otherwise. They compete for donors against other fund-raising organizations; they compete for the time of volunteers against other personal obligations and opportunities, and they even compete for their clients. If people do not choose to use the benefits provided, a nonprofit group cannot fulfill its social mission.
Worse yet, each set of customers wants something different. Creating value for one segment doesn’t automatically satisfy the others. If strategy is about serving a set of customer needs better than competitors do, nonprofit organizations must find a way to simultaneously fill the needs of each one of their customer groups.
Foundations must deal with a similar three-part accountability.
They have an obligation to create value for society by using their tax-subsidized resources effectively, but they also must satisfy the needs of their grant recipients if they are to help them succeed. What’s more, they must satisfy their donors and boards if their staff members are to keep their jobs. For them, society, grantees, and their boards represent separate segments that expect – and deserve—different needs to be met.
The problem is, no organization can follow three unrelated strategies to create three different kinds of value for three separate constituencies. A single overarching strategy must be developed to simultaneously meet the needs of all three “customers” in a way that is both internally consistent and mutually reinforcing.
And that makes running a nonprofit organization harder than running anything else.
Living Your Mission: What's Behind 17 Words
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By: Keith Timko
President
Leader to Leader Institute
This is an excerpt from the full article, available on BoardSource.org.
Since the Leader to Leader Institute was founded in 1990 as the Peter Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, the social sector landscape has seen significant changes. The numbers of nonprofits have swelled, and management and leadership resources available to social sector leaders have increased dramatically. Despite the emergence of new leadership approaches, one tried and true concept has undergone little change: the centrality of the mission.
The mission remains the foremost organizing tool, helping to build common understanding and ensuring that programs and activities are aligned. For every organization, the mission explains why the organization exists and provides direction for doing the right things.
Communicating the Mission
Once the mission is in place within an organization, board members, staff, volunteers, funders, vendors, and customers benefit from frequent reminders of the organization’s core purpose. For instance, when people walk into your organization, do they see signs of the mission statement? Is it displayed anywhere in your organization’s physical offices? Does the mission statement appear on your organization’s Web site and in annual reports and newsletters? The following approaches to communicating the mission remind stakeholders of the purpose of their work and their goals.
· Physical plant: In the entrance to ServiceMaster’s corporate headquarters, the mission of the organization is showcased in stone. In many public schools, a mission statement prominently displayed in the front entrance greets students, parents, teachers, and administrators and quickly establishes a common point of reference.
· Web site: Project Hope works to achieve sustainable advances in health care around the world, and employees ensure that the words “health opportunities for people everywhere” are visible on every page of their Web site.
· Board and staff meetings: At KaBOOM! — whose mission is to create great playspaces through the participation and leadership of communities — biweekly staff conference calls include reading thank-you letters and stories from children to illustrate how the organization lives its mission.
· Business cards and printed literature: Many organizations print the mission statement on their business cards. It not only reminds employees of why they come to work, it sends a message to those outside the organization that says “this is who we are and what we stand for.” Business cards are no longer just for staff. One Make-a-Wish Foundation chapter also prints business cards for board members.
The value of communicating the mission is reinforced by an often-told story of a NASA custodian who was proud of his work cleaning and polishing floors. When asked to describe his job, he didn’t say, “I clean the floors.” Instead, he replied, “I help to put men on the moon.” Organizations that truly live their mission help everyone — from the chair of the board to volunteers to new program associates — understand at a fundamental level how individual work connects to the mission of the organization.
Connecting Mission and Results
Board members, staff, and volunteers who have a passion for the mission also want to know that their efforts are achieving results. Like the coxswain, the leadership team of the board chair and chief executive has a responsibility to inform the crew of where they are in relation to other crews and the finish line. Leaders understand that progress reports on results — and particularly the right results given the mission of the organization — are linked organically to living the mission.
With that in mind, leaders who live the mission strive for new and more comprehensive ways to measure their results. They yearn for new sources of information and continually seek input from the board, staff, volunteers, and customers about how they can be more effective in delivering their programs and services. Frequently, these organizations have feedback loops, established indicators, customer surveys, and periodic evaluations that apprise the leadership team of how well the organization is furthering its mission.
Organizations that live their mission also expend considerable effort on increasing staff understanding of the connection among personal accountability, mission, and results of the organization. For instance, the environmental organization cited earlier includes “furthering the mission” as the first accountability item in all board and staff position descriptions. Annual performance reviews are an opportunity to revisit the staff’s passion for the mission and to emphasize the connection between daily tasks and the organization’s results. Volunteers and staff can then say with confidence, “This is how I contribute to the goals of the organization.”
Questions to ask about your program
Nonprofit Finance Fund
How much has your organization changed during the last five years?
Does significant change during the past few years indicate continued change in the future?
1. How much do you expect your program to change in the future?
The more you expect program to change, the more appropriate staying flexible with your facility becomes. If this is the case, renting may allow greater choice until your program is more fixed.
2. How much space do you need?
To answer this question, you need to know how much space you have. Combine that information with your program plan to determine how much and what kind of space you need. The more you need, the greater the up-front costs, which will tent to tip the scales in favor of renting.
3. Does you program require specialized space?
To the extent the answer is "yes", absolutely unique space is required, then owning your own building will be the best, if not the only, choice. To the extent the answer is "no" or "maybe", then renting becomes a possibility.
4. How tied are you to a particular neighborhood?
Changing location can affect how your work is perceived by your donors and audience.
5. What stage is the real estate cycle in?
The pressure to make a facilities change is most intense when choices are most limited-at the top of the real estate market.
© 2000 by the NONPROFIT FINANCE FUND.
Change, Facilities & Program Choices
Nonprofit Finance Fund
Defining long-term program goals is essential before undertaking a major facilities project. Once the facilities choice has been made, programming is "cast in concrete" and changes are very hard to make. Program goals, organizational growth and facilities are linked in the following ways:
1. Facilities are a means to realizing a programmatic end.
Having clear program goals will help you determine what facility best supports those goals. If those goals are unclear or programming is in flux, then making a long-term facilities choice could be premature. In such a situation, renting might make more sense than buying or undertaking a major leasehold improvement.
2. New facilities accelerate an organization's growth.
This is especially true for smaller non-profits (with budgets of $400,000-800,000) for whom growth brings the encumbrances of a larger organization: more people, a management infrastructure and many more external stakeholders. Small organizations, used to being able to make rapid program shifts, often fail to realize they lose much of their program flexibility as they get larger.
A successful plan will entail moving forward while retaining a balance among programming, finances, management capacities and facility. This is difficult because facilities change infrequently: they often appear to be once-in-a-lifetime "opportunities"; and they usually involve large dollar amounts and major organizational changes. These major changes and large costs can throw an organization off balance. For example, programming and occupancy costs could increase much faster than revenues. Such imbalances can threaten an organization's ability to survive.
The plans need to be at least as long-term as the facilities commitment, and preferably longer, since facilities are a means to an end. Seizing a facility "opportunity" before making fundamental program choices forces managers to create new programming - and build a new audience - to make the new space work.
© 2000 by the NONPROFIT FINANCE FUND
Analyzing Your Space Needs
Nonprofit Finance Fund
This page refers to information to be gathered on a Facility Requirements Checklist. See Facility Requirements Checklist for a sample and a blank form.
A. Quantify the space requirements