How Can You Survive a Financial Drought?
One night, our friend Nick joined us for dinner. Afterward, we sat in our living room with after-dinner coffee. The conversation drifted to sore backs. Nick, a deep muscle therapist, moved to the floor to illustrate a lower back technique. My husband joined him, demonstrating something he learned in physical therapy. In a minute, I showed them a similar yoga move.
At that moment, my teenage son entered the room and asked, “What are you doing?”
Patterns of Success
My son saw three adults lying on the floor in different but comparable contortions, all designed for healthy supple backs—each reflecting both its origins and the same core principle.
Likewise, even though COVID-19 isn’t the Great Recession, the fundamentals of surviving that recession are the same patterns that your nonprofit needs to master this financial drought. When you filter out the differences between therapies and yoga, the fundaments of flexible backs emerge. Likewise, by sifting out distinctions between the Great Recession and now, the essentials of how to manage your nonprofit during financial droughts appear.
Financial Droughts Success Patterns
This spring, while talking with a client, I shared a Great Recession success story. After we hung up, I searched my computer files to find it. With the story, I found a forgotten study from 2012.
In the study, five years after the Great Recession, I interviewed more than a dozen CEOs about their experience. The study, which became the white paper, “Nonprofit Income Innovations During the Great Recession.” In it, I analyze the recession’s impact and revenue patterns. Three nonprofit patterns emerged, Nonprofits who five years later were in:
- a better place,
- hoping for better, and
- worse off.
Discover the Pattern
Discovering patterns, reoccurring processes, lies at the heart of my advisory work with nonprofits. We succeed by repeating what works and building on success. Finding the essentials of success—in any endeavor, allows you to focus your limited resources on activities that move the needle, the 12 percent of efforts that make 88 percent of the difference. These essentials become touchstones for streamlining your work.
If you’d like to know more about surviving this financial drought, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to help you see your success patterns and build a customized approach so your nonprofit can be financially healthy and flexible.
