Managing an NGO: a full guide for doing good more productively
Over the last few years, I’ve volunteered and worked for different NGOs on different continents. Their causes ranged from integrating war refugees in German cities, over reducing the suffering of the poorest in Argentina, to educating on reducing animal suffering. These important causes were never tackled as much as they could have been tackled. At all these NGOs, there’s a lot of work and motivation lost, due to an ineffective way of structuring tasks, meetings, and communication.
In most NGOs you will quickly see one or multiple of the following:
- Slow decision making, due to lack of feedback of key people or group
- Redundant, ineffective communication and information being lost
- Too much focus on intentions versus outcomes
- Overvaluing while misunderstanding a non-hierarchical organization
- Lack of knowledge sharing and knowledge building
- Unfocused long meetings with not a lot of concrete outcomes
- Varying commitment and skills of volunteers makes planning hard and often leads to tasks left undone
It’s sad to see these organizations operating so far away from their impact potential. If they paired up their good intentions with best practices from the corporate and startup world, they could achieve so much more.
I’ve seen quite an impact on several NGOs’ effectiveness by implementing a system based on the pillars of
- Effective mission statement & goals: necessary basis for all operations
- Effective meetings: agenda lists, action items, & meeting discipline
- Efficient decision making: decentralizing responsibility & organizational structure
- Effective communication: sync/async, transparency, & topic relevance
- Effective task management: enablement, responsibility, & commitment
- Effective learning: culture & retrospectives
Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover each of these principles with an article. While optimized for small- to medium-sized NGOs with a fair share of volunteers, a lot is inspired by “High output management” by Andy Grove, arguably one of the best management books of all time, and “The Great CEO Within”. The latter is hosted on Google docs by its author and states:
“When you say it twice, write it down. (…) To vastly improve the quality of the communication, and reduce the amount of time that you spend communicating it … write it down.“
Well… and this is exactly why I want to write these articles.
Finally, I will also present a concrete implementation of tools following these principles, taken from one of my active volunteering projects. Bonus: the implementation will rely only on tools that are free for NGOs.
Spoiler alert: the principles will be much more important than the tools.
If you’re an NGO and interested in working with me, feel free to reach out. I’m taking pro-bono projects.
