An Umbrella Group Builds a Network for Members to Swap Management Ideas

BRAINSTORMS

By Heather Joslyn

For 13 years, the National Council of Nonprofit Associations has tried to help its 37 members connect. Each year, the council holds a conference where members can meet and talk about their shared concerns about recruiting, serving, and communicating with their states’ charities. The national umbrella group also runs other projects, such as an e-mail list, to link its members. But, says Audrey R. Alvarado, the council’s executive director, such fleeting contacts didn’t fully satisfy members’ needs to pick one another’s brains.

Early last year, she, other council staff members, and leaders of various member groups began expressing a desire to link the group’s members even more closely together. “We talked about formalizing what our network does best, and that’s sharing information,” she says. From these conversations came the council’s Peer Exchange Program, which provided money for employees of state nonprofit associations to visit one another’s offices for up to three days to soak up new ideas about managing their operations.

The program was unveiled to members during the council’s annual conference in Albany, N.Y., last June, says Ms. Alvarado, and was considered a short-term pilot program. Until the end of 2001, members would be invited to apply to send an employee or trustee to another member group. The visitor’s travel expenses, up to $1,000, would be covered by the national council, while the host site would be given $500 to help pay for its staff members’ time, with the money coming out of the council’s general operating budget. After the visit, the host would be required to file a report with the council on the experience.

The council did not limit the number of participants, and in the end, five organizations requested six peer exchanges (representatives of Utah Nonprofit Associations visited both the Georgia Center for Nonprofits, in Atlanta, and the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits, in Raleigh). Visitors chose where they wanted to go, and most made their trips late last year.

Valerie Venezia, director of membership and service development of the Council of Community Services of New York State, in Albany, visited the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Baltimore, for two days in December. She selected the Maryland group, she says, because it is like her organization in that it provides a lot of one-on-one management assistance to its members. Ms. Venezia has worked at the New York group for two years, after she left a job at a for-profit Internet company, and was seeking a wide range of information about the nonprofit field from her peer-exchange visit. “Since I’m kind of new to the nonprofit sector, I really wanted to get some best practices out of [the peer exchange], systems that can make our work easier, that can make sure that I’m doing the best that I can for my nonprofit members,” she says, specifically information about group purchasing, bargaining, and providing management assistance.

Upon arriving at the Maryland group’s offices, she was presented with a packet of information from Nancy Hall, the organization’s director of finance, marketing and member services, on a range of topics, from membership recruitment to employee benefits. In addition, she says, she spoke extensively with Ms. Hall about how the Maryland group works with its nonprofit members. On the second day, she sat in on a budget meeting. “They’ve got a great system down there,” says Ms. Venezia. “I was impressed by it and have implemented a couple of those things here in New York.”

Her group is currently trying a small-scale program of training for its members, emulating the Maryland group’s comprehensive selection of tutorials on such topics as board governance, employee benefits, and computer technology. She also learned from Ms. Hall how to download from the IRS’s Web site every month a list of organizations that have been newly designated as charities, in order to find new members. And she keeps in touch with Ms. Hall, she says: “It’s almost moving into a mentoring relationship, which is how I think the Peer Exchange Program should move.”

Sharing Resources

The North Dakota Association of Nonprofit Organizations, in Bismarck, had a visit from a neighboring group, the South Dakota Nonprofit Association, for three days in December and covered a variety of topics, from assembling a newsletter to working with state agencies, says Brenda Dissette, North Dakota’s executive director. Both organizations have been operating for less than four years — Ms. Dissette is the only paid staff member of her group, and the South Dakota group is entirely volunteer-run — and the peer exchange prompted the two young associations to brainstorm ways that they might share resources, even considering the notion of merging the two groups.

In the nation’s capital, the Washington Council of Agencies met with three representatives from the Florida Association of Nonprofit Organizations for a day and a half last December. Betsy Johnson, the Washington group’s executive director, says that her employees found themselves asking the Floridians questions as often as they answered them. “We all know each other” in the national council, says Ms. Johnson. “We have the opportunity to meet each other here and there, but we never really have the opportunity to go to the other organization and say, ‘Now, how do you do this? What problems do you have? How do you overcome those problems? What is your environment like that makes it different than my environment?’ And just have a leisurely conversation to just knock ideas around. And that’s what this peer exchange did. It’s fabulous, and they need to continue to do it.”

The exchange itself may be as important as the particulars the nonprofit managers discuss, Ms. Alvarado says. “It’s just as valuable that people get a sense that they’re in similar straits, or that the other groups are having some problems, or that the visitors say, ‘You know, I got to share some information about what we’re doing, ‘” she says. “It becomes much more of a process where both were learning.” The state associations’ similar missions, she says, can inspire close communication. “You don’t have to explain to the other what you’re trying to do because you have a grounding in the same things. So you already have a head start in sitting down to share information.”

Future Plans

The National Council of Nonprofit Associations is pleased with the Peer Exchange Program’s initial results and is now seeking grants to continue the program. (The cost, Ms. Alvarado says, would depend on how many members want to participate in a given year.)

If the program continues, she says, the council may take more of a matchmaker role in pairing visitors with hosts, so that a visitor will get the specific expertise he or she seeks. It also intends to require more preliminary communication between the parties involved in peer exchanges to make the visits more productive. “Once the partnerships are made, [we would] then have the groups chat with each other prior to the visit, so it’s more extended,” she says. “So that rather than one or two days [at the host site], you’re building the relationship prior to them knocking on the door and saying, ‘I’m here! ‘“

The future, she says, may also see the council putting together peer-exchange events focused on specific topics, such as emerging groups’ concerns or technology, documenting their advice and distributing the information widely among its members.

If the program continues, says Ms. Venezia, the national council should provide members with more information about each state organization’s areas of expertise; such information would be especially helpful to those individuals, like herself, who are new to the state-association network. Sharing an agenda, pre-visit, with both the visitors and the members of the host’s staff, as the Georgia Center for Nonprofits did before visitors arrived from Utah and the Donors Forum of Chicago, may also help make peer exchanges most productive, says Karen Beavor, executive director of the Atlanta group.

The peer-exchange concept is also being considered by some of the council’s members as something the charities that belong to state umbrella groups could adopt. “Obviously, the money issue would come up,” says Ms. Venezia, “but that might be something the state associations could take on to facilitate.” For the time being, she says, her group is considering setting up e-mail lists dedicated to specific topics that will allow its members to swap management ideas.

Whatever happens to the Peer Exchange, says Ms. Johnson, its principles can’t help but aid nonprofit managers. “People benefit by talking to other people, period,” she says. However, she adds, most groups in a given region that have similar missions already have some kind of relationship. What might be most useful, she says, is for state organizations to help charities build peer-exchange bridges across diverse nonprofit fields. “The people who serve the homeless don’t talk to the AIDS folks, for instance,” she says. “We believe that part of our reason for existing is to pull these folks together to begin dialogues, and we try to do it as much as we can.” Representatives of many kinds of groups, for instance, might attend a seminar on trustees or budgeting and find common ground. “But we can’t just call someone from the homeless community and someone from the AIDS community and say, ‘Sit there and talk to each other.’ They need something to talk about.”

How does your charity share ideas with its peers? Tell us about it in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.