Cutting Costs, Part 1

In the face of government budget cuts, declining revenues from private donors and the Great Drying Up of America's foundations, many of us in the non-profit sector are exploring unconventional fundraising strategies. You know what I'm talking about.

In these creative moments, it's also a great time to think more about compensating for declining revenues by lowering overhead costs as much as possible. Other than ordering fewer pens, How? Simplify.

The best way (albeit not the easiest) way to lower overhead dramatically is to create efficiencies by re-engineering your organizational processes. In other words, re-think the way you do things. You might just find you can significantly reduce the amount of time you let get away from you.

First, if your organization doesn't have it's processes written down, this is a good place to start. There are so many good reasons to make sure you have your stuff down on paper - training, data integrity, conflict management - did I say training?!!! Also, writing down your processes in procedures is often a forcing mechanism for working together as a team. All in all, it's a very valuable process for your organization.

Once you have written down the operating procedures, the fun starts. Working together, you will cut unnecessary steps and redundancies within roles and across programs. The goal is to cut the fluff you don't need. Be ruthless! If it's not necessary, axe it.

There's a good reason why more organizations don't do this: it's really hard. Which brings me to a second major point: Embarking on such an endeavor requires buy-in from the very top of your organization. It requires a minimum time commitment from all staff. Without that buy-in, the initiative probably will not reach fruition.

So, given the challenges of achieving such a feat, there must be some pretty big rewards, right? I think so. More on how re-engineering your processes will lower your organizational overhead next time!