Summary: in today’s podcast, Delashea Strawder from Mosaic Youth Theater of Detroit and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the importance of core values for nonprofits. Every nonprofit craving sustainable growth and progression should ensure that it has some guiding principles that undergird its decision to remain focused on its target goals. Nonprofits’ core values are road maps that facilitate the execution of nonprofits short and long-term projects.

Nonprofit Core Values 

For owners of nonprofits, having some principles that provide your organization with a clear purpose and direction is critical to actualizing your nonprofit’s vision and mission. Nonprofits’ core values are essential in building trust among donors. Nonprofits’ core values are signage that helps in better understanding what nonprofits stand for, what they do, and how they do it.

Plus, nonprofits’ core values ensure that staff, board members, donors, volunteers, and supporters are working in tandem toward the same shared ideas. It also helps to make clear to nonprofits stakeholders the reason behind the organization and strategies to attain set goals.

Moreover, core values, envisioning futures, and leading forward are the bigger pictures that really make a difference in nonprofit organizations. Still, many nonprofits make the mistake of concentrating on the present with little attention to long-term plans. 

The management of nonprofits should think about whether their values align with the organization’s greater mission and ensure that the entire community imbibes the nonprofit’s culture.

Build a Strategic Plan

Besides doing the day-to-day, nonprofits management should create a specific strategy for a plan of execution. In other words, there should be a systematic approach for implementing and evaluating the results regarding nonprofits’ overall long-term goals. In addition, strategic planning focuses on integrating various departments within nonprofits to achieve strategic goals for the optimal operations of the organization.

Then again, strategic planning involves leveraging considerable thought and due diligence on the part of the high-level management to settle on a plan of action and set out to achieve them with the most result-oriented approach for effective management function.

Strive for Excellence

Excellence for nonprofits is essential for the successful implementation of their program. That said, it means what you are doing well today should be done better tomorrow and even more perfect in the days ahead. For nonprofits, excellence means the passionate dedication of leaders and managers to the continual improvement of the key processes through creativity and innovation to promote better work conditions, foster teamwork, and enhance motivation levels. 

Everything about nonprofits should be tilted towards perfection. For example, volunteers and nonprofit employees should be equipped with the necessary skills to deliver sustainable quality services while remaining committed and responsible to the organizational core values.

Get the Right People

The importance of human resources in every organization cannot be emphasized. Every nonprofit should strive to recruit passionate and committed people to their cause. This means working with a team whose values align with your nonprofits, making it easy for your organization to reach its objective without veering off course. 

Your nonprofit’s culture should be clearly spelled to resonate with your workers for effective operation. Frictions usually occur when there’s a mismatch between the organizational mission and vision and workers’.

Leadership Skill

For nonprofits, there’s no denying that leadership helps in the planning and execution of core values. Leadership has a significant place within nonprofits operations. Good leaders motivate others to cooperate in carrying out the necessary tasks in the organizations. Leadership skills include empathy, courage, delegating functions, and great learning ability. 

Leadership helps to create nonprofits’ culture and developmental direction. Plus, leaders handle unexpected challenges, deal with conflicts, delegate duties, and help in the day-to-day of the nonprofits. 

Conclusion

The success of every nonprofit is largely dependent on its core values. In other words, every nonprofit should ensure that its organizational vision and mission are clearly stated for effective operation. A well-established nonprofit culture ensures that nonprofits stick it out and follow through with their intended goals without deviating even when faced with challenges. Nonprofits’ core values help them achieve both their immediate and long-term objectives more effectively.

Learn More About Our Guest

A champion of arts and culture and its inherent ability to motivate, empower and mobilize, Delashea Strawder celebrates every opportunity to inspire individuals and communities to embrace the arts as vehicles for positive change. She is the Executive & Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Mosaic Youth Theater of Detroit, a creative youth development organization that uses the arts to mentor, empower, and support youth to thrive. As an artist and arts administrator working at the intersection of education, arts & culture, and social justice Strawder knows firsthand how music and theater can foster engagement, transform communities, increase opportunity, and promote equity.

About The Host, Stephen Halasnik

Stephen Halasnik is the host of the popular, The Nonprofit MBA Podcast. The Nonprofit MBA podcast’s purpose is to help nonprofit leaders. Stephen is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Financing Solutions, a leading provider of loans for nonprofits in the form of Lines of Credit to nonprofits. Stephen is a best-selling Amazon author and is considered a leading authority on building great, purpose-driven businesses. Stephen lives in New Jersey with his wife, Gina. Mr. Halasnik’s number one purpose is raising his two boys, Michael and Maxwell, to be good men.

10% of profits from Financing Solutions is donated to charity.