Meetings 101

If you want to have more effective meetings, first you have to learn the basics. Here are some simple, easy-to-follow and proven guidelines that should be followed each and every time your group meets.
Print this page. Hang it on your meeting room wall. Write the guidelines on a poster. Memorize them by heart. Do whatever it's going to take to improve your meetings!

Guidelines you and your group can follow before, during and after your meeting

Read on ...

Assessing Your Organization's Innovation Capabilities

This article offers a framework to help managers confronted with necessary change understand whether the organizations over which they preside are capable or incapable of tackling the challenge.

(...more)

Marketing and media

Q. How regularly do media need to be contacted to keep an environment issue alive?
There is a fine line for groups to walk when it comes to keeping the media updated on a long‐running issue that has been – and will continue to be – in the news.
Not contacting the media often enough can see your story fade from the headlines. But if you contact specific media outlets or journalists too often, you run the risk of being tagged a serial pest and being ignored by the very media you seek to carry your story.
One easy way to decrease the chances of being labelled a serial pest is to build solid relationships with the media outlets and journalists you deal with. This will allow you to bounce ideas off journalists, to call more informally and update them on the latest news about your issue, or to ask them if they are interested in a certain story or angle.
These relationships are especially important when working with the media on a long‐term or ongoing issue – if a journalist knows you, and is familiar with your story, they are more likely to give you more of their time and a friendlier ear.
It also means you can cut down on the amount of “backgrounding” you have to give journalists, allowing you to quickly “cut to the chase” when talking with them.

One key tip: Find out when the journalists in your contact list are “on deadline”. Avoid those times when you make contact and you’ll be less likely to be given short shrift.
Q. As small community not‐for‐profit organisation in what ways can I market the broad range of services we offer? How do I develop a marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy is not something that can be whipped up at the drop of a hat. Assembling a good, solid marketing plan can take hard work, analysis, preparation and knowledge of your current standing and resources.
The first thing you should look at is your group’s current situation: its current stakeholders and partners, its current standing and performance, and the current context or environment it operates in.
From there, a SWOT analysis will build on this information and further clarify the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats which face your organisation. All this information will help your group know the issues it needs to focus its plan around, and form strategies to let you do that – for example: “We want to sign up 50 new sponsors between now and the end of the year.”
Take particular notice of your SWOT analysis – using your strengths and opportunities to best achieve your marketing aims while avoiding or fixing your weaknesses and noting the threats your group might face.
Then, work through an action plan or list of things your group must do in order to achieve its stated objective. What must you do? Who will do it? When will it be done? How much will it cost? How will you know if you’ve achieved those aims?
Finally, examine your resources – your people power, your finances and technology – as well as those resources you might need, and draw up a budget for the marketing effort. Of course, once the plan is approved, it will only succeed if there is constant monitoring, appraisal and review. Keep track of the plan’s progress and, if necessary, modify it. Devote a generous amount of time to the plan’s development to ensure the process is thorough and to increase its chances of success.

The Marketing Guru is an initiative of the Marketing, Media and Post Centre, the online resource for community organisations provided by Our Community and Australia Post. You can send your marketing and media questions to guru@ourcommunity.com.au.

The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings

by Barbara J. Streibel

In our increasingly collaborative work environment, the ability to manage results-driven meetings has become a critical career asset. Let The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings provide you with a step-by-step template for energizing your next meeting, and transforming it from a roomful of clock-watching individuals into a collaboration of involved and enthusiastic partners. (more ...)

Buy the book from Amazon or, if you are a Pivotal Gold Member, request your free copy. Not a member? Join here

The Power of Ordinary Practices

Seemingly mundane things that managers do can have great impact on their workers, says Professor Teresa Amabile. In this conversation with Professor Mike Roberts, she updates her ongoing research on creativity in the workplace by investigating how people's intense inner work lives affect their productivity—and how managers can encourage production.

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How do I get state-wide media to take notice of local issues?

This is a common challenge for many locally-based community organisations which are able to hit the headlines successfully in their local area, but struggle to match this local publicity on a state basis.

The key is to make the issue relevant to the audience you are targeting; in this case, the entire state.

Make it very clear how your local issue is relevant to other parts of the state. Is it opposition tocertain types of development, the destruction of parks or wetlands, a shortage of publichousing, a legal hiccup or government decision that could affect many?

Think of the local issue as an example or case study of the wider problem. Show how it could impact oncommunities across the state.Without this type of wider relevance, hopes of wider media coverage are slim.

Of course, there is also a much greater level of competition for coverage at a state level. You’ll have to work that much harder to gain coverage.

So, in addition to a great hook, it is almost certain you will need to organise good visual opportunities forphotos (print publications) or footage (TV).

Staging an event, protest or some other attention-grabbing activity is one way of doing this. If you do go this route, try to stage your event on a weekend, preferably a Sunday when there’s less competition.

Does it strengthen or weaken my brand to use a new logo in a merchandising program – plastering iton merchandise of relevance to the organisation?

The classic answer here is: “It depends”.

It is very important that your logo is used thoughtfully and in context, not gratuitously or in away that denigrates or cheapens your organisational brand.

Generally speaking, if you are going to use your group’s new logo on merchandise, there are some basic rules to follow:
• Show restraint – Don’t fall into the trap of putting your logo on everything. Pick and choose your targets in terms of what the most number of people will see, and what people will hold on to thelongest.
• Not too large, not too small – Jumbo-sized logos on merchandise look cheap. Too small, and noone will be able to see it. Use a medium-sized logo that doesn’t overwhelm the item it is placed on.
• Convey a message – Where possible, convey your message with your logo. Does your group have ashort slogan, catchphrase or tagline it can use in conjunction with the image?

Respect your logo like you do your group’s good name and reputation. Your logo is an expansion of your group and its brand – damage it, and you run the risk of doing the same to your group and brand.

The Marketing Guru is an initiative of the Marketing, Media and Post Centre, the online resource forcommunity organisations provided by Our Community and Australia Post. Send your questions to guru@ourcommunity.com.au.

Our Community Photo Bank

Our Community and Australia Post are working together to build up a gallery of photos that show the full extent of Australia’s communities and the people who work with them. A total of $5000 in cash prizes is available for photographers who upload images to the Photo Bank, and their nominated community groups. There are two prizes – one for the most popular photo, and another for the photo that best exemplifies the work of Australian community.

The competition is open until October 22, but photos will remain on the Photo Bank indefinitely. Find out more and view existing photographs at
www.ourcommunity.com.au/photobank.

Don’t miss your chance to show the rest of Australia what’s going on in your neck of the woods – and maybe win some loot while you’re at it.

Communication Success Tip

[From Parsons Associates Coaching]

Think before you speak.

Saying what you mean and meaning what you say is the golden rule to communication.

To achieve this, you must hear what you are saying before it is spoken.

This requires pausing for a moment of thought.

Analyze what you plan to say and evaluate whether it sounds like what you mean.

When you speak to someone you don’t have a backspace key to erase what you just said.

Video - Sharing - the Leadership Challenge

See practical examples of this particular style of leadership in change in the public sector

Top Five tips for a healthy event

[From Our Community Matters, the newsletter of http://www.ourcommunity.com.au/]

If you're taking care of the health of both your volunteers and the general public (and you should be), take these considerations into account when planning your next fundraising event.
1. Free and easily accessible water
You may think you can make more money by selling your own cans (and perhaps forbidding other people from bringing their own), but this is very risky. If anyone gets dehydrated you may be held liable. Make sure
that volunteers have a clear source of hydration, even if you have to buy it.
2. Adequate first aid
You may be able to get this expertise from within your own volunteer roster that is, you may be able to arrange for your volunteers to take the course. If n, thought, you'll have to mae other arrangements.
3. Smoke-free areas
This is a no-brainer. Slightly harder is the question of whether to have an entirely smoke-free event. Will this discourage participants? On the other hand, is it ethical to facilitate ill-health? Will it cheapen your brand?
4. Shaded areas
Any outdoors event venue needs to have as much shade as possible.
To set a good example volunteers should be encouraged to be SunSmart (a long-sleeved collared shirt, sunglasses and a broad-rimmed hat when outdoors).
5. Healthy publicity
These tips do involve you doing more work, so you need to get something back for the cause. Try and make it a sales feature. Promote your healthy event in your media campaign and stress how friendly it is to families (working families, even!). Explain any restrictions to volunteers in advance.

Keep it fun, keep it healthy, and minimise risks.

Not just one of the gang

When exploited, a good manager's intimate working relationships with the team can boost performance. Too much closeness could lead to discomfort.

In business, as in sports, winning teams have a well-honed sense of camaraderie that helps team members to read one another's signals, move as one, and watch each other's backs. In management circles, this sense of commitment and connection is often referred to as affiliation. Many experts consider it an essential component of effective teamwork. The more people value their relationships with one another, the thinking goes, the better they will perform for one another and the organisation. But can you have too much of a good thing?

According to a new study of 20 executive leadership teams from Fortune 500 companies conducted by the Philadelphia-based Hay Group, you can. While confirming that affiliation is a crucial component of effective teamwork, the study also showed that too much emphasis on positive relationships, especially by the team leader, could hamper performance.
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Support for volunteering

[Via the Ourcommunity (www.ourcommunity.com.au) newsletter]

Everybody’s always been in favour of volunteering, but now some governments are actually starting to do something to help support it.

The UK Workforce hub has issued a set of National Occupational Standards 2008 for Management of Volunteers to put together all the things that a volunteer coordinator – paid or unpaid – might have to do.

These National Occupational Standards define the whole spectrum of activities involved in the management of volunteers and will help you to carry out this role effectively, with emphasis on
A. Developing and evaluating strategies & policies that support volunteering
B. Promoting volunteering
C. Recruiting, placing, & inducting volunteers
D. Managing & developing volunteers
E. Managing yourself, your relationships & your responsibilities
F. Providing management support for volunteering programs

Each section goes into more detail – the section on Management Support, for example, includes information on promoting your organisation and its services, managing projects involving volunteers, obtaining funds to support volunteering, and more.

Each of these points is broken down further, too, and running an eye down them as a checklist would be a useful exercise for anybody who’s been given the job.

One of the things that’s too new to make the standards under Recruiting also comes from England, where they’re giving universities the option of allowing their students degree credits for their voluntary work – for “experiential learning” they’ve done in the workplace or while volunteering.
Although credit systems are already in operation in most UK universities, up to now there’s been no single system operating across the whole of the country.
So not only are we behind the UK in the medal tally, their universities have also got a much better grasp of the value of volunteering than ours have.

And why are the British doing this? Because, as they say,

The emerging agenda for higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK) promotes lifelong learning, social inclusion, wider participation, employability and partnership working with business, community organisations and among HE providers nationally and internationally. Consequently, higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly recognising the significant knowledge, skills and understanding which can
be developed as a result of learning opportunities found at work, both paid and unpaid, and through individual activities and interests.

Seems sensible.

Over in America, meanwhile, they’re conducting the kind of fine‐grained research into volunteering that we need if we are to hold our own.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, has done surveys to find that
• Volunteers, on average, are about as busy as other people.
• Volunteers don’t make time for volunteering by simply trading paid work for unpaid work.
• Volunteers trade off more than an hour a day of TV watching, on average, to engage in voluntary service. On average, recent volunteers watch approximately 15 hours of television per week, compared to approximately 21 hours for former volunteers and 23 hours for non‐volunteers.
• Volunteers spend substantially more time caring for children than either former volunteers or nonvolunteers do.
• In a typical day, volunteers tend to be more socially connected and interact more with others. For instance, recent volunteers spend 78% of their mealtime hours eating with other people, compared to about 70% for
non‐volunteers.
• Good health is preserved by volunteering; it keeps healthy volunteers healthy.

What’s not to like?

Back here in Oz, though, the Australian Bureau of Statistics funding has been cut, and its coverage of the Australian voluntary sector is cursory at best. Do the American findings also apply here? We can only guess.

Out of Pocket – Out of Luck

Meanwhile, Volunteering Australia has released the finding of the 2008 National Survey of Volunteering Issues. The survey attempts to work out where volunteers are satisfied, where they’re concerned, and what moves them. It’s found, for example, that 98% of volunteers said that they believed their work as volunteers made a difference to their organisation and its work, and 86% of volunteers believed their volunteering increased their sense of community belonging – figures that help the sector’s quest for government recognition of its effect on community health and social cohesion.

The survey looked at Corporate Volunteering for the first time – 38% of surveyed organisations with volunteers had corporate or employee programs, and 57% of those respondents reported that corporate volunteers made an extremely valuable contribution to their organisation.

On the downside, it seems that Australian community groups are being forced to take a harder line on repaying out-of-pocket expenses.
On the other hand, when asked, “Do out of pocket expenses affect your ability or desire to volunteer?” the proportion who said “No, they don’t,” went up from 36% to 60%, so the net effect probably wasn’t large.

Does your organisation offer to reimburse any out of pocket expenses?2007(n = 117)
2008(n = 194)
Yes – in full 27% 28%
Yes – in part 52% 38%
No – we can’t afford it 18% 22%
No – it’s against our policy 1% 7%
No – we haven’t thought about it 1% 4%
Don’t know 1% 3%

Video - Better Meetings

Now this is a great new take on "meetings" ....

Stres control: tough leadership versus Easy Does It

Tough leaders are usually seen as ogres.

Their exacting demands and high expectations add to stress levels. And their obsessive-compulsive behaviour can have a negative effect on results if they don't understand how to control stress to get positive results without serious negative reactions.

The same kind of leadership challenge can be found in the Army. Management at all levels are faced with the decision of "tough leadership" or "easy does it" in preparing troops for combat and on the battlefield.
Article continues

Usability: Bringing User-centred design inside the organisation

Trying to get the spirit of usability and user-centered design (UCD) established internally can be a difficult and isolating experience, even for the most determined user champion.

Introducing change of any kind in organisations is difficult at the best of times, doubly so when you have to break through the concrete walls of 'process' and 'methodology'. The emotional journey of trying to introduce usability is no different to that of a revolutionary, desperately trying to change the status quo through various guerrilla tactics.

This article offers practical advice of what a user champion can do to introduce and embed usability and user-centered design within a company.

(more ...)

For Your Eyes Only

Young Australians can win up to $3000 for a community group of their choice by entering the Your Eyes Only competition. To enter, young people aged 12 to 15 need to submit a creative piece of work that shows the positive things about their community through their eyes. Entries will be judged by a committee made up of young people from right across Australia.
Entries need to be received by September 2, 2008. Find out more at The Foundation for Young Australians’ website at www.youngaustralians.org or call (03) 9670 5436.

Team Building and More

Some very practical ideas to use here...

Summing Up: Why Don't Managers Think Deeply?

What is your organization—and what are you—doing to bring more deep thinking into work and life? According to respondents to this past month's column by Jim Heskett, providing time to reflect, particularly in an era of multi-tasking and the tyranny of technology, was most frequently suggested as an antidote to the dearth of deep thinking. (Online forum now closed.)

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5952.html

Board Development - workshop, Sydney

Where: Sydney
When: 30 July 2008
Start time: 4pm
Finish time: 6pm
Are you a non-profit leader, or a current or potential board member? This afternoon workshop turns the spotlight on what’s required to make your non-profit board deliver. You’ll look at best practice, performance expectations and what it takes to make non-profit leaders and board members work effectively together.

To address the sector’s need for practical and affordable skills development, Social Ventures Australia has developed an integrated program of capacity building workshops specifically designed for non-profit organisations of all sizes and stages of development.

Led by qualified and experienced facilitators who are familiar with nonprofit culture and the unique issues we face, these workshops introduce key concepts of organisational and board development and offer specific techniques on how to apply them to your organisation.

SVA workshops are for non-profit leaders and managers. They’re short, sharp and focused to make sure your time out of the office makes your time in the office easier and more effective.

Why come?

Get tools and know-how that boost organisational outcomes
Apply your learning in real-time
Benefit from experienced facilitators and non-profit peer working
Cost: $200

For more information or to register download the workshop flyer.

Successful Grants and Proposals

Wednesday 16 July

Is funding an important issue for your organisation?

Learn ways to secure funding with successful tenders and proposals.

Back by popular demand!

http://www.training.infoxchange.net.au