 We are so glad you're here. It's another episode of the nonprofit show. And today I'm so grateful that Elizabeth Wolfe accepted my invitation. I met her in Chicago as we were both presenting at another conference and really enjoyed meeting you, Elizabeth, and learning more about you. So Elizabeth serves as the principal of Intuition Consulting, which really catches and piques my interest. So I would love for you to share in a little bit about the name. But you're gonna share today about the critical needs of smaller nonprofits. And this is a really critical conversation that we need to have. And so I'm excited to dive deep with you on this topic and learn from you because you've got some great insight to share. But before we dive deep, we want to remind our viewers and our listeners who we are. So hello to you, Julia. Julia Patrick is the CEO at the American Nonprofit. Thanks to you, Julia. We have now done over 850 episodes working towards 900. And dare I say even a thousand, we might reach that. So I'm honored to serve alongside you. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. Really had a lot of fun during this journey. And we also have immense gratitude for our amazing presenting sponsors. So a huge shout out to our friends over at Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd, as well as nonprofit tech talk. We encourage you to check these companies out because they're not just here for us in this show, they're really here for you and your community. So please do yourself a solid and check them out because they are amazing. As I mentioned, they've helped us to produce nearly 900 episodes. The latest and the greatest is we now have an app so you can scan that QR code on the screen that you see. And just a few hours after our conversation with Elizabeth, you will receive a notification that the show has now been uploaded to the list of available courses and shows and all the good stuff there. We're also on podcast platform, we're still there as well as the broadcast. So again, wherever you like to consume your entertainment, Julia was telling us that her sister picked her up and there we were on her radio, like coming through the radio in her car. So again, no excuses. We do our best to make this accessible through so many platforms and again, free of charge. So thank you so very much. Back to you, Elizabeth, you've waited patiently and I'm so glad to have you here. Again, for those of you watching and listening, we have with us today Elizabeth Wolf, Principal of Intuition Consulting. If you wanna check out the website, it's intuitionconsult.com. Welcome, Elizabeth. I am so happy to be here. Thank you so much for asking me and I'm here to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart and my practice. So I'm thrilled. Well, speaking of practice, where does the name come from? Because I am Pete, I wanna know. So back in, I don't remember, I guess it's about 13 years now. I was trying to figure out what to name my practice. I had decided to go out on my own. And so I did all this due diligence and I had my friends who were in advertising do little focus groups with me and we were doing all kinds of, you know, figuring out and every name that I came up with was already taken and it was very demoralizing. And one night, I woke up in the middle of the night and guess what? My intuition told me what to name this company. And it just popped, the word intuition just popped into my head. And I said, you know, I am an intuitive person. I want to integrate that into my practice with my clients. It's perfect. So here we are. Well, I love that you did that. But yeah, and thank you because, you know, intuition gets a bad rap. And a lot of times we are afraid to say that this was a leading factor. I mean, we'll use the word intuit. Oh, will we intuit this? But to actually, to welcome this. So I am really excited to have you on and have you share with us this piece of this approach, I guess, and acceptance. So let's kick this off by asking you to help us to define a smaller organization. Is it budget? Is it staff? Is it length of operations? Is it part all? I mean, help us to understand how we can kind of narrow this in. Sure. Well, I think the story answer is it's a little bit of everything and every organization is different. They have their own personality. They have their own DNA. They come to fruition through various channels. No organization is the same as any other. So, you know, I like to think of it as a continuum and, you know, you can be small by choice. We're going to talk a little bit about that. You can be small by circumstance, lack of money, lack of people. You can be small by comparison. The other organizations in your space might be quite large and more well-established and you're not. But, you know, I think length of operation is probably not one of the criteria because, I mean, if you're an emerging organization, generally speaking, you're going to be small unless somebody gives you $5 million right at the get-go and says he or hire all the staff you could possibly need. But I don't know that organizations like that can really be successful because they're kind of emerging. They don't really know what to do. And I think that's really the concept for me behind smaller organizations. It's organizations that have not developed yet. And that development is really on a continuum as well. It can be understood and, you know, this is kind of nerdy. You'll like this, Jared. It's nerdy. I'm here for it. It's like the organizational development theory, which, you know, I use to be instructive to organizations to say, you know, where are you on this continuum? Are you just an idea? Are you a startup? Are you in growth mode? Have you reached maturity? Are you in decline? Are you no longer with us? That continuum, I think, is really where that definition of small takes a different kind of connotation because you can be small as a startup but you could also be small as a mature organization. You know, and when I think of small, I think of two things. FTE count, full-time employee count, as well as organizational budget, right? So those are two kind of like factors, if you will, Elizabeth, that I tend to gravitate towards when I identify, are they small, medium, large? Like kind of where are they on that scale? So I really appreciate your perspective on this and the fact that you're like, look, it could be by circumstance. It could be by choice. It could be by comparison. Like there's a lot of factors that go into this. Yeah, and I think that the budget thing is probably a good marker, although once you get into organizations growing and at whatever pace they grow at because some take a really long time, some have a very steep growth trajectory, get bigger or more capacity very quickly, and then plateau out. Again, it's really variable. Budget size doesn't generally indicate what stage you're at, but it can indicate the size of your organization and it does tend to be that smaller organizations have smaller budgets. I mean, it's kind of logic. But, you know, it's a catch-all phrase, I think is the bottom line. And for me, the better definition is where are you right now on the life cycle and where do you think you're gonna get to and what's gonna happen in between those two points? And I guess we'll talk about that a little more when we get into assessment because that's important in kind of where are we starting to, where do we aspire to be? Where do we think we can get to? And then creating that kind of roadmap. So let's jump into that. Let's jump into that because smaller nonprofits, conducting assessments, sometimes that just seems like a heavy lift and oh, that's really only for, you know, medium to large size organizations or, you know, organizations in crisis. I mean, talk to us about this and why we should be looking at this no matter what our situation is. So if that statement that you just said were true, I would have no practice. Because that's basically the organizations that I work with are those organizations that think that they don't have what it takes to do an assessment or what would this be for? What can I learn from it? It's my job to help them understand that identifying this roadmap between point A and point B where we are right now and where we hope to get to is the way to attain what they want to attain. And, you know, we talked a little bit or we mentioned the word growth, but it isn't always growth. And that's a big question that I try to ascertain in the very beginning, you know, what do you, what is your understanding of the word growth as it pertains to you? Do you want to be bigger? Do you want your budget to be $5 million instead of 350,000? What does it mean to you to do the work that you do? I mean, if you can serve the population that you want to serve and still stay nimble and lean, that's fine, you can do that. And again, that's small by choice and I love that. There's, you know, when you do like, you know, in larger organizations or even in the corporate world, when you do things like SWAT analysis, it's really assessment on a smaller scale is really basically the same. You scale it back to be digestible for a group of people who may never have done this kind of work before. And I use a tool, a tool, I don't, I mean, I call it a tool. It's a rubric like SWAT, it's called SOAR. So it's strengths opportunities, which are, you know, a kinder way of saying challenges or things you haven't done yet because of whatever circumstances you find yourselves in, positive or negative. A, for aspirations, where do you hope to be? And the R can be anything from a roadmap to recommendations to, you know, the content of the R part of it is really where do you, what is the road that you're gonna be taking? What's the route that you're going to take between, you know, the snapshot of where we are today and where you'd like to be in a year or three years? And that's the other thing I think about assessing smaller organizations. We're not talking about long-term projections for the most part. The furthest out that I generally go, I mean, we could talk about where you might be in five to 10 years, but the furthest out I would generally go is five years because so much is changing externally. I mean, nobody predicted the pandemic. Nobody predicted the economic downturns. Nobody, you don't know. And in order to best help my organizations understand the climate out there, we like to kind of keep things small. So a year, three years, you know, what can come out of that, excuse me, what can come out of that assessment phase is a list of priorities. Sometimes we call it a strategic framework if we're really, you know, getting fancy, but I try to stay away from, and Jared knows this because I talked about it in my presentation the day we met, strategic planning is a very scary term. So when organizations say, you know, we need to develop a strategic plan, I say, what does that mean to you? And they generally don't know. They just have read it in a book or someone else said, you need a strategic plan or a funder might have said, do you have a strategic plan? So they think they need to have one, but I try to titrate that down to be something more manageable for them because otherwise it's overwhelming and they're already overwhelmed. Jared, are you seeing more within your practice and, you know, traveling across the country? Are you seeing more organizations open to this concept of saying, let's pull back and let's look at 12, 18, 36, 48 months as opposed to, you know, decades? So what are you seeing? I'm seeing both, but I do think that in light of the pandemic, right? We still have so much uncertainty and we've talked here at the show, Julia, about like, you know, let's create a budget that is 12 months and then let's revisit it every quarter and let's revise it, like really keeping our finger on the pulse. And I am seeing that certainly in the strategic planning assessment arena where it's like, okay, we've just been through a whole lot of muck and I'm not sure where we're going or where we wanna go. Our staff, our team is burnout. We've got high turnover, right? Like, and this kind of takes us into growth is do we want to grow? Is that something that's a priority for us right now, right? Or do we stay where we are, whether it's small, medium, large, regardless, to maintain, right? Like kind of that survival mentality because everyone, I believe, needs a little bit of a break right now. So I'm seeing a mix back, but we live in different parts of the country. So it is interesting, right? Yeah. I think that when we talk about growth and it's so closely entwined with fundraising and fundraising is exhausting, especially for small nonprofits. And I think the thing that they find the most challenging and yes, there are outliers, organizations that have very secure funding, either they have a major donor or a bunch of major donors or someone has given them an endowment grant or something really special. But for the most part, I think that growth is so closely tied into how much money do we have to raise? And sometimes it takes them away from, what is the really important question here, which is why are we here? What is our purpose? And what do we want our impact to be? It's also about mission, vision and values and sticking to those, but the bigger umbrella is that purpose and impact because it's so important to understand, what are we here to do? And how are we going to know when we are being successful? That's metrics are associated with that, but it's detached itself then from the fundraising machine and how much do we need to raise and what's the number and how much, where do we have to go? It's a little bit more mission focused than that. And I kind of like that for my groups. It doesn't necessarily make things any easier. I mean, growth and figuring out capacity building, where do we need to improve the assessment processes really designed for like, what are we doing well and where do we need to pay some more attention? And if we do those things and pay attention and bolster all of those systems up, maybe it's tech, maybe we need a really good CRM or maybe it's communications, maybe we need to understand how to connect with our community better, but all of those different ways of building capacity are ways of empowering organizations. Even if they don't grow the way we typically understand growth to be, they can get stronger. They can be more sustainable. Wow, I love using that worth growth, understanding growth versus strength. That for me is like the big takeaway because we get, and we talked about this in the green room chatter, I feel like this is somewhat of an American phenomenon in that we are so push, push, push on growth. Even from our schools, we rank everybody and the race kind of thing, but I love using that word strength. I mean, to me, that's a powerful concept, really, really cool, really, really cool. Yeah, and I think it helps them. I also like to place the organizations that I work with in whatever their ecosystem is. It's the broader community of organizations and the systems in which they exist because the reality is that you can't do everything. You can't be all things to all people. So you need to really understand what else is happening here and who else can I partner with? And that effective partnering, and that's a whole other subject which we don't have time for today, but effective partnering is really key with smaller organizations because then they can do more. They can do events together. They can do programs together. They can do conferences together. And that, again, it makes them bigger, bigger in extending their capacity. It makes them stronger to use the word that you love. And it's also a more sustainable way of behaving. So understanding the ecosystem, not as a set of competitors, but a set of partners, I think is really important. You know, so that leads us into who drives these conversations and the decisions? You know, I'm assuming it's leadership and you told us this is something, like one of your favorite questions you love to talk about. So, Talus Elizabeth, is leadership different in smaller nonprofits than it is mid-sized, larger-sized, enterprise-sized? Is there a difference? I certainly think so. And I think if you asked the leaders in those organizations, they would certainly think so. I mean, leadership, as you know, and I'm sure you've done a show or two or maybe more about this, leadership is challenging. No matter what. In the nonprofit space today, leadership is really challenging. And there's certainly a number of reasons why that is true in general. The pipeline is narrow, to say the least. And that's a big problem for smaller organizations because the turnover is very high. And if you don't have a pipeline of leaders that can do this work, you're going to have organizations that are really challenged in the leadership department. And that makes it very difficult for them to survive. I mean, I think that there's a couple of other factors for small organization leadership that people don't always talk about. Loneliness, it's hugely, hugely lonely. I've done this work. I was a CEO of a small organization. I had an admin part-time. It's very lonely to not know if you're doing a good job because there's nobody around to tell you that you're doing a good job. I mean, it would be nice if your board told you, but again, that's a whole other subject that we don't have time for today. And that doesn't always happen. So if you're a board member and you're watching this, if you have a leader of a small organization that you're responsible for, thank them and support them because they need it. They're not getting a lot of feedback. They feel challenged all the time. You come in every day with a list of to-dos that's a mile long and you're lucky if you get to do two of them. If your day isn't derailed by something that wasn't on the list before. But aside from those factors, it's also the way that they get socialized into doing this work in the first place doesn't always prepare them for the specific needs, the capacity building, the constant churn of the fundraising journey, let's call it a journey. I think that it's surprising to many of the leaders when they get into this and they say, this is not what I thought it was gonna be. I thought I was gonna be a CEO. I thought I was gonna have staff that I delegated things to. There's no one here to delegate to and the people who are here aren't as equipped as I would like them to be. They need a lot of help. They need a lot of mentoring. A good leader turns out to cultivate those kinds of staff so that they then can turn around and become the leaders of tomorrow. But it's really, really challenging. I love that. You've said so many great things and it's very clear, Elizabeth, that you have really been in the trenches and you have your own stories to share through this. I'm in another group when we call it scar tissue, right? We've got a lot of scar tissue along the years and I just wanna say as well, I serve as an interim and I feel that way as an interim leader, whether it's CEO or COO or CDO for development, there's a lot of like, is anyone else here? Am I the only one? I served as an interim as well and it's the same kinds of challenges and you don't necessarily feel like, oh, I don't have to care about this because I'm only an interim. You're taking it on. You're fostering this organization. It's a huge responsibility. Yeah, yeah. It's such an interesting conversation to have this and it's very, to go back to the very first word we started with, it's intuitive in so many ways but it's really hard to define as well. When you look at the passion that it takes to run an organization or even be involved in an organization and then the reality, I loved your comment, Elizabeth. You talked with a lot of CEOs and they're like, wow, I didn't think I'd be working this way. I thought I'd be working that way on the mission and yet there's these other aspects that are kind of chewing up the day, if you will. Yeah, and they're scared. They wanna do a good job but they're really, really scared that they're not. There's a lot of confidence issues. Some of them aren't equipped. I mean, some of them are founders and they founded an organization for a particular reason but they don't really know what they're doing. They're really, really scared. Yeah, we don't have a lot of time left and I really wanna ask this question and it kind of dovetails to so many comments that you've had that have been really interesting but what is the path forward? Is it coaching? Is it education? Is it more money? Or what is it that we can be looking at? And I think you're gonna say yes, yes and yes but help us to get a sense of how we can move forward as opposed to just agreeing to, it can be really rough. Sure, I mean, right at the beginning of the pandemic I think that there were a lot of organizations that right away felt this is an opportunity for us, smaller organizations like we can, because we're already, sometimes they were already doing things online. So the pivot to all online activities and programs wasn't that big of a deal. So they were able to do that and it was very empowering for them. It didn't change things dramatically on the fundraising side, I don't think. Although there was for a time, I think a little bit more attention to we need to help these organizations that are working so hard to change the world and heal all of these problems, all of which were exacerbated by COVID. So it did shift things, but I think what it shifted the most is how these organizations prioritized. And so fundraising obviously still important but it did sort of take a little bit of a backseat to we need to figure out like what are we going to do moving forward, thinking more strategically. So it was great for me because I was able to stay in my house and do all of this wonderful work with wonderful organizations. And I think that the thing that came from that is many of them said, wow, I never thought that this kind of work would be important for us to do, but it is important. And it wasn't just because of COVID, it's always important. So I think for me, one of the messages is to organizations always think about how you can get this knowledge and this learning. If it's through a coach or if it's through a consultant who does this kind of work, great. If it's through you going for professional development as a leader or sending your staff as well for professional development, great. But figure out how you can start to weave strategic thinking and this kind of capacity building thinking into your everyday life because it will benefit as you move along that continuum of growth and development. The other thing I think is the confidence factor is so important. And I mean, not just for leaders but for everyone who's working in the nonprofit space. It's so important for you to understand that this is a really important space. It drives so much that's going on in the world. And we are the essential workers of the workspace without nonprofits. And again, it's a challenging field. A lot of nonprofits do not survive. But this is one of the reasons why I've chosen to nurture these smaller groups because it's so important for them, most of the time they're doing incredible, incredible work and nobody even knows about it. But feeling that you're making a difference and having that kind of confidence is so important to just surviving that one more day. I love it. Well, you've brought a lot of confidence to so many of our viewers. I know Jared and I during this episode of the nonprofit show, it's been great to have you on and to hear your approaches. They make sense and they're very intuitive and yet they're very specific. And so it has been a delight to have you on. Check out Elizabeth Wolfe principle at Intuition Consulting. You can find her at intuitionconsult.com. And I suspect we will be chatting with you some more because this has been a lot of fun. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, and we've been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself. I like to call her my nonprofit nerd, but she can be yours as well. Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have amazing support and that includes our friends at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd, and nonprofit tech talk. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out. Ladies, this has been great. I have loved this conversation and I think it's really a great way for so many of our nonprofits who might feel like there's nobody out there hearing them or understanding them to kind of circle back around and understand there's a lot of support. You know, Jared and I end every episode of the nonprofit show with this message and it goes like this. To stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here again tomorrow. Ladies, thank you so much.