How does a nonprofit with a couple thousand Facebook likes and an Excel spreadsheet of donors utilize the digital leverage of big organizations? In the absence of physical contact, digital communication is the new virtual glue that links stakeholders to organizations. The digital universe, however, has rapidly expanded into a vast, crowded, and mercurial communication space that favors the leverage of large organizations.

SMALLER ORGANIZATIONS FACE BIG CHALLENGES

NO DIGITAL STAFF - A recent poll of small nonprofit's revealed that 68% of them had no digital staff at all. They rely, rather, on their communication staff to take up the slack and test various digital platforms as they evolve, believing that they will intuitively know what works. This approach, of course, has failed.

Strange Bedfellows –

The conference industry is booming, expanding more or less in parallel with the Internet. The very way information is exchanged is evolving, different now than in pre-Internet days when events were less plugged-in and interactive, more limited to the so-called sage on a stage.

Even as everyone predicted the rise of digital would do away with face to face, precisely the opposite is happening, as the value of in-person meetings and conventions rises. And the need’s only getting bigger, much to the delight of the travel industry and CVBs. – Rafat Ali

The more that people are connected electronically, the more hunger there is to meet face to face, says Michelle Russell, editor of Convene magazine.

There is a longstanding belief in corporate America that financial incentives are the most powerful motivator of performance. The findings of various studies by behavioral psychologists suggest otherwise.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Books, 2009) author Daniel Pink outlines the potential unintended consequences of using monetary incentives exclusively: extinguishing intrinsic motivation, diminishing performance, crushing creativity, encouraging unethical behavior, and fostering short-term thinking. Rather, he says, “autonomy, relatedness (connection with others) and competence (a sense of mastery, accomplishment and achievement) are the core human needs and key intrinsic motivators.”

Event planning is a complex management job that requires advanced planning skills. Organizing a major event or meeting is not unlike opening a small business. It requires settling on a strategy, connecting with vendors, opening a venue, hiring employees, developing a marketing plan, establishing a budget, and executing the ultimate client interaction.

THE FOUR ATTRIBUTES

When hiring an outside planner to take your event from conception to completion, look for these four superstar success traits:

A CASE HISTORY

My company was about to introduce a new product and, since I am the head of corporate training, I was tasked with planning our national sales training event. It wasn’t my first time planning a corporate event, but it was my first company-wide national event. After 2 months of back and forth with a Florida based meeting planner, I had completed an extensive checklist and had developed a broad outline of the event. That’s when our CEO’s secretary called and asked me to meet with the boss and bring all my notes along.

My friend Evelyn passed away in a beautiful hospice room at the Mayo Clinic this past week. She was a member of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”. Raised on a farm in Indiana during the Great Depression, Evelyn spent her young adulthood filling munitions with gunpowder in a defense plant in Nebraska.

“Didn’t care to bring anymore innocent children into the world during the Depression or the war,” she once told me; “didn’t think it was fair.” She lived her entire life a spinster, as she referred to herself, earning a living and doing life’s chores without anyone to share the burdens.

The desert outside Tucson, Arizona is an unforgiving landscape inhabited only by snakes, scorpions, lizards, the occasional coyote, and Evelyn. She was tough on herself but easy on the natural world she lived in. “I consider myself a steward of the land,” she said. She allowed herself only the barest essentials and if she inadvertently ended up with two of something, she would quickly give one away. However, she never stopped nursing the cactus and agave and Palo Verde and Mesquite trees that surrounded her.

The managers of residential care facilities we work with everyday report that the residential care and post-acute health care industry is changing at an alarming rate. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has shifted its focus away from simply measuring volume, toward a pay-for-performance system focused on value and quality. The implications of this shift in payment processing and compliance procedures for management in post-acute care, nursing homes, and hospice facilities are vast, complex, and daunting. Managers are scrambling to measure quality outcomes, improve compliance, and emphasize the customer experience throughout their organizations.

The purpose of this weekly blog is to stimulate thought and discussion about the topics that affect the entire social services sector. Even though our blog appears here on the FAMCare site, it is not our intention to inform you about our products in this space. However, every now and then, FAMCare does provide the perfect solution to a problem the social services sector is faced with. 

TRACKING OUTCOMES 

I had a friend participate as a guest blogger this week for us.  His name is Frank and this is his post.  I hope you enjoy it.

 The theme of a class on advanced management practices I attended at the Harvard Business School was...INFORMATION.

 Modern management theory focuses on the speed and quality of actionable information. At Harvard they are teaching that critical management information sources must be accurate, real-time, data-driven, and actionable.