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Launch and grow your nonprofit with confidence! The Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits is your weekly resource for nonprofit startup advice, nonprofit growth strategies, and practical tips for nonprofit leadership. Whether you're dreaming of starting a nonprofit organization, navigating the challenges of a new role, or looking to scale your impact, this podcast provides actionable insights. Learn nonprofit best practices based around the 6 critical elements that any nonprofit needs to grow foundationally strong: Leadership, Development, Marketing, Programs and Services, Operations, and Finances. Learn effective fundraising strategies, and essential nonprofit management techniques. Get nonprofit coaching and access free nonprofit resources to build your nonprofit capacity and achieve nonprofit success. Join Matt Stockman, a seasoned nonprofit growth coach, as we explore nonprofit development and provide the guidance you need to make a lasting difference. Tune in for weekly episodes filled with nonprofit tips, inspiring stories, and expert advice to help you grow a nonprofit that thrives. If you are looking for nonprofit training or ways to improve your nonprofit strategy, this podcast is for you.
Matt Stockman (00:00)
Strong leaders know that better results rarely come from working harder alone, but from learning how to draw the best thinking out of the people around them. And when you do that properly, a brainstorming session can be a really powerful tool for problem solving. The challenge is that most brainstorming sessions are poorly designed, which means they waste time, they drain energy, and they leave everybody wondering what was actually accomplished, if anything.
So in this episode, I'm gonna show you how you can structure brainstorming differently and walk you through a simple framework you can use to turn group input into clear ideas, smart decisions, and real progress for your nonprofit.
Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. This podcast exists to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong, sustainable foundation by providing clear frameworks and practical tools and the real world guidance that you need that you can actually put into practice.
My name is Matt Stockman. your host. I'm a nonprofit growth coach. And here at Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every successful nonprofit has to be operating at peak performance in six key areas in order to be successful. Those areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations, and finances. So on every episode of the podcast, we focus on one of those core areas to help you create
lasting impact throughout your nonprofit without unnecessary complexity. Now, before we jump in, I want to give you a heads up. If you're in the dreaming phase or early phases of your nonprofit, looking for clarity on mission and vision, you're thinking about putting together your board, you're doing your initial fundraising, and you're figuring out what your MVP is, your minimum viable program is,
This is a personal invitation from me to you to join me for my upcoming virtual Launchpad Workshop, Essentials for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to Impact. It's three hours over three days where we together will workshop your mission statement and your vision statement, we'll define who your board members should be, we'll drill down into fundraising, and we'll help you build out your beginning programs and a whole lot more. We talked about a lot of stuff in the workshop that we're not able to get into in the podcast and there's
a lot of camaraderie as well. So if you're feeling overwhelmed or just kind of stuck in your dream for a nonprofit, sign up for the workshop. It's April 28th through the 30th, one hour each day. Try your best to be there live. That does make a huge difference to be able to experience it with other people who are in exactly the same place as you in this journey. But you will have access to the recordings as well if you can't make all the sessions. Sign up today. Cost is $49 for the whole thing, but space is limited.
So go to nonprofitlunchplan.com and click on workshop to sign up. We've all been in this situation before. People on your team gathered on a Zoom call or in a conference room, maybe a whiteboard, and everybody has been brought together for a brainstorming session. You need some fresh ideas for an old initiative, or you're looking to increase your average gift size, or another problem has surfaced that you're just not sure how to address. The hope is,
that the spontaneity of people just tossing out ideas will spark a creative solution to the problem. And typically, the attitude around brainstorming sessions is, well, the more people in the room, the more potentially great ideas will come out of it.
should make sense, especially when that logic is fueled by internet legend stories like the one I hear about all the time, the legend that goes that the idea for Flamin' Hot Cheetos came from a janitorial employee at the company that was invited into a brainstorming session. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but let's assume it is. Moments like that are a rarity.
And the actual truth about brainstorming sessions is more does not equal better. Frankly, most brainstorming sessions that I've been invited to have been really more than anything quite frustrating. Lots of talk, but typically few or no actionable ideas at the end. Brainstorming sessions can be sessions where a few people just try to top each other's crazy idea and eventually it ends with not much actual progress having been made.
though, brainstorming sessions can work. In fact, I believe they can be a very effective tool for creating the best solutions to growth. And as the leader of your nonprofit, tapping into the minds of others can bring about new perspectives, fresh thinking, and your next great idea. But only if you increase the chance for success by taking some steps leading up to the brainstorming meeting and during the meeting itself,
And after two,
that's what I'm going to walk through with you in this episode.
And also a lot of the practical steps that I'm going to spell out for you in this episode are just as applicable to any meeting that you're doing with your team or your volunteers. I'm excited for you to hear this so that you can start capitalizing on the collective brain power of the people around you. So let's dive in. First off, here's why a lot of nonprofit leaders think that brainstorming should work, but how they derail the whole thing from the start. Typically we think
We need some outside thinking. And so we gather people from different roles or different departments and different levels inside the organization with the belief that this diversity of perspective will bring in what is needed to unlock a challenge or a creative barrier. So the leader may just simply say something like this. Let's just all meet on teams and talk. won't give too much detail in advance and an effort to keep the room thinking freely and not get too blocked by
preconceived ideas, which again, in theory, seems like it should work, except 99 times out of 100, it doesn't work. Now, sidebar here, I will happily admit that occasionally something great will come out of a session like this, like the Flamin' Hot Cheetos story, if that's actually true, but I contend that those moments happen in spite of the design of the meeting, not because of the design of the meeting. Here's why most of the time brainstorming sessions like those just don't work.
It comes down to a few simple mistakes that are super easy to correct. And that's why we're here today in this podcast. First, the wrong people are in the room. In most nonprofits, bringing outside thinking in to tackle a complicated problem means that well-meaning individuals are all giving ideas and insights on something that they don't actually know much about, which for all of the people who do know the challenge intimately is super frustrating.
Those people end up frustrated or slowed down by either not being able to speak freely or frustrated because they have to spend a lot of time telling the outside thinker why their idea won't work something they thought of and tried weeks ago.
If you want an effective brainstorming session where you've got a good shot at making real progress, it's simple enough, but handpick the people you want in the room. Find the people on your team, your board, your partners, volunteers that are more familiar with the work and the problem who can think and speak with knowledge. Get only the people in the room who truly understand the actual problem and the existing barriers to the solution.
and who can speak from a place of experience and understanding. That's step one to effective brainstorming sessions. Just make sure the right people are in the room. Step two is brief those people ahead of time, like a couple of days before. Tell them specifically what you're hoping to accomplish in the session, the challenges you're having, and the solutions that you've already thought through or tried and passed on and why. Most creative problem solvers
need to think for a bit about the problem and we'll start narrowing in on ideas that will actually be a lot closer to great by the time you get to the meeting.
of us can't walk into a brainstorming session completely unaware, assess the situation, think through some ideas, and then come up with anything meaningful in less than an hour. So that's step two, make sure they're briefed ahead of time, a couple of days in advance if possible. Then step three,
Create a basic agenda and a fixed amount of time for the meeting. Creative problem solvers need barriers to do their best creative work. Barriers like, we only have 60 minutes to come up with a new workaround. I wouldn't recommend a meeting like this going more than an hour and if you can do 30 minutes, that's actually even better. Also make sure that participants know the rules of engagement, like the time limit, the agenda, the expectations, what the follow up is gonna be, things like that.
Another small detail, but a big priority, phones go in a basket outside the door. Undivided attention is crucial. Step four then is control the chaos, but not too much. This is actually the most challenging things about leading meetings like these. You do want to keep the meeting on task and not allow participants to go down too many rabbit trails.
But if you've done a good job getting the right people in the room and they've been able to think about and process things prior to the meeting, a rabbit trail might be where the magic happens. So finding the moments where things have drifted too far off and gently bringing the room back to center when you need to is important. And the other thing that's super important during the meeting is to keep the tone positive by using the yes and principle of improv.
If you're familiar with improv at all, the cardinal sin of improv is to say the word no, because no shuts down the bit. Same thing holds true in a good brainstorming session. Even if ideas come up that have been tried or failed,
Don't dwell on no because and then follow it up with explanations and excuses, et cetera. Focus with yes and, and then move on to more ideas. Step five then, record everything. Ideas can fly around pretty quickly in a meeting like this and when it's all happening in the moment, it's super easy to forget what somebody said in passing. That just might be the future key to the whole thing. So recording everything in the moment is helpful. Step six.
Send participants a recap of the main points of what you talked about with the instructions of what to do if somebody thinks of something else after the meeting. Some creative thinkers can process quickly and generate creative ideas quickly. Others like me need processing time. That's why whenever we do a discovery call together, as an example, I always do a lot of listening and then I come back to you with recommendations about what I think your next step should be usually 24 or 48 hours later.
I spend that time processing the best solutions for you. So it's possible that your best idea in a brainstorming session still might come even a few days after the step seven, let everybody know what the final solution was. Because another frustrating experience that I've had in brainstorming sessions is this. We come up with some great solutions for a problem that another department is struggling with.
and the meeting ends and then it's crickets. Did they use our idea? Did it work? Is the problem solved? When the loop is never closed, I'm going to be a lot less likely to give meaningful contributions to the next brainstorming session. If it just feels like I give all this brain power to solving a problem and I never know what the outcome is, I'm not a fan of doing that in the future. Effective brainstorming.
is not about getting more voices in the room. It's about leading the process well enough to leverage the brain power that you have at your disposal in the most powerful way possible. And when you choose the right people, you prepare them ahead of time, you guide the conversation, and you follow through afterward, all seven of those steps, these sessions stop feeling like talk and start producing traction that moves your nonprofit forward.
Now, before we wrap up for the day, if you're in the dreaming or early phases of your nonprofit, you're looking for that clarity on mission and vision, you're building your board, doing a little fundraising, you're still trying to figure out how to launch your first program. Again, you're invited to join me for the upcoming virtual Launchpad Workshop Essentials for Moving from Nonprofit Idea to Impact. It's three hours over three days.
where we'll dive into those things. We'll workshop your mission statement and your vision statement. We'll define who your board members should be. We'll drill down into your fundraising efforts and help you build out your beginning programs and more. We talk about things that we can't get to in the podcast necessarily. And so if you're feeling overwhelmed or just stuck in your dream, you're not sure where to go next, but you know that somehow deep down you've seen the problem and you're the person to solve the problem.
Sign up for the workshop. It's April 28th through the 30th, one hour each day. I wanna really encourage you to try to be there live. It does make a huge difference to experience it with other people who are in exactly the same place in the journey as you are. But if you can't make all three days in a row live, it's just an hour a day. You will have access to the recordings as well. Sign up today. The cost is $49 for the whole thing, but space is limited. We keep the numbers low.
in order for us to really have healthy conversation and for me to give personalized attention to everyone. Go to nonprofitlaunchplan.com, again, nonprofitlaunchplan.com, and click on Workshop in order to sign up. That's it for this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. If in any way, shape, or form,
This podcast is helpful. Would you please consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader who maybe is just getting started and needs more clarity than they need a bunch of books or anything like that. Until next time, keep building wisely and keep making a difference. And thank you so much for watching and listening.