Applications Open for the Next Nonprofit Org Accelerator Cohort

[Deena Englander]

Are you a nonprofit executive director, entrepreneur, or lead operative in your organization? Are you seeking to gain skills and expertise to make your organization have a greater impact?

Applications are open now until February 23rd for the next Organization Accelerator cohort (previously called Operations Fellowship) beginning in April. Full details on our program are available in this document.

Objective:
This program aims to empower leaders and operations professionals in non-profit organizations, particularly those who may not have formal business training. Through a comprehensive course covering strategic organizational foundations, strategies for growth, team development, and increasing impact, participants are provided with the knowledge, tools, and hands-on experience needed to achieve their organizational goals. The program aims to enhance participants’ abilities to lead effectively, optimize workflows, foster a healthy organizational culture, and create actionable plans tailored to their unique contexts.

About the program:

This program is an experiential learning style and hands-on educational experience designed to support nonprofits and infuse nonprofit leadership with strong operations and management skills. It exposes our participants to many key ideas regarding effective management and leadership techniques while strengthening their organizations.

We meet twice a month—once with a speaker on a certain topic for an interactive workshop, and then again to review the homework participants complete after that session. Each participant receives 1 monthly coaching session to ensure that the organization is implementing the best practices and tools developed as part of this program.

As I mentioned, I’m a strong believer in experiential learning, and I believe that the best way to gain knowledge and talent is by actually doing the work and acquiring the skills—and we’ve seen great results so far.

General Feedback:

For those who have participated in our programs so far, the qualitative data assessment suggests a substantial increase in organizational stability, impact and growth. Additionally, the participants (particularly those who paired it with coaching) displayed an increase in confidence, personal happiness, community connectedness, achievement, and a decrease in burnout and stress.

ROI

This is not a free program—it does require an investment by your organization. I am waiting for my 501c3 approval to come in, at which point I hope to seek funding for cause-area-specific cohorts. But that doesn’t exist yet.

To measure the cost-effectiveness of the program, there are 2 numbers I suggest people look at to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for them:

1. How much staff time is saved by an accelerated learning curve

   1. How many people you don’t have to hire

   2. How much faster your talent can output more value

   3. The dollar value of the difference in payroll between natural growth (self-study and experience) vs accelerated, supported growth; we can often shave off years of natural growth

   4. Potential costly mistakes you or your staff will make if they don’t have proper education; a pretty common one is hiring the wrong person

2. How much further can your funding dollars be stretched

   1. Measure your budget—how much are you receiving in funds?

   2. Multiply by increase in anticipated impact; we typically see a 30% increase in productivity—but it should be valuable to you even if you only see a 10% increase in impact

   3. To figure out the percentage for increased impact, think about how many more services /​ projects /​ whatever it is you’re measuring you’d be able to do if you were 30% more efficient with your time

Other Helpful Information

Past posts about the fellowship and our services:

• Introducing WorkStream EA

• Introducing EASE, a managed directory of EA organization service providers

• How WorkStream EA strengthens EA organizations

• Congratulations to our first program graduates

Quick Links:

• View full detailsof the program

• Apply for the organization accelerator

• Join our next information session on Wednesday January 24th at 1 PM EST

• Schedule a time to chat to see how we can help you and your org

I look forward to having you in our next cohort!

[Donald Summers]

Congratulations on launching this. Many more of these efforts are needed.

Having run a cohort-based nonprofit accelerator for the past two years, I can tell you that it is very hard to attract participants ready to launch in sync. Especially if you are charging more than a nominal fee. Second, you need to offer orgs very deep experience in all types of earned, contributed, and invested revenue. You are an organizational specialist with serious chops, but you don’t appear to present the revenue generation experience across earned, contributed and impact capital domains—I can be wrong, but this capability doesn’t come through, and unless you have turn-key guidance for leaders, their programs will struggle for funding. Don’t mean to disparage your very well meaning effort but this does appear to be a gap. I encourage you to read “Scaling Altruism” and also look at www.altruistaccelerator.org. If this interests you, I would welcome hearing from you.

Again, fantastic that you have the vision and the ambition to launch a nonprofit accelerator—but beware of the inherent challenges and limitation of a cohort model and also the depth of knowledge needed, especially around finance, impact analytics, governance, etc.

In any event, best of luck. Hope this is helpful perspective.