10 Ways to Accelerate Your Nonprofit Career in 2010

January 8, 2010 | Career Advice, Leadership

UPDATE: Congrats to the winner of yesterday’s contest, Kelly Cleaver! Check out her winning response below and please continue to share your own!

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee but to enable it.” - Antoine de St. Exupery

It’s 2010 and it’s about time that you start thinking about how this year is going to be different. How this year your career is really going to take off. If, in fact, that’s what you want. If you’re content to stay where you are, how you are, that’s fine, too. But if you want to accelerate your nonprofit career, then this is definitely the year to do it. As I’ve said before, if there ever was a time to do something new with your career, it’s now, when the rules of the game are changing so fast that there’s no right answer. I don’t even have all the right answers. But do you want my best advice? Try out these ten ways to finally become the nonprofit leader you want to be in 2010.

Develop a Personal Mission Statement

Every nonprofit has a mission statement to guide their work. So, why shouldn’t you? I developed a personal mission statement a few years ago and it changed my life. Since then, I have trained over 100 people to develop their own personal mission statements and it is often a life-changing process for them. It is truly an eye-opening process to write out your goals and values for your life and then compare them to how you actually balance your priorities, especially your career. What better way to begin the year than to become more aligned with your purpose?

Fall Back in Love With Your Job

If you’ve been working in the same nonprofit job for years, it can be difficult to keep the fire alive. After a particularly bad or hectic day, it can seem impossible to stay resilient with all the challenges brought on by the economic downturn. Many of you are doing the work of two positions, causing your workload to increase. All the while, you may be asking yourself, “why am I doing this again?” Even though you may not be feeling the love right now, here are a few ways to get it back.

Get in Good With Your Boss

Most nonprofit CEOs are overworked, underpaid, and are often so busy that they don’t know which way is up. And if you can find ways to help your boss, they will be more willing to help you further your career. I’m not talking about brown-nosing, here, but showing genuine concern for the person who supervises you. Hopefully you like and get along with your boss, but even if you don’t, it’s still super important to develop a good working relationship. Here are a few ways to do that.

Resign Gracefully

Sometimes, you start a great nonprofit job, and it’s just not what you expected. Maybe you really love the cause, but it’s the organization itself that’s driving you crazy. You enjoy working with the kids or doing outreach for the homeless, but you don’t think you can go one more day working for an evil jerk of a boss. They don’t pay you enough to deal with dysfunction. Also, your friends are tired of your complaining. It may be time to quit, but you want to leave on good terms. Even if it was the nonprofit job from hell.

Build Your Personal Brand Online

As the nonprofit field gets more competitive for top jobs, more and more candidates are applying for positions with impressive education and experience. Instead of spending a fortune to go back to school, young professionals need to make themselves stand out by developing a strong personal brand that potential employers can view online. Are employers Googling you? Assume that they are. And if they can’t find you, you pretty much don’t exist.

Introduce Yourself to a Search Firm

If you’re looking to take the next step in your career, connecting with a search firm may be the way to go. Also called “headhunters”, there are organizations out there specifically looking to place people with exceptional talent for a particular nonprofit position. Their job is to use their networks to find the perfect candidate without going through the typical process of posting a job online and taking in applications from any old person who wishes to apply. There are many recruiting firms out there now that specialize in nonprofit positions and could be looking for you!

Build Your Network the Old-Fashioned Way

You’ve heard this many times before. The key to getting your dream nonprofit job is to network, network, network. Well, that’s because it’s true. Even in the technology age, you simply cannot restrict your job search to online job boards and email. Back in the day, before Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, nonprofit leaders actually made connections face to face most of the time. But if you’re a young nonprofit professional just starting out, it can be a daunting process to advance your career when you don’t know anyone. Here are a few ways to build your network just like nonprofit leaders did in the olden days.

Join a Nonprofit Board of Directors

Every nonprofit professional should serve on a board of directors at some point. If you plan to stay in the nonprofit field, you should see the work from all angles, especially the governance side. But more importantly, if you aspire to a CEO or other leadership position, board experience will prove to be invaluable to you. Here’s why.

Negotiate a Higher Nonprofit Salary

Anyone who works for a nonprofit organization knows that doing good for a living can actually get you jacked up financially in the long run. However, we do need to stop acting as if our bosses are the ones holding us down. Like my grandma says, can’t nobody do anything to you unless you let them. So instead of griping about your low salary, try asking for a raise or negotiating for a better one when you come into a new position. And by all means, be prepared to walk away from an offer that doesn’t meet your financial needs. But how do you negotiate more money in a sector that’s always crying broke?

Cultivate a Slash Career

Newsflash: the rate of nonprofit pay is not going to change anytime soon, so assuming you can’t change the system, adding a “slash career” could help pay the bills. Moreover, many young nonprofit professionals burnout after just a few years of working in a nonprofit because they view their day job as their only option of living out their values while at the same time providing a stable financial future for themselves. But this is not necessarily the case. You can slash your life and become more self-sufficient and fulfilled as a nonprofit employee.

Stanford Social Innovation Review

The Contest

From now until 5:00pm EST MONDAY, JANUARY 11, I invite you to share your stories about what you’ve done in the past that’s enhanced your nonprofit career OR what you plan to do this year to accelerate it. The reader with the winning story will receive a free, one-year subscription to the Stanford Social Innovation Review (a $44.95 value)! The Stanford Social Innovation Review brokers conversations, asks hard questions, disseminates the fruits of rigorous research, and presents real-life case studies. It is one of THE best resources for nonprofit trends, and commentary. They put out an excellent issue every quarter, and I’m gonna get you hooked up for a whole year! You can find the Stanford Social Innovation Review on Facebook and since they’re also one of my Top 30 Nonprofit News Sources and Thought Leaders on Twitter, you should definitely be following them here:

@SSIReview

Happy commenting and please forward this post to your friends who are looking for ways to accelerate their nonprofit careers in 2010!

The content above is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Getting from Entry Level to Leadership: 50 Ways to Accelerate Your Nonprofit Career. Part guide, part memoir, the book weaves an inspiring path for young professionals who want to build meaningful and rewarding nonprofit careers. The book will help you:

Develop valuable nonprofit expertise
Practice authentic leadership
Establish a strong personal brand

Be sure to follow this space for news about when the book will be released!

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Tags: Career Advice, nonprofit career advice, nonprofit careers

Kelly Cleaver

Rosetta (or Melinda)-

What exactly is a "slash career"?
Melinda Lewis

I've had a "slash career" for awhile without having the phrase for it! For me, it's more about achieving the flexibility and time with my kids that I want, not about the money, but the principle is the same. Here's to a successful 2010 for you and all of your readers!
Kelly Cleaver

PS-

I guess that wasn't so short and sweet... O:-)
Kelly Cleaver

Hi Rosetta,

I will make my response short and sweet. For the first part of last year (2009), I was feeling lost, overwhelmed and frustrated. I was (and still am) a recent college graduate who had decided on a career in nonprofit during the second semester of my senior year. And while I was lucky enough to find an entry level full-time position at a nonprofit within a year of graduation, I had no idea how to pursue a better nonprofit career for myself. Luckily, Google led me to you. And thanks to you, your blog and Twitter, which are both full of excellent resources, I was able to point myself in the right direction.

Your blog led me to YNPN, but I could not find any local YNPN chapters or any other groups similar to YNPN closer than a 3 hour drive from me. So I emailed YNPN, got in touch with a fellow young nonprofit professional in the area, and we set about trying to form a Detroit chapter. We had a successful kick-off event in October, a growing list serv, Happy Hours, and a community involvement activity. Through YNPN, I found myself at networking events all the time, from a MI Women's Forum discussion event, to the YNPN Grand Rapids/EPIP program at the IS Annual conference, and more. I was promoting YNPN, but also promoting myself. As YNPN Detroit is well into the process of structuring its leadership, I should have the opportunity to take on a board membership position.

During all of this time, things at my current job improved immensely. I invited someone from upper management at my organization to be the guest speaker at YNPN Detroit's kick-off event. She was very impressed by the turn-out and I was able to show off some of my hard work. The same month of the kick-off, I applied for a different position and it was offered to me. By this time, since I had been reading blogs and had made connections with so many great resources through the YNPN leaders listserv, Twitter, etc, that I was able to ask for advice and successfully negotiate for a higher starting wage.

In less than a year's time, I went from someone who had no idea how to pursue a successful career in the nonprofit sector, to someone who was networking, starting a YNPN chapter, getting a promotion, negotiating pay, and is now trying to work on your suggestions regarding personal branding and personal missions statements. And I am not yet 25.

So thanks Rosetta. You have sincerely helped. I was very lost. Now, I feel that I am in complete control of my life. I did a lot in 2009, but I am confident that I will do even more in 2010. Thank you for the resources that you have provided.

-Kelly Cleaver-
Andrew Kramer

Hi Rosetta,

2009 was a deeply challenging year for me, and 2010 is looking to be at least a challenging for me in my professional and personal development. When 2009 started, I hated my job, disliked and distrusted my employer and my board and was very scared to do something new because the economy was so bad. I also didn't feel I had enough "experience" to move into new roles--although I have a MBA and years of work experience--but mostly because other people had told me that "they" didn't think I had enough.

I learned several good things, though, from all of this in 2009: 1) I loved the mission for my organization, so I hung tough and made it through--turns out that I was correct in my distrust, but people making bad decisions and doing bad things will usually get what's coming to them. 2) I took your advice and demanded a greater role in the decision making process for our organization. Although I'm one of the youngest people in organization, I'm now the second highest paid employee and sit on the strategy and management team. --That last bit about demanding to be paid what you're worth is important--I had to ask, over and over, for a raise, but each time I had more evidence, a better argument, and an improved value-proposition for my company. I simply became too valuable not to be paid more.
Another NPO friend of mine and I go so tired of the lack of any professional networking groups that we put our resources together and started a monthly coffee-talk group open to anyone. It wasn't terribly innovative--or difficult to put together--but it made a big difference for me in a couple of key respects: 1) I understand better now that it's my decision to decide if I love or hate my job (so I did find lots of ways to fall back in love with my job); 2) there's not much difference between jobs and job satisfaction--only how we look at it; and 3) that the more community you have around you, the less isolated, ignorant and foolish you are likely to become. By that I mean, I realized that being brash, quitting my job and walking away from some important commitments (i.e. not resigning gracefully) wouldn't be good for me, my current organization, or, frankly, for any future employer I might have because fundraising is a business where your past relationships always matter.
I tried to start a blog a couple of times, but just realized that right now in my life I'm just not that motivated to share regularly. I spend quite a bit of time in the comments sections of particular bloggers and have been featured a couple of times for my comments, but I think in many ways that's as valuable contribution as writing my own site.
Last week I started volunteering again at an adult literacy nonprofit as an instructor after a four year absence. It just stuck with me that a huge part of my job is to ask people to give up their valuable time and resources and I wasn't doing the same--so to become a better fund raiser, I'm doing what we ask others to do--and it has completely been the best decision so far this year. So that's not quite joining a board, but in many ways it is as important for my career right now--I have meetings with my board members on almost a weekly basis so for now at least I'm covered--because it helps give me the perspective that my "customers" have when we approach them.
Our organization is just starting to get into the social media world, but I think that we'll begin to realize some tangible gains from improving our brand online--which also means that I'll end up spending some time improving my brand--everything from the groups I join on LinkedIn to deciding on the privacy settings for Facebook.
One of the other critical things I've learned from last year that I'm dedicated to pursuing in 2010 is learning that things don't always go "my way" but I am still responsible for my attitude. Meaning, I am responsible for how I look at things, what attitude and position I take and how I act out based on that attitude. Much beyond that, it's not up to me what happens. Life--and especially careers--aren't always fair, but my reaction to a given circumstance is completely my choice. It's okay to be angry at injustice, but it's not okay to be vengeful, resentful, hateful, or apathetic and resigned to it. Sometimes, it's okay not to be angry, even when everyone else around you wants you to join the angry mob. Letting things go can be a useful skill to develop--especially in cases where just moving around a yelling or crying or whatever won't change the circumstance. But most importantly, I'm learning that I have limits and constraints, so it's my job to recognize what's important, focus on what I can control and just ignore--or at least just don't let it bother me that I can't change everything.
I can be more specific about that: I live in Dallas. My organization's headquarters is in Houston. I travel one day a week, usually, to be in the Houston office for meetings. I'm pretty sure I'm as high up in the organization I can go without physically moving to Houston--which I'm not really inclined to do because my friends and family and history are all in Dallas--and they are all extremely important to me. At some point in the near future, I'll probably have to made a decision about my long term career with my current organization--either we'll have to expand our Dallas operations and I'll take over that responsibility, or I'll have to move to Houston or find another job here in Dallas. Not quite there, yet, but in the long term it's a career constraint that I'll have to deal with.
The great thing is, though, that if I do the things listed above--or at least do the things that make sense and motivate me right now to accomplish my goals--then I won't have to worry too much about that decision when it comes time.

Thanks, Rosetta, for incentivizing this discussion with the SSIR membership!
Diana Hernandez

Rosetta,
I have started 2010 with quite a few changes. I have been delaying my networking and development as I finish out my bachelor’s. No More. Today, I will attend my first volunteer orientation at the Houston Area Women’s Center. Part of my plan is to identify organizations with causes I really care about and find out what I can do to help. This plan should also help address how shy and anxious I feel around new people. I hope to volunteer for more organizations this year.
In addition, I have started a twitter account to get myself into the process of sharing my thoughts and journey. I have also decided to participate in Success Magazine’s “Designing the Best 10 Years of Your Life”. The year 2010 is all about concrete goals to accelerate my nonprofit career and in the process do more for my community.
Anh Phuong Tran

Hi Rosetta,

Thanks for sharing your tips. In 2009, social media enhanced my nonprofit career. With your advice, I tried twitter, and now find myself learning and engaging with the nonprofit twitterati and beyond. I found my voice again on my blog, and make time to create connections and build stronger relationships online, enhancing offline bonds.

This year, I'm working at my dream job and convincing others to take the social media plunge. I'm excited to see how my organization embraces social media to share our stories and space with others.
Valerie Lambert

What I've done - and am continuing to do - to enhance my career, simply, is to refuse to take "No" for an answer.

Just as we're expected as fund raisers to keep looking for ways to "Yes," I've applied that to my career.

When I started getting told that I couldn't go to various conferences, due to budget cuts, I applied to be a speaker, which resulted either in free or reduced admission, so I was allowed to continue my "career education." This also provided networking.

In addition, I joined a committee of my professional fund raising society and revamped our monthly networking roundtable, expanding the once-a-month meeting to include an online networking community as well. I'm now on the board.

This led to my being interviewed for articles in trade publications and asked to speak at regional and international conferences, instead of just local ones.

I also won a fund raising award after applying the knowledge gained at various sessions to one of my campaigns.

Each success has fed another...and so it goes!
Tiruba

This past fall, I was hired by an NPO for the first time. I have volunteered for NPO's for 10 years so it was exciting to get a job DOING what I was passionate about. Ironically, I got the position because I had a personal mission statement and it impressed the hiring committee (so other commenters, please heed Rosetta's advice).

This year, I plan on doing some board work. It will be my first time serving on a board of directors and I feel this is important to further my reputation as an involved advocate in child welfare.

I am also going to re-examine my networking and think about how to do things outside the box. Instead of going directly to the governmental agencies involved in child welfare like I have been doing, I need to work more with non-profits that are working to prevent the problems before the government steps in.

This is all.

Thanks!

Tiruba
April Northstrom

Hi Rosetta,

Simply because I just did an internal audit of myself and my career path...I had to share. The past year was a transformational one for me. My work as a independent consultant inspired me every day to find the freedom to help the people and causes that I care about.

I am 110% dedicated to nonprofits and fundraising, but knew I couldn't make a difference or get paid by just talking the talk. I've always believed in networking and in 2009 started networking with a new group of real-live-human beings who work in my field. I began building an online brand, volunteered with local orgs. and even started graduate school. These are the things that made my year transformational.

That said, I spent the early part of 2009 terrified of being out on my own and selling myself to local organizations, especially because I had just moved back to my home state after a long absence. The second half of the year kept me very busy building my connections and workload. After sweating out the hard stuff and a handful of sleepless nights, I now I have a career I LOVE and a boss I like (me!), but how do I get to the next level? I can't stay buried in my writing (or my sweatpants) forever...

What do I need to do to accelerate my career? What will make every day, the best day? Confidence.

Without any doubt, I've learned that being a millenial means that confidence comes and goes. I have good days when I conquer everything and make a genuine impact, other days I struggle to be heard. I know I can do the job and I know I have the experience to back it up, but I need to sell that to my more seasoned peers. Somedays I succeed, others I go running. I need to plant my feet, be confident and get down to business.

Confidence is my way to accelerate the career I want to have in nonprofit/foundation management. Perhaps it is a bit whimsical, but I know that if I tackle every project by being my own cheerleader, my work will be better. Confidence is the extra zip that I can carry in my pocket. :) I need to get that back.

I love where I am professionally, but I don't want to stay here. 2010 will be my year of confident selling, telling, creating, sharing and listening.

Thanks for your inspiration!

Best,

~April