staff retention

5 Best Practices for Nonprofit Employee Onboarding

Ann Green Communications, new staff, planning, staff retention , , ,

Your nonprofit needs a skilled, dedicated team to advance its mission. Use these onboarding best practices to set your new hires up for lasting success.

By Debbie Willis

Every new employee brings passion, talent, and a fresh perspective to your nonprofit. However, recruiting and retaining these essential team members is not always easy. In fact, 60% of nonprofit leaders report experiencing staff-related concerns—whether that’s a lack of staff capacity or losing staff because they cannot provide competitive pay and benefits.

Your nonprofit’s new hires and long-time employees are all dedicated to making the world a better place, but they need an environment that allows them to flourish. So, how do you foster this kind of environment?

Building the foundation your employees need to thrive begins with onboarding. Just as you start the year strong with clear goals and plans, help new hires step into their roles with clear expectations, training, and support.

Let’s walk through five best practices to boost morale, productivity, and retention through your employee onboarding process.

1. Use a learning management system.

It’s easy to assume that only corporations and large nonprofits operating in multiple locations need a learning management system (LMS) to help train and onboard employees. However, even small nonprofits—especially those with hybrid or remote employees—can benefit from investing in an LMS.

With a dedicated learning platform, you can create structured onboarding pathways, provide more convenient access to resources (sometimes even in multiple languages), and engage new hires in an online learning community. According to TopClass’s LMS for nonprofits guide, your platform should come with these essential features:

Alt Text: The top features nonprofits need in an LMS, as explained in more detail below

  • Branded Learning Dashboard: Each new hire can monitor their individual onboarding progress and view achievements on a personalized dashboard branded to your nonprofit.
  • Various Types of Content: To design a more engaging onboarding experience, you can incorporate various types of content, from interactive videos to timed assessments.
  • Collaborative Learning: Turn onboarding from a solo journey into a social experience through discussion forums, leaderboards, and cohort-based learning sessions.
  • Secure Payment Processing: Beyond onboarding, your nonprofit can offer learning programs to individuals and partner organizations for a fee. Many LMS platforms facilitate this by allowing you to sell courses, create coupons, and set up discounts.
  • Assessment Tools: Throughout onboarding, add mini-assessments with true-false, multiple-choice, and free-form questions to ensure your new employees are well-prepared and identify any knowledge gaps to address.
  • Integrations: Your LMS should integrate with popular tools, including HR systems and CRMs like Salesforce, to help you create a seamless onboarding process for the entire team.
  • Advanced Reporting: Track employee onboarding progress, assessment results, and certification completion to provide each new hire with the appropriate support, recognition, and follow-up.

Plus, you can use your nonprofit’s LMS to streamline many other processes and activities, including upskilling employees, onboarding volunteers, and educating board members.

2. Create a clear, detailed onboarding checklist.

You need to get your new employees up and running promptly so they can start contributing to your mission-centric initiatives. To minimize confusion and help new hires prepare for what’s ahead, provide them with a step-by-step onboarding checklist to follow. Whether this is a simple Google Doc or an automated path in your LMS, your checklist should cover basic activities and tasks such as:

  • Learn about the nonprofit’s mission, values, programs, and leadership.
  • Review workplace policies, including communication and paid time off (PTO).
  • Attend a virtual or in-person tour of the facility.
  • Set up an email, software access, and a workstation.
  • Complete compliance and technology training.
  • Share feedback in an onboarding survey.

Remember, the purpose of onboarding is to help employees feel comfortable and confident in joining your nonprofit’s team. Rather than generally familiarizing new hires with your organization, encourage them to start engaging deeply with your mission. Take opportunities to share real stories about your impact and provide access to nonprofit webinars and other resources that they can use to immerse themselves in your work.

3. Assign a mentor or buddy to new hires.

Life at a nonprofit can be very fast-paced. Create a mentorship or buddy program to help your new hires find a sense of belonging and avoid feeling overwhelmed when they start. By pairing each new employee with a more experienced team member, you provide them with individualized encouragement and support through onboarding and beyond.

When pairing mentors or buddies with new hires:

  • Be thoughtful about each match. Survey new employees about their learning preferences, communication styles, career goals, and interests. Use these insights to assign a mentor or buddy who will provide the most relevant support for each new hire—for example, you might pair a new social media manager with the digital marketing manager to learn more about brand voice and storytelling techniques.
  • Schedule regular check-ins. Provide formal and informal opportunities for new hires to connect with their mentor or buddy. You might use your LMS to arrange structured check-ins with relevant discussion prompts. At the same time, encourage pairings to meet for casual coffee chats to delve into specific questions the new employee may have about workplace expectations or guidelines, such as your fiscal policies.
  • Offer recognition and incentives. Inspire new hire mentors and buddies to put in their best effort by giving them a shout out in newsletters or “Mentor of the Month” programs. You can even award their time and dedication with a small gift card, a branded t-shirt, or additional PTO.

Incorporate questions related to your mentorship or buddy program into your onboarding survey to collect feedback and learn how to improve your pairings going forward.

4. Focus on building social connections.

During onboarding, your nonprofit should focus beyond simply getting employees up to speed in their roles. Go deeper to help new hires find a sense of camaraderie and closeness in their new workplace. After all, recent Gallup research indicates that employees with a best friend at work are much more productive and less likely to leave their organization.

Of course, nurturing these friendships requires more than simply telling your employees to bond. Building relationships with donors is a year-round effort, and the same goes for your employees. Start early by incorporating some of these social ideas into your onboarding process:

  • Invite new hires to share interesting facts about themselves on internal communication channels.
  • Assign rotating lunch or coffee pairings with a new team member each week.
  • Break the ice with a team storytelling session in which everyone shares why they’re passionate about your cause.
  • Set up a virtual or in-person scavenger hunt for items related to your nonprofit’s work.

By adding more opportunities for new hires to laugh and learn during onboarding, you can make them feel welcome both in their roles and in your organization’s community as a whole.

5. Check in and provide feedback frequently.

Develop trust and engagement early by regularly checking in with new employees and providing feedback on their progress. For example, during the first week of onboarding, managers could meet with new hires for 15 minutes every day to answer questions. Then, these check-ins can turn into weekly one-on-one meetings to discuss expectations, performance, and challenges.

Establish a culture of gratitude at your nonprofit by frequently expressing appreciation to donors and employees—including new hires. Consider these thoughtful ideas for making your new employees feel valued:

  • Spotlight them in email newsletters and social media posts, along with their skills and hobbies.
  • Gift them branded apparel, notebooks, water bottles, etc.
  • Celebrate onboarding completion with a certificate or badge.

Additionally, empower your nonprofit’s team to spread positivity and appreciation through peer-to-peer recognition. For example, eCardWidget recommends designing employee recognition eCards that team members can personalize and send to their peers for a job well done or other career milestones.

Improving your onboarding process, whether through implementing an LMS or launching a mentorship program, will create lasting benefits throughout each new employee’s experience at your nonprofit. 

Start small, focusing on the main improvement areas you identify from onboarding survey responses, and be transparent about the changes you make along the way. Before long, you’ll have an onboarding process that fuels engagement, connection, and loyalty.

Debbie Willis is the VP of Global Marketing at ASI, with over 20 years of marketing experience in the association and non-profit technology space. Passionate about all things MarTech, Debbie has led countless website, SEO, content, email, paid ad, and social media marketing strategies and campaigns. Debbie loves creating meaningful content to engage and empower association and non-profit audiences.

Debbie received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing Information Systems from James Madison University and a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from George Washington University. Debbie is a member of Sigma Sigma Sigma sorority and American Society of Association Executives, and dabbles in photography.

Fundraising Efficiently: 3 Ways to Improve Your Operations

Ann Green fundraising, major donors, planning, staff retention , , ,

Let’s take a look at three areas where nonprofits can drive increased fundraising efficiency: staff retention, donor qualification, and campaign planning.

By Chelsey Newmyer

What first comes to mind when you think about increasing your nonprofit’s fundraising efficiency?

Cutting expenses? Making bigger asks of more of your donors? Sending more emails and appeals to keep your mission on their minds?

These methods can work, but they shouldn’t be your first or only steps. 

Cutting expenses can soon become unsustainable. Asking more from larger segments of your donors will ultimately make your fundraising less efficient if you’re not asking the right donors. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and potentially hurting relationships. Blasting your messages too frequently can also have the unintended consequence of making your audience tune you out.

The key to success lies in fundraising smarter, not just leaner or more aggressively, with an eye on the long-term sustainability of your strategies. Learning to do more with what you already have will grow your ability to drive impact into the future. 

Many nonprofits understand the value of sustainable fundraising streams like recurring giving programs, but how can you go further? What are some foundational ways to build efficiency into your efforts from the ground up? Let’s take a look at three fundamental ways to get started.

  1. Minimize employee churn.

To make the most of your resources, start by preserving them. Any organization’s most important resources are the people who keep it running.

The average employee turnover rate for nonprofits hovers around 19%, consistently higher than for-profit companies. It’s a common problem battled by organizations of all sizes. Churn is also costly for nonprofits and can create major hurdles to growth. There are several reasons why internal churn can be so harmful:

  • Churn creates new costs. Hiring new team members to replace those who leave takes time and money. Not to mention, there’s the opportunity cost to consider since new staff won’t operate as effectively right away.
  • Churn decreases overall engagement and morale, leading to worse outcomes across the organization.
  • Churn can harm your nonprofit’s relationships. Fundraising programs thrive on relationships with donors, businesses, and other partners. When experienced fundraisers leave, there’s a risk of losing all the valuable relationships they’ve built.

Altogether, these impacts can slow or derail your organization’s growth, making it harder to generate meaningful returns on your fundraising work. It can also become a harmful cycle if left unchecked, with remaining employees more likely to leave as well if they’re feeling burnt out from picking up the slack.

If fundraiser retention has been a challenge for your nonprofit, work to improve it before diving deeper into other fundraising efficiency improvements. Graham-Pelton’s guide to nonprofit staff retention outlines the essential elements of an effective strategy and 15 steps organizations can take to get started.

With a stable, engaged team ready to drive your mission forward, you’ll then be able to implement new changes that help them work more efficiently.

  1. Refine your donor qualification process.

Prioritization is a key part of efficient fundraising. For nonprofit fundraising teams, this means focusing on your donor qualification strategies.

Qualification is the process of prioritizing your major donors and prospects for outreach based on how likely they are to give at the current moment. It relies on sets of criteria that either qualify or disqualify a prospect for outreach, for example:

  • Qualified: Active donor, hasn’t been solicited in the last X months, proven giving capacity at the intended level, etc.
  • Disqualified: No proven giving capacity, lapsed donor, or was recently solicited and declined to give, etc.

Qualification is used specifically for major giving. Relationships with major donors need to be thoughtfully grown over time—which is a time-intensive process—hence the increased need to effectively prioritize outreach. When a major gift is secured, it can represent a significant return on the investment of that time. By focusing your efforts on where it’s most likely to drive impact, you’ll increase the overall ROI of your efforts without cutting costs or making bigger asks.

If your nonprofit hasn’t refreshed its approach to qualification (or doesn’t yet have one), there are a few immediate steps you can take. 

First, review your data to learn more about the donors who’ve given large or major gifts. Find trends in their characteristics and in the cultivation and solicitation strategies you used to ask them for gifts—use these trends to establish updated qualification criteria. Using these criteria, take a first pass at generating a new prospect list. 

From there, keep refining your approach as you talk to donors, ask for gifts, and learn more about them. Just be sure to consistently revisit your prioritized prospect list to ensure it’s as fresh as possible based on your most recent (and well-maintained) data. This efficient approach makes it possible to present fully customized appeals to your donors and boost your chances of securing a gift.

  1. Thoroughly plan ahead for your fundraising campaigns.

Like major gift fundraising, large-scale campaigns are time-intensive, but they can also deliver high ROIs.

Following capital campaign best practices can be incredibly efficient, despite these fundraising goals being among the highest your organization ever pursues. Focusing on major gifts and following a strategic order of solicitations allows you to pack a punch, securing large sums in a very targeted way.

But you’ll also need to ensure that your campaign plans are designed to be truly achievable. Goals need to strike the right balance of being ambitious but realistic. This will help maximize your ROI (while ensuring you’re not pursuing a goal that’s too high or leaving money on the table by aiming too low).

To set the perfect goal and minimize wasted time and effort during a major campaign, conduct a feasibility study early in the planning process. This can be done for any big initiative that will rely on major gifts, not just capital campaigns.

A feasibility study or planning study seeks the input of major donors, prospects, and stakeholders on your initial campaign plans and goals. Since these are the supporters who’ll ultimately help drive the campaign to success, the idea is to use their input to help shape your finalized goal and approach. It’s also a helpful way to secure early buy-in on your project by allowing key donors to become more closely involved.

If a large campaign is coming up for your organization, develop a case for support and begin mentioning the campaign to your donors so that it’s on their radar. Develop initial lists of who to include in your study and whose gifts would be essential for success based on your qualification process.

Once you’ve conducted a planning study and analyzed your findings, make adjustments to your plan as needed and move forward with your campaign. Look for ways to keep donors engaged with the project beyond just inviting them to a luncheon or grand finale gala. Have a plan in place early for thanking and recognizing donors. This will not only lead to a more successful campaign but also strengthen your relationships for more effective fundraising in the future.

Increasing your efficiency shouldn’t mean trimming your operations down to the bare essentials or stretching your donor relationships to their limits. 

Instead, look for ways to do more with what you already have. Across all areas of your work, including internal management processes, donor stewardship, and campaign planning, you can drive greater impact by preserving your time and prioritizing your work.

Chelsey Newmyer is a Senior Consultant at Graham-Pelton. An analytical problem solver, Chelsey uses a data-driven approach fostered by her engineering background to conduct multipronged annual giving campaigns, manage leadership-level prospects and volunteers, and enhance cross-departmental relationships.