A nonprofit professional, whether a grant professional, program director, or finance team member is nearly guaranteed to have a list of high priority projects that need to be done, and not enough time to do all of the work in that moment.

For example, a grant professional is typically expected to create the grant calendar to fit in as many grant applications in a year as possible. The first strategy that many grant professionals rightly rely on is driven by grantmaker deadlines. Yet there are numerous methods for estimating mission (business) value and return on investment for a grant professional (and the organization as a whole) to utilize in effectively prioritizing the grant opportunities being considered.

In this session, participants will learn seven methods to use to prioritize their work as well as ways to facilitate prioritization discussions about the work beyond being deadline-driven using those seven methods.

These seven methods are anchored in the three primary sources of assessing business value and all can be used to help nonprofit professionals prioritize projects and priority work:

1 – Market/Mission Value 

2 – Risk Reduction 

3 – Capacity Building

As a result of this session, you will be able to:

• Identify seven techniques for prioritizing your projects 

• Identify three techniques for determining business value 

• Explain the importance of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in prioritizing your work

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The constant to-do list of tasks and projects that nonprofit professionals face can make the work feel like a hamster wheel (always going!) or perhaps Groundhog Day (always faced with the same problems/tasks every day) and the impact of the work you are doing toward achieving the strategic goals for the organization in service of the large mission for the organization can get lost.

Having a set cadence for approaching your work in smaller goals as a heartbeat for yourself and the team can allow you to achieve small wins as you build toward achieving your larger goals and also provide you the opportunity for small tweaks for continuous improvement of your work and the way you work along the way.

In this session, we will explain how Sprints can be used by nonprofits to solve big problems, test out ideas, and achieve bold nonprofit goals. We will look at case studies from multiple nonprofit settings to show how the Sprint cadence has been used to achieve big audacious goals so that you can prepare to set your first Sprint in motion.

In this session you will learn:

• Understand what a Sprint is and how that becomes an operating cadence for your team;
• Learn how to determine the ideal length of a Sprint for your team;
• Learn from case studies of nonprofits that have used Sprints to help achieve short and long-term goals; and
• Understand how to launch your team’s first Sprint.

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Large new initiatives, new special events, and huge federal grant applications… These are the types of things that nonprofits are always faced with. Yet how are the team members in the nonprofit organizations or the leaders in the organization supposed to have the most accurate estimate of when the initiative will launch, if the special event details will be done on time, or if the application will be submitted before the deadline? What often happens is heroic efforts by team members to make the deadline or be ready for the event, and that is not a sustainable approach for the individual employee, team, or organization.

In this session, we will teach you the two Agile estimation techniques, affinity estimation and planning poker, and why/when you will use them. We will explain the importance of story point estimation and why to use it in place of hour estimation. We will help you be ready to use Agile estimation to plan for achieving a sustainable pace of high performance for yourself, your team, and your larger organization.

In this session you will learn:

• Gain an understanding of two Agile estimation techniques;
• Understand the significance of story point estimation over hour estimation;
• How to apply Agile estimation techniques to help plan large nonprofit initiatives; and
• How to use Agile estimation to achieve a sustainable pace of high performance.

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Our work as nonprofit professionals and the way we work together to accomplish that work doesn’t always go exactly as planned. Sometimes it goes far better than planned or expected. Other times there are hiccups and hurdles to handle along the way. A retrospective is a team event that is focused not on the work as you would expect in a post-mortem event but rather, focused on improving the *way* we work together as a team and building on our past successes (and failures as well).

We will share multiple strategies to facilitate a retrospective with your team to ensure your team benefits from the event. You will learn new techniques to help keep team members engaged in continuously improving the way you work together.

 Many different styles of retrospectives will be demonstrated that can help breathe new life into this event and re-invigorate Scrum teams to eliminate waste and continuously improve the way they work. We will share case studies that provide additional inspiration on the unique approach successful nonprofit teams are taking with retrospectives to inspect their process and approaches and pivot when they encounter obstacles.

In this session you will learn:

• Understand what a retrospective is and how to conduct one;

• Learn the benefits of continuous improvement focused on how we work together; and

• Learn from case studies of nonprofits that use retrospectives to adapt to change.

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We all spend A LOT of time at work and with our colleagues. We often develop friendships with some of our colleagues that influence our personal happiness. In this webinar, we will look at our professional happiness with our team as a whole and how that influences our team performance.

Team happiness is a leading indicator of team performance, yet is often a metric that is overlooked by nonprofit leaders or organizations. Measuring team happiness is not the same as being asked occasionally by your organization if you are happy with the organization/your role in the organization. That is why regardless of your title or role in your team, YOU can help influence your team’s happiness and test ideas to help improve the team’s happiness.

In this session, we will look at why it is meaningful to measure and track trends of perceived team happiness as well as perceived stress levels in the team. We will look at case studies to highlight how this technique has helped to minimize burnout in nonprofit teams and instead helped teams to thrive while achieving their goals together.

In this session you will learn:

• Understand the value of measuring team happiness;
• Increase awareness of different methods of measuring team happiness;
• Understand how to implement and track a team happiness measure; and
• Learn why tracking perceived team stress levels in addition to team happiness may be important.

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