This article was written by Dr. Amy Elliott, Director of the Office of Community Engagement at Marietta College. She has an extensive background in facilitating organizational and personal change and development, as well as experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors, including founding and leading organizations in both. She is a nonprofit lifecycles certified consultant.

Mission Met asked Dr. Elliott to share an overview of nonprofit lifecycles because we were recently exposed to it as a team at the Nonprofits LEAD conference. It’s helpful in understanding where organizations are on their growth trajectory and the kinds of capacity building they need at various stages. Mission Met does not currently have a nonprofit lifecycles consultant on staff, but we are supportive of the model and would encourage organizations to familiarize themselves with it while exploring their capacity building needs. We will be referencing this model as it relates to strategic planning in future articles.

Nonprofit Lifecycles

When asked to write a blog about nonprofit lifecycles I was excited to share this ingenious model with a wider audience. Once I started to think about the article, however. I became overwhelmed. I felt like someone asked me to write about a subject so large that it is incredibly difficult to decide what content to include and what content to exclude. I decided to start with the “what” and “why” of the model.

A Common Assessment Challenge (and Solution)

In order to do planning of any kind, we must first assess and come to some agreement on “where we are now" vs. “where we want to be." These assessments, the sharing of results of the assessments and the goals that are set from the conversations take on many forms in our different organizations.

A sound argument could be made that the tools used or types of assessments completed don’t matter. One could argue that the importance lies, instead, in the process of assessing current status and the great conversations that come from it. These are the real benefits to the organization and the planning process. I tend to agree with that theory.

However, so many times in organizational planning we need to share our assessment results with those outside the scope of the work. A challenge of this is that the basis and the vocabulary have to be understood by all involved. That is where a universally understood and simple tool like nonprofit lifecycles becomes incredibly valuable.

The tool or model that I have found to be the most useful, relatable, poignant and translatable for assessing and then communicating organizational capacity needs is the Nonprofit Lifecycle model developed by Susan Kenny Stevens. The premise of the model is (based on Stevens’ decades of nonprofit leadership and consulting experience) that there are normal, naturally observable stages that all organizations go through over time.

This premise should be comforting to the nonprofit staff or board members. Knowing that there is a natural flow, predictable growing pains and next steps takes the exploration of our challenges away from being personal and feeling like we are to blame. It moves us into a realm of systems which makes it much easier to objectively discuss topics pertaining to our organizations. As a natural result, the potential solutions can be discussed impersonally, making the conversations easier to have when blame or fault are off the table

Understanding the Role of Assessments

When nonprofits opt to work with the Nonprofit Lifecycles Institute, they first take an assessment known as the Online Selfie or organizations can take the assessment from the book. The assessment is often completed by many individuals within the organization (e.g. board members, leadership, staff.)

The responses to the assessment are not a determination of your organization’s stage. Instead, the team is encouraged to work through their responses together, a conversation that is often facilitated by a Nonprofit Lifecycles consultant. The result is the conversation and a collective determination of where they are within the lifecycle stages. The book version is particularly helpful because participants can learn about and reference the model throughout taking the assessment and in the follow-up conversations.

Why Nonprofit Lifecycles?

Why is it useful? Why should you, a nonprofit leader, take your valuable time to explore this particular model? Because it will become a basis for talking about where you are that will keep all the stakeholders in your world on the same page.

The key question about the Nonprofit Lifecycles Model may be why it is so widely applicable that the community of nonprofit lifecycles practitioners all over the world are using it for assessment, planning and design in any social impact organization with any mission in any situation?

The reason for the widespread applicability and use is that it is a simple, accurate model with an easy to understand and reproduce visual that leads to a common understanding of and language for the capacity situation and the stage of the organization.  

I would argue that once you have a common visual model and some common language to use, you can communicate with your staff, your board, your donors and your community about where you are and why your priorities are what they are at any given moment. 

The First Step

I encourage you to check out the Nonprofit Lifecyles Book and the NLI website. Then have a conversation with someone about what you learned about where you are in your organization, and maybe even what it tells you about your next steps. And, if you’d like to work with a certified consultant, take a look at their directory.

Use the vocabulary of the model to talk about the "lifecycle stage" instead of faulting a person, the board, finances or a particular leader. Talk about "table legs" that may need to be strengthened rather than repeating a conversation about what "can not" be done.  See what opens up when it feels less personal to talk about the organization. Did it make planning conversations easier to have?

Editor's Note: In the future, we will be diving into the lifecycle model and how it might help you with your strategic planning, development and execution.