• What’s your mission? Can everyone in the organization articulate it as well as you can? Do you have your elevator pitch down along with your impact numbers? What’s the word on the street about the services you offer? Fundamental questions like these demand clear, compelling answers. Yet many nonprofits struggle to answer them meaningfully.
• Enter Greenwald Solutions, expert in making behind-the-scenes staff as knowledgeable and efficient as possible, particularly in prioritizing and enunciating organizational goals. Like a course in “Your Nonprofit 101,” consulting with Adam helps make the most of staff output in order to attract and retain clients. The assemblage of comprehensive written plans for programming, fundraising and communication are part and parcel of Adam’s methodology, key to both immediate and long-term improvements.
• He also meets with staff, stakeholders and key constituents in SWOT-analysis fashion, aiming to earn buy-in so that everyone can articulate what matters most to the nonprofit.

PROGRAM EVALUATION

• Well and good isn’t good enough to inspire confidence in the community and with potential funders. Programs require solid research and convincing outcomes to indicate their legitimacy and value.
• Through the implementation of such key practices as peer-reviewed research analysis and professional interval-based survey development, Adam’s expertise authenticates the need that programs meet and verifies that the solutions they offer are demonstrable. Greenwald Solutions helps confirm that organizations are uplifting the communities and causes they serve to a conclusively better place.

FUNDRAISING PLAN EVALUATION

• Adam can help align programming staff with fundraisers and brings clarity that sheds light on what’s most critical: the menu of giving opportunities for donors, potential board members and the community to fund.
• Alongside an organization’s senior staff, Adam enables all parties — including the executive director and board members — to accurately articulate funding needs. He fosters the brand of close-knit collaboration and precise dialogue between colleagues and supervisors that raises the spirits of fundraisers and funders alike.

COMMUNICATIONS PLAN EVALUATION

• Maybe a graphic designer, perhaps a social media intern: organizations often budget for marketing and communications staff when they can! But more often than not, they lack even the most basic strategy to communicate important information. Ad hoc or reactive planning for the promotion of a nonprofit can jeopardize efforts to successfully reach out.
• Greenwald Solutions ensures that a consistent communications plan is in place, including fundamentals like newsletter templates, elevator pitches, tag-lines, social media calendaring and consistent visual branding. With Adam aboard, an organization can see upticks in their email open rates and improvements in their direct mail efforts, among other indicators that an organization is effectively broadcasting its message.

HUMAN RESOURCES + STAFFING EVALUATION

• Strapped and stressed nonprofits often overburden staff with tasks that are overlapping, unconnected and inappropriate for their skill set. But instilling efficiency in an organization’s hiring protocol can require some serious rethinking.
• The best way to achieve this and what Greenwald Solutions does brilliantly, is to evaluate what positions are truly needed according to the nonprofit’s needs, avoiding shoehorning priorities into the limitations of the existing payroll. Putting into place proper staff evaluations, performance evaluation plans and progressive disciplinary action plan — another Greenwald Solutions specialty — can all help a nonprofit maximize its human resources.
• Working with Adam reveals smart, practical ways to outsource certain tasks and to bring in qualified employees for specialized demands. And Adam’s knack for helpful communication with the executive director and the board can also shed light on what’s truly necessary to carry out an organization’s directives, including the legal ramifications of employee relations.

• All the blame and none of the credit: the efforts of dedicated staff often go unsung. Adam directly empathizes with this, as a colleague who’s been in the trenches of nonprofit grind.
• Through Greenwald Solutions, he offers uncommon insight in supporting professionals who grapple with hassles that hinder the good the organization can accomplish. Adam provides therapy-esque, confidential and high-level rapport and coaching for executive directors and developmental staff surrounding key obstacles such as the legwork required to attract funders, surmounting of fiscal year fundraising constraints, measurement of success and progress in the nonprofit, management of donors and other demands, emphasizing workable strategies to mend these issues.

COACHING

• Nonprofit staff often have vastly different perceptions of how the public reads their output; honest, clean-cut feedback on how well (or not well) they convey organizations’ messages to the right people, and address the right issues, can prove enlightening.
• Adam excels in the tough yet tasteful coaching of staff members needed to spot and end ruts, neutralize office politics and rejuvenate their performance. Though coaching can feel time-prohibitive, Greenwald Solutions can even make a lunch hour productive beyond the sandwich. (Nights and weekends and video conference are also options that help make the coaching flexible.)
• Adam sweetens the pot with a free one-on-one, introductory session, in which he helps staff lay out six-month achievement plans regarding the deliverables of the coaching experience. From motivating staff to stay on-board longer to outlining a long-term career trajectory (while maximizing a current position), the routes of work with Adam as a coach are as varied as they are valuable.

DEVELOPMENT STAFF COACHING

• Adam’s personal experience as an executive director, vice president of development and director of development, lends authenticity to his coaching here. He grasps the nuances of both overseeing fundraising efforts and working under a fellow staff member with more experience and higher organizational rank.
• Greenwald Solutions emboldens development staff to bring discipline to their efforts toward the end of deeper professional satisfaction and overall nonprofit improvement, including tactics that generate key information from the budget, expenses breakdowns and program-to-fundraising budget calibration. He also helps staff create and implement overall annual plans that define and clarify how and why funds are being raised, spent and evaluated for the good of the organization.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR COACHING

• Greenwald Solutions empowers executive directors to think both “big picture” and about themselves. Developing clear and defined lines of communication throughout the organization, and outlining boundaries of responsibility with the board, can help them to advocate not only for the nonprofit but also for their own professional needs and preferences as well.
• Adam’s coaching can help bring about this clarity and precision by establishing the climate and culture of the organization (open-door vs. close-door, casual vs. more businesslike) in conjunction with the board, in ways that are most effectively conveyed at all levels. Adam also supports executive directors in how to position their organizations against similar organizations via strategic planning, encouraging collaboration between all constituents and toward the creation of detailed multi-year plans.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

• You’re deeply committed to the nonprofit world, but are you in the right sector? Do you want to ask people for money, manage the database, plan special events or write grants? Is this the best fit for you? How do you transition into an area where you haven’t had experience?
• Partnering with Adam can lend much-needed clarity and direction to your pursuit of the best-fit nonprofit sphere and position. And investigating the horizons of opportunities doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your job; instead, Adam smoothly refocuses your search into helpful avenues like position-specific professional organizations and resume-building educational opportunities. He also mines your work experience for a set of transferable skills that can support lateral moves you can consider making beyond your current employment.

TOP-DOWN / BOTTOM-UP STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

• Both top-down and bottom-up management strategies pivot on a key truth: everyone answers to someone, no matter their position. Bosses hold responsibility to the board, while an organization’s volunteers and constituents have much to bear on how even lower-level employees handle their effectiveness and responsibility.
• Greenwald Solutions specializes in the nuances of both approaches and generates apt, meaningful methods of improving clients’ use of them. The collaborative team environment that earmarks a bottom-up style benefits from how Adam simplifies the carving out of time and space for communication-enriching dialogue to take place. Calendaring opportunities to listen and receive feedback is also crucial for top-down adherents, which Adam can help create toward the end of improved delivery of services and more authoritative decision-making.

• Most nonprofits have needs beyond their budgetary constraints. Volunteers and credentialed pro bono professionals, the life-blood of nearly every charitable organization, in every size and setting, are common solutions to these additional demands. But accomplishing all that’s needed without a well-drawn, intentional volunteer and pro bono services plan can often spell trouble or even disaster.
• Greenwald Solutions helps organizations think through both immediate and long term needs, identify a variety of solutions and determine next steps. “How do we advertise these volunteer opportunities?” “Why should busy people volunteer at our agency?” “What’s in it for them?” These and other questions need answers before embarking on a professional-level volunteer program, answers that Adam can help discover and implement.

VOLUNTEER RECRUITMENT

• Quick tip: stapling a sign to a telephone pole or advertising online may not be the best route to rounding up passionate, reliable and qualified volunteers. Instead, organizations should consider the wellspring of local opportunities that match volunteers with nonprofits, a process of research and action which Greenwald Solutions can expertly manage. It’s also critical that organizations create and oversee protocols and measures that incentivize volunteers to lend their time and energy. Sorting adults-only opportunities from those that can accommodate youngsters, providing accident or injury insurance coverage for volunteers and arranging for community service credits for students are just a handful of means that, with Adam’s support, nonprofits can improve their recruitment efforts.

VOLUNTEER MANAGEMENT

• “You can’t always get what you want:” a Rolling Stones’ lyric that many nonprofits have taken too closely to heart, particularly regarding the handling of their volunteers. The “just take what you can get” approach to volunteer performance and disciplinary issues, or tolerating unprofessional and ineffective service out of gratitude for volunteers’ very existence, can seriously hamper an organization. And since effective volunteer management offers credibility with the community and with funders, it becomes all the more important to rectify discord here.
• Greenwald Solutions helps nonprofits devise and execute helpful guidelines to structure and chart the identify of an ideal volunteer, the process of scrutiny and training to find and vet potential volunteers and organizational rules and expectations for their contributions. Adam also helps put into place the means to collect feedback from volunteers, as well as from clients and supervisors, that can serve as welcome material for newsletters, reports and a sense of satisfaction throughout the organization.

PROFESSIONAL PRO BONO SERVICES

• High-level professionals require a different approach than volunteers who stuff envelopes, among other important yet less intensive contributions. When mismanaged, Ph.D.s, MSWs, accountants and lawyers and other credentialed experts can alternate between feeling underused and feeling overly entitled, neither of which leads to long-term fulfillment for an organization.
• With the support of Greenwald Solutions, nonprofits can simplify how they attract, retain and manage specialized professionals. Adam helps organizations develop tempting tactics like tax benefits and continuing education credits, as well as communicating the ripple effect of professionals’ expertise on the larger community. In addition, he can also help set up peer-to-peer trainings on organizational protocol that maintain work ethic and respect for a nonprofit’s culture, structure and goals.