If you run a nonprofit, you probably didn’t take the job to spend your days doing the books. Yet that’s exactly where so many Executive Directors end up – buried in operations, with no time left for the donor relationships and storytelling only they can do. On a great episode of RelishTHIS, Simon Severino of Strategy Sprints handed me a deceptively simple fix.
Every day, log how you spent your time. Then answer two questions:
- One – of everything I did today, which task could someone else do better than me tomorrow? When the same task shows up three or four times, it’s a pattern, and it’s ready to hand off (delegate, automate, outsource, or cut).
- Two – if tomorrow I lived more freely and more intentionally, what would I do? This one reconnects you to the vision – the book you meant to write, the major donor you meant to call, the mission work that keeps getting buried.
Simon says you can routinely reclaim 10 to 14 hours a week this way. That’s a Foundation move, but it’s in service of everything downstream – because those reclaimed hours are exactly where fundraising and marketing live.
Then there’s my favorite idea from our conversation, and it’s a pure Inspire-phase play: the list of 100 dream partners. Simon has clients name 100 aligned organizations and work the list on a fixed cadence – one big joint effort a year, and roughly 48 small ones, about one a week. It turns “we should do more partnerships” into an actual system. And it’s the most elegant, lowest-cost reach there is, because other people carry your message. As Simon put it, having people who believe in what you offer tell others about it is the most elegant way to do “sales.”
Start this week: track your time, answer the two questions for three days, and draft your first 20 dream partners.
Reframe your whole approach and learn more about the Audience Engagement Cycle with Mission Uncomfortable, free at missionuncomfortablebook.com, and calculate your Purpose-Driven Marketing Score here. And, as always, if you need some help, give us a shout.
