This is the ninth post in a series applying Seth Godin’s rules of bootstrapping (see also here) to building a non-profit organisation.
Rule 9: Become ever more professional
Professionals do it right, they make it work, and they don’t take it personally.
Seth Godin
Of course your non-profit organisation should be professional.
You need to:
- Show up – be there for the people you seek to serve
- Show up – it takes time to get good at what you do
- Show up – you need to go deep in the context that you’re serving, know your clients and their context really, really well. Few people do this
- Show up – for your clients and your team, especially when you don’t feel like it today
- Keep your promises
- Do good work that no-one else can do (if only because no-one else will)
- Make it work – which might mean going beyond your technical contribution and paying attention to the necessary ‘wrapper‘
- Understand the full stack of skills that make your organisation’s work possible, and get a working knowledge of as many of them as you can
- Specialise
- Find partners, colleagues, friends who complement your skills and personality
- Learn to get help, delegate
- Do you work in the right way – find lasting solutions that don’t sacrifice things that are important to you on the way
- Stay client-focused – there might be a ‘show’, and you might even have a big role, but it isn’t about you
- Stay honest – the professional pushes back against donors with ideas that won’t work, or won’t help even if they do work, or that aren’t really about the clients (see Rule 1)
- Stay honest – be clear about what you do and don’t, explain what’s not working, own your mistakes
- Find the right price for your work – a price that enables you to do it sustainably and with space for human connection, ensuring of course that your work is worth more than people pay for it
- Create more value than you capture
- Communicate clearly – you have to take responsibility for knowing your audience, for being clear and convincing, for stopping from time to time to make sure you’re being understood
- Build assets – deliberately do things that will make it easier tomorrow
- Be there early
- Start on time
- Stop on time
- Stopping on time means, with enough time to talk to people afterwards
- Create boundaries that allow you to do good work, and to be generous
- Be committed – overcome The Resistance (ala Pressfield)
- Read and learn – all the time
- Read within your field
- Read outside your field
- Read fiction, poetry – they’ll enrich what you do
- Apply what you learn – try new things
- Understand how new technologies have and are changing your work
- Try to see the future
- Think about what you do
- Write about what you do
- Connect with others that do what you do, or things like it
- Be generous – share what you know
I’m stopping writing now, so that I can go and show up for some people by making pancakes.