Effect Collective

08/07/2026

A nonprofit board supervises just one person.

Yet roughly half of nonprofit CEOs say they have not had a formal performance review in the past year. About one in five say they have never had one at all.

Boards usually skip it for kind reasons. Things are going well. Nobody wants to seem ungrateful. The chair is a volunteer with a day job. The CEO has been there forever. So the review quietly becomes a thank you note.

Without a review there is no written record of expectations, no agreed set of goals, no defensible basis for compensation, and no early warning system. Every problem arrives as a surprise. That is expensive for the organization and unfair to the CEO.

What a real review includes:

✅ Goals set at the start of the year, in writing, agreed by both sides.
✅A CEO self assessment submitted first
✅Input from the full board and staff the CEO directly manages (Broader stakeholder input for a more 360-look in some years)
✅A written summary delivered in a private conversation
✅Compensation discussed separately, at least a few weeks later
✅New goals agreed upon

Commit to making this happen every single year. It changes the relationship.

Board chairs, when is yours scheduled?

08/05/2026

Twenty nine percent.

That is the share of nonprofits with a written succession plan, according to BoardSource's Leading with Intent. Which means roughly seven in ten boards are one resignation letter away from improvising.

Here is the part people miss: succession planning is not an executive search. It is a continuity plan. And you can build the first version of it in a single board meeting.

Three questions to put on your next agenda:

1. If our CEO were unreachable tomorrow, who signs, who speaks to staff, and who talks to the funders? Name people, not titles.

2. Where is that written down, and can two people other than the CEO find it in five minutes?

3. When did we last talk about this in a calm year rather than a crisis year?

Twenty minutes of discomfort now buys you months of stability later. Boards that do this once find it easy to do again.

If your board has never had this conversation, we will run it with you.

07/03/2026

Happy 250th birthday season, America.

As we celebrate the Fourth, we want to celebrate something woven into the American story from the beginning: our nonprofit and voluntary sector.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the United States and was struck by something he had not seen in the same way elsewhere. Americans, he observed, “of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations.” They came together to build schools, hospitals, churches, libraries, and civic institutions. He called the art of association a fundamental discipline of a free people.

That instinct never left us.

Today, Americans give at a scale that is almost hard to comprehend. In 2025, charitable giving in the United States reached an estimated $617.2 billion, crossing the $600 billion mark for the first time. Individuals still account for the largest share of giving, about 64% of the total. Roughly 1.5 million 501(c)(3) organizations operate across the country. Nonprofits employ nearly 10% of the private workforce.

Those numbers tell one story. The moment tells another.

Need is rising. Donor participation has been declining. Public funding is uncertain for many organizations. More dollars are coming from fewer people, and that makes the pipeline fragile even when the generosity is real.

So this Independence Day, alongside the fireworks, here’s to the food banks, shelters, arts councils, free clinics, schools, religious institutions, civic groups, volunteers, donors, board members, and staff members who keep showing up.

Two and a half centuries in, the American habit of joining together to care for one another remains one of our best inventions.

Happy birthday, America. 🎆

06/15/2026

Three Chicago Jewish day schools just did something the rest of us should study.

Akiba-Schechter, Bernard Zell, and Chicago Jewish Day School stopped competing for the same families and started collaborating. Their message to parents became simple: find the Jewish day school that is right for you. Any of the three. Because when a family chooses Jewish education, the whole community wins.

The results were not soft. All three schools saw applications rise. They reached families who had never considered day school at all. And the directors found something they didn't go looking for: colleagues instead of rivals, which turns out to be its own antidote to burnout.

This is the difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance one. John Kania and Mark Kramer named the underlying truth back in 2011 when they coined "collective impact" in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: no single organization solves a complex problem alone. Chicago built a common agenda and a shared front door, and the entire community got stronger for it.

Now here is where I want us to push further.

We already know where Jewish kids start. PJ Library reaches more than 240,000 families, sending free books every month to children from birth through age eight. We have the data. We know these families by name. And then, somewhere after the books stop, we lose them, and every camp, youth group, synagogue, and school spends real money and energy trying to find them all over again.

That is not a marketing problem. It is a coordination problem.

Imagine camps, summer programs, day schools, and PJ Library treating that pipeline as shared ground instead of competing turf. We have the names. We have the moments. We have the mission. What we too often lack is the willingness to sit at one table.

Chicago proved it works. The rest of us cannot afford to keep pretending we are smarter alone.

https://prizmah.org/hayidion/cusp/how-three-chicago-schools-traded-competition-community?fbclid=IwY2xjawSWpNBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFvZ0s4Tm0xejNqUUdQNnJCc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHr_tPfoB6Xuha0XsCx2TloxERRPOJr9HXm_GwkFwMNZ3cKfiBhGjIiRKm8vQ_aem_lB0u5A3qK4NUdg6YiDQJQw

06/11/2026

Nanette was delighted to be the speaker at the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island Annual Meeting this evening.

05/11/2026

There's something powerful about watching a board slow down long enough to actually think together.

This weekend I had the pleasure of facilitating a board retreat with the team at Egan Maritime Institute on Nantucket. We worked through strategic priorities, what it means to be an ambassador for an organization's mission, and how to tell their unique story in a way that sticks.

The best retreats don't just move through an agenda. They make space for the conversations people have been meaning to have.

Grateful for the trust, and for a group that showed up ready to do real work. (The harbor view didn't hurt either.)

04/21/2026

The Most Powerful Board Committee Might Not Be the One You Think

Most boards have a Finance Committee. It reviews budgets, monitors cash flow, and sometimes has a subcommittee that oversees investments. That work is essential and many people think it is the most powerful committee of the board.

But the committee with the greatest long-term impact may be the Nominating Committee.

Why? Because the Nominating Committee helps determine who will be sitting around the table making decisions about the future.

Board composition affects everything: culture, risk tolerance, strategic direction, donor connections, CEO oversight, and whether the board is willing to ask the hard questions when it matters most.

When you get board composition right, good governance becomes much more achievable. When you get it wrong, no policy, committee structure, or retreat is going to solve the problem.

Too often, though, the Nominating Committee is treated like a backup function. A small group that springs into action before the annual meeting to fill empty seats. There is no skills matrix, no pipeline, and no real selection criteria beyond, “They care about the organization and would probably say yes.” That is not a strong nominating process. That is a last-minute scramble.

The strongest Nominating Committees work throughout the year. They identify gaps. They build relationships. They think about the board the organization will need three years from now, not just who is available today. They recruit for both mission alignment and needed expertise. They understand that every board seat is a strategic choice.

If your Nominating Committee only meets in the spring, it may be time to rethink its role. Because who serves on your board is one of the most important governance decisions your organization makes. Treat it that way.

Is your Nominating Committee truly shaping the future of the board, or just filling seats?

04/08/2026

Bylaws untouched for a decade.
Committees that exist on paper only.
Policies nobody's looked at since President Obama.

Sound familiar?
Our April newsletter is about the one thing that gets this unstuck.

💫 The Effect: Who Owns It?

04/07/2026

The issue usually isn’t bad board members. It’s unclear expectations.

If no one has defined what “engaged” actually means, people default to what feels safe: attend meetings, vote on the budget, call it a day.

The fix isn’t a new committee. It’s a direct conversation about what this organization actually needs from its board — and whether the current board signed up for that.

Most organizations haven’t had that conversation.

That’s the work.

04/06/2026