2. SPEAKER
2
Melissa joined Minnesota Philanthropy Partners in 2010. She has
more than 10 years experience in accounting and auditing for the
nonprofit sector. Melissa also serves as treasurer on the board of
directors for Saint Paul Conservatory of Music. She graduated from
the University of St. Thomas with a degree in accounting.
Melissa Pelland, CPA
Melissa.pelland@mnpartners.org
www.linkedin.com/in/melissapelland
www.mnpartners.org
3. CONSULTANT
3
Lee Kuntz is a work process consultant, trainer, strategist, speaker
and mentor. Lee founded and leads Innovation Process Design,
LLC. Lee believes how you do your work can bring real value to
your customer. As a transformation agent, she leads organizations
to see and harvest opportunities in their work process. Lee believes
all service organizations can learn and leverage process
optimization to add more value to their customers, their company
and their employees.
Lee Kuntz,
Innovative Process Design
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leekuntz
www.innovationprocessdesign.com
6. WHO WE ARE
6
COMMON BOARD MEMBERSHIP
Minnesota Community Foundation
(more than 650 affiliate funds)
The Saint Paul Foundation
(more than 1,000 affiliate funds)
GiveMN
The Marvin
Warroad Area
Foundation
Mardag
Foundation
F. R. Bigelow
Foundation
The
Community
Investment
Group
Saint Paul
Public Schools
Foundation
Red Wing
Property
Conservation
Fund
The Jones
Family
Foundation
7. FOUNDATIONAL SYSTEM
7
• Over Budget by $1.25m
• 2.5 Years Behind Schedule
• Custom But No Ability to Scale
• New System - Old Processes
9. OUR PROBLEM – OUR JOURNEY
9
• USE Our New Technology
• REDUCE Our Risk for Errors
• Create SCALE
10. SOLUTION INSIGHTS
10
• Short on Resources & Knowledge To Meet
Solution
• Increase Community Impact & Improve
Service
• Fundamental Change In Our Process
• Recognized We Needed Outside Help
11. INNOVATIVE PROCESS DESIGN
11
• PROCESS MANAGEMENT TRAINER MENTOR
• PROVIDED “FRESH SET OF EYES” TO APPROACH
NEW WAY OF THINKING/WORKING
Thank you Christine. I am going to start this presentation with a few questions if you don’t mind participating.
Has your Foundation ever struggled with:
Having to much to do.
And what about Fully implementing new systems
Mitigating risk
Maintaining a competitive advantage
Providing a superior level of service for your constituents
If you raised your hand you have found the right session. Today you will get tools to solve all of these challenges.
Most of my career has been in public accounting and I was pretty sure at the time I would never leave public because I thought private would be boring. In 2009 we were living in San Diego, CA and we had our six month old son. My husband and I decided to move back to MN to be closer to family. A week before I was going to start my new public accounting job in MN I decided it would not work for our family for a variety of reasons why public accounting can be challenging for families.
In any rate I am glad I made the switch because there is nothing boarding about community foundations.
Our work we have been doing regarding process improvement has been challenging, exciting and powerful. I hope you can see why I say all of those things by the end of this presentation.
I want to introduce you to Lee Kuntz who is our amazing process improvement coach. Say something about the number of projects.
Today we are delighted to share secrets with you. Secrets that can help your foundation cure pain, recapture time and do more for your community and donors. Secrets to success that the St. Paul Foundation learned through. Today you can start a journey to get tools to solve those all those challenges Melissa mentioned when we started.
Foundations are complex organizations with a great product. Your foundations are similar in complexity as I saw when I was at American Express in their Investment Department and what I have seen as 15 years a black belt and an improvement coach and trainer. Because of this complexity, you have a great opportunity to improve how you work and your results.
We know you can have those results because the St. Paul Foundation achieved really impressive results.
We want you to take home your learning from today. There we’ve provide you some tools.
Does everyone have a folder? When you open it, on the left is my team’s information.
On the right is a take home sheet. This sheet encourages you to take notes and to evaluate your foundation’s readiness to improve results. The take home sheet also encourages you to prioritize your learnings and follow up and take action when you get home.
See feedback from? Like you my team is a quality organization. Please complete the feedback from and leave it on the table when you leave. I’ll pick it up.
Agenda
Why we decided to take on this work.
How we did it and how you can do it.
And lastly I am going to show you our impressive results.
Let’s have Lee give us a little primer so we are all on the same page when we talk about continuous process improvement.
The success of your foundation is driven by two elements. What you do and how you do it. What and How. What and How.
Your foundation chooses what they will do: The causes to focus on. The programs you will offer. That is fun work, but it is only a small part of how you deliver results.
A big part of your results to your donors, community board and employees is how you to the work. How you deliver on what your foundation decides to do.
How many of your do these activities in your foundation:
Process Donor contributions?
Management money
Pay Grants?
Each of these is a process with a series of steps. When those steps are done well, the process creates great results for the donor, community, board and employee. That is what we are here today to talk about. This big piece of what you do: Improving the processes of how you do what you offer. Improving these processes can successfully improve your results.
MNParterns is a network is a network of organizations- - - (HOLD UP MY HAND)
We have two rather large CF’s which offer the standard products similar to your CF.
Second is our partnership is with our private client foundations. We provide programatic and administrative support for two private client foundations – F.R. Bigelow and the Mardag Foundation. Not only are these private clients valuable to our bottom line because they pay for the services we provide they are also a significant partner with us and on the impact we have in the community.
Third we have five SO’s which we provide various levels of service – some live with us, some don’t. Some use our databases, some don’t. All of them usually ask for forgiveness and rarely ask for permission.
Together we have over $1Billion and assets and grant over $75M a year.
When I arrived at the foundation we were well into a database conversion. We were leaving Foundation Power and moving to Blackbaud. Our conversion process was painful.
We were over budget by $1.25M and went live 2 and ½ years later than originally planned.
Our legacy system was highly customized and we were moving to a open and flexible system. As our IT Director says we over programmed our legacy system. If we needed to have it scratch our butt on Tuesday after lunch we programmed it to do so. We didn’t have that option in the new system. It had no elasticity. We customized ourselves into a corner.
We moved our processes over and made our new system act like our old when we could. We hopped along with what they gave us and it was painful. Never had the time to redo and use the technology we were buying.
Then it hit us…….
We were not using the systems to process our work!
Like you we wanted to use our systems as best as we could. For example – RE handles acknowledgement letters and has a system that can produce those letters fairly well and accurately. But we didn’t use that function because we wanted to letters to look just like they did in our legacy system so we had them create custom letters that mirrored how we have always done it.
We had pain! People were feeling it all over the organization. Our chief of staff at the time asked us to come up with a list of 10 processes we should redesign and that is how process redesign work began.
After that we started to think what are our goals? How are we going to be successful and what do we want to measure. We decided to measure three key things and use this as a guide in determining if we would take on a redesign project.
Use technology
Reduce risk for errors
Create scalability
Great idea by our chief of staff but our people are tired.
We did not have the resources or knowledge to get to our goals. We needed help.
Needed to increase community impact through improved service and reduced risk of error.
What we wanted to do was make a fundamental change in our processes. That’s when we recognized we needed outside help.
With that we brought lee to the table to help us with this fundamental change.
It has been a good match between my team and the St. Paul Foundation. We know because of the awesome results they have achieved.
Let me share their approach and why it works.
Do recall the last time you had a consultant come in and give you and your employees recommendations? Did people get excited and get immediately on board? Did it cost a lot?
Improving processes is different than other changes. And these are the factors that make it important that improvement skills be incorporated into your team. When your team gains the skills to see their opportunities and solve then, you get better buy in and better results.
Also ongoing improvement becomes financially feasible.
In addition building skills and empowering staff gets them more excited to come in to work. It binds them to your Foundation. That’s important, isn’t it?
The St. Paul Foundation has trained every employee in improvement. That means they have an ongoing cycle of improvement happening. That is one of the reasons for their fantastic success in improvement. I serve a lot of organizations. The St. Paul Foundation’s approach has needed them some of the best results I have seen.
It is possible to do improvement both ways – one time and ongoing. There is an investment difference also.
THIS SLIDE WILL BE 15-20 minutes. Lee to discuss each bullet and then I will provide an example of what we do at the foundation.
Tool Set – Charter,
Rapid Improvement – Most successful has been event style redesigns – 8 ½ days over a two week period.
Facilitation -
Change Implementation – how quick or slow are you going to go. IRF very fast, stock gifts took a very long time to implement.
Framework –established internal, cross-functional steering committee to determine organizational priorities, allocate resources, provide feedback to process optimization teams, and promote process optimization to support strategic goals.
Risk Review – what could go wrong.
THIS SLIDE WILL BE 15-20 minutes. Lee to discuss each bullet and then I will provide an example of what we do at the foundation.
Work Steps – these don’t get dusty, we use them and update them
Outcome Measurement – Scorecard
Ownership – Cultural shift, We have stakeholders, process owners, project managers (sometimes they are they same person). Roles are identified and expectation of those roles are discussed.
Customer/Stakeholder – Donor impact. Are decisions were driven by how it would impact our donors and constituents. Its how we talk about what we are going to change in our process or add.
Framework – 90 day check in
So you heard about some of the things we did during our redesign events but now let me tell you about what we have achieved.
First I am going to focus on three of our processes we redesigned and show you actual time and money saved. Lastly I will talk about some of the softer or intangibles we are seeing benefit the organization as a result of our redesign events.
We hit all three of our goals; PAUSE we got to scale, reduced errors and actually use our technology from these events. I am going to highlight one of the goals from each of our redesign events.
Focus on use of systems.
We cut our time in half and that is because we are using our systems.
Proposals - We identify gifts quicker to ensure accurate entry and have a formal chain of command to get us answers when we are not sure where to put the gift.
We scrapped a custom report we had made for us to review gift entry and now use system canned reports and queries. We no longer have to rely on programmers to change our custom report and we have much more flexible reporting.
Investment Recommendation focus on Errors
Define – This process is primarily only applicable to our donor advised funds and it is where the donor elects what investments they would like their fund invested in and the % allocation. Historically errors in this process have cost us money so over the course of time we added lots of redundancy to ensure accuracy.
After our redesign event we reduced the number of handoffs and double checks and we have not had an error in this process since the redesign over 2 years ago.
I don’t know about you but we process a lot of these.
We cut our time by 2/3. Let me say it again. We can do this process in a 1/3 of the time.
AND 99.6 of our donor advised grants are out the door in the agreed upon timeframe of 14 days.
The take away we had was the right people doing the right work.
We had to bring out the pepto for this POP event. Our grants administrator said “what am I going to do for the rest of the afternoon.”
Time is money – and by saving time it gives us more opportunity to lift the boat.
One of the hard things to measure is the intangible that are the result of our process improvement work. This is the softer side that we can't measure but it is seen and felt throughout the organization.
There are lots but I am only going to focus on two here.
1st concept is the sense of ownership and pride. We have identified process owners, owners are supported be a team who are part of the process, broke down silos between departments, team members knew the entire process not just the piece they did. People see the foundation caring about the work they do and celebrating their outcomes.
2nd concept is Capacity – this was a sticky at first. People were fearful to loose their jobs. No one has lost their job since we started this work. The reason why we want to provide capacity is so that we can take on new work, provide better back ups, and ultimately less over time during high processing months, and really freeing people up so that we can grant vacation requests at anytime during the year.
This work over the past two years has started to change our culture for the better.
Any questions?? And flip
I hope you saw tools you can implement in your organization to improve results. I hope you have concrete next steps when you get back to the office this week.
Melissa and I will be here for questions. Or talk with me today or tomorrow with questions. My contact information is in the folder also. Call me with questions. I do look forward to learning about your foundation.
Now please fill out that feedback form and ask for the resources you want to take your next steps to improve processes to improve foundation results. Please leave the feedback form on the table.
Now the question before you is: Will you take the journey? Will you get your team and foundation the tools to cure pain, recapture time and deliver more to donors and the community? Will you take that next step later this week?
Thank you.
