Is summer a slow time for your organization? If yes, and if you don’t already have a white board scribbled with ideas or post-its cluttering your monitor, we’re sharing some ideas for how to spend a season that finally has some downtime with this list of summer initiatives. With all of these thoughts, be sure to anticipate the time it will take to maintain them (as well as the other resources they may necessitate).
- Launch a Social Media Program. Check out this post on whether or not your organization is ready to launch.
- Consider launching a Planned Giving Program. You may want to start out with providing basic bequest language on your website and creating simple brochures that include this information. At the beginning of a new program, you can think through how you might want to honor and recognize planned giving donors differently than, or additionally to, your annual or major donors.
- Launch Next Gen or Young Professionals Board. You can review some key elements of Board orientations in this post.
- Go Green – Starting a Recycling Program. This might include basic trash sorting, or can be more sophisticated in migrating meetings to ‘green meetings’. This post includes a list of resources for the nonprofit ready to go green.
- Review what parts of your program could benefit from additional data collection. Explore what data you have already collected that is waiting to be analyzed. Take a look at some of these free resources available to your nonprofit.
- Tag and organize photos so that your Marketing/Communications team (or person…or volunteer) has more options beyond using the same easily accessible ones.
- Host a team appreciation retreat and invite members of your team to help plan it. We share the elements of a successful team retreat here.
- Onboard interns (or even launch an internship program) in time for summer breaks.
- Clean out storage or a closet, and organize all your event swag leftovers. Perhaps some of the more valuable, but dated, items can make their way to ebay to be sold or consider giving some of them away at an employee appreciation event. Regardless, you probably don’t need to have swag from golf tournaments several years ago in storage unless you have a strategic reuse in mind.
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