Here’s some tips on how you can be the best candidate for an executive director position, based on my experience interviewing hundreds of people over the years. These tips will be valuable to anyone applying for a job at a nonprofit organization, not just the executive director position.
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Executive Directors, You Are Not Alone
As an ED, you face situations every day that require you to be at your best. Hopefully, none of these situations sound familiar:
- The board chair doesn’t want to meet regularly and doesn’t run meetings well, but no one else will take on the position.
- Your board is made up of the executive directors of your partner agencies, but you also manage funds for those same agencies, causing inevitable conflicts
- After you are hired as an ED, you find out that your predecessor had neglected to pay the IRS payroll taxes for quite a while.
Your First Month as an Executive Director [Video]
On your first day as an Executive Director, everyone will have their own ideas of what you should do first. It will be hard to prioritize amongst all the demands on your time. Watch the video below to learn what you should focus on. It all comes down to listening.
Avoiding Bias in Hiring
Even in nonprofits, it is hard to avoid bias in hiring. We want to be better than for profit companies and give everyone an equal chance, but the truth is that we are all human and have opinions about other people. If you grew up in an all-white environment, you have to put in more effort to relate to someone of another race. If you have never known someone who is deaf, you won’t know how to communicate with a potential deaf employee. [Read more…] about Avoiding Bias in Hiring
Welcome to Ingrid Kirst Consulting
You can expect weekly posts on a wide range of topics about successfully running small nonprofits. This will include the areas of recruiting and training board members, online tools to make your work easier, rules and regulations for nonprofits, fundraising, grant writing, event planning, and much, much more!
After 20 years working in nonprofits, I can share a wide range of information that will save you time and energy. For eleven of those years, I was the Executive Director of an organization called Community Crops, in Lincoln, Nebraska, which helps families grow their own food through a network of community gardens. When I started at Crops, it was a project hosted by another nonprofit. Since we had grown larger than that organization, I completed the process of incorporating the organization and filing to be a 501(c)(3). From there, the organization grew to a twelve-person team with a $400,000 budget serving hundreds of families. As a result, I have experience with every aspect of running an organization, from the beginning when I did everything, to when I left when I was managing the higher level aspects of the organization.
I’m excited to start blogging to share my expertise with other organizations so they can avoid mistakes and function more efficiently. I’m also available for consultations to nonprofits in the Lincoln area, or elsewhere by phone/e-mail.