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I
Nonprofit
Professional
Performance
Magazine
P
eople generally
select a non-
profit to support
because they’re so
aligned with its
cause, and its ways
of positively con-
tributing to it, that they decide this is the tribe
for them. But what’s the secret sauce guiding
whether someone decides to engage with your
nonprofit as a member, volunteer, paid staff, or
donor?
My experience working with causes and
nonprofits since the 1970s shows the foundation
of engagement is a blend of intentions, values,
skills and procedures. Intentions include a
nonprofit’s vision, mission and goals. Values
describe the principles the culture will embody
while accomplishing the nonprofit’s intentions.
Skills and implementation procedures enable
people to turn a nonprofit’s intentions and values
into effective actions that help it accomplish
its reasons for existing, and in ways that those
involved find deeply fulfilling.
In a future article, I’ll describe three key skills
(agreements, breakdown repair and performance
reviews) for successfully turning leaders,staff and
volunteers into effective collaborators. Here is
the engagement foundation from which people
become motivated to master those key skills,
using, as an example, a nonprofit I co-founded.
In the 1980s, pioneers in psychology were
blending western psychology and eastern healing
principles, and producing surprisingly promising
results.Bythe 1990s,mental health professionals,
educators and coaches turned this into a small
movement. But these folks were isolated islands
who were making their innovations and working
with clients pretty much on their own, often
afraid to tell fellow
professionals about
these outside-the-
box methods. These
methods
weren’t
going to gain the
credibility
they
deserved unless an organization united the field.
In1998,these innovators,educators,practitioners,
and researchers were brought together, and the
field was given a name: Energy Psychology (EP).
The time finally came to establish a professional
association for this field. So, partly because of
my background in leadership and organizational
development, and partly because I had become
a leading trainer in the field, a fellow leader
persuaded me to co-found with her the first
nonprofit professional association uniting the
field, and to serve as its first president. We
named that organization the Association for
Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP).
I had two main roles as ACEP’s founding
president: 1) Embody and articulate the
organization’s vision, mission and values to make
joining irresistible to like-minded innovators,
practitioners, researchers and donors. 2) Build
a sustainable organization that would evolve
to succeed with each of its rather ambitious
initiatives. My personal goal was to become
obsolete as rapidly as possible (that took four
years).
Months before opening for membership, we
incorporated as a nonprofit, started 501(c)
(3) filing, and fine-tuned the organization’s
intentions, values, skills, and procedures. We
knew the emerging field so well that we were
very clear about what its adherents saw as
its challenges, and what they were seeking
in overcoming them. We opened ACEP to
The Secret Sauce of Engagement
Intentions, Values, Skills & Procedures
david Gruder