Welcome to Bill Hoffman’s Insights Blog. Below find reflections on nonprofit leadership, maximizing your board’s effectiveness, seamless leadership transitions, and other topics designed to help you think through how to fulfill your mission. Please share any thoughts or reactions to these Insights via the email link at the bottom of the page.
Courage of High Expectations
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) or the "Nation's Report Card" results were recently released, and the results should be a wake up call. It was hoped that K-12 student academic performance would recover from [...]
Top Four Ways a Board Can Support their CEO
As the previous post indicates, the challenges of the nonprofit CEO’s job are significant and can lead to overwork, frustration, or leaving the job when they still have more to offer. There are certainly strategies [...]
Nonprofit CEO Burnout – Is it Inevitable?
The short answer according to a recent LinkedIn post is that nonprofit CEO burnout is unavoidable; the author considers it only a matter of time. The post was meant to be provocative in that [...]
Engage – Don’t just Present!
How often have you wanted to present information – results of research, a report, or data recipients need to understand or take action on? And how often have you defaulted to the “tried and true” [...]
Hidden Destinations
I was struck by something when I mentored a middle schooler who had received a “promise” scholarship for college tuition – and came from a family where no one had ever gone to college much [...]
High Expectations … High Retention … High Performance!
Most of my work is in education; helping philanthropies maximize their impact on educational outcomes. An underlying theme is that setting high expectations for students is the first critical step in improving student achievement. There [...]
Does One Size Fit All?
We’re talking strategic plans here and as you may have guessed – the short answer is “no”, one size does not fit all. The longer answer is that each organization has different needs for their strategic [...]
Rightsizing your Board
One of the most frequent questions when working with a nonprofit on board development is “What is the best size for a board?”. It’s no surprise that there is no single correct answer, other than [...]
ROI for Board Members
Volunteers have choices as to where to get involved and invest their time. They have expectations that their involvement will have a positive impact on the organization, that is, there’s a return on their investment [...]
Who’s on First?
If you’re old enough to know what the title references, great. If not and you'd like a nice diversion, check out this comedy routine, Abbott & Costello Who's On First. The reference for this [...]