Back in October 2011, CharityVillage® covered the early pilot launch of Imagine Canada‘s new Standards Programs, designed to be a guide to good governance and operating policies and practices and intended to complement standards that many organizations already have in place.

The details of that story can be found here, but long story short; the national organization enlisted several groups to test out what is, in essence, the rejigging of their longstanding ethical code program.

This new program, whose initial, small-scale pilot phase will end in the spring of 2012 with the announcement of the first accredited group, is intended to provide “a Canada-wide set of shared standards for charities and nonprofits wishing to enhance their effectiveness in the fundamentals of governance, paid-staff management, financial accountability, fundraising, and volunteer involvement,” according to Imagine Canada.

So what did some of the participating organizations find out about their own operating standards levels while in the pilot? Is there a clear benefit to being involved in the program?

Attention Boys and Girls of Canada

Susan Bower, vice president of business operations of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, shared some of her organization’s findings with CharityVillage®. The results were revealing.

Bower described her organization’s experience in the pilot program as “satisfying.”

“We had a set of operating standards our clubs adopted several years ago and we’ve committed to assess ourselves against those standards, but to have an external assessment is great. We’re asking our clubs to do that,” she said, referring to the program’s mandate to review and evaluate how well participating organizations measure up to Imagine’s envisioned accountability standards.

As the national organization for all its member clubs in Canada, Bower said her office has always asked its regional staff to conduct peer reviews of their own operations. But the national office had never before held its “own feet to the fire” in this manner before, she said.

“We didn’t have a complaints policy in place, for instance. That’s been a good change,” Bower said. “The other area was we didn’t have a formal policy in place for conflict resolution in and amongst staff. These things have been good to talk through and it’s led us to do some training with staff around some of those issues. It caused us top change our processes to make sure we’re collecting that data on these things.”

Additionally, Bower said she was impressed by how participating in the pilot ramped up internal discussion on governance issues that beforehand were mostly not discussed, unless there was an emergency.

“As a result of our own risk management [we] put these policies into ‘conversational mode’ on a rotating basis so that they stay fresh. We’ve brought various risk management issues into our management conversations every three to four months, whether it’s privacy issues or the complaints issues; so as managers we could refresh our thoughts and refresh what we’re responsible for as leaders,” she said.

Bower added that much of the time situations encountered at work aren’t of the crisis variety where it’s clear one has to take action. What participating in the program did for her team is look at how to handle everyday workday situations so that her organization can “manage risk in a healthy way.”

Let’s commune in Niagara

Liz Palmieri, executive director of the Niagara Community Foundation, said her organization was very pleased at being one of the test groups for the new pilot.

“It helped us look at everything we’re doing…it left us with a structure that will maintain the sustainability of our organization, not from a fundraising-finance perspective, but from a governance-management perspective. This is really key for any organization,” she said.

A self-described policy wonk, Palmieri said that as the first and only executive director of the foundation — she’s been in the position since the organization’s founding 12 years ago — it’s been her priority to ensure that proper policies and procedures are in place at the organization.

As such, participating in Imagine Canada’s test phase helped the foundation “fine-tune what we had developed, or in one particular area where we had very little policy, around our volunteers, it helped us create and put in place practices and policies that will see the organization into the future,” she said.

Palmieri said one area of concern to the foundation was in succession planning. She called it a huge issue for any small organization. Being in the Standards Program helped her foundation review that planning and ensure that when or if staff, or her, leave “that we’ve got good documentation and training and orientation programs in place. That was one of the key ones for us.”

And as mentioned above, policies and procedure on volunteers was a subject that was exposed as lacking during her group’s self-assessing as part of the standards’ operating plan.

“We had used volunteers more from a policy perspective as opposed to direct service, and making sure that when a volunteer is recruited that they are accountable and working with a staff person; that there is an evaluation component; that there is opportunity for them to do some evaluation and provide us with feedback… getting that stuff in place was really important and quite useful,” she said.

Transparent to the max

One of the major goals of the standards program is to encourage participants to become and maintain transparency in all aspects of their operations, particularly on the financials.

With the sector increasingly the subject of sensationalized stories focusing on a minority of fringe organizations who abuse their charitable status for financial gain and deception, perception of nonprofits and charities as doing good and being fiscally responsible with donor dollars is essential for all concerned.

Palmieri, along with other executive directors and executive-level managers in the sector, didn’t initially realize her organization could be more transparent financially.

She said her foundation already felt pretty transparent prior to enlisting as a pilot participant but didn’t realize there were many upgrades it could make to take transparency to a new level.

“We always post our financials on our website. But it was things like adding a link to the CRA website so that people could find our T-3010 form very easily. Some people probably didn’t know those were available publicly. That was a really easy thing to do to make our financials that much more transparent,” she said.

Getting ready for launch

The Program publicly launches in spring 2012, while charities and nonprofits will be invited to participate in the first public intake in the fall of 2012.

CharityVillage® will follow this story with another report later this year looking at the CRA’s reaction to the initiative and what kind of public impact the program is having.

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.

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