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Thursday, June 08, 2006
Toral: Accountability and transparency
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
How should one run a non-profit IT (information technology) organization?
This is a question I received lately from a reader who is planning to put up one with the intent of promoting their area’s outsourcing capabilities and push for e-commerce adoption in the community.
Here’s my advice. Gather peers of similar interest and find common goals.
You can use the Internet or put up a mailing list to get prospective members organized. Discuss concerns and matters that are worth addressing or focusing into. You can’t change the world you live in within one day. Better focus on areas or goals where your influence is strong.
Plan your activities. Will you have monthly membership meetings, seminar, research, advocacy outreach and policy lobbying, among others? Better make this clear and plot this in a calendar to determine how much time all of you can give. If this is a volunteer group, then you have to narrow your expectations as everyone has work to do to sustain their daily living.
Organize the membership structure. Don’t start by immediately declaring that you are not going to charge any membership fee. Relying on grants or personal money will not make a non-profit organization sustainable. To come up with the right fees, be clear with the benefits and responsibilities required from each member. The last thing you want is to have a few people working in your organization while the rest just avails of the free food, among others.
Fiscal rules, accountability and responsibility. In any organization, handling money is a sensitive issue. Be cautious as you are not spending your own money. Charging board meetings and other related expenses should be reasonable. Have a clear bidding process for large transactions. Financial statements must be regularly reported. Any question in relation to it should be answered without hesitation.
In the end, no matter how successful your projects are in building funds, it is still not your money. Only work on projects that you can finish within your term. You should never finish a term with heavy accounts payable and un-finished business. This is regardless of one’s good chances at re-election.
Rules on position paper development and conflict resolution. There will come a time that your organization will begin to tackle issues in which members’ points of view will be varied, even conflicting. Rather than wait for this to happen, better set up the rules now on discussion of issues and values to live by. Check debate fora and private voting procedures.
Do not assume that when members do not ask questions, they agree. In all likelihood, they were busy and that is why you have to maximize the use of mailing lists to ensure transparency in decision making. Private voting is also important to eliminate fears of being lambasted for having a particular point of view.
There are many ups and downs in running an IT non-profit organization. You can be assured that you’ll have successes, commit mistakes and will both be loved and hated by some. How you acknowledge your shortcomings and improve your actions afterwards is an important step towards becoming a true leader.
Remember, you are merely a caretaker of the organization. In the end, you will realize it is like a child who will grow, and once this happens, you have to learn to let go, for it will become bigger that you. It will have a life of its own. Your ultimate success is ensuring that your organization will moved on without you.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (June 8, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here. |
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