Non-profit work can easily affect your personal life. Oftentimes the lines are blurred between the non-profit and your personal life. You might find that all your evenings, weekends, and free time are spent on your non-profit. Burnout might start to creep in and, despite the fact you are incredibly passionate about the cause, you may struggle to juggle everything. If this sounds familiar, here is how to solve this issue.
Boundaries
Setting boundaries can be an unfamiliar but incredibly helpful way to ensure that you don’t allow work-life to bleed into your personal life. First, you want to set boundaries with yourself. If you tell yourself that you won’t work past 7 pm, stick to that. Even if there is more work to do, stick to your boundary. As time goes on, you will begin to notice a healthier balance and the ability to set and maintain boundaries will settle.
You can use this new skill to set boundaries with colleagues, and other work-related individuals. This way you can prevent yourself from taking on too much work and burning out. By setting boundaries, you clearly state what you will and won’t allow, and most of the time the other individual will respect you for it.
Perhaps you might schedule rest days or hours where you don’t work at all. Having that boundary with your working life will give you time for rest and reflection and will usually help you perform much better.
Treat It Like A Startup
Nonprofits are unique and, usually, they aren’t run like a business, simply because they aren’t. However, there is much to learn from successful business models and you might find that applying them will make it a lot easier to manage everything. Startup models are a great way to do this, do some research and see how you can configure your current plans to match a startup.
Online Presence
An established online presence can help your organization become more effective and successful. Having a great website will help you clearly outline what it is that you do, your vision, your goals, and your achievements. Having a good website will allow you to streamline your time more effectively as you can direct people to the website and other social media platforms.
If you aren’t tech-friendly and are not sure where to start, take a look at other similar organizations and their website or social media. This research will help you better understand how to run your online presence most effectively.
Social media marketing has exploded and has become one of the best ways to advertise and market, often for free. It may initially need some time and thought, put into your social media strategy, but over time it will begin to work for you and you might find that you reach a much bigger audience in a smaller time frame.
Delegate
Delegation will help you to manage both your and everyone else’s time more effectively. Oftentimes, when we are passionate we want everything to be perfect and exactly as we envisioned it, this can be difficult to manage as time goes on and the workload builds. Instead, begin delegating tasks evenly so that everyone has the chance to learn, develop, build their skills, and contribute.
Sometimes, with non-profit organizations, lines can get blurred as everyone will often give a helping hand. This means that there aren’t always dedicated roles or teams which can make it difficult to assign tasks quickly.
If this is the case, think about outlining roles clearly so that people are aware of their responsibilities and where certain tasks lay. This way there is less confusion over who is going to complete which task and who is responsible for it.
Open Communication
Ensure the lines of communication are open between everyone. The more comfortable everyone is with each other, the more they are willing to be honest. For example, if you’re having a bad day and want to finish a couple of hours earlier, you should feel comfortable enough to let the team know. Where communication is open and honest, others will be more than happy to jump in where necessary. The better the team functions, the better the organization functions.
Non-profit organizations are an incredible way to enact social change. This often comes at a personal price, however. Usually, every waking moment is filled with work-related thoughts and activities. Instead, taking some time to reflect and think about finding better ways to run the organization and your own time will help you reduce stress and be more productive whenever you need to work.
