Doing Good in A Professional Way

How often have you tried to make a donation or get involved with an organisation that is doing great work only to have your emails or calls unanswered or the logistics around your visit be a disaster?

What about trying to get a Section 18A certificate after having made a donation?

I know that mostly I have found these things to be a laborious process with many unanswered calls or emails before sometimes actually just giving up!

As a NGO, doing fantastic work, saving lives, looking after the under-served and making sure that underprivileged and disadvantaged groups have a voice it is difficult to prioritise administration over the essential day-to-day tasks they have.

BUT … How long can you hide behind your good deeds and good work before the lack of administration and professionalism will come back to bite you?

In my view it is the small things that count!

These are my top 5 tips

• Replying to emails (even if just to acknowledge receipt or say thank you)
• Being on time. For meetings, deliverables and submitting documentation. For me this is a respect thing. If you are late, you don’t respect me or my time.
• Ask for help. If you don’t know how to do something or what to do – ASK! It is amazing what can happen.
• Be Nice. Be Calm. Smile. Managing expectations is so important so if you are late, just let the person know.
• Helping others helps you to feel better about yourself. Give it a try.

I think these are the small things that count. Get them right. In your organisations, in your homes, with your colleagues, friends and family and you will see the kind of change it makes in your day.

forgood can help you to find the capacity to assist with these things by putting needs up on your profile asking for skilled volunteers. Either look for volunteers to help you with processing and procedures to improve points 1 – 5 above or get the volunteers to do something else so that you have more time to pay attention to the small things! And the big things!

I think we often hide behind the idea that we are a non-profit so we can get away with having poor administration, slow systems and unreliable processes. I think that small businesses do the same and I think that the South African Government are the worst culprits! And it is an easy thing to fix.

Try out getting some volunteer assistance – let us know how it goes, and we can profile your story 😊