key: cord-1003696-ccwm1ez1
authors: Ashcraft, Alyce S.; Sanders, Ellarene D.; Pappas, Thomas S.
title: Taking Stock: Disruption in the Life of a Professional Organization
date: 2022-03-24
journal: Nurse Lead
DOI: 10.1016/j.mnl.2022.03.002
sha: 8ad8d39aae1f745d3614afee1eba0b1699c3b26d
doc_id: 1003696
cord_uid: ccwm1ez1

The purpose of this paper is to describe the journey of the National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence, a 501(c)(3) organization, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the RISE (resilience, intention, sustain, and endurance) model, the organization’s response is detailed. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed us to think about the way we operate and proactively develop and implement strategies for the organization. For example, changing to a virtual format for our leadership conference was a very successful change that has influenced our planning for future conferences. We are emerging as a stronger organization due to our initial and sustained responses to this crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the journey of the National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence, a 501(c)(3) organization, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the RISE (resilience, intention, sustain, and endurance) model, the organization's response is detailed. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed us to think about the way we operate and proactively develop and implement strategies for the organization. For example, changing to a virtual format for our leadership conference was a very successful change that has influenced our planning for future conferences. We are emerging as a stronger organization due to our initial and sustained responses to this crisis.

The National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence (NHCGNE) was incorporated as an independent 501(c)3 organization in 2016 after a 16-year history as a John A. Hartford Foundationfunded entity. Schools of nursing and international consortia of schools of nursing are the primary members. The mission of NHCGNE 1 is to enhance and sustain the capacity and competency of nurses to provide quality care to older adults through education, research, and practice. Membership dues are the primary source of operating funds. There are 10 active committees, 2 special interest groups (SIGs), and 2 groups that are pending SIG status that meet regularly to carry out the programmatic efforts of the organization. NHCGNE hosts an annual leadership conference that provides networking opportunities along with dissemination of information related to our mission. Prior to the pandemic, the committees, SIGs, and board of directors (BOD) conducted business virtually, with face-to-face meetings occurring at the annual conference. Day-to-day operations are supported by a part-time executive director and Virtual Inc., 2 our professional services firm (PSF).

The RISE model, as presented by Maher 3 was used to explain the response stages NHCGNE went through to navigate the consequences of the COVID-19 virus. In this model, organizational actions are categorized as resilience, intention, sustain, and endurance. Resilience focuses on financial capacity and requires the BOD to minimize overhead, diversify revenue, and avoid debt. Intention requires an immediate action plan to lessen financial impact as well as lessen the decline in organizational resources in order to maintain operations. Sustaining an organization requires the BOD to be well informed of the financial situation in order to move forward and make plans to maintain core operations. Endurance requires organizational leaders to review vulnerabilities and strengthen operations to cope with current and future challenges.

Resilience COVID-19 presented one of the greatest shocks to the US economy with noted reverberations to resource

The RISE model was used to explain the response stages the National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence went through to navigate the consequences of the COVID-19 virus. Significant changes: converted leadership conference format to virtual format, switched financial institutions, renegotiated agreement with our professional services firm. Transparency between the membership, organizational leadership, and the professional services firm is a major key to our continuing success.

constrained nonprofit organizations. This significantly impacted NHCGNE because our major source of funding is annual institutional member dues. Every member institution had to examine their funding, with 8.9% of universities unable to renew their membership in 2020. Our annual membership is paid in the month of March, the month during which pandemic public health measures were instituted across the country. We revised membership materials to emphasize benefits; sent out notices and encouraged renewals with followup letters; and made direct contact via board members and individual members to schools to encourage renewal. Some schools requested to have membership benefits and invoices submitted directly to the dean of the school. This request was different from our normal process, suggesting that member schools were reconsidering the return on investment of organization membership.

Like many others, NHCGNE initially approached pandemic operations as though we would deal with short-term effects for 60 to 90 days before resuming normal activities. We continued to look at finances and negotiated reduced operating costs with a renewed urgency compared to our pace prior to the pandemic. We continued to hold virtual board and committee meetings, work on projects, and plan for our conference. To diversify our revenue, we explored partnering with other organizations, potential grant funds, ways to monetize the outcomes of a gerontology leadership educational grant that yielded educational modules, and development of marketable products, and implemented a board of director and committee fund-raising drive (investing in ourselves). We also changed our inperson leadership conference to virtual in 2020 and 2021 to maintain that revenue stream. We pledged to make the virtual leadership conference, at a minimum, cost neutral and were transparent with the budget and the planning processes and decisions. It ultimately exceeded our expectations. Resilience is dynamic, requiring organizations move from the status quo to creating a "new normal." 4

Between April and May 2020, we realized the impact of the pandemic could persist for a much longer time period. We are a lean 501(c)(3). We began the year revising our strategic plan, aligning goals with finances. We started by drafting a policy stating funds cannot be promised or expended without board approval. We also finalized a new master services agreement with our PSF to significantly reduce costs. This resulted in our PSF not attending every meeting to take minutes and ensure follow-up. Most committees and SIGs write their own agendas, take their own minutes, and follow-up on action items. Only the BOD meetings and leadership planning committee meetings have ongoing PSF support. The executive director attends all committee and SIG meetings to support the groups and trouble-shoot the meeting platforms while meetings are in progress. The president also attends may of the committee meetings to offer support to planned activities. This has the advantage of being able to expedite some actions because of our knowledge of strategic priorities. The executive officers and BOD developed a focus on the "bigger picture" and on actions that would lead to positive outcomes for the organization, instead of concentrating on editing reports and documents at meetings. Low-impact decisions needed to take up minimal board meeting time.

A town hall asking members about what they needed from NHCGNE and how our mission could support them during the pandemic was conducted in April 2020. A Powernoodle event was conducted to assist with strategic planning and ensuring our organizational goals were in line with what members expected. NHCGNE, as a 501(c)(3), qualified for the Cares Act Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. 5 We pursued this financial opportunity with the support of our PSF and received funds in May 2020. Completing the loan application was not difficult, but ensuring the loan forgiveness process was a challenge.

At this point in time, the board began to seriously consider a virtual conference, as what we had hoped would be a 60-to-90-day issue grew into a more than 18-month issue. We began to consider converting the annual leadership conference to a virtual format in June and confirmed the change in July. With the help of our PSF, we quickly found a platform that would work to host our conference in the new format. We set a date for the conference in late October, so we would not conflict with other conferences that might still occur inperson. Previously, the in-person conference would normally occur the second week of November 2 days before the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) meeting.

In late July, an opportunity presented itself to partner with another organization to help with foundation funding. This funding allowed for conversion of an in-person nursing seminar to a virtual interactive program that was held in late September. We received and disbursed the funds and ensured they were 501(c)(3) compliant. We received a total of 2 grants in 2021 to support Spring, Fall, and Winter sessions of the event.

In October 2020, we held a very successful virtual conference and business meeting. We were able to incorporate the normal keynote, plenary, recognition event, business meeting, Mary Starke Harper dialogue, 6 networking, and happy hour sessions live for real-time participation of attendees from all over the world. Posters and moderated presentations were provided as prerecorded sessions that attendees could access for 60 days after the conference. Continuing education was available for all sessions except the business meeting and happy hour. We saw an increase in net revenue that was driven by more inclusion of individuals who in the past would not have travelled coupled with much lower costs for the online event. This resulted in extremely positive satisfaction scores from participants as well as a positive financial outcome for the annual event.

Routine transitions occurred in November and December of 2020. We had a change of president, treasurer, and some board members after elections were conducted in September. We held orientation for the BOD and completed our strategic planning process for 2021. We simplified the strategic plan to 2 major goals, and all committee charges corresponded to 1 of these goals. We contemplated holding future virtual conferences based on the success of the October event.

Co-chairs for our 2021 leadership conference planning committee were appointed in January. The strategic plan was reviewed with the board and was presented at the orientation for each committee and SIG. We produced our annual report and evaluations for the various groups. The leadership planning conference committee committed to a virtual conference for 2021 in February. Although we had hoped to have an in-person event at the 2021 GSA conference, the new Delta variant made this impossible.

Our October 2021 conference was also very successful. We followed the same format used for the 2020 conference to enable real-time participation of attendees from all over the world. We saw a greater increase in revenue over expenses which was driven by careful planning and development of additional funding streams. We are planning to use some of sessions for marketing and recruitment purposes in 2022.

We are a volunteer organization, and we depend upon our membership to handle the majority of our operations. Our executive director, PSF, board of directors, and membership cannot continue to operate as if we are still in a pre-pandemic world because of the degree of continuing uncertainty in the nonprofit financial environment. 7 We made changes in how we conducted business in order to sustain our financial viability, including the BOD being cognizant of income and expenses. To sustain our organization, membership dues are essential to fund our operations. The membership committee was charged with increasing membership, but at a time like this, maintaining membership became an even higher priority. Invoices are sent out in December for a majority of members with a due date of March. We follow up with schools who do not submit their dues on a timely basis to "gently" remind them. Some chose not to renew for budgetary reasons, and some paid their renewals up to 4 months late. We did have new members join because, as they indicated, they saw the value of our organization. Despite COVID-19, membership remained stable.

Other measures were taken to manage fiscal responsibilities. The BOD approved a policy that was sent throughout the organization that stated nonbudgeted expenses required board approval. An example of this concerned the need to change our social media management system. The system we were using had a free version that allowed us to schedule social media posts routinely. When we received notice that it would no longer have a free version, we explored other paid systems and selected one with better options for our organization. Before the decision was finalized and the funds expended, the BOD discussed and agreed to the additional expenditure.

Routine annual expenditures were also reviewed including the increase in insurance premium pricing and the need for determining if our package is competitive. Our website occasionally requires updating that our PSF cannot perform, so an outside contractor is needed at an hourly minimum cost. Rather than calling the contractor for small tasks, we accumulate work that will fill the minimum time charged. In addition, the executive director continues routine review and approval of all invoices before they are paid.

A major change that occurred in 2021 was a change of banks. This occurred because of services needed related to the PPP loan, resulting in the lost opportunity to receive a second PPP loan. The change has resulted in streamlining many of our internal operations because of ability to interface with the new bank's systems. Our PPP Forgiveness Application was finally approved 2021. Potential revenue changes for 2022 include allowing sliding-scale memberships for international schools based on the World Health Organization's classifications of lower-income, lower middle income, upper middle income, and highincome countries; and participation fees for SIGs that would allow engagement of persons who are not eligible to be individual members. These require bylaws revisions, which are in progress.

Virtual Inc., as a business partner to NHCGNE, worked with the board to adjust retainers as well as provide some senior consulting assistance with regard to accessing federal assistance programs. Virtual Inc. further provided, as a value added, consulting chief financial officer services that assisted the leadership conference committee, finance committee, and BOD to set the rates for and review the expenses for the 2020 and 2021 NHCGNE Leadership Conference. As noted above, both conferences were not only a programmatic success but were a financial success as well.

NHCGNE is in a stronger position to move forward to meet its mission and goals. Financial operations are significantly more transparent and stable to the officers, BOD, committee chairs, and committee members. We are likely to continue with a virtual leadership conference based on its success. We considered the increase in attendance, participation of distinguished speakers, and financial success as significant outcome measures. In addition, we raised funds at our virtual conference by having a raffle of items such as gerontological nursing books.

The entrepreneurial committee is developing a fundraising effort that should afford us the opportunity to award small research grants and student scholarships in the near future. The membership committee is developing new outreach to increase organizational memberships. We are focused on obtaining more sponsorships for our annual conference and awards. The Distinguished Educator in Gerontological Nursing recognition, which is managed by the education committee, continues to be successful. Each of the efforts adds to revenue above our expenses and has prevented tapping into reserves. We have also developed a partnership with another organization that affords our members access to discounted gerontological nursing resources.

The BOD is hopeful about the future of the organization. Some things are more challenging. For example, committee chairs and the executive director have assumed more work to generate meeting records, minutes, and to follow up with the PSF to obtain answers to questions and identify processes to achieve the goals of the board and subgroups of NHCGNE. The pandemic obviously affected NHCGNE, but we believe we are emerging as a stronger organization due to our initial and sustained responses to this crisis.

The RISE model 2 offered a way for NHCGNE to evaluate the resilience of our organization. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to think about the "usual" way we operate and proactively develop new strategies that will continue in the organization.

Our PSF provided consulting services that has allowed NHCGNE to adapt and evolve with our everchanging environment. NHCGNE has moved forward and changed, for the better, some of its processes and policies. Because of the pandemic, we focused on the basics of financial state of the organization and mission priorities. 8 We anticipate that many of these changes will remain in place because they make us a stronger organization.

Enhance and sustain the capacity and competency of nurses to provide quality care to older adults

Virtual Inc. Meet our team. Available at

Fiscal responses to COVID-19: evidence from local governments and nonprofit

Redefining urgency: social impact leadership and dynamic resilience

Nonprofits, boards urged to be bold, take advantage of PPP loan program

Congratulations to our Mary Starke Harper honoree for 2020

COVID-19 as a nonprofit workplace crisis: Seeking insights from the nonprofit workers' perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic: a challenge for US nonprofits' financial stability

National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence (NHCGNE) president for 2021-2022 and Professor/ Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Nursing in

The authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of their board of directors, committees, and members for their continuing work and support. 1541-4612/2022/$ See front matter Copyright 2022 by