As a Canadian news startup preparing to hire your first employee, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of how full-time and part-time employment is typically defined in Canada — although there is no specific legal definition. This will help you establish proper employment contracts and policies.

Full-Time Employment:

Generally, full-time employment means working more than 30 hours per week.

Many employers in Canada observe an eight-hour work day with a 30-minute unpaid lunch hour. Therefore, a full-time week is 37.5 paid hours per week.

Full-time employees usually enjoy additional benefits not commonly available to part-time employees. These benefits can include health and dental coverage, profit sharing, or contributions to a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP).

The company may cover the entire health insurance premium or share the cost with the employee.

Hourly pay or salary?

Full-time employees can be paid by the hour, or you can offer a salary. 

If paid by the hour, the employees must be paid for overtime and receive statutory holiday pay, which is required when an employee works a nationally or provincially recognized holiday.

Salaried employees are not paid overtime. Even if they work 80 hours a week, their compensation will not change. Salaried employees are not paid for statutory holidays even if they work on those days. 

Typically, a company distributes a salary to the employee in equal or near-equal amounts for every pay period, which could be monthly or bi-monthly.

Part-Time Employment:

Part-time employment is usually less than 30 hours per week.

Technically, a worker can work up to 40 hours per week and still be considered part-time. The designation of full-time versus part-time employment depends on the employment contract and the employer’s policies.

Under the Canada Labour Code and provincial and territorial regulations, part-time workers must be paid overtime.

Overtime Pay

In most provinces and territories, the overtime threshold is generally 40 work hours per week. There are, however, exceptions in certain provinces. Ontario’s overtime threshold is 44 hours.  In Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, it is 48 hours. 

Any hours worked beyond the regulated hourly threshold in a single workweek are considered overtime hours and must be paid in accordance with provincial or territorial rules.

Typically, most Canadian companies do not offer health and dental coverage, profit sharing, or contributions to an RRSP to part-time workers.

Contractor or employee?

In Canada, determining whether someone is an employee or a self-employed contractor is crucial, as it impacts tax obligations and contributions to employment insurance and pension plans.

“Employers are responsible for deducting Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contributions, Employment Insurance (EI) premiums, and income tax from remuneration or other amounts they pay to their employees,” according to the Canadian Revenue Agency’s (CRA) online guide RC4110, Employee or Self-Employed?

According to CRA, the employer’s intent going into the employment relationship and the degree of control over the worker are important factors in determining whether you have an employer-employee or a business relationship.

Differences between employees and independent contractors

Volunteers and unpaid interns

Each province and territory has different regulations around volunteering and unpaid internships, so be sure to look into the rules where your business is located. Ensuring that volunteer work meets the specific criteria outlined by the law is crucial to avoid any potential fines and penalties.

For instance, in Manitoba, volunteering can only be unpaid if the work is performed for a charitable or political organisation, according to Manitoba’s employment standards laws.

The term “internship” is commonly used to describe on-the-job work experiences. These internships and other forms of unpaid training may be permitted in your province or territory if they meet certain conditions. For example, in Manitoba the training must be for a limited duration and approved by the provincial or federal government or a school board. An example of an allowable unpaid internship in Manitoba is a co-op placement required for graduation from a college program. Mandatory job-specific training must be compensated.

If you have an unpaid internship that does not properly meet the regulations of your province, a complaint could be filed against your company.

For example, an event planner in Winnipeg hired unpaid interns without proper provincial approval. Manitoba Employment Standards launched an investigation and determined the interns should have been paid for their work. The employer paid the owed wages, and the claims were closed. Further non-compliance could have resulted in a penalty.

When in doubt, seek legal advice to understand the requirements surrounding unpaid volunteering and internships. 

Note: Whenever possible, LION recommends its member organisations pay interns for their work.

The post Staffing Considerations for Canadian News Businesses appeared first on LION Publishers.

Here is the template. Please make a copy to start your planning.

The post Revenue Growth Plan Template appeared first on LION Publishers.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to create one. 

Ground yourself in your mission

Planning for the future can be stressful, and it’s easy to get off track or lost in the weeds. That’s why it can be useful to start by grounding yourself in your mission. This can serve as a North Star as you navigate your way forward. 

Here’s an example: The Breach brings together diverse collaborators to publish investigative journalism and analysis about political, social and economic processes in Canada with the intention of fueling social movements that can address crises, avert disasters and put forward a compelling vision of the future.

If you don’t already have a mission statement, here’s a resource for how to articulate one and why.  

Ask yourself: given your mission, are there any revenue opportunities that you would not pursue because they are not aligned with your values or your audience?

Identify your stage of sustainability

LION is in the process of mapping the stages of sustainability based on what we’ve seen across the independent news industry. It may be useful to articulate your current stage and consider what it would take to progress to the next one. The stages are:

• Ideation: You are developing a concept for a news business.
• Preparation: You are beginning to implement a minimum viable product (MVP) for a news business.
• Building: You are expanding your editorial offerings based on audience and market research while building a foundation for revenue and operations.
• Maintaining: You have had some journalistic impact and are developing your target audience, but are still seeking operational and financial stability.
• Poised for Growth: You have a clear target audience and your revenue and operations are stable. You have the internal capacity to do the work you’ve committed to in service of your organizational goals and mission.
• Growing: You are enhancing your editorial offerings to reach new audiences. Revenue is growing and you are building your team.
• Scaling: You have a stable audience and revenue base and are pursuing significant new revenue streams or audiences.
• Sustaining: You have achieved revenue stability across multiple streams, are having consistent journalistic impact, and have sustainable workloads and compensation for staff and contributors.

Once you’ve identified your current position, ask yourself: what type or amount of revenue growth would help you move to the next stage? 

Understand your revenue growth strategy

There are ultimately only a few high-level strategies for increasing revenue. Some of them are:

• Gain more customers. In the case of a news business, a “customer” could be a paying subscriber or member, a business that advertises, a donor who gives, a foundation that provides grants, etc.
• Gain more repeat or loyal customers. This could mean converting casual readers into members, a reader subscribing to two newsletters instead of one, or a donor giving a bigger gift.
• Keep more of your current customers. This could mean addressing churn by tracking, understanding and preventing when and why people unsubscribe, stop advertising, stop giving etc. 
• Add products. This could mean starting a membership program, branching out into events or monetizing a community calendar.
• Raise your prices. This could mean charging $12 a month for a subscription instead of $10 or upping your ad pricing.
• Grow your bottom line. This could mean cutting costs by entering into editorial partnerships that lower the cost of producing stories or automating tasks so they require less by-the-hour human-power.

As you start to assess potential opportunities, make sure to articulate which of these is your aim so you can ensure that your actions always point back to your strategy. So, for example, if you’re focused on getting more people reading your content, you’ll also need a plan to, say, leverage that for advertisers or convert them to subscribers. 

Assess potential revenue streams

Launching a revenue stream is hard. Launching one that doesn’t build on anything you already do is much, much harder. So think through what you’re good at. Do you provide nuanced, insider coverage on a topic that a lot of people are deeply passionate about? Then perhaps subscriptions are a great revenue stream to pursue. Or perhaps you’re amazing at engaging with your community and bringing people together. Then memberships or events might be a fruitful path. Make a list of things you’re good at and match them to a potential revenue stream. Here are a few revenue streams to consider alongside some pros and cons.

Know your financial position

It’s not worth creating a revenue growth plan if you don’t already have a solid understanding of your finances. You need to have a budget in place and be able to project your revenue and expenses or you won’t know where you’re starting from or where you need to go.

Once you know your financial position, ask yourself: How much revenue do you need to generate to maintain your current operations? What are your general growth goals? How much revenue do you need to generate to meaningfully grow?

Know your organizational capacity

It’s also not worth investing time in creating an amazing revenue growth plan if you don’t have the organizational capacity to pull it off. It’s important to gain an understanding of who on your team is contributing to revenue generation and how by asking the following questions:

1. Who are your team members? Include anyone (even part-timers and contractors) who regularly and meaningfully contributes to revenue generation. Also include anyone who might be able to contribute if their role or duties were shifted. If you’re wearing many hats, consider what things can shift off your plate so you can devote more time to generating revenue.
2. What are their key responsibilities as they relate to revenue? Don’t include every little thing. Instead, consider their high-level buckets of work, like “ad sales” or “funder outreach.”
3. How do they divide their time? Assign (or better yet, ask them to estimate) what percentage of their time is focused on which aspects of revenue generation. Here’s a handy chart for converting hours to percentages.
4. What is their current bandwidth and capacity? Are they working beyond what they can reasonably do and are perhaps burnt out? Or might they be looking to contribute more?
5. What is the maximum percentage of time they might reasonably devote to revenue generation, given their other responsibilities? 
6. What would have to change for them to devote more time to revenue generating activities? What would they stop doing?
7. What training or support would they need in order to increase their contributions or contribute in a new way?
8. What insights have surfaced as you think about this person’s capacity to work on revenue generation and how willing are they to invest their time in something new? 

A note: don’t assume you know the answer to these questions without asking the people involved. They know their work, their bandwidth and their interests best.

Evaluate Opportunities

Now it’s time for the fun stuff. You doubtless have a million ideas but aren’t sure if they’re likely to pan out. Give them both a gut check and a deeper look by going through the following steps.

Assess potential revenue

1. Understand the opportunity. Make sure you’ve researched what it is and how it would work. But don’t get bogged down in the details yet. For now, you just need to understand the general shape and potential of the opportunity.
2. Ensure it furthers your mission. If it’s out of alignment, out of scope or violates your values or audience trust, it’s a no-go.
3. Evaluate it from a market perspective. Is this a growth area that is likely to continue to provide opportunities, or is it a contracting area or one-off prospect given broader market conditions? Is there a need for this idea in your market? Are there others in your market who are doing it? Could you do it better or differently? Are you the right organization in your market to pull it off? How do you know? Don’t forget that these questions also apply if you’re seeking to increase support from foundations or major donors, as these areas are also subject to market forces and success requires that your goals are aligned with their priorities.
4. Evaluate it from an audience perspective. Do the people who would engage with this idea actually want it? What evidence do you have (like surveys, interviews, data) that this is the case? Don’t assume you know what people want! There is too much on the line to make decisions that aren’t informed by data.  Here’s how to conduct audience research.  We’ve found that using a Jobs To Be Done framework is incredibly useful when thinking through ideas from an audience perspective. Here’s a quick example.
5. Evaluate it from an expertise and capacity perspective. Do you or the people on your team have the knowledge and experience to hit the ground running with this opportunity? If not, would the time spent developing knowledge and getting up to speed pencil out? Is your team in a good place to take on something new in terms of bandwidth, workload and mental/emotional health?
6. Evaluate its revenue potential by doing the following:
   1. Calculate the size of the total population that could possibly engage with this opportunity. What is the largest possible number of people or entities in question? If you’re looking to expand your local advertising efforts, this would be the total number of local businesses in your market. If you’re looking to create a membership program, this is the total number of readers/viewers/listeners in your market. 
   2. Narrow it down by the slice of population you would target. If you’re looking to increase local major donors, how many have or are likely to give to a mission like yours? If you’re building a restaurant guide, how many local restaurants might be interested in advertising to your publication’s demographic?
   3. Now estimate how much of that population would actually engage with this opportunity. How many businesses would actually advertise? How many members would actually pay? How many donors would actually give? Be realistic and conservative here. Do whatever research you can to understand typical conversion rates or rules-of-thumb for the opportunity you are assessing. You don’t want to build your plans on overestimations. That said, it can be difficult to estimate with accuracy given all the variables. Here are a few starting points:
      1. The marketing Rule of 7
      2. Membership metrics
      3. Newsletter conversion rates
      4. Prospect ratios
      5. Sales statistics
   4. Calculate what the people or entities would pay for this opportunity. What does an average ad or sponsorship cost? What is the price of a subscription? What is the average gift? What do your competitors charge? What do similar products in similar markets look like?
   5. Get to a final number by multiplying the population that would actually engage with the opportunity by the amount they would pay. So it might be that there are 1,000 people in your target membership demographic who would pay $10 per month for a membership. That means this revenue opportunity could add up to $120,000 a year. It’s important to note that that number will unlikely be static, as some members will undoubtedly stop being members. So you’ll want to factor in your churn rate.
7. Prioritize ruthlessly. You likely will need to pick one strategy and engage with only it. This may mean choosing between a major donor strategy or launching a membership program — at least for now.  Trying to do both will stretch your team too far, and make it harder for you to execute on your editorial mission. Ask yourself: will this generate the revenue you need? Will it move the needle enough?

Assess the full costs of the new revenue stream

1. Estimate the work this opportunity will take and how much employee time it would cost (aka the indirect costs or overhead). There are a couple ways to do this.
   1.  If there are people already on your team who will redirect their efforts completely or partially towards this project,  calculate the percentage of time they’ll spend on the work and multiply that by their salary and benefits to learn what your personnel expenses would be. 
   2. It might be easier to back into the above by estimating the number of hours this opportunity will take per week, especially if you are an un- or underpaid founder or are relying on volunteers to run your organization (note that we always advocate paying people who meaningfully contribute to your news business — especially you!). Here’s how:
      1. Make a list of all the tasks this opportunity will require, making sure to count things like communication, documentation and coordination, which are easy to forget but are crucial and take up a lot of time. 
      2. Estimate how many hours it will take to complete each task and add them all up. Remember, it’s better to overestimate so you’re getting a true sense of how much this will cost. 
      3. If you’d like to take it a step farther, assign an hourly rate to the work and see what it amounts to. As every news leader knows, sometimes time is just as valuable (if not more!) than money.
2. Estimate any direct costs associated with the opportunity. These might be additional staff members or higher hours for current staff (include benefits cost if applicable), tools/technology, consultant hours, subscriptions, fees etc. List them all, price them and add them all up. 
3. Do the math. When you add up all the expenses, do they justify the revenue you’re likely to generate? What are the opportunity costs of focusing on this opportunity instead of others? Would your time and resources be better spent elsewhere?

Assess your return on investment

A return on investment is a simple way to calculate the profitability of an opportunity. The formula is: Potential revenue – potential expenses / potential expenses. The result is a percentage that you can easily compare to the ROI on other opportunities. 

So if launching a sponsorships effort is likely to bring in $20,000 a year and it will cost $7,500 to launch, the ROI in the first year is $20K-$7.5K / $7.5K = 1.6 or 160%.

By contrast, if deeping your efforts around major donors is likely to bring in $20,000 a year and it will cost $3,000 in the first year, the ROI  is $20K-$3K / $3K = 5.6 or 560%. 

It’s important to note that ROI doesn’t take into account the passage of time. Perhaps the costs of an opportunity are largely up front, and it will cost much less to maintain. You wouldn’t expect a high ROI in the first year under those circumstances, but you can plan for the initial investment in time and/or money. You will also want to consider how the opportunity might – or might not – scale. Perhaps raising $20,000 from donors represents a saturation of the market, or maybe it’s a foothold in a longer-term strategy.

You can always turn to budget modeling to determine when an investment will start paying for itself and become truly profitable. Dive into that process here. 

Set Revenue Goals

Now that you’ve done all the work of assessing an opportunity and understanding why it might work and what it would take, it’s time to decide on your growth plan and set some goals. 

These should be specific goals that move your news business forward and contribute to revenue growth. Learn how to set organizational goals  here and how to set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals here. These are presented as high-level organizational goals, but the thinking can be applied to revenue goals as well.

As you consider your goals, map out exactly what it would take and what it looks like. What has to happen for you to reach this goal? How will you measure progress and success? 

Here’s an example. Let’s say your SMART goal is to identify and apply for at least four grants, for a total of at least $100,000, from at least two existing funders and two new ones by the end of September. In order for it to happen, you’d need to:

• Build pipeline documentation to track targets, contacts and application dates
• Prioritize at least one morning per week for prospecting and outreach
• Attend at least one major industry conference to meet target funders
• Develop a reusable boilerplate from past grant applications to reduce grantwriting time
• Plan for a slower publishing cadence to ensure you have the time to focus on this goal

And you might measure progress by:

• Tracking each stage of your pipeline, knowing that you need 3-4x conversations with funders to net an invitation to apply (emails, meetings, follow ups, invitations to apply)
• Tracking the number of grants submitted
• Tracking the total potential grant dollars

Now give yourself a cold, hard reality check. Are your goals reasonable given what it would take to achieve them? Should you pare back your expectations or pursue other goals that may be equally strategic but more in reach? And even if your goals seem within reach, are they truly contributing to your business’ sustainability or might you reconsider how they connect to the bottom line? 

The post How to Create a Revenue Growth Plan appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post The Importance of Goal Setting appeared first on LION Publishers.

A staffing plan unites some of the most important aspects of a successful news business: strategy, goals, finances and people. It’s an opportunity to assess where you are, where you want to go, and what it takes to reach your goals. 

Why a staffing plan is important

A staffing plan allows you to step back and assess your current and future needs when it comes to your organization’s most important resource: its people. It ensures your hiring is in line with your strategies and goals and helps you feel confident that any new hiring investments will move the needle toward sustainability. Here are some other benefits:

• It prompts you to go beyond your gut or what you’re most familiar with to understand what staffing choices will move your news business forward in the long-term. 
• It gives you the confidence to know exactly how a new hire will benefit your organization — and justifies the cost.
• It streamlines your hiring process. Once you’re ready to hire, you know exactly what you need and why, which frees you up to focus on making it happen and recruiting the right person.

• It can help with employee growth and retention, since you can identify training and professional development needs that will benefit both parties. 
• Bringing on a new team member typically allows a busy founder to give up some portion of their duties, which can be hard. But founders often tell us they were able to grow their businesses only after they gave up some control and shared the responsibility of building their organization.
• It can be a key component to succession planning, allowing you to get the right people in the door early enough to start planning a key employee’s eventual exit.

How to get started

Make sure you have a solid understanding of your finances and can project your revenue and expenses. This will tell you when and under what circumstances you can hire, and how it would affect your bottom line in the near and longer term. 

Next, prepare yourself to think realistically and strategically about where you are and where you want to go. It’s critical to have a clear sense of how your new hires would fit into the bigger picture.

Finally, don’t do this alone! This is a major strategic conversation, so it makes sense to involve your current team members, board members, advisory board or other key stakeholders that are invested in your organization. If you are a solo founder, this might be a spouse, mentor, parent or other trusted sounding board. 

Understand the options

As you start thinking about what your news business needs, it’s useful to articulate on the front end what’s on the table.

Employee Type

Most news businesses work with a mix of employee types, depending on their needs and resources. But the definitions of employee types and the obligations employers have to them varies considerably depending on the size of your news business and where you’re located. Here is an overview that breaks down some of that complexity.

That said, here are some common types of workers we’ve seen across LION membership, alongside some things to keep in mind.

• Full-time employees (FTEs) are, by the IRS’ definition, team members who work an average of at least 30 hours per week or 130 hours per month. But the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes regulations like minimum wage and overtime pay, leaves it up to the employer to decide. It’s important to familiarize yourself with your state’s labor regulations; some states are more stringent than others on the definition of part-time vs. full-time. 
• Part-time employees (PTEs) work fewer than 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month. Keep in mind that anyone working part-time will obviously work fewer hours, but will also need more time to get settled in the role, build relationships, make progress and create systems, structures and workflows for their duties. So if you hire a part-time ad salesperson for 20 hours a week, you might expect that it would take them twice as long to start closing deals than it would a full-time worker.
• Contingent workers are hired to complete a particular task or project and — no surprise — the definition and regulations vary state by state. For a news business, this category of worker typically captures freelancers, independent contractors, or consultants that can be hired for single or recurring projects. Here’s a breakdown of types of contingent workers. It’s important that the statement of work is spelled out at the start of the relationship with a contingent worker. It should include things like a detailed description of the services they will render, deadlines or milestones to meet, the agreed-upon payment and how they’ll get paid along with signatures from all parties. 
• Volunteers are people who contribute to your organization who are unpaid. This can include pro bono workers, event volunteers or board members. But, of course, anyone who consistently and meaningfully contributes to your organization (like founders and interns) should be paid for their critical work.

One important note: Managing people takes time and intention to do well, so factor this into your planning as you consider your mix of worker types. Perhaps it’s cheaper to work with a group of freelancers instead of hiring a full-time reporter, but managing them and their work costs the news leader time they might otherwise spend on revenue generating activities. It might be possible to eventually make up that cost by moving away from freelancers. So, whenever possible, think long-term. People are the ultimate investment, so treat them as such. 

Job Types

Many news leaders are familiar with the different types of editorial jobs, like reporter, editor, copy editor, etc. But many are less familiar with the business, financial, operational and administrative roles that are necessary for a built-out business. And because the legacy news organizations from which many news leaders originate don’t tend to signify experience level by job title (you’re a “reporter” whether you’ve been there 2 or 20 years), news leaders may also be unfamiliar with the different levels of seniority that come with different job titles.  

Here is a handy collection of job descriptions focused on revenue and operations developed by the American Journalism Project and its grantees that can give you ideas as you consider different roles and think about the skills and qualifications required for each. 

Peer organization teams

We all like to know what others are doing, so it may be useful to understand how other independent news businesses are organized and what roles they have on staff. Here are a few independent news business’ staff pages alongside their mission statement. 

Ground yourself in your mission

Planning for the future can be stressful, and it’s easy to get off track or lost in the weeds. That’s why it can be useful to start by grounding yourself in your mission. This can serve as a North Star as you navigate your way forward. If you don’t already have a mission statement, here’s a resource for how to articulate one and why.  

Identify your Stage of Sustainability

LION is in the process of mapping the stages of sustainability based on what we’ve seen across the independent news industry. It may be useful to articulate your current stage and consider what it would take to progress to the next one. The stages are:

• Ideation: You are developing a concept for a news business.
• Preparation: You are beginning to implement a minimum viable product (MVP) for a news business.
• Building: You are expanding your editorial offerings based on audience and market research while building a foundation for revenue and operations.
• Maintaining: You have had some journalistic impact and are developing your target audience, but are still seeking operational and financial stability.
• Poised for Growth: You have a clear target audience and your revenue and operations are stable. You have the internal capacity to do the work you’ve committed to in service of your organizational goals and mission.
• Growing: You are enhancing your editorial offerings to reach new audiences. Revenue is growing and you are building your team.
• Scaling: You have a stable audience and revenue base and are pursuing significant new revenue streams or audiences.
• Sustaining: You have achieved revenue stability across multiple streams, are having consistent journalistic impact, and have sustainable workloads and compensation for staff and contributors.

Once you’ve identified your current position, ask yourself: how would one or more hires help you move to the next stage? 

Set Organizational Goals

It’s critical to understand your major organizational goals for the next year when creating a staffing plan. Otherwise you might be meeting a short-term need and missing the bigger picture. These should be specific, holistic goals that move your news business forward and contribute to its sustainability rather than goals focused on just one aspect of what you do. For example, it might sound wonderful to hire a new reporter, but perhaps an ad salesperson or audience manager might help you achieve more far-reaching aims. Learn how to set high-level organizational goals here and to set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals here. 

As you consider your goals, map out exactly what it would take and what it looks like. What has to happen for you to reach this goal? How will you measure progress and success? 

Now give yourself a cold, hard reality check. Are your goals reasonable given what it would take to achieve them? Should you pare back your expectations or pursue other goals that may be equally strategic but more in reach? And even if your goals seem within reach, are they truly contributing to your business’ sustainability or might you reconsider how they connect to the bottom line? 

Think through Key Roles

No two news businesses are organized exactly alike. But because they are businesses, there are a number of key roles that they require to thrive, and it may be useful to ask yourself who on your team is  — or should be — filling them. This may help guide your thoughts as you identify needs or redundancies and refine organizational goals. 

Ask yourself:

• Who is owning the vision and strategic direction?
• Who is ensuring your business is in compliance and protected against any legal or financial risk? 
• Who is working on the activities that generate revenue?
• Who is managing your money?
• Who is producing your product?
• Who is quality controlling your product?
• Who is ensuring your product reaches your audience?
• Who is overseeing team culture and overall team well being?
• Who is overseeing the team’s professional development and performance goals?
• Who’s owning DEIB/EDI?
• Who’s owning onboarding and recruiting?

Evaluate your Current Team

Once you’ve got a destination, it’s time to locate your starting point. Evaluate your current team to identify their primary roles and responsibilities along with how their work contributes to your organizational goals. Don’t forget to include those who are offering key external support, like an accountant or an attorney. Identify the differences between what people are supposed to do versus what they actually do versus what they can potentially do — and maybe what they shouldn’t be doing given their bandwidth and capacity. And make sure you are actually talking to your team about their work. Your assumptions about what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis may not be correct. Adding a new hire will absolutely affect your existing employees’ work and that should be taken into consideration while planning.

If you want to take this to the next level, fill out job scorecards for each team member to get a full picture of what people do and how they advance the mission. 

Map out the following for each employee/worker:

1. Who are your team members? Include anyone who regularly and meaningfully contributes to your news business.
2. What are their key responsibilities? Don’t include every little thing. Instead, consider their high-level buckets of work, like “financial planning,” “freelancer management” and “newsletter production.”
3. How do they divide their time? Assign (or better yet, ask them to estimate) what percentage of their time is focused on editorial, revenue generation, administration, etc.
4. How do they contribute to organizational goals? Which organizational goals are they currently working toward? How does their work move the organization forward?
5. What is their current bandwidth and capacity? Are they working beyond what they can reasonably do and are perhaps burnt out? Or might they be looking for more challenges and opportunities?
6. What other areas of expertise does this person have that they aren’t necessarily applying to their current role but may be relevant to your news business?
7. What are their expectations in terms of growth and professional development?
8. What insights have surfaced as you think about this person’s current and future roles and responsibilities and how they fit into the organizational goals?

Conduct an HR Gap Analysis

Now that you have a good idea of your current team and your organization goals, it’s time to evaluate the gaps between what you can do and what you want to do. Go through the following steps to determine what skills gaps you will need to fill.

1. Look over each of your organizational goals and determine what skills you need on the team in order to meet them. These could be skills like “donor cultivation,” “coding,” “grant writing” or “story development.”
2. For each skill, evaluate how critical it is to accomplishing the goal and what level of skill is required, then rate them on a 1-3 scale. For example, you might rate “knowledge of local philanthropy” at a 2 because it’s not as important as, say, “donor cultivation,” but you may rate the skill level at a 1 because it’s very important that they already understand the particulars of your philanthropic scene. That reflects the reality that a new development hire with extensive previous experience and a good set of contacts and influence is likely to bring in major donors more quickly. That will prepare you for the fact that your potential hire will probably cost you more than an entry level employee but will likely pay off in the long-term. In hiring, as in life, you tend to get what you pay for. 
3. Note whether you already have the skill on your team, whether you could train someone on the team to learn it, or whether you would need to add that skillset to your organization.

Identify external considerations

It’s critical to think through all the internal factors involved in your staffing plan, but it’s also important to address the external influences that may play a role by answering the following questions.

1. What is the talent availability in my market?
2. What are the compensation expectations for the roles I’m seeking to hire?
3. What changes in technology might affect the labor supply and demand?
4. What hiring trends should I consider?
5. What are my aspirational peers, allies and competitors doing?
6. What economic or financial factors might influence my plan?
7. What DEIB factors should I consider given my goals and the market?

Map out your staffing needs

You know what skills you need to meet your organizational goals. Now it’s time to start shaping that information into the positions you’ll need by going through the following steps:

1. Identify the biggest gaps between your current capacity and your goals. These are your greatest area of need and would likely be the skills required of your next few hires.
2. Consider how you might shift the responsibilities or areas of focus of your current team members to better align with your goals or to more efficiently or effectively meet them. Can you better leverage some of your team members’ skills? Would training or professional development enable you to accomplish some of your goals without a new hire? 
3. Identify the role tools or technology could play in addressing some of your needs. Could you automate some of your workflows to free up critical staff time? Would a new CMS or CRM enable you to forgo an administrative hire?
4. Think through what you can accomplish through contractors or part-time hires versus a full-time hire. Contractors may be a good fit for one-off needs or short-term projects. Part-time employees may work well for needs that are ongoing, but not intensive. Full-time employees are best for ongoing, intensive needs that are integral to the organization. Consider if or when you might shift workers from one category to another to meet your needs.
5. Identify the experience and skill-level you require. Does the role require someone who is able to strategize and design, or someone who will plug into current systems and execute? Don’t expect one person to do it all. Be realistic about what you need and design the roles accordingly.
6. Articulate when you need to make these hires to meet your goals, with the understanding that it takes around three months for an employee to settle into a new role and six months to a year before they are executing at a high level. Adjust your expectations accordingly. Setting unrealistic expectations of a new hire could lead to burnout, dissatisfaction or their exit, and turnover is expensive, time-consuming and frustrating because it sets you back from meeting your goals.

Create job scorecards for your newly articulated roles

If you didn’t create job scorecards before, now’s the time. It may feel like busywork, but it will pay off in the long run. A job scorecard details the outcomes, competencies and skills that a new hire needs to demonstrate to be successful in the role, and connects them to your organizational goals. Creating one helps you articulate why you need this new role, and later creates a venue to ensure you and the employee are on the same page regarding expectations while giving the employee a clear path for professional growth.

Let’s say you want to hire a major donors manager. You might include the following outcome in the job scorecard: bring in 20 major donors at the $150,000 level in the next year to be successful in the role. And the competencies/skills to help them get there might include being a strong relationship builder and understanding how to quickly and effectively prioritize different opportunities. 

The job scorecard is the backbone of your hiring process; everything you spell out in the scorecard should be incorporated into your job description, interviews and eventually, when you hire a candidate, their performance reviews. This provides clarity for you as you think through what the role entails and what success looks like, and it is invaluable for your employee, who will know exactly what to expect and how they’ll be evaluated.

More information on how to create them and how to use them here. 

An important note: Resist the urge to try to have your cake and eat it too by squishing together two roles into one. That amounts to asking one person to do two different jobs and demonstrate two different skill sets, and unicorns are rare for a reason. This can very easily lead to ineffective work and, ultimately, burnout. You either need to make the tough choice about which responsibilities to prioritize (i.e. what will give you the bigger return on investment at this particular moment), consider hiring for two roles, or move some of the work to a contractor or part-time worker.

Examine your workplace culture

After having done all this work to assess your current staff and plan for your future one, it’s critical to take a good, hard look at your work environment to ensure that you have the systems and structures in place to set people up for success.  

Healthy workplaces don’t just happen; they must be built with intention and conscientiously maintained. In our experience, one of the biggest contributors to burnout is a workplace environment that is toxic, unsupportive, chaotic, opaque or poorly structured. A few things to consider:

• Conduct an employee survey to understand how people feel about the current environment. Your view of the culture and its strengths and weaknesses may not be the same as others’. In very small organizations, this could be accomplished through honest 1:1s and group conversations as long as everyone feels comfortable and safe enough to speak candidly. 
• Evaluate where your organization is on its DEIB journey and incorporate best practices into all aspects of the work. You can find some great resources here. 
• Think through how information is created and communicated across your organization. Is the information clear, accessible, transparent and actionable?
• Articulate the management styles of you and other leaders and whether they meet team needs. There may be a need for some training or realignment.
• Make sure there is clarity, alignment and documentation around mission, vision, core values, processes and policies to ensure everyone knows what is expected. Here’s a guide for how and why to craft your mission, vision and values.  

Here are some ways to get started: Onboarding and Preparing a New Hire for Success.

The post How to Create a Staffing Plan appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post Financial Management for News Entrepreneurs – Course Summary appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post Your Budget in Practice appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post Your Budget as a Model appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post Your Budget as a Report appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post How to Create Your Budget appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post Introduction to Financial Management for News Entrepreneurs appeared first on LION Publishers.

The post Setting Organizational Goals – Course Summary appeared first on LION Publishers.