It’s been a while since my last post - but we’ve been busy with good work in the meanwhile, including welcoming our daughter into this world!
We’ve been working with some high-impact clients to effect operational transformations and help them grow, in addition to building out a suite of services to give nonprofits more resources. We’re ready to transform our next high-impact organizations and give them the resources they need to grow.
Recap: About WorkStream Nonprofit
Our mission is to provide nonprofits with operational support, training, resources and guidance to help them:
- Maximize available resources
- Increase their impact
- Create a sustainable and scalable organization
- Achieve operational excellence
I’m personally passionate about eliminating the operational bottlenecks that limit nonprofit effectiveness. While in businesses, it’s easy to measure effectiveness in terms of finances, nonprofits don’t have that metric, so maximizing impact becomes a little more of an obscure metric. We’re here to solve that problem. We’re here to give nonprofits the support they need to achieve maximum impact.
New Services
While serving as a fractional COO and operations consultant, I noticed a pattern amongst my clients - we would develop the ideal workflow, and then we needed to find the right staffing to support it. I’m a big fan of utilizing staff resources effectively so that people work at what they’re good at and outsource the rest. So the natural next step was for us to help find quality talent. Doing so, we identified a need for more support in that area, so we’ve developed new services to fill those gaps. Our hope is that by creating these products and making them available to impactful organizations, we can make a big difference in the EA nonprofit success and impact rates.
1. Executive Assistant Services
Designed to support the busy nonprofit entrepreneur, our executive assistants will help you manage logistics and detail work that would otherwise bog you down. Your time is valuable; having a partner to support your highly impactful work will increase your bandwidth and redirect your focus to where it belongs.
Packages start at $800/month
2. Bookkeeping Services
It’s pretty rare that I walk into an organization and they have a strong financial partner. Often, small nonprofits are either overpaying for services, or don’t have financial partners to manage their finances appropriately. It’s not just large nonprofits that might get audited - all nonprofits are required to have clear financial systems. I strongly believe that an organization’s finances can tell the story of the company - but only when properly managed.
Our team of trained bookkeepers will help you manage organizational expenses, budget development and reconciliation, and maintaining financial compliance. Our flat fee model means that you’ll get your monthly and annual financials taken care of with the professionalism, transparency, and reliability you deserve.
Packages start at $500/month
3. Technology Systems Implementation
If you’re not using automated project and contact management systems, you should be. There is so much room for efficiency and impact improvement when your technology systems are supporting your workflow to enable you to get more done more quickly. A good system means that you can do more with fewer staff. Our unique approach to identifying the right systems for you and implementing it for your team means that you can realize an increase in impact with minimal additional resources.
4. Hiring Support
Effective workflows aren’t just about the processes; it’s just as much about the people. Efficiency means that you have the right people doing the right jobs. Often, people make a hire for reasons other than a quantitative assessment of the job requirements and the candidate’s ability to meet that. We’re here to help you assess the job’s true requirements and how it fits into an efficient workflow, and then design a hiring process that will get you a high quality candidate that’s a perfect match for the job.
FREE Resources for Nonprofits
As part of our mission to give nonprofits the resources they need to grow, we offer the following free services:
- 2 initial consulting sessions or general workflow evaluations, and 1 free session each quarter afterwards. A little bit of guidance can often go a long way, and we’d love to help provide you the guidance towards making a greater impact early on.
- Educational blogs and other materials. I’m a big believer that the barrier between struggling and efficiency is often just education, and we’d like to close that gap. Click here to add yourself to our mailing list and be notified of any new releases
- Matchmaking to qualified service providers. It’s hard to know exactly what partner you need and whom to trust. We’re here to help you solve that problem.
- Coming soon: Matchmaking to pro bono consultants. Sometimes, you just need a short answer without the full engagement. We’re working on building a list of partners to be able to give you those answers.
Hear What Our Clients Are Saying
Deena has been an invaluable partner in keeping CAIS running smoothly during a critical transition period. She stepped in seamlessly and ensured that operations, hiring, and financial processes stayed on track. She played a key role in hiring across multiple areas—including our COO, program manager, communications director, policy lead, and operations associate—helping us build a stronger team. She also handled complex HR challenges with professionalism and care.
Beyond that, Deena provided the stability and operational backbone we needed to keep moving forward, making sure nothing fell through the cracks. Her ability to step into a fast-moving organization and provide immediate structure and support has been a huge asset. I highly recommend her to any organization looking for experienced operational leadership.
- Center for AI Safety
"We really appreciated the support we were able to get from WorkStream in setting up our operations."
- Foresight Institute
“Deena’s expertise is invaluable. She has supported our organization in streamlining workflow processes and as a result, saved us over 1,000 employee hours per year through increased efficiencies. She is extremely skilled at distilling processes down to their core steps and defining the actions necessary to move work through to completion. I can’t recommend her highly enough!”
- Conflict Resolution Center of Baltimore County
Ways You Can Help
- If you specialize in any business services, and would like to donate 1-2 hours a month, we’re seeking partners for our pro bono consultant matchmaking services. Learn more and sign up here.
- Give us ideas! All our services are designed because they address gaps that we’ve noticed. If you have any other ideas of how to help nonprofits, we’d love to hear them.
- Our ability to provide financially accessible services depends on our donors - please help us by contributing to our cause.
Other News
- We’re accepting applications for our next organization accelerator. We’ve made a few changes to it. In this next iteration, we’ll be running 6 nonprofits through the 6-month program with up to 2 team members per organization. The objective is to give those nonprofits a strong foundational infrastructure that will catapult their future growth. The $2,800 investment you’ll make means that your organization will have both trained staff and the infrastructure it needs to thrive. Click here to apply or view the full program details.
- We’re ready for the next transformation! We’ve just wrapped up 2 transformations and we’re ready for the next organizations to transform. Schedule a time to chat with me to see how we can help you achieve the greatest impact.
TLDR: If you only pick up one thing from this post, it’s that we are here to help you and you can use this link to talk to me, or email me at [email protected]. I look forward to being a trusted resource for you and your nonprofit!
Hi Deena, first of all, congratulations on your new arrival! Fellow EA mum here.
So this is a cool business of which I was previously unaware, so thanks for posting.
A key question that came to mind when reading your post and site was: what’s stopping clients from going straight to EASE/your partners? I see that you offer a matchmaking service, but for those clients who are equally unfamiliar with you as they are your partners, the level of trust is the same either way.
Also, how do you untangle the overlapping roles e.g. some of your individual partners now work as employees for some of your organisation partners offering similar services; could there be conflicts of interest there?
Thank you! We're enjoying her :)
There's nothing stopping clients from going straight to EASE - that's part of why we make it publicly available: we want people to have easy access to qualified professionals. However, there are a few scenarios in which we can help:
So that's why we make the matchmaking service free. It's an easy way to provide value and make sure orgs get the right support.
I do hope that over time, we'll have enough trust from the community that our opinion will matter!
For any partners who work at similar organizations, their arrangement with their employers is their own affair; if they're working full time there, they're doing other work on the side (although I believe that the majority of the professionals have their own businesses).