Flying is much harder to justify when the purpose is primarily listening, routine discussion, status reporting, attending a board meeting, receiving information that could be transmitted electronically, ceremonial attendance, networking without defined meaningful objectives, or repeatedly attending the same conference without documented organizational products.
Every meeting requires maintaining an Action-Item System, composed of a maintained log of contribution status, and related worksheets. This is how meaningful contribution is documented as evidence. Participants that do not accomplish meaningful contributions, are not provided opportunities to further waste organization resources and opportunities. Obvious care is needed to ensure abuse of the Action-Item System is not used to eliminate organization productive assets. Corrupting entries, limiting access to otherwise supporting entries, embellishing entries with more than what was actually meaningfully contributed.
Corrupt leadership often praise one another for useless efforts.
Flying and allocated Leadership opportunities based on useless efforts harms the nonprofits ability to grow.
A nonprofit could require every proposed trip to answer six questions before approval:
- What useful product is expected from the trip? Not “attend conference,” but something tangible such as securing a partner, completing training, obtaining commitments, inspecting a project, or producing a documented implementation plan.
- Why can this not be achieved reasonably by Zoom, telephone, email, or a local representative?
- What is the total organizational cost? Include time as well as money.
- What additional value is expected specifically because of physical presence? Based on what members-at-large value related to organization purposes.
- What would constitute a successful result? Define it before traveling.
- What happened afterward? Compare the promised product with the actual result. Embellishment and Omission are acts of supporting corruption.
This creates a useful distinction between travel as transportation and travel as a benefit.
For example:
Weak justification: “The conference is important and gives us visibility.”
versus:
Strong justification: “The organization will spend $3,800 to send one representative. Three prospective institutional partners have scheduled in-person meetings there. The objective is to secure at least one partnership worth approximately $25,000 in services or equivalent program capacity. The representative will also return with a written implementation report for the membership.”
The second can later be evaluated.
Another useful test is the Travel Replacement Test:
If the organization instead spent the same money on Zoom meetings, local services, member development, online training, or direct program work, which choice would probably produce more useful organizational value?
If the answer is consistently the alternative, flying is probably becoming a privilege rather than a productive organizational tool.
For your nonprofit-development framework, I would phrase the principle this way:
Travel should not be justified by the importance of the person traveling or the prestige of the event. It should be justified by the additional useful product that physical presence is reasonably expected to create for the organization.
What materially useful capability becomes available by flying that is unavailable, substantially degraded, or unlikely through remote participation?
What meaningful evidence is there that individual participants prepared for being productive, and did more than just act like they were participating?
This is a significant indicator of entrenched corruption, when a person is selected to travel and substitutes social presence for useful performance.
Repeated travel with low productive yield should become progressively harder to approve. Repeated travel that consistently produces partnerships, funding, training capacity, completed projects, or other durable organizational products becomes easier to justify.