By Janine Vanderburg, JVA Consulting

13 an unlucky number? Not this year. We’re excited about 2013 and the opportunities it holds for you, our clients and others working across sectors to bring about community and social change. In no specific order, here are our 13 resolutions for 2013—and how we intend to make them happen.

Have more parties. Every time we have a party, you tell us how much you loved the opportunity to get together with others in the sector with great music, food and beverages. We love it, too! So this year, we resolve to have more parties, including the one party we didn’t get to last year because we were so busy—a celebration of our 25 years in business!

Make sure our work with you is fun and engaging. Do board retreats have to involve dreary discussions of how people are not upholding their roles and responsibilities? We don’t think so. You can have fun during retreats, strategic and business planning, while raising money and yes, even during evaluation, while still achieving results.

Couple fun with the most rigorous thinking and research. Our research team likes to call themselves data geeks. While we think they are a lot of fun to be around, they are also committed to bringing the most rigorous data collection and analysis to their work, helping you make sure that you’re making decisions based on data, not whim. Look for more from our research team this year on how you can use data to increase your funding, strengthen your boards and membership programs, evaluate your programs, and create dashboards to quickly assess how your organization is doing, all while having fun.

Advocate! Whether it’s the fiscal crisis, debates about education funding or public policy positions, those involved in community and social change have a voice and often are uniquely able to tell the story of those most affected. Through our trainings and blogs, we will help you do that. And we’ll use our voice and relationships to advocate for policies that support our clients’ work.

Get new training chairs. You love our training workshops, calling them the best nonprofit workshops available. You find our modern Scandinavian chairs a bit—hard? We’ve heard you. In the next week, we’ll be running a contest to have you help pick our next training chairs. Check us out in JVA 411 and on Facebook starting January 7 to vote.

Offer affordable ways to get our expertise. This year, JVA has increased its total number of trainings to over 100. For new nonprofits and/or nonprofits with small budgets, our training offerings provide an affordable way for you to access our team’s knowledge and expertise. For example, you can learn how to write a grant proposal in a day from our expert grantwriting team. No money to hire us to create a fundraising/financing plan for your organization? We’ll walk you through our process in Fund Development Plan in a Day. Is developing an earned income strategy on your list for the year? You can get it done at our Social Enterprise Academy, a weeklong intensive program that will cost you less than what you would pay for one day of consulting from a social enterprise consultant. Are many of these trainings of interest you? Our training subscription series allows you access to all of our trainings and is the most practical, affordable tool around to provide high quality professional development to your staff and board.

Support the advancement of young people in the sector. Last year, I was privileged to facilitate a leadership learning circle for the Denver Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, and was struck again (positively) by the commitment of this generation entering the nonprofit sector, and (negatively) by the lack of career pathways that exist for them. This year, we pledge to use our connections and resources, as well as vehicles like our networking clubs, to engage young nonprofit professionals and help them progress in their careers.

Prepare those seeking encore careers to work in nonprofits. My friend Marci Alboher just wrote a book on encore careers that is a great start for those of you thinking, “what next?”

If you are in the for-profit sector and want to transition to the nonprofit world, two JVA intensives will help you prepare to transfer your executive or sales skills to the nonprofit sector. Executive Director Academy is a weeklong intensive that prepares you to lead a nonprofit organization and Development Director Intensive is a two-day immersion on what nonprofit fund development is all about.

Help people connect. As millenials and boomers continue to flock to Colorado, the number of daily calls and emails we receive for informational interviews about the state’s nonprofit sector and how to find a job here has skyrocketed. We’ve bundled what we know into a training called Degrees of Separation in Nonprofit Job Hunting (Hint: It’s Really Only Two) so that you can get the latest and greatest and also connect with others to form your own networks as you search for that perfect social change career.

Help you raise more money. JVA Consulting started over 25 years ago by raising money. It’s still a powerful part of what we do because without financing, all the best plans in the world won’t come to fruition. While we won’t know the total amount we raised through our efforts for another few months, we’re pledging now that we’re going to help you raise even more, whether through fund development planning and consulting, social enterprise development, capital campaign strategizing or grantwriting.

Help all our clients leverage social media. Social media is a powerful way to connect and stay connected to members, donors, constituents, customers and clients. We’re going to continue to push all of you who are not yet in the game to get there, and we’ll “like you on Facebook” as a start. For those of you just getting started, JVA’s Social Media Intensive 101 training will provide you with a great jumpstart.

Share big ideas for 2013—both yours and ours. Throughout 2013, JVA Consulting will be using our blog to bring you some of the best and most interesting ideas to advance community and social change. Titled Big Ideas for 2013, these blogs will feature a combination of stories from JVA staff members, interviews with changemakers and guest blogs. To see our first guest blog, click here.

Appreciate each other—and you! For everything you do to make the world a better place. From all of us at JVA, a big THANK YOU for over 25 years of partnering with us to make the world a better place.