Thank you for responding to each of the six fundamental definitions presented below.

Please review the referenced materials and check "Yes, I agree" or "No, I do not agree" for each. The links to each reference will open in new windows/tabs when you click on them.

1. Vision and Purpose

The Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community is a private community of nonprofit thought leaders, leader practitioners, forward-looking funders, policy makers, and instigators who believe that mission and performance are inextricably linked. The community's audacious vision is to trigger a vital core of the social sector to embrace the importance of high performance. The members of the community share the desire to inspire, support, and convince nonprofit and public-sector leaders (and their stakeholders) to build great organizations for greater societal impact and to increase the expectation and adoption of high performance as the path to this end.

2. The Definition of High Performance

The definition of high performance and the seven pillars to achieve it (defined in the Performance Imperative) are the definitional foundation of our community's work.

Community's Common Definition of 'High Performance:' High performance is the ability to deliver—over a prolonged period of time—meaningful, measurable, and financially sustainable results for the people or causes the organization is in existence to serve.

The Seven Pillars of High Performance - Organizations that commit to pursuing high performance generally make the most progress by cultivating seven core disciplines:

Pillar 1: Courageous, adaptive executive and board leadership (the preeminent pillar)
Pillar 2: Disciplined, people-focused management
Pillar 3: Well-designed and well-implemented programs and strategies
Pillar 4: Financial health and sustainability
Pillar 5: A culture that values learning
Pillar 6: Internal monitoring for continuous improvement
Pillar 7: External evaluation for mission effectiveness

3. Ambassador Expectations

First and foremost, ambassadors "walk the talk" by demonstrating "performance matters" in your own work and actively encouraging others to do the same—in your own words, time, and way. The cornerstone expectation is that "As an ambassador, I will participate in some way."

As an ambassador, I commit to my fellow ambassadors that I will:

Serve as an ambassador of the community's purpose in my own work, communities, and networks by:

• Buying into the need to trigger a mindshift that mission and performance are inextricably linked
• Inspiring, supporting, and convincing nonprofit and public-sector leaders (and their stakeholders) to accept that "performance matters"
• Incorporating the community's messaging—anchored in the definition of high performance and its seven disciplines—to deliver a consistent, ongoing, and unified message to the field
• Representing the community's purpose, products, and positions in speaking engagements, planning retreats, conferences, informal conversations, personal emails, and social media channels, when I can.

Be a contributor, learner, and beneficiary of the community's online forum by:

• Being reasonably present in the online forum—asking and responding to requests for assistance or information, contributing to conversation prompts that help build relationships and the social fabric of the community. I will contribute if and when I want and in my own way, with the expectation that my participation in the online forum contributes to the community 70-20-10 rule of participation:
  • 70% observe—you read or observe but don't contribute
  • 20% comment—you respond, question, exchange, share, or suggest in dialogue with others in the community
  • 10% create content—you are part of the community's collaborative-development backbone.
  (It doesn't matter in which of these online participation levels you engage; you just need to be in one of them. Episodic observation counts, but no one should be completely dormant. To date, ambassador participation has been higher than the 70-20-10 ratio, noteworthy for a community of our size.)
• Contributing to the collective IQ of the community by sharing specific knowledge and experience in building high-performance organizations, whether in leadership, management, program, financial health, culture, performance, evaluation, etc., when I can.

Contribute to growing the community and the relationships on which it is built by:

• Lending a hand to nominate ambassador candidates, invite those you know, participate with others in regional gatherings, make connections for other ambassadors and help build the social fabric of the community, when I can.
• Sharing examples of my efforts in the field to promote the community's messages of high performance, products, and positions to share with others
• Responding to short queries, surveys, and requests for feedback to vet proposed candidates, review and critique new products, and gain insights on issues facing the community.

4. Ground Rules and Email Courtesies

Simple rules of the road to encourage norms that nurture the spirit of community.

You can review the Ground Rules and Email Courtesies here (Link - click to review).

5. Intellectual Property Provisions

Formal recognition of the Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community ("the Community") and protection of intellectual property (IP) in community-generated content.

We've taken a series of steps to formally recognize the Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community ("the Community") and protect the intellectual property (IP) ownership of its community-generated content. These steps are designed to: 1) facilitate and enable collaborative exchange and development within the community; and 2) encourage broad-based reproduction, distribution, and (relatively unconstrained) use and creation of derivative works of community-generated content. We consider these works the property of (owned by) the community and protect them through a selective and respectful application of trademark, copyright, and Creative Commons licensing described below.

You can review the expanded explanation of the community's IP provisions here (Link - click to review).

Thank you for completing these acceptances.

When you are done, please make sure to click the 'Submit' button below to submit your responses and mark your survey in the system as 'complete.'

—The Leap Ambassadors Support Team