Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
I am often asked by exhausted board members and executive directors what the board can do to raise more money. My answer, let me tell you right away, is NEVER to launch a new event. Don’t get me started on my anti-events rant, that’s another post. But there are other things that board members can […]
Lucy Bernholz is hosting a great conversation on her Blueprint Research and Design website called “What Capital When?” As part of their work with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in their Digital Media & Learning initiative, Blueprint is hosting this online conversation around the theories and strategies of program-related and mission investing […]
Most businesses that are looking for funding know the power of a case for support, although they probably call it their “pitch” or “deck.” But most nonprofit organizations don’t have an articulated case for support, and this is a real missed opportunity. A case for support is absolutely critical to any kind of fundraising campaign, […]
At the risk of going against the crowd, I’d like to add my perspective to the Idealist crisis. Idealist.org is a job site for nonprofit organizations that has been around for 10 years. It’s a great site that brings nonprofit organizations and aspiring nonprofit job seekers together. It has launched many a great career, including […]
There is a growing discussion among social impact organizations and those who fund them about how to measure impact. It is indeed a very slippery endeavor. Mario Marino, Chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners (a venture philanthropy fund in Washington D.C. that makes growth capital investments in nonprofits) has been encouraging nonprofits to measure outcomes for […]
Along with the burgeoning social entrepreneurship movement comes a bit of hubris that social entrepreneurs know better how to create social change than do the nonprofits that have been working toward social change for years. Some social entrepreneurs argue that nonprofits are too set in their ways to embrace a new way of creating solutions. […]
Note: This post is the first in the ongoing blog series, Financing Not Fundraising. For more on the Financing Not Fundraising approach, view the Financing Not Fundraising book series and the Financing Not Fundraising webinar series. I’d like to outline a new vision for how the nonprofit sector gets funded. Fundraising in its current form just doesn’t […]
We all know the nonprofit sector is really struggling. Particularly in the midst of a deep recession it can be difficult to figure out how to get out of a vicious cycle of increasing demand for services, relentless fundraising, diminishing capacity and so on. But there is hope. In order to break free of the […]
The kick-off of Austin’s MindPop collaboration was this morning. MindPop, which I’ve written about before, is a collaboration of a handful of leading Austin philanthropists hoping to improve access to arts education for all Austin children. They want to understand what is holding our kids back from learning about and experiencing the arts and what […]
Lucy Bernholz, head of Blueprint Research and Design, a philanthropy consulting firm, and thought-leader on trends in philanthropy is preparing a monograph on what 2010 will hold for the social sector. As a true adopter of social media, she is asking others to contribute, in essence crowd-sourcing answers, this year to her annual “what will […]
