Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
There was a really interesting article in the Wall Street Journal recently about the New York City Opera that dramatically illustrates how critical a nonprofit’s strategic alignment of mission, money and competence is. I’ve written before that for a nonprofit to be truly effective and sustainable, three things must be aligned: Their mission, or reason […]
One of the big reasons I launched Social Velocity a few years ago was that I saw the potential for the social entrepreneurship movement to leave the nonprofit sector behind. The nonprofit sector is undercapitalized, struggling and at times inefficient, to be sure. But we cannot abandon it. Social Velocity exists to help remake, rework […]
Below is a guest post from Mat Despard, a teacher of nonprofit management and leadership at the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and coordinator of UNC’s Nonprofit Leadership Certificate program. Matt has a real interest in economic empowerment interventions to improve social, economic, and health outcomes among very poor […]
In this month’s Social Velocity blog interview, we’re talking with Beth Kanter. Beth is a leading thinker and innovator around social media for nonprofits. She writes one of the longest running and most popular (and one of my favorite) blogs for nonprofits Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media. She also co-authored the seminal […]
In part 9 of our ongoing blog series, Financing Not Fundraising, we are discussing the importance of calculating the return on investment of every revenue-generating activity your nonprofit undertakes. This can be fairly easily understood through two basic, but critical analyses: net revenue raised and cost to raise a dollar. If these two calculations were […]
In our ongoing blog series, 10 Great Social Innovation Reads, below are my top 10 picks for the best reads in the world of social innovation in May. But I’m sure I missed some great stuff, so please add your favorites from the past month in the comments. Three new books released recently argue in […]
There is a blog I read that doesn’t fit with any of the others on my favorites list. A Smart Bear written by Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software, which (I’ll be honest) I know nothing about, is really refreshing and eye-opening. The blog is supposed to be about startup software marketing, but I […]
Especially in challenging economic times like these it is critical for nonprofits to have a solid, well-thought out plan for bringing money in the door. But many organizations either don’t have a comprehensive fundraising plan, or they aren’t sure whether the plan they have is really going to effectively result in enough dollars. In our […]
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 […]
I’ve discussed before how important boards of directors are to the effectiveness of the nonprofit sector. But I think they are particularly critical to overcoming the bias against nonprofit capacity. Boards of directors are a largely untapped resource available to nonprofits. If nonprofits could figure out how to tap into the expertise, networks, knowledge and […]
