Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
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 […]
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 […]
Nonprofits exist in a strange netherworld between market forces and social change. They are trying to create a solution to a social problem, but as much as some might like to deny it, that desired social change exists within a market economy. That means that in order to be successful, nonprofits, just like any business, […]
Seth Godin has gotten everyone talking (some are even yelling) about his latest post that chastises nonprofits for not embracing change and getting on the social media bandwagon. Godin is irritated at nonprofits for not embracing these new tools to “focus attention and galvanize action” around their cause. And the overwhelming amount of debate about […]
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 […]
The struggles and challenges nonprofits face all come down to one key problem: a misalignment of mission, money and core competencies. For any organization three things must be aligned: 1) their mission, or reason for existing 2) their core competencies–what they do better than anyone else in the world, and 3) their resource engine–all the ways […]
It’s a topic that’s on every nonprofit Executive Director, board, and staff member’s mind these days. How can we possibly raise money when the economy is in such turmoil? Well, there are ways. Here are 10 to get you started: Harness Your Board. Your board of directors ideally is a group of people who are […]
