Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
As part of the martyr complex from which so many of them suffer, nonprofit leaders often think that it’s best to push themselves and their organizations harder, faster, farther. Nonprofit leaders are continually faced with new opportunities – new client populations to serve, new demands for program expansion from funders, new partnership opportunities. And while […]
My guess is that you want to attract more money for your mission. Who doesn’t, right? But to do that you need to cultivate a Culture of Mission and Money among your board, staff, and funders. Does your nonprofit have one? Here are some key things present in a nonprofit with a robust culture of […]
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself worn down by the state of our country. The divisiveness, the anger, the coming apart instead of coming together is increasingly hard to take. And I know many of you feel the same. It seems that as time marches on we increasingly find ourselves battling the differences […]
In this month’s Social Velocity interview, I’m talking with David Grant. David is the former President and CEO of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and past chair of the Council of New Jersey Grantmakers. He now consults nationally with nonprofits, foundations, and schools and is the author of The Social Profit Handbook: The Essential Guide to Setting […]
There is a tool that I think is incredibly helpful to nonprofit leaders trying to figure out where to focus their resources and how to plan for the future. Indeed it is typically one of the first activities in the strategic planning process I use with my clients. The Program Matrix helps a nonprofit board […]
I’m excited to report that a week from today, July 26th, I will be participating in a live online chat at the Foundation Center’s Grant Space website, titled “Are You a Social Entrepreneur?“. Abby Chroman, leader of global community curation for AshokaHub, and I will be fielding questions from the audience about social entrepreneurship, social […]
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 […]
I’m back from Spring break, which came right as the flurry of discussion about my blog post The Critical Alignment of Mission, Money and Competence was winding down. I really appreciate the great comments and discussion from Sean Stannard-Stockton (of the Tactical Philanthropy blog), Nathaniel Whittemore (of Change.org’s Social Entrepreneurship blog), Kjerstin Erickson (founder of […]
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 […]
One of the things I’m really excited about is the potential for the financial crisis and restructuring we’re experiencing to completely transform how nonprofits are financed. I’ve written before about how we need to move away from the notion that “overhead” funding is bad, and how we need to restructure nonprofit accounting principles in order […]
