Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
In today’s Social Velocity interview, I’m talking with Kathy Reich, Director of Organizational Effectiveness Grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Kathy leads a cross-cutting program to help grantees around the world improve their strategy, leadership, and impact. Her team makes grants on a broad range of organizational development issues, from business planning to social […]
I’ve been working with several clients lately to create a strategic plan, and I love the moment when the real value of the strategic plan and the process of creating one becomes blatantly obvious. It’s the point at which board, staff, funders start to see the possibility that the plan holds for the nonprofit and […]
Can we talk about crazy for a minute? I’ve recently witnessed some behavior from nonprofit leaders that made my jaw drop: A board chairman convinced the rest of his board to turn away a donor who wanted to give the nonprofit a significant amount of money to fund organizational capacity (strategic planning, coaching, fundraising training) […]
Board members sometimes stand in the way of a what their nonprofit needs most. I’ve talked before about the meaningless at best and destructive at worst distinction between “overhead” and “program” dollars. And board members often are as bad as donors at forcing nonprofits to ignore the very real costs of the work they do […]
There was a really interesting interview last week in the Nonprofit Quarterly with Bill Ryan, author of Governance as Leadership, who recently led a study on coaching in the nonprofit sector. Coaching is a form of management consulting where a leader is given one-on-one strategic guidance. An executive director can be coached to grow an […]
I believe very strongly that in order to fix a broken nonprofit sector we must change how things are done. But it is not enough to change only the larger structures of the nonprofit sector (IRS regulations, public perceptions about “overhead expenses,” funder requirements). Individual nonprofit organizations must also change how they operate in order […]
Last Thursday I was a guest on Michael Chatman’s The Giving Show, a weekly radio show about philanthropy. I was delighted to talk with Michael and his listeners about how nonprofits need to rethink the ways they bring money in the door. If you missed the show, you can still listen to the podcast here. […]
In this month’s Social Velocity blog interview, we’re talking with Rebecca Thomas. Rebecca Thomas is Vice President of Strategy & Innovation at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a national leader in nonprofit, philanthropic and social enterprise finance. She has strategic responsibility for national initiatives, funder partnerships and new online and next-generation services that advance the organization’s […]
In May I launched a new ongoing blog series that profiles Social Velocity’s work with Charlotte Chamber Music, a small performing arts organization that has a big vision, but lacks the capital to get there. Charlotte Chamber Music enlisted Social Velocity’s help last Spring to create a strategic plan and a capacity capital pitch to […]
Part 6 of our ongoing blog series, Financing Not Fundraising, demonstrates the critical importance of money for building nonprofit capacity and describes how to find it. There must be a recognition in the nonprofit sector, and among the philanthropy that funds it, that nonprofits need money to support not only their direct services, but also […]
