Failure to Plan
We’ve all got an Achilles’ heel – that area of weakness and vulnerability in an otherwise strong and healthy entity. But for some, that Achilles’ heel may just be the single greatest point of greatest vulnerability.
Too many nonprofits suffer from multiple points of vulnerability: an underperforming board; a revenue stream lacking in diversification; an absence of an employee recruitment and retention plan; no strategic plan, or a failure to adhere to it; trying to be all things to all people, and so on. Having any, Read more
Science of the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle
While many nonprofits are used to working with scarcity—in fact, I often think too many nonprofits are so rooted in their framework of scarcity—not enough dollars, people, time, energy, etc.—that they can’t even dream in a framework of prosperity.
A professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton and an economist from Harvard—have affirmed what they call the scarcity mindset. They have shown that a brain focused on what a person is lacking becomes obsessed with that missing thing to the exclusion of all else and, as Read more
Charity Case
In March 2013, Dan Pallotta’s iconic TedTalk, “The way we think about charities is dead wrong,” was released; since that time, it has received over 4 million views. If you aren’t among those four million, and nor are the staff and board of your organization, correct that oversight immediately.
In June of that same year, the three nonprofit watchdog groups (GuideStar, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, and Charity Navigator), released the first of their two letters trying to debunk the overhead myth—the very thing that they Read more
