Social Media and Boards
Amid the current atmosphere of uncertainty and polarization, people seem more apt to use social media as an outlet for expressing their concerns. For me, this has led to several recent conversations about board members sharing their personal political views on their social media pages and the problems that arise when those board members are clearly linked back to the organizations on whose boards they sit.
While you should already have a social media policy for staff and regular volunteers, you may not have realized the 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
Mastering Nonprofit History
As someone who believes in the learning power of history, I am increasingly dismayed by how little others value history. While modern-day board members seem to have struggled for decades to grasp just what they are supposed to do and how they should do it, those who populated the earliest boards in America—the boards of educational institutions—figured it out long ago. All we have to do is follow.
I require students in my masters level governance class to read about the history of governing boards in Read more
Enjoy Those Million-Dollar Paydays
I love good research and I love The Wall Street Journal. But the reporting on the results of the recent research it did on salaries of nonprofit CEOs is emblematic of the problems of both much of the research about the sector, and the reporting out of that research.
The Journal’s headline read, “Charity Officials Are Increasingly Receiving Million-Dollar Paydays,”* with the subhead of “About 2,700 people had seven-figure pay packages at nonprofits in 2014, a number that was up a third in three years, newly Read more
So, be honest
Read the news on nonprofits from around the country and you’d know our sector is struggling. But I fear that a good portion is our own doing, which makes the part which we don’t control even more threatening and scary.
Headlines of employees embezzling signals lax financial oversight by the executive director and the board. Stories of nonprofits struggling to make payroll and keep their doors open forewarns a variety of behaviors, from poor management to failure to balance mission fulfillment and the bottom line, to Read more
What’s Hot in Nonprofit Staffing?
It’s my practice to always keep an eye on the sector, taking its pulse, monitoring the trends to see what is a blip, what’s moving from trend to part of the fabric, and everything in between. Executive directors who don’t do this risk harming their organizations. , I read a lot—and I mean a lot, from the solid, academic journals to the lay publications, the revered to the trash. The variety of sources helps me sort the wheat from the chaff, to pick out the Read more
When Nonprofit Boards Fail
Years ago, a colleague said to me, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t drown his sorry ass!” She must have been thinking about nonprofit board members when she said that. I’m reminded of that turn of phrase as I think about all of the wake-up calls nonprofit boards have received over the years and all the near misses they’ve been granted. And, yet, so many still act as if they have no clue what it is they are supposed to be Read more
Nonprofits Should Remain Switzerland
Time and again, we see a problem of a few being addressed by a response that pulls in the masses. Such is the idea of repealing the Johnson Amendment. Religious organizations that are considered to be 501(c)(3) organizations already have a number of exemptions to the rules that govern the rest of the sector; why not do that here? If it is so important to allow all religious leaders to be able to make political endorsements and preach politics, then Congress and the IRS should Read more
Do Foundations Make a Difference?
The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s report, The Future of Foundation Philanthropy: The CEO Perspective, has a number of interesting findings from among the 200 responding foundations. But perhaps the most talked about one is this: while 66.6% of these CEOs think foundations can make a significant difference, only 13% see foundations actually making that significant difference.
What hypocrisy this finding reveals. How many of these CEOs would argue to their boards to continue to fund a nonprofit that only achieved 13% of its intended outcomes? I 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
