It’s We, not You
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of language. I pay a lot of attention to the words people use, their written and spoken grammar, the idiosyncrasies of regional speech patterns, and so forth.
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Thus, it should come as no surprise that I pay special attention to board members’ use of pronouns. For example, when board members speak, do they makes comments like, “You should really redo the website so that Read more
Sleepwalking through the Workday
I just came back from a use-it-or-lose-it week off; days that had to be taken before the end of the fiscal year, or be lost forever. While I totally enjoyed it, the only reason I chose that particular week was to avoid losing those days. When we work hard at our jobs we must take the offered time off from those jobs to refresh, rejuvenate, regroup, rewhatever. It is particularly important that leaders model this healthy behavior of working hard, separating from work and relaxing Read more
Board Membership is a Team Sport
One of the members of a board president’s peer learning circle I facilitate recently asked, “What tools are there to help keep a board president motivated?” I confess that in all of my years of facilitating learning circles of board presidents and of one-on-one conversations with board presidents, that question has never been asked.
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There are really two questions here, the first being how does a board president stay motivated about the mission? If direct engagement with the mission—seeing it in Read more
Believe in your Brand
My brain works in funny ways. Listening to Shankar Vedantam on NPR talking about golfing with big name clubs versus no-name clubs, my mind goes to nonprofits.
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Vedantam was unpacking yet another interesting piece of social science research. This one looked at whether using a putter from a well-known brand—in this case, Nike—made a difference in the success of the golfer, compared to those putting with a generic club. And it did: those who were told the putter they were using Read more
Fundraising is all in the prep
Earlier this year, the Nonprofit Quarterly and BoardSource did a pulse survey (a quick, “let’s just take the pulse of those who bothers to respond”) trying to understand boards’ greatest concerns for 2016.
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Of the 173 responses, 53% (n=78) selected “general economic uncertainty, increased volatility and shocks.” In other words, they are worried about funds. The fourth, at 29% (n=43) greatest concern, is the “increasingly competitive environment.”
Taken together these say boards are really worried about financial sustainability: an unpredictable financial climate Read more
Dumping Your Junk at your Local Nonprofit
Earlier this month, a nonprofit in Albuquerque got a donation it didn’t want: a trailer full of junk, literally. Sadly, this is not newsworthy to those of us who work in the sector. We have too much experience receiving donations of goods we cannot use, from totally battered and broken items to those that are irrelevant to our work. To any individual who has dropped off goods at a nonprofit thrift store and actually bothered to looked at the donated items that have been Read more
The 2% Solution
Year after year, charitable giving makes up only 2% of America’s GDP. I don’t care what the actual number of dollars is because it still always amount to the same small percentage.
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I was intrigued when I caught a headline suggesting there were three ways to increase this 2%. Sadly, though the author of the article says these three things could move the needle on the GDP, they certainly didn’t move me: legacy giving (the new term for planned giving), donor Read more
Merger Myths
While I frequently rail against the proliferation of nonprofits organizations, the automatic solution to this problem is not mergers. Consideration of a merger should give everyone who cares about the clients of their nonprofit pause—literally. Pause and think about who will truly benefit from a merger?
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You’re a struggling nonprofit? Find an organization with which you can merge. Retiring executive director and no internal candidate to promote to avoid a search? Merge. Add in that both of these situations are Read more
The Crime of Negligence
In 2012, a routine audit of Visit Philadelphia discovered the CFO has been embezzling from the organization for the past seven years, charging personal expenses to the corporate credit card and using corporate checks to pay personal bills, to the tune of $200,000. On top of this, the CFO hired her best friend as an independent contractor and was kind enough to share some of the embezzled largess with her bff. Despite the fact that the CEO of the organization had been unhappy with the Read more
Accepting Board Underperformance
One of my favorite classes in the eight-week online sessions of the La Salle Master’s in Nonprofit Leadership is in nonprofit governance. After each class, I relish reading and responding to each of the more than 200 student posts per discussion board.
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At the start of the session, I tell students, all of whom work for various nonprofits, that they are going to find this a very difficult class. Yes, there is a lot of work, but that’s not why Read more
