Willingness to be Scrutinized
We talk a lot about accountability in the nonprofit sector: we must be accountable to our funders; the board is accountable to the public; the executive director is accountable to the board, the rest of staff accountable to the executive director, and so on.
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Frequently, in our sector, accountability is linked to transparency: we must be transparent and accountable. But what does that accountability mean? We say it, we know what it means; in other words, we have a general concept Read more
Reflecting our Values
If I could proclaim a universal resolution for 2016 it would be to stop dissing nonprofit professionals.
We may not make six or seven figure salaries but that does not mean we are of lesser talent, lesser value, lesser smarts, and lesser everything else than our higher salaried counterparts. Just because we prefer to use our talent in support of great causes that offer lesser financial rewards doesn’t mean we are one iota less capable than the person with the same skills and degree of talent Read more
Buzz words, key words, plans and stuff
The challenge in taking two weeks off from posting is that I now have so much about which to write. My solution: snippets. This is not a “trends to watch in 2016;” it is simply, “here’s a whole bunch of stuff about which to think.”
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Effective altruists. While this is, indeed, a trend to know about in order to determine how you want/do want to play into their world, it is something absolutely deserved of everyone’s attention. This includes nonprofit Read more
It’s all about the ego
As we approach the end of the year, many people start thinking about the resolutions they want to make for the new year. I know the data suggest that folks shouldn’t bother, as the vast majority won’t keep them beyond the first month (if they make it past the first week).
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Nevertheless, for those of you who try each year to make them and stick to them, I’d like to suggest one that if all of us in the nonprofit sector Read more
Add Humanity to your Workplace
I’m not in the habit of calculating the dollars and cents of plain, decent manners, despite the fact that manners seem to be on the endangered activities list. But a headline recently grabbed my attention that had me asking if it really said what I think it said.
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The headline was attached to an infographic entitled, “The business value of the thank you.”
But this infographic was about, as I assumed it would be, the value of a simple “thank you” to performance in Read more
Defensible Spaces
I was going to write this week about the power of “thank you,” as it seemed very fitting coming off of Thanksgiving. But the mass shooting in San Bernardino earlier this week has diverted me.
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According to shootingtracker.com, maintained by “Guns Are Cool” on reddit, San Bernardino was the 355th mass shooting in the United States this year. While criminologists have not landed on a universally supported definition of what constitutes a mass shooting, shootingtracker.com borrows from the historic FBI definition (and, therefore, Read more
Value Learning in your Nonprofit
Whenever I talk to groups about core values—those principles for how you do the work of the mission, and their importance in a nonprofit, I always use an example of one particular The Nonprofit Center’s core value. I always choose it to really hit home on a particular point that Jim Collins’ makes about core values: they are not restatements of what’s in your mission; they are independent of your mission.
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In fact, they are so independent that one of the questions Collins Read more
Standing Up for Ourselves
Recently, the Philadelphia Business Journal had as its “Business Pulse” question of the week the following: “Do you agree with companies asking employees to ‘volunteer’ to work for free some days?” Sixty-five percent of the respondents said “No – getting paid for the work you do is only right.” Far behind at 32%, was the response option of “It depends”-depends on what else the company does for employees besides paying them. In other words, how good are the perks? Only 3% said yes, employees should Read more
Forsaking our values
Earlier this week, I got an email from a friend who works at a small foundation. Her message was simple: “you are not going to believe what they did to me; my time here is going to be hellacious and depressing; they have gone so corporate.” I didn’t have to ask; I knew exactly what she meant, as I’ve been hearing this too much lately, and no longer a phenomenon reserved for the mega nonprofits.
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What made this message more poignant was how Read more
Nonprofits Rolling in Luxury
The front page of the October Chronicle of Philanthropy had an alarming headline: “1 in 3 Americans Lacks Faith in Charities.” It just as easily could have said, “2 in 3 Americans Have Faith in Charities.” But it chose the statistical spin that would make the heart beat faster and bordered on yellow journalism. There are enough media outlets in this country that spin the worst about nonprofits, it shouldn’t also come from within our own ranks. But that’s not the (main) point of this Read more
