Let’s hear it for the girls
How’s this for a depressing headline: “Women in PA won’t get equal pay until 2072?”* When I officially entered the workforce, women were making 56.6% of what men earned, the lowest it had been in the preceding 13 years. As of 2013, that differential is up to 78.3%. Progress, granted, although not always steady. The fact that it will have taken a full 100 years plus nine for the first equal pay act—The Equal Pay Act of 1963—to achieve reality is beyond sad. And it Read more
Better Late than Never
Better to write a late thank you note than never to write one at all. Or wash the snow, sand, salt or gunk off your car than leave it there forever. Or finally start exercising after promising for years. Or fire your executive director. What exactly is stopping you? Why would you procrastinate when costs of putting this off are simply too high?
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(As an aside, for those great executive directors, those you wish would stay for ever, it is not better late Read more
In Search of the 3 Musketeers
This semester I’m teaching two graduate classes: a class in nonprofit management in La Salle’s MBA program and one nonprofit management in our Masters in Nonprofit Leadership program. While I’ve taught each of these classes before, I’ve never taught them simultaneously. In both classes, though I have a bit of a different approach, I have the same end goal: like Jim Collins, I want these future leaders not to think about what is a great nonprofit organization as opposed to a great for-profit organization, but Read more
All Hail the Development Director
I am not a fundraising professional, nor would I ever want to be, although I have been raising funds since high school. If I am passionate about a nonprofit, I am all in, helping to bring in money to support that organization. But as an executive director (my paying job) and board member (my volunteer job), I want—no, I need—to be guided by a fundraising professional in the work of raising funds and ensuring organizational sustainability.
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Sadly (or is it cheaply?), too many Read more
Giving Men
Professor Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady, the wonderful musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, sings a wonderful lament that is still funny today: “Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?” But in the world of charitable giving, the refrain should be: why can’t men be more like women? Well, maybe with a little subterfuge from a new study, we can make that happen.
It is well established in the annals of academic research that men are less likely to give of their money Read more
Leadership under Milennials?
Are we getting lazier? Or, have we always been a lazy sector? I’m really not sure of the answer, but I know we need to confront it.
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This past week, I read 108 mission statements, the result of an assignment I’d given to two of my classes: one in La Salle’s Masters program in Nonprofit Leadership and the other in our MBA program. To be sure, two very different groups of students.
The assignment was to pick any three mission statements of the student’s Read more
What Tools Do You Use?
The Bridgespan Group has just released the results of a new study, “Nonprofit Management Tools and Trends 2014,” which it plans to update every two years. Patterned after research that Bain & Company has been doing on the for-profit sector since 1993, this work looks at how nonprofit leaders are using, and anticipate using, 25 different management “tools” to enable their organizations to do a better job at fulfilling their mission promises and how the tools mesh with 21 management trends.
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The 25 Read more
The Science of Fundraising
No better way to start a year off than talking about money! In fact, the group of executive directors with whom I was just chatting were all very positive about how their work year ended, noting that they saw a nice uptick in individual giving. Nice way to end and a great promise for the future.
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Here’s a tip to that could help you have success with fundraising. According to a study released last month by The Science of Philanthropy Initiative at Chicago Read more
