This video has been making the rounds on social media. If you haven't seen it, it does a great job of shining a light on the unreasonable demands some nonprofit funders make. It's both hilarious and depressingly accurate. Thanks to the folks at Human Services Council of New York for [...]
I was watching the evening news the other night, and was taken with a story about a cute nine-year-old boy who went to the city council in his little town of Severance, Colorado. He was there to ask them to abolish the town’s 100-year-old ordinance that banned snowball fights. The [...]
Are you tired of nothing getting done the way you want in your office? Are you managing a bunch of people but feeling like they don’t have enough motivation? Do you feel like it’s hard to motivate people in nonprofits? What if there were a better way to motivate people, [...]
At a recent board meeting for a national association focused on collecting immense data for the charity sector, the discussion drifted to DAFs (donor advised funds). The consensus prediction was that within the next five years the top five charities in the United States, and possibly the world, based upon [...]
Are you successful? How can you tell? Isn’t it great, to look back on a recently completed fiscal year, and say, “yes, we did it! We were successful!” But many fundraisers can’t ever experience that little bit of euphoria. Nor can their chief executives or their governing boards. It’s not [...]
Randy Hawthorne and I have a lot in common. We both run a blog, a conference and a webinar series for fundraisers, and we both opened up co-working spaces for nonprofits. What I lack is his fashion sense, a print magazine, and a podcast - like his excellent Hubcast from [...]
Ever since my very first Professional Fundraising Conference in 1983, where I met Jerry Panas for the first time, until just last year, Jerry was a fixture at nearly every single one! It was so easy to spot him. Why? He was always the person nearly everyone else went to [...]
Mission. Values. Vision. Organized, they become your brand, and your singular and compelling case for support. Together they drive everything your nonprofit does today. And everything you will do tomorrow. They are your body, heart and soul. Combined, they define your essence. They are how you are known in the [...]
"Fundraising is the only profession you can join without knowing a thing." So observes Professor Adrian Sargeant, founder of the Philanthropy Centre. And it's not the new fundraiser's fault, either. Charities that hire untrained fundraisers and then expect great results are to blame. Dr. Sargeant has been passionate for 25 [...]
I have been proud to be a part of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project every since its inception more than a decade ago. In case you are not familiar with FEP, a little background might be in order to help you realize just how important the four comparison metrics noted below [...]
The recently released and breakthrough research report entitled The Wake Up Call – A Study of Nonprofit Leadership in the U.S. and its Impending Crisis can be found in its entirety here. Nearly 1,200 nonprofit leaders participated in this research project that should sound a warning cry for nonprofit sector. [...]
Understanding what a budget is and its importance is crucial for every organization because it can be a way to achieve financial sustainability. But what is a budget exactly? Some people see it as a forecast, meaning a prediction in the future. Others see it as a target or even [...]