We've all seen the stats outlining the poor retention rates for working fundraisers, with most leaving their positions every 16-18 months. Researcher Penelope Burk found that this costs nonprofits $127,650 in direct and indirect costs every time a fundraiser needs to be backfilled. While there's a lot of (good!) ideas and strategies [...]
These are the fundamental areas your nonprofit must focus on in the year ahead. And I mean focus. Prioritize these areas.Create written plans for these areas.Include goals, measurable objectives, strategies and timelines.Assign staff and volunteer responsibility.Monitor, measure and evaluate what’s working/not working.And don’t get distracted from your mission. Persist. I’ve selected [...]
Whether you are a nonprofit organization or a for profit business, your true motives, and thereby your core values are reflected more strongly by actions than by press releases! Everyone has heard the old adage “Actions speak louder than words.” Yet, time and time again the very actions undertaken seem [...]
Is the beginning of the year seeming especially long to you? ARE YOU SO BUSY YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO? Maybe you should do like DMX says, and stop, drop and shut em down open up shop! So maybe you’re not going to ride a four-wheeler up a set [...]
When I worked full time in fundraising, I felt like I was scrambling to find money to fund our many programs. We took money from Nike. From Boeing. These companies would be considered anathema to some nonprofits because of their involvement in the abusive Chinese labor factory industry, and in [...]
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 [...]