The Importance of Self-care as Self-defense to Nonprofits
Nonprofit organizations are givers: We recruit like-minded staff and volunteers who give and give until they are spent. All too often burnout leads to poor performance and high staff turnover. However, reframing self-care as self-defense can help us to …
5 Best Practices for Building a Nonprofit Annual Operating Budget (with Template!)
There are as many forms of nonprofit budgets as there are forms of organizations. Unlike financial statements, which have some rules and guidelines according to accounting standards, the same level of industry-imposed standardization for budget documen …
Setting Organizational Goals: Does your team know what to do?
Do your employees know when they are doing a good job? If you were to ask your team what the most important thing the organization needs to accomplish this year, would you get consistent answers? When your organization’s managers write performance revi …
Ensuring Dogs and Cats Get Equal Scratch in Decision-making
Are you a dog or a cat person? I don’t mean your preference for a pet. If you show up to a meeting barking and clawing to make your point, you might be a dog person. If you lay back during the decision-making process but circle back to pee on outcomes …
Disrupting the Space of Disaster Philanthropy: A View from the Front Lines
I am the CEO of After the Fire USA (ATF), a leading nonprofit in the space of megafire, climate change, and disaster recovery. We help communities navigate the complexities and stages of recovery post-megafire disaster. Prior to 2015, megafires were fa …
Up Your Game with Skills-based Volunteering
Every nonprofit has that project which is both vital to the organization but beyond their reach. It might be a new accounting system, a website upgrade, a fundraising strategy, or a complete strategic plan. That project is always on the to-do list but …
7 Guiding Principles for a JDEI Policy That Isn’t Just Hot Air. Plus, a Free Sample Policy!
For those who have spent the better part of their careers working on equity issues, recent events have been wrenching–and cause for hope: the Black Lives Matter movement is finally entering the mainstream. But just like those obligatory corporate envir …
Passion Meets Professionalism: Transitioning from Volunteer Leaders to Paid Staff
Imagine executives from the six largest school meal programs in the country, sitting around a table discussing how, together, they could make a difference in school food. By leveraging their buying power, they can change the industry. They decide to be …
The Growth Paradox for Nonprofit Organizations
We have been talking about the Overhead Myth and the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle for many years, but there has been only modest progress on donor demands that result in underinvestment in nonprofit infrastructure, and malnourished organizations. But if …
Does Your Nonprofit Receive Donations of Services, Supplies or Equipment? Changes are Coming!
Changes to How Nonprofit Organizations Report In-kind Contributions of Nonfinancial Assets It is common for nonprofits to receive donations and contributions of nonfinancial assets, more commonly known as in-kind contributions. Typical examples of in-k …
