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Ask Rita: Interns Who Lose Their Academic Connections with Your Nonprofit—Are They Really Interns?
Dear Rita: We’re a nonprofit that provides counseling services to disadvantaged community members. For a number of years, psychology students from a local college have served as interns, shadowing and assisting our counselors in their day-to-day activi …
Letter from the Editor
In the face of fear, nonprofits are showing unprecedented courage. The April 2020 issue of Blue Avocado is a special installment that offers nonprofits help navigating the trials of operating during the global Covid-19 pandemic, to make sure our commun …
Letter from the Editor
The world today is a scarier, more uncertain place than usual. Quarantines, economic instability, and political strife seem to be the new normal. Never before has the work of community-led nonprofits—promoting grassroots leadership, lifting up women’s …
4 Tips for Sustaining and Managing Donors
Donors are the life source for nonprofits. Sustaining them for long periods of time is the best way to increase your revenue. After all, it’s much easier (and less expensive) to retain donors than it is to acquire new supporters. In fact, if nonprofits …
Ask Rita: How Do We Stop Bullying Behavior?
Dear Rita: Help! Our workplace is becoming populated by a group of bullies. People are becoming more aggressive—to the point of being abusive—in their language and communication style. We’ve received a number of complaints that include rudeness, yellin …
Donor-Centric Budgeting & Reporting: Top 6 Tips
“Pledge now and get an attractive station tote bag!” Sound familiar? The nonprofit industry I’ve been immersed in for nearly my entire career—public media—is among the most famous for taking a relatively transactional approach to fundraising. While eve …
The Pitfalls of Running a Mentoring Program
So, you want to support the next generation of nonprofit, business, or community leaders, and you’re considering launching or expanding a mentoring program? Well, it’s not as easy as you might think… at least to do right. But the good news is there are …
Developing a Successful Intern Program
Interns can be a godsend to any nonprofit. Depending on their background, they may be as valuable as paid staff and their main goals are typically finding an opportunity to learn and grow. How can you determine if interns are right for your nonprofit a …
NextGen Nexus: Moving Beyond Awareness
So many causes ask me the same question: How do we build awareness about our issue among young Americans? In the conversations that follow, I often help nonprofits refine their thinking to focus on an even more important consideration: …
Embracing Unlikely Allies: Sleeping with the Enemy
I’ve been actively engaging my so-called opponents in the meat, dairy, and egg industries for 20 years. As president of the animal protection organization Mercy For Animals, I work to end factory farming and construct a compassionate plant-based food s …
