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Charity Raters Part I: Charting the Bad and the Bad
Wouldn’t it be great if there were an objective rating system so that donors could choose the best nonprofits to donate to just as investors use rating agencies to pick the best companies to invest in? Don’t answer; it’s a rhetorical question. Here’s w …
Donor-Advised Funds: Non-Transparent Tax Shelters for Good
Nonprofits are probably most familiar with donor-advised funds (DAFs) at community foundations: a donor gives, let’s say, $1 million to a community foundation and gets a $1 million tax deduction that year. Over the next several years, the donor …
Getting Real About Real-Time Evaluation
Every once in a while a field creeps closer to actually being helpful to nonprofits. Thanks to evaluators Clare Nolan and Fontane Lo for explaining a type of program evaluation — and how to make it work for you. Have you ever had an eval …
Take A Fresh Look at Scrip Fundraising
Increasingly, nonprofits are finding scrip to be a comparatively easy way to raise funds. How does scrip fundraising work, anyway?
Organizing the Board to Support Nonprofit Revenue Strategy
Instead of focusing only on how board members can raise individual donations (or not!), think more broadly (and effectively) about how board members can support the key aspects of your nonprofit revenue strategy: In the quest for funds, there is no sho …
Contract Wizardry: Conjuring Impact from Government Contracts
Have you ever tried to piece together eleven government contracts for overlapping programs, trying to make them fit together to fund all the costs? Or have you had six foundation grants, all for the same program area, but each requiring different line …
Regrets of a Former Arts Funder
As Program Officer for Arts and Culture at the San Francisco Foundation, I and philanthropic colleagues often bemoaned how fragile many culturally specific organizations were. One person would wonder why there were so few financially stable Afri …
Lucky 7: The Casino Industry and Philanthropy
Is it worth going all-in on casino philanthropy? Only if you know when to lay the odds and when to take the odds.
Alternatives to Strategic Planning at Nonprofits
In Part 1 of this two-article series, we discussed some of the ways in which strategic planning processes have served nonprofits poorly. One key reason is that strategic planning is the primary organizational change process that nonprofits know …
How to Hire Your First Development Director
The only thing worse than not having fundraising staff is having bad fundraising staff. To help you avoid the mistakes many others have made in hiring development staff, we’ve stolen a script of a scene with consultant Leyna Bernstein as she talks with …
