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Four Ways to Remove a Board Member
Occasionally, a board member needs to be removed from the board. In some cases, a conflict of interest or unethical behavior may be grounds to remove an individual from the board. In other cases, the behavior of a board member may become so obst …
Court-Ordered Community Service: Volunteers or Prison Labor?
Each year, hundreds of thousands of court-ordered community service workers are placed in nonprofits to fulfill their sentences. Although the image is typically one of a teenager sentenced to picking up litter, court-ordered volunteers perform a …
How Much to Pay the Executive Director?
Nonprofit board members are often puzzled when it comes to setting the salary of the executive director. On one hand, we want to keep our talented staff; on the other hand, we know the budget is tight. Some legal and practical guidelines: It’s m …
Nonprofit Auctions: A Complete Compliance Guide and Sample Forms
Auctions are known for two characteristics: they raise money (sometimes a lot), and they are a ton of work. Blue Avocado contributor and CPA Dennis Walsh gives us a complete, handy compliance guide, and even better: five sample forms to make sure your …
Treasurers of All-Volunteer Organizations: Eight Key Responsibilities
More than half of the nonprofits in the United States are estimated to be all-volunteer organizations. Here is a wonderful, succinct guide for the 600,000 + treasurers of such organizations: My time as treasurer of a faith-based nonprofit was a …
Golden Rule of Board Resignations
At some point you may resign from a nonprofit board before your term is up. You might be angry, disappointed, or just too busy. Don’t botch your resignation: do it right. Most often as board members we stick out our term limits and leave …
Executive Director Evaluation Survey Form
In the last issue of Blue Avocado, we discussed how board evaluations of executive directors (CEOs) are different from all other performance evaluations in the organization. These differences — including the limited ability of board members to observe …
Can Nonprofit Boards Vote By Email?
Can nonprofit boards vote by mail and email? As is true of so many matters, there are legal answers and sensible answers to this question, which may not be the same. Attorney Gene Takagi and Emily Nicole Chan discuss both in this helpful article …
A Board Member’s Guide to Nonprofit Overhead
Calculating overhead rates and managing overhead expense are important staff roles. Board members are not required to know how do staff accounting work, but we do need to bring an informed perspective to our oversight: Harvard’s indirect cost ra …
Five Internal Controls for the Very Small Nonprofit
Segregation of duties, checks & balances . . . difficult to implement in the organization that has perhaps three or fewer staff, or only a few active board members in an all-volunteer organization. We asked CPA Carl Ho, who works with dozens of sma …
