Recent Posts
Navigating the nonprofit world can be challenging. Blue Avocado offers expert guidance on a range of topics — from building strong boards to maximizing your fundraising impact. Explore our latest posts for practical tips, strategies, and solutions to common issues facing nonprofit organizations today.
-
Social Enterprise & Earned Income: A Key To Revenue or a Distraction?
-
You Can’t Fire Me, I’m a Volunteer!
-
Empowering Next Generation Leaders through Crowdfunding
-
Nonprofit Leadership Tips from the Basketball Court
-
Some Say Fundraising Is Just Sales: They’re Wrong!
-
Fundraising for “Friends of” Organizations
-
Ask Rita: Employees Who Cross Jurisdictions: Which Law Applies?
-
Why You May Need to Delete Half of Your Nonprofit’s Email List
-
Volunteer Management: How to Get it Right
-
Ask Rita: How Do I Prevent Sexual Harassment at My Nonprofit?
-
Scarcity or Abundance? An Experiment in Collaborative Fundraising
-
The New Fundraising Frontier: Impact Investing
-
In-Kind Fundraising: A Great Way to Expand Your Budget
-
Ask Rita: Are Summer Helpers Employees, Contractors, or Interns?
-
Show Me The Money! A Step Toward Solving the Problem of Operating Support
-
Succeeding When You’re Small: Lessons Learned from DonorsChoose.org
-
Achieving Equity: We Need a New Approach to Funding
-
Finding Your Voice As a Nonprofit
-
What Millennials Really Want: Professional Development
-
The Nonprofit Student Debt Conundrum
-
Ego Checks, Spaghetti Sauce, and Other Suggestions for Nonprofit Collaboration
-
4 Things Your Nonprofit Can Do to Recruit & Retain Millennial Leadership
-
The Gentrification Phenomenon: A Nonprofit Dilemma
-
Process, Process, Process: The evaluation model you shouldn’t ignore
-
Connection is Key: How Knowledge Sharing Helps Organizations Grow and Prevents Isolation
-
Lide Haiti: Helping women and girls help Haiti
-
Branching out: Raising more dollars by understanding donors’ differences
-
Financial Focus: You Told Us
-
In the Boardroom: Asked to Join that Board?
-
Data Visualization: User-Centered Design
-
Whose Nonprofit Is It Anyway: When a Nonprofit Leader Moves On
-
Ask Rita: Is it Legal to Require Nonprofit Employees to Donate Gifts?
-
Nonprofit Spotlight: Michigan Nonprofit Association
-
Yes, You Really Need One: Why Strategic Planning Matters and How to do it Better
-
Point-Counterpoint: Should Nonprofits Be Allowed to Support Political Candidates?
-
In the Board Room: Staying In the Loop And Out Of the Weeds
-
Building a More Diverse Board with Intention
-
Nonprofit Spotlight: The Trenton Community A-Team
-
Is Diversity as Good for Business as it is for Communities? New Study Says Yes
-
In These Turbulent Times for Nonprofits
-
How To Be a Community-Powered Nonprofit
-
First-Person Nonprofit: Making the Case (Statement!)
-
How Nonprofits Can Work With Their Bankers Amidst Change
-
The Financial Outlook for Nonprofits
-
First Person: I Am A Young Social Entrepreneur
-
Nonprofit Mergers Are Like Falling In Love
-
Divorce and the Nonprofit Board Member
-
Robert Egger: “Our Sector Is About To Be Hit, And Hit Hard” A Blue Avocado Interview
-
Ask Rita in HR: What About Marijuana Decriminalization?
-
Gearing Up and (Teaming Up) for a Leadership Transition
-
Is Your Nonprofit Ready for a Capital Project?
-
Rewrite the Script When These Characters Show Up in Workplace Politics
-
Ask Rita in HR: How Do I Stay ADA Compliant When an Employee Has a Disability?
-
If Your Board Looked Like Your Community
-
Ask Rita: Can I Just Hire Independent Contractors?
-
Gifts from the Board Chair
-
Promoting a Worthy Cause? Don’t Miss These Six Ideas for Getting Exposure for Your Nonprofit
-
Nine Nonprofit Trends that Need to Die
-
Everything We’ve Been Taught About Major Gifts is Wrong
-
A Tiger Escaped Today, and I’m on the Zoo Board
-
Why Don’t Foundations Build Capacity in Fundraising?
-
Can We Fire Someone for What They Said in Personal Email?
-
A Fork in the Yellow Brick Road to Oz
-
From Black Panther to Nonprofit CFO
-
Mediocrity Starts with ME (Humor)
-
Outdated Job Description May be Getting Us in Trouble
-
If You Give a Board Treasurer A Cookie…
-
Sample Disclosure of Amount Deductible in Ticket Purchase
-
Sample Tax Deductibility Handout for Auction Participants
-
Sample Acknowledgement of Non-Cash Donation
-
Sample Silent Auction Bid Sheet
-
Sample Auction Reporting Checklist for Nonprofits
-
A Board Member’s Guide to Nonprofit Overhead
-
Crawling Out of the Psychological Depths
-
Who’s the Boss? The Board or the Executive?
-
How Do You Count Employees… to Determine Which Laws Apply?
-
The Very Good but Seriously Flawed Executive Director
-
Downward-Facing Budget and Other Nonprofit Yoga Poses
-
Following a Founder or Long-Timer Requires a Hard Head
-
Nonprofit Auctions: Compliance Guide and Sample Forms
-
Surprise! Most Legacy Gifts DON’T Come from Major Donors
-
I Followed A Founder: A First-Person Nonprofit Tale
-
A Funder’s Message to Other Funders About Overhead
-
Transgender Employees: A Respectful & Legal Workplace Approach
-
Fundraising in Nonprofits of Color
-
Ten Things Boards Do Right (Without Even Realizing It)
-
Cow Board Members Give of Their Time, Not Milk
-
DIY: Make a Bylaws Cheat Sheet
-
First Person Nonprofit: A Day in the Life of a Major Gifts Officer
-
Bring Unicorns Back to Our World: The Problem with Outcomes
-
How to Staff and Support a Committee
-
Mental Health Counselor May Have a Mental Health Problem – What Can We Do?
-
Funny and Awkward Nonprofit Board Tales
-
Adding It All Up: Nonprofit CFO Study
-
The Sustainability Question: Why Is It So Annoying?
-
Ask Rita: Do Nonprofits Need Insurance for Volunteers?
-
How to Deal with an Office Bully
-
Managing Your Nonprofit’s Rating
-
Nonprofit Executive Director Gives Advice on Love, Marriage, and Other Stuff
-
Extreme Board Makeover
Six tips to successfully “team” remotely at your nonprofit, and support remote workers to effectively collaborate and accomplish their goals.
Change is hard. Here are some steps to help you construct a careful plan on the front end in order to bring you success in the long run.
Information about Form 990 and your nonprofit filings. Hopefully this will keep your fiscal year-end stresses at bay!
How to use digital fundraising tools to ease your nonprofit’s workload and raise more money in the process.
Ask the community you serve what they want and need. Remember that your work should happen through, not to, the communities you serve.
How can you fund innovation when your nonprofit continues to struggle to keep the lights on? Here are some ideas.
Reliance on at-will employment to support a termination without proper preparation and risk assessment can lead to serious consequences.
Mapping where data is stored, along with creating a logic model that shows important outcomes to track, helps your nonprofit focus resources.
Efficient layouts can drive cost savings & support collaborative work environments. Branded spaces inspire employees to live out your mission
Funders and nonprofits should keep sight of the fact that human beings are on the other side of the table. Social sector work is about people.
Simple advice that can help guide you more quickly to the best practices without learning the hard way when starting a nonprofit.
The 2016 rule is gone. The DOL is working on a new one. Employers still need to conscientiously remain in compliance with any State laws.
Interview with Ken Doane of SH Cowell Foundation, one of the remaining funders committed to supporting capacity building.
All nonprofits should draw up contingency plans to cushion the impact of these cuts and survive future shutdowns.
A sample eWorkplace HR Policy. Intended for use by nonprofit organizations.
Internal tension and disagreements began to dissipate when the voices of those we serve were engaged in dialogue and decision-making.
Millennials trust people like themselves more than nonprofits, government, and business. They want to improve the world.
Do not buy into the idea that things will never change. The work is too important, the consequences too severe, for us to let fear stop us.
Employers may not arbitrarily fail to count time worked, however small, of the employee’s regular schedule or any period of time.
It sounds like a great idea to start a social enterprise that provides both income and impact, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.
If you’re too busy to deal with a disgruntled volunteer, she might quit, take all of her friends, and besmirch the organization’s good name.
Launching a crowdfunding campaign is the easy part. The real work is building a community of supporters, a movement of change-makers.
“If you play life as a game, you’ll always win.” While the work of nonprofits is no game, there are many lessons we can learn from them.
You need belief in your organization’s ability to make an impact; belief in those your organization serves; and belief in the funder and their desire to create change in partnership with your organization.