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.
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Nonprofits: How to Have a Board Meeting By Telephone
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Ask Rita in HR: Do we really have to do performance evaluations?
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Getting to 100% Board Giving
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How to Recruit Terrible Nonprofit Board Members
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Charity Rater Reviews: Charting the Bad and the Bad
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Matrix Map Part Two: The Strategic Imperatives
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How to Keep the Board Under Your Thumb
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The Matrix Map Approach Part One: How to Create the Matrix Map
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What Are My Nonprofit’s Obligations Under the Affordable Healthcare Act?
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Nonprofit Funding: Buying a Cake and Restricting it Too
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The Founding Fathers Write a Grant Proposal
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Ten Biggest Mistakes Boards and Executives Make
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Kirk Kramer: An Uncomplicated Path for Developing Leaders
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In the Swirling Dust of Change, Life Still Goes On for an ED
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Conflict of Interest… or Conflict of Loyalty?
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How to Schedule a Nonprofit Meeting: Point of Vu
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Hiring Job Candidates with Criminal Convictions: Unlock the Possibilities
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New Sitcom: Nonprofit Life
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Dress for Nonprofit Success?
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Deconstructing Nonprofit Sustainability
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A Board Member Crosses the Line
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A Gay Activist is Conflicted about the Marriage Equality Campaign
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Collective Impact: Resistance is Futile
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Citizens United Unfair to One Million Corporations
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Stuck Between a Financial Crisis Wrought by the Founder and a Hard Place
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Twelve Ways to Get a New Executive Director Off on the Right Foot
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All Hands on Board: The Board of Directors in All-Volunteer Organizations
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Donor-Advised Funds: Non-Transparent Tax Shelters for Good
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Ditch Your Board Composition Matrix
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Donor-Advised Funds Background
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Is Coming to Work Required to Keep My Job?
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High Pay for Nonprofit Execs? Analysis of 100,000 Salaries
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And Now for a Different Type of Board Agenda
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Stance: The ED’s Role and Attitude in Strategic Planning
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Coming Out as a Christian
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Board Support Position: Sample Job Description
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What’s the Right Size for the Board?
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Getting Real About Real-Time Evaluation
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Take A Fresh Look at Scrip Fundraising
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Organizing the Board to Support Nonprofit Revenue Strategy
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How To Use Text Messaging for Nonprofit Outreach
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Questions to Ask Prospective Board Members
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Vanguard Foundation Update: With Leader Pleading Guilty, “Truth and Reconciliation”?
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Nonprofits: How to Survive an IRS Audit
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The Automatic Nonprofit Salary Calculator
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Executive Director Evaluation Survey Form
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Vanguard Foundation Update
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The Philanthropic-Consultant Industrial Complex
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Evaluating the Executive Director
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Contract Wizardry: Conjuring Impact from Government Contracts
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Nonprofit Staff Don’t Vote in Elections? False!
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Only Bad Restaurants Go to Scale
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Social Media for Nonprofits: 6 Do’s and Don’ts
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Are Social Workers Exempt or Nonexempt? Help!
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The Governance/Support Model for Nonprofit Boards
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Get the Most Value from Your Audit
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When Kids Volunteer: Liability Basics
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Nonprofit Tax Quiz
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How to Get a Job at a Foundation
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Nonprofit Personnel Files — A Guide from Ask Rita
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Foundation-Nonprofit “Partnerships” — Fact or Fiction?
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Should Staff Contact with the Board Be Restricted?
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12 Ways for New Nonprofit Executive Directors to Succeed
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Firing My Friend, the Founder
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Sample Drug-Free Nonprofit Workplace Policy
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Can We Fire Someone Who Comes to Work Drunk?
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Nonprofit Lessons from Star Wars
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Regrets of a Former Arts Funder
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Ten Myths About Nonprofit Boards
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Outsource Your Bookkeeping!
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The 7 x 7 Board Member Briefing
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The Board Just Fired Me …and I’m the Founder!
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Four Ways to Remove a Board Member
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Standing on the Shoulders of Movements
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Should You Be Considering a Nonprofit Merger?
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The Trouble with Turkey
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Board Insurance: Do You Really Need It?
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Endorsing Candidates. Illegal. How to Do It.
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Three Instant Improvements for Board Agendas and Accountability
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Nonprofit Job Sites Reviewed and Rated
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Can I Be Held Personally Liable for Misclassifying an Employee as Exempt?
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Benchmarking and Analyzing Salaries: A Fast How-To
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Blue Ribbon Nominating Committee for Your Board
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Lucky 7: The Casino Industry and Philanthropy
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Alternatives to Strategic Planning at Nonprofits
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In Defense of Strategic Planning: A Rebuttal
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Ask Rita: Can We Discriminate in Favor of People with Disabilities?
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Court-Ordered Community Service: Volunteers or Prison Labor?
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Strategic Planning: Failures and Alternatives
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Firing the Executive Director
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Get Thy Nonprofit Self Into Therapy!
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Where Should the Board Chair, the ED, the Staff Sit?
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Ask Rita: The HR of Nonprofit Romance
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How to Hire Your First Development Director
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Grantseeker’s Guide to Foundation Affinity Groups
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Finding the Right Nonprofit Board to Join
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Nonprofit Bookkeeping Test
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Meaningful Budget Work by the Board
We in nonprofits are good at taking on myths and sacred cows. But perhaps the least examined of these myths is the one about going to scale.
Sick of people telling you a hundred things your nonprofit should be doing with social media? Kaitlyn Trigger provides some dos and don’ts.
Should social workers be classified as exempt or nonexempt employees when it comes to overtime considerations?
Much of the confusion about board responsibilities is confusion between what the board does (as a body) and what individual board members should do.
Audits are expensive in terms of money, staff time, and board attention. CPA Dennis Walsh tells us how to wring the most value from them.
If kids are among your clients or constituents, then getting them involved is a natural. But you’ll want to be sure you’ve got basic protections in place first.
In the nonprofit sector we throw around tax opinions, but here’s a chance to learn something from a 17-question quiz.
How foundations say they hire is often different from how they approach the hiring process. We asked foundation staffers how they got hired.
An overview of how to manage your organization’s personnel files and a checklist of documents to include in a personnel file.
Between foundations and nonprofits, sharing values, connections, and other support is good — but the relationship should be focused on funds.
Should board members have contact with staff independent of the executive director? Opinion is sharply divided.
Some easy and important ways for board members to help a new executive get started quickly and on the right foot.
A board member shares a story about the difficult process of firing a nonprofit founder when money just wasn’t coming in.
A drug-free workplace policy with sample language to consider including in your nonprofit’s employee handbook.
What to do about an employee that appears to be under the influence, but isn’t drinking on the job and it doesn’t seem to affect performance?
Deepak Bhargava of the Center for Community Change channels the Force to call nonprofits to action, drawing parallels to Star Wars.
Rethinking what defines art and how the less mainstream types can be protected and encouraged.
Ten of the most common myths about nonprofit boards, and the reality of the situation for each item.
Outsourced accounting — having the accounting done by an outside person or firm — isn’t new, but it is getting a second look as nonprofits search for ways to cut office costs.
7×7 board briefings are when each board member makes a 7 minute presentation, followed by 7 minutes of questions, answers & responses.
A nonprofit founder provides a first-person account of what it’s like to be fired from her organization — by a board that she had put together.
How to remove a board member that consistently disrupts meetings or is otherwise destructive and demoralizing.
All our organizations stand on the shoulders of movements. Are you strengthening the movements that provide the nutrients for your org?
When times are tough, funders start to think that mergers are a good idea for nonprofits. And sometimes nonprofits themselves agree.