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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Upcoming Webinar: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Working with Consultants – Live Q&A (March 20, 2025)
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2024 Blue Avocado Year in Review
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What is the Secret to Successful Grant Writing?
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A Nonprofit Partnership: How One Board Member Connected Two Organizations and Boosted Both
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A Practical Guide to Getting and Keeping Nonprofit Volunteers
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Key Qualities and Skills to Look for in Potential Board Members
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Innovative Leadership — Culture Doesn’t Have to Eat Strategy: Tending to Human Factors During Strategic Planning
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Treasurers of All-Volunteer Organizations: Eight Key Responsibilities
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The Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Fundraising in 2025
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Nonprofit Photo Contest
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The Most Successful Nonprofit Fundraising Strategies
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Insider Newsletters: An Easy Way to Keep Your Board in the Loop and Engaged
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An Easy-to-Use Accounting Procedures Manual Template
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A Guide for Private Foundations: Tax Exemption and 990-PF Filing Requirements
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Nonprofit Leaders: How Does Your Nonprofit Measure Success?
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Why is it Hard to Give My Money Away? A Donor’s Perspective
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The Biggest Mistakes New Nonprofits Make
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Five Years and Growing: How One Nonprofit Built a Sustainable, Collaborative Mission
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The Best Route to Approaching Donors: Hand-Head-Heart
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Measure What You Value: Designing a Values-based Performance Appraisal System
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The One Tool/Strategy Nonprofits Wish They Implemented Sooner
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Link Arms to Elevate Your Nonprofit’s Impact
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Your Nonprofit Got its Grant. Now What?
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Rebuilding Nonprofit Boards: When a New Board Can Be a Fresh Start
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Nonprofit Rebranding Strategies: Five Steps to Achieving a Successful Nonprofit Rebrand
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The Realities of Living with Food Insecurity
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Drive Your Nonprofit’s Mission by Investing in Your People
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Blue Avocado Presents: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Fiscal Sponsorships – Live Q&A
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The Critical Role of Cultural Responsiveness in Today’s Nonprofits
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8 Easy Ways to Grab More Attention for Your Small Nonprofit
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Supporting Caregiver Employees in the Nonprofit Sector
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How Curiosity and Creativity Can Foster Self-Aware Nonprofit Leaders
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Nonprofit Grant Proposal Budget Calculations: A Road Map
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Increase Safety for Your Nonprofit’s Team
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Your Nonprofit’s Budget: A Window to Finding Your Priorities
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How can nonprofit leaders avoid burnout?
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Using Philanthropy to Address Racial Harm and Inequity
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Nonprofit Fundraising: Are You Choosing the Right Grants?
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Preparing Your Nonprofit to Move Beyond the Founder
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Litigating a Path to Progress: Nonprofit Advocacy through the Courts
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Can Nonprofits Look to the Past to Build the Future?
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Blue Avocado Presents: Copyright Concerns for Nonprofits – Live Q&A
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How Lessons Learned From Fighting Food Insecurity Can Help Your Nonprofit
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Five Lessons for Creating an Effective (and Accountable) Nonprofit Board
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Grant Management Series: Involving Your CFO throughout the Grant Application Process
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Empowering Community Voices: The Strategic Advantage of Nonprofit Advisory Committees
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Ask Rita in HR: Should Murphy’s Law Be a Consideration in Making HR Decisions?
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The Big Chill: Why Nonprofits Should Care about Affirmative Action
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Vision Before Strategy: A Nonprofit’s Guide to Defining Success
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Beyond the Hype: Why ESG Frameworks Miss the Mark for Small Nonprofits
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Charting a New Course for Youth Engagement
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Blue Avocado Presents: Does Your Nonprofit Qualify for the Employee Retention Credit (ERC)? – Live Q&A
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Is Your Nonprofit’s Mission Obsolete — Or Just Ready for a New Direction?
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Five Signs Your Nonprofit is Ready to Reach a Bigger Community
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The MONGO Dilemma: To Collaborate or Not?
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Unmasking the Silent Impact of Trauma in Nonprofits
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The Art of Grant Budgeting: A Guide for Nonprofit CFOs
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5 Ways Nonprofits Can Balance Creativity and Structure
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How to Persuade a New Generation to Join Your Nonprofit’s Board
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Nonprofit ROI: How “Measuring the Good” Can Help Nonprofits Justify Investments
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9 Principles to Make Your Nonprofit Fundraising Effective — and Fun!
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Blue Avocado Presents: Cyber Incident Response Plans for Nonprofits – Live Q&A
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Moving Beyond Performance: Making DEI Actionable
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From Crisis to Clarity: Five Steps to Demystify Succession Planning
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The Expanded Matrix Map: Leveraging Your Triple Bottom Line for Fundraising
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Is There Anybody Out There? Navigating the Challenges of Managing Hybrid Work Teams
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Can You Hear Us Now? Using Feedback to Create Community-Centered Services
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Unlocking Potential: Collective Leadership in Nonprofits
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From Startup to Success: Guiding Nonprofits with Six Core Principles of Improvement
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Blue Avocado Presents: IRS Form 990 – What Your Nonprofit Needs to Know (Live Q&A)
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Rethinking Perpetuity: Resetting Endowment Expectations After the Pandemic
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Advocacy Amplified: How Nonprofits Can Garner State Legislative Support for Their Causes
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Volunteering Alone Will Not Save Us
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The Year of Three Executive Directors: Important Lessons for Board Management
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We May Be a Motley Crew, But We’ll Adapt to You: 8 Tenets of Holistic Community Engagement for Nonprofits
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Join the Movement: Activating Nonprofits for Lasting Change
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Growing the Roots of Consensus in Nonprofit Governance
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7 Things Nonprofit Leaders Can Say to Funders to Effectively Manage Limited Resources
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A Beginner’s Guide to Filing a Form 990 for Your Nonprofit Organization
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How Nonprofits Can Benefit from Embracing ESG Practices
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How U.S.-based Nonprofits Can Deliver Disaster Relief Abroad: A Tigrayan Case Study
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Why Executive Directors Need L&D to Execute a Smooth Succession
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How Nonprofits Can Change Unfair Laws
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The Power of Collaborative Fundraising
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Why Nonprofit Organizations Need Chief Diversity Officers
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7 Key Factors for Building Peer-to-Peer Fundraising at Your Small Nonprofit
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The Data Is In: Nonprofits Are Getting More Operational Support
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How to Implement Strategic Inquiry at Your Nonprofit in 5 Steps
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Performance Appraisals Are Broken — Here’s How Managers Can Fix the Process
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Re-evaluating the Great Resignation
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Working Through Grief: How to Build a Supportive Workplace
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ESG is Everywhere. Should It Matter to Nonprofits?
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Fundraising and Public Speaking
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Blue Avocado Presents: Why ESG is Important to Your Nonprofit – Live Q&A
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Ask Rita: I’ve Never Fired Anyone Before — and Now I Have To!
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Using the Sensory Funnel to Improve Nonprofit Efficacy and Productivity
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Nonprofit Mergers & Collaboration
Copyright attorney Kate Spelman shares how your nonprofit can protect its original material and ensure you’re not improperly using someone else’s material.
The research librarians at IssueLab compare love and nonprofit research, finding and highlighting unusual research reports.
Can an employer terminate an employee who exceeds the maximum medical leave?
For your future use and reference, Blue Avocado shares some common jargon often found across the nonprofit sector.
Segregation of duties, checks & balances, can be difficult to implement in small organizations. Here are five important, do-able controls.
Rick Cohen delves into the less-heard concerns and questions about Teach for America, and its effect on the education sector.
The Just Awards will show the most irrational, irresponsible, and irrelevant organizational behaviors that hinder social service and change.
It’s the call no board member wants or expects to get: The organization’s executive director is being investigated for embezzlement.
Jonathan Spack dives into fallacies that the nonprofit sector has internalized, which can contribute both to poor management and self-esteem.
Part 3 in Blue Avocado’s series on diversity offers specific, practical tips for recruiting people “unlike ourselves” for nonprofit boards.
Rick Cohen explores three large and distinct ways that the nonprofit sector is involved with the health care reform debates.
Explore how diversity is applied the nonprofit sector as a whole — speaking to foundations, consultants, capacity builders, and observers.
This article — the first of three in a series — provides a fresh and practical focus on nonprofit board diversity.
Nonprofits have a long history of innovation and heroism in health care and in disasters; be sure to manage the flu and its implications well.
Rick Cohen mined metric tons of data to bring some newly published, meaningful facts about the nonprofit sector that we should be aware of.
Attorney Gene Takagi and Emily Nicole Chan discuss whether nonprofit boards can vote by both mail and email.
Steven Young Lee shares how his past experiences provided the right mix of skills to launch him on the path of nonprofit work.
One way to be sure that each person on the board is clear on his or her responsibilities is to adopt a board member contract.
Tim Wolfred, a leader in the field of nonprofit executive transitions, on how to weigh both the organization’s needs, and your own heart.
For-profit companies seek foundation grants and government tax exemptions that presents risks and challenges to the nonprofit sector.
Ask Rita explores how nonprofits should do criminal record checks on prospective employees, volunteers, and board members.
Pamela Davis explains how everything we’ve been taught about this economy needs to change, with the false equivalency of price and value.
Edie Boatman shares advice about making a career change from a for-profit position to a nonprofit position.
A nonprofit considered moving away from having an annual audit to having a review, and the board wanted a legal opinion before making a decision.