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.
-
Unlocking Potential: Collective Leadership in Nonprofits
-
What are the best strategies and tips for managing a nonprofit board of directors?
-
The 3 ‘Rs’ of Equitable Community Engagement
-
Blue Avocado Presents: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Working with Consultants – Live Q&A
-
From Crisis to Clarity: Five Steps to Demystify Succession Planning
-
The most critical areas for improvement to achieve your mission
-
Why Are Nonprofits Experiencing An Insurance Crisis? And What Can the Nonprofit Sector Do About it?
-
The Expanded Matrix Map: Leveraging Your Triple Bottom Line for Fundraising
-
What are your nonprofit’s priorities and goals for 2025?
-
Nonprofit Leadership Isn’t Perfect, and That’s the Point
-
Four Ways to Remove a Board Member
-
What are the Biggest Challenges in Getting (and Keeping) Your Nonprofit’s Staff and Volunteers?
-
When Does Interim Nonprofit Leadership Make Sense?
-
Five Internal Controls for the Very Small Nonprofit
-
2024 Blue Avocado Year in Review
-
What is the Secret to Successful Grant Writing?
-
A Nonprofit Partnership: How One Board Member Connected Two Organizations and Boosted Both
-
A Practical Guide to Getting and Keeping Nonprofit Volunteers
-
Key Qualities and Skills to Look for in Potential Board Members
-
Innovative Leadership — Culture Doesn’t Have to Eat Strategy: Tending to Human Factors During Strategic Planning
-
Treasurers of All-Volunteer Organizations: Eight Key Responsibilities
-
The Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Fundraising in 2025
-
The Most Successful Nonprofit Fundraising Strategies
-
Insider Newsletters: An Easy Way to Keep Your Board in the Loop and Engaged
-
An Easy-to-Use Accounting Procedures Manual Template
-
A Guide for Private Foundations: Tax Exemption and 990-PF Filing Requirements
-
Nonprofit Leaders: How Does Your Nonprofit Measure Success?
-
Why is it Hard to Give My Money Away? A Donor’s Perspective
-
The Biggest Mistakes New Nonprofits Make
-
Five Years and Growing: How One Nonprofit Built a Sustainable, Collaborative Mission
-
The Best Route to Approaching Donors: Hand-Head-Heart
-
Measure What You Value: Designing a Values-based Performance Appraisal System
-
The One Tool/Strategy Nonprofits Wish They Implemented Sooner
-
Link Arms to Elevate Your Nonprofit’s Impact
-
Your Nonprofit Got its Grant. Now What?
-
Rebuilding Nonprofit Boards: When a New Board Can Be a Fresh Start
-
Nonprofit Rebranding Strategies: Five Steps to Achieving a Successful Nonprofit Rebrand
-
The Realities of Living with Food Insecurity
-
Drive Your Nonprofit’s Mission by Investing in Your People
-
Blue Avocado Presents: What Nonprofits Need to Know About Fiscal Sponsorships – Live Q&A
-
The Critical Role of Cultural Responsiveness in Today’s Nonprofits
-
8 Easy Ways to Grab More Attention for Your Small Nonprofit
-
Supporting Caregiver Employees in the Nonprofit Sector
-
How Curiosity and Creativity Can Foster Self-Aware Nonprofit Leaders
-
Nonprofit Grant Proposal Budget Calculations: A Road Map
-
Increase Safety for Your Nonprofit’s Team
-
Your Nonprofit’s Budget: A Window to Finding Your Priorities
-
How can nonprofit leaders avoid burnout?
-
Using Philanthropy to Address Racial Harm and Inequity
-
Nonprofit Fundraising: Are You Choosing the Right Grants?
-
Preparing Your Nonprofit to Move Beyond the Founder
-
Litigating a Path to Progress: Nonprofit Advocacy through the Courts
-
Can Nonprofits Look to the Past to Build the Future?
-
Blue Avocado Presents: Copyright Concerns for Nonprofits – Live Q&A
-
How Lessons Learned From Fighting Food Insecurity Can Help Your Nonprofit
-
Five Lessons for Creating an Effective (and Accountable) Nonprofit Board
-
Grant Management Series: Involving Your CFO throughout the Grant Application Process
-
Empowering Community Voices: The Strategic Advantage of Nonprofit Advisory Committees
-
Ask Rita in HR: Should Murphy’s Law Be a Consideration in Making HR Decisions?
-
The Big Chill: Why Nonprofits Should Care about Affirmative Action
-
Vision Before Strategy: A Nonprofit’s Guide to Defining Success
-
Beyond the Hype: Why ESG Frameworks Miss the Mark for Small Nonprofits
-
Charting a New Course for Youth Engagement
-
Blue Avocado Presents: Does Your Nonprofit Qualify for the Employee Retention Credit (ERC)? – Live Q&A
-
Is Your Nonprofit’s Mission Obsolete — Or Just Ready for a New Direction?
-
Five Signs Your Nonprofit is Ready to Reach a Bigger Community
-
The MONGO Dilemma: To Collaborate or Not?
-
Unmasking the Silent Impact of Trauma in Nonprofits
-
The Art of Grant Budgeting: A Guide for Nonprofit CFOs
-
5 Ways Nonprofits Can Balance Creativity and Structure
-
How to Persuade a New Generation to Join Your Nonprofit’s Board
-
Nonprofit ROI: How “Measuring the Good” Can Help Nonprofits Justify Investments
-
9 Principles to Make Your Nonprofit Fundraising Effective — and Fun!
-
Blue Avocado Presents: Cyber Incident Response Plans for Nonprofits – Live Q&A
-
Moving Beyond Performance: Making DEI Actionable
-
Is There Anybody Out There? Navigating the Challenges of Managing Hybrid Work Teams
-
Can You Hear Us Now? Using Feedback to Create Community-Centered Services
-
From Startup to Success: Guiding Nonprofits with Six Core Principles of Improvement
-
Blue Avocado Presents: IRS Form 990 – What Your Nonprofit Needs to Know (Live Q&A)
-
Rethinking Perpetuity: Resetting Endowment Expectations After the Pandemic
-
Advocacy Amplified: How Nonprofits Can Garner State Legislative Support for Their Causes
-
Volunteering Alone Will Not Save Us
-
The Year of Three Executive Directors: Important Lessons for Board Management
-
We May Be a Motley Crew, But We’ll Adapt to You: 8 Tenets of Holistic Community Engagement for Nonprofits
-
Join the Movement: Activating Nonprofits for Lasting Change
-
Growing the Roots of Consensus in Nonprofit Governance
-
7 Things Nonprofit Leaders Can Say to Funders to Effectively Manage Limited Resources
-
A Beginner’s Guide to Filing a Form 990 for Your Nonprofit Organization
-
How Nonprofits Can Benefit from Embracing ESG Practices
-
How U.S.-based Nonprofits Can Deliver Disaster Relief Abroad: A Tigrayan Case Study
-
Why Executive Directors Need L&D to Execute a Smooth Succession
-
How Nonprofits Can Change Unfair Laws
-
The Power of Collaborative Fundraising
-
Why Nonprofit Organizations Need Chief Diversity Officers
-
7 Key Factors for Building Peer-to-Peer Fundraising at Your Small Nonprofit
-
The Data Is In: Nonprofits Are Getting More Operational Support
-
How to Implement Strategic Inquiry at Your Nonprofit in 5 Steps
There are only four things people look at in a nonprofit’s annual report. Focus on what people actually read.
A governance committee can be an effective way to help define the board’s work, the work of individual members, and strengthen that work.
Blue Avocado provides suggestions for which written documents a nonprofit organization’s board should have.
Nonprofits face increasing pressure to show that their programs are evidence-based. How to “tweak” these practices to your own populations.
Advice for a nonprofit supervisor with a bookkeeper that has missed deadlines and may be coming to work drunk.
Blue Avocado readers share their ways of signing off on nonprofit emails. The consensus is quick, and in keeping with the tone of the email.
Embezzlement is especially painful for community nonprofits. Here are the most common types of nonprofit embezzlement and how you can deal with them.
Standard elements of a drug and alcohol free workplace program for nonprofits. Includes a sample drug- and alcohol-free workplace policy.
Sadly, fun at work sounds like an oxymoron to lots of people. Blue Avocado contributor Janice Clark offers some ideas to lighten things up.
Immigration rights groups are prepping the way for legislative reform, which they say is critical to addressing the issue over the long-term.
Perhaps the single most important attribute of an effective board is also its most intangible: An independent sense of itself.
With the elections coming up, a nonprofit’s staff is buzzing with political talk. Ask Rita shares how to avoid this creating a minefield.
Be sure that your nonprofit is getting the most value out of your relationship with your broker, and with your insurance companies.
Many nonprofit board members don’t think about the organization’s insurance until something adverse happens. Here’s the low-down on liability.
Blue Avocado explores the plight of people in the nonprofit sector who find themselves close to retirement without enough savings.
A quick roundup of just a few of the most compelling and informative nonprofit commentaries around recent financial developments.
Blue Avocado shares steps for how a nonprofit organization can shut down its operations and ride into the sunset gracefully.
Exploring different ways nonprofit employees can plan and save for retirement — and which ways are better suited than others.
For nonprofits, it’s hard not to think that closing down is the ultimate disaster. But sometimes a lack of money or energy forces the issue.
After Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi community nonprofits used the region’s recovery as a stepping stone to lasting social change.
Would it support your cause if your organization took a stand on a public policy issue? Is it legal to do so? And how would you go about it?
Part one in this three-part series on nonprofit retirement looks at calculating retirement needs and using that information to explore choices
Ask Rita provides policies nonprofit organizations should consider when adding a policy forbidding cell phone use while driving.
A quick checklist for Family and Medical Leave Act requests as a way of making sure you’ve remembered all the key points.