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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Social Enterprise & Earned Income: A Key To Revenue or a Distraction?
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You Can’t Fire Me, I’m a Volunteer!
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Empowering Next Generation Leaders through Crowdfunding
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Nonprofit Leadership Tips from the Basketball Court
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Some Say Fundraising Is Just Sales: They’re Wrong!
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Fundraising for “Friends of” Organizations
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Ask Rita: Employees Who Cross Jurisdictions: Which Law Applies?
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Why You May Need to Delete Half of Your Nonprofit’s Email List
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Volunteer Management: How to Get it Right
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Ask Rita: How Do I Prevent Sexual Harassment at My Nonprofit?
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Scarcity or Abundance? An Experiment in Collaborative Fundraising
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The New Fundraising Frontier: Impact Investing
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In-Kind Fundraising: A Great Way to Expand Your Budget
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Ask Rita: Are Summer Helpers Employees, Contractors, or Interns?
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Show Me The Money! A Step Toward Solving the Problem of Operating Support
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Succeeding When You’re Small: Lessons Learned from DonorsChoose.org
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Achieving Equity: We Need a New Approach to Funding
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Finding Your Voice As a Nonprofit
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What Millennials Really Want: Professional Development
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The Nonprofit Student Debt Conundrum
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Ego Checks, Spaghetti Sauce, and Other Suggestions for Nonprofit Collaboration
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4 Things Your Nonprofit Can Do to Recruit & Retain Millennial Leadership
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The Gentrification Phenomenon: A Nonprofit Dilemma
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Process, Process, Process: The evaluation model you shouldn’t ignore
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Connection is Key: How Knowledge Sharing Helps Organizations Grow and Prevents Isolation
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Lide Haiti: Helping women and girls help Haiti
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Branching out: Raising more dollars by understanding donors’ differences
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Financial Focus: You Told Us
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In the Boardroom: Asked to Join that Board?
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Data Visualization: User-Centered Design
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Whose Nonprofit Is It Anyway: When a Nonprofit Leader Moves On
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Ask Rita: Is it Legal to Require Nonprofit Employees to Donate Gifts?
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Nonprofit Spotlight: Michigan Nonprofit Association
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Yes, You Really Need One: Why Strategic Planning Matters and How to do it Better
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Point-Counterpoint: Should Nonprofits Be Allowed to Support Political Candidates?
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In the Board Room: Staying In the Loop And Out Of the Weeds
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Building a More Diverse Board with Intention
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Nonprofit Spotlight: The Trenton Community A-Team
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Is Diversity as Good for Business as it is for Communities? New Study Says Yes
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In These Turbulent Times for Nonprofits
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How To Be a Community-Powered Nonprofit
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First-Person Nonprofit: Making the Case (Statement!)
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How Nonprofits Can Work With Their Bankers Amidst Change
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The Financial Outlook for Nonprofits
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First Person: I Am A Young Social Entrepreneur
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Nonprofit Mergers Are Like Falling In Love
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Divorce and the Nonprofit Board Member
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Robert Egger: “Our Sector Is About To Be Hit, And Hit Hard” A Blue Avocado Interview
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Ask Rita in HR: What About Marijuana Decriminalization?
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Gearing Up and (Teaming Up) for a Leadership Transition
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Is Your Nonprofit Ready for a Capital Project?
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Rewrite the Script When These Characters Show Up in Workplace Politics
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Ask Rita in HR: How Do I Stay ADA Compliant When an Employee Has a Disability?
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If Your Board Looked Like Your Community
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Ask Rita: Can I Just Hire Independent Contractors?
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Gifts from the Board Chair
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Promoting a Worthy Cause? Don’t Miss These Six Ideas for Getting Exposure for Your Nonprofit
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Nine Nonprofit Trends that Need to Die
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Everything We’ve Been Taught About Major Gifts is Wrong
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A Tiger Escaped Today, and I’m on the Zoo Board
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Why Don’t Foundations Build Capacity in Fundraising?
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Can We Fire Someone for What They Said in Personal Email?
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A Fork in the Yellow Brick Road to Oz
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From Black Panther to Nonprofit CFO
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Mediocrity Starts with ME (Humor)
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Outdated Job Description May be Getting Us in Trouble
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If You Give a Board Treasurer A Cookie…
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Sample Disclosure of Amount Deductible in Ticket Purchase
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Sample Tax Deductibility Handout for Auction Participants
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Sample Acknowledgement of Non-Cash Donation
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Sample Silent Auction Bid Sheet
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Sample Auction Reporting Checklist for Nonprofits
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A Board Member’s Guide to Nonprofit Overhead
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Crawling Out of the Psychological Depths
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Who’s the Boss? The Board or the Executive?
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How Do You Count Employees… to Determine Which Laws Apply?
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The Very Good but Seriously Flawed Executive Director
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Downward-Facing Budget and Other Nonprofit Yoga Poses
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Following a Founder or Long-Timer Requires a Hard Head
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Nonprofit Auctions: Compliance Guide and Sample Forms
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Surprise! Most Legacy Gifts DON’T Come from Major Donors
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I Followed A Founder: A First-Person Nonprofit Tale
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A Funder’s Message to Other Funders About Overhead
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Transgender Employees: A Respectful & Legal Workplace Approach
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Fundraising in Nonprofits of Color
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Ten Things Boards Do Right (Without Even Realizing It)
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Cow Board Members Give of Their Time, Not Milk
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DIY: Make a Bylaws Cheat Sheet
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First Person Nonprofit: A Day in the Life of a Major Gifts Officer
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Bring Unicorns Back to Our World: The Problem with Outcomes
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How to Staff and Support a Committee
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Mental Health Counselor May Have a Mental Health Problem – What Can We Do?
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Funny and Awkward Nonprofit Board Tales
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Adding It All Up: Nonprofit CFO Study
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The Sustainability Question: Why Is It So Annoying?
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Ask Rita: Do Nonprofits Need Insurance for Volunteers?
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How to Deal with an Office Bully
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Managing Your Nonprofit’s Rating
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Nonprofit Executive Director Gives Advice on Love, Marriage, and Other Stuff
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Extreme Board Makeover
Specialized volunteers can come from organizations that recruit those seeking opportunities for organizations in need of specialized help.
Guiding principles for organizations that want to create a binding, board-approved JDEI policy with values, action plans, and accountability.
To be successful, transitions from volunteer leaders to paid staff must be planned, deliberate, and done in an orderly fashion.
Often nonprofits can have unchecked appetites for growth, which combine with structural factors that make such growth haphazard.
A new accounting standard will bring clarity and consistency to how in-kind contributions of nonfinancial assets are reported for nonprofits.
Leann Malone, Executive Director of Lancaster County First Steps, on strong business acumen, retaining qualified staff, and the bottom line.
The ADA interactive process is a two-way street. What should employers do when employees aren’t interacting in good faith?
The stronger the relationship between the board and chief executive, the better they work together for a planned transition.
We hire new staff, we hold team-building events, we might even bring in a consultant to determine the causes. But there is one area that is often overlooked when trying to fix problems: the culture of the organization and its connection to mission and values.
The board expects the Executive Director (ED) and CFO to work in partnership to further the mission, but most boards also expect the CFO to perform a “watchdog” function. If the ED is the engine of the bus, the CFO is the insurance, the maintenance, and yes, sometimes the brakes.
The efforts you make to meet the ED’s needs and assert your needs will pay off for both the ED, the CFO and the community.
While more and more in our sector push for real systems change, here are three practices that could advance nonprofit justice work.
When to engage in an interactive process with employees to determine if a disability limits their ability to perform essential job functions.
Is your nonprofit’s team unbalanced? To correct the balance, there’s some unbiased actions that need to happen.
When we embark upon what’s known in the nonprofit world as “donation season,” chances are that your organization thinks about putting together a fundraising video or other media that demonstrates the impact of your work.
How to evaluate an employee’s request for a religious accommodation and when to appropriately provide such accommodations.
Every nonprofit needs a budget, but some are more effective than others. Consider these tips for making a budget that works well for everyone.
Forecasting is financial prototyping, and it’s a tool that will remain as part of our finance strategy. Download the budget forecast template.
How can supervisors help their employees perform at their most productive level and maintain consistency in their approach to managing their employees?
Seven results-based ideas and three relationship-based ideas on how to build your nonprofit’s capital structure.
Terminating an employee because they haven’t shown up or reported in should be pursued only after proactive efforts to reach out have failed.
Blue Avocado explores procedures concerning who is permitted to catalog and inventory donated items received by a nonprofit.
Tax law concerning nonprofit organizations can be complex. Blue Avocado explores where tax laws do and don’t apply.
No one is too important, too indispensable, or too essential to escape discipline for zero-tolerance policy violations.