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
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.