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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Nonprofit Retirement: Calculating retirement Needs & Exploring Choices
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Ask Rita: Zero Cell Phone Use While Driving Policy
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A Family and Medical Leave Act Checklist
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Ask Rita: Can an Employee Come and Go Using Family or Medical Leave?
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Is It Time for an Audit?
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Gas Rates, Volunteers, and Justice
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Should the Board Hold Executive Sessions?
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More Than the Olympics: Sports, Nonprofits & Community
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Boards of All-Volunteer Organizations
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Three-Step Immigration (IRCA) Compliance for Employers
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Obama: the Nonprofit Sector’s Favorite Son?
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Overtime Pay for Nonprofit Preschool Teacher?
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The Best Way to Raise Money? Choose a Revenue Strategy
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What Should Nonprofit Boards Know About Insurance Brokers?
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In Search of Unicorns: Finding & Hiring Outside Grantwriters Part 2
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Unicorns Found: Meet Two Grantwriters
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Word on the Street from the Council on Foundations Conference
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The Unrecognized Value of Community Nonprofits, Hiring Grantwriters, Extended Warranties, MTV
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In Search of Unicorns: Finding & Hiring Grantwriters, Part 1
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Nonprofit Budgets Have to Balance: False!
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Don’t Drive, Chew Gum and Use the Phone at the Same Time
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Meaningful Acts of Appreciation for Nonprofit Boards and Staff
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Nonprofits and the Media
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Pay Off My Student Loan or Pay Into a 401K?
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What Should We Do About an Employee’s Outrageous Blog?
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Why is it called Blue Avocado?
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Abolish Board Committees?
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Reasons to Have (& Not to Have) an Attorney on a Nonprofit Board
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Can We Require An Employee To Take Her Meds?
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Promises, Promises: Rural Advocates vs. Big Philanthropy
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Five Ways to Let Government Money Run You Over
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Good Management vs. Good Leadership
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What Do I Say to a Donor or Funder?
Learn about what makes a good talent management strategy and how investing in learning and development helps organizations fill their leadership pipeline.
Discover how small nonprofits can take on unfair laws and policies that hinder their ability to serve their communities and come out victorious with the help of coalitions.
Learn about tangible benefits from collaborative fundraising and the five simple steps to ensure your collaboration goes as well as possible.
The Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) at the Urban Institute explains why it is important to re-confirm and re-establish the need to keep making progress on the important work of equity and inclusion in nonprofit organizations to affect real change.
For small nonprofits it’s difficult to know where to start with fundraising for target programs. The problem is compounded when your nonprofit is located in a disadvantaged community. If you find yourself in this situation, peer-to-peer fundraising, centered on grassroots recruiting, could be the route to achieve your objectives in a well-defined timeframe.
A compelling case for how nonprofits can build organizational capacity and infrastructure to ensure longevity by getting funding for those investments for their nonprofit.
Five steps nonprofits can take to implement strategic inquiry including building board support, listening to community, research, broadening networks, and sharing the journey.
Neither supervisors nor employees think that the current process for performance appraisals is working. In this article, our author uses her experience as a trainer and coach with more than 2,000 managers, direct service staff, board members, and other volunteers to present a 6-pointed, human-centered approach that supervisors can use to fix the performance appraisal process.
To understand how resignation trends impacted nonprofits, sector leaders must look below the headline figures to understand employee motivations.
Borrowing from her own experience of losing her husband from cancer, the author presents five strategies to help employees work through grief.
Nonprofits can learn from the for-profit sector’s efforts on ESG and begin to think about how these corporate strategies can apply to their work as well.
10 concepts that both public speaking and fundraising have in common: Goal setting, knowing your audience, visualizing success, and paying attention to the details.
How to handle termination of employment at their nonprofit properly and with due regard for all concerned.
How understanding the sensory funnel can help nonprofits better take care of their employees and volunteers.
Best Thing Ever? Or the Swan Song of a Dream? See how one nonprofit merged with another and learn concrete steps nonprofit EDs and boards can use in their decision-making process.
A case study that shows how valuable hard and soft data can be used to turn around declining contributions, and build stronger relationships with donors.
To counteract NIMBY attitudes, a two-step framework is presented for proactive community engagement that will build local support.
How nonprofits can work with public, educational, or governmental TV stations to raise visibility and get the word out about their great work.
Nonprofits often struggle to connect with the next generation of donors. An Associate Board might be the answer to keep your nonprofit moving forward.
Welcoming Change, Not Just Dollars: What Every Grant Professional Wants Nonprofit Executives to Know
Nine areas of grant writing that are critical for nonprofit executives to understand if they are going to move from a merely transactional to transformational grant writing program.
Nonprofit leaders must be proactive in identifying risks, take steps to prevent them, and be prepared with a communications plan in the event of a crisis.
Regenerative thinking is an ideal approach to reorient our perspective from ‘What’s in it for me’ to asking ‘How can we all benefit?’
Entities that do the work of meeting human needs are called nonprofit organizations, but altruistic business enterprise might fit better.
Nonprofits have been leaders in building sustainability for generations. Nonprofits can be the catalysts for the systemic change in consciousness we so desperately need by advocating for a community-benefit approach in our economic system.

