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What I Learned as a Funder: Frank Tips for Nonprofits
Over decades in the social sector, I spent countless hours in the grant-seeking trenches and saw my share of things that left me wondering whether to laugh or cry. But then I became a foundation funder and encountered a prospective grantee’s “toxic dia …
Scarcity or Abundance? An Experiment in Collaborative Fundraising
As a recovering lawyer, I wasn’t professionally trained in development when I became an executive director three years ago, yet my Board expected me to get to work fundraising…fast. When I began exploring the field, I quickly learned there are a lot …
The New Fundraising Frontier: Impact Investing
Capital campaigns can be a slog! Most organizations face similar challenges: donor fatigue, the time it takes to raise funds, rising development costs, and concerns about falling short of your fundraising goals. But what if there were another way to ra …
The Best Route to Approaching Donors: Hand-Head-Heart
As someone who began her career as a fund raiser and migrated to become a funder as head of a large corporate foundation, I have a somewhat unique vantage point on the struggle many nonprofits endure when engaging funders and major donors to support th …
Point-Counterpoint: Too Much Influence or Not Enough – Should Nonprofits Be Allowed to Support Political Candidates
After signalling his intentions to do so at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, on May 4, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at weakening the Johnson Amendment, an act that has received mixed reaction from the nonprofit world …
From Black Panther to Nonprofit CFO
Norma Mtume is my hero. As a college student she joined the Black Panther Party and went on to serve as director of the Alprentice Bunchy Carter and the George Jackson People’s Free Medical Clinics. She also co-founded a nonprofit in a broken-down trai …
I Followed A Founder: a First Person Nonprofit Tale
Too often the focus on nonprofit executive transitions is about the departing executive. We’re in the middle of interviewing 58 executives who followed founders or long-time leaders. Here’s just one of their stories; we’ll call her “Amanda”: The …
Fundraising in Nonprofits of Color
Almost all research on fundraising is done on mainstream nonprofits, and almost all advice and guides on fundraising are addressed implicitly to mainstream nonprofits. Yet because they have different development trajectories, nonprofits in communities …
Deconstructing Sustainability
Maybe in some mythic past it was possible to think first about strategic impact goals, and then about how to raise the money. But today we know better: you can’t talk about what you’re going to do without talking about how to get the money. And, …
Donor-Advised Funds Background
This brief introduction to donor-advised funds (DAFs) accompanies the Blue Avocado article “Donor-Advised Funds: Non-Transparent Tax Shelters for Good.” In 1931, a New York community foundation created the first donor-advised funds (DAFs). But a …
