A collaborative capital campaign created an entire new arts and business district in Cleveland. Photo: Gordon Square Arts District

Collaborative fundraising takes time and trust. That’s what we heard over and again in our interviews with seven nonprofit executives in Rhode Island, Boston, Cleveland and Spokane, each of them successful collaborative fundraisers.

We looked into the topic at the prompting of our friends at New Roots Providence and presented our early findings at a New Roots workshop on January 19.

The short version of what we learned from our informants:

• Successful collaborations flow from a deep process of trust-building among the partners. The right partners may take years to self-select, discover their shared goals and commit to combined action.
• Detailed legal agreements help establish trust and smooth functioning by exploring and resolving the partners’ deepest worries in advance. (These also take time)
• At the same time, good partners must be ready to make commonsense adjustments to agreements when they create unfair or unproductive results for some partners.
• Long-term and permanent collaborations need to form an independent organization to fundraise and distribute revenues. (Another time-consuming process.)
• The collaborative case must promise more than the sum of its partners: new funders respond to a transformative vision.
• Truly successful collaborations can reach more and larger funders and generate more income at lower cost than the two partners could achieve separately.

Our cases covered five forms of joint fundraising: grants, workplace campaigns, events, capital campaigns, and, finally, our elusive ideal of truly integrated annual fundraising. We’ll tell you more about three very interesting cases in future posts:

• The YWCA and YMCA in Spokane, Washington created a fully integrated capital campaign to build new shared buildings in two locations.
• The Gordon Square Arts District in Cleveland, Ohio brought two theater companies together with a community development organization to build not just theaters, but a whole theater-oriented arts district with major economic benefits for the city.
• The Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts began by building new shared performance space for the the Nora Theater Company and the Underground Railway Theater. The partnership then went on to take on all fundraising, business and back office operations, leaving both groups free to focus on their artistic missions alone.

If you have had a good – or bad – experience with collaborative fundraising that you think could help others, please send me an email. We’d love to hear from you.

What are you waiting for?

You owe it to your new ED and to your organization to complete this review ASAP.

As a Board, this interim evaluation can answer the questions that should be on your mind about this new hire:

• What impact has this Executive Director had in their first months in office?
• How well has the ED fulfilled our expectations at this point in time? (Caveat: How clearly were those communicated to the ED at the time he/she was hired?)
• How is this Executive Director perceived among key stakeholders outside of our organization? Inside of our organization?
• Have we established the ideal relationship between the Board and the Executive Director? What do we need to do to create that?
• Is this an Executive Director we want to keep? If yes, what can we do to ensure that happens? If not, what are our next steps?

Your new ED is likely hungry for formal feedback. A well-constructed review also provides an opportunity for your new ED to answer some questions of his or her own:

• Is this job all that I expected? Is it a position that I want to continue serving in?
• What does the Board appreciate about my performance to date? My staff? Other constituents?
• Are there areas for improvement in my performance?
• What is working well about my relationship with the Board? Individual board members?
• What can be improved in the way we work together? How?
• What does the Board want me to accomplish in the next year? Over the next five years? How does this mesh with what I’d like to accomplish?
• What do I need from the Board to succeed in this position?

You’ll find a sample review process in our free Toolbox.

While you can’t avoid every risk or foresee everything that could go wrong, you can take a thoughtful approach to planning for risks that could imaginably happen — and some of  the one you couldn’t imagine .

A handy resource is The Nonprofit Risk Management Center, which has a free newsletter published three times a year, a library of free articles and other tools you can purchase.

According to the Center, you can start preparing for risk by 1) completing an inventory of what might go wrong, 2) planning for how you’ll prevent or respond to that potential harm and finally 3) safeguarding your organization from financial ruin in the event something bad still happens.

The Center groups the risks you should inventory into four categories:

1. People
2. Property
3. Income
4. Goodwill

Your insurance company, the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, and even professional associations like the Public Relations Society of America can be instrumental in helping you figure out what to worry about (as if we don’t have enough worries already) and how to implement adequate safeguards.

You can get started by taking the short tutorial on the Center’s website.

Last week‘s news brought us two cases of embezzlement from nonprofit coffers. The first was the theft of $1 million over eight years by the controller of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. The theft was noticed by a super vigilant bank employee who questioned the signature on a check. (Note to bank —give that employee a big thank you from all of us. Note to store checkout clerk—could you maybe look at the signatures on credit cards now and then.)

In the other incident, the board chair of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce was implicated in misappropriating $2.3 million in funds from the Albert Ellis Institute, of which he was the President and Director of Administration.

How could this happen, you might be asking yourself?

To quote from an editorial in the Hartford Courant:

“The [Mark Twain House] case presents a hard-earned lesson for the Twain House and other nonprofits. It isn’t the kid driving the van who embezzles from a company; it’s almost always a trusted, well-placed employee. “

Both cases should make you jump now to evaluate the effectiveness of the internal controls at your organization.

While it’s not always possible to prevent theft from occurring, you can create controls that limit the damage and increase the chance of early detection — not the year or more in the two cases mentioned above.

The United Way of Central New Mexico has a free online Internal  Controls Tool Kit to get you started.

As a small business person myself, I had to wonder how my plumber could stay in business with such delays in invoicing. I guess cash isn’t a problem for them.

What’s this got to do with your nonprofit? It made me think about delays around money.

As a donor, it makes me crazy when I mail a check for a contribution to an organization I care about and the check doesn’t get cashed right away. Let me say that my definition of “right away” stretches to a few days (I’m willing to give small organizations some leeway, though they tend to really need the money the most).

But after that, the failure to cash my check raises a series of doubts in my mind:

• First, did my check arrive at all?
• Second, did they really need my gift so much if they don’t feel a need to deposit it in their bank account.
• Third, should I have other worries about their internal cash controls if  checks are undeposited for more than a day or two?

If this describes you, it’s time to tighten up your internal controls.  Here’s a helpful toolkit from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence at the United Way of Central New Mexico to get you started.

Please don’t make your donors ask “did you get my check?” It doesn’t inspire confidence or the next gift.

1. What’s working?
2. What isn’t?
3. What are your recommendations for change?

I’ll be forever grateful to my graduate program in organization and management at Antioch University New England for revealing these three simple questions. I don’t remember whether it was faculty member Peter Smith or Marsha Greenberg who shared these organization development gems with us, but thank you to both of you. The questions have remained with me and they are at the core of my own work today.

What I like about these questions is that you don’t have to hold a master’s degree in organization development or anything else to use them within your organization to help solve problems, improve programming,  or make operations more effective.

Of course, the answers will be different depending on whom you ask. Each person has a different experience of an issue and a different level of knowledge and expertise. That’s why we consultants gather and synthesize input from many perspectives as it helps us get a well-rounded view of your situation.

In asking, it is critical to be a neutral listener, someone who is willing to put aside their own assumptions and really listen to what is being said. After you’ve synthesized what you think you’ve heard, share your analysis with the people you’ve spoken to and ask them if you understood the situation correctly. You want to reach agreement on your understanding of what is working and what isn’t.

Hopefully you will have many recommendations for improvement. Do some additional study before you jump into making changes, however. You’ll want to explore more fully which recommendations might work best for you. And you’d also be wise to seek out possible solutions that no one raised simply because they didn’t have the knowledge of other approaches.

What questions do you use in your organization to help you solve problems or challenges that you are facing? I’d love to hear from you.

Young Haitians displaced by the 2010 earthquake. Courtesy of Grassroots International.

Still, I did say “good photo.” One hundred and fifty well-chosen words make a better use of page space than the giant check handoff photo, the shot of bored-looking people  around a conference table, or the glassy smiles of people holding plaques over their bellies. These visual clichés may be easy to shoot, but they lack emotion or meaning for anyone not in them.

So how can you get great images?

Well, the best photographers take the best photos. A well-organized day of professional shooting can result in 100 to 200 good-to-great photos of your key programs and people in action, enough to ensure that you have at least a few good images for anything you print in a year. The Genesis Center invested in a day of work from Ilene Perlman and loved the results, showcased in their 2009 Annual Report.

If you can’t hire a pro, your best alternative is brute force: take a lot of photos all the time. Enlist your staff, your volunteers, even your program participants as photographers. Remember that every photo should be a story and that stories are about people. Are you proud of your new building? Show us the pride, not the bricks, by putting beaming people out front. Make the photo about their feelings.

Grassroots International makes grants to organizations in rural areas from the Middle East to Mexico. They rely on their traveling staff to diligently take photos and upload them to the Grassroots International Flickr account. They get enough good-to-great photos that we have trouble choosing which ones to leave out of the Grassroots International Annual Report.

Even total amateurs will get a great shot now and then, but you can get luckier by copying the professionals: get up close, shoot from a variety of angles, and avoid harsh flash lighting. Mix posed photos with action shots. Be sure to get releases from your subjects. And, did I say take lots of shots? You can find motivation and more tips in this recent article from Michelle Gienow in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Need inspiration? Check out 120 of 2010’s best news photos at Boston.com.

I’m still thunderstruck by a concept that I bumped into a few years ago. I found it in a  paper whose title is a mouthful: Supporting Financial Vibrancy in the Quest for Sustainability in the Nonprofit Sector. It was authored by Marilyn Struthers of The Ontario Trillium Foundation.

In the paper, Ms Struthers poses that we build financial vibrancy in our quest for organizational sustainability. The article outlines six capacities that contribute to financial vibrancy and the creation of resilient and adaptive organizations rather than merely stable ones.

But tucked away in all this very compelling analysis,  under a box four pages into the study, was the sentence that left me speechless:

“Financial vibrancy is the capacity of an organization to make the transition from one sustainable moment to the next.”

I experienced a moment of ultimate clarity, marveling at the purity, the honesty of that statement.

When I share this marvelous saying with the participants in my workshops, I can see a great burden of guilt fall from their shoulders. Smiles emerge.

Nonprofit organizations exist in an incredibly dynamic world. The ground is shifting even as I write, with great uncertainty about the economy, about the future of employment, about cuts to government funding, unending technological innovation, coming shifts in our ecosystems, and even about our very security and survival.

“Experts” glibly chastise nonprofits for so many wrongs — chasing grant funding, for not having diverse revenue streams, for scorning individual giving, for lack of board fundraising. Yet, the reality is that there are no best or right answers for any nonprofit. Each must craft its way, unique to its own circumstances and opportunities.

I share the pain of my nonprofit colleagues, having shouldered that  Sisyphean task of revenue generation myself. I marvel that there are any strong spirits left at the end of the day.

Me, I’m still humbled that given all the financial handcuffs nonprofits wear that so many have carved out, no matter how awkwardly, business models that enable their work to continue, some for decades, others for centuries.

According to the IRS site:

“This one-time relief benefits Form 990-N (e-Postcard) and Form 990-EZ filers only. Organizations required to file Form 990 or Form 990-PF are not eligible and are automatically revoked if they fail to file for three consecutive years.” Any organization that loses its tax-exempt status will have to reapply.

In quickly looking through the over 1,100 nonprofits on the RI list, I noticed at least one of my former clients whom I had told years ago when I worked with them briefly that they needed to file a 990 (I’ve let them know they are on the list) and surprisingly many veterans organizations.

This is pretty serious stuff.  You can find the list on the IRS web site by clicking here. If you haven’t been sending any annual 990s to the IRS, especially if you are a very small nonprofit that was previously exempt from filing, you would be well-served to scroll through your state’s list.

“It doesn’t matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence — qualitative or quantitative — to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence. If the evidence is primarily quantitative, then think of yourself as a laboratory scientist assembling and assessing the data.”

Collins goes on to say that being hard isn’t  an excuse for not attempting to measure performance. “All indicators are flawed,” he reminds us.

But, prescient of the charity raters, Collins reminds us that it is important to be curious to learn for its own sake, in pursuit of the greatness to which we aspire. (For me, greatness means really taking on social challenges – making the world the best it can be – whatever your cause.)