Archive for the ‘Good reads’ Category
Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 1, 2010 in Big ideas, Good reads
Despite our incredibly full work schedules, Jon and I actually spent a weekend away from work. The weather was just gorgeous, sunny and warm, and even the downpour Saturday night couldn’t spoil our much needed respite.
I finally pulled those weeds and planted the last of the veggies and annuals I’ve been staring at for the last week. I accomplished my first bike trek over 25 miles this spring on the East Bay Bike Path — I finished 30 and even had a few more miles in me, really I did, but those two flat tires within minutes ended the trip for me. Thanks to instant service from Legend Bicycle, a mere $11.60 for a new tube, rim tape and installation and I’m back in the saddle.)
Throughout the weekend I’ve been using some of my leisure time to catch up on the stack of magazines and newsletters piling up at home and in the office. And in doing so I’ve been reminded why it is so critical to take time out from the work. What applicable gems of information I’ve been missing!
The Spring/Summer magazine, Land & People, of the Trust for Public Land led with a fascinating story about an innovative collaboration among five conservation groups inspired by two of their donors. The groups have come together as the Northern Sierra Partnership to share “strategy, leadership – and most unusually donors and funding — to prioritize and execute conservation projects across a five-million-acre swath mountains.”
I’m always on the lookout for examples of great collaborations, with a special eye for fundraising partnerships. These groups believe that by working together they will raise more money than any of them could on their own — in this case, Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 26, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Good reads
Sometimes a little reading is a good place to start.
Staff or directors of nonprofit organizations come to us every day seeking our help to improve their functioning. And while I would never discourage anyone from that, I also encourage my clients and prospective clients to do some reading on their own. (Maybe it’s because one of my best friends and my next door neighbors are all librarians!)
I happen to learn a whole lot from reading. It’s one thing that I wish I had much, much more time to do. Thankfully, with Twitter, I now have hundreds of helpers who are out there looking for good reads that they can recommend to their followers. (You can follow me @gaylegifford)
I often start retreats or planning sessions I facilitate with a good discussion about an interesting article that the group was asked to read in advance of the session.
There is lots of really, really interesting stuff out there. So let me just share a tiny few this Monday.
Founders.
I jut got off the phone with the founder of a relatively new nonprofit organization. While the conversation had little direct connection to founder-ness, it did remind me of two of my favorite articles about founders. Both are written from the perspective of colleagues who really honor the extraordinary role of founders, unlike some of the other pieces I’ve read that treat founders as a disease to be cured.
Nonprofit Funding and Financial Issues
There is so much to recommend here, but take a look at anything from Clara Miller of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. I find myself frequently recommending ” The Looking Glass World of Nonprofit Money.”
I’m also very much transfixed by The Bridgespan Group’s study “How Nonprofits Get Really Big” that raises lots of questions about the doctrine of diversification of nonprofit revenue sources.
Program Planning
If you haven’t yet, you’ve got to take a look at The Stages of Change model developed by James O. Prochaska, Ph.D. et al at the University of Rhode Island. While I could have titled this section Making Change, I really think that anyone designing programming should take a look at this five stage model of change before leaping in.
Okay, just a few of my favorites for a Monday. Care to share some of yours?
(Or course, we’ve got a whole library of reads in the Articles sections of our website.)
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 2, 2009 in Effectiveness, Good reads, Research, Strategic Thinking
Here’s a new must read if you care about small nonprofits: “Outsourcing back office services in small nonprofits: Pitfalls and Possibilities.”
Thank you so to my colleague and friend Jane Arsenault of FioPartners for forwarding this report. (If you are interested in nonprofit alliances and haven’t read through Jane’s 1998 book Forging Nonprofit Alliances, you’ve been missing one of the pioneering works on this topic).
“Outsourcing back-office services…” is a study conducted by the Management Assistance Group for the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation of Washington, D.C. It confirms through a study of Meyer grantees, industry experts and other literature what many of us have been thinking about, wishing for and experimenting with for a number of years.
Among the findings:
- Outsourcing may present an opportunity for small organizations to improve their back office.
- There may be new for-profit business opportunities in providing these services.
- Because of their small size and lack of spending on any back office, outsourcing doesn’t offer immediate cost savings for most small organizations. But the report goes on to say that it could help free time for more focus on program and strategy.
- Outsourcing needs to be approached cautiously by both organizations and their funders.
Large nonprofits and nonprofit networks have been outsourcing many back office functions for years. In our experience, small nonprofits haven’t been profitable enough for for-profit businesses to service. The lack of money to be made providing these functions has been a real barrier to the development of many services from which small organizations could benefit.
And small organizations simply haven’t had the time, expertise or money to solve this problem for themselves.
Across the country, larger nonprofits are stepping up to provide some of these services. All types of creative arrangements have been developed that don’t force small organizations to merge and thereby dissolve the important, close constituency and localized advocacy work that so many of our smallest nonprofits provide.
With the current economic crisis and a renewed interest in exploring nonprofit joint ventures, the time may finally be right for a thousand flowers to bloom in this area.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on September 22, 2009 in Good reads, Strategic Thinking
- Are volunteers a finite or infinitely renewable natural resource?
- Does each nonprofit have an obligation to our whole sector to create satisfying experiences that regenerate volunteers?
- Are poor volunteer practices not only driving people away from the offending organization but also souring volunteers against any volunteer service in the future?
These are some of the questions provoked by an intriguing article in the article “It Ain’t Natural: Toward a New (Natural) Resource Conceptualization for Volunteer Management” in the August 2009 edition of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly .
While the title screams academia, the ideas raised by the authors Jeffrey L. Brudney of Cleveland State University and Lucas C. P. M. Meijs of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, deserve serious discussion and wide exposure within our sector.
Citing a a study done by the Corporation for National and Community Service, Brudney and Meijs warn that “a staggering one in three Americans evidently dropped out of volunteering between 2005 and 2006.” They note that other studies document similar problems in other countries.
The authors suggest that nonprofits in general are too preoccupied with recruiting volunteers and don’t pay enough attention to retaining them.
I’m sure you’ve heard someone lament (and maybe even have said it yourself): “we can’t find enough good volunteers.”
What if, the authors suggest, instead of treating “volunteer energy” as a resource with an inexhaustible supply, we perceived volunteers as a resource that could actually run out?
How would our behavior need to change?
I find this concept incredibly intriguing, especially because it fits very nicely into my”we’re all in this together” framework of civil society.
Imagine that you are a first time volunteer. You’ve been thinking about doing something good for your community so you’ve found your way to a volunteer job through family, friend or volunteer center. You’re excited, but a little unsure of your role and how you might contribute.
It’s likely that it may take quite a while before you hear from the organization at all. Or, they contact you quickly but they don’t really have any volunteer needs right now. No one takes the time to find out what skills you have or what else you might have to offer.
Or maybe they have a job, but in reality it is pretty undefined. You are assigned to a staff member (or another volunteer) who simply doesn’t have the time to train you and makes you feel as if you are in their way. You never really get a good idea of what you should be doing or how to Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 14, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Big ideas, Good reads, Helpful sites, Research, Strategic Thinking
Today is definitely a web discovery kind of day. It started this afternoon when I received an email from The TCC Group heralding a new study they released called “The Sustainability Formula.”
The Sustainability Formula is based on an analysis of TCC’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool.
The formula is:
Leadership + Adaptability + Program Capacity = Sustainability.
I really liked this framework (though I think there might be a few missing pieces of the definition, for example, how about something around longevity? Or resilience as in – the ability to bounce back from adversity).
I’m working on a project now with the Rhode Island Foundation’s Initiative for Nonprofit Excellence that enlists an organization assessment tool by the Marguerite Casey Foundation that is framed around the 4 Core Capacities developed by TCC. So I was particularly interested in reading this report.
But my really amazing discovery was captured in one small paragraph at the bottom of page 2. It talked about nonprofit lifecycles and offered a framework that I hadn’t bumped into before. The stages went like this:
“Stage 1: Core program development
“Stage 2: Infrastructure development for the purpose of taking programs to scale
“Stage 3: Impact expansion which is defined as community leadership that changes the systems and policies that affect an organization’s ability to achieve its mission.”
I was floored, I have to admit it. One of those AHA! moments.
Some people have AHA! moments by finding the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor. I have them when I discover amazing new organizational frameworks or research nuggets that challenge our sector’s core assumptions. (Or when I eat some really fabulous dark chocolate)
This was SO MUCH MORE VALUABLE than the typical “Start Up, Growth, Maturity, Decline/Renewal” lifecycle model I see so often. This was a lifecycle framework that was MISSION-focused.
Be still my beating heart.
As someone who tries to pay attention to new literature on nonprofits, I kept scratching my head on how I could have missed this gem. So of course I went on a Google journey to find more details about this model.
After a nonproductive search on TCC Group’s own website (though there are lots of interesting publications there), I ended up on The Philadelphia Foundation’s website where I found the article “Characteristics of High Performing Nonprofits based on Organizational Lifecycle.” Which I spent time reading.
That article referenced a 2005 BoardSource publication, Navigating the Organizational Lifecyle: A Capacity Building Guide for Nonprofit Leaders I had seen the book as a subscriber to BoardSource but I never ordered it because I figured it was just the same old same lifecycle framework. That will teach me to assume!
Yes, you may be asking about now, other than alerting your readers to all these great resources, what is the point of this blog entry?
Okay, here it is.
I regularly encounter individuals, usually good-hearted souls, who have done little research on best practices about how to build a great nonprofit. Or how best to build effective programs that address the problems or needs they’ve taken on. I’m always curious, when there is such great stuff out there usually for free, why they didn’t take the time to look.
Maybe they’ve taken to heart the old adage about curiosity killing cats and been scared away?
My problem is just the opposite. I rarely have difficulty finding really valuable information – besides Google, I’ve got great colleagues and Twitter to keep me busy.
No, my problem is trying to tear myself away from the next great read.
So, a word of advice: Try some research. You can learn a whole lot by looking, to paraphrase the great Yogi Berra.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on July 10, 2009 in Big ideas, Fundraising, Good reads, Strategic Thinking
“Give away one thing to create demand for another.” That’s the online business strategy discussed in Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine.
I had to stop my car so as not to miss all of Terry Gross’s interview with Anderson on NPR’s Fresh Air Wednesday, July 8th.
Now bear with me as I share a bit of my un-edited thinking as I was listening to the interview. (Why is it that I can’t resist exploring complex analogies on Friday afternoons?)
Anderson described how businesses are making money on the Internet by giving things away for free. I was particularly enthralled because the strategy he was describing — give the basic level away for free and then charge for the premium model — seemed to align with the radical museum membership program envisioned by Beverly Sheppard and John Falk in their 2006 book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New business models for museums and cultural organizations from Alta Mira Press.
In their book, Falk and Sheppard ask why museums (and zoos, et al) discount prices for repeat users and thus receive the least proportional revenue from their best customers. In the commonly used nonprofit Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on May 18, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Better Boards, Good reads
Can your charitable nonprofit pass the Mom test?
Let’s say your mother came to you for advice:
“Dale, you’re well off, your sisters don’t need my help. I’ve decided to leave what money I have to charity. What do you think of my giving it to the group you’re involved with?”
When deciding what to say to your Mom, you would probably ask yourself two questions.
1. Is my organization worthy of such a big gift?
You can spot a worthy organization pretty easily:
- It has passionate and competent leadership who turn dreams into reality
- The cause really matters and the programs change lives.
- It invests its money well — where it generates the greatest impact.
While worthiness is critical, it isn’t enough to meet the Mom test. You can probably think of a few worthy causes but you’d never give to the organization because you don’t trust how well they are managed.
That brings me to the second question:
2. Is this an organization that my mom could trust to use her gift well?
Trustworthy organizations take their stewardship commitments seriously. They want their donors, their clients, the public and the media to know that their trust is well founded. Trustworthiness means that you:
- Place stewardship and ethics above all else.
- Deliver on your promises.
- Avoid conflicts of interest and always make decisions in the best intereste of the community and people you serve.
- Consider every dollar and every asset a precious resource that must be used wisely.
When your board or staff are evaluating how well your organization is doing, it helps to think about your mother. Because if you don’t believe that your organization is a wise investment for your mother, it really isn’t for anyone else’s mom (or dad or sister or brother) either.
Chapter 9, How are We Doing? A 1-Hour Guide to Evaluating Your Performance as a Nonprofit Board.
You can order the book at Contributions Magazine. Just click here.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on May 5, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Communicating, Fundraising, Good reads
When did you last receive a sincere expression of gratitude for a gift?
My friend and colleague Janet Hedrick, CFRE, writes about gratitude in her book, Effective Donor Relations.
Gratitude is sincere. It is being truly thankful. It embodies a deep human connection.
Last night, my bedtime reading was the May edition of Inc. Magazine. The magazine isn’t typically a place where I expect to be inspired by articles about gratitude.
But the article Everybody Loves Zappos in the May 2009 issue of Inc. Magazine had an amazing story about gratitude and deep human connection.
In the article, CEO Tony Hsieh tells one of those legend-making tales about extraordinary customer connections.
In the story, a customer service rep was handling a return of boots from a woman who had ordered them for her husband. She was returning the boots as her husband died in a car accident before he received them. Without asking permission, the call center rep ordered flowers charged to Zappos and had them sent to the woman for her loss. Hsieh says “not only was she a customer for life, but so were those 30 or 40 people at the funeral.”
I think the story struck me so strongly because just hours before I was having a discussion with the students in my class at Simmons College that seemed so contrary to the Zappos example.
All semester, my students have been working on graduate service learning projects. Their teams have developed communications plans to support organizational changes for seven nonprofit partners.
One group has been working on a project for an arts nonprofit. The organization had recently made a number of changes to its volunteer programs. In particular, volunteers were now required to pay membership dues before they could participate in various tasks. Most of those volunteers were over 60, most fairly well-off, and a number had been volunteering for the organization for many years.
A lively discussion centered around the reason for this change. Even though the organization had seen shrinking revenues, was it a good strategic decision to reward years of volunteer service this way? How did the short term need balance against long term good will and volunteer loyalty?
Fortunately, my students designed a communications plan that really emphasized ways the organization could express sincere gratitude to their volunteers.
How would you rate yourself on the gratitude scale? What could your organization do today to increase its donor gratitude quotient? What have you done? I’d love to hear your stories.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on April 20, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Fundraising, Good reads
How do you get donors to give unrestricted gifts? This is a huge challenge for most nonprofits.
Unrestricted gifts are those given by donors with no strings attached. Nonprofits love them because they can use the funds anywhere in their organization. Unrestricted gifts are critical for funding ongoing operations — the stuff you do day in and day out that institutional funders are loathe to give to.
Unrestricted gifts are used to fund back office operations like administration, fund development and finance. While not particularly sexy, these core functions are extremely important to ensuring good management and future sustainability for your organization.
Donors are more likely to give directly to programs, or to anything that feels concrete. That’s why the local land trust can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase a critical piece of land, but barely can scrape together enough funding to get its newsletter sent on time. Or why many an organization has completed a successful capital campaign to purchase and renovate a new building, only to find it can’t meet the annual costs of operating its shiny new space.
So how do you get donors to give unrestricted gifts? To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, let’s count three ways:
- Membership. Though not my favorite, I’ve placed membership at the top of the list because it is the tactic most frequently used. Membership programs imply ongoing affinity for your organization. They suggest giving year after year and donor usually know that the giving supports the basic functions of your organization. The downside of membership is its ability to get in the way of fundraising (Yes. It’s true. More about that in a future post).
- Build donor loyalty. In her book, Donor Centered Fundraising, author researcher Penelope Burk argues that you’d be more successful in pitching designated gifts to your new or more recent donors who haven’t yet learned that your organization delivers on its promises. As you build your relationship and your reputation for results, your donors will be more comfortable investing directly in your organization, without feeling the need to control their gifts.
- Help your donors visualize their investment. While nothing is more important than building donor loyalty, I strongly suggest this approach for both new and long-standing donors. Here is how it works.
Make your case for support just as solid as a bricks and mortar campaign. Look forward three or five years (this is where having a long-term vision really makes a difference). Once you’ve quantified what societal outcomes you are trying to achieve, then add up all the costs of getting there. Add together your direct program costs, your program-related overhead costs, and the cost of the new capacity you need to build to reach your goal. What’s the total? Build your fundraising case around that amount.
You can find an example of this concept in our free Toolbox. Check out “Major Gifts are not Just for Bricks and Mortar.”
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 26, 2009 in Communicating, Fundraising, Good reads
I’m already a fan of For Impact/The Suddes Group but they just stole my heart with their wonderful little post today “9 TIps to Help you get to the ask.”
Over and over again I hear from staff and volunteers of nonprofits “I could never ask someone for money.”
Nick Fellers at The Suddes Group has just given anyone involved in raising money an amazing present with his simple and “be authentic” (tip 3) approach.
Tip 9 – “Don’t make decisions for your prospects” is a conversation I have over and over again with nonprofit staff or voluneers who spend way too much time thinking up all the reasons that someone can’t give to them and then use it as the reason to never ask.
I think you’ll really appreciate this tip sheet. Bottom line, or Tip 1, says Fellers, “Always ask.”
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