Charitable giving topped $373 billion in 2015, a 4 percent increase over 2014, according to "Giving USA 2016," the annual report published by Giving USA Foundation and produced by Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The giving totals are the highest ever recorded for a single year. Don't have time to dig into the full report? No worries. We've compiled some of the highlights...
It’s all about your organization’s culture. And affecting your organization’s culture shift absolutely will not happen overnight. It takes patience, consistency and commitment. And, as the development director (or executive director), you primarily are responsible for building a culture of philanthropy. So how do you become a dedicated key player?...
Today’s world brings good and bad, but when a crisis strikes, people often speak out and become vocal about their pain, anger and desire to change. How should nonprofits capture this passion and turn it into engagement?...
With giving totals rising, many institutions are wondering if they should continue the difficult and costly work to acquire new donors. We’ve said before that this is a dangerous proposition, a perilous “head fake” that could end up destroying your future donor pipeline. While donor acquisition is costly, does the return on boosting donor participation…
A colleague asked me to write about what board members can do to be helpful to staff. Nonprofit board members are critical to the success of organizations. We rely on them for so many important things and are deeply grateful for all the time, skills, connections and resources they give, especially considering that the majority…
Nonprofits rarely have the luxury of big advertising budgets, and it's not often they get chances to analyze whether their ads are working. But a new study may help shed some light on the kinds of ads that actually help drive donations. Market research firm Millward Brown and the Ad Council recently set out to…
Mature charitable enterprises operating in today’s challenging environment view their compliance obligations through the lens of stewardship. They see risk and opportunity as two sides of the same coin. An organization that effectively manages its compliance risk is almost certainly, by definition, an organization poised to take expedient advantage of available opportunity...
Many organizations, nonprofit and for-profit alike, are strengthened when they team with others. The legal services firm Ralli Partnership Law researched eight of the most famous business partnerships and came up with the great infographic below (keep reading after for the rest of this post): It is important to partner, but why should a nonprofit…
A nice, fat paycheck is all well and good, but new research has revealed a surprising price tag on the job satisfaction that comes with working at a nonprofit organization: almost $40,000! The study, which was published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, compared the happiness levels of people who worked at nonprofit organizations with…
Not long ago, the African country Malawi was a donor darling. Being dirt poor and ravaged by AIDS, it was needy; with just 17 million inhabitants, a dollop of aid might visibly improve it. Better still, it was more-or-less democratic, and its leader, Joyce Banda, was welcome at Westminster and the White House. In 2012,…
