Yup, This About Sums It Up

I was on the lookout for a second tip for this week’s Advisor, and I was lead to the Web site, “Nonprofit Good Practice Guide: Promoting the Power of Shared Knowledge,” hosted by the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy & Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The guide is a compilation of glossaries and articles about best practices for nonprofit management, broken down into categories including advocacy, evaluation, financial management, fundraising, governance, marketing and communications, organizational management, technology, and volunteer management.

Drilling down into the fundraising section, I found a box titled, “Pitfalls,” with one live link — “Failing to Inform, Educate, and Motivate Donors” — that, when clicked, produced a separate box reading, simply, “An uninformed, uneducated and unmotivated donor is one who will probably not make future gifts.”

To that, I say, bravo, Johnson Center! You’ve managed to sum up, in a small handful of simple words, one of the big problems facing many nonprofits today — the shift in attitude from “donor as ATM” to “donor as engaged, involved, motivated partner in furthering our mission.”

You can find the Johnson Center’s Nonprofit Good Practice Guide at www.npgoodpractice.org