Accountability

Dubbed “The Most Wanted Gun in America” by The New York Times, the AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle available to citizens, is turning out to be a popular choice for fundraiser giveaways. (No, really.) But when Second Amendment Sports, a gun shop in McHenry, Ill., announced it would join the trend and raffle off a Smith & Wesson AR-15 modern sporting rifle to benefit the victims of the Orlando shooting, it hit a snag. The law...

Legislation introduced in the Senate last week would open the American Red Cross to outside oversight that it has long resisted. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced the bill following his staff's lengthy investigation that raised questions about the charity’s spending after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and documented how Red Cross leaders resisted an earlier congressional inquiry...

We all know that millions of Americans enjoy volunteerism. All of us strive to identify, recruit and orient volunteers each year. We also know that, for our organizations to continue to stimulate volunteer engagement, we must provide meaningful opportunities for volunteers to engage in win-win situations. In order to provide those, we need to have those volunteer experiences for ourselves...

Good news for fundraisers everywhere. Giving is up! According to Giving USA’s 2016 report, which was recently released, giving is up across the board. Americans gave more than $373 billion dollars in 2015, breaking the record set in 2014. This might be hard to hear, but if your organization didn’t meet its goal, it might…

The American Red Cross is having a rough go of things lately—a mounting deficit, layoffs, more questions over its responses to recent disasters. And now, a "super racist" pool safety poster. The poster, part of the organization's swim safety efforts, features a diverse group of swimmers frolicking about in a public pool, with arrows pointing to certain swimmers indicating "cool" or "not cool" behavior...

Good customer service is not always something we talk about in the nonprofit sector. As a sector, we often veil the concept in euphemisms, like “donor-centric fundraising” or “quality case-management.” Industry slang aside, the concepts of good customer service are the foundation of any good organization...

If you have watched or read any news since the U.K. voted to exit the European Union last week, it is very likely these words were mentioned in the coverage: uncertainty, volatility, instability. Financial markets have dropped sharply. Nobody is quite sure what will happen. I don’t know about you, but this certainly put me…

The Miami Dolphins donated more than $5 million to the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center on Wednesday, the largest single amount ever given by an NFL team to a charity. The funds were raised through the Dolphins Cancer Challenge (DCC), which includes fundraising bike rides of varying lengths that end at the Dolphins' stadium. "I'm looking…

Last week, I went home to West Virginia, but I did not expect to drive right into a 1,000-year flood. Disaster hit my home state in a big way. That said, what impressed me the most when seeing the flooded areas was how West Virginians are working very hard to survive in any way possible...

An earthquake fractured many lives in Haiti in 2010, with 1.5 million losing their homes and 160,000 losing their lives. To help Haitians pick up the pieces, many donated to the American Red Cross, which received about $487.6 million in donations. Those funds went to the Haiti Assistance Project, an initiative that projected to build 700 homes in the nation's poor neighborhood of Campeche...