Executive Issues

If you spend any time in nonprofit resource development, you will or should develop a desire to step up to major gift solicitation. Major gift fundraising is the highest level and is not easy. Many professionals are engaged in major gift fundraising, but like a pyramid, very few excel at the highest level for a long period spanning multiple organizations...

Remember your first job? Most people do. In my case, each of my early jobs—from working as a musician while in college to my time as a pension fund executive overseeing billions of real estate assets under management—played 
a role in getting me to the next step in 
my career. Here are some lessons I took from early jobs that I still use today...

The word I hear lately more than any other is "uncertainty." Here in the U.S., every four years on Jan. 20 there is a change of power. It comes with the awesome privilege of being part of this great democratic experiment called the United States of America. In my lifetime as a voter, there have…

If a coalition of philanthropic leaders have their way, more San Diego nonprofits will be heading into the shark tank. There’s a growing movement to build a stronger social entrepreneurship ecosystem in San Diego. Supporters envision more nonprofits pitching ideas to potential backers, pursuing money-making ventures aimed at addressing social problems and seeking investment in…

Madison, Wis., has long leaned on philanthropy. When John Nolen had a vision of a city built on an isthmus, it was a small group of philanthropists led by John M. Olin who ponied up the $2,500 to publish the unique architectural plan. Since then, nearly everything people love about Madison has been built at…

Successful nonprofit organizations are run by great leaders. So, what does it take to show excellent, innovative leadership in the public sector and nonprofit worlds? These two realms often intersect, since they share similar interests: the public good, social justice, socioeconomic mobility, ending hunger and homelessness, and so on. According to Ohio University, one of…

Running a nonprofit is for those with a heart, but not for the faint of heart. In many ways, the responsibilities of a nonprofit CEO or executive director are much more demanding than those of a for-profit leader. Nonprofits often face challenges with limited resources and competing demands for those resources. It is up to…

As an industry, I think we have trouble innovating. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about our desire and ability to test. We love testing. We love setting up objectives, stating hypotheses and looking at things from a statistically valid perspective. Most of those tests are tactical, and when it comes to really moving the marble, those won’t work. What I’m talking about is strategy innovation, audience innovation or even brand-wide offer innovation...

I’ve been enjoying The Cooper Review, the satirical blog of Sarah Cooper that features weekly original articles, videos and cartoons on workplace humor. I happened to catch one of the cartoons in a recent Medium post called “9 Cartoons To Help You Avoid Any Work.” It really spoke to me about our culture of overwork,…

I was recently talking to Susan, a development director for a regional nonprofit, and she was lamenting that she had another gala to put together. Even though this gala takes an enormous amount of time and effort from the staff, the executive director and the board want to keep it going because it brings in almost half of their revenue each year. Susan wasn’t upset about all the time and effort it took to pull it off each year, but the fact that the revenue generated by the event was really in transactional gifts, not mission-oriented gifts...