Executive Issues

Eric is the development officer for a youth-related charity in the Southeast. Eric, his executive-director boss and I had a very productive 30-minute phone call a couple of weeks ago. Eric wants to be perfect. So does his boss. Wouldn’t we all?

If you are a leader in any way, shape or form, mushrooms can roll uphill on you. It doesn’t matter whether you are leading your event income department, your 10-year-old in doing homework, your Boy Scout troop or your company—if you lead, the mushroom can roll uphill on you. The worst of it is—if the mushroom is rolling uphill on you, it is because you let it, even unwittingly asked for it.

I remember when, decades ago, a community foundation in the Northeast decided to study the outcome of a grants initiative to build fundraising capacity at local nonprofits. Many of those grants were targeted to seed the funding of a development director under the assumption that the position would pay for itself many times over in subsequent…

The nonprofit sector is changing, and you need to be ready. So, NonProfit PRO reached out to some of the sector’s brightest minds and biggest innovators for predictions on what’s in store for the 
coming year. In all, we received 80 trends from 44 leaders at 34 nonprofits, agencies and consulting groups, covering everything from leadership issues to giving trends to big ideas...

Busy is a term we’ve come to embrace in our society and have even glorified the meaning. You’re busy. I’m busy. We’re all busy. So naturally, your organization’s board chair and CEO are, no doubt, busy. But there’s one thing that simply can’t be put on the backburner if you want your organization to run…

Eighteen nonprofits located in or near Richmond, Va., have reported receiving donation offers from an alleged British philanthropist—who was actually a scam artist....

Peekskill, N.Y, Mayor Frank Catalina is pushing to establish new rules nonprofits must follow before the city selects them to distribute federal and state funds, including a ban on awarding grants to elected officials. In an email Saturday afternoon to council members, Catalina wrote that he plans to work with the city manager and city…

As customer relationship management systems (CRMs) take on a larger role in the nonprofit sector, the admin role is becoming critical for the operations of a data-driven organization. If you have recently taken on the responsibility of an admin, or if this position is in your future, you may wonder if you have what it…

Big strides recently have been made in the acknowledgment that overhead ratios are poor indicators of an organization’s impact or financial efficiency. Although the movement toward outcomes-based measurement offers a promising alternative to understanding impact, very little has been done to truly shift the sector’s understanding of what it takes—or even means—for nonprofits to be…

I was talking to a very talented major gifts officer who had a long track record of success prior to his current assignment. I could tell he was very frustrated. And he felt misunderstood. To put it plainly, he could not get management to understand that without program information he would not be successful....