Financial Independence: Six Approaches. © Gabriel Shaffer, Mutiny on Wood County, 2006 Editors' note: This article was originally published in the fall 2006 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly. Organization A has control over Nonprofit B to the extent that B is dependent on A for resources. This common relationship is the essence of resource dependency theory: the idea that organizations are not simply free actors, but are subject to the powers of outside forces. Managerial discretion remains, of course (within a limited range of choices), but larger forces loom over organizations and define what is possible for them.
The predicament for many nonprofits is that B is supposed to be serving C, but must satisfy the conditions set by A. For nonprofits seeking resources, this is their daily reality and existential dilemma. Formed for charitable purposes but existing in a market economy, nonprofits must come to terms with the world as it is if they are to gain access to the resources required to do their work. Why Long Fundraising Letters Outpull Shorter Ones. In Phoenix, Carwashes Help Groups Raise Money. Thank You To the Max: Minnesota Give to Max Day Raised $13.4 Million in 24 Hours. Note from Beth: The 3rd annual Minnesota Give to Max Day took place last month. The campaign has been profiled on this blog since it started. And every year, the good folks in Minnesota share their results and lessons learned.
It’s become an annual holiday tradition for Beth’s Blog. Minnesota’s ‘Networked Nonprofits’ raised $13.4M in one day by Jeff Achen, GiveMN.org On November 16, 2011, more than $13.4 million was raised to benefit Minnesota nonprofit organizations. Social media strategy payoff In my Nov. 14 guest blog post, “24 hours, millions of dollars, thousands of nonprofits—What gives in Minnesota? We had 150,742 visits to GiveMN.org throughout the 24 hour event. Traffic sources to the Give to the Max Day webpage on November 16. Since our outreach efforts focused on providing nonprofits with social media resources, email templates and content such as a video PSA for use on their homepages, it would seem those efforts paid off when it came to driving traffic. Owning it. Reader (1000+) Minding the Gap (July 22, 2010) | Opinion Blog. How do you inspire people, from your CEO to rural farmers to consumers, to change their ways to do good (or at least better) for society?
Okay, so you’re a change agent at a traditional nonprofit organization—or you’re a social entrepreneur who has just started a social enterprise. You’ve got your seed funding and a rock-solid business plan. Now what? How do you inspire people, from your CEO to rural farmers to consumers, to change their ways to do good (or at least better) for society? Don’t laugh. How to get people to care more about “doing good” is one of the hottest new topics making the rounds of this season’s social innovation conferences. Referred to more clinically as “the neuroscience of change,” the topic popped up for the first time last spring, at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, then again last month at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, and then again this past week, at the annual Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.
They/We Are Not Different. Nonprofit Newswire | From the Annals of Unusual Fundraising. Nonprofit Newswire | Delivering Aid to People Who Are Rarely There. May 3, 2010; Sources: The Christian Science Monitor | Leslie Clark heads a foundation that, at first blush, seems like a contradiction in terms and purpose. Her group—the Nomad Foundation—is dedicated to bringing health care and education to nomads of Niger, the world's poorest country. Unlike other humanitarian agencies that have enough struggles just getting services to people who live in one place, Clark's problem is compounded by the fact that she is trying to help migratory groups that never settle down but who are constantly on the move. The solution? Locate services at what Clark calls "fixed points," places that nomads are likely to cross as they make their way along well-traveled routes in the northern part of the country.
For example, the Christian Science Monitor reports that at one location, Doli, the foundation "dug a well, set up a cereal bank, built a two-room school, and hired a teacher to manage it. Smart Money: Is Your Favorite Charity Spying on You?
Business Model. Donor Research. Texting and Online Giving. Grants. Donors That Give More to Church Give More Elsewhere. CARE to Offer Virtual Packages. Jonathan Palmer for The New York Times Dayton Edie, left, with his wife Marta. Among the marvels it contained were canned bacon, margarine, flour, sugar, Maxwell House coffee and peanut butter. “We didn’t know what peanut butter was for,” Mrs. Edie, 85, now living in Kentucky, recalled. “We had never seen it, and it became something of a delicacy for us.” The packages spawned a nonprofit group, the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, now known as . The organization later dispensed with the packages, instead focusing on large development projects and disaster relief operations, and the term “care package” entered the vernacular. CARE is staking a claim to it again, this time with a 21st-century twist. “I came to understand that this was a part of our history that we weren’t making optimum use of,” said Helene D.
Donors also have the option of making a partial gift for a service and inviting family members, friends and colleagues to add to the virtual box. Mrs. Mr. Charities Rush to Help Japan, With Little Direction. But wealthy Japan is not impoverished Haiti. And many groups are raising money without really knowing how it will be spent — or even if it will be needed. The Japanese Red Cross, for example, has said repeatedly since the day after the earthquake that it does not want or need outside assistance. But that has not stopped the American Red Cross from raising $34 million through Tuesday afternoon in the name of Japan’s disaster victims. Roger K. He also shared a note sent by the Red Cross’s international governing body in Switzerland, a missive that was sent out to the American and other national Red Cross organizations and read in part: “At present, the Japanese society is not launching a national or international appeal, but expressions of solidarity in the form of unearmarked financial contributions would be gratefully received.”
Mr. Few charitable organizations are actually at work in Japan yet. Asked how money raised for the fund would be used, Dr. The Most Generous Online Cities Are . . . January 19, 2011; Source: Convio | Alexandria, Va., Cambridge, Mass. and Arlington, Va., for the second year in a row have topped the list as the nation’s most generous large cities based on online giving in 2010, according to Convio, a provider of Internet marketing and business management applications for nonprofits. The report ranks the 273 cities with total population of more than 100,000 based on per capita online giving and total amount donated online through Convio online fundraising tools.
The current rankings come from donations processed between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2010. The average gift size increased from $62 in 2009 to $65 in 2010 as more than $389 million was donated in the 273 major cities included in the report. Donors in the most generous cities increased their total online contributions by more than 27 percent over 2009 totals, according to Convio. Other cities in the top 10 include: Seattle, Washington, Berkeley, Calif., St. Nonprofit Newswire | Mississippi Wants to Know if All Charities Are Toeing the Line.
April 19, 2010; Associated Press | The 38,000 nonprofits registered to do business as charities in the state of Mississippi better believe it when the secretary of state Delbert Hosemann says the "check" is in the mail. Not money—but letters Hosemann is sending to check if each of these groups still deserve nonprofit status. "Mississippians are the most charitable people in the country. We need to know these groups are doing right by them," Hosemann said. Letters sent from Hosemann's office will ask questions about fundraising and activities. So his election in 2007, Hosemann, a Republican, has pursued election law changes, land reforms, securities laws amendments and regulations governing burial contracts. Changes to the law included bumping the threshold to $25,000 annually from $4,500 for charities to register with the state.
Artwork donation not appreciated. DEAR MISS MANNERS -- I own an artwork purchased from a major New York gallery and I wrote twice, to both the former director and present director of a city-owned art museum to which I financially contribute, that my will says that I leave the piece to the museum. I never received an acknowledgment. Recently, a literary magazine had a long essay on the artist on the occasion of a show of his art in a major American museum. I sent the essay to my contacts at the museum mentioning that I had never received an acknowledgment. At a museum event the other day, the museum director told me he recalled my letter but did not think it warranted a reply!
Should I change my will? GENTLE READER -- Yes, if only to spare your survivors from dealing with someone so rude. Miss Manners gathers that the museum is not that interested in this particular work of art, which is more likely to be appreciated by the major museum that showed the artist's work. GENTLE READER -- Sure there are, lots of them. Stanford Social Innovation Review : Opinion Blog : The Heartache of the Failed Hail Mary (April 9, 2010) A look at how nonprofits can improve organizational capacity in order to more effectively implement long-lasting social change.
When I speak to groups I often tell them of growing up in Minneapolis and the more than one hundred groups aimed to help my fellow neighbors and I move out of poverty. And as more and more organizations were created to help my community, the more I began to notice that there were still growing lines of those receiving free clothing at the “Free Store” on Nicollet Avenue or food from the Sabathani Food Pantry on 38th Street. The natural question for me, at that time, became that with more and more people rolling up their sleeves to help then why were there more and more people in those lines needing the help.
Of course there are many socio-economic factors that are part of the reasons for the growth of poverty in my community and that more people helping do not necessarily mean better results. Nonprofit Newswire | Arizona: Squeezing Nickels and Dimes from Nonprofits. April 13, 2010; Sierra Vista Herald | Nonprofit Quarterly readers are invited to read this newswire as an intemperate, frustrated rant. Every week we cover news items concerning states and municipalities trying to eke nickels and dimes of revenues from tax-exempt entities (student taxes, bed or patient taxes, payments in lieu of taxes, registration fees, and so many more). It’s as though state legislators and city council members imagine the nonprofit sector is brimming with surplus cash, hoarding dollars so that vital services will starve and taxpayers will be slammed.
The truth is this: State and local governments (and the feds) give away far more as tax abatements and tax subsidies to the business sector, not even counting the nation’s recent bank, insurance, and automobile bail-outs, than they ever forego in taxes or fees to nonprofits. Take Arizona, whose budget slashes aimed at nonprofit providers have been covered here on our Web site. The real story? Nonprofit Newswire | Harlem School of the Arts Too Important to Fail. April 21, 2010; New York Times | A group of donors has decided that New York City's Harlem School of the Arts, which has been training young people in dance, music, theater and visual arts for nearly 50 years, is too important to fail. After the school was forced to shut down on April 1 because its money had run out, The Herb Alpert and Starr Foundations and two anonymous givers stepped forward on Wednesday with a $1 million lifeline. In addition, the singer Mary J. Blige will lead a group of celebrities that have pledged to raise more funds that the troubled school needs to keep operating.
The New York Times also reports that New York City will continue to support the school by investing in its building and making grants. Some 3,000 students a year take classes at the school, and graduates have gone on to some of the city's best performance high schools, then excellent colleges and renowned conservatories like Juilliard. Getting Going: When to Dump a Charity. Five-Digit Giving (June 14, 2010) On Jan. 12 at 4:30 a.m., James Eberhard was woken by a telephone call from a U.S. State Department representative with the news that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had struck Haiti. “Can we turn up a text relief effort?” Asked the representative. Eberhard called his colleagues at the Denver-based company Mobile Accord and its nonprofit division mGive. Eberhard is founder and chairman of both organizations, which work together to create cell phone text donation campaigns for charities.
The results shattered records. The Haiti earthquake marked a tipping point in the evolution of text giving. That changed in March 2008, when two early players in the text donation space, Jim Manis and Jenifer Snyder, finalized negotiations with the major wireless carriers to pass 100 percent of text donations on to charities. Both the Mobile Giving Foundation and mGive work with cell phone service providers and charities to set standards, vet nonprofits, and facilitate technology and billing systems. Volunteer Nation. Smart guide to charitable giving. Should School Return Donation from Strip Club Owner? January 29, 2011; Source: Miami Herald | For some time now, parks, school football teams, and groups that support low-income children have been grateful for support from Florida businessman Joe Rodriguez. But once people learned how Rodriquez makes his money, at least one beneficiary was urged to give back a $20,000 gift.
It turns out that Rodriquez runs strip clubs in several Florida cities. According to the Miami Herald, Rodriquez' ties to the sex industry were disclosed in late January by a columnist for the Palm Beach Post. The news came right after Rodriquez made a $10,000 gift – his second for that amount in as many years – to Roosevelt Elementary in West Palm Beach. Word of Rodriquez' occupation, which he hadn't spoken about in the past, apparently has rankled some in the community. They include Anthony Verdugo, executive director of the Christian Family Coalition, who wants the school to return the money.
For his part, Rodriquez wonders what all the fuss is about.