Want to lead? Run a good meeting. That’s advice from Ken Phillips, my former boss at Plan USA (when it was Foster Parents Plan). Ken invited me to co-present a workshop with him as part of the AFP ICON 2021. The workshop runs on June 29th from 3:50–5:05 EDT . Unfortunately, all the workshops are …
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Continue readingWhat does your board know about fundraising? I wanted to share my podcast interview on boards and fundraising with Steven Halasnik of Nonprofit MBA. https://tinyurl.com/ygmn72x6 What does your board know about fundraising? Start here: First and foremost, the board needs to ensure that its nonprofit is making an important difference for its community, its constituents, or …
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Continue readingAnne Wallestad, the CEO of BoardSource, has been rocking the nonprofit universe this month with the release of The Four Principles of Purpose-Driven Boards. I encourage you to read her March 10, 2021 article in Stanford Social Innovation Review. What makes Anne’s article so noteworthy isn’t that her sentiment is new. But when BoardSource speaks, …
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Continue readingMonday was a sad day for me. It was time to step off the board of Blackstone Academy Charter School. Have I mentioned already how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE this school? I’d be surprised if I haven’t because I usually find a way to promote Blackstone regardless of the situation I’m in. If you …
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Continue readingIn the P.C. (pre-Covid) year of 2018, a team* of consultants, members of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management Governance Community of Practice set out to learn more about the formal leaders of nonprofit boards. We assigned the phrase board leaders to refer to officers and committee chairs. Who responded? Through the magic of survey monkey …
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Continue readingWhat to do. What to do. Revulsion, anger, sadness, resolve. All of these emotions have been filling my head since Charlottesville. Well, really for much longer but seeing Neo-Nazis and Klansmen in the streets made them very raw again. I found myself weeping reading some of the first hand accounts coming through my Facebook feed. …
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Continue readingThe board’s role in approving the budget provides a great teaching tool for the difference between management and governance.. Okay board, what are you really approving? In the typical organization, your Executive Director with her leadership team have crafted the budget to review with the board of directors. But when the budget gets to the …
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Continue readingYes, the election left me gobsmacked. But this is no time to act like a deer in the headlights. Hundreds in my community and across the US are already thinking and planning to prepare to act strategically. You don’t have to be for or against the incoming administration to recognize that a lot is going …
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Continue readingWhat are the basic principles of nonprofit governance? Friday I attended an ARNOVA colloquium called A Pluralistic Perspective on Nonprofit Governance: How should context be taken into account? Four non-US academics cautioned us to think about the many factors that influence how governance is practiced in civil society organizations. They hailed from the UK, Southeast Asia, …
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Continue readingThe tough challenge for all volunteer nonprofits is finding people to do the work that isn’t so much fun to most people, jobs like fundraising, membership, financial management, communications, human resource management, IT support — you get it.
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