I recently gave this presentation entitled “Being on a Board: What’s It All About?” at the Grant Professionals MidAtlantic Conference and I am sharing the slides with you here. I was asked to give this presentation because many grant professionals get asked to be on a Board and some would like to be on a [...]
I recently encountered an organization that’s on the cusp of a big change … a change about which its huge constituency is feeling a bit uncertain. The agency has never had a chief executive, and that’s part of the new picture that has some supporters skeptical. After all, things have gone okay without one, why [...]
The donor pool can be (and has been!) sliced and diced in a variety of ways. My preferred method of grouping donors is by motivation: The” Social Donor” uses charitable contributions to attract personal visibility and social prestige. Although no one admits is, there are plenty of major gift donors who engage in philanthropy as [...]
Too Often, What We Call a Program, Really Isn’t If you spent the day guiding old ladies across the street and someone gave you a dollar for doing it, would that mean you’re delivering a “program?” What many people call a program is too often just a sporadic set of disconnected activities — it’s not [...]
On which side of philanthropy’s great divide do you stand? More importantly, where do your donors and potential donors stand? The divide used to be less noticeable, but with the explosion of social media over the past five years, tweeting, blogging, and linking has brought the great divide to the forefront. On the one side [...]
I’ve worked with nonprofit organizations for a very long time. I’ve noticed two distinctly different approaches to leading: reactive versus proactive. You’ll very likely notice each of the two distinctly different types in the following paragraphs. Fundraising The reactive nonprofit is continually fundraising and then spending whatever funds are obtained — so the organization is [...]
In another sterling example of checking brains at the nonprofit boardroom door, I recently learned of a charity that is financially on the ropes. Poor decisionmaking, weak leadership, the struggling economy, and ho-hum programming have this cultural entity (with a multi-million facility) on the verge of collapse. No one is currently at the helm, and [...]
Last week, I did a workshop among nonprofit Executive Directors. Some of them expressed great frustration at the exorbitant compensation of CEOs of very large, for-profit companies. They mentioned that many of the companies’ products were very poor quality anyway. One participant offered a rather novel assertion that the pay of those CEOs should be [...]
“Capacity building” is a term from the Grantonese language usually referring to an organization’s systemic effort to secure ever greater amounts of money on a consistent basis. It is not to be confused with “sustainability,” another word from the original Grantonese, referring to that state of fiscal nirvana in which a nonprofit believes it will [...]
Marion is a popular facilitator of workshops and Board retreats. Her expertise includes strategic planning, board development, governance and harnessing the power of technology. [Read more ...]
Priya Small has extensive experience in collaborative evaluation planning, instrument design, data collection, and grant writing and facilitation.Provided by
