Continuing yesterday’s thread, I think we might need a new job title. “Fundraising” is stigmatized – it sounds transaction-y and narrow and kind of like something you don’t want to do. (If there’s a job out there that no one can fill, then I probably don’t want it, right?) “Development” is not so great either [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘non-profits’
March 16, 2009
A ’sustainable’ revenue stream?
Hats off to Nell Edgington at the Social Velocity blog for a post titled “The Critical Alignment of Mission, Money and Competence,” which kicked off an interesting conversation between Nell, me, Sean Stannard-Stockton who writes the Tactical Philanthropy blog, Nathanial Whittmore who writes the Social Entrepreneurship blog for Change.org, and Kjerstin Erickson, the CEO of [...]
February 9, 2009
The core skill of innovators
In reflecting on how we create innovation in the social sector, I came across this great talk by Randy Nelson of Pixar University. He starts off by describing the problem NASA had: when they were looking to hire someone to walk on the moon, they faced the problem that no one was deeply qualified for [...]
February 9, 2009
Should foundation program officers be more like venture capitalists? (Part 2 of 2)
(This post first appeared on the Tactical Philanthropy blog, as part of a conversation Sean Stannard-Stockton kicked off on creating a ‘capital market’ for philanthropy. It is the continuation of my earlier post on whether foundation program officers should be more like venture capitalists.)
One of the big problems we need to solve as a sector [...]
January 14, 2009
Kiva and Acumen overhead ratios redux
Sean Stannard-Stockton picked up my post Why overhead ratios are meaningless for Kiva and Acumen Fund in his Tactical Philanthropy Blog, and in reading his summary of my post I realized that I wasn’t as clear as I could have been in the original post.
I was trying to make two separate points, and I think [...]
January 13, 2009
Job security in the nonprofit sector
For those in (or interested in) the nonprofit sector, today starting at noon (in about 2 hours) the Chronicle of Philanthropy is holding an online discussion titled “The Recession and Your Career: How to Become an Indispensable Asset” featuring Nick Fellers, Karen Katz and Lynne Sarikas.
I’m curious to see how the discussion unfolds. That said, [...]
January 12, 2009
Why overhead ratios are meaningless for Kiva and Acumen Fund
Matt Flannery, the CEO of Kiva, wrote an excellent post on nonprofit overhead over on the Social Edge blog. Kiva has been a game-changer in the poverty alleviation space: they use Kiva.org to connect donors to microfinance loan recipients in the developing world. What’s important is the loan part — rather than getting a grant [...]
January 8, 2009
The psychology of real
Today I was talking about the economy with someone who I respect a lot. She said that we still don’t know how much of what’s going on in the economy is real and how much is psychology.
I respectfully disagreed. What strikes me most about this economic crisis is that what’s psychology is real. There’s no [...]
December 29, 2008
Becoming a must-read blog (or, tackling my RSS feeds)
As part of my year-end housecleaning, I’ve been trying to catch up on the 30 or so blogs that are in my RSS feed. It’s been time-consuming and stressful.
(for those of you not using an RSS reader, I encourage you to start. It makes blog-reading incredibly easy and frees up your Inbox too. I use [...]
December 26, 2008
Should nonprofit leaders be like boiled broccoli?
Nicholas Kristof had a very interesting column in Tuesday’s NY Times called “The Sin of Doing Good,” focusing on Dan Pallotta and his new book, “Uncharitable.” Kristoff leads off the column with this question: “If a businessman rakes in a hefty profit while doing good works, is that charity or greed?”
Pallotta ran a for-profit company [...]
