On October 21, I called the Forging Ahead blog “The Most Important Nonprofit Blog” because of the way that executive director Kjerstin Erickson was embracing radical transparency in response to their fundraising crisis. On November 3, the Tactical Philanthropy Community responded with a number of offers of assistance. The lead assistance came from Curtis Chang [...]
Category Archives: Fundraising
Donors Turning to Wealth Advisors
December 3, 2008 – 10:27 am
In each of the past few years, Bank of America and The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University have conducted a study of high net-worth philanthropy. The study focuses on the giving of wealthy families, not institutional foundations (although the wealthy families may very well have their own foundations). You can find a summary of [...]
More FORGE
October 30, 2008 – 11:06 am
A Tactical Philanthropy reader “Leanne” has taken the conversation to the next logical step and is offering to connect FORGE with funding leads. Leanne write: I sent a link to a foundation a few days ago to the info. email on FORGE’s website. I know some of us have access to funders and information/connections that [...]
FORGE & Transparency
October 29, 2008 – 9:00 am
A great conversation is running in the comments section to my FORGE update. If you care about nonprofit transparency, I think this is a conversation you need to be a part of. We have a real life social experiment going on. This isn’t a theoretical argument. If FORGE doesn’t take the right steps, they’re going [...]
FORGE Update
October 28, 2008 – 7:07 am
Last week I wrote about the nonprofit FORGE, who’s executive director Kjerstin Erickson has been using her blog on the Social Edge website to chronicle the effect of the financial crisis on her organization. For FORGE, this isn’t just an experiment in radical transparency, they are in very real danger of going out of business. [...]
Philanthropic IPOs
October 23, 2008 – 9:50 am
From the Ottawa Citizen (hat tip to Ani Hurwitz): Non-profit ‘IPO’ invests in future of girls The TSX may be flagging, but a Toronto-based non-profit foundation is betting that the IPO it offered yesterday at the exchange is the way to raise $1 million to fund programs for girls by the end of the year. [...]
The Most Important Nonprofit Blog
October 21, 2008 – 3:03 pm
Forging Ahead, hosted on the Social Edge website, just became THE must read nonprofit blog. The quick synopsis of the blog: Kjerstin Erickson was 20 when she launched FORGE. She didn’t have a business plan. She didn’t have a revenue model. She didn’t have connections. And she didn’t have a penny. But she now works [...]
Network for Good Charity Badge & Philanthropic “Markets”
August 11, 2008 – 11:20 am
A couple weeks ago my wife decided to raise money to save an art therapy program at a public school in a disadvantaged area of the San Francisco Bay Area where we live. She had spent the last year as a volunteer art therapist at the school during a program to complete her masters degree. [...]
Online Grant Applications
June 25, 2008 – 10:10 am
Flaw #9 from the Project Streamline report: More than 80 percent of the grantmakers who responded to our survey reported that they have taken steps to make their information gathering practices “more efficient and streamlined for nonprofit applicants.” …Many streamlining strategies have turned out to be useful to foundations and their grantees. Yet others, notably [...]
Fundraising Gymnastics
June 18, 2008 – 3:46 pm
Flaw # 7 from the Project Streamline report: The most commonly cited effect of the foundation funding system is that nonprofits continually reinvent their programs—at least on paper—in response to foundations’ preference for the “new and different,” and reluctance to pay core operating support. Application and reporting requirements also cause nonprofits to develop strategies that [...]
