At the Center for Effective Philanthropy conference, one of the most interesting sessions was a discussion of scale between the successful nonprofits Nurse-Family Partnerships and Homeboy Industries and funders the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and the California Endowment. The session was titled Promises and Pitfalls of Going to Scale and examined the different ways that [...]
Category Archives: nonprofits
Should Nonprofits Become Obsolete?
March 16, 2009 – 11:34 am
Last week Google released Google Voice, a universal phone number that ties together your various phone numbers, email, SMS, and voice over IP addresses. It includes a central voicemail box. The product is a revamped version of the service previously offered under the name Grandcentral (which Google bought). My friend Allan Benamer, writes the Non-Profit [...]
Do Teachers Deserve to be Paid Well?
March 11, 2009 – 9:45 am
During the discussions we’ve been having about nonprofit pay (see the 46 comments on this post), I’ve taken the position that employees should be compensated for the “impact” they have on an organization regardless of whether the organization is a nonprofit or a for-profit. I wrote about this last summer in the Financial Times and [...]
Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter?
January 29, 2009 – 10:35 am
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations is “a coalition of more than 350 grantmaking organizations committed to building strong and effective nonprofit organizations.” On their website they write: Why is it important to focus on organizational effectiveness? Nonprofits cannot have impact unless they have well trained, capable staff, strong management and a committed, accountable board of directors. [...]
Best Places to Work & Nonprofit Performance
January 6, 2009 – 9:46 am
Yesterday, Kari Dunn Saratovsky wrote on the new Case Foundation Blog about ranking nonprofits based on how good of a place they are to work: Young people have become in many ways disillusioned with the top-down hierarchical approaches that are so often found in traditional nonprofit organizations. Instead they embrace a leadership style that has [...]
Seth Godin on Expertise & Passion
December 31, 2008 – 4:20 am
Underlying the debate on nonprofits paying their employees market rate salaries and generally using the profit incentive to maximize social good, is a debate around whether passion is the main ingredient for producing social impact or whether it is expertise. Seth Godin wrote on this very topic yesterday and with his permission I’m republishing his [...]
Another Foundation Funds FORGE
December 12, 2008 – 10:44 am
The day after I laid out Why I’m Investing in FORGE, I received an email from an anonymous foundation asking me for additional commentary on my rationale. Today I was cc’d on this letter that they sent to FORGE. This is being reprinted with permission: Dear Kjerstin, It was great to meet at your office [...]
Clara Miller on an Equity Ethic
December 12, 2008 – 10:14 am
This article appeared in the Financial Times on December 9. It is authored by my friend Clara Miller, CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund. It is reprinted with permission. More from non-profits now means less in futureBy Clara Miller In the aftermath of the economic tsunami, many non-profit organisations will be called upon to do [...]
FORGE Final Report
December 10, 2008 – 9:19 am
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 [...]
Charity Navigator’s Big Move
December 8, 2008 – 11:15 am
Long time readers of this blog know that through out much of 2007, I wrote critically about Charity Navigator many times. I also played hosted to numerous guest blog posts and reader comments from people who were critical of Charity Navigator. The heart of my argument was that Charity Navigator’s core metric rewards nonprofits that [...]
