Roger’s Rule

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The most generous donors don’t want to pay for everything themselves. When I was a young (still in my twenties) executive director of a small human service agency we had…
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An Ahoy Moment

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In the early years after Alexander Graham Bell’s big discovery, people couldn’t agree on how to respond when the telephone rang. About half the people said, “Hello!” (That was the…
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Getting Paid — Part I

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Let’s talk about nonprofit salaries. The greatest expenditure by most nonprofits is for staff salaries, which makes sense: a nonprofit typically doesn’t produce goods, as a manufacturer does, but services,…
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The Big Squeeze

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When I was a kid, I loved the TV series “Batman.” There was a scene in every other episode, it seemed, where the caped crusader found himself trapped in a…
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Follow the Money

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It’s important to know how people get paid. Once you understand that, you can see how financial motivations affect their actions. (more…)
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Getting Something for Nothing

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Sometimes relatively insignificant measures can assume an absurdly disproportionate importance. For decades U.S. News and World Reports has been ranking the country’s top universities and colleges. These rankings have taken…
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