Staff Salaries Matter
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Everyone values the work that nonprofits do. But not everyone values the people at nonprofits who do the actual work. I’ve repeatedly encountered nonprofit boards that fail to invest appropriately…
Read More Three Nonprofit Fundraising Ideas That Sound Good, But Aren’t
H.L Mencken famously said, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” One problem facing nearly every nonprofit organization is a shortage of…
Read More A Catchy, Popular, Attractive, and Bad Idea
[This post was co-published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on August 9, 2016.] The charitable world has been buzzing recently about a new idea from the Minneapolis Foundation: The Pay It Forward…
Read More The False Allure of Charitable Endowments
[Note: This article was co-posted March 2, 2015 at Inside Philanthropy.) In her recent Inside Philanthropy guest blog post defending donor-advised funds, Council on Foundations CEO Vikki Spruill asserts that…
Read More Think Before You Endow
I was recently asked at a public forum why I don’t like endowments. I answered: “It’s not so much that I don’t like endowments. It’s that nonprofits and their donors…
Read More Waiting. And Waiting.
There’s an epidemic of deferred philanthropy in this country. What do I mean? Let’s imagine that your house is burning. Firefighters arrive on the scene, and they offer you three…
Read More Endowments, Pro and Con
OK. I admit it. Sometimes I go a bit overboard to prove a point. A friend of mine made me realize this the other day. She chided me: “You’re always…
Read More A More Powerful Kind of Legacy
My friend Susan is a fan of my blog and usually sends a note to say that she agreed with what I wrote that week. But not when she read…
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