Cause Marketing

It is a trend that even small grassroots nonprofits can become involved in, and this article from Nonprofit About.com is a good overview.

Even though I share the same skepticism about cause marketing as the article's author, for some nonprofits it is a natual fit and should be utilized.

An excerpt, with links at the jump.

“In what seems another life, I once taught a course about the history of American Consumerism. Although I tried not to turn the course into a rant about runaway consumerism and big business, I'm afraid it was pretty tough.

“As cause marketing came on the scene, I was cautious and reluctant, not sure anything good could come out of this "collusion" of cause and companies.

“However, if there was a battle to hold the line on cause marketing, it is clear that it has been lost. And maybe that is just as well. After all, if we want companies to be responsible (CSR), then it's hard not to accept cause marketing as part of the CSR mix.

“Plus, nonprofits and businesses have proved themselves to be very adept at blending marketing and causes. Causes have welcomed the promotional power that they otherwise would not have, and companies enjoy the "halo" affect for their products.

“What we reluctant cause shoppers can do is keep tabs on the trends, point out the differences between good cause marketing and bad, and push the field to more inclusiveness where small, local organizations have just as much of a shot at landing a business partner as do better branded, national nonprofits.

“Here are the trends that seem to dominate today's cause marketing scene:

“Trend #1: Growth

“The trend for cause marketing is definitely up and rosy. Cone Communications recently released the results of a global survey that found that consumers everywhere are on board:

• 81% of consumers around the world want companies to address key social and environmental issues; 93% say companies should go beyond just legal compliance to operate responsibly; and 94% expect companies to analyze and evolve their businesses to make their impact as positive as possible.”

Fundraising 2011

It has been a challenging period for nonprofit fundraising, so this article from Nonprofit About.com is a good overview of what some of the current research is telling us.

An excerpt, with links at the jump.

“I'm swearing off watching the stock market daily. I've decided to check in on my investments only once a month or so. I may even wait until the end of the year. That's because I'm getting a bad case of motion sickness watching the gyrations of the financial markets.

“Unfortunately, nonprofits can't ignore the fundraising tickers for their own organizations, nor for the sector as a whole. As dizzying as it sometimes seems, tracking the trends is part of the planning that must go on, whether it's for your end-of-year fundraising campaign, or looking out to 2012 and beyond.

“Over the past few weeks we've had a mountain of data come in via at least three surveys that leave us wondering what the trends really are.

“First up was the Nonprofit Research Collaborative's Nonprofit Report for Summer/Early Fall 2011. The Philanthropy Journal has a good summary of that survey, the upshot of which is that the fundraising climate is still tough.

“According to this survey, 44% of the nonprofits surveyed reported raising more in the first half of 2011, 20% raised less, and 25% raised the same amount. These figures are pretty close to the same figures for 2010, but are dramatically down from before the Great Recession.

“This week, the Chronicle of Philanthropy released an extensive survey of its Philanthropy 400. The list is made up of the 400 organizations that raise the most from private sources and are considered a bellwether for whence the sector goes. The Philanthropy 400 groups raise almost $1 of every $4 donated to charities in the US.

“The top 400 organizations did increase their donations by a median of 4.7% in 2011, much better than the 3.5% in 2010. However, that increase did not come close to overcoming the 11% decline they experienced in 2009. All in all, the report was pretty gloomy.”

Book Review. Giving 2.0

This is a petty good review of a new book, Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World, by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, which makes it sound worth a read and I have ordered it so will let you know what I think after I get a chance to take a look at it.

The review is from Nonprofit About.com.

An excerpt.

“Laura is well positioned to overview the current state of charitable giving and has played many roles within it...from founding a nonprofit to setting up family foundations to volunteering and meeting a wide range of givers, industry insiders, and social ventureneers of all types.

“Laura also understands the hearts of charitable people, no matter what their resources, pedigree, age, or position on the economic ladder. We all want the same things...to help, to make a difference, to bequeath a better world to our children.

“What I liked especially about Laura's book is that it fully engages with the web 2.0 world. It's hard to remember that this new world of online everything is only about a dozen years old. Yes, we were finding our way around it, in what now seem like unbelievably awkward ways, back in the 90s (remember paying by the minute to access the web through AOL?), but the online world as we now glide around it is relatively new.

“As the web has blossomed, so has the charitable world. Now nonprofits almost always have websites, and the number of giving "gateways" has grown to dozens from just a few only recently. It can be confusing for all of us, even as we love the variety and multitude of opportunities to give back.

“Laura takes all of that into account, addressing both traditional ways of planning and executing one's charitable giving and also how to do so using the tools of the online world.”

Peter Senge’s Work

I first encountered his works through his magisterial book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, and recently purchased the 2006 revised edition, along with his 2008 book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, and my admiration for his work continues to grow.

If you are a nonprofit leader who has been exploring the discipline of organizational development—and if you aren’t, you should be—then he is one thinker whose work you should become familiar with; and for a wonderful conversation between two truly great organizational thinkers, I suggest getting a copy of Leading in a Time of Change: A Conversation with Peter F. Drucker & Peter M. Senge.

From Senge’s 2008 book, an excerpt:

“three guiding ideas [that] stand out as essential for creating a more sustainable future.”

1. There is no viable path forward that does not take into account the needs of future generations. The term sustainability is widely used to express the need to live in the present in ways that do not jeopardize the future….

2. Institutions matter. Today’s world is shaped not by individuals alone, but by the networks of businesses and governmental and nongovernmental institutions that influence the products we make, the food we eat, the energy we use, and our responses to problems that arise from those systems…

3. All real change is grounded in new ways of thinking and perceiving. As Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”… (pp. 9-10)

Principles & Compassion

A perplexing situation that has been obvious for generations is how some of the largest foundations begun with money from compassionate American capitalists have morphed into some of the most virulent opposition against capitalism and America.

Fortunately, every so often, principles arise (Bravo Goldman Sachs) as this story from the Wall Street Journal reports.

An excerpt.

“Earlier this month, hundreds of New Yorkers received an unusual dinner invitation from the Lower East Side People's Federal Credit Union.

“The Credit Union, a small lender serving New York's poor, was holding a fund-raiser to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Among the chief sponsors listed on the invitation was Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

“Among the honorees: "Occupy Wall Street."

“They might as well have asked Marie Antoinette to dig into her purse to support Madame Defarge's knitting business.

“Shortly after the invitation was sent out, Goldman withdrew its name from the dinner. It also pulled the plug on its $5,000 funding pledge.

“The debate that ensued—between bankers and nonprofit chiefs, philanthropists and financiers—turned a modest fund-raising dinner into a heated battleground between Wall Street and the Occupy protestors, exposing contradictions on both sides.

“On one side was Goldman Sachs, which told the credit union it didn't want its name or money used to celebrate a protest movement known for placards like "Goldman Sachs is the work of the devil," dinner organizers said. The investment bank's giant glass-and-steel headquarters tower is just blocks away from the protest headquarters in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.

“On the other side of the debate were several hosts and board members of the credit union, who said honoring the protesters is more important than the money from Goldman—even though the funds were slated to cover a quarter of the dinner's $20,000 cost.

"Their money was welcome, but not at the price of giving up what we believe in," said Pablo DeFilippi, one of the dinner hosts and associate director of member development at the National Federal of Community Development Credit Unions. "We lost their $5,000, but we have our principles."

Hybrid Nonprofits

An excellent article from Harvard Business Weekly about the challenges they face in fulfilling their mission.

An excerpt.

“For those who like to view things in black and white, it's tempting to divide the working world into two camps. There is the for-profit sector, primarily driven by the prospect of financial success. And then there's the not-for-profit world, which eschews the almighty dollar in the pursuit of curing societal ills. In reality, though, the line between the two is growing blurrier.

"In the not-for-profit sector, a number of organizations are trying to be less dependent on donations and grants," says Julie Battilana, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. "In the meantime, facing increased public pressure to help address societal problems, for-profit firms have adopted social responsibility policies, which have pushed them to focus more on social initiatives."

"Some of them have been accused of losing sight of their social mission, or even having a negative impact on the populations they were trying to help"

“In the wake of this evolution over the past decade, more organizations have adopted a hybrid business model in which a social mission is the primary goal, but they still aim to generate enough commercial revenue so they can survive and thrive without depending on charitable donations like a typical nonprofit would. Commercial microfinance organizations often adopt a hybrid model, for example: they provide business loans to poor people who wouldn't traditionally qualify, but they still depend on the loan recipients paying them back with interest.

“The main problem with the model is that hybrid organizations run the risk of suffering from so-called mission drift—meaning that they stray from their original goals—usually by focusing on profits to the detriment of the social good, but sometimes vice versa.

"Mission drift has been identified as a potential problem among microfinance organizations," says Battilana, who has been studying hybrid organizations for several years. "Some of them have been accused of losing sight of their social mission, or even having a negative impact on the populations they were trying to help."

“According to Battilana, there are two key questions that leaders must address to keep the mission on course while still making enough money to sustain that mission: One, whom should you hire to strike a healthy balance between idealism and the bottom line? And two, what's the best way to socialize new hires to stay focused?”

The Learning Organization

Becoming one is a key attribute of success, whether forprofit or nonprofit and the leading thinker in this field is Peter Senge, whose magisterial, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, is the one book you need to have in your library.

This article from Stanford Social Innovation Review examines the difficulties involved in actually becoming a learning organization.

An excerpt.

“Reinventing the wheel—this well-worn phrase describes one of the oldest of human follies: undertaking a project or activity without tapping into the knowledge that already exists within a culture or community. Individuals are blessed with a brain that, some of the time, remembers what we’ve already learned—or at least that we’ve learned something. But what about organizations?

“Consider the views of Kim Oakes, director of sharing and communities of practice at the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a national network of 99 charter schools serving 27,000 students via 1,900 teachers. Oakes told Bridgespan’s research team: “We know that about 80 percent of our teachers create materials from scratch. … It became increasingly important to connect our teachers, so that they could build upon one another’s ideas rather than work in isolation.”

“Or consider World Vision, an international Christian development organization with an annual budget of more than $2 billion operating in 93 countries. World Vision was facing the consequences of rapid growth. In the words of Eleanor Monbiot, its senior director for knowledge management: “We were growing at 10 to 15 percent a year. We had moved from everybody knowing each other vaguely, to a breaking point. … The No. 1 need was to know what people were up to, where the best practices lay.”

“KIPP, World Vision, and a host of other nonprofits, large and small, are tackling the challenge of making their organizations as smart as the individuals who constitute them. In short, they are engaging in the hard work of organizational learning: The intentional practice of collecting information, reflecting on it, and sharing the findings, to improve the performance of an organization.

“Authors ranging from the late business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. to MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer Peter Senge have emphasized the value of knowledge and learning inside organizations. But, to use another well-worn phrase, this is easier said than done. In the fall of 2010, a Bridgespan Group team surveyed 116 nonprofits about how they learn—and how they translate the knowledge gained into practice, to increase their impact and fulfill their missions. We then explored these topics through interviews with more than half a dozen organizations, which were recommended by their peers for their innovative approaches to learning.

“The results of the survey indicate that nonprofit leaders care deeply about capturing and sharing knowledge across their programs and fields. But they also identify three significant impediments to organizational learning: a lack of clear and measurable goals about using knowledge to improve performance; insufficient incentives for individuals or teams to participate in organizational learning activities; and uncertainty about the most effective processes for capturing and sharing learning. These issues also surface in forprofit organizations, according to outside studies, where knowledge hoarding between business units can result from competition for resources. In the nonprofit sector, however, 97 percent of survey respondents said their leaders value knowledge sharing as a means to achieve their missions. Still, many of them struggle to do it well.”

Nonprofit Voters

An interesting article from Blue Avocado about the results of a voting survey of nonprofit employees.

An excerpt.

“In a survey of 560 staff at health and human service nonprofits, a remarkable 100% of senior managers and 92% of "line staff" (non-senior managers) are registered to vote. Wow! And . . .

• Nonprofit staff are 49% more likely to be registered than the general population.

• Nonprofit staff were 21% more likely to vote than the general population (in the 2010 election for governor).

“Letting candidates know that nonprofit staff vote

“SVCN is presenting these findings to the county board of supervisors and to city councils, to show that nonprofit staff are voters. "You'll hear even more from us right before the November election!" vows executive director Patricia Gardner.

“Nonprofit staff volunteer more, too

"Not only do we work in the nonprofit sector," Patricia says, "but we volunteer in the sector -- everyone is doing it!" In fact, 90% of senior managers and 72% of other staff volunteer in the community.”

"We know we [nonprofit staff] put in extra time where we work, but we're also volunteering elsewhere," says Patricia. "Our sector leaders are actively engaged in the community in many ways."

Congruence, Alignment

Both mean about the same and both are becoming much more crucial in an era of shrinking funds for nonprofits, both from government sources and from private philanthropists.

They are also core elements of my consultancy practice.

This article from Harvard Business Review, which uses the term coherence, also meaning about the same, takes note.

An excerpt.

“There is a crisis in the not-for-profit sector. Since the great recession began, donations to the largest charities in the U.S. have dropped by billions — down 11% in 2010 alone, according to a recent report from the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This was the worst decline since the Chronicle began ranking its "Philanthropy 400" list of America's largest fund-raising charities in 1990. Leaders of philanthropic and other non-profit organizations naturally blame the economy for this problem; and many expect things to get worse as the economic malaise drags on.

“But the financial meltdown has not affected all charities and not-for-profits equally. It is the more versatile, general-purpose charities — including such well-known, diverse institutions as The United Way Worldwide and the Salvation Army — that are faring the worst. For more tightly focused not-for-profits, such as the Cleveland Clinic and the network of Food Banks around the country, the decline is not nearly as sharp.

“Why the disparity? Our own research on organizational strategy and leadership more broadly suggests a reason. Since 2010, we've been conducting an ongoing survey of managers' attitudes about the strategies of their organizations (click here to take the not-for-profit version of the profiler). More than 65% of the respondents from the non-profit sector said it was a significant challenge to bring day-to-day decisions in line with their organization's overall strategy. When asked about their frustration factors, 76% (the largest group by far, and a larger percentage than their for-profit counterparts) named "too many conflicting priorities." When asked about their organization's core capabilities — distinctive things their association could do better than anyone else — only 29% said these supported their organization's strategy, and almost 80% said that their association's efforts to grow had led to waste.

“All of these results suggest that, while the hit to fundraising has hurt many not-for-profits, the more fundamental core problem is strategic. These institutions lack a strategy for connecting their mission with their ability to deliver. In short, this is a crisis of coherence.

“Coherence is a fundamental alignment among the elements that create value in an organization. A coherent not-for-profit has three core strategic elements fitting seamlessly together. First, there is a well-defined "way to play," a distinctive way of achieving the organization's mission — thus making a difference in a way that would otherwise go unfulfilled. Second, the organization backs up its mission with a system of interrelated capabilities: a combination of processes, tools, knowledge, skills, and organization, all focused on reliably and consistently delivering what is needed to create value according to that way to play. Third, all its activities relate to this strategic mix; if it doesn't have the capabilities to perform some service, in a way that fits with its overall strategy, then it leaves that to a different organization.”

Creative Disruption

A good story on the difficulties and opportunities facing the nonprofit human service sector from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

An excerpt, with links at the jump.

“With a bigger share of America’s population reaching old age and growing more diverse, social-service organizations are in for some big changes in the not-too-distant future. Adding to the challenge: the turbulence in government and private financing.

“For the past six months, the Alliance for Children and Families—a membership group for human-service charities—has interviewed nonprofit leaders, gathered focus groups, and conducted surveys to identify the emerging trends organizations must embrace to succeed.

“Today the alliance has published its findings in a new report, “Disruptive Forces: Driving a Human Services Revolution.”

“Sparking Conversation

“Some of the six trends detailed in the report will sound familiar, such as the need for nonprofits to demonstrate to potential donors the results of their programs as well as the emergence of new types of financing that combine social and financial returns.

“But the report also includes some provocative observations that are likely to spur debate. For example, when discussing “information liberation,” which refers to the fact that a new generation of consumers is more likely to share information about themselves, it’s clear that the report’s authors disapprove of social-service groups’ approach to handling client information.

“The human-services sector has used ‘privacy’ and ‘confidentiality’ as an excuse to avoid developments that promote information sharing,” they write. “Information sharing can improve service-delivery models such that they ultimately give consumers more control over how their information is shared and allow other agencies in the same continuum to provide better care.”

“The report calls on organizations to integrate advances in science and technology into their work and suggests that brain scanning might be one way for charities to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs.

“Boards will find themselves challenged by the ethical tension between high-tech and high-touch approaches,” the authors write.

“Other forces cited in the report that require nonprofits to act: growing competition that requires a willingness to take risks on innovative projects, plus a focus on “branding causes, not charities,” to persuade donors to focus on the issue, not on a particular group.”

New Corporate Form

As the concepts of social enterprise and venture capitalism influenced business thinking over the past several years, the formation of new forms of doing business have emerged; witness the flexible-purpose corporation in California, as reported by the New York Times.

An excerpt.

“A new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits is taking root around the country, as more states adopt laws to bridge the divide between nonprofits and businesses.

“California is the latest state to adopt a statute permitting what is called flexible-purpose corporations, new companies that are part social benefit and part low-profit entities. The companies are now allowed under laws in more than a dozen states and two Indian tribes.

“States like New York and Massachusetts are weighing comparable legislation — sometimes also known as low-profit limited liability or benefit corporations — and efforts are afoot to get federal legislation passed that would lower hurdles to the creation of such companies, including a quiet push to get preferential tax treatment for them.

“Many of the companies adopting the new structures provide services to nonprofits or are food purveyors that, for example, might employ the disabled. Perhaps the best known is MOO Milk of Vermont, a group of small dairy farmers.

“Unlike a straight nonprofit group, these businesses can tap into conventional capital markets as well as philanthropy.

“And unlike a for-profit corporation, the structure allows investors to emphasize the social mission over making money, and to be supported by money from foundations.

“Directors of many companies want to do the right thing, but they’re so busy looking at how not to get sued for failing to maximize profits that they don’t think more aspirationally about creating a great company that helps the planet and people and also makes money,” said R. Todd Johnson, a lawyer who is among the leaders of the movement to get states to create new legal structures.

“Not surprisingly, the trend concerns some executives in charge of charities, who fear increased competition for philanthropic dollars fueled by the enthusiasm for the new formats among foundations, many of which have been lobbying hard for new laws to foster this type of business.”

Nonprofit Job Growth

In what should not be a surprise to anyone, this story from the Nonprofit Chamber of Service reports it only grew by 1% in 2010.

An excerpt.

“The growth in nonprofit jobs slowed in 2010 compared with other recent years, according to a new analysis of U.S. labor statistics.

“The number of nonprofit jobs grew by just under 1 percent from 2009 to 2010, according to a study of figures in 45 states by the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Civil Society Studies, in Baltimore. Year-to-year nonprofit job totals increased by 1.2 percent in 2009 and 2.6 percent in 2008.

“However, nonprofits fared better in 2010 than for-profit companies, which saw a 0.9 percent decrease in jobs last year.

“Among specific fields, education added the most jobs in recent years, at a rate of 1.9 percent from 2007 to 2010, followed by professional services and arts, each at 1.8 percent. Health-related jobs grew by 1.6 percent, and social services by 1.5 percent. Civic groups saw a 0.5-percent drop in jobs during that three-year period, according to the report.

“Other key findings show that half of all nonprofit jobs are health-related, 13 percent are in education, and 11 percent in social services.”

Donor Service

This article from Nonprofit About.com begins with the too often practice of not thanking donors, something that should be done immediately regardless of how the donation came.

From my perspective, if an organization does not thank donors immediately and well, they virtually negate their foundational mission, within which their organizational mission is embedded, of community service.

An excerpt from the article.

“A friend donated a considerable amount of money through payroll deduction to her local public radio station. For that amount, she was supposed to receive a thermos with the station's logo on it.

“When she didn't receive the gift nor any kind of thank you from the station, she called and asked about it. The woman on the phone said, "Oh, well we don't send thank you's for donations through payroll deduction." She didn't know anything about the gift.

“That was it...no apology...no "Let me put you through to someone who can help." Apparently, they didn't send the advertised gift for payroll deduction donations either because it never came. Why payroll deduction would have made any difference at all is perplexing. My friend was so infuriated that she never gave another cent and has plenty to say about the radio station whenever possible.

“I suspect that the woman my friend spoke to did not know what she was talking about, and that if the development department had known about the conversation they would be horrified.

“Overall there was a disconnect on several levels. What is their policy on thank you's? Is there a glitch in the fulfillment process that resulted in the gift not being sent? Why hadn't the woman on the phone been properly trained so that she knew the policies and what to do when her help was not enough? Why did she not appreciate the importance of a donor call such as that one?”

Meeting With Peers

This is a good article from Stanford Social Innovation Review, touching on an important resource and fortunately, it is one available in Sacramento at the Nonprofit Resource Center ED Network, and here is their October meeting agenda.

An excerpt from the article

“We recently conducted a focus group with nonprofit CEOs in New York City. Given all the recent research that points to the value of peer-to-peer support for nonprofit leaders, we wanted to know why so little of this is done online. One CEO immediately responded, “We don’t have time.”

“The facilitator of the focus group was taken aback. “How do you have time to come to this two-hour focus group but don’t have the time to go online?”

“The leaders in the room saw the return on investment for a well-organized meeting with their peers to be much greater than anything they could do in the digital commons. They were more confident that they would get actionable insight into management techniques. But perhaps more importantly, the meeting provided an emotional and psychological benefit that is rarely met: a space for candid conversation about successes and failures in a safe, supportive environment. (highlighting added)

“Face-to-face conversations with other leaders—commercial and nonprofit—remind us that failure is, in fact, the norm and does not preclude success.

“If [CEOs’ successes] were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100,” Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz recently wrote on TechCrunch. “This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging…because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.”

“If the buck stops at the CEO, every failure in our organization ends up piled on my desk—whether it’s a typo on the website, a bad hire, or a missed market opportunity. After just a week, the failures stack up so high that it is hard to see past the mountain of complaints.”

Author in Sacramento Today

Excellent opportunity to hear from author Dan Pallotta—his new book, Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential is excellent and I posted on it in May—who will be in Sacramento later today, as reported by the Sacramento Business Journal.

An excerpt.

“As Sacramento kicks off a multiyear campaign to boost local charitable giving, the community gets a pep talk Thursday from a national philanthropy expert who challenges the way nonprofits are measured and regulated.

“Dan Pallotta, a Harvard professor and author of a provocative book on philanthropy, will speak from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria. Tickets purchased in advance from the Nonprofit Resource Center ’s website are $35. Tickets at the door are $40. Pallotta will answer questions and sign his book after his talk.

“The Association of Fundraising Professionals, the Nonprofit Resource Center and philanthropists invited Pallotta to speak in Sacramento with the hope of convincing Sacramentans to think about philanthropy in new ways and to increase philanthropic support of this region’s nonprofits.

“The talk is in conjunction with the launch last month of the GiveLocalNow initiative that seeks to boost the amount given annually to local charities by $250 million.

“The public giving campaign launched after research found that the region lags the national giving average, particularly for households earning $200,000 or more.

“In the foreword of his most recent book, “Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential,” Pallotta argues for “giving charity equal rights with the rest of the economic world and allowing it to use the system everyone else uses to get things done — free market capitalism.”

Starting Up

The initial period of building a new nonprofit to fulfill a mission is always more complicated than the novice realizes, and this article from Nonprofit About.com does a good job of looking at many of the relevant issues.

An excerpt with links at the jump.

“Starting a nonprofit is complex, with many missteps possible at any point. Going from nothing to a sustainable and financially healthy nonprofit is not for the timid. Avoiding these common nonprofit startup mistakes will get you off to a great beginning.

“From a review of the literature already available on this topic and by posting the question on various social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Quora, I found that these mistakes were the most likely to plague nonprofit startups:

“Lack of Research and Planning

“Lack of a business plan is one of the most prevalent mistakes that startup nonprofits make. In their enthusiasm to do good, many founders of nonprofits forget that a nonprofit is a type of business. Businesses have business plans in hand before launching. A business plan encompasses an evaluation of the competitive environment, sources of funding, potential products or services to be offered and to whom, and a needs assessment….

“Lack of Financial Savvy

“Close behind lack of planning is unrealistic expectations about funding for a startup nonprofit. Many founders do not anticipate what it will cost to start their nonprofit, much less have any idea of where to get the funds. Any nonprofit startup needs a funding plan, must decide if services provided will be available for a fee or be free, and should institute a good financial records system. A nonprofit that has weak funding at the beginning is unlikely to be able to sustain itself long enough to get a vigorous fundraising program going.”

Direct Mail

I am a big believer in direct mail—old school hand signed letter in an envelope to an individual carried by the postman—as one of the most potent forms of ongoing organizational communications with a large number of donors, and this article from The Nonprofit Times notes its continuing importance.

Also, a great how-to book I recommend is Building Your Direct Mail Program.

An excerpt from the Nonprofit Times article.

“As George Carlin said, the trouble with experience is that we don't get it until after we need it. Nonprofit decision-makers would love for the Great Recession to be over so they can put the bitter experience behind them, but the economy is still mired in a recovery that nobody notices.

“During the DMA Nonprofit Federation conference, Craig Finstad of the American Lung Association said that his organization has learned lessons about mailing during the recession, and he passed some of those lessons along.

“* If your piece is not in their mailbox, someone else's is. The strategy is to stay in front of renewal donors. The organization resisted pressure to cut the number of appeals without testing.

“* If you mail it, they will come.”

Social Media II

Following up on yesterday’s post, here is some specific info about why being on LinkedIn is a good idea.

An excerpt.

“1. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 120 million members in over 200 countries and territories.

"While Facebook has 750,000 million users, many professionals prefer to use it exclusively for personal purposes. A recent study by Lab 42 showed that that 61% of people surveyed used LinkedIn for professional networking, compared to 22% for Facebook and 4% for Twitter.

“Professionals who are already using Twitter can set up their LinkedIn updates to appear in their Twitter feed and vice versa, so the two networks complement each other.

“As of July, 2011, Google + had already gained 20 million users, and it could become increasingly valuable over time. All the top social networks strive to add more features and gain new users, so there’s no guarantee that LinkedIn will be a useful network over the long term, but for now, it’s the best choice for most people who use social networking for professional purposes.

“2. LinkedIn helps professionals stay connected or to reconnect with people they already know, as well as get to know new people.

"It also provides opportunities for professionals to exchange knowledge and resources and be part of a broader network of people with similar interests.

“3. Nonprofits can create free “Company Pages” on LinkedIn to create visibility for their brand.

"The company pages also make it easier for non-profit organizations to promote their products and services, as well as get people to “follow” them and post:
 status updates
 job opportunities
 news mentions
 new hires
 tweets
 blog posts

“Over 101,000 organizations currently have a company page on LinkedIn.”