NonprofitEye

No Comment by pam ashlund On December 27th, my nonprofit blog, the Nonprofit Eye, had 39 page views. On the same day, my blog about my car, Boxster Heaven , had 440 page views.

Nonprofit Image Problem? by pam ashlund Life has a way of being just plain embarrassing sometimes. I've been in accounting since the '80's. As a manager I take my job and it's concomitant responsibilities very seriously. I work hard to achieve due diligence, as any good financial manager would. Along those lines, I keep up on the body of work on the subject of Fraud Detection. Here's the rub: Call it vanity, call it a mid-life crisis, call it treating myself to one big splurge.. I bought a sports car this summer. Oh the shame. I love this car so much true, but how embarrassing in the nonprofit world. I know I should be driving a Prius d--n it. I document my love-hate relationship with this car on my blog: Boxster Heaven How do these two topics converge? The IT Compliance Institute (the self-proclaimed "Global Authority for IT Compliance Information") has a great article called Best Practices: Ten Tips for Fighting Corporate Fraud. And #7 on that list is: ...

8 Days for Charitable Giving in 2006 by Pam Ashlund You know, I've never seen a holiday fundraising appeal which really focused on tax-time. Maybe smiling children are more appealing than a write-off to a giver...or maybe not! Here's a re-cap on tax-exempt giving: Beth's posts on Fundraising Widgets and on Donor Documentation Pam's post on IRS Regs, Tis The Season to Be Giving David's post on the great Tax Advantages of Giving Gifts of Stock The IRS's Roundup of Tax-Exempt Giving Technorati Tags: Charitable Giving , Donations , Nonprofit , Tax Exempt Donation

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: NONPROFIT CENSORSHIP? (originally posted 1/25/06 and cross posted on El Loro ) by pam ashlund This post is the first in a series on censorship, free-speech, and the power of ideas Are nonprofits censored or controlled by government funding? After 1989, if your nonprofit accepts a federal contract of over $100,000, you are subject to the Drug Free Workplace Act. In a "Drug-free workplace", the employer has taken steps and initiated policies to ensure that employees, vendors, and customers are not: taking or using alcohol or drugs, selling drugs, or affected by the after effects of indulging in alcohol or drugs outside of the workplace during non-work time. Here's the funny part: Does the Act require employees to do drug testing? Nope. Does this mean if we are implementing a drug testing program to comply with the act that we are censoring ourselves? Maybe so. Just as an examination of anti-depressants can easily turn into a conversation about the ...

You've heard of SOP-98-2 right?   SOP is acronym for "Statement of Position". Today we're talking about SOP-98-2 or " Accounting for Costs of Activities of Not-for-Profit Organizations...that include Fund-Raising ." SOP-98-2 has been effective since December 15, 1998 and applies to all fundraising activities of NPO's and to state and local government entities although most nonprofit managers haven't heard of it, we've been subject to this rule for over a decade. "Accountability" "Misleading the Public" "How much of your donation goes to the cause". These topics have receive a lot of media play. Your donors want to know "if I make a one dollar donation, how much will go the cause?  Typically the answer is 75 to 85%. Most folks would be okay with knowing that 80 cents of your buck go to the cause, yes. But what about the cost of fundraising? If you use a professional fundraiser, it's possible tha...

The Challenge of Working For (and Staying in) a Nonprofit Job by pam ashlund PART I - NONPROFIT EYE BURNOUT SERIES Why did you start working for a nonprofit? Me? In a nutshell, I joined because I found no meaning in helping someone else make money. After college I suffered a few very empty years. I worked for a property management company, and I was miserable. I couldn't figure out how to inject meaning into my life and I figured either I start selling somebody else's shit, or I went to work helping people. It seemed like a basic "either-or" "good or evil" question. I choose the good. But since I work in finance and management...I didn't immediately find meaning. When I did it wasn't because I was helping people (or helping the people who help people). It was because I found my passion. I LOVE teaching, coaching and mentoring (i.e managing a team and supervision). I LOVE figuring things out; automating meaningless tasks, producing fantastic and usefu...

I get so bored with the same old nonprofit themes at the same old boring conferences and the same old boring nonprofit rags. Yawn. If those are the yawns, the nonprofit bloggers are the antidote. Inspiration is as close as an RSS feed. And today I came across a new (to me) voice: Where Most Needed . Written from an Operations perspective, the blog covers topics ranging from accountability, performance measurement to fraud detection. Last week's article announced the death of nonprofit accountability in a post titled " Accountability is So Last Year ". The post suggests our funders will be nudging us to "transcend" accountability next. I've been fretting about preventing nonprofit burnout, staying off the IRS radar, how to reduce dependance on government funding...but now...it's time to work on transcending accountability! In California, the Nonprofit Integrity Act was only passed last January, 06, but it's time to move on folks! Seems even ...

Follow-up to Dec. 9th post on Social Enterprises I admit it, I have an unabashed love for Harvard Business Review! Why? Because I love a well constructed argument, because I love to see nonprofit issues explored with laser-focus, because I'm a nerd, because, because. Alright already, judge for yourself. Back in 2005, they published an article " Should Nonprofits Seek Profits? ". For only six dollars you can download a reprint of the article for your Executive Director (or your organizations biggest proponent of launching a for-profit business venture, maybe someone on your Board???). In case the title isn't enticing enough, here's the description they offer: Nonprofits increasingly feel compelled to launch earned income ventures--not only to appear more disciplined and businesslike to stakeholders but also to reduce their reliance on fundraising. There's plenty of hype about the value of earned income ventures in the nonprofit world, but such proje...

For the fourth consecutive year the poverty rate rose, from 12.5% in 2003 to 12.7% in 2004. The number of people in poverty increased also, by 1.1 million, to 37.0 million in 2004. 37 million people in poverty? In the US? Yep. "How much can a person make and be "in poverty"?" you might ask. According to the US Census Bureau, the 2005 Poverty Threshold , without going thru charts and tables, this is how it breaks down: One Person - less than $10,000/yr; Two Persons - Less than $13K; Three People - Less than $16K; Four People - $20K; etc. etc. Technorati Tags: nonprofit , poverty , poverty threshold , poverty in america

Read an exciting article on disaster recovery the other day (I know, I know, proof that I have NO life!)...I came across info on the life expectancy of various digital storage media... average life of a diskette - one year, average life of a CD - ten years - average life of magnetic tape - tops 50 years. All of these involved storage in ideal conditions (temperature controlled, stored vertically, dust free, etc. Since the advent of the digital age, more and more knowledge is stored electronically, often with no physical counterpart. We take photos with digital cameras, save them on unbacked up hard drives or worse still leave them on the tiny cards that come with our cameras. We write novels and store them on flash drives. We leave these flash drives dangling from our key chains or stuffed in our backpacks. By way of example, a friend stored all the family photos on a server and in the time it takes to say "power surge" they were gone. No more baby pics. His wife learned ...

Went to a Garden Party: Social Enterprise, Earned Income, or Profit by Pam Ashlund Los Angeles, CA Dec 4-6 Attended a three day workshop at the Grantsmanship Center this week. The topic? “ Earned Income Strategies ”. Although I couldn’t begin to summarize the three days of info in one post, I think we are all familiar with the risks of income strategies: Lose money, damage reputation, hurt morale Mission Drift - Get successful and: lose track of your mission Funders move on (think you don’t need them anymore) Become vulnerable to attack on the unfair competition front And of course… the dreaded Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT) My take-away's from the meeting: Any idea would not succeed without a motivated champion of the venture Don’t confuse “earned” with “unrelated” Proceeding on ventures without clear goals is a recipe for failure (corollary: starting without a business plan is “flying without a net” The best nonprofit success stories involve a blending of the purpose...

I'm a big fan of the " Don't Tell the Donor " blog. Where else can we get an insiders look at nonprofit fundraising confessions? This anonymous blogger, known only as "a fundraiser" is apparently a Blackbaud Raisers Edge user. "A fundraiser" has me (again) pondering the sad cross purposes of fundraising and finance. The two should be like body and mind--inseparable. "A Fundraiser", in a December 1st post titled "Projections, predictions, and the problem of past performance", confides: ...it discourages me when I hear fundraisers who feel they do not have a responsibility to provide cash flow projections and predictions to the finance teams. It seems obvious that finding a resolution to these problems could only make us more effective. Accordingly I offer a few thoughts of my own, hopefully they'll get us a little further in that direction: Accountants are bound by (at least) three guidelines: 1) Generally Accept...

Ask And Ye Shall Receive: Error 404 File Not Found by Pam Ashlund Before my fingers had left the keys...my prayers were answered. If only I could tag a webpage and know it would still be there when I returned! While I've been tagging used Del.icio.us for a few weeks, I came across another service: Ma.gnolia. I finally got around to importing my bookmarks to Mag. today and was just browsing around, reading the FAQ files, and what did I find? This: When you add a bookmark to Ma.gnolia, we rush around in the background to save a copy of that web page for your future viewing. Never again will you be lost if a web page moves or gets deleted. Ma.gnolia's saved copies have got you covered, so that what you find stays found. Would I be pushing my metaphor if I said 'I was lost but now I'm found'? Okay, okay...so how did Ma.gnolia handle the legal/ethical dilemma? How does Ma.gnolia treat controlled content when making saved copies? Ma.gnolia only makes a saved cop...

The Temporality of Digital Knowledge by Pam Ashlund The nonprofit community has a wealth of information online. Advice from Fundraising to Finance. Whitepapers, ToolKits, Articles. A collective knowledge that could never be found in one book (or ten books for that matter). What worries me is that the owners of each piece of this databank have no commitment, responsibility nor mandate to leave this information on line. When a website closes, the data goes with it. When a newspaper archives its free material, it is either gone or pay-to-play from that point forward. At the moment this information is all available at a click, but it is not centralized and its very existence is oh so tenuous. As anyone who has bookmarked or tagged a reference URL has discovered, upon returning to the link, the site is no longer there, the article has been moved, or resides behinds a closed door. These broken links are a fact of the electronic age. The ethical dilemma: make sure this data doesn't dissap...

Tax Exemption is in the Eye of the Beholder by Pam Ashlund What is the life cycle of a nonprofit organization? What can we expect as we move from visionaries, to implementers, to administrators? Organizational Development professionals have come up with some very valuable takes on the life cycle of nonprofits; and our funding sources have started to rely on that research in their funding selection process. Seems there are some pretty predictable things that happen as we evolve and therefore we can learn from those we follow. Going through an assessment process can be quite the value-added exercise. But today I happened upon a different kind of nonprofit life cycle (on the IRS website). The IRS has a peculiar take on the nonprofit "life cycle"; or maybe not. It is true that life has a beginning, a middle and an end. And that is how the IRS frames it. But their view doesn't just have an ending, it assumes it. Here's how it goes: a nonprofit starts up, then it ages and ...

OMB, CFR, Title 2 and More Exciting Nonprofit Stuff by Pam Ashlund For two decades nonprofits have been guided by three OMB circulars: OMB A-133, A-122, and A-110. As of September, 06, two of these three fixtures of the nonprofit world are being phased out and then coming back to life in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations–(A-122 becomes Part 230 and A-110 becomes Part 215) to be exact. The rules won't change as far as I can figure. Only the names have been changed. Apparently there were some contradictions between the OMB's and the CFR's. The change will streamline and thereby resolve the conflicts. Sounds like implementation won't happen until later in 2007 and nonprofits won't really have to comply until government funding sources update their contract language; but it is coming soon. FYI, I wouldn't worry about compliance or implementation, since we're already bound to follow these OMB circulars. Read th...

Dysfunction & NonProfit Burnout or a Balanced Life? Part III in Burnout Series by pam ashlund Choices, choices. Back in a September, '06 post, I started a conversation about fraud prevention in Nonprofit Hall of Shame . A colleague wrote that a significant factor contributing to fraud would be burn-out. This has led me to give a lot of thought to the idea of balance. Not just having a massage or taking a day off, but creating work-home-family-finance-health kind of balance. In response to my speculations on the causes of fraud, Ken Goldstein proposed a new movement (in his post " Fraud, Burnout and Getting What We Deserve "): "The Nonprofit Selfishness Movement": We all need to set aside certain times and days to something entirely selfish (and legal). A little "me time" to guiltlessly get away from the stress of constantly being other-focused. Time for our own families, time to take a vacation, and time to recognize our own worth without resorting...

The Limitations of Dashboards By Pam Ashlund I first heard the concept of an electronic dashboard introduced in March 24, 1999. There it was, within the 496 pages of Bill Gates’ book Business at the Speed of Thought . It was so exciting to me that I ran back to the office determined to implement. I attended a Microsoft’s Dashboa rd training and found out that I was sold on an idea that didn’t technically exist. The back-end programming was available, but there wasn’t a commercial product; there wasn’t even a commercial engine to customize. So I waited. It was 2001, with this visionary Dashboard in mind, that I converted from Fundware to Financial Edge . There were other features that met our conversion requirements, but it was the promise of the Dashboard feature that was number one (two and three were: Integrating FE and RE; and Integrated Assets Software). But when we launched, there was a problem. An electronic dashboard may be live, but accounting isn’t—it’s accrued after the fac...

‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE GIVING: NONPROFIT CHARITABLE GIVING CONTRIBUTIONS & MORE by Pam Ashlund Collecting donations for your nonprofit? As a financial manager (and those that imagine incorrectly that I’m a tax accountant or a CPA) I can’t tell you how often I’m asked about documentation for donors. Some want to know about receipts for cash gifts, the others how to value an in-kind gift. The first has concrete answers, the second has a few gray areas. But for all answers it’s one-stop shopping and must come from one source and only one source: the IRS. So what follows are quotes from the IRS site, and links to the IRS site, not my personal opinion (because if you want my personal opinions then enjoy them, but don’t use them as a substitute for a tax specialist or a lawyer’s). The IRS has a great round-up of nonprofit topics . From there you can drill down to: Tax Information for Contributors For donors wanting to know how to claim a deduction for their contribution, you want: Publica...

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? by Pam Ashlund Tuesday I wrote about tagging, but it didn't answer one question: what is all that tagging supposed to achieve? Presumably it’s about categorization (for yourself and for the public), but more significantly it’s about attracting attention (pro’s call that “publicity”). OK, I admit it, I was perturbed by my Technorati ranking of 170,000, but today I read that they rank 57 million blogs, so maybe anything over a 1 million ain’t bad. LOL Amy Gahran in her blog “ Contentious ” has a great article deconstructing Technorati’s ranking methodology. Did I just use deconstructing and methodology in the same sentence? Maybe I need to lay off the coffee! Seriously folks, I’ll be here all weekend. Try the veal! But back to Amy…she asks: is “more” better? Using variables like “posting frequency”, “regional popularity” and “in-bound links” to measure popularity, authority and influence has it’s limitations. In high school, popularity had nothing to ...

Tag You're It - Nonprofit Tag Systems by pam ashlund I have a nonprofit tech item today. Tag's seem to be a reality of the Web 2.0 world; but I find them so difficult to use. Some widget's exist to make this easier, but even widget's might be a challenge to install for someone who just wants to throw some tags in their blog. Want to know more about widget's? follow Beth Kantor's thread on "Widget's" on Beth's Blog . As Marnie Webb from Ext337 says: Sure, tagging and badges already make all this possible, but possible isn’t easy. And it isn’t easy. It’s possible in an early adopter kind of way. While I was enthusiastic about the "sharable" nature of Technorati's tags at first...I now find it cumbersome to add them. It's also odd that they're in the form of a hyperlink, meaning: 1) that I have to make a decision each time about where the link should go; and 2) a link re-directs from my site and my blog platform doesn't...

NonProfit Performance Measurement by pam ashlund I am fascinated by how quickly legislators determine our agenda. The latest example? Evaluations and Performance Objectives. Anyone remember the way the introduction of the Performance Objective was heralded in to the non-profit world? "This will make you more effective", they told us. "This will validate our work". Blah Blah Blah. I, for one, drank the kool aid. Then came the truth, somewhere between the ideal and the reality, the stats didn't change anything. Now a huge amount of staff time (not to mention trees sacrificed) is devoted to counting numbers, which go nowhere. Consider the following three problems: There was no funding for a decent evaluation; Evaluations take good research design; Nonprofit administrators learned how to game the system by ever reducing their goals so that they might be achieved (after all you WILL get penalized if you don't meet those goals). If that wasn't enough to drive...

Changing of the Guard: Nonprofit Transition by Pam Ashlund My head is spinning tonight. At the CA Association of Nonprofits conference last month I heard the news: founder, Flo Green, is retiring. It came as a shock to me because Flo and CAN are synonymous to me. We don't know each other at all, and therefore are not on a first name basis, but I think of her as Flo. That says something about her charisma. Upon hearing her talk, people leave thinking of her as a friend. And she has been a friend, to the nonprofit community and to me by way of inspiration. At that same conference I was introduced to the ideas of Fundraising speaker Kim Klein. She delivered a keynote I covered in NonProfit Confidence Problem . And, as with Flo, I was inspired and I left feeling like I had another friend. And now I hear (thru the Chronical of Philanthropy's article ) that Kim is also retiring. Just yesterday I was talking to a friend over lunch about the whole changing of the guard phenomena. Peo...

Nonprofit Open Source by pam ashlund I didn't know what " Open Source " was until I left the nonprofit world. In the for-profit technology world "open source" is almost a religion. In the nonprofit world it's almost unknown. If you wanted to understand it at a deep level you could get comprehensive coverage at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) website ... but IF, like me, you just want to cut to the chase... it's been around for almost 25 years, but wasn't known by the name "open source" until 1998. Known as free software before '98 it suffered a public relations problem. The analogy used on the GNU website is: "free” as in “free speech”, not as in “ free beer ”. You can see where there might have been some misunderstandings. "Open Source" communicates the function without confusing newbies. Like most ideas, the concept evolved over time. Fueled by a desire to: do anything to destroy Bill Gates and/or Microsoft; and prove...

Language with a Chip on Its Shoulder: From Here to Blackbaud's Infinity by Pam Ashlund Don't have time to read the whole thing? Jump to the funny part! Background: This week I attended the 2006 Blackbaud Conference in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. Well, at the convention center (in the not so beautiful airport area). There was over 850 attendees, representing nonprofits, educational institutions, churches, etc. Arrangements were made with six hotels, which booked to capacity (even overbooked at the Embassy Suites). They also arranged for shuttles from these six hotels. See No Room at the Inn for my midnight adventures. Needless to say, I was running, hiking, taking local transportation etc. and still running late for everything. To make a breakfast at 7:30 am (which would be 4:30 am California time), I would have had to wake up at 5:30 am (2:30 am my time), leave by 6:00 am, run the mile to the Holiday Inn where the shuttle for the convention center departed, to make b...

I BLOG THEREFORE I AM by pam ashlund Anybody using accounting software out there? If you do, then you've probably seen the dreaded existential question, you click post...and then..you receive a message: Are you sure you want to do that? Fortunately all accountants have nerves of steel. Either that or we're just wild risk-takers (insert rim shot here). Software designers could have come up with something less unnerving, say for example "please verify your selection". Yet the best I've come across so far is a simple "are you sure?". Since I face that "are you sure" question every time I post an entry, I've had years to get used to it, but I still crack a smile sometimes. Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, I did a search on Technorati and got this result: There are blogs, and then there's whatever you just typed in. If it's a blog, we don't know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it's a blog that do...

WHAT'S IN A NAME? by pam ashlund What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) Let me begin with a declaration: No one should be allowed to self-declare themselves a “wave” (the third wave, the first wave, the new wave); It’s okay for historians to name these movements retroactively, but naming them yourself, in real time, is a no-no. So many have called for a new name to replace "non-profit"; the objection being that it is defining ourselves by what we are not . Try out a few commonly in use: CBO - Community Based Organizations NPO or Non-Profit Organization? NGO or Non-Governmental Organization "Civil Society" The "Third Sector" (Church and State being first and second) Pondering these, I came across a website called ForBenefit.Net where a new name (and model) is proposed: For-Benefit . Touted as "a new paradigm in organizational design" and "a new class of organ...

Historical Memory, Social Change and the Limitations of the Human Psyche Challenges Facing Nonprofits and Society as a Whole by pam ashlund Two problems are troubling me tonight: 1) Progress is so slow (in every arena, but it's social change that I have in mind here); and 2) For whatever reason, human thought falls victim to the most base errors; preventing us from seeing and thinking clearly. Progress is slow: The challenging part of any academic endeavor is that we have to start over again with every generation. Unlike physical genes, these non-physical meme thingy’s are not transferred by DNA through reproduction (or any other physical mechanism). Fortunately, there is some overlap of generations to achieve a modicum of historical memory. The invention of the printing press didn't hurt either (should I be saying silicon chip?). Still this darn transmission process is SO fragile. The dark ages almost wiped out all of human knowledge were it not for a couple of cloistered monk...

Development and Finance: A Broken Marriage? by pam ashlund This article is the start of a conversation on classic rifts that exist in nonprofit organizations. Today I'm blogging about the odd way that conflicts in Blackbaud's software products mirror departmental and emotional conflicts. Development and Finance - One department brings in the money ("develops" the funds) and the other counts the money. You'd think that would be a marriage made in heaven...but for some reason...not so much. This was evident, on two levels, at Blackbaud's 2006 Conference for Nonprofits. First, and most fundamental, at the software level: I attended the session on integrating two software products ( Blackbaud's fundraising product the "Raisers Edge" and its accounting product "Financial Edge"). You'd have to figure that two products from the same company would already be integrated (and certainly not require a class), anymore than one would think you...