NonprofitEye

Are nonprofits just sitting ducks? Is it easier to steal from a nonprofit? or is it a limit of imagination...our hearts are in the right place so much so that we can't conceive of someone setting out to take advantage... Still every month (even every week at times), another story of a nonprofit fraud. NOTE : these are not charities who have defrauded the public, but rather charities who have been the victims of fraud. SEPTEMBER 29, 2006 METHUEN, Mass. A Methuen woman faces two dozen felony charges for allegedly stealing from the Children's Glaucoma Foundation . ...45-year-old Karen Sicher stole more than half a million dollars from the Boston-based nonprofit organization.... SEPTEMBER 24, 2006 Elaine Bernard and Carol Dela Torre (launched) Genesis in 1987, eventually turning the Fresno group home and foster-care business into an $8 million annual enterprise caring for neglected, abused and abandoned children...Now the sisters...are accused of using the nonprofit's credit...

Here's the article I was trying to write in Nonprofit Doublespeak/Excessive Compensation : Who here is a compensation specialist? Not me, but I know there is a science to it. Salaries aren't (usually) plucked out of thin air. They are determined, not just by mean and median, but by geography, skills, the market and scope of responsibility. Therefore, before we evaluate whether a $200,000+ salary could be appropriate for a non-profit executive, let us go through three steps: STEP ONE: CONTEXT Start with some stats cut and pasted from the "Economic Statistics Briefing Room" section of the White House's website... Median household income was $46,326 in 2005, up 1.1 percent from 2004 after adjusting for inflation. This is the first annual increase in real median household income since 1999. Since 1967, the first year for which household income statistics are available, real median household income was up 30.9 percent How does that break down by ethnicit...

Your Name Here: Creating Ways to Reach an Audience by pam ashlund Most folks in the entertainment industry know that they are after the 13-35 market, but what's the magic number for nonprofits? Are we trying to reach an audience to educate? to fundraise? to reach out and help? If we're advertising the services of a teen pregnancy prevention program then maybe our audience is 13-17 year olds. If it's an audience of givers then maybe it is just wealthy people in general. All I know is that if we are trying to reach today's high schoolers and we aren't completely immersing ourselves in YouTube and MySpace , then we have missed the boat. Yes the girl in this vlog is just doing a spoof, but it speaks for itself in terms of untapped potential: I'm visualizing a link to an online giving page where a pull-down menu allows the donor to pick their coffee-drink giving level....Frap & Scone - $8.95....1 lb Rare Ethiopian Whole Beans - $28.50, etc. Technorati Tags: My...

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH $200,000 IS EXCESSIVE COMPENSATION How did I wander into this strange land where nonprofit executive salaries over $200,000 may be considered excessive? When you are a lone voice standing against the crowd you are likely to be labeled a) schizophrenic (R.D. Laing [1] ); b) a terrorist (G.W. Bush); c) mental-patient (Ken Kasey); d) paranoid (Sydney Pollak); e) neurotic (Freud); f) a poltergeist (Spielberg). In the movies (at least the movies of the 60’s and 70’s) when you stand by your guns against all odds you are a hero (especially if you triumph in the end). I’m thinking of Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; RollerBall; One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, etc. Even fairly recent movies, such as The Matrix, speak to the issue of a hidden reality which we are either afraid (or not permitted) to see. Sadly, in that film, the “false” reality is so powerful one has to take a drug (the red pill) to b...

Women in Nonprofits, Women in Engineering? by pam ashlund I was thinking about the notion that nonprofits are run by women. That is probably still true, I'll have to look around for some stats. In my quest I came across the Women in Engineering organization. I didn't find stats, but I did find this: Contact Webmaster Peter Wong at: peter.wong@tufts.edu But either way, that got me thinking about a group my sister introduced me to years ago: Society of Women Engineers . I surfed over to their site tonite to see what the dismal stats were on women holding jobs in engineering, and here is what I found: We've come a long way baby. sigh. Technorati Tags: Nonprofit , Womens Issues , Women in Engineering

The Hazards of Revenue Recognition for Non-profits by pam ashlund "New" nonprofit rules for recognizing revenue were established by the Financial Accounting Standards Board back in 1993 (FASB 116), links summarized in a previous post . Then why now is the subject of Revenue Recognition suddenly so important? File it under “Blame it on Enron”. When this infamous company decided to recognize revenue based on their projection of future sales (NOT completed sales), they opened the door to a previously unimaginable new chapter in the ongoing novel of Fictional Accounting. The guys who came up with this scam were known as " The Smartest Men in the Room ". Were they? The answer is yes (and no) and yes. Madness in the Method? Even though their method was clearly preposterous, the lesson we can learn from their sad example is that accounting is mostly, but not ALL hard science. Many accounting decisions involve significant “management discretion”. Any area of accounting that...

SOLVING THE NONPROFIT IDENTITY CRISIS: THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE by pam ashlund When will nonprofits learn what is common knowledge to politicians? Modern political strategy stands on three pillars (according to Wikipedia): M essage, M oney, M achine. The entry-level campaign strategist understands that the second two won’t come until the first pillar is set up...establish the clear message (and ideally condense it into a catchy sound bite). Let’s face it, we have an uphill battle on money and machine. If we raise too much money-- unrelated business tax , if we raise too little-- program cuts , if we spend it promoting our cause-- misuse of funds ; if we hire savvy leaders— Excessive Compensation ! If we hit the streets- unallowable costs ; if we use our volunteer activists? Lobbying ; If we hook up with local politicians? Loose your tax-exempt status! But Message? There are no barriers in our way here. Who are we? What do we want to be? And once we know why we are here…what...