NonprofitEye

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...