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...