The Superstar Foundation invited GuideStar to help find, recognize, and grant a $5,000 award to a case manager, social worker, or direct service staff who is a Superstar within his or her GuideStar Platinum-level organization. We'd like to congratulate this year's Superstar Award winner, Clair Watson!

More than ever before, the people on the front lines of social change are in agreement: we need to evolve the conversation about nonprofit overhead. It's time to reduce the Overhead Myth's stranglehold on donors, the media, and the general public.

The legal requirements for unpaid internships have been in a state of flux the last several years. In Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc., unpaid interns sought minimum wage and overtime pay based on allegations that they qualified as employees under federal and New York State wage-and-hour laws. In 2013, the federal District Court in Glatt ruled in favor of the unpaid interns, finding that they should have been classified as employees and, therefore, were entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay. That holding was soon reversed, however. In 2015, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the District Court's Glatt decision and established a different test for evaluating the legality of unpaid internships.

Federal courts in the Second Circuit are now tasked with applying the new Glatt standard. On August 24, 2016, United States District Judge J. Paul Oetken of the Southern District of York dismissed an unpaid intern lawsuit against the Hearst Corporation, using the new Glatt test. A copy of Judge Oetken's decision in the case, which is captioned Wang v. The Hearst Corporation, may be found here.

Each year, more than 7 million people use GuideStar to find data on 2.4 million current and formerly IRS-recognized nonprofits. Being the data nerds that we are, we wondered: what organizations are our users most curious about?

A few months ago, our grantwriter and I dealt with a grant for $4,000 that comprised a five-page narrative and about 10 attachments. Luckily, of course, we have most of those documents ready in our Master Grant folder. The kicker, though, was the unusual requirement for us to print out a document with ten labels, each corresponding to one of the attachments, and literally cut out each of the tabs and paste it on to the attachments. So there I was, handling a glue stick for the first time in years, carefully pasting each tab. I was getting more and more irritated, gritting my teeth and wishing I had listened to that one palm reader in Saigon who told me to go into medicine or maybe law (I think my parents paid her).

The preceding is cross-posted with permission from the Alliance blog. Based out of the UK, Alliance magazine is the leading global magazine on philanthropy and social investment. 

I recently wrote about collaboration, one of the most discussed words in the field of philanthropy these days, right up there with transparency and administrative cost control.

Do you ever worry you’re not doing enough to attract the donors of the future?

Does thinking about how to market to Millennials (who will make up 36% of the U.S. workforce by next year and nearly half by 2020) fill you with anxiety, because it’s just one more thing to add to your overflowing list?

Fear no more!

Today I’m going to tell you how you can have it all – and with very little extra work.

Last fall BoardAssist launched a junior board matching pilot program to find junior boards for all the terrific millennials who approach us for board service. The pilot was an immediate success with loads of amazing young professionals approaching us for junior board seats. From the nonprofits we helped, the feedback has been extremely positive. While many were concerned that having a junior board would take a lot of staff time away from other critical functions, what we’ve heard has been wholly to the contrary. Millennials are terrific self-starters that don’t need or want a lot of hand-holding. Give them a task to do, and they will get it done!

What keeps nonprofits from approaching corporate funders for support? Is there a difference in cultivating relationships with corporate funders vs private foundations and individual donors? What can a nonprofit do to break into this consistent yet, often elusive funding stream? 

In my long career as a funder, I loved the satisfaction of helping people who were doing wonderful things for other people. During those many years, I actually saw few proposals that advocated for bad ideas. But I did encounter an astonishing number of funding requests that were cast in the worst possible light.

Today, GuideStar published the 16th edition of our annual Nonprofit Compensation Report, the only large-scale analysis of its kind based entirely on Form 990 data reported to the IRS, and the most comprehensive nonprofit compensation study available (135,512 observations from 96,242 FY2014 Forms 990).

I train people (and boards) to be great fundraisers. 

Note from Beth Kanter:   I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of Data Driven Nonprofits by Steve Maclaughlin (launching today, Sept. 6th) and so data and nonprofits has been on my brain.  So when colleague, Cheryl Contee reached out an idea for this post, I could not resist!  Speaking of books, you can pre-order my next book, The Happy Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout due out in October.

Guest Post by Cheryl Contee

I have worked as a fundraising consultant for the past eight years.  So in March when I took a part time job as major gift officer for one of my long-time clients, stepping out of the “tell ‘em how it’s done” role and into the “do it myself” role has been humbling, exciting, and very informative.

Maybe you are a fundraiser who stepped into a situation where donors have been well treated.  Where the board has resonant relationships with supporters.  Where the organization’s story is well crafted.  If so, count yourself among the lucky few. 

The following is a case study interview between Brian Saber, Asking Matters, and John Collins, founder and executive director of the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, to understand his strategy behind successfully preparing board members to become leaders and advocates for his organization. 

Brian: Hi John. From what I understand you took a different approach to building your board when you founded the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance in 2012. Can you share what you did and why you did it?