GuideStar Blog

You’ve recruited a strong, dynamic, and influential board. So, what now? It’s time to activate your board as fundraisers. Each of your board members needs to actively participate in fundraising to support your organization. Cultivating a fundraising mindset among your board of directors is a critical step in implementing a culture of philanthropy. 

In this post, the second in our series about the new trends in capital campaign fundraising (part 1 appeared last week), we explore whether, why, and when you will need an experienced consultant to guide you through your capital campaign. 

Giving Tuesday and the end-of-year giving season are fast approaching. Although traditional methods of giving still predominate, the number of people who give online is steadily increasing. How can you ensure that these tech-savvy donors get the right information about your organization, especially if they give through third parties such as Facebook, GuideStar, JustGive, Network for Good, community foundations, and the major donor-advised funds? 

Advances social sector’s ability to share information globally to improve outcomes 

Foundation Center, GlobalGiving, and GuideStar today announce the release of BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) information as open data. This enhancement makes it easier to identify and share information about entities around the world that are working to advance social good. The ability to distinguish these organizations from each other and to gather scattered information about them is vital to understanding their activities, impact, and funding.

Today GuideStar published the 2018 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report, the 18th edition in our annual series. Over the years, thousands of nonprofits—more than 2,400 in the past two and a half years alone—have used the GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report to benchmark compensation practices, determine appropriate compensation for specific positions, and protect their leaders from IRS penalties.

Board recruitment, and more specifically, recruiting the right board members, should be among the most critical issues for any nonprofit. The strength of an organization and its ability to achieve its mission through smart governance, creative thinking, and fundraising is dependent on the board and those the organization entrusts to lead it. With a strategic approach to the recruitment process, a nonprofit’s development department can better harness the potential of its board members and raise more money and awareness for the organization.

An email from an international relief charity trumpets, “Your gift will multiply 5 times in impact!”

An appeal letter from a military charity bears a stamp at the top that shouts, “$1 = $41!”

No doubt, you recognize offers like these—they’re multipliers. And, as we know, multipliers are generally pretty effective in fundraising appeals, for a good reason—donors tend to like them. 

Last year, Giving USA’s Annual Report called donor-advised funds (DAFs) one of the “hottest topics in the philanthropic community.”¹ Between 2007 and 2016, assets in donor-advised funds nationwide skyrocketed from $32 billion to $85 billion,² and this trend continues today. Who uses DAFs? How can your nonprofit collaborate with DAF advisors to meet your goals? I explore these questions below.

Massive undertakings like capital campaigns require all the tools in the toolshed. And with today’s technology, the available tools have never been more effective.

Here’s the scenario:

You need to raise $750,000 to renovate your existing facility. Finding those first few dollars to get a capital drive underway is always tricky. You look at the overall capital budget and identify that you need about $90,000 in office equipment, furniture, and technology. If you start your campaign by securing in-kind product donations for these items, you’ll set the stage for leveraging cash support for the rest of the renovation. And the beauty of this approach is that writing the grant proposals for these types of product donations is fairly easy.

First the nonprofit space had to adapt to the Internet. We built websites, started sending out email newsletters, and made Facebook pages to connect with our communities.

Giving Tuesday is one of the largest giving days in the United States and it’s now a worldwide giving phenomenon.

Recent reports show that nearly a third of annual giving comes in the final month of the year. This holiday season, get a running start on those funds by kicking off your year-end campaign on Giving Tuesday and gain the momentum you need for a strong finish.

There is no fundraising without marketing. Your community won’t turn out to support your organization on Giving Tuesday if you don’t ask them to, and the week leading up to the giving day is the most important time for getting the word out. In those final seven days, it’s your job to keep your campaign top of mind and move supporters to get involved. Although marketing efforts should start as early as the beginning of November, there’s a lot you can do in the week before Giving Tuesday to get people’s attention and mobilize your donors.

The three major not-for-profit health plan foundations in the state of Massachusetts are led by dynamic women. In addition to being mission-driven executives, the three—Nora Moreno Cargie, Karen Voci, and Audrey Shelto—are friends who champion each other’s careers. They are servant leaders who listen, learn, and truly engage with constituents—they see leadership as a privilege. To achieve their goals as leaders of their foundations, they engage with stakeholders across the spectrum—in the community and within community-based organizations, in the political and legislative realms, and in the corporate and philanthropic spheres.

Attracting the right volunteers or full-time employees to a nonprofit can be tricky. Today’s market is overflowing with nonprofit organizations. Careful and precise position description writing can help resolve this problem.

I am working with an organization that has a noble mission but hasn’t balanced its budget in a long time. Maybe never. Board members are fatigued and pessimistic, and all have stayed LONG past their terms have expired, because (surprise!) no one else could be recruited to fill their slots.

What gets in the way of you and your board raising more money?

For a fundraising trainer like me, this is a key question. Any sort of fundraising education must address the barriers that make it difficult for people to participate.

This list of common barriers won’t surprise you. Perhaps you’ve experienced them yourself.

Mitt Romney got pretty beat up in the media in 2012 when he said, “I like being able to fire people.” It made him sound like a cold, power-hungry corporate executive. It was also tone deaf because Americans wanted a president to create jobs and not terminate them with glee.

Data just released by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics using a technique first developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies shows that the nonprofit sector continued its steady record of significant job growth through 2016, the latest date for which data are available, outpacing the rate of for-profit job growth by over 3 to 1.

Recently, a representative of a health care consultancy contacted us. He needed to benchmark compensation for a range of medical jobs. Could GuideStar help?

It turns out we could. After talking with the client to define exactly what he needed, our data analysts were able to return (that’s data talk for “pull” or “produce”) a data set with compensation information for more than 2,000 job titles held by 17,000 individuals at 5,000 nonprofit medical facilities. Many of the positions were highly specialized, such as Physician Radiation Oncologist (we found one) and Physician—Women's Clinic (we found three).