July 12th, 2008
There’s this notion out there that the nonprofit sector has only recently come around to the idea of metrics and accountability, and I’m just not sure that’s true. For example, the Baltimore Sun, in writing about a company that has developed piece of software that purports to measure nonprofit impact, noted the other day:
It’s a newer way of thinking. Traditionally, nonprofits have been satisfied to know they’re working hard to do good work, but rarely set measures to determine what was good. Individual employees sometimes kept their own records, in logbooks or Excel files or - in one Minnesota organization’s case - on recipe cards. But often, there is no entity-wide system … .
Nonprofit metrics are not long-standing facets of the sector, but neither do I believe that they are as recent a phenomenon as the Sun’s wide-eyed report would have us believe. It’s not as if a Red Cross chapter director in Boise read a management book two years ago and snapped her fingers and launched an accountability movement. Admittedly, I have only my own anecdotal evidence of 15 years in nonprofits to go on, but my gut tells me that, while not nearly as explicitly stated or as formalized as it is now, the attempt to measure results goes back further than many think. | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 2 comments
July 11th, 2008
Mention “religious missionaries” and the mind immediately conjures up visions of pious men and women taking lengthy trips to exotic international locales to do good deeds and convert the locals. But these days, missions also include numerous shorter service-immersion trips by younger congregants to foreign lands. As the Washington Post noted earlier this week, some critics have raised concerns about these jaunts, calling them “religious tourism.” The churches are responding.
To make missionary work more meaningful, some churches are taking a different approach. In response to the criticism, a growing number of churches and agencies that put together short-term trips are revamping their programs and establishing new standards.
For the past four years, for example, the Fairfax Presbyterian youths have stayed closer to home, in places such as Welch, West Va.; Lansing, Mich., and Philadelphia. Last week, a team of 44 were in St. Petersburg, Fla., to clean and paint low-income homes, assist the homeless and volunteer at a free health clinic.
This shift gets to the heart of the new emphasis on nonprofit outcomes. As the Post wrote, one Mexican “church was painted six times during one summer by six different groups.” This not simply about making “missionary work more meaningful” for its participants — it’s about ensuring that the work has a truly beneficial impact for those it’s meant to help. Isn’t that what mission means? | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 1 comment
July 11th, 2008
And you thought Dick Cheney was bad.
On this day in 1804, the vice president of the United States of America shot his political rival during a duel. As in, on purpose. Alexander Hamilton died the following day. His killer, Aaron Burr, was charged but never tried, and eventually returned to Washington, D.C., to serve out the remainder of his term as Thomas Jefferson’s No. 2. (Jefferson had already made clear his intention to drop Burr from the ticket for his second term; George Clinton replaced Burr as veep. No word on whether the P-Funk All-Stars were named to cabinet posts.)
The Aaron Burr Association seeks to honor and perpetuate Burr’s memory “as a student, a soldier, a lawyer, a politician, a patron of the arts, an educator, a banker, and as a husband and father” and “to secure for him the honor and respect which are due him as one of the leading figures of his age.” Burr has gone down in history as the bad guy, with some accusing him of using a doctored firearm to gain an unfair advantage in his duel with Hamilton, whose reputation has remained so untarnished that his portrait glances out from every sawbuck printed by the U.S. Mint. The association is distressed by this:
Burr’s supporters in the Aaron Burr Association since 1946 knew his character was not consistent with that of a villain, and have tried to convince history teachers that teaching children to hate an innocent person is wrong. We don’t need villains to be united. Attacking someone’s character does not make the attacker superior. The press destroyed Burr’s reputation, while Burr stood silent in Hamilton’s death. Hamilton’s biographers were hailed, while Burr’s were spurned. Burr could not prove the trick pistols were used, and took the blame for the duel. Throughout our history, we have rallied on the backs of those we condemn. 200 years after the duel, this negative behavior by our teachers and politicians must stop.
Nonprofits are like ice cream: There’s one for every conceivable individual taste. | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 10th, 2008
He could have done eBay, but instead of cashing in, Morton Savada chose to share his love of music with a wider audience. The late Manhattan record store owner’s estate recently donated Savada’s 200,000 78-rpm records to Syracuse University, opening up a vast archive of the earliest recorded American music to researchers and audiophiles.
The collection, valued at $1 million, weighs 50 tons and represents more than a half-century of American music history.
Included are recordings from 1895 to the 1950s, with big band, jazz, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian and Latin among the genres. The collection also contains spoken-word, comedy and broadcast recordings, and “V-disks,” which were distributed as entertainment to the U.S. military during World War II.
Savada was driven to make his posthumous donation in hopes that others would share his passion:
Savada did not attend Syracuse, but wanted to donate his collection to a major institution that would maintain it and make the recordings available for research and teaching, said his son, Elias Savada, who runs a film research company based in Bethesda, Maryland.
Syracuse gets no monetary value out of Savada’s generosity, but it surely gains in prestige among music scholars, a nice plus for a university whose communications program is among the nation’s finest. The gift is a nice reminder that funding is not the only things for nonprofits to solicit. | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 9th, 2008
In reporting the other day about deals cut by a Maryland county executive to allow developers to purchase and build on public land in exchange for contributions to county charities, The Washington Post focused on the failure of those developers to pony up the scratch once the agreements were in place. But the big pickle, in my mind, is the use of those charities as extortion leverage in backroom swapping done without public scrutiny. As the Post noted:
The arrangements, laid out in five contracts in recent years, were shrouded in mystery. The county did not name the charities in four of the five contracts. It identified some of the organizations only under pressure from the state. Officials at the nonprofit groups said they knew nothing about the funding they were to receive.
Certainly the nonprofits could use the funding, but the seedy nature of the deals surely taints the contributions. Oh, wait, that’s right: There have been no contributions. This is a lousy, lousy way for government to fund charities — or, more precisely, to compel private businesses to fund them charities. Shame on Prince George’s County for deceiving its residents and its nonprofits in a sadly familiar unethical tale of political influence and under-the-table, sweetheart deals. | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 9th, 2008
After reading my post yesterday about ProPublica’s collaboration with 60 Minutes on a story that the Washington Post also delved into, the journalism nonprofit’s general manager, Dick Tofel, wrote to me with “two factual assertions I hope you’ll reconsider”:
- 60 Minutes “likely would have done [this story] anyway.” What’s your basis for that?
- Our Alhurra story is “nearly identical” to that in the Post. Do you really think that’s a fair reading of the two stories?
My response to Tofel’s note:
In my haste to post this morning, I used sloppier language than I should have. It would have been more accurate to say that the Al-Hurra story is the kind of story 60 Minutes does with some regularity. Regarding the content issue, I used Wasserman’s assertion that the Post’s story, like yours, “was a distressing chronicle of ineptitude and incoherence, and it too was all about Al-Hurra.” “Nearly identical” may be too strong a characterization.
I then asked Tofel if I could post our exchange, and he assented, adding, “I’d also urge you to re-read the Post story and ours and reach your own conclusion about their similarity.”
Duly noted. And good advice always. | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 8th, 2008
It’s not the fault of either the Red Cross or the Salvation Army that epic flooding has turned vast swaths of the Midwest into lakes and swampland. But those organizations could have done a better job anticipating funding needs and preparing for having to help those displaced. While the Red Cross has already pleaded poverty, now the Salvation Army is asking its local donors, at least in Kansas, to replenish the bare coffers that its regional and national offices, which manage disaster-relief efforts, have been unable to maintain.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Weather-related disasters are increasing in frequency and impact, as any Google search could tell you. It is incumbent on nonprofits to communicate this effectively and often during fair weather, so that they’re not playing catch-up while victims twiddle their thumbs and sleep on cots in high school gyms. I know it’s tough to get people to open their wallets for disaster relief when there’s no disaster screaming at them from the front page of their morning paper. But somehow, someway, fundraisers must get better at this. Changing weather patterns mean that disasters that once struck once a century now happen once a generation. Fundraising needs to change accordingly. | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 8th, 2008
The inaugural effort of Pro Publica, a new, nonprofit investigative journalism initiative funded by a California philanthropy, gets a thumbs-down from a journalism ethics professor. Writing in the Miami Herald, Edward Wasserman of Washington and Lee University points out that Pro Publica’s collaboration with 60 Minutes on a piece detailing the many flaws of a U.S.-funded Arab-language news network in the Mideast is hardly the kind of independent-minded investigation originally envisioned.
First, Wasserman notes, having to link with CBS’ flagship newsmagazine dilutes Pro Publica’s brand, and second, at almost the same time that the 60 Minutes piece was airing, the Washington Post was running a nearly identical story, a troubling fact given that Pro Publica is supposed to be digging up the stuff that the corporate media types are too hamstrung to publish. Then there’s the fact that up to now, Pro Publica has been little more than an aggregator of investigative stories running elsewhere.
It’s important for Pro Publica to get its brand out there, but jumping into bed with 60 Minutes to do a story it likely would have done anyway — and a story that the Post did do anyway — makes you wonder exactly why the organization is needed in the first place. Big-corporation journalism is producing fewer of these necessary pieces around the country, and Pro Publica’s mindset and resources are desperately needed. But if it’s merely going to “subsidize” corporate pieces, as Wasserman put it, and run stories that are already being covered, what’s the point? | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 7th, 2008
For all of the fundraising promise that online initiatives show, the good ol’ USPS still remains a proven medium for scaring up resources. GuideStar, excerpting from Larry Stelter’s How to Raise Money by Mail, recently offered some tips on using snail mail to solicit planned giving.
Such solicitations must be targeted, Stelter writes, ideally to those who have given at least twice to your organization, regardless of the amount, and are at least age 55, “the point … where people seem most open to learning about and acting on philanthropic opportunities.” Delivering mail to such a group can take a lot of scratch, of course, so for budget-conscious organizations, Stelter has additional advice:
- Seek “donors who, in terms of their giving history, strike a balance between longevity and consistency,” such as those who have donated to the annual fund three years out of the last five.
- “Narrow the list further to those people aged 55 or older who have made at least four gifts at any time in the past seven years.”
- “If you’re still over budget, focus on those who have made gifts in five of the past eight years or mail to those who are age 60 or older instead of 55.” | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 6th, 2008
- In addition to brewing a hell of a beer, Sam Adams’s Jim Koch is linking with a nonprofit to help entrepreneurs get off the ground. | Boston Globe
- The nonprofit appeal of Barack Obama. | Blue Avocado
- The difficulty in laying down mission-based metrics. | The NonProfit Times
- The Federal Housing Administration casts a sharp eye at nonprofits loaning money for mortgage down payments. | National Public Radio
- It’s wicked easy to subscribe to 501(c) Files feeds: Just click here and follow the simple instructions. As always, thanks for reading! | 501(c)
Share This
By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
Recent Comments