Considered the look of your nonprofit communications lately? Do they scream shoestring budget?

Here in the Philadelphia region, where I live, six of the area’s top 10 employers are nonprofits, and a staggering 27 percent of city employees work for nonprofits.
Great news for the sector, right?
Well, that depends on how well the sector’s doing here.
As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday, the Philadelphia Foundation “is commissioning a study to benchmark the state of nonprofits in Philadelphia and its four neighboring Pennsylvania counties.”
It has tapped the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia to catalog and group the members of our nonprofit world, examine their finances and funding sources, and compare them with their peers. The foundation …read more

Yesterday’s Washington Post had a nifty piece on a group of 25 D.C.-area women who have banded together to form a kind of informal foundation, the African American Women’s Giving Circle.
… [T]hey pool their charitable dollars, debate their passions and award grants. Like a book club, they meet monthly — at their homes, in offices and even during yoga classes held in parks. …
Some members are lawyers, consultants and business owners. One recently lost her job as a real estate loan counselor, yet she still gives. Most contribute $2,500 a year; some give as much as $10,000, and others as …read more

Bad news, Generation X, Generation Y, Millennials, and whatever the hell else they’re calling anybody under the age of 50 these days: The Baby Boomers are coming to the nonprofit sector.
Yesterday New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote breathlessly about the coming trend of retiring Boomers who are shelving their golf clubs in favor of “encore careers” that involve “giving back”:
Some 78 million American baby boomers are now beginning to retire, and one survey this year by a research institute found that half of boomers are interested in starting such new careers with a positive social impact. If we boomers …read more

It’s one thing to cultivate wealthy young arts supporters to ensure a future stream of funding.
It’s quite something else to give them leadership responsibilities at family arts foundations.
In a fascinating piece in last Sunday’s Arts section, the New York Times profiled a couple of twentysomethings who have been handed the reins and “are being groomed … to take over the family business, so to speak — that business being arts patronage.”
Their position is a rare one. Not many people have a foundation in the family. But the journey ahead of them poses some interesting questions. It is one thing to …read more

On Friday Bill Gates passed off day-to-day responsibilities for Microsoft to Steve Ballmer and walked out of the software giant’s Redmond office and into his new life as a philanthropist.
With an endowment approaching $40 billion, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest. Here’s how it describes its mission:
Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the …read more

Today is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the day when the sun’s rays reach us most directly, giving us the year’s longest period of daylight.
That means it’s also a great day to remember that too much daylight — well, too much sunlight — can be harmful without the proper protection. As the Skin Cancer Foundation notes,

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States. More than one million skin cancers are diagnosed annually.
One in five Americans will develop skin cancer in the course of a lifetime.
In 2004, the total direct cost associated with the …read more

You must be doing something right for Slate to refer to your start-up funding as "the Google IPO event of the nonprofit world." The innovative search engine-turned-online applications company raised $1.67 billion in its initial public offering, after all, so when a philanthropic consultant writes that your "tested model … is about as good a philanthropic bet as they come," it’s time to pay attention.
The subject of Georgia Levenson Keohane’s ardor is Single Stop USA, a new anti-poverty nonprofit that raised $35 million in under months from some very discerning foundations. The organization says its Turbo Tax-like software needs just …read more

Philadelphia’s CBS affiliate, KYW-TV/Channel 3, is reeling from news that federal agents seized the computer of its lead anchor, Larry Mendte, who is suspected of reading the personal e-mails of his former coanchor, Alycia Lane. Lane, you may recall, was accused of hitting a New York cop late last year, and though the charges were dropped, KYW sacked her in the wake of a string of controversies that made her the news far too often. According to newspaper reports, Mendte and Lane had developed a frosty relationships toward the end of their tenure together, with each wanting credit for their …read more

The Foundation Center’s recent publication of Guía para escribir propuestas, a Spanish-language edition of its popular Guide to Proposal Writing, might seem to make little sense, given that most foundations want their proposals submitted in English. But according to Janet Camarena, director of the center’s San Francisco office, who oversaw the translation, the expansion of resources and training services to Spanish speakers is part of a larger, longer-term strategy to engage with audiences that might not be aware of how it could help them.
"A central piece of our strategic plan a few years ago was to start reaching out to …read more