Do you really support the missions you work for?

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There’s a new website called greatnonprofits.org. It was started by some students at Stanford University as a “place to find, review, and talk about great — and perhaps not so great — nonprofits,” according to the GreatNonprofits homepage.
After taking a look around the site, it appears to be very similar to other review sites you would find for restaurants and other services vendors. The idea of being able to post “not-so-great” information about nonprofits on this site might make anyone in the sector a little scared, but it shouldn’t.
The great thing about blogs, review sites like GreatNonprofits, and other forums where …read more

Not everyone in Beijing right now is there to marvel at Michael Phelps. As MSNBC reported the other day, a healthy nonprofit enterprise has sprung up at the Games, with a plethora of Olympic pin collectors set up outside the Beijing Exhibition Center to obtain as many pins as they can through “barter, exchange and trade.” One Canadian collector, who claims to have 40,000 to 50,000 pins in his portfolio, noted that he wasn’t in it for the money:
“I could sell [pins] for a couple hundred bucks,” he said. “But I spent thousands to come here. That’s not what it’s …read more

Debt forgiveness for young nonprofiteers holding student loans. | Mission-Based Management
A call for fundraisers to watch what they say. | the fundit
How do you stay focused on the mission when the work pushes you to the brink of exhaustion? | Perspectives from the Pipeline
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)

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 …read more

Nonprofiteers, why do you do what you do? Jeremy Gregg, who blogs at the Raiser’s Razor, posed that question recently in what he called his Philanthropassion Contest, and the responses he got were terrific, energizing reminders of the powerful lure of mission-driven work. Gregg culled the most eye-opening comments and posted them, along with his winner, here. I won’t steal his thunder by telling you who won and why; go there yourself and check out all of the thoughts sent in by his readers. Many will inspire you, which is great; some may even help you do your jobs better, …read more

A recent post by Tracy Kaufman, of the provocatively titled blog Ask the World’s Foremost Expert on Philanthropy, caught my eye for its strongly worded plea to nonprofits to shut up, already, with the corporate jargon. Ms. Kaufman, without naming names, wrote that “some nonprofit bigwig” had published a piece in “one of the many philanthropy-ish magazines that I read at work” that contained this quote:
Leveraging existing knowledge, know-how and relationships with other donors can support achieving desired outcomes. Listening, following one’s intuition and being surrounded by professional philanthropic resources will go a long way to ensuring effective social investment.
Ms. …read more

Commenting on a New York Times profile of the new director of the Dia Art Foundation, Conde Nast Portfolio blogger Felix Simon posts compellingly on why nonprofits need to carefully consider any grand plans for growth. As he points out, Dia has done a terrific job setting itself up as an ongoing concern with an endowment large enough to obviate the need for vast public approval. It offers a perfect venue for the works it presents, Simon says, making the new director’s stated intention “to take it to a new chapter” something to be approached warily:
To use a stock-market analogy, …read more

Many of my colleagues in b5media’s Business Channel, as well as the bloggers who staff the Entertainment Channel, are celebrating the summer solstice with the Great Blog Off. They have pledged to post new copy every hour — either their own stuff or contributions from guests — to commemorate the fact that this is the first year since 1975 that the solstice has not happened on June 21.
I’m not able to dive in, unfortunately, but am thrilled about the Great Blog Off’s nonprofit tie-in, with each participating blog soliciting donations for a charity that supports a mission related the respective …read more