Creative services for free in a 24-hour blitz? This for-profit agency is serving nonprofits with no marketing dollars in a round-the-clock CreateAthon.

MITRE’s inclusion on Fortune’s 2008 list of the 100 best companies to work for marked the seventh consecutive year the nonprofit R&D organization has been so honored. The secret to its success? Keeping its ears open.
“We listen to our employees,” Bill Albright, MITRE’s director of quality of work life and benefits, tells the 501(c) Files. “We ask them questions about some things they think they need by way of surveys, and we also administer a biennial employee engagement survey. We take those results very seriously and try to respond to them to the extent we can.”
Albright notes that the aspects …read more

Fortune magazine’s annual list of best companies to work for is out, and, happily, several nonprofits appear on it.  These include a number of health-care organizations (the Methodist Hospital System, OhioHealth, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Griffin Hospital, Vision Service Plan, Scripps Health, the Mayo Clinic, King’s Daughters Medical Center, Southern Ohio Medical Center, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network, and Baptist Health South Florida), the research firm MITRE, and Navy Federal Credit Union. It’s terrific to see as commercially focused a publication as Fortune acknowledge that the benefits of working for nonprofits — focus on mission, diversity …read more

There’s a great discussion happening over at Gift Hub about whether philanthropic leaders should blog. Blogger Phil Cubeta, a financial services exec who directs his company’s charitable efforts and who calls himself a “morals tutor to America’s wealthiest families,” offers 24 reasons, some of them serious, some of them not, against such public commentary, and invites his readers to weigh in in favor of the practice. With trend watchers predicting an age of “transparency tyranny,” anything that results in greater accountability and in clearer views of one’s organization would seem to be of obvious benefit. Yet I’d argue for even …read more

A report released this week concludes that while nonprofits have performed heroically in helping the south to rebuild after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, their limited reach has prevented them from making the kind of large-scale contributions the region needs. The report, from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, is part of an ongoing series examining the storms’ impact. It observes that unlike government’s bumbling efforts to help out, the nonprofit community has stepped in and made a noteworthy impact, however small:
In sharp contrast to the criticism that seems to accompany the …read more

Over the last week, newspapers’ front pages and radio and TV newscasts have included a healthy share of nonprofit news, with Nobel Prizes being handed out to a variety of individuals and groups with no connection whatsoever to quarterly income statements or the SEC. Yet the immense validation conferred by a Nobel Prize will undoubtedly help their recipients. Doris Lessing will sell more books. Environmental organizations focused on climate change will receive more donations. Researchers working in the fields of genetic alteration, surface chemistry, data storage, and whatever the Nobel laureate in economics studies (the prize will be announced tomorrow) …read more