Not for Profit

How to Save Community Development from a Budgetary Free-Fall

“State nonprofit community development associations can’t simply close up shop because their states are in various stages of budgetary free-fall.   A dozen associations at the annual conference of the National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) in Washington, D.C., on Monday and Tuesday, volunteered difficult answers to what they have accomplished for the nonprofit [...]

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How to Create an Effective Non-Profit Mission Statement

“Mission’ for nonprofits is the same as ‘profits’ for private sector companies. In the private sector, corporations achieve their goals by carefully designing business operations that are reflected in a budget and then regularly reporting on how actual profits compare to that budget. If mission accomplishment is as important as profit attainment, why do most [...]

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Tips for Entrepreneurs Who Want to Start Not-for-Profit Organizations

“There are huge markets where people have needs — for food, shelter, education and more — but can’t afford to pay money out of their own pockets to have their needs met. In the United States, the government created the 501 (c) (3) nonprofit corporation to help address this situation. Technically speaking, a 501(c)(3) is [...]

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For Love or Lucre: Create a nonprofit, a for profit or something in between

Social entrepreneurs who want to start a new venture quickly confront an important question: What type of legal structure should I create? Should I start a traditional nonprofit, a for-profit, or something in between? This is not a simple question to answer, and it is in some ways becoming more difficult with the proliferation of [...]

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Increasing Civic Reach: Nonprofits Board members staying connected to the communities they serve

am convinced that skill at fundraising and governance alone do not an excellent board member make. Nor do such skills alone ensure that a nonprofit organization maintains a durable, deep connection to the wider community it serves. A third skill—I call it civic reach—distinguishes a great board member from a merely adequate one, a world-class [...]

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Chris Hughes On What’s Next For Nonprofit Social Site Jumo

Talk about competition for attention: There are 1.5 million registered nonprofit groups in the U.S. Beyond the well-known names like the American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society, the struggle to stand out is enormous. That’s where Jumo comes in, said Chris Hughes, Jumo’s founder and executive director and a cofounder of Facebook. The [...]

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Social Entrepreneurs Don’t Need Profit For Success

A term I’m hearing more and more these days is “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to create and manage a venture to make social change. On the surface, this sounds like entrepreneurs who want to build [...]

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Myths about Online Volunteering

Are myths about online volunteering preventing your organization from tapping into this valuable resource? In the following article, which first appeared on the website Coyote Communications, consultant Jayne Cravens dispels some common misconceptions about finding and working with online volunteers. Online volunteering means unpaid service that is given via the Internet, either via a computer [...]

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Your Media Relations Can Make or Break Your Charity

Did you see the 60 Minutes story about Greg Mortenson, his book, Three Cups of Tea, and his charity, the Central Asia Institute? If not, you can get the gist of the expose with this AP article or Monday’s New York Time’s article about it. The 60 Minutes report was pretty damning, alleging misrepresentation of [...]

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‘Three Cups of Tea’ Author Defends Book

While the publishing industry waited to see whether it faced the embarrassment of yet another partly fabricated memoir, Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” a book popular with the Pentagon for its inspirational lessons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, forcefully countered a CBS News report on Sunday that questioned the facts [...]

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