Funder Relations

9 awesome nonprofit trends we should all celebrate with unicorn cookies!

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Vu

Hi everyone, I am in Saigon right now, where it is a 95 degrees and the humidity is so thick, you can use a knife to whittle out some humidity sculptures for your next silent auction. But, things have been great. Food is cheap and ubiquitous and good, so I’ve been loading up, especially on cold young coconuts and mangosteens, a purplish tropical fruit that tastes like general operating funds (You need to add “Eat five pounds of mangosteens in Southeast Asia” to your bucket list right now!).

The relatives, meanwhile, still have no idea what I do, and while my Vietnamese is pretty good, it is not when it comes to advanced topics. I have the vocabulary of a ten-year-old, so it leads to awkward conversations like this:

Aunt: We heard that you got a new job? Tell us about it

Me: Yes, I work for a…location…that grows people who…drag others…to do good things…

Aunt: Drag others to do good things? You mean, leaders?

Me: Yes! Yes! Leaders! Leaders from groups of people who have …the darker…skins…

Aunt: People of color?

Me: Yes, people of color! We send these leaders into…businesses that don’t make money, but they help make the world better…

Aunt: NGO’s?

Me: Yes, yes!

I won’t recap the next part, where I try to explain capacity building and community organizing. Just be glad your elevator speech doesn’t last thirty minutes and involve a lot of wild gesturing, followed by your relatives looking disappointed at your career choice.Continue reading →

9 annoying nonprofit trends that need to die

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Vu

Hi everyone, I am heading to Vietnam this week for a much-needed vacation. I’ll still be writing each Monday, but can’t guarantee the quality of the blog posts, since I’ll be stuffing my face with street food and coconut juice. But, before I go, let’s address some irritating trends that have surfaced in our sector. Below are a few that the NWB Facebook community came up with. See if you agree, and for the love of hummus, if you are guilty of any of them, cut it out right now.

Ignite-style presentations: “Ignite” involves a five-minute Powerpoint presentation with 20 slides, where the slides advance themselves every 15 seconds. It cuts off long-winded people, and it’s kind of fun to see how speakers match up their speech with the slides. When done right, and used mostly for humorous and easy-to-understand stuff, it can be great. But I’ve seen it too often used for novelty’s sake to explain difficult nonprofit concepts or missions, in which case it becomes “presentation by karaoke,” underestimates the intelligence of the audience, wastes endless hours of speakers’ time in preparation, and makes me want to punch the event organizer in the neck. I once attended an event feature five of these short presentations. People had a great time—“Ooh, that lightbulb graphic appeared JUST when she said ‘I had an idea!’ That’s so, like, awesome!”—but by the end of the night, no one in the audience remembered anything the speakers said.Continue reading →

Why the Sustainability Myth is just as destructive as the Overhead Myth

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Vu

Hi everyone, thanks to the latest episode of Game of Thrones, I’m depressed out of my mind. And I’m hungry. So this post will probably be slightly bitter, and have food metaphors. Last week I mentioned my piece in the Chronicle of Philanthropy regarding sustainability. Unfortunately, since the piece is for paid subscribers only, many of you were not able to read it, leading to several angry comments, and one reader who sent me a severed stuffed unicorn head.

All right, no one sent me a stuffed unicorn head. But that gives me a brilliant NWB merchandizing idea: Stuffed unicorn heads that you can buy and send to board members who don’t show up to meetings. Or funders who make you write a ten-page proposal with eight attachments for a $5,000 grant. Or coworkers who keep leaving their containers of food in the fridge until they get all moldy. Take your butternut squash and quinoa salad home, for the love of GOF (General Operating Funds)!

But, getting back to the topic, there were a few readers annoyed that they couldn’t read the article, so I want to recap and elaborate on the main points here. I know, I know, we’ve been talking forever about this. I hope this will be the last time we bring up Sustainability for a while.

The Overhead Myth

When Charity Navigator, Guidestar, and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance got together in 2013 and wrote a letter denouncing the Overhead Myth, I was ecstatic. The Overhead Myth is one of the dumbest and most damaging concepts ever inflicted on nonprofits and the communities we serve. Imagine if we go on Yelp to find help deciding which restaurants to frequent, and all the reviews are like this:

“We were disgusted that the Happy Chicken spends over 30 percent of their revenues on rent, water, insurance, and accounting software. Go a block down the street and eat at the Flying Lemur instead; the owner assures me she only spends 10 percent on things like electricity.”

That’s what the Overhead Myth is like, and since it is down, we all need to kick it so that it never gets back up to terrorize us again. There is still a lot of people in society we need to educate regarding this issue. Let’s send them severed stuffed unicorn heads…Continue reading →

Standardized answers to the Sustainability Question

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Vu

Hi everyone, last week the Chronicle of Philanthropy published a piece I wrote on the Sustainability Myth. Warning: The piece is for paid subscribers, but it was adapted from this post—“Can we all just admit there is no such thing as nonprofit sustainability?”—which you should check out, since it talks about teeth tattoos, which is an earned-income strategy I am working on in order to increase my organization’s “sustainability.” Tattoos on one’s canines and incisors will be the next big thing in society, trust me, and my organization is going to ride that wave.

Recently I wrote a grant proposal for $30,000, and of course, at the end, there it was, the Sustainability Question. “How will you sustain your program when support from the XYZ foundation runs out?” I took a deep breath. And by “taking a deep breath,” I meant chugging a mini bottle of vodka I keep in my laptop bag. Then I looked at pictures of cute baby animals. That always helps me to calm down. Continue reading →

Winter is coming, and the donor-centric fundraising model must evolve

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Vu

Hi everyone, this post is one of the toughest I have written. Mainly because I just watched the latest episode of Game of Thrones and now am feeling depressed and anxious about which character I like is next to die. Just kidding—kind of. This post is difficult to write because individual donor cultivation is complex, and I have been so focused on other areas of our sector that this seems like new territory for NWB. Today’s post, then, is more an invitation for discussion, and I hope fundraisers, and donors, will weigh in with thoughts and counterpoints.

Over the last few years, we have been sharpening our fundraising knives on the whetting stone of donor-centrism in order to carve into the gluten-free loaf of equity and social justice. (This may just be the worst metaphor I’ve written since the Vitamix of summits blending the margaritas of community engagement). Because of the constancy and complexity of fundraising, the brilliant development professionals in our field—Pamela Grow and Mary Cahalane being two that I learn from—have created a model where the donor is at the center. It is not about us and our organizations and programs, but about the donors and their relationships with our missions. I’ve been making sure donors are thanked quickly and in personalized ways and are constantly kept in the loop, for example. And I’ve been learning to say “you” way more often in all my communications, both at work, and even at home—e.g., “YOU do the dishes!”Continue reading →