Dirt-cheap and easy nonprofit Halloween costumes! [video]

Hi everyone, this week, on October 24th at 12pm Pacific Time, I’ll be in discussion on the topic of imposter syndrome with Esther Saehyun Lee and Aleeka Morgan. It’s FREE; captions enabled. Register here. Read Esther’s essay “You’re not feeling imposter syndrome, you are an imposter: Identity and belonging in nonprofit work” by Esther in advance.

Halloween is coming up, and you’re probably invited to a bunch of parties. Of course, if you’re a nonprofit professional, you probably don’t have much money to spend on costumes, nor time to make something elaborate.

So here are some costumes that are quick and easy and can be put together with stuff you probably already have! Check it out, as well as last year’s costume ideas below (I don’t know how anything can beat “Strategic Flan”), and add your costume ideas in the comment section!

Last year’s costume ideas, still relevant for this year:

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Are you perpetuating inequity while engaging in Community-Centric Fundraising?

[Image description: Three fluffy little yellow ducklings, waddling along on the grass, surrounded by tiny white wild floweres. Image by WinniArt on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, the virtual rally to get nonprofits better representation within the White House, and ideally the Harris administration, has been changed from October 24th to October 17th at 4:30pm Pacific Time, so please note that in your calendar. It’s free; register HERE.

Over the past four years, one of the most heartening things I’ve seen is the rise of the Community-Centric Fundraising (CCF) movement. Organizations are doing really awesome and creative stuff, such as asking their donors to support other nonprofits, getting rid of long-held practices such as “raising the paddle,” and using nontraditional metrics for assessing fundraising success. You can read about a lot of the cool stuff colleagues are thinking and doing at the CCF Hub, edited by the brilliant Chris Talbot-Heindl.

It’s also been heartening for me and other CCF proponents to receive fewer annoying and misinformed comments on this topic: “CCF people don’t care about raising money at all; all they do write angry beat poetry about taxes!” “Woke is broke, and it must be true because it rhymes!” “Vu Le hates donors and thinks you should punch every donor you meet in the face!”

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[Video] how to be a demure and mindful funder

Hi everyone, if you’re free this week on September 26th at 4:30pm Pacific Time, please join White House Includes Nonprofits (WHIN)’s virtual gathering to rally the sector to support Harris/Walz and to push for nonprofits to have a seat at the table in the upcoming administration. See the details and register here. Another session is scheduled for October 24th at 4:30pm Pacific Time; join one or ideally both!

I spent a lot of this weekend working on the book, while simultaneously resisting the urge to throw my laptop off a cliff and run away to live a simple life in a small fishing village in another country. Which apparently is a very common temptation for people who attempt to write books!

So, here’s a little video instead. Thanks to colleague Farrah Parkes for the idea. A lot of funders can be more demure and mindful. See you next week!

Are you engaging in Toxic Niceness and perpetuating inequity? 7 questions to ask yourself

Hey everyone. If you are on LinkedIn, you may have seen posts by two of my favorite accounts: Crappy Funding Practices, which publicly names and calls out the malarkey and shenanigans of certain funders (while occasionally giving kudos to really awesome ones), and The Home for Wingless Unicorns, which publicly names the organizations that do not disclose salary on their job postings, because not disclosing salary perpetuates inequity.

Generally, the feedback to these groups has been positive and encouraging. But once in a while, there’s the predictable Why are you being so mean to people? Why name and shame?! You’d get your message across so much better if you just offer chamomile tea to people and speak to them in a calm soothing voice while swaddling them up like a baby!

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Here are the Nonprofit AF posts you missed over the past two months because of tech issues!

[Image descriptions: Four or five fluffy ducklings in a group, looking cute and happy. Image by JonPauling on Pixabay]

Hi everyone, over the past two months, my blog traffic plummeted. Though I was still writing each week, no one was reading, even when they included the usual picture of cute baby animals. Feeling betrayed, I started plotting a sector-wide scheme of revenge.

But it turns out that none of my email subscribers had been getting any email notices when new posts were published. Thanks to the tech experts I’ve contracted with (shout out to Jordan!), we got to the bottom of it, and everything is better now. So no revenge. Sorry that the first thing I thought of was revenge; I will now return the 20,000 praying mantises I ordered online.

Anyway, because notices hadn’t been sent since January 22nd, you probably missed these the last eight blog posts or so. Here they are below, so you have a chance to catch up.

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