Nonprofit Spark Archives - WebTalkRadio.net

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Nonprofit Spark – Success factors in nonprofit mergers – 082712 Aug 26, 2012

Show notes

Nonprofit mergers are being explored throughout North America as a way to address funding cuts, strengthen services, increase operational efficiency and even, pending executive director retirements. In Minnesota, more than nonprofits have already merged, or the better term is “realigned.”

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A new report was issued this summer about a study of 41 direct service organization mergers that occurred in Minnesota from 1999 to 2010. The study, Success Factors in Nonprofit Mergers, was a joint project of MAP for Nonprofits and Wilder Research, both based in St. Paul. There is a lot experience embedded in this report of value to nonprofits everywhere who are considering realignments. Leaders of new nonprofits might consider exploring opportunities to realign with older ones where retirements are pending. And leaders of emerging nonprofits may use realignments as a way to expand the scope and reach of their services.

My guest this week is Renae Oswald-Anderson, director of redesign services for MAP for Nonprofits. Her organization has completed 65 realignments affecting 120 organizations since 2007. It also provides management consulting and services, and board recruitment and training, and has done so for more than 30 years.

On the show, Renae and I talk about what nonprofit executives and boards need to consider when exploring a realignment. You’ll notice that the primary driver of successful realignments is not finances, but rather, how the merged nonprofits will better serve changing community needs.

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Nonprofit Spark – Getting started with planned gifts: bequests, appreciated stock and annuities – 08/20/12 Aug 19, 2012

Show notes

On this week’s show, I return to my favorite topic – fundraising. Many, many organizations – even 30, 40 or 50 years old – are not encouraging donors to remember the organization in their wills. It’s a huge lost opportunity and yet, planned giving can be an easy and natural fit into the fundraising and communications you’re doing now. It does not have to be complicated and it can be about gifts for today and tomorrow.

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My guest this week is Michael J. Rosen, a certified fundraising executive, and President of ML Innovations, Inc, a fundraising and marketing consulting firm based in Philadelphia. He’s the author of the bestselling book, “Donor-Centered Planned Gift Marketing.” He also is an adjunct professor at Drexel University where he teaches a course on advanced fund development. Finally, he is a recipient of the prestigious Skystone Prize for Research in Fundraising and Philanthropy from the international Association of Fundraising Professionals.

You’ll come away from this show with just enough information to talk internally about how to incorporate planned giving into your current fundraising program and to get started. A great companion Nonprofit Spark episode is Planned gifts and endowment primer which aired on September 19, 2011.

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Nonprofit Spark – Five marketing ideas that will immediately boost your silent auction results – 08/13/12 Aug 13, 2012

Show notes

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers right now across North America who have begun work on fall special events and related silent auctions. This show is designed to help all of you boost your success at the silent auction, once you’ve got the items in hand and people at your event. We’re honing in on this: What are you doing to market the items in your silent auction room?

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For instance, are you using a sound system to make announcements about items and is the lighting subduing or supporting buying? You’ll get some very practical ideas for marketing your items on this show and raising more money.

My guest this week is such an expert about silent and live auctions that I just had to have her back on the show this week. Sherry Truhlar is president of Red Apple Auctions. She is a charity auction educator and onstage auctioneer. She also is a certified meeting planner. She has worked with nonprofits on some 300 events and is a walking, talking, and lively idea machine about auctions. You may want to listen to the interview I did with her last October, Handheld Bidding Devices, which also is lively and packed with ideas. That show aired the week of October 24, 2011.

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Nonprofit Spark – Avoiding pitfalls of cause-related marketing-080612 Aug 05, 2012

Show notes

The show this week is about cause-related marketing, that unique relationship between a nonprofit and a for profit who both benefit from associating with each other and together, generate revenue for the nonprofit.

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You may be familiar with the recent cause-related campaign between Coca Cola and the World Wildlife Fund. They joined forces to raise awareness and money through the Arctic Home campaign that focused on protecting the polar bear’s natural habitat. The campaign ran from November 1, 2011 through March 15, 2012.

For the campaign, Coca Cola changed 1.4 billion of of their Coke cans to white matched donations from customers who supported the World Wildlife Fund by texting the package code off of their can and a donation. The company was willing to match up to $1 million in texted donations through the period of the campaign.

Now, that’s a big example of cause-related marketing for an international organization, but you can look around your own area to find more local examples. These can be highly effective relationships that make a big financial difference for a nonprofit.

So what are the basics you need to know before you consider cause-related marketing? What pitfalls should you avoid? How is this different from company sponsorships? I have two attorneys on the show this week from the Venable law firm and it’s main office in Washington, D.C. It has a large nonprofit practice. Kristalyn Loson as an associate in the firm’s Regulatory Practice Group. She focuses primarily on nonprofits and associations, and legal issues related to charitable giving. She’s joined on the show by her colleague, Jonathan Pompan is Of Counsel at the Venable firm; he focuses on providing legal advice and regulatory advocacy for companies, nonprofits and associations. Together, they encourage due diligence before embarking on a cause-related marketing campaign.

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Nonprofit Spark – Criteria for a successful major campaign – 07/30/12 Jul 30, 2012

Show notes

With so much gloom and doom about the economy here and in Europe, we can lose sight of the fact that nonprofits like yours are still working your magic in your communities. And guess what? There are a lot of people in addition to your current donors who have the financial means to support what you’re doing.

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What if you’ve been dreaming about expanding by buying or renovating space, adding programs, or establishing an endowment? How will you know you’re ready for a major fundraising campaign and when to move forward with it?

On this week’s show, I speak with Rita Galowich, president of Fund Inc, a Chicago-based fundraising consulting firm to nonprofit organizations. Rita has run campaigns of all kinds for her clients and she knows, as all good fundraising consultants do, that there are criteria for success that must be understood and accepted prior to launching. We discuss those today.

I interviewed Rita last year about building an individual fundraising program and I encourage you to listen to that, too, because you’ll hear today about how important it is for your organization to have an established donor base before you initiate a big campaign. The other thing about that show is she describes how to develop fundraising skills that will serve you very well when it’s time for a larger campaign. Developing Individual Donors and Your Fundraising Skills aired a year ago, the week of July 25, 2011.

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Nonprofit Spark – Millennial Impact Report 2012 and boosting engagement – 07/23/12 Jul 23, 2012

Show notes

On this week’s show, my guest and I discuss a new point of view about fundraising and cultivation to encourage more contributions. Recently, I replayed an interview I did with Martha Taylor of the University of Wisconsin Foundation about unique ways to cultivate women donors. This week, we look at Millennials, the active and passionate men and women between 20 and 35 and the myriad ways they engage with nonprofits.

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My guest this week is Derrick Feldmann is CEO of Achieve. It’s a fundraising agency that creates campaigns that nonprofits use to attract attention and secure financial support from all audiences, especially Millennials. Achieve partnered with Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates, a company that works with philanthropic organizations, to conduct their third study Millennial involvement with nonprofits. They released the Millennial Impact Report 2012 just a few weeks ago.

While it’s easy to write off people in this age group as potential donors. my guest this week says, ‘Take another look.” Some 64% if Millennials volunteered for a nonprofit and 75% said they gave a financial gift in 2011.

This is an interesting interview with a Millennial about Millennials, and he challenges us to reconsider how nonprofits define giving, volunteering, and involvement so as to be open to the tremendous contributions this generation has to offer. It’s all about authentic communication.

In the interview, Feldmann refers to a YouTube video of a presentation by Carolyn Everson, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook. She describes the new wave of expectations more and more people have – not just Millennials – for authentic connections with nonprofits. Here’s the link to the video, Social by Design.

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Nonprofit Spark – Funders: Stop asking non-profits for budgets! – 07/16/12 Jul 16, 2012

Show notes

My guest this week has a truly radical idea that you’re going to love. She first shared it with me a week ago and then in our actual interview but you know, I could not get my head around it at first. It was almost too simple. She is on a mission to persuade funders to stop asking for budgets from nonprofits who are applying for grants! Say, what??

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Carol Cantwell is the founder of Fun with Financials, a San Francisco-based company that teaches nonprofits practices that support informed financial decisions. It also assists foundations with their grants and processes so they support nonprofit financial health.

Over the years, Carol gained experience working in financial roles at a nonprofit and while working with hundreds of social justice organizations on their finances. She knows full well the burden placed on nonprofits to devise budgets and variations of budgets and reports about budgets in order to obtain foundation grants. She’s pointing to the pink elephant in the room that most of us who’ve sought grants haven’t dared to say a word about.

I’m so delighted by this that Carol and I have set up a Twitter conversation about it at to start a movement to eliminate budgets for funders. Check out the conversation at #nofunderbudget.

Before you participate in the Twitter chat, listen to this interview about Carol’s radical, elegant and completely responsible idea.

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Nonprofit Spark – “How to use your photos for storytelling – 07/09/12” Jul 09, 2012

Show notes

On this week’s show, we explore what you can do to build a collection of great photos that tell the story of your organization. This is another “show and tell” show, which means we want you to look something we’re talking about. In this case, We review a blog post that shows examples of photos in online annual reports, on donation pages, in e-newsletters and on Facebook.

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My guest is Julie Damon, CEO and marketing director of Branded4Good, a company that provides nonprofit marketing and website development services to help organizations build their brand and support their fundraising. Julie and I are particularly passionate about this topic because we’re the ones who actually work with the photos you take. Most of them, frankly, are not good and sometimes, there’s not even one worth showing from a batch of 200 images you send us. Not having great photos is a lost opportunity for telling your organization’s unique story. All the text and explanations in the world are not as powerful as a few great photographs.

Julie and I make lots of suggestions here, and I hope you’ll be inspired to try even just a couple of them over the next year, and then a couple more the year after that. Within a few years, you’ll have a library of great images at your fingertips to use to you pull people closer to your organization and into caring deeply about it.

To support you in learning more about photography, I suggest you listen to an interview I did last year with the awards manager for the nonprofit, PhotoPhilanthropy. About 20 minutes into that episode, we review a slideshow of stunning images telling the story of an orphanage in Transylvania. That show, Powerful Photographic Storytelling, aired the week of August 15, 2011.

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Nonprofit Spark – Training do’s and don’ts for non-profit trainers – 07/02/12 Jul 02, 2012

Show notes

The show this week focuses on training because just about every nonprofit has someone in the organization who is training staff, volunteers, board members, service providers or clients.

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I know a nonprofit that cooks and distributes meals every day. The kitchen director regularly has to train people about food safety and preparation. Another organization trains new staff about mental illness, and how best to work with the clients who come in for services. A third organization runs a massive fundraising walk and trains staff and volunteers how to manage registrations, answer participant questions, and even, perform CPR and apply First Aid.

Training is happening all the time in nonprofits, but only in rare cases is there someone on staff who has formal training in how to design great training. Inexperienced trainers talk too much and overwhelm participants with material. Inexperienced trainers don’t have participants try out what they’re learning so they discover things on their own. Inexperienced trainers are, plain and simple, not making the kind of difference that creates memorable “ah ha” moments for learners. The result is that people take a long time to catch on, they make mistakes, money and time is wasted, legal and financial risks build, and it all creates lots of frustration.

Did you know that highly skilled trainers only talk a total of 45 minutes in a day-long seminar? Did you know you should cover only three key points every 60-90 minutes? There is a lot to learn about learning!

My guest this week is Gayle Noakes, a principal and the managing director of CLA University at CliftonLarsonAllen, our Nonprofit Spark sponsor. Gayle is charged with overseeing the learning and development efforts for the firm. She consults with leaders and facilitates various meetings and events, in partnership with business leaders. She holds an MA in Human Resource Development and Certificate in Organization Development from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN.

We talk about common misconceptions managers and new trainers have about training, and offer several ideas for designing a great training program that helps people do great work.

Want to learn more about designing effective training? Gayle Noakes and her CliftonLarsonAllen colleague, LaChel Hird, and I are facilitating a follow-up webinar on July 31 from 12-1:30 p.m. EST. Learn more about Six Do’s and Don’ts of Training online; I’ll also talk about the webinar later on the show.

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Nonprofit Spark – Advice from the wisest nonprofit fundraisers in North America – 06/25/12 Jun 25, 2012

Show notes

On this week’s show, I knit together golden nuggets about non-profit fundraising from three of the wisest development professionals in North America. Together, they have more than 60 years experience and have raised millions of dollars – if not billions – for charities. The interviews were held early last year and I didn’t want you to overlook those podcasts because they are so rich with ideas for improving your fundraising results.

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I start the show with Phil Schumacher of Gunderson Lutheran Medical Center in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, who describes what he’d do – and what he wouldn’t do – if he were starting a new development program at a nonprofit. My second guest is consultant and author Jerold Panas who focuses on the need to have a strong board of directors, and how the staff and board can work together to approach donors. Finally, my third guest is Martha Taylor of the University of Wisconsin Foundation who sheds light on how to court women donors to your organization. These are extraordinary fundraising professionals so I hope you make time to sit back and soak in what they have to share.

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