Working Nonprofit Style
This article from the NPQ archives addresses the ways you can build the human capital in your nonprofit without necessarily adding to staff numbers. In short, if your staff members are leaving their spirits at the door as they enter, you have a problem. Again, if you are a manager in this scenario, YOU have a problem.
This thought-provoking interview with Shannon Maynard and Robert Grimm, then of the Corporation for National and Community Service, advocates for a different and more inclusive and strategic approach to talent in and around your nonprofit—paid and unpaid. We consider this interview to be an NPQ classic.
It’s not about technology; it’s about what you do with it.
In nonprofit politics, the commando approach has it pros and cons.
In such challenging times, nonprofits need to identify the most cutting edge organizational tools, technologies, and behaviors that engage constituents and achieve results. To that end, I would draw our attention to the campaign organization built by President-elect Barack Obama.
In other countries, the kind of innovation that is vital for the future of U.S. nonprofit abounds.
Advocacy suffers from an inadequate conceptual frame and inconsistent messages. We are mired in the same old debates about what constitutes advocacy, where the line is drawn between advocacy and civic engagement, and whether we should proudly proclaim lobbying as our constitutionally given right “to petition government” and our public-interest responsibility or should instead avoid the L word for fear of scaring nonprofits and funders away.
One organization takes the generational challenge seriously and discovers that it has created a situation that can’t be healed.
People: They are our greatest asset. Does this oft-repeated phrase hold real meaning in the nonprofit sector (where it certainly should), or is it a mere cliché? How do those who spend most of their waking hours in nonprofits feel about the third sector as a workplace? In this issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, we attempt to answer these questions by exploring the motivations, aspirations, and struggles of nonprofit employees and by reviewing trends in the management of our people and our work. As always, we are anxious to hear back from you about the resonance of this coverage and your ideas for other related topics.NPQ Announces its New Web-based Rapid Response SystemAs this issue goes to press, we face political and economic shifts that could ripple out powerfully to nonprofits, philanthropy, and the communities that they serve.
If the bookkeeper in your national social-justice organization was helping himself to the contents of the till, what would you do?
