Strategies for Building Better Nonprofits

The blog fell into disuse while I was involved in other writing projects: starting a freelance Web writing business, studying screen writing, and job hunting. In addition, I found time to study grant writing and work on a couple of small grant proposals.

Now is the time to get a useful, daily blog running for nonprofit staff and social entrepreneurs who want to make their organizations more effective and efficient. I hope you will want to follow along, or at least review some old posts. The older posts dealt mainly with using various brainstorming and problem solving techniques to make nonprofit programs and projects more effective.

More of the same is coming up, but with more attention to marketing, fund raising, and earned income. The new focus reflects what I think are bigger issues, or bigger opportunities, for nonprofits. Building partnerships with businesses, other nonprofit, colleges and universities, and trade/professional associations seems like a good strategy in many cases. I'll have more to say about how to come up with partnership ideas.

Stay tuned for some more short posts focused on practical ideas and information

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9 Ways Cognitive Bias Undermines Social Change Efforts

This is going to be the first of many posts on how cognitive bias might undermine social change efforts. Yeah, I know. I will do my best to keep this concrete and interesting. A number of quirks in how our brains work might lead to mistaken judgments in many areas relevant to social change: problem analysis, strategy, program design, and advocacy. Maybe fundraising. Taking effective action on a certain problem is what activists want to do, so we'll come back to fundraising later. 1.Confirmation bias may cause us to look for reasons why a certain strategy or tactic is the right one. Supportive evidence gets woven into the narrative, lending support to the need for more education for women or more gun control or whatever the topic might be. Negative information gets tossed out. 2. Bandwagon effect -This may be a real problem when the resources devoted to addressing an issue get all of proportion to the seriousness of an issue. Instead, bandwagon jumping siphons away money and v...

Using SWOT Analysis to Rev Up Your Fundraising

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy. The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT. Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts. SWOT - A Quick Review This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps: Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social medi...

A Powerful Tool for Nonprofit Planning 2

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts. Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity. I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy. To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time: CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM CULTURE ECOLOGY ? ECONOMIC ? DEMOGRAPHIC LEGAL POLITICAL ? TECHNOLOGICAL ? Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements. From the polit...

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