Let’s Talk

Dear Nonprofit CEO,
I know your plate is full. You manage your board and your staff, have programs to monitor and design, staff vacancies to fill, and there are always fires to put out – and this is the shortlist.
It is probably a true statement that your work history that prepared you to lead your organization did not include fundraising responsibilities.

This is a difficult topic to address, but one that has fascinated me for a while.  We are witnessing the phenomenon, last seen in the late 1960s during the George Wallace presidential campaign, of robust political fundraising on a messages of hate, divisiveness and demonizing of an entire classes of people. Hundreds of millions of […]

One of Yogi Berra’s famous utterances – When you get to a fork in the road… take it – has always resonated with me because it characterizes the forced choices we have to regularly make in our advancement work. Whether we like it or not, or whether we know it or not, we are constantly faced with forks in the road that give us options that may make or break our fundraising program, or at least slow its progress.

I don’t want to throw cold water on your fine day, but it is reasonable to start thinking about the inevitable economic downturn that may be just over the horizon.  Markets are cyclical and that means there are regular recessions every seven-ten years. Recent history includes downturns around the 1986 tax reform, the dotcom bust of the late 1990s, 9/11’s aftermath, and the burst of the housing bubble in 2008-2009.