Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....
Communications/Marketing
October was Breast Cancer Awareness month, but as far as Madhulika Sikka, executive editor for NPR News and author of A Breast Cancer Alphabet, is concerned, the month-long campaign long ago passed its sell-by date.
Fundraising
Social Velocity's Nell Edgington has a good post about the five "most egregious taboos in the nonprofit sector":
Nonprofits shouldn't raise a surplus.
Nonprofits shouldn't pay market-rate salaries.
Nonprofits shouldn't demand that board members fundraise.
Nonprofits shouldn't question donors.
Nonprofits shouldn't invest in fundraising.
Edgington has much more to say in her post about each one, as well as a separate post and video on number 3, so check it out.
Impact/Effectiveness
On the Impact Investment Policy Collaborative site, Nick O'Donohoe, chief executive officer of UK-based Big Society Capital, the world's first social investment bank, shares some policy lessons learned in the process of establishing the bank.
Nonprofits
Greg Cantori, president of Maryland Nonprofits, takes issue with a Washington Post investigative report published last weekend ("Inside the Hidden World of Thefts, Scams and Phantom Purchases at the Nation's Nonprofits") which indirectly suggests that the nonprofit sector is rife with fraud and financial shenanigans. "Like many alarming highlights," Cantori writes,
"this 'diversions of assets' listing from the Washington Post identifies less than one-tenth of one percent of the nonprofit sector. Of Maryland's 32,000 nonprofits, we were able to identify 20 that may have had a reportable incident over the past five years." The real story, Cantori suggests eslewhere in his piece, is that "dishonest people will try to take advantage of nonprofits," as is true in any sector and industry vertical. "Theft," he adds, "is extremely difficult to prevent when the perpetrator is determined, has inside information, and is trusted...."
Philanthropy
Writing in the Nonprofit Quarterly, Paul Hogan, vice president at the Buffalo-based John R Oishei Foundation and a twenty-year veteran of the nonprofit sector, considers the fundamental dynamic between grantseeker and funder, "supplicant and bestower," and asks: What can we do to change it?
In the Sunday New York Times, Canadian writer and journalist Chrystia Freeland, casts a skeptical eye on efforts by today's plutocrats to exercise political power through an "activist engagement with public policy and social problems" -- an approach popularized as "philanthrocapitalism" by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in their book of the same name. Citing Bill Gates, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg as outstanding practitioners of the aproach, Freeland suggests that
this form of plutocratic political power offers the tantalizing possibility of policy practiced at the highest professional level with none of the messiness and deal making and venality of traditional politics. You might call it the Silicon Valley school of politics -- a technocratic, data-based, objective search for solutions to our problems, uncorrupted by vested interests or, when it comes to issues like smoking or soft drinks, our own self-indulgence.
But the same economic forces that have made this technocratic version of plutocratic politics possible -- particularly the winner-take-all spiral that has increased inequality -- have also helped define its limits. Surging income inequality doesn't create just an economic divide. The gap is cultural and social, too. Plutocrats inhabit a different world from everyone else, with different schools, different means of travel, different food, even different life expectancies. The technocratic solutions to public-policy problems they deliver from those Olympian heights arrive in a wrapper of remote benevolence. Plutocrats are no more likely to send their own children to the charter schools they champion than they are to need the malaria cures they support....
Steve Hilton, president of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, chats with the Bridgespan Group about how he defines "success" in philanthropy -- and offers a caution about getting caught up in the “technical side of trying to quantify everything.”
GiveWell's Holden Karnofsky has a good post on the role of philanthropic funding in politics -- a list which suggests "that the connection between money and policy change isn't necessarily a matter of 'quid pro quo' donations for actions. The connection can be very indirect, long-term, and complex -- and is perhaps most powerful when it fits this description."
Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Paul Brest, former president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, explains how "the contemporary effective altruism movement seeks to transform philanthropy in two ways: 1) by directing philanthropy to the most important objectives, and 2) by ensuring that philanthropic dollars are spent as effectively as possible."
That's it for now. Drop us a line at mfn@foundationcenter.org if we missed
something....