Volunteers are the backbone of many an organization. This practical, hands-on guide, filled with useful tips and everyday examples, will help those responsible for volunteers successfully recruit and manage this invaluable resource. Anyone who supervises volunteers will find this book an indispensable guide for navigating the intricacies of managing unpaid workers. Underlying the content is the message that volunteers are a vital part of an organization's workforce and should be treated as valuable members of the team. Volunteers can work alongside paid staff members to help the organization run smoothly and efficiently-and cost effectively. The book is packed with easily implemented advice and proven techniques for successfully handling common situations. Concise and easy to read, it assumes neither previous volunteer management experience nor familiarity with business practices, yet even experienced volunteer managers will come away with fresh ideas and new approaches. To augment her own expertise and increase the diversity of viewpoints, the author interviewed volunteer managers from various types of organizations and shares their stories. Quotes and anecdotes throughout the book help readers relate to common problems and illustrate the challenges and rewards of managing volunteers.

"Fundraising Fundamentals is a practical and valuable resource for fundraising professionals, trustees, philanthropists, and nonprofit executives who aspire to raise substantial monies for worthy causes. I have utilized Jim Greenfield’s literature in various fundraising courses . . . my students have benefited from the theory and substance that Jim so clearly conveys along with real-life models that can be applied to their respective organizations."
–Stephen M. Levy, CFRE, President of Levy Philanthropic Counsel
Former Chair of the Association of Professionals Foundation Board
Adjunct Professor of Philanthropy, Columbia University

Proven methods and techniques for running a successful annual giving campaign

Learn how to carry out winning annual giving campaigns that will help your nonprofit organization grow and increase its financial resources with Fundraising Fundamentals. Complete with the essential basics of fundraising and comprehensive enough to help experienced fundraisers improve their campaigns, this up-to-date Second Edition features key material on:

• How to find likely first-time donors
• Membership organizations and donor clubs
• Methods of donor renewal, upgrading, and reward
• Recruiting and training volunteer solicitors
• Multimedia and Internet soliciting techniques

An insider's guide to the coming philanthropic revolution Meet the next generation of big donors--the Gen X and Millennial philanthropists who will be the most significant donors ever and will shape our world in profound ways. Hear them describe their ambitious plans to revolutionize giving so it achieves greater impact. And learn how to help them succeed in a world that needs smart, effective donors now more than ever. As "next gen donors" step into their philanthropic roles, they have not only unprecedented financial resources, but also big ideas for how to wield their financial power. They want to disrupt the traditional world of charitable giving, and they want to do so now, not after they retire to a life of philanthropic leisure. Generation Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving pulls back the curtain on these rising next gen donors and the "Impact Revolution" they seek, offering extensive firsthand accounts and expert analysis of their hands-on, boundary-pushing strategies, as well as their determination to honor the legacies they've inherited and the values they hold. This Updated and Expanded edition includes new, practical resources designed to help those who work with next gen donors to engage with them in even more productive and effective ways - to help them become the sort of transformational donors we all need them to be in this pivotal time. Three Best Practice Guides offer targeted tips for key audiences - nonprofits and fundraisers, families, and advisors - and introduce new data and additional featured donors. A new Preface answers the most pressing questions asked by the thousands of readers already energized by Generation Impact, including what has changed in the world in recent years and how these influential emerging donors are responding. Adapting to the revolution that next gen donors are bringing may not be easy, but this book can help.

Winner of the 2002 Skystone Ryan Research Prize from the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Sponsored by the prestigious Council on Foundations, Opening Doors is a down-to-earth guide for fundraising practitioners who want to broaden their funding base and reach new donors or improve the diversity of their existing development programs. Based in solid research, Opening Doors provides information about the cultural and charitable practices of four broad groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. It is filled with illustrative personal stories, real-life examples, and proven strategies. In addition, this hands-on resource:

• Helps readers understand the rich philanthropic traditions in diverse American populations
• Shows how to encourage prospects to become donors through personal meetings, house parties, special events, and direct mail
• Presents practical ideas for seeking gifts from business owners of diverse cultural backgrounds
• Describes ap propriate and effective ways to encourage small donors to become large donors

Although research on the value of membership of Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) is increasing, there remain few theoretical and empirical advances in this area. Addressing this gap, this book offers a fresh perspective, exploring how NPOs' survival is linked to the promotion, recruitment and retention of members. Highlighting the critical role of NPO members in creating value in the pursuit of its missions, this book demonstrates how NPOs must promote active participation and empowerment of its members to facilitate fund raising, financial administration, and the pursuit of alliances. Providing a road map for improvement in recruiting and retention processes, the authors also showcase the development of strategies to motivate potential members and donors, and the part played by the commitment of the board in the achievement of the NPO's social mission. In today's global world, this book is insightful reading for those interested in using coordinated action to navigate adverse scenarios. Written primarily for NPO managers who aim to proactively engage their members in the creation of social value, it is also a valuable resource for researchers interested in the underlying foundations of NPO membership.

Balancing Acts offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change, and ascribes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. Reviewing change initiatives from different types of organizations, Balancing Acts confronts the problems and pitfalls head-on that often arise during workplace transitions. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult, and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners will increase their chance of success. Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems, and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined result. Instead, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book's central argument is that while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns: confrontation and compassion, participation and observation, assertion and inquiry, and planfulness and emergence.

Until very recently, popular belief held that business skills were not needed at charitable organizations. No longer. Far from interfering with an organization’s ability to provide needed services, techniques such as marketing, cash flow analysis, property management, and good use of technology all contribute to a charitable organization’s mission capability. Unlike a not-for-profit that thinks of itself as a charity, the successful not-for-profit is really a mission-based business. In an era of rapid change, increasing competition, and the need for more accountability to governments, foundations, insurers, and donors, knowing how to innovate, compete, and take reasonable risks on behalf of the mission is critical. It is, in short, the era of the social entrepreneur.

The skilled social entrepreneur has the ability to get the most mission out of the resources at hand–including traditional business techniques. Finally, here is a book that will help you learn their techniques. In Social Entrepreneurship, you will learn how successful social entrepreneurs:

• Focus on community wants and needs
• Match those with core competencies to provide the quality services
• Assess risk and gauge opportunity
• Develop new project ideas and test their feasibility
• Write a business plan
• Project finances in the plan
• Tap into new sources of funding
• Develop the idea of social entrepreneurship throughout the organization
• Make sure that mission, not money, is the bottom line

Also included are the seven essential steps of the not-for-profit business development process, real-world case studies, sample business plans, and a self-assessment process to determine if your organization is ready for social entrepreneurism. In addition to entrepreneurs, middle managers, policy setters, volunteers, and a host of other important staff members will get value from the mission-beneficial information in this book. Most important, Social Entrepreneurship will help you to help your organization succeed and thrive–and make your job more interesting and productive.

Praise for Social Entrepreneurship
The Art of Mission-Based Venture Development

"A great read . . . contains both the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications that those of us in nonprofit leadership badly need. I will share it with my management team and board."–Joseph M. Hafey, President and CEO, Public Health Institute

"A sound, practical guide for developing social entrepreneurs. Brinckerhoff makes taking mission-related business risks on behalf of the people served less risky with the step-by-step application of business ideas and techniques. Warnings, real-world examples, and hands-on advice keep the reader on track to sensible risk taking."–Connie Kirk, President and CEO, Tommy Nobis Center

"Peter C. Brinckerhoff’s new and masterfully written book has a lot of practical information in it for any organization that wants to learn how to become and stay entrepreneurial. Brinckerhoff provides the right kind of information to any organization interested in succeeding in a highly competitive and service-oriented environment . . . [and] stresses the importance of an organization’s encouraging innovation and risk only if it does not lose sight of its core values, its strengths, and its mission. That is excellent advice for any organization and for anyone who ventures into entrepreneurial waters."–Andrew H. Souerwine, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Management and Organization The School of Business Administration, University of Connecticut

The Social Media Survival Guide for Nonprofits and Charitable Organizations is a must-have for anyone attempting to fundraise on behalf of a non-profit organization. The book offers critical insights including: Why today's nonprofit organization must understand the basics of networks and how incorporating social media into existing plans can catapult your fundraising efforts How to arm frontline fundraisers and operations staff with the tools they will need to maximize everything from annual fundraising to high-end stewardship using social media The importance of creating an online, mobile, peer-to-peer engagement strategy to facilitate and enhance the donor life cycle-from researching a new pipeline of support, to cultivation, mechanisms for giving, events, follow-up, stewardship and more

Learn how to manage and leverage risk

Like all organizations in today’s volatile marketplace, nonprofits are under tremendous pressure to be more accountable for their operations, specifically to funders, donors, clients, and the public at large. Proper risk management can not only help nonprofits create a sound and transparent financial structure, but also exploit new development opportunities that may not otherwise be realized. Managing Risk in Nonprofit Organizations shows managers how to implement sound risk management procedures in every aspect of their organization.

The authors divide their guide into three sections–The Nature and Purposes of Risk Management, Recognizing the Context for Risk Management, and Risk Financing for Nonprofits. A large array of potential risks is covered, including:

• Human resource issues
• Fundraising
• Internet use
• Mergers
• Volunteer management

Senior level managers and executives at nonprofits, board members, and professional risk managers will find Managing Risk in Nonprofit Organizations to be an invaluable guide to this vital topic.

From their experience in nonprofit operations and their understanding of the realities of urban politics, the editors of this wide-ranging volume and their contributors dig into issues seldom explored in the literature. They study the role of nonprofits in local governing coalitions, the potential of nonprofits to replace social welfare programs, their efforts to restructure key elements of the local political process, and the unanticipated internal impacts of the changing roles of nonprofit organizations in the urban community. The result is a compelling argument that to understand life in contemporary American cities, we must take into account the expanding role of nonprofit organizations, their response to increased service demands, and their participation in common efforts to direct policy choices.

Hula, Jackson-Elmoore, and their panel of scholars, researchers, and close observers of urban policymaking focus on the delivery of social services to illustrate the complex and important set of roles that nonprofits have assumed. As social programs are cut at all levels of government, it is often believed that nonprofits can and should take up the slack and restore at least some portion of the cutbacks in such services. They examine how some nonprofit organizations have taken a proactive stance in this regard by implementing efforts that do not simply react to political and social change, but attempt to initiate and guide it instead. They attempt to change the political environment in which they operate, and the result has been to change the face of local politics in many jurisdictions. Each chapter of their book explores these expanding and emerging roles. Themes and focuses vary, which in turn reflects the variation and complexity within the nonprofit sector itself. At the same time, each chapter presents an emerging political or policy role now being played by today's nonprofits and voluntary associations, and a theoretical context in which such activities and behavior can best be understood. Scholars and advanced students in public administration, economics, and nonprofit management, as well as executive-level nonprofit managers, will find here an important update on what is happening in their special worlds, and the knowledge they need to make sense of it.

Modern businesses exist in a dynamic and increasingly competitive realm. To remain viable, organizations must constantly adopt new methods and processes to optimize productivity and workflow. The Handbook of Research on Emerging Business Models and Managerial Strategies in the Nonprofit Sector is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly information on management tools, analytics, and infrastructures for contemporary nonprofit organizations. Highlighting a range of multidisciplinary topics such as crowdfunding, shared value creation, and human resource development, this publication is ideally designed for managers, professionals, students, researchers, and academics interested in enhancing process management in nonprofit businesses.

Drawing on the findings of the most ambitious national study to date on nonprofit strategic restructuring, the authors provide nonprofit managers, board members, consultants, and foundation executives with research-based information to use in making tough decisions about whether and how to pursue a range of organizational partnerships--from jointly managed programs and consolidated administrative functions to full-scale mergers. The authors investigate two widespread assumptions--that strategic restructuring leads to greater organizational efficiency and that nonprofit consolidations are similar to corporate consolidations. Six in-depth case studies of actual nonprofit restructurings highlight the costs and benefits associated with this increasingly adopted course of action, a trend that is expected to remain on the upswing for the foreseeable future.

Nonprofit organizations continue to reduce staff, programs, and hours of operation; all in the name of survival. Some have not survived. Some organizations try to attract new audiences, at times sacrificing their missions to do so. All compete for a share of diminishing government, corporate and private funding sources.

Dr. Frederick A. Lambert, who has taught management and organizational leadership on the undergraduate and graduate levels, relies on the principles of total quality management to help your nonprofit organization excel, rather than merely survive. You can learn how to

build a foundation that promotes success;

craft and pursue a strategic plan;

create and sustain a culture of quality;

put the customer first no matter what;

develop leaders who will create and sustain

organizational growth and success.

Nonprofit organizations continue to hire consultants, merge with other organizations, and downsize in the name of survival. But most of them wouldn't need to do any of these things if they focused on executing on the strategies in Being the Best.

The impetus to purchase this book is to provide social profit leaders, change agents, and new organization development (OD) practitioners who need a simple "Monday-ready" tool kit so they can help their social profit organization build capacity. A complete large scale change approach is offered. This practitioner's playbook contains tactics and tools that can be experimented with by the social profit improvement team. A playbook allows the team to create, explore, and master without fear while learning. What is contained in this playbook has been tested across many for-profit and non- (social) profit organizations. It is designed to be a bridge for OD theories that have informed the work to field ready tools for large scale change. This book provides both explicit and tacit knowledge. The contents in this book have been tested in social profit projects.

This book contributes to the current discussion in society, politics and higher education on innovation capacity and the financial and non-financial incentives for researchers. The expert contributions in the book deal with implementation of incentive systems at higher education institutions in order to foster innovation. On the other hand, the book also discusses the extent to which governance structures from economy can be transferred to universities and how scientific performance can be measured and evaluated. This book is essential for decision-makers in knowledge-intensive organizations and higher-educational institutions dealing with the topic of performance management.

A major reason complex programs are so difficult to evaluate is that the assumptions that inspire them are poorly articulated. Stakeholders of such programs are often unclear about how the change process will unfold. Thus, it is so difficult to reasonably anticipate the early and midterm changes that need to happen in order for a longer-term goalto be reached. The lack of clarity about the "mini-steps" that must be taken to reach a long-term outcome not only makes the task of evaluating a complex initiative challenging, but reduces the likelihood that all of the important factors related to the long term goal will be addressed. Most of the resources that have attempted to address this dilemma have been popularized as theory of change or sometimes program theory approaches. Although these approaches emphasize and elaborate the sequence of changes/mini steps that lead to the long-term goal of interest and the connections between program activities and outcomes that occur at each step of the way, they do not do enough to clarify how program managers or evaluators should deal with assumptions. Assumptions, the glue that holds all the pieces together, remain abstract and far from applicable. In this book the author tackles this important assumptions theme head-on-covering a breadth of ground from the epistemology of development assumptions, to the art of making logical assumptions as well as recognizing, explicit zing and testing assumptions with in an elaborate program theory from program design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.