Silicon Valley Nonprofit Helps Donors Help Nonprofits - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly

Silicon Valley Nonprofit Helps Donors Help Nonprofits - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly: When they write a check to a nonprofit organization, donors are said to wonder whether another group out there is more effective in the work they do, and if this organization really has the capacity to do what they say. Tipping Point, a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley, has developed a model that connects donors to effective nonprofit organizations and helps nonprofits fund their capacity-building needs.

Weaving Nonprofit Capacity Building Into Philanthropy: An Interview with Kathy Reich | Social Velocity

Weaving Nonprofit Capacity Building Into Philanthropy: An Interview with Kathy Reich | Social Velocity: In today’s Social Velocity interview, I’m talking with Kathy Reich, Director of Organizational Effectiveness Grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Kathy leads a cross-cutting program to help grantees around the world improve their strategy, leadership, and impact. Her team makes grants on a broad range of organizational development issues, from business planning to social media st

Triangle Community Foundation invests in capacity-building � Philanthropy North Carolina

Triangle Community Foundation invests in capacity-building � Philanthropy North Carolina: Triangle Community Foundation is investing $53,400 to strengthen the operations and effectiveness of 22 local nonprofits that have shown success in youth literacy and community development.

Opera House finds success with corporate partners

Opera House finds success with corporate partners: n conjunction with its 10-year anniversary, the Napa Valley Opera House has launched a new corporate sponsorship program, which they hope will be a mutual success — raising money the Opera House needs while helping local businesses connect with the customers and clients they need.

According to the Opera House’s development director Jessica Thomason, they have always worked with local businesses in a sponsorship capacity, but they anticipate this new program will be an even greater success because of the way it was designed.

Fundraising, Part 2: Investment in capacity pays off � Philanthropy North Carolina

Fundraising, Part 2: Investment in capacity pays off � Philanthropy North Carolina: Note: This article, the second of three, is from a report written for Blackbaud, which asked me to look at fundraising strategies that nonprofits have found to be effective.]

Since the bottom fell out of the economy nearly five years ago, San Francisco-based Dignity Health has invested in building the capacity of its fundraising operation, an investment that has begun to help fuel growth in major gifts and planned gifts.

Operating over 40 nonprofit hospitals and care centers throughout California, Arizona and Nevada, Dignity Health raises roughly $100 million a year in private philanthropy and government grants through 33 separate foundations that support the hospitals.

Fundraising, Part 2: Healthcare groups invest in development capacity � Philanthropy North Carolina

Fundraising, Part 2: Healthcare groups invest in development capacity � Philanthropy North Carolina: While much of that growth has been tied to the economic recovery, it also reflects “more stimulation and activity in planned and major gifts, and the commitments people are making,” he says,

Fundraising performance is the direct result of investment in fundraising capacity, McGinly says, including the size of the fundraising staff.

Kathleen P. Enright: Building Non-Profit Resilience: Strong Roots in a Harsh Climate

Kathleen P. Enright: Building Non-Profit Resilience: Strong Roots in a Harsh Climate: For those of us who work in philanthropy, we are continually looking for how we can strengthen organizations that operate in their own types of droughts -- environments where their services are often most critical when funding is scarce, as demonstrated unambiguously by the recent financial crisis. Working in this type of environment requires strong roots. Yet all too often, grantmakers are focused on seeing immediate results from their grants neglecting the foundational roots that build the resilience required to sustain a non-profit organization for the long-term. As a result, grantees go without proper support for capacity building.

Reinventing the Nonprofit Capital Campaign | Social Velocity

Reinventing the Nonprofit Capital Campaign | Social Velocity: Yesterday I wrote a post at the About.com Nonprofit blog about how nonprofits launching a capital campaign should consider a capacity capital campaign instead. You can read the whole post here. But below is an excerpt:

Bigger Annual Fund Gifts for Smaller Nonprofits

massnonprofit.org ::: eventually ask qualified donors for sizably larger gifts. The gifts are solicited during an in-person visit when passion and financial capacity align.

What size gifts are we talking about? Depending on your donor base, major gifts for smaller nonprofits are likely to fall into the $10,000 to $100,000 range. G

Ryan Scott: The Volunteer Dating Game

Ryan Scott: The Volunteer Dating Game: But for whatever reason, you haven't taken the plunge, so volunteer mingling will have to suffice.

It doesn't have to be this way. Imagine a world where the energy, passion and skills of
volunteers aligned perfectly with the needs and capacity of nonprofits. Where expectations
were calibrated and trust was built over time.

That's the world that Gap Inc. is working to create with its global teams of employee volunteers.

How to build grantees’ network effectiveness: six lessons and deeper reflections from the Packard Foundation | Working Wikily

How to build grantees’ network effectiveness: six lessons and deeper reflections from the Packard Foundation | Working Wikily: The leading edge of social change is increasingly network-centric. Collaboration, coordination, and working in networks are becoming the new normal, as leaders across sectors work to move the needle on today’s most pressing problems. It is fast becoming a new kind of capacity for nonprofits to build, but what does it mean in practical terms for a foundation to build its grantees

Eric Lanke: Leadership is a System Capacity

Eric Lanke: Leadership is a System Capacity: That's the other big lesson I got out of the "How to Be Open" chapter in Humanize by Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant. Here's the key passage, pulling directly on the work of Peter Senge, and again, the emphasis is mine:

The unexpected challenges and benefits of building a business plan - Civil Society - Governance - Blogs - providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits

The unexpected challenges and benefits of building a business plan - Civil Society - Governance - Blogs - providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits: In last month’s blog I wrote about my new focus on developing our charity’s organisational capacity and the varied work this is entailing. Since then, I’ve been working on the one thing that ties all of this wide-ranging work together: creating our business plan.

Although I was familiar with the term “business plan” before we started the process, this is the first time I’ve ever been involved in creating one.

The business plan encapsulates pretty much everything about our charity. From articulating what we do and how we manage ourselves, to describing how we plan to build upon identified opportunities and tackle weaknesses - the business plan covers it all.

Weingart Foundation | Current E-Newsletter

Weingart Foundation | Current E-Newsletter: February News

Capacity-Building Planning Grant Award Announced
The Weingart Foundation is pleased to announce that the $100,000 planning grant for developing a comprehensive Capacity-Building Information Exchange has been awarded to a collaborative that includes Nonprofit Finance Fund, Center for Nonprofit Management and Taproot.

Assessing A Donor’s Legal Capacity - TheNonProfitTimes

Assessing A Donor’s Legal Capacity - TheNonProfitTimes: The nature of a charitable gift planner’s work is to come into regular contact with elderly donors. Along with this contact sometimes comes the question of whether the donor has the mental capability to make a gift.

In a presentation during the recent National Conference on Philanthropic Planning in San Antonio, Texas, Marcia Inger Navr�til and Laura Hansen Dean of The University of Texas at Austin discussed the issues that arise when a donor’s mental capacity becomes an issue.

Southern California’s Fil-Am Community Unites for Philanthropy

Southern California’s Fil-Am Community Unites for Philanthropy: HOLLYWOOD—The southern California Filipino-American community now resonates with one vision and one purpose, from as far east as san Fernando Valley to the western blocks of hollywood. The community, represented by 70 of its top leaders representing over 30 organizations, came together under the auspices of the ABs CBN Foundation international on september 17th to discuss collaboration and philanthropy. The ABs CBN Foundation international’s institutional giving program, the Kapamilya Circle of Giving, held its capacity-building event, Kwentuhan Hollywood (Hollywood Stories), on the weekend of the TFC’s One Kapamilya Go event at Universal studios.

Love the Loyal | BLACKBAUD'S Prospect Research Blog for Non-Profit Fund Raising

Love the Loyal | BLACKBAUD'S Prospect Research Blog for Non-Profit Fund Raising: n the early days of building predictive modeling services for nonprofits, I was hoping to prove that there are two separate concepts — likelihood to give and capacity to give — that we could statistically combine in different ways to rank our prospects and understand the giving choices they were most likely to make. I believed that likelihood, also known as affinity, inclination, or propensity to give offered us more insight to future behavior than capacity.

$10 Million Investment to Enhance Philanthropy among UT Institutions - UT Dallas News

$10 Million Investment to Enhance Philanthropy among UT Institutions - UT Dallas News: The University of Texas System Board of Regents has authorized a $10 million investment to strengthen fundraising capacity among the 15 UT institutions.

The initiative, called Strength in Numbers, is part of Chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa’s new action plan for advancing excellence throughout the UT System.

Building a Stronger Regional Safety Net: Philanthropy's Role - Brookings Institution

Building a Stronger Regional Safety Net: Philanthropy's Role - Brookings Institution: "Although federal, state, and local governments are often the primary funders of nonprofits, governments do not often take the lead in creating new organizational capacities or in coordinating capacity across political jurisdictions. In many regions, the local philanthropic community has become aware of these gaps in services for the poor and has sought to assist the nonprofit community in building capacity and expanding activities. Local foundations are experimenting with various strategies to address the growing dispersion of poverty."

Institute of Fundraising to launch long-awaited research portal - Civil Society - Governance - News - providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits

Institute of Fundraising to launch long-awaited research portal - Civil Society - Governance - News - providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits: "The Institute of Fundraising plans to secure funding for and launch its fundraising research portal for members this year, it was outlined in the organisation's annual general meeting yesterday.

After first mooting the establishment of an independent research capacity early last year, the Institute plans to step up progress."