3 Steps to Building a Sustainable Nonprofit Partnership Building a sustainable nonprofit partnership isn't easy. I know first hand, as I have built several over my career. Sometimes we spend hours and hours in negotiations, only to have the potential collaborator back out at the last minute. Or, we make it through the set-up phase [...]
Your Simple Guide to Improving Nonprofit Impact In addition to the obvious, there are many reasons to track and improve nonprofit impact and efficiency in meeting missions. These secondary issues might be because a major funder requires accountability to a set of outcome measures, or the Board of Directors is asking why goals aren’t being [...]
We assume that volunteer programs enhance the capacity of nonprofit organizations by supplementing and extending the work of paid staff. But by how much? Maybe it’s time for us to get down to the business of calculating our volunteer program ROI.
8 Ways Investing in Volunteers Builds Trust and a Freebie for You! Volunteers add so much more than an extra pair of hands to your organization. They bring tremendous value in so many ways. Understanding your Volunteer Return on Investment (ROI) can help you understand the depth of their worth and create more buy-in from [...]
Volunteer Sustainability Strategies You Need To Increase Capacity In the face of ever-growing community needs and persistent economic strains on nonprofits, volunteer sustainability isn’t just a nice thing. It’s a necessary thing. Volunteerism is a strategic choice to use human resources to build capacity, and recent data shows it works. The Points of Light Service [...]
How to Calculate the Lifetime Value of Volunteers It’s not uncommon for nonprofits to calculate the lifetime value of their donors. It helps them make decisions about how much is reasonable to spend on cultivating new contributors. This metric also helps the organization assess whether they are doing a good job at retaining supporters. But, [...]
It occurred to me that one way to communicate the transformations nonprofit supporters make possible is by pulling the information together into a “Portfolio of Change.”
Not very many nonprofit people like numbers. Whether you're a total fan or feel they are a necessary evil, your program outcomes can be a powerful tools to communicate the value of your program to stakeholders. They may even help your program get the respect it deserves.
You Need Change? This is Why Volunteers Are Important As nonprofits continue to grow their community engagement strategies, there’s been a growing interest in why volunteers are important and measuring the impact of volunteers as human resources. For good reason. If you don’t understand the return you can expect, it’s a challenge to see where [...]
Is Research on Volunteerism Disappearing? Is volunteerism of interest to academics? Is current and relevant research on volunteerism available? The short answer is, yes. The long answer is a little more complicated. Because I often hear complaints about the lack of research in our field, I thought the issue might bear deeper examination. Here’s a brief [...]