Happy Monday!  This post comes to us from our friends at Movie Mondays!

In today's video episode, Deidre McCormack Martin talks about her role as the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization as it pertains to fundraising and talking with donors.

SEEDS OF DOUBT

When the Cancer Charities fraud case broke in 2015, donors began to ask how this kind of egregious fraud could go undetected for 28 years. “Can we depend on the IRS or the FTC or the state attorneys general to keep an eye on the nonprofit sector? Isn’t anyone watching the store?” Even concerned case workers began to wonder how the reaction to this case could have been so painfully slow. Everyone involved in the sector understood immediately that if this kind of doubt is permitted to creep in, nonprofit is in for big trouble.

This message comes to us from our friends at Movie Mondays - a video training source for nonprofits on fundraising and board strategies.

 

The end of December is a period filled with new opportunities, particularly in terms of nonprofits who are starting to prepare for their 2017 tech budgets. January 1 essentially creates a clean slate - a situation where anything is possible if you put the plans in motion now. If you truly want to prepare properly for your 2017 tech budget, however, there are a few key things you'll want to keep in mind.

The commissioned salesman is the world’s oldest profession…well, maybe not the oldest…some other professions lay claim to that title…but it certainly is the most obvious and logical - If you earn a little more for every sale you make, you will be motivated to make more sales.

The For-Profit world has utilized the commission salesman successfully since Egyptian farmers started selling produce around 3100 B.C. Doesn’t it make sense that development professionals, the nonprofit equivalent of salespersons, who essentially sell the mission of an organization, would also respond well to incentives?

This is the question asked by recent research out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Hey there - it's Monday and this morning we have a new fundraising tip by our friends at Movie Mondays. 

Click below to see the short video on "A Fun Way to Expand Your Donor Base and Engage More People!"

Ever since Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected the next President of the United States the internet has been abuzz with speculation about how it could have happened. We think our colleagues at Generation Citizen, the civics nonprofit, summed it up in one sentence:

THE EPIDEMIC

The silent scourge of opioid addiction began to secretly infest America’s small suburban towns almost a decade ago. The wanton prescribing of opioid pain medication, like OxyContin, by American doctors claimed more innocent victims to heroin addiction than the entire army of illegal drug dealers. Suburban housewives, school teachers, firemen, and ministers replaced inner-city teenagers as victims. The legitimate medical profession, critical of its own previous performance in pain management, prescribed vast amounts of opioid derivatives and ended up addicting entire towns to heroin. No one seemed to notice or wanted to admit it. Gradually, however, as the poison that legitimate doctors injected into the veins of unsuspecting fathers, mothers, sons and daughters began to have its pernicious effect, heroin addiction was recognized by local and federal health officials as an epidemic that had silently infected our entire society.