Occasionally I will get a new philanthropy book or report from a publisher to review. The most recent was The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks and the Answers all Donors Crave by Harvey McKinnon. The book covers questions like:
*Why me?
*How much do you want?
*Will my gift make a difference?
*How will I be treated?
*How will you measure results?

For those of you that fundraise professionally or as a volunteer know intuitively that you should know the answers to these questions but knowing you should know something and actually preparing to answer the questions is a completely different thing. From the standpoint of being “professional donor” these are the same questions that I want answers to during site visits.

*Why me? Does our foundation provide an added benefit of name recognition or leverage if we fund this project?
*How much do you want? Is the ask size appropriate and match our foundation’s giving capacity?
*Will my gift make a difference? Will you do this project with or without our foundation’s funding? How would our gift increase your nonprofit’s ability to do good work in the community?
*How will I be treated? I pride myself on not being the program officer that tries to leverage their power to get all star treatment but it is important to treat individual donors and foundation representative with courtesy.
*How will you measure results? Will this program positively impact the community and how will you measure that impact?

11 Questions Every Donor Asks is a back to basics fundraising approach but sometimes the most simple techniques are the most effective.

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Your resume can be a key branding tool. Below are some tips from my Do Good Guide on Branding Yourself for Personal and Professional Success.

1. Contact information is easy to find—many ways of contact provided including home phone, cell phone, professional email (not something like partyon@aol.com), and address.
2. Work history descriptions are concise, precise, thorough, and do not over-use modifiers like very, extremely, really, etc. Descriptions are written in active voice. –Prepared monthly marketing reports, rather than –Monthly marketing reports were prepared.
3. Resume does not contain any typos, misspellings, or grammar mistakes.
4. Focus is on accomplishments rather than responsibilities. Example: planned and implemented three large fundraising events, completed three direct mail campaigns each year and oversaw membership renewal mailings. Instead of: responsible for fundraising.
5. Contains juicy, descriptive words that relate to your specific field of work.

Your resume or work history on LinkedIn is a key place to highlight your accomplishments. So make sure you make the most out of those opportunities.

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Sean at Tactical Philanthropy has a great post today about knowledge management at Foundations. The cataloging and sharing of knowledge at Foundations has long been a problem but the folks at Meyer Memorial Trust have been tackling this head on. From Sean:

For some time now I’ve been talking about the need for large foundations to share their knowledge base with the general public. While some people have made this argument from the standpoint of obligations that foundations have to the public, I’ve thought that foundations will find that they are able to more effectively further their own mission by sharing their knowledge base. Since individuals give seven time more money each year than all the foundations in the country combined, it stands to reason that foundations who share their knowledge with the public might influence some of these vast flows of funding to support the mission of the foundations.

Recently the Meyer Memorial Trust, a $700 million+ foundation that has proven innovative in a number of ways, launched an attempt to share their knowledge base with anyone who is interested. The project is called connect+ipedia. Rather than explain the project myself, I asked Amy Sample Ward – Communications and Learning Associate at MMT and author of the foundation’s New Media Blog – to share her thoughts with Tactical Philanthropy. Read the rest here.

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“The anger that comes with a sense of injustice, that life is deeply unfair, is powerful and dangerous.”
-Katherine Marshall

The Push Conference is over but the posts will continue. I think the best types of conferences are ones where you have new ideas to chew on indefinitely. The session on Flatness was an interesting contrast between the rest of the world’s view of U.S. consumerism and how some U.S. companies are working to develop ethical brands. Chandran Nair started the session with an overview of how the exportation of U.S. culture is an unsustainable global nightmare and yet it would be unfair for the U.S. to tell the rest of the world that they can’t enjoy the same level of consumerism that we take for granted everyday. If every person in China began driving and eating the amount of seafood that U.S. citizens do, the air would be unbreathable and the oceans would be emptied of fish (or at least the delicious ones). His suggestion was an increase of environmental planning worldwide.

Other speakers on this topic included Jonathan Greenblatt and Katherine Marshall. Jonathan talked about how corporations are trying to buy authenticity through their social responsibility efforts. He gave some examples of when this has worked well (Ethos Water, Good Magazine, Tesla sportscar, and Living Homes) but it can also go bad like the Red Campaign. My favorite quote from Jonathan was “moving people from consumer to advocate is the best way to engage people.” This is evidenced by the organic movement and consumer’s push to get store to stop using plastic bags. Jonathan is now working for Good Magazine, who’s YouTube videos have been extremely popular (they have been described as Sesame Street for grownups) so I have shared one below.

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Tonight was the opening reception for the 6th annual Push conference that I will be covering on this blog. Push’s founder described the conference atmosphere as a “zone of discovery” and said that she hoped through our experiences here that we will develop connections to new visions of what is possible and invent a future where we can all contribute.

Push has a history of staring the conference with performance art and this year was no exception. Jenni Wolfson presented the first segment of her one woman show “Rash” about her experience in Rwanda documenting human rights abuses for the UN. A video of one of her performances is above. She had a very powerful message how about the randomness of your place of birth can have such an impact on your destiny. The show was painful to watch because it laid in front of the audience the bare truth about how ugly humans can become, when teachers can murder students and nuns can slaughter church members simply because of ethnicity.

Following Jenni was Dan Wilson, a songwriter and artist, who performed a variety of his songs including his hit “Closing Time”, which was written to celebrate the impending birth of his daughter. Dan also wrote “Not Ready to Make Nice” for the Dixie Chicks. His beautiful messages of hope and possibility were a startling juxtaposition to Jenni’s show.

The opening was an important reminder to me that art can expose the ugly side of human existence that we would rather ignore and can also show us our greatest possibilities. Both of those viewpoints are important as we look at how we can shape the future. Look for more posts this week as the conference progresses.

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I am SO excited that I was selected to cover the Push: The Fertile Delta conference for this blog. The conference begins this Sunday and the organizers describe it this way:

The PUSH conference is for the curious and courageous. It is a wildly fruitful, catalytic experience for the intellectually inquisitive who have a sense of the changes coming our way. It is for those who need a place to discuss, confirm, collate and explore ideas, so they can invest in the future and lead change.

Yikes, no high expectations there. I have developed a new appreciation for futurists as I have grown in my foundation job. Foundations and nonprofits are often forced to deal with current and past problems because those needs are so pressing and overwhelming, it seems a little too high minded to start thinking about future trends when we can’t even get a handle on the present. Futurists seem to have a unique ability to look at the present for clues to what the future may bring. I’m not advocating that all foundations ignore the current problems our communities are facing but a few forward-thinking institutions might be able to influence the future.

Look for my dispatches from the conference coming early next week.

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*This is where I would work from Photo courtesy of BDA Rebel

Back in November of 2007 I wrote a post for Tactical Philanthropy about how work flexibility in the foundation sector would increase the effectiveness of grantmakers. That post was inspired by the great work of Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the creators of Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (R.O.W.E.). Cali and Jody now have a wonderful book out called “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It.” This dynamic duo are proposing a new way of work where “people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, as long as the work gets done.” This is NOT the same as telecommuting or flexible schedules. This is about completely changing the nature of work so that employees are accountable to what they accomplish for the organization, not how many hour they sit behind a desk. This also isn’t some touchy feeling model of making employees happy, it’s also about efficiency. Best Buy has seen a 35% increase in productivity since implementing the model, a decrease in turnover (a very expensive problem for nonprofits), and have a much happier and committed workforce.

I think this new model is important to the social sector because the work that we do is so important to the healthy functioning of our communities but the normal structure of work makes it impossible for you to be a normal functioning part of the community that you live in. How much time do you spend in traffic getting to your job and how much time do you spend in you local park getting to know your neighbors? Who says that you can’t be working from a laptop while sitting in a park chatting with your neighbors?

People work for nonprofits because they care about the work of the organization, what if nonprofits changed the nature of work to show that they care about the people that are making the organization successful?

What would it take to make this the norm in the nonprofit sector?

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Every time I use LinkedIn’s question and answer feature I am amazed at how amazing my LinkedIn network is. (If you aren’t already a part of my LinkedIn network, click on the “add me to your network” button on the right). I have been trying to think of new topics for my professional development guides and asked what the greatest career challenge is for young people in nonprofits and because the answers were so great I thought I would share some of them with you:

I see a real need for mentors in our world. I think for profit corporations do a much better job providing opportunities for young professionals to develop meaningful relationships with older professionals in the same field. We tend to “go it alone” too much!
-Kevin

Hi Trista! The greatest challenge I see is the low ceiling in the nonprofit world. As an ambitious young nonprofit professional, it’s reasonable to assume I could hit top of my career ladder in 10 years. Where will I go from there?
-Laura

Young people need to be invested in-both with money, opportunity, time, and energy.
-Chelsea

I challenged with mapping out a career path; while I know what my desired end result is, I’m not quite sure of all the steps I should be taking to get there.
-Heidi

What do you see as the greatest career challenge facing young nonprofit staff members?

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A long-time passion of mine has been helping young professionals in the nonprofit sector develop the “soft” skills that you need to move ahead in your career. My most recent project is a series of professional development guides for do gooders, that has been taking off. I’ll occasionally post excerpts from the guides on the blog and I’d love to hear if you have any suggestions for future guide topics. From my branding guide:

Just as certain thoughts pop into people’s heads when they think of “iPod” (1,000 songs in your pocket) Or “Subway” (Eat Fresh), when people thing of you, as a professional, they should think of your “Brand.” Can you brand a person? Of course! What do you think of when you think of Michael Jordan? Great basketball player, good jump shot, shoes, etc. What do you think comes to mind when people think about you? If you don’t know, it is time to find out.

These days before anyone meets anyone, they run straight to Google to check out their web presence. Managing your presence on the web is one of the most important ways to manage your brand. To begin managing your web presence, Google yourself. For a good start on your internet image, look for the following clues:

• You should appear somewhere on the first page of results.

• Posts that mention you should be related to professional work, and not embarrassing photos from college parties.

• Topics that should appear in search results include articles written, previous media interviews, references to jobs and internships, and professional networking affiliations. Remove content that is unrelated to work if you can. If removal is contingent on help from others, respectfully request that they remove content. Also, to push less relevant content below the first page, create newer, more relevant content and focus on moving it up in search results by back links and references from others.

You might be surprised what you will find, and your search-engine entries will change over time as people pick up and post work you may have done years ago, or never take down old web pages.

The full guide can be found here.

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