Before Jack Welch retired, he was quoted as saying, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” The start of a New Year is the perfect opportunity for nonprofit leaders to vision cast (or recast) for their staff, volunteers, and donors. Without a vision [...]
Thank you all for everything you have done to bring us to the point where we understand where we are... Dr. William N. LaForge, President
Ray Dalio speaks to an extremely important, but challenging to implement, leadership principle -- meritocracy of ideas. Office politics, organizational hierarchies, tenure in a position or organization all work against this principle.
By Mark Belcher, Partner After more than 20 years of working in and with various types of development organizations – higher ed, research, hospitals, etc. – one thing I have come to appreciate is that there is more often than not a considerable gap translating our work into the language of business operations. As is also [...]
More than 20 years ago one of our founding partners, Doug Alexander, wrote this article for Fund Raising Management Magazine. I stumbled upon it the other day and realized that 20 years later this problem still exists and this advice is still spot on. Click here to read the article: build it and they will [...]
Raising money is a rewarding and fulfilling profession if you ask many of the successful men and women who ask for funds on a daily basis. Nonprofits, whether they are in business to help one individual, one child, one animal, or to transform society, give development officers reasons to be proud and feel purposeful in [...]
Good or best . . . which is the enemy? Sometimes a great deal of truth can be found in simple phrases. And, then again, sometimes the truth can be found when the phrases are modified. So, for example, how many times have we heard, “If it’s not broken, don’t mess with it?” Focus on [...]
A wordsmith might argue that passionate philanthropy is redundant. After all, isn’t philanthropy in its essence the ‘love of humankind’ and isn’t ‘love’ a passion? Nevertheless, all of us have probably seen or heard a case for giving delivered dispassionately. Sometimes the case is so compelling that it survives the dry delivery of the message. [...]
Arthur L. Criscillis, Ed.D., Partner I was asked by a client to join the staff for their yearly planning retreat and was asked to do a presentation on the top ten characteristics of effective development programs. While I have given a great deal of thought to what makes a development program excel, I had never really [...]
By David King, President & CEO Several times a year, we are called on to take over campaigns already underway that we did not help plan nor were we involved during the early execution. Often these are campaigns that have (or are perceived to have) "stalled." Sometimes these campaigns are victims of changes beyond the [...]
