The following article is cross-posted from Alliance magazine blog. Based out of the UK, Alliance magazine is the leading global magazine on philanthropy and social investment. Some of the world’s wealthiest people have combined forces to launch Co-Impact, a new $500 million initiative to pool resources, talent, and ideas to improve the lives of underserved populations across the developing world.

Hi everyone. Once a while, I do a call to action. For example, if you haven’t written a review of a foundation on Grant Advisor lately, or encourage your grantees to do so, please do it! Grant Advisor is like a Yelp for foundations, and everyone who writes a review gets a basket of gluten-free mini muffins*! (*By gluten-free mini muffins, I mean the joy of advancing our sector by increasing transparency and decreasing power imbalance). […]

While teaching a university course on nonprofit leadership, we were addressing the importance of return on investment (ROI) for nonprofits. That is, how funders who make large investments in a nonprofit expect measurements that indicate their assistance is having an impact. One student, who was a nonprofit executive director, pushed back, saying that even her major donors were “just fine with stories, pictures, and anecdotal evidence” of their program’s effectiveness. Therefore, there was no need […]

Somewhat paradoxically, most nonprofit executives and board members spend more time and effort on financial matters than their counterparts in the business sector do. For people in the nonprofit sector, that’s an unfortunate fact of life, since asking for money can be fraught with psychological complexity. Indeed, even bold leaders of extraordinary nonprofits sometimes become remarkably timid when the need to ask for money arises.