Home

Inspiration and Insights in India

Do poverty, homeless and illiterate children, hunger, appalling slums and crippling disease overwhelm compassion when the scale is immense, the odds seemingly hopeless?

It would be easy to turn away from these challenges in places like New Delhi (Delhi, Haryana) and Jaipur (Rajasthan), India.  Visionary, committed, highly professional leaders and staff of nongovernmental organizations in India are hard at work however solving these problems, one person at a time and through civic action. 

Does Your Board Get the Nonprofit Model?

It’s a familiar story.  The board decides to look ahead a decade so the executive director of the agency arranges a board strategic planning retreat. 

The facilitator begins the exercise in earnest, assuming that all board members understand and are prepared to act on the realities of not-for-profit finance and management, and that they grasp the impact of those realities on this agency.

Board Technology for the 21st Century

Does your agency act as if it’s in the 21st Century? 

Weather, travel, and disability can hamper volunteer participation in governance and service.  What does your agency do to mitigate the effects and enhance its utilization of volunteer willingness to help and their power? 

How do you use technology to ensure that the “meeting goes on” so progress towards your governance goals occurs?

Strategic Planning with Compassion: Development Planning Using 'Appreciative Inquiry'

Board members and executive officers alike tend to recoil at the thought of strategic planning. Sure, everyone votes to make a plan. No one relishes living the process.

Enter the challenge posed to me by the organizers of a fall conference for not-for-profit board and staff development.  The theme is using “Appreciative Inquiry” methodology -- so can I fit a strategic planning for fund raising seminar into that model?  “Sure,” I bravely said.

Maximize Your Recovery

Len Iaquinta's Blog

Most not-for-profits short-circuit their effectiveness by failing to strive for excellence in fund raising in all the available avenues for realistic support.  Rarely are best practices followed throughout the funding planning of the organization.

For example, few organizations realize the full short- and long-term benefits of their newsletter mailing list, open houses, special fund raising events, periodic mail or phone solicitation campaigns, gift shop customers, friends and social networks, et al.

Don't 'Buy Media' ... Market Your Message!

Len Iaquinta's July Blog

It’s a common mistake. 

The agency’s marketing and communications committee decides the organization is not well enough known and needs more clients, money, referrals, and whatever.  Probably they want it all.

Then the chair leaps to gather rates and suggested advertising schedules from various media reps and brings them to the committee to choose among.  Trouble is, the organization has yet to determine the messages that matter and the market segments that pay off. 

Benefit from the Burgeoning Volunteer Force! - Part Two – Challenging Younger Volunteers

Len Iaquinta's Blog

Did you think the title refers to volunteers in their 20s and 30s being a handful to manage?

Then you are not tuned in to the younger generations.  They want to be involved in positive change.  But don’t ask them to simply plug into your pre-conceived notion of what is best for them to do.

Give them a goal -- a project to accomplish.  Then step back and turn them loose.  Forty years of motivating volunteers of all ages has taught me to choose young volunteers wisely and to let go.  But stay in touch.

Benefit from the Burgeoning Volunteer Force! - Part One – Boomers Come of Age

Len Iaquinta's Blog

We are educated and trained in the crafts, trades and professions.  We’re looking for social contact, meaningful activity, challenging and interesting work.

Don’t ask us to stuff envelopes! 

Many of us are even experts -- nationally, regionally or locally.  Most organizations need our skills.  Few craft a way to use our time effectively.

Clock is Ticking on 2009 IRA Charitable Rollover

Len Iaquinta's Blog

The Congress did us another favor.  The IRA Charitable Rollover provision was extended through 2009.  Some of the tax incentive was removed, but research shows that few donors are motivated primarily by tax consequences.  It’s your mission that moves them.

So what is your plan to get these gifts?  Recall the scenario.  The IRS says: A Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) is a nontaxable distribution made directly by the trustee of your IRA (other than a SEP or SIMPLE IRA) to an organization eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions.