Author name: Matt Spangler

Donor Advice

Relevance

By relevance, I’m referring to you. What is your passion? We don’t need to spend a ton of time on this, because we’re talking about things that you’re already feeling. But the big key with this final topic is just that: feeling, emotion.

Donor Advice

Impact

But What Do They Actually Do?  It’s a question that should be easily answered with simple facts.  But here’s where it gets interesting: something that should be so heavily data-driven can actually be quite subjective. I’ll break this down into a couple key areas to clarify.

Donor Advice

Sustainability

Now that you’ve got some tools to evaluate the historical financial health and decision making of prospective organizations, you now need to figure out whether you’re dumping your money down a black hole long term. The buzzword here is “sustainability”, and we’re going to use it in 2 senses: program sustainability and financial sustainability. To make this simple, I’m going to lay out a handful of sample questions you can ask an organization.

Donor Advice

Fiscal Responsibility

For a long time, there was a stigma around using traditionally for-profit terms like “marketing”, “sales” and even “income” for non-profit organizations, especially those who are faith-based. But the reality is the best run organizations function much like businesses, in both their front and back office operations. And in much the same way publicly traded companies are accountable to their shareholders, it is incumbent upon charitable organizations to manage their donors’ contributions responsibly. With that in mind, I won’t waste your time discussing business practices you already know, but instead we can focus on the differences in the non-profit sector.

News

The Faith-Based Nonprofit Quandary

Last month, Marianne penned a beautiful narrative about our experience hosting the First Lady of Honduras, a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The reason for hosting her was because we were publicly signing an agreement to provide crisis care services to children in an official capacity

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