Research and recommendations for effective, day-to-day nonprofit practice from ASU faculty, staff, students, and the nonprofit and philanthropic community.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
I quickly realized that Public Allies was no cop out when we were sworn in as AmeriCorps members. Back in September when I stood beside more than 40 committed Allies who had a variety of values, backgrounds, beliefs, and goals, but all taking the same oath I realized this was the real deal. We were committing to something that was bigger than ourselves for the sake of the greater good.
The oath reads:
I will get things done for America - to make our people safer, smarter, and healthier.
I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities.
Faced with apathy, I will take action.
Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground.
Faced with adversity, I will persevere.
I will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond. I am an AmeriCorps member, and I will get things done.
We each have followed this oath to a tee in our unique ways at placement and as a collective cohort.
- Bring Americans together to strengthen communities.
The second year allies led us in two service projects this year. One of which we partnered with Be a Leader Foundation and Duncan Family Farms on Cesar Chavez Day. We held an event for the farm employees to bring their kids to learn about who Cesar Chavez was. This event also provided a workshop for parents about Be a Leader’s resources to help their children go on to college. As…
Read moreWednesday, June 11, 2014
This article follows Knoke in exploring how public incentives offered by professional associations (such as lobbying on behalf of collective interests) compete with private incentives (such as member networking opportunity) in promoting monetary gifts, voluntary coproduction of organizational outcomes, and commitment to the association. Olson’s contention that public goods do not motivate civic engagement has fostered several decades of research geared toward establishing the role of such goods in associational outcomes. Based on membership surveys of three engineering associations and two health care associations, the study concludes that private incentives are not universal motivators, while public incentives show some evidence of motivating engagement. Unexpected differences between the two fields of professional association are striking, prompting suggestions that current practitioners and future research give attention to field differences and resist overgeneralization regarding engagement motivations, outcomes, and commitment across professional fields.
In his landmark study of community engagement patterns of Americans over much of last century, Robert Putnam (2000) singles out professional associations. Putnam observes widespread disengagement from neighborhood and community association after World War II, and asserts that workplaces subsequently began to shape our patterns of engagement. In place of real connections, Americans joined more “…
Read moreWednesday, April 23, 2014
In a society fundamentally rooted in capitalism, how can nonprofits argue their worth when their work cannot be translated into a monetary sum?
Increasingly, nonprofit organizations are looking for new ways to measure (and thereby validate) the importance of their work. Our organizations have been measuring outputs in one way or another for as long as there has been philanthropy. This is not without good reason. We measure to ensure that our practices are effective, and to demonstrate that to any number of stakeholders, from the donors who fund us to the constituencies we serve.
Manyhave focusedon uncovering new ways of gathering this data and new metrics for analyzing it. Now the discussion is shifting to moving beyond outputs (e.g. number of people served) to impacts (e.g. what difference it made in those people’s lives and the community as a whole). Social impact models seek to move beyond basic performance measures to better understand and illustrate what has been accomplished and, more importantly, what it meant. When faced with shorter attention spans and more critical…
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Whenever I leave Turkey, I can't stop myself comparing everything to home. The things I compare the most are related to my work.
The United States and Turkey are completely different when it comes to the nonprofit sector. The conditions that created and expanded the nonprofit sector in the U.S. are non-existent, inconsistent or immature in Turkey. Naturally I cannot explain all the differences and similarities in the nonprofit sectors of the two countries in this post, but I wanted to share a few insights and observations that caught my attention.
Let's start with terminology. First, we do not use the term “nonprofit organization”; we use “civil society organization” or “non-governmental organization” instead. Secondly, we do not use the term “sector,” we use words such as area, arena, and field. Why? In the United Sates, the nonprofit sector is not so different from the private sector in terms of professionalism and organizational structures. The two are, however, extremely different in Turkey, and nonprofit organizations avoid using any term that will associate them with the for-profit sector such as “sector”, “client” and “marketing”. The Turkish “nonprofit sector” has its own terminology.
According to the Charities Aid Foundation's (CAF) Global Giving Index 2013, the U.S. ranks first while Turkey ranks 128th out of 135 countries.*
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
More and more nonprofits are shifting their fundraising focus online—and for good reason. Online fundraising platforms are making it easier than ever for donors to contribute when and how they want to, and they eliminate some of the costs of direct mail solicitations and in-person events.
Data published last year in the Chronicle of Philanthropy shows this trend clearly: online donations to nonprofits increased 14% in 2012 relative to 2011, while overall donations increased by only 1.5% in the same period.
But this trend has been uneven. The American Lung Association, for example, received nearly a third of its private donations through the internet in 2012—but the median large organization raised only 2.1% of its donations online in that period.
The lesson? Online fundraising is important—and growing more important every year—but nonprofits can't just open a spigot and watch online contributions pour in. Successful online fundraisers avoid the common mistakes that plague so many others. Here are four fundraising pitfalls we see too often, and how can you can avoid them.
Inconsistent messaging on donation pages
Many nonprofits mistakenly assume that someone who has visited their website, read their fundraising collateral, and navigated to a donation page is all but certain to donate. Those nonprofits…