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 “…

In a society fundamentally rooted in capitalism, how can nonprofits argue their worth when their work cannot be translated into a monetary sum?

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.*

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…

Nonprofits are organized around data. Whether for membership and volunteer management, communications, promotion, or revenue tracking, the information we collect comprises one of our most critical assets and is central to realizing our missions. Not all data is created equal, however. This is the explanation behind many organizations’ resistance to data collection and management, which is seen as an investment of time and resources that yields little or no return.

There is an important distinction between more data and better data. What is better data? Information that allows nonprofits to create actionable changes to their workflow and structure.

Of course, data is only as good as the database used to manage it. Think of your database as your “institutional memory.” Having an excellent memory enables you to measure progress, identify new objectives, and demonstrate results to prospective donors. Data that is difficult to retrieve, stored in multiple places, and very likely to contain errors is relatively meaningless. Accurate and accessible data, however, allows organizations to quantify the effectiveness of their initiatives and adjust their methodology accordingly. It also allows you to do more with less, something a majority of nonprofits are regularly challenged to do.

Too many of us rely on Excel and Access to keep track of our records. While useful for limited tasks, these tools create opportunities for duplicate or…