Welcome to Research Friday! As part of a continuing series, we invite a nonprofit scholar, student, or professional to highlight current research reports or studies and discuss how they can inform and improve day-to-day nonprofit practice.

The ASU Lodestar Center Research Friday Blog is on hiatus for the summer.

"Research Friday" Bloggers Needed 
We are currently recruiting bloggers to write for us in the fall. If you are interested, please contact Stephanie La Loggia at Stephanie.LaLoggia@asu.edu.

The ASU Lodestar Center is currently working on publishing the findings from the 2011 Nonprofit Compensation and Benefits Report and the 2011 Arizona Nonprofits: Scope of the Sector report. To view past research reports, please visit: http://lodestar.asu.edu/research.
 

Some nonprofit organizations hire professional fundraisers to help reach funding goals more quickly and easily. But how do nonprofits know that the professionals they choose to work with will appropriate the funds in full? One way that government agencies help curb professional fundraising fraud is by requiring individuals and businesses to purchase surety bond insurance before they can be licensed to work on behalf of nonprofits and other organizations.

Fundraiser bonds are not like financial bonds that are used for investment purposes, nor are they like performance bonds that provide financial returns to investors. These bonds are a specific type of license and permit bond, which government agencies often require before certain professionals can be licensed to work. License and permit bonds function as lines of credit that can be tapped into to pay for monetary losses or fines that result from licensing violations made by, in this case, professional fundraisers. Simply put, surety bonds guarantee professional fundraisers handle funds ethically.

Thousands of individual surety bond types exist, each providing a specific type of financial protection that depends on the bond's purpose and its contractual language. Despite their individual…

If you are depending on special event income to fund your mission, it’s likely you’ve noticed the last five years have felt like you are moving up the down escalator.

Perhaps you have noticed that sponsors are gripping their pocketbooks with a tighter fist, attendees are not as plentiful as they once were and high-end table buyers are downsizing their commitments. What’s more is that it doesn’t really matter whether it is a high-end gala or a walk. Keeping staff motivated and raising the big dollars with special events can be an expensive and staff-intensive endeavor that is growing more difficult to sustain in our world’s diminished economy.

Yet, donors are still available but are far more discriminating about where to invest their charitable dollars.  Here are some items that donors want when making their decisions:

• Results. Donors want to know what happened with the dollars you used to have. What did your organization do to move the marble?
• Personalization. Do you know me and what I like to support? 
• Knowledge. Do you keep me informed of mission progress without always asking for support?

So how does an organization make this transition? Here are some steps to get started:

Collect and organize

Hopefully, you are already collecting as much contact information as you can…

One of the primary gauges we use for digital communications is post reach and engagement, including number of views and amount of individuals who have interacted with a “like” or comment. As a nonprofit, your message is most likely tailored toward a specific cause, whether it’s through news, links, or photos.

Your ultimate breadwinner for social media engagement is photos. People LOVE photos and that’s the way it has always been. Do you remember being younger and loving books packed full of photos? The same rule applies with social media! Always tell/share your story with a photo, the more original the better.

If you have a news update or link, take or find a photo that fits with your nonprofit’s mission and enhances the update. This increases the likelihood of people reading your post. Also, get creative and show the “behind the scenes” of your organization. People respond well to seeing staff and activities going on at an organization and it increases transparency. As a smaller organization, we regularly showcase employees who are celebrating birthdays and anniversaries on social media which, in turn, increases employee appreciation.

ICAN recently completed a $5.6 million capital campaign and throughout the process we posted construction update photos. The community consistently responded with positive feedback because the photos allowed them to feel…

Welcome to Research Friday! As part of a continuing series, we invite a nonprofit scholar, student, or professional to highlight current research reports or studies and discuss how they can inform and improve day-to-day nonprofit practice.

These days,"social network" is a term that often refers to a social media community, such as Facebook, and thus is not a term that many managers would take seriously unless they were discussing a social media campaign. In fact, we all live in social networks, every day, and the implications are important for organizations, professional networking and leadership development. The ways in which social networks are designed for interaction among the members of an organization can create a network of support to improve teamwork, as well as create the highest level of information flow to stimulate ideas.

A social network is defined as "an organized set of people that consists of two kinds of elements: human beings and the connections between them," (Christakis, pg. 13). The connection between two people within a social network is referred to as a tie. According to Mark Granovetter, "the strength of a tie is a combination of the amount of time, emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding) and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie" (Granovetter, p. 1361). A tie is defined as strong or weak based on these factors. Each type of tie has advantages…