The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World


Book Description

Be the exceptional nonprofit leader your organization needs to thrive and make a difference today. As a nonprofit leader, you're committed to doing the most good. Your organization is poised to make real change-yet your mission can be derailed by the unprecedented challenges that have arisen over the past several years. With no playbook to go by, how can you ensure that you're making the right calls for the organization and the people you serve? Denver Frederick is a trusted advisor to nonprofit CEOs. He has spent countless hours curating a guide to becoming an exceptional nonprofit leader. It is a resource filled with wisdom from subject experts and the most influential people in philanthropy. Culled from his longtime radio show and popular podcast of the same name, The Business of Giving provides thoughtful strategies and novel approaches you need to step up and become the "sense maker" for your organization. You'll discover: What your counterparts are doing to address the same challenges you face. How to significantly improve your organization's problem-solving capacity. Keys to scaling for maximum impact. Obstacles that derail your decision-making process and how to get back on track. 7 distinguishing features that make tech-centered nonprofits stand out. 150 tips from exceptional leaders that you can start using tomorrow. The Business of Giving is every nonprofit leader's master class for successfully navigating turbulent social and economic times. In addition to providing fresh, actionable ideas, it will validate much of what you and your team are already doing. Read it now to make quick, sound decisions about your increasingly complex management challenges.




Engine of Impact


Book Description

We are entering a new era—an era of impact. The largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will soon be under way, bringing with it the potential for huge increases in philanthropic funding. Engine of Impact shows how nonprofits can apply the principles of strategic leadership to attract greater financial support and leverage that funding to maximum effect. As Good to Great author Jim Collins writes in his foreword, this book offers "a detailed roadmap of disciplined thought and action for turning a good nonprofit into one that can achieve great impact at scale." William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker identify seven essential components of strategic leadership that set high-achieving organizations apart from the rest of the nonprofit sector. Together, these components form an "engine of impact"—a system that organizations must build, tune, and fuel if they hope to make a real difference in the world. Drawing on decades of teaching, advising, grantmaking, and research, Meehan and Jonker provide an actionable guide that executives, staff, board members, and donors can use to jumpstart their own performance and to achieve extraordinary results for their organization. Along with setting forth best practices using real-world examples, the authors outline common management challenges faced by nonprofits, showing how these challenges differ from those faced by for-profit businesses in important and often-overlooked ways. By offering crucial insights on the fundamentals of nonprofit management, this book will help leaders equip their organizations to fire on all cylinders and unleash the full potential of the nonprofit sector. Visit www.engineofimpact.org for additional information.




Delusional Altruism


Book Description

How you give matters. Discover philanthropic strategies for creating transformational change. Whether you regularly donate to charity, run a small family foundation, or are responsible for millions of dollars in grants, you are a philanthropist. Delusional Altruism: Why Philanthropists Fail To Achieve Change and What They Can Do To Transform Giving looks at how you can create transformational change. It reminds us that how we give is as important as the amount we give. The author describes common practices that hinder transformational change and explains how to avoid them, ensuring that your gifts help create the impact you seek. Delusional Altruism—a set of all-too-common errors in philanthropic strategy—can derail a program of giving and result in a loss of efficiency and effectiveness. This book asks philanthropists and charitable organizations to consider whether they have fallen under the spell of Delusional Altruism. Are you cutting out impactful giving in order to save money or avoid uncertainty? Is your philanthropic approach unnecessarily restricted by traditional thinking? This book will help you answer these questions and determine how you can achieve better outcomes through the process of Transformational Giving. Ask questions that spur learning and fuel innovation Believe that investment in yourself and your operation is important Increase the speed of your actions to increase the impact of your giving Give in ways that create lasting, sustainable change Follow strategies to make your philanthropy unstoppable Although enhanced opportunities for philanthropic giving are on the horizon, changes to philanthropic practice are needed to prevent this philanthropy boom from becoming under-leveraged. Implementing updated approaches now can lead to positive change for the future. Read Delusional Altruism to learn how you can transform reality with strategic giving.




The Purpose Economy


Book Description

A series of shifts are happening in our economy: Millennials are trading in conventional career paths to launch tech start-ups, start small businesses that are rooted in local communities, or freelance their expertise. We are sharing everything, from bikes and cars, to extra rooms in our homes. We now create, buy and sell handcrafted products in our local communities with ease. Globally recognized entrepreneur, founder of Taproot Foundation and CEO of Imperative, Aaron Hurst, argues in his latest book that while these developments seem unrelated at first, taken together they reveal a powerful pattern that points to purpose as the new driver of the American economy. Like the Information Economy, which has driven innovation and economic growth until now, Hurst argues that our new economic era is driven by connecting people to their purpose. It's an economy where value lies in establishing purpose for employees and customers through serving needs greater than their own, enabling personal growth and building community. Based on interviews with thousands of entrepreneurs, Hurst shows this new era is already fueling demand for a whole host of products and services and transforming how millennials view their careers. A new breed of startups like Etsy, Zaarly, Tough Mudder, Kickstarter, and Airbnb are finding new ways to create value by connecting us with our local communities. At the same time, companies like Tesla and Whole Foods are making the march from just appealing to affluent buyers to becoming mainstream brands. Hurst calls these companies, along with the pioneering entrepreneurs who founded them, the Purpose Economy's taste-makers. This book is at once a personal memoir of Aaron Hurst’s own awakening as a purpose driven entrepreneur, when he left a well-paying tech job in 2001 to launch Taproot, creating a pathway for millions of professionals and Fortune 500 companies to volunteer for nonprofits. It's also a blueprint for a new economic era that is transforming companies, markets and our careers to better serve people and the world.




The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management


Book Description

The go-to nonprofit handbook, updated and expanded for today's leader The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management is the bestselling professional reference and leading text on the functions, processes, and strategies that are integral to the effective leadership and management of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. Now in its fourth edition, this handbook presents the most current research, theory, and practice in the field of nonprofit leadership and management. This practical, relevant guide is invaluable to the effective practice of nonprofit leadership and management, with expanded attention to accountability, transparency, and organizational effectiveness. It also extensively covers the practice of social entrepreneurship, presented via an integrative perspective that helps the reader make practical sense of how to bring it all together. Nonprofit organizations present unique opportunities and challenges for meeting the needs of societies and their communities, yet nonprofit management is more complex and challenging than ever. This Handbook provides a framework to help you lead and manage efficiently and effectively in this new environment. Building on solid current scholarship, the handbook provides candid, practical guidance from nationally-recognized leaders who share their insights on: The relationship between board performance and organizational effectiveness Managing internal and external stakeholder relationships Financial viability and sustainability and how to enhance both for the long term Strategies to successfully attract, retain, and mobilize the very best of staff and volunteers The fourth edition of the handbook also includes content relevant to associations and membership organizations. The content of the handbook is supplemented and enriched by an extensive set of online supplements and tools, including reading lists, web references, checklists, PowerPoint slides, discussion guides, and sample exams. Running your nonprofit or nongovernmental organization effectively in today's complex and challenging environment demands more knowledge and skill than ever, deployed in a thoughtful and pragmatic way. Grounded in the most useful modern scholarship and theory, and explained from the perspective of effective practice, The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management is a pivotal resource for successful nonprofit leaders in these turbulent times.




Generation Impact


Book Description

An insider’s guide to the coming philanthropic revolution Meet the next generation of big donors—the Gen X and Millennial philanthropists who will be the most significant donors ever and will shape our world in profound ways. Hear them describe their ambitious plans to revolutionize giving so it achieves greater impact. And learn how to help them succeed in a world that needs smart, effective donors now more than ever. As “next gen donors” step into their philanthropic roles, they have not only unprecedented financial resources, but also big ideas for how to wield their financial power. They want to disrupt the traditional world of charitable giving, and they want to do so now, not after they retire to a life of philanthropic leisure. Generation Impact pulls back the curtain on these rising leaders and their “Impact Revolution,” offering both extensive firsthand accounts and expert analysis of the hands-on, boundary-pushing, unconventional strategies next gen donors are beginning to pursue. This fascinating book also shows another side of the donors in Generation Impact: they want to respect the past even as they transform the future. They are determined to honor the philanthropic legacies and values they’ve inherited by making big giving more effective than ever before. If they succeed, they can make historic progress on causes from education to the environment, from human rights to health care. Based on years of research and close engagement with next gen donors, Generation Impact offers a unique profile of the new faces of philanthropy. Find out, directly from them: How they want to revolutionize giving to expand its positive impact on our lives and our communities. Which causes interest them, how they want to engage with those causes … and, perhaps more important, how they do not want to engage. Which new tools and strategies for change excite them most. What they are learning from previous generations, and what they want to bring to their work alongside those generations. How we can all ensure their historic potential is channeled in ways that make our world better. The Impact Revolution will be messy, but it could also result in solutions for some of our most persistent problems. Generation Impact offers targeted, practical advice to parents, families, and their advisors, as well as nonprofit professionals—those who work closest with these next gen donors—on how to engage, nurture, and encourage them as they reshape major giving and make their mark on history. Help them channel their enthusiasm—and their wealth—to make the most positive difference in a world with such great need.




Crisis Ready


Book Description

Crisis Ready is not about crisis management. Management is what happens after the negative event has occurred. Readiness is what is done to build an INVINCIBLE brand, where negative event has occurred. Readiness is what is done to build an INVINCIBLE brand, where negative situations don't occur--and even if they do, they're instantly overcome in a way that leads to increased organizational trust, credibility, and goodwill. No matter the size, type, or industry of your business, Crisis Ready will provide your team with the insight into how to be perfectly prepared for anything life throws at you.




What If?


Book Description




Creating Value in Nonprofit-Business Collaborations


Book Description

Collaboration between nonprofits and businesses is a necessary component of strategy and operations. Creating Value in Nonprofit-Business Collaborations: New Thinking & Practice provides breakthrough thinking about how to conceptualize and realize collaborative value. With over a hundred case examples from around the globe and hundreds of literature references, the book reveals how collaboration between businesses and nonprofit organizations can most effectively co-create significant economic, social, and environmental value for society, organizations, and individuals. This essential resource features the ground-breaking Collaborative Value Creation framework that can be used for analyzing the sources, forms, and processes of value creation in partnerships between businesses and nonprofits. The book is a step-by-step guide for business managers and non-profit practitioners for achieving successful cross-sector partnerships. It examines the key dimensions of the Collaborative Mindset that shape each partner's collaborative efforts. It analyzes the drivers of partnership evolution along the Collaboration Continuum, and sets forth the key pathways in the Collaboration Process Value Chain. The book concludes by offering Twelve Smart Practices of Collaborative Value Creation for the design and management of cross sector partnerships. The book will empower organizations to strategically increase the potential for value creation both for the partners and society. Praise for Creating Value in Nonprofit-Business Collaborations: New Thinking & Practice! "This is a playbook for enabling business and nonprofits to co-create shared value. These new types of collaborations about creating value, rather than the tense standoffs of the past, are part of the way we will create actual solutions to society's challenges." Michael J. Porter, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, Harvard Business School "Co-creating value is a powerful concept Jim Austin and May Seitanidi are sharing with us that will bring business and non-profit leaders to a new level of understanding and performance. This new book is the indispensable guidebook for leaders of the future." Frances Hesselbein, Founding President and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, Former CEO of the Girl Scouts of America, and Holder of Presidential Medal of Freedom "I love the book! While it focuses on "cross sector" collaboration, it should be read by every executive in the "for-profit" sector. Business is about how to collaborate with stakeholders to create value. This book tells you how to do it. Bravo!" R. Edward Freeman, University Professor and Olsson Professor The Darden School University of Virginia "Finally a book that demystifies what is probably the single most indispensable strategy for advancing social change: cross sector collaboration that creates genuine, measurable value for all. The book is an original and valuable resource for both the nonprofit and business sectors, providing a promising new roadmap that shows how to go beyond fighting for one's share of the pie, to collaboration that actually makes the pie grow." Billy Shore, Founder and CEO of Share Our Strength and Chairman of Community Wealth Ventures "Professors Austin and Seitanidi provide essential guidance for managers determining how to produce benefits for their organizations and high impact for society. This is an informed, thoughtful, and practical analysis." Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School and author of SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth and Social Good




Just Giving


Book Description

The troubling ethics and politics of philanthropy Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today’s democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society’s benefit, Just Giving shows how such generosity not only isn’t the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values. Big philanthropy is often an exercise of power, the conversion of private assets into public influence. And it is a form of power that is largely unaccountable and lavishly tax-advantaged. Philanthropy currently fails democracy, but Rob Reich argues that it can be redeemed. Just Giving investigates the ethical and political dimensions of philanthropy and considers how giving might better support democratic values and promote justice.