Welcome to this week's Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants! I asked, what's your big idea that the sector should be implementing? And eight bloggers offered some interesting ideas:
- Joshua Karlin at Marketing and Fundraising Ideas encourages nonprofits to set powerful goals
- Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention urges the sector to put more thought into commmunications and technology, and recommends the NTEN Conference next month in New Orleans.
- Social Butterfly says the nonprofit sector should take a revitalized, revolutionary look at collaboration.
- Tera Wozniak at Social Citizen also thinks collaboration can make the nonprofit sector better and more efficient.
- Bob Guinto at Nonprofit Supporter thinks we need to take a closer look at compensation of our leaders.
- Sherri Garrity at Make it Count suggests that nonprofits be ruthless about money and operate with heart.
- Rebecca at Wild Apricot Blog says the nonprofit sector should focus on creating a culture of giving.
- Audrey Alvarado at the Nonprofit Congress blog says nonprofits need to band together in a critical mass to change the sector together.
- And I think we should just bring our authentic selves to the sector and it will all work itself out.
1 comments:
My nomination is to declare 2008 the year that the program service-administrative cost ratio formula became irrelevant. Yes, the good old 70%-30% ratio has been declared officially useless in identifying whether or not a nonprofit organization is effective in accomplishing its mission and helping the community. Most readers of these blogs have probably been beating their heads against the wall about this anyway. I read a lot of research reports and I have never read one that demonstrated that the expense ratio is a clear indicator of the quality of programs or management, or impact on the lives of people. One reason why we continue to chase this argument, though, is because the ratio is prominent, well known, and easily calculated. We need a two-step retirement plan. First is to jointly stop using the ratio as a way to distinguish our organizations from others, in an unhealthy type of competition, as in “our administrative ratio only is 5%, so your donated dollar will go farther with us.” The second is to find a better way to convey the quality and effectiveness of the work that you do, which requires a real method of evaluating and communicating the programs and impact on clients. So don’t be irrelevant – join the movement.
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