Non-profit trends Archives - Helen Brown Group

March 29, 2018 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Philaepángelma

As #ResearchPride Month comes to a close I wanted to say thank you to everyone – practitioners and our kind vendor colleagues alike – who participated with loads of tweets, podcasts, blog posts, articles, and even re-posting oldies-but-goodies from years past. It’s been another great month of sharing.

One of the main themes that I noticed this year was the outpouring of gratitude for the way our profession is generously collaborative, and I think that’s something we shouldn’t take for granted. [Read more…]

March 15, 2018 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Justification

I had a nice email back-and-forth with a colleague the other day discussing a new trend she was seeing in the field. As the conversation wound down to a close, I wrote that I looked forward to seeing her at the Apra International conference (Pittsburgh! August 8-11!). She came back for one last reply, saying that after nearly 20 years of going, the vice president of fundraising was asking her for justification of the expense. [Read more…]

February 22, 2018 By Helen Brown 7 Comments

Worth a Listen

Except for the few of us who work at our main office in Watertown, most everybody at HBG works from home. One of the (many) nice things about that is that you can listen to podcasts without bothering anyone else in the office (except maybe your furry 4-legged office-mates). [Read more…]

February 15, 2018 By Helen Brown 2 Comments

Freeports: The Purgatory for Art

As the HBG Book Club group read about tax-free zones called freeports last week in Jake Bernstein’s page-turner, Secrecy World, it was a perfectly-timed coincidence that this fascinating Planet Money podcast came out on that very topic. [Read more…]

February 8, 2018 By Helen Brown 4 Comments

Is Your Nonprofit Ready for GDPR?

The new EU data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on May 25^th and it brings with it an entirely new set of rules that nonprofits world-wide – not just in the European Union – will have to abide by. I’m not seeing a lot of discussion about it here in the US fundraising community* and that concerns me. [Read more…]

January 4, 2018 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Innovation in Philanthropy

Creativity abounds everywhere in the Third Sector, from service providers in the field, to fundraising offices managing more on a shoestring, to a new breed of funders (and well-established funders, too) thinking up new ways to engage with, spur forward, and support their philanthropic priorities. In this week’s article, HBG Senior Researcher Grace Chandonnet shares some of the interesting and creative ways funders are having an impact in the world today. ~Helen

Lately I’ve been thinking about the innovative ways that young entrepreneurs are actively engaging in philanthropy. As my colleague Elizabeth Roma writes, the philanthropy landscape is ever evolving and innovating and appears to be picking up the pace of change exponentially in recent years in what is being referred to as the New Gilded Age. Elizabeth touches on innovative philanthropic vehicles such as the Emerson Collective and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, as well as B-Corps and impact investing. [Read more…]

November 23, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

More Giving, Thanks to Thanks Giving

When I read this week’s featured article by Kathy Mills on the Apra-Carolinas website, I knew I had to ask share it with you today. Kathy is Senior Donor Identification Analyst at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and I wanted you to read her description of the way that their prospect research and annual giving teams partner together.

They’re making relationship magic – joining their talents to give sincere thanks to donors, and it’s a great lesson – for this season and all year round.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, and warm thanks to Kathy and the kind folks at Apra-Carolinas for allowing us to re-share this!

The Impact of Thanking Annual Fund Donors

When I was younger, my mother forced me to write thank you notes to anyone who had given me a gift for my birthday. It seemed like a chore at the time, but as an adult, I came to appreciate when I was thanked for sending a gift – and I certainly remembered those that never thanked me. Today, sometimes a simple “thank you” seems like a dying art.

As nonprofit organizations, it’s critical that we thank our donors promptly. That $25 annual fund donor could turn out to be a $25,000 donor in the future if he or she feels appreciated right from the start. But every organization sends a thank you letter. What if you took it one step further? [Read more…]

November 16, 2017 By Helen Brown 3 Comments

Are the rich less philanthropic than we thought?

When we try to estimate a potential donor’s gift capacity, the fundraising tradition has been to use statistics from the IRS that show that, on average, Americans give around 2-5 percent of their income annually to charitable organizations.

That average is derived from people who itemized charitable deductions. Even though that’s an average, for those of us in prospect research that’s been a reliable percentage to use because, by and large, only people who benefit from itemizing actually bother to do it – and that’s wealthy people. [Read more…]

August 3, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Another day, another hundred million dollars…

This week on The Intelligent Edge, HBG senior researcher Rachel Dakarian provides a window into the ongoing discussion that members of the HBG Book Club have had recently over our first shared book. I think in the beginning we thought that we’d all read this useful book, share our thoughts weekly, and then go back to our work. What’s actually happened has been a lively, ongoing, daily chat-room discussion as we toss articles to each other with comments of “hey, read this! It’s just what we were talking about yesterday!” punctuating our times between book club meetings. Rachel expands on our latest discussion beautifully in this week’s article. We’re interested to hear your thoughts as well! ~Helen

“Carnegie 1903” Drawing by Louis Dalrymple

As you may have noticed, ours is the era of the mega-gift. This trend of non-stop blockbuster giving has left many reeling or salivating – not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, nor will this trend be ending any time soon. Wealth and philanthropy are often perceived to fit hand in glove, but we prospect researchers know firsthand how difficult it can be to verify wealth and encourage charitable giving. [Read more…]

May 25, 2017 By Helen Brown 4 Comments

That work book

You honestly do want to read it. You spent the money on it. It’s just sitting on your desk or your shelf.

Very innocently. But making you feel guilty.

That work-book you bought.

I’ve got a few books like that on my office shelf. Some that I’ve started and abandoned after an interested afternoon, and others that I haven’t even cracked open yet. (but I will! I swear!)

But now, a solution.

Last week, some of my HBG colleagues and I – independent of each other – watched a vidcast of David Callahan and Emmett Carson in a fascinating, spirited, and sometimes provocative debate sponsored by Philanthropy New York. Callahan is the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, and author of the new book The Givers; Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. Carson is president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in the world, with $8 billion+ in assets. [Read more…]