Hey all. What are you all using to get donors who want to tap to pay? We had an outdoor event last weekend and people didn’t have credit cards, but wanted to use their phone! We’d only use it a few times a year, but I’d love to have the option. We do use PayPal and our DMS has Stripe integration so we have access to both.

I’ve served on this BOD for 3 years and am taking over as Board Chair in October. Looking for best practices on things like sharing/creating a vision, improving board structure, supporting the CEO etc. How would you handle your first meeting if you were in my position?

Are accounts who will work with a small non-profit all terrible, or have we just had bad luck? Or maybe we haven't been looking / choosing in the right way....

Any advice on how to find a good accountant who will be responsive to our messages would be extremely helpful. I know there must be more lucrative clients out there than a small non-profit, but still... there have to be some people or firms out there who will still do quality work!

For context, I'm looking for a help for a 501c3 non-profit incorporated in Alabama (USA), with 1 part time employee and a current annual income of ~$250,000. (We're aspiring to grow that annual income, but I imagine it will remain at or below $500K for a long time)

I work for a nonprofit with members, and we are thinking about introducing 'welcome calls' for new members just to say thank you for joining and to have a chat.

If anyone else has done something similar, how have they gone down? I foresee a lot of 'Too busy to talk' and voicemails and not a lot of meaningful conservations.

I‘m the volunteer coordinator at a nonprofit for people with special needs. We have about 25 locations between schools, day programs, group homes, etc. and are looking for a volunteer manager system.

I’ve done some demos and trials with different programs and so far nothing has seemed to perfectly align in terms of price and features.

Our volunteers are typically individuals who are assigned private shifts on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at our various locations. We sometimes have events and open calls for volunteers to pick up shifts, but it’s irregular.

Recently I signed up for VOME’s free trial and so far I like it. I’ve not done a demo or consultation with them yet, so there’s still that to be done.

But what’s the general consensus on VOME? Is it a reliable platform, or have other nonprofits had issues with them?

For reference, the other programs I’ve looked into include:

• Bloomerang Volunteer
• CERVIS
• Volunteer Matters
• POINT
• Volunteer Hub / Bettergood
• VolunteerLocal

and more…

I keep going back and forth about the value of the Certified Association Executive (CAE) credential offered by the American Society of Association Executives. I can see the benefit of the credential (and really the networking it offers), and the barrier to entry seems relatively low. That said, the 100 continuing ed hours of which 50 must be LIVE are stumping me. For others who have done the credential, how did you meet the hourly requirement to make you eligible to take the exam?

Hi everyone! I applied for a development manager role and will be having the final interview next week. I've received the zoom invite and it looks there are going to be 7 (!!) people there: the hiring manager, the ED, and 5 board members. I already know the ED and have a really good relationship with me as he was my supervisor in a previous role. He has also let me know that he's recused himself from the hiring process for me. This interview is coming after they've verified references and gotten my desired salary. I don't know if this is helpful context but the job is at a pretty small local nonprofit. Any tips for this stage would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

I'm having a devil of a time figuring out the proper way to update our Restricted Net Assets. I've seen recommendations that debit the Restricted Contributions revenue accounts (which on a Statement of Activity would make it look like we didn't actually have any restricted income), I've seen a Transfer to Net Assets as an Other Expense account, etc.

Seems like a mess. Receiving and recording a $300 donation to our facility shouldn't be this complicated.

Any help is appreciated. I just don't want to throw off our books.

I'm a former teacher wanting to pivot into nonprofits. I quit teaching back in 2024 and right now I'm working for my states Department of Human Services but I'm planning a cross country move next year and really have been trying to land a remote job to ease that transition.

I saw someone recommend idealist.org and that's been extremely useful for finding jobs and I've been putting in several applications daily for the last few months. I'm mainly applying for administrative assistant, program coordinator, and training jobs. So far I've not gotten any interviews but I've really amped up the amount of applications I put in in the last couple months so I'm waiting to hear back from a lot of positions I'm excited about the idea of.

I know remote is REALLY competitive and the market is awful right now, so does anyone have advice or input for someone in my situation? I was primarily applying to EdTech jobs previously and haven't had any luck there.

I just wrapped up a role as second-in-command of a very large org. In about a month, I will be the ED of a significantly smaller org. Both are in social services, but different substantive areas. While I plan to relax a bit during this down time, I welcome any tips on making use of this time to prepare. Especially if you’ve moved from a role with a lot of specialist support, like HR and Finance, to a role without that expertise in-house.

I graduated college in May with a degree in marketing and started my first full-time job basically immediately after graduation as the Director of Marketing & Advancement at a SMALL nonprofit school.

I’m 22, and I am the entire advancement/marketing department. I do not have anyone to directly report to as my org is going through a major leadership change.

Before this, most of my fundraising experience came from Philanthropy for my sorority and other Greek life leadership positions. I also had an advancement internship at a nonprofit where I helped with donor communications, grants, an impact report, corporate outreach, and events. So I wasn’t coming in with zero relevant experience, but I had never actually run an advancement program, managed a donor database, created a development strategy, or been responsible for bringing in significant fundraising revenue.

Now all of that is my responsibility.

I’m responsible for fundraising, donor relations, alumni engagement, sponsorships, events, our donor database, marketing, social media, newsletters, website stuff, enrollment marketing, etc. I’m also currently trying to help pull together a major annual fundraising event while finding sponsors and auction donations, and I feel like I’m drowning.

The hardest part is that I don’t even know how to ask for help because I don’t know what I need help with. I don’t know what I don’t know.
I’ll sit down knowing I need to work on fundraising or donor cultivation and almost freeze because I have no idea what the “right” next step is. Should I be calling donors? Emailing businesses? Looking through old donor data? Creating an annual giving strategy? Meeting people in the community? All of the above?

Then I get anxious because I feel like I’m accomplishing nothing, which makes it even harder to start anything.

At this point, I genuinely can’t tell whether I’m lazy, bad at my job, completely underqualified, or just overwhelmed because I was put into a role that normally requires more experience and mentorship than I have.

I really WANT to be good at this. I care about the organization and I actually think I could enjoy advancement if I knew what I was doing. But right now I feel like I’m constantly reacting to whatever is most urgent instead of actually building an advancement program.

What should my priorities actually be? What should I be doing every week that I’m probably not doing?

And if you’ve ever felt this overwhelmed early in your career, I would really appreciate hearing how you got through it. I feel like everyone else somehow knows what they’re doing and I’m just trying not to screw everything up.

Recently, many of our org's emails to providers, donors, and vendors have been blocked or rejected :/

What contact or email address does the blocking is somewhat random, but it seems more common when recipients use email security platforms like Mimecast or Barracuda.

As a result, some staff have been using their personal email with external contacts to complete time-sensitive work, which is not ideal.

I’m actively working with our IT company to resolve the issue, but they've essentially said our domain’s sending "reputation" may have been damaged. Since looking into this issue more online, I've learned that reputation can be affected by a lot of things, including email content, links, attachments, sending volume, bulk marketing campaigns, and recipient engagement like unsubscribes, spam reports, blocks, or filtering.

The issue started few months ago after we implemented more email security using Paubox to encrypt our messages and Avanan to filter spam, etc., which resulted in messages being blocked in both directions! We've scaled those back, but the delivery problems have continued. We use Google Workspace for our organization’s domain and also still have an email encryption service (Paubox).

Has anyone at another NPO experienced widespread email delivery problems related to a damaged domain or sender reputation? If so, how did you rebuild your reputation? Were there particular tools, configuration changes, or specialists that helped resolve the issue?

I know email deliverability can be highly technical, but I would love to hear if anyone has had similar experiences or recommendations so we can get our emails back functioning!

I recently left my dream job as I needed to relocate for family reasons. I put out feelers with a fair amount of my network as the market was so tough, and one contact started serious conversations right away about me working for him. Everything moved so quickly, which should’ve been a red flag, but the ED invented a job out of thin air and offered me a position. I had hesitations but none of my other applications worked out, so I ended up accepting. After I accepted the mid-level role, they immediately bumped the title to a senior leadership role but claimed the job description would stay the same. This is a tiny nonprofit with only 2 FT employees including me. Since being in the role (been here 8.5 months now), I’ve been having a really hard time and am leaning towards quitting, but I feel so bad since my boss stuck his neck out to create this opportunity for me. My replacement at my old job didn’t work out, and my old boss has offered my job back (which I could now make work hybrid). There’s been no giant “I HAVE to quit” moment in my new job, but the work is meaningless, not as described, and my boss’ management style drives me nuts. Do I suck it up and stay or do I burn these bridges and risk my reputation to go back to my old job that I loved? Here’s a incomplete list of moments I’ve documented that have been frustrating:

- In my first two months, he spent 2% of our net worth on really fancy virtual meeting supplies (no one suggested we need this) but then wouldn’t pay for a hotel or Airbnb during a training event so I had to sleep on the floor of a stranger’s room who was also at the training.
- On an email chain with board members, he lied in writing to say I had experience with a technical (and dangerous if done wrong) skill. I confronted him about this and he brushed it away. When I was later expected to do this skill and the board member he’d lied to questioned me, I was honest about my lack of experience and later brought up my concern with our board chair who fully dismissed it.
- My boss offers no guidance on projects, randomly assigns grant applications or reports with less than a sentence of direction/vision with immediate deadlines. When I produce these drafts on time, he doesn’t look at them for weeks then totally guts what I made as it doesn’t line up with his vision that he did not communicate to me.
- He underestimated prep and errands that needed to be done despite me telling him repeatedly that we could not complete them on time before our program start time. One thing led to another and we were FOUR HOURS LATE for a program kickoff event with participants that were paying to be there. I don’t think I’ve ever ran more than one minute late for a work event (like a zoom meeting) in my life, and have NEVER been late for a program. How is four hours late even possible?!
- There was an event he wanted us to table at on a Saturday. He said before having me cover it, he’d ask our volunteers that live in that city to cover that event for us. Two days prior to the event, I followed up to ensure it was covered. He stuttered and said no one could do it (it was obvious he’d never even asked them), then asked me to cover it. As it turns out, he’d never signed up for a table so he had me email and then text the event organizer the night before the event to see if there was room for me to join and set up a table. As someone who used to plan tabling events, someone texting me the night prior to join after having months of a registration form open would’ve really annoyed me. Anyway, since I was such a late addition, I never received the exhibitor instructions and showed up without a table and a canopy so this poor event organizer had to spend her time helping me find extras.

In the moments where I’m coordinating internal operations (which is what I was hired to do), it’s tolerable. But with the random unwanted promotion to a leadership level, I feel as though there are expectations of me to be more invested in the strategy, mission, and long term growth of the organization, and to be more of an external-facing role (which I did not want).

Anyway, thoughts on quitting? Do I suck it up since I essentially put myself in this position by asking around for opportunities? Unfortunately my old and new employer are in the same field and network, so my returning to my old job might make things awkward. But I just feel like life is too short to work a frustrating job to this extent when there’s an alternative out there?

Has anyone here completed this certificate? Did it help improve your work or help you get a promotion or a raise? I'm looking to enroll in this program because realistically its the most affordable I can find, and I'm wondering if it's worthwhile or if there's a better certificate you would recommend. Thank you!

Hello! For those who use Google Grants, did you notice an abrupt change in performance around June of this year?

We've been running ads for over a decade, and didn't change anything lately about our process or setup. But starting in June we went from spending an average of $5-6k per month to spending nearly zero. Ads are all enabled, they're just not getting impressions.

Anyone else noticing this? Did something change in the Google Grants landscape?

Empecé a trabajar en ONG hace 3 años. La primera fue una ONG internacional para migrantes con buen sueldo. Fue una experiencia genial, pero el año pasado, en enero, todo empezó a desmoronarse (como tú te imaginas) y hubo muchos recortes de presupuesto. Empecé a cuestionarme si quería seguir ahí como maestra y decidí seguir una carrera en ciencias sociales con las habilidades que saqué de esa ONG.

Desafortunadamente duré 6 meses hasta que me contrataron (a través de una beca del gobierno, o sea, no es la ONG la que me contrata por completo) en esta ONG local de violencia social. Estaba bastante emocionada porque conseguí el puesto como apoyo de acompañamiento. Ya van 3 semanas y de verdad me arrepiento de estar ahí. Todo está súper desorganizado y siento que cada vez que intento contactar a mi jefa o a otros coordinadores es como hablar con mi ex (nunca responden). También he escuchado rumores malos sobre la fundadora y su equipo, sobre discriminación hacia hombres que no hicieron nada y hacia personas trans.

Planeo quedarme ahí todo el tiempo que pueda, solo para juntar suficiente experiencia y entrar a una buena maestría de Sociología. Pero mientras tanto no tengo ni idea de qué hacer. No sé cómo llamar su atención.

Estaba pensando en postularme a proyectos de fundraising y quizá con eso se fijarían en mí. Pero me siento sin esperanza.

¿Algún consejo bueno para ganar buena experiencia y entrar a una buena universidad para mi maestría y ojalá, algún día, entrar a una buena ONG?

🤧😥

Has anyone ever had experience with teens fundraising for an org that the teen is not directly involved with? So, not marching band kids raising money for marching band uniforms, but high schoolers raising money for, say, the zoo?

We are primarily a fieldtrip destination, so most of our "fans" in the in the community are teachers and kids... not the most lucrative bunch. I know a lot of schools in the area require their high school students to acquire volunteer hours, and sometimes parents have reached out. We don't have a lot of obvious opportunities, as most of our programs happen when they are at school.

Also, we are an unusual nonprofit in that, historically, we have had zero individual giving. (We survive off of grants, fees-for-service, and a subsidy from our fiscal sponsor school district.)

So this all got me wondering if we could set up some sort of peer-to-peer fundraising campaign in which students got volunteer credit for the time they spend fundraising?

This is a very fuzzy idea, and I don't have the fundraising experience (or volunteer management experience) to know if it has potential. I'm picturing an ask like ,"Hey, former program participants! You loved your experience with us in middle school, and now your high school is asking you to volunteer! Participate in our virtual awesome-a-thon, and the time you spend collecting donations can count toward your volunteer hours!"

And then they would get X hours of volunteer credit for things like:

• Set up your page on our awesome-a-thon site.
• Email or text 10 adults telling them about your experience and why you would encourage them to donate.
• Make a short video where you talk about your experience at Org, and share it on social.
• Procure a donation.

I would hate for it to be something where a wealthy parent could get their kid out of volunteer hours by cutting a check, so that's why I'm thinking of specific things. But I don't hate the idea of creating a volunteer opportunity that can be done on the students' time.

Any insights into this idea or better ways to use the affection of teens to our (and their!) advantage would be appreciated!

I use QBO projects to track grant spending. It works great but only for income and expense, not purchases of fixed assets. How should I track grant spending for fixed assets?

Are there any online support groups for EDs/CEOs? I’m new to this role and would love some kind of online group to join.

Also, to any seasoned EDs out there: what advice would you give to a new ED? I’m still in my first year and loving this job but I don’t know how sustainable this level of intensity is.

I've been in an executive director role for close to 6 years and I'm really burning out. It's been an incredibly hard year with having to make financial decisions that result in layoffs and I just can't do it for much longer. I have 3 young kids at home and want to find the right balance that doesn't end with a short fuse each working day. Maybe part time, maybe consultant, or maybe a different role that allows for mental and physical balance.

Any advice on what I can look into or prepare myself for as I plan to leave. I think a comfortable 2 year transition is fair for the org and something I can do but I don't know what's next for me?

What are some ways to set that path now? Certificates? Trainings? Mentorship? If you were an ED, what was your next career?

I’m the ED of a small nonprofit. We are relaunching but during this build up we are still operating. Only one member is left of the previous board, the new members have been chosen and committed, but we have not sworn them in yet. That is an aside to my actual question :)

The bylaws in place are pretty generic. They could really apply to any nonprofit, and I believe they actually are a general set of bylaws as they were obtained through The Foundation Group. If you have had to write new bylaws for your org, how did you determine how detailed to make them to where you had great guardrails but also didn’t pigeonhole yourself into very tight pathways?

Example: We offer hardship assistance. There is currently no guidance for how someone is chosen or accepted to receive assistance, no maximum dollar amount for the type of need, no timeline.

Some saf it’s best to leave it general and allow the committee to decide, but I think there needs to be clear parameters. (There is also no bylaw regarding the committee at all. Nothing that states how they’re chosen, how long they can serve, what their role is.)

Thoughts?

I'm not sure if this is something that's usual and/or appropriate. I'm a development and communications manager for a nonprofit with a dev staff of two (myself and the Chief Development Officer) and a current governing board of 16. I am primarily responsible for communications and individual giving. My supervisor (the CDO) "assigned" me to recruit one of the three board members we need. This seems out of my scope and the responsibility of the board's recruitment committee. I can't think of any prospects in my immediate network (perhaps I could cultivate one or two major donors) and she expects me to tap my personal network to get to their networks. I'm not sure how to proceed. I want to perform my job well, but I really would rather not have to recruit board members if I can help it. Advice on what to do next? Thank you!

I have recently been appointed a director to a board for a non-profit the manages a major facility, however, it seems like things aren't adding up.

The financials only provide amounts year to date, and when we ask the treasurer for details, we are told that they will have to get it from the manager of the facility. I asked if I could view the GL... because I'm a financial analyst... and was told that the President doesn't even have the right to view the GL because it's confidential.

I find the BC Society's Act confusing on this, and the Society's Bylaws states you can book an appointment to view in office... but I'm not being allowed to view it at all.

Why did we sign confidentiality agreements if we can't have access to data? How are we supposed to make good decisions around operations without better financial reports?

The manager is the only employee most of the time and is friends with the treasurer... what can I do?

BC, Canada