Vital Signs: Metro Boston's Arts and Cultural Nonprofits 1999 and 2004

Examines four "vital signs," or categories of data, to gauge the health of the area's arts and cultural nonprofit organizations in 1999-2004: a supportive environment, an innovative marketplace, an engaged audience, and the right-sized organization

Learning from a Funders' Collaborative: The Human Services Strategic Restructuring Pilot Project

In 2009, Eighteen funders in Northeast Ohio joined together in the Human Services Strategic Restructuring Pilot Project (the Collaborative) to examine how to support nonprofit organizations in strategic restructuring. This the final report on that project

Strategic Positioning and the Financing of Nonprofit Organizations: Is Efficiency Rewarded in the Contributions Marketplace?

This article addresses the question of whether operational efficiency is recognized and rewarded by the private funders that support nonprofit organizations in fields ranging from education to social service to arts and beyond. Looking at the administrative efficiency and fundraising results of a large sample of nonprofit organizations over an 11 year period, we find that nonprofits that position themselves as cost efficient reporting low administrative to total expense ratios fared no better over time than less efficient appearing organizations in the market for individuals, foundations, and corporate contributions. From this analysis, we suggest that economizing may not always be the best strategy in the nonprofit sector. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 2. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Growing Philanthropy through Giving Circles: Lessons Learned from Start-up to Grantmaking

Individual donors coming together to pool their funds and to make grants, that is the idea behind giving circles. Emerging as a new trend in the United States, giving circles are typically organized around a particular issue or area of interest and are considered a high engagement form of philanthropy. The circle's grantmaking functions, proposal review, and site visits engage members in a participatory process that, when combined with the increased impact of pooled charitable resources, has strong appeal to many donors. The Baltimore Giving Project, housed at the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers (USA), has supported the growth of many giving circles since 2000. Its report details the growth and lessons learned from two of these circles

Managing Up in Down Times

Examines issues confronting foundation senior management during both up and down economic cycles. Focuses on the concepts of resource stewardship, change management, and achieving successful results

Bridging the Organizational Divide -- The Making of a Nonprofit Merger

Nonprofit, community-based housing development organizations have only recently become significant players in the provision of affordable housing, at least in the United States. Historically, this job was left either in the hands of builders, developers, lenders and landlords of the business sector or in the care of agencies, planners and policymakers of the public sector. Only in the past 30 years has the provision of affordable housing moved beyond the familiar domains of the market and the state. A host of nonprofit organizations is now playing a larger role in constructing new housing, rehabilitating older housing, managing rentals and bringing home ownership within the reach of thousands of people for whom the American dream has proved elusive.The growth of these third-sector organizations has been both rapid and impressive, but it also has been uneven. Across the country, there are places where nonprofit housing development organizations are both plentiful and productive, supported by sophisticated networks of interorganizational collaboration, public funding, private financing and technical assistance. There are many other communities, however, where no nonprofits are engaged in affordable housing or where the ones that do exist are very new or very small, accounting for only a handful of new housing units every year.Lying between these two extremes are those communities where multiple nonprofits of varying size serve a similar geographic area, each producing a modest but respectable number of housing units; each competing for constituents, funding and development opportunities; each struggling to survive. The organizations that find themselves in this uncomfortable situation often confront a special set of challenges. They are productive, but not prolific. They are effective, but not efficient. They are successful, but not sustainable. Indeed, they are frequently quite precarious. The loss of a single staff person, the delay of a single project or the adverse decision of a single funder can threaten not only their short-term chances for success, but their long term prospects for survival.Those who sponsor and fund such organizations sometimes find themselves in a situation where competition among multiple nonprofits is weakening them all. In these cases, the sponsoring and funding organizations have taken different tacks to address this problem. In some cases, they have acted to strengthen every nonprofit, while working to increase the division of labor or the division of territory among them. In other cases, they have acted to strengthen one (or more) nonprofit at the expense of the others, culling weaker performers from the herd.While these have been the most common approaches for dealing with the weaknesses that organizational competition and duplication can sometimes create, a third alternative has been gaining ground. Multiple nonprofits, operating within the same jurisdiction, are being encouraged to collaborate -- even to the point of merging their programs, assets and hard-won identities.Why is collaboration gaining in popularity? A financial explanation would be that it is becoming harder to find enough resources to strengthen every nonprofit to the same degree, funding multiple nonprofits to serve a similar clientele in the same locale. There is also the political reality that public and private funders find it difficult to choose easily (or accurately) which nonprofits should live -- and which should die. There is a practical explanation as well. Collaboration is becoming a strategy of choice simply because it is proving to be an unusually effective way of achieving greater productivity, efficiency and sustainability. When a collaborative (or a merger) is carefully crafted, the nonprofit partners do a better job together than they did apart. This is not true in every case, of course.Read the full report for lessons in organizational matchmaking and the making of a nonprofit merger

Foundations for the Future: Emerging Trends in Foundation Philanthropy

Paper presented at the Forum on Philanthropy, Public Policy and the Economy, January 19-20, 2000.Foundations are currently experiencing an unprecedented period of change. Historically, change in the foundation sector has been created from within or in response to legislative and regulatory changes. At the cusp of the 21st century, however, foundations face a barrage of simultaneous external forces that are redefining the world in which philanthropy operates. Never before in the history of the philanthropic sector has so much change taken place, at such a rapid pace, outside of the control of the foundations themselves. This paper presents the societal trends that are affecting philanthropy, analyzes the impact they are having on foundation programs and operations, and discusses ways that foundations might reinvent themselves to capitalize on the unique opportunities present in today's environment

Oregon Nonprofit Sector Report

Based on survey data, provides an overview of Oregon's nonprofit organizations; their employees; financial health; organizational capacity, including collaboration; advocacy and public policy activities; economic and social impact; and future outlook

Laying a Solid Foundation: Strategies for Effective Program Replication

With limited funds available for social investment, policymakers and philanthropists are naturally interested in supporting programs with the greatest chance of effectiveness and the ability to benefit the largest number of people. When a program rises to the fore with strong, proven results, it makes sense to ask whether that success can be reproduced in new settings.Program replication is premised on the understanding that many social problems are common across diverse communities -- and that it is far more cost-effective to systematically replicate an effective solution to these problems than to continually reinvent the wheel. When done well, replication of strong social programs has the potential to make a positive difference not just for individual participants, but indeed for entire communities, cities and the nation as a whole.Yet despite general agreement among policymakers and philanthropists about the value of replication, successful efforts to bring social programs to scale have been limited, and rarely is replication advanced through systematic public policy initiatives. More often, replication is the result of a particular social entrepreneur's tireless ambition, ability to raise funds and marketing savvy. The failure to spread social program successes more widely and methodically results from a lack of knowledge about the science and practice of replication and from the limited development of systems -- at local, state or federal levels -- to support replication.Fortunately, there seems to be growing awareness of the need to invest in such systems. For example, the 2009 Serve America Act included authorization for a new Social Innovation Fund that would "strengthen the infrastructure to identify, invest in, replicate and expand" proven initiatives. The Obama administration recently requested that Congress appropriate $50 million to this fund, with a focus on "find(ing) the most effective programs out there and then provid(ing) the capital needed to replicate their success in communities around the country."But more than financial capital is required to ensure that when a program is replicated, it will continue to achieve strong results. Over the past 15 years, Public/ Private Ventures (P/PV) has taken a deliberate approach to advancing the science and practice of program replication. Through our work with a wide range of funders and initiatives, including the well-regarded Nurse-Family Partnership, which has now spread to more than 350 communities nationwide, we have accumulated compelling evidence about specific strategies that can help ensure a successful replication. We have come to understand that programs approach replication at different stages in their development -- from fledgling individual efforts that have quickly blossomed and attracted a good deal of interest and support to more mature programs that have slowly expanded their reach and refined their approach over many years. There are rarer cases in which programs have rigorous research in hand proving their effectiveness, multiple sites in successful operation and willing funders prepared to support large-scale replication.Regardless of where a promising program may be in its development, our experience points to a number of important lessons and insights about the replication process, which can inform hard decisions about whether, when and how to expand a program's reach and total impact. In the interest of expanding programs that work, funders sometimes neglect the structures and processes that must be in place to support successful replication. These structures should be seen as the "connective tissue" between a program that seeks to expand and the provision of funding for that program's broad replication.This report represents a synthesis of P/PV's 30 years of designing, testing and replicating a variety of social programs and explains the key structures that should be in place before wide-scale replication is considered. It is designed to serve as a guide for policymakers, practitioners and philanthropists interested in a systematic approach to successful replication

Volunteering Reinvented: Human Capital Solutions for the Nonprofit Sector

To grow and adapt in today's continuously changing society, a nonprofit organization must recognize the value and contribution of both its paid staff and volunteers. Simply recruiting large numbers of volunteers, however, does not necessarily translate into success for the nonprofit sector or the community at large. Successful results are achieved when an organization is able to support, mobilize, and manage its volunteer resources for the greatest possible impact on a problem or need.In a competitive environment where resources are often scarce, nonprofit executives and boards of directors have become more strategic about how they leverage the various resources at their disposal:money, space, inkind donations, equipment, technology, and employees. Unfortunately, however, one of the most powerful and plentiful resources of all -- volunteers -- continues to receive short shrift from nonprofit leadership. This paper is intended to educate nonprofit executives about volunteering as a key human resource strategy, illustrate that volunteering is not just nice but necessary, and demonstrate the value volunteers bring to an organization that strategically plans for how to use them both to support infrastructure and to deliver programs and services