Archive for Social Entrepreneurship
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Financing Not Fundraising: Finding Individual Donors
In part four of our ongoing Financing Not Fundraising blog series, we are focusing on the most untapped, greatest sustainable funding opportunity facing the nonprofit sector. Individual donor dollars make up 80% of the private money entering the nonprofit sector each year, compared to 5% from corpor...
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What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?
I have a new post up at the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog called “What Social Value Do Nonprofits Really Create?” Here is an excerpt: There is a concept that good entrepreneurs know only too well, but nonprofits could stand to explore. A “value proposition” is the unique value a p...
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Beating Innovation to Death
There is a tendency in America of late, or maybe for awhile, to over-analyze to the point of distraction. So too is the case with the Social Innovation Fund, the federal government’s + million experiment in providing growth capital to nonprofits. This great experiment to see whether government can...
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Wielding the Money Sword
A new blog at the Chronicle of Philanthropy site launched this week that I’m pretty excited about. Written by Clara Miller and others at the Nonprofit Finance Fund, the Money and Mission blog will help nonprofits “understand and skillfully wield money as a tool.” What a revolutionary idea. ...
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Data and the Future of Philanthropy: An Interview with Lucy Bernholz
In the August installment of our Social Velocity interview series, we are talking with Lucy Bernholz, founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc. a strategy consulting firm for philanthropic institutions and individuals. She is also the author of many seminal books (including the ...
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What I’m Reading
Someone asked me the other day how long it takes me to write a blog post. I told them the writing only takes about an hour or two. However, the reading and thinking about what’s being done, or said, or written about and what I want to add to the conversation takes many times longer. So, to that en...
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Funding Social Innovation: An Interview with Paul Tarini
In the July installment of the Social Velocity interview series we are talking with Paul Tarini of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You can read our previous Social Velocity blog interviews with Clara Miller and Kevin Jones. Paul Tarini is the head of the Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, whi...
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Bringing Small Nonprofits to Scale
English at Work could be a poster child for social innovation in the nonprofit sector. An Echoing Green fellow, founder Maile Broccoli-Hickey is a social entrepreneur, but like most of them, she doesn’t even know it. Her tireless work to build an organization that can effectively and efficiently t...
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A New Kind of Nonprofit Leader
In his New York Times column this week Bob Herbert strongly criticized America and its leaders for not stepping up to the plate to guide us through these very troubling times. As he put it: As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the...
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Financing Not Fundraising: Aligning Money and Mission
In our ongoing series “Financing Not Fundraising,” we are exploring the argument that nonprofits need to stop fundraising and start financing social impact. The idea is that nonprofits have to break out of the narrow view that traditional FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundat...
