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Fundraising Ethics

Fundraising Ethics

Effective fundraising and development must include careful consideration of the laws and regulations that govern such activities, which include interactions with donors, staff, and volunteers.

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Development In Nonprofits

Development In Nonprofits

Effective development requires a substantial amount of input from different kinds of ‘players’ throughout an organization. For example, a fundraising/development professional needs an accurate understanding of the accounting picture in order to communicate fiscal realities to donors/philanthropists.

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Fundraising And Development

Fundraising And Development

Fundraising is generally viewed as ‘asking for money’. This is essentially true. Whether you have been asked to support the local Little League baseball team or received a printed mailer that asked for your support to build a homeless shelter, you have likely been the recipient of a fundraising activity.

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Best Practices in Organizations

Best Practices in Organizations

Recently, I had a “conversation” with an individual about next steps related to further developing a nonprofit board. Excited about some of my recent research that touches on new ways to conceptualize the role of nonprofit board development, I indicated that perhaps we could consider new ideas.

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Great Pains

Great Pains

Love is not a place, or strategy, direction, or inflection of voice, or choice, thing, way, or dream, even though it may seem like one to me, a man lost in his own sea and multiple versions of ‘me’.

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Small Hands

Small Hands

The past is both place and theory, seems dreary, though, to wallow in my history and lose the mystery if I hold on to my version of self and not embrace

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I is Me

I is Me

I have come to realize old adages have truth, theorize old fears can die, believe that I have no purpose on this earth other than to disentangle the mystery of self

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Stepping Outside The Shadows Of Myself

Stepping Outside The Shadows Of Myself

Those two boys to my left are my sons when they were much younger and I subscribed to a much different paradigm of life, so different in fact that what I am about to write would have been unthinkable when this photo was taken.

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Running To Love

Running To Love

Yesterday, I was on a run near a river and actively pondering the experience of love when I had a profound realization about myself that I think is relevant for others. All my life, love has been an experience for me that has felt so utterly massive, so real, that I have run from it. I went out on my run yesterday with the intent to explore why this is the case, and I unexpectedly ran into an answer.

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In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight

As I lay hiding, confiding to no one and no thing, the remnants of past selves bring me pain inside the heart I pretend is my brain is a boy, so scared to share himself with a world that seems so hard

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What is Love?

What is Love?

Sure, I know love. It is a feeling, right? Is it an action, too? Or is it a sequence of actions? Is it formulaic? When I read the last post on love by my associate, I am forcibly reminded that perhaps I do not know what love is it all.

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Soft Feelings

Soft Feelings

Soft feelings are hard to let go, especially when they bleed into dreams and streams of consciousness that meander and flow into places I do not understand or know. Broken people made whole inside the hole within the sphere of the heart of the soul and liquid dreams, streams of…

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Decisions

Decisions

In an office, who makes the decisions? Is it the manager? Supervisor? General staff? Do these questions matter? Absolutely, because how this question is answered reveals much about how an individual views reality itself.

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The Truth

The Truth

The truth. It is a fascinating concept and one that supports how many of us go through our everyday lives. There is some sort of ‘truth’ that supports our cultural values, approach to life, or how we build our business(es).

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Selfies

Selfies

There is something unnerving about our reliance on presenting ourselves to “the world” through the use of ‘selfies.’ It is as if our ability to capture an image of ourselves with the use of a phone’s camera indicates something about our inherent power.

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The Loneliness

The Loneliness

It has been reported that the feeling of loneliness may be correlated with the use of social media, and, even at face value, there seems to be merit in these reports.

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The Money

The Money

Ever notice that many entrepreneurs in this age bracket often resort to citing their own financial wealth as proof that others should follow their inherent “power” and step into their own proverbial “greatness?”

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The Speed

The Speed

Remember being a kid and thinking about adulthood? It seemed like a theory that would never be proven. Childhood lasted forever — every moment, experience, bowl of Quaker oatmeal seemed to require an eternity to complete.

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The Validation

The Validation

There is something deeply disturbing about the validation required by many today. Did we eat the right food, say the right thing, buy the right product, look good doing it?

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Love(s)

Love(s)

Love is something we discuss with others (or at least should). We point to it, demand and laud it. But what is it? Are all loves the same? When we teach our kids about love, we explain it in a way that encourages them to think on it as if it were a timeless sort of thing. It is exists as some sort of truth, as if any deviation from it represents a failure on their respective part.

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The Hate

The Hate

It is so easy to lay blame, point fingers, puff up our chests and essentially ‘hate’ what is around us. Society subtly encourages angry thinking in its creation of various competitive platforms whereby people are challenged not to look within, but destroy something outside themselves.

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Origin Stories

Origin Stories

Recently, I had the chance to read The Truth about Stories (2003) where author Thomas King compares two origin stories, each of which present startingly different worldviews. According to King,...

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Jumping Ship

Jumping Ship

There is something to be said about jumping off of the proverbial ‘Millennial Falcon,’ this notion that people in their 20s and 30s do not just understand social media better (and they do), they understand more about life.

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Motivation

Motivation

We have all heard it. “If I were you, I would…” Is such a statement meant to motivate, or is it instead a strategy by which we assert our position in life? Is it motivation at all?

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Objectives

Objectives

When it comes to managing projects or people, although perhaps there is no difference between the two, the term, 'objectives,' is often used.  The thinking behind objectives is that it is necessary...

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The Isolation

The Isolation

For those of us who sometimes feel isolated and alone, social media can tend to make us feel worse about ourselves. We are not part of the scene that is social media. We don’t have as many “likes,” “shares,” or “follows.”

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Perspective

Perspective

If we are to understand an organization, we must ask certain questions first, right?

What are your job descriptions? What is your employee retention rate? Do you offer benefits? Are you profitable? What is your mission?

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Looking Back

Looking Back

We have all done it from time to time, right? We have been guilty of looking back. In this age, however, is there time to look back?

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True Love

True Love

In this day and age where we seemingly must “crush” everything in sight in order to prove ourselves to a world that seemingly watches our every move, is there a place for love anymore?

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