Tools for Managing Through the Recession
~ Laura Mandeles
We are currently working closely with clients to incorporate the current financial realities into planning, management, and marketing strategies, helping them navigate through these difficult times. Lots of other folks in our business are offering advice these days about how nonprofits can cope with the current recession. The Nonprofit Finance Fund has developed an online resource that provides answers to basic questions about the economy and some tools for managing nonprofits during the recession. They offer an outline for organizational analysis and a self-assessment worksheet, as well as more general information about economic conditions.
Do You Really Want to Cut Your Advertising Budget?
Knowledge@Wharton~ Tom Wolf
Corporations - both for profit and nonprofit - are looking for budget line items they can reduce during the economic crisis. Often, one of the discretionary items they consider is advertising. According to an article that appeared in the November issue of Knowledge@Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), "Research shows that companies that consistently advertise even during recessions perform better in the long run. A McGraw-Hill Research study looking at 600 companies from 1980 to 1985 found that those businesses which chose to maintain or raise their level of advertising expenditures during the 1981 and 1982 recession had significantly higher sales after the economy recovered. Specifically, companies that advertised aggressively during the recession had sales 256% higher than those that did not continue to advertise." So before you cut advertising, perhaps a better strategy is to make sure that the dollars you are now spending are deployed where they will do the most good.
How To Attract Donors
~ Jane Culbert
We all know that donors are increasingly besieged by requests for gifts in these difficult economic times. How do donors decide to whom to give? How can nonprofits show that they are worthy of receiving precious philanthropic dollars? How can those who guide donors help them with their decisions? I recently read about a new McKinsey report on this topic entitled The Nonprofit Marketplace: Bridging the Information Gap in Philanthropy (executive summary), produced with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Philanthropy Program. One of the main points of the report is that current assessments of worthiness, which rely heavily on financial measures (fund-raising ratios, numbers of people served), do not provide adequate information about which nonprofits are effective and which are not. Some of the burden for communication falls on nonprofits themselves, who often don’t assess the intrinsic impacts or social benefits of their programs or communicate these outcomes to their donors, beyond anecdotes. The responsibility for communication of relevant information is shared with intermediaries (like Guidestar) who provide information to potential donors, and of course with the donors themselves, who need to learn how to ask appropriate questions. Anticipating some controversy, Hewlett Foundation has set up a web site devoted to this topic. Take a peek and see if you have anything to contribute to the discussion!
Learning Science in Informal Environments
Science Daily~ Dennie Wolf
Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits, a new publication from the National Academies Press, makes it abundantly clear that both adults and children can learn from the informal looking, listening, and manipulating that they do as they move through exhibits and activities at children's museums, aquaria, and science museums. In addition, the report points out the many different kinds of effects that informal learning can have: motivation, curiosity, facts, and even a sense of membership in the community of individuals who do, think, and love science. The report has bold implications for exhibition design, staff training, and evaluation whether the content is triceratops, Turner, or the Civil War.
