Two Great Development Opportunities

For Aging Services Professionals – May 8

Helping Professionals Help Older Adults Embrace a New Purpose: Spirituality & Social Engagement - The University of Indianapolis Center for Aging & Community will host a workshop for aging services professionals -- "Helping Professionals Help Older Adults Embrace a New Purpose: Spirituality & Social Engagement" on Wednesday, May 8, 2013 from 9:00am - 3:30pm at the UIndy campus. For information and registration, visit here. 

For Board and Staff Leaders – May 9

2013 Board Chair Summit - The fourth annual Central Indiana Board Chair Summit, hosted by Lacy Leadership Association will take place on Thursday morning, May 9, at the Arthur M. Glick JCC. This year's focus is on "Leading Change" and assessing your organization's readiness for change with Thresette Briggs, president of Performance3. Ms. Briggs brings more than 20 years strategic and hands-on experience in organizational development and empowering leaders to create teams which support successful organizations. More

Developing Your Case for Long-term Support

On Thursday, May 2, the Planned Giving Group of Indiana(PGGI) welcomes nationally known speaker Caleb B. Rick J.D. to the Riverwalk Banquet Center from 8:30-11:30AM. Please join us!

While many organizations use a case statement for a capital campaign, few have developed a case for long-term support. A Case for Legacy Giving is a fundamental tool for engaging staff, board members, volunteers and donors in grasping the importance of this area of philanthropy. Participants will be invited to answer a series of questions as you begin to draft your own “Case for Legacy Giving” and “Roadmap for Marketing Legacy Giving”. This process will include a review of communication goals, identify sample tools, and describe how to build a communications inventory.

Caleb is an adjunct professor of nonprofit management at Vermont Law School and a nationally known proponent of donor-centered, outcomes-based planned giving. He has counseled hundreds of charity leaders on legacy giving, endowments, resource development and non-profit management, and spoken at dozens of conferences.

Event details and registration.

‘Brackets for Good’ Scores for 16 Nonprofits

Every March, Brackets For Good hosts a single-elimination, bracket-style fundraising tournament for sixteen, pre-selected local nonprofit organizations. The incentive... a chance to win $5,000, in addition to donations they generate themselves.

Brackets for Good wrapped up its 2013 competition in late March with Shepherd Community surpassing Fountains of Hope in a win/win final that raised over $20,000, overall, for each finalist and a total of more than $80,000 for all participating organizations. See how the 2013 competition played out. http://indianapolis.bracketsforgood.org.

Register to be considered for 2014 - Any nonprofit with 501(c)3 status is welcome to register. Once the organization status is approved, an evaluation form will be sent to the nonprofit in January 2014. After the evaluation form is completed and submitted, the Brackets for Good team will perform their own “bracketology” to determine which organizations are selected. For more information about the selection process visit here.

How Do You Track Grants? The Hard Way or the Easy Way?

(Beth Huffman, Foster Results)

So you’ve received a new grant award? Congratulations! Now, you sit back and relax. Right? Not so! I’m sure you’re aware the hard work has actually just begun.

When your nonprofit has received a grant, it’s your responsibility to the funder to be compliant with their requirements and report to them correctly. Effective systems and processes to manage the grant should to be set up from the beginning.

Grants management does not have to be hard, painful or complex, but a challenge that many nonprofits encounter is related to growth. Perhaps a nonprofit began with receiving just one or two grants; those weren’t so hard to manage. As the organization grows to have many grants, however, management of the grants becomes overwhelming if a system was never set up to track information and report effectively.
Good grants management systems are not created nor maintained in isolation. A good system requires a team effort...

Read the full article.

Maximizing Your Communications with a Content Calendar

Communications includes everything from social media, to e-mail campaign management, and annual reports. Technology supports these efforts, but it can only work well with an integrated strategy. Nonprofits need a content calendar, the right staffing support (paid or volunteer), and the right tools to make it all sing.

A well-executed communications plan will look to annual cycles. Some things, like the annual report, are obvious and easily lend themselves to planning far enough in advance to leverage content, public relations, media relations and supporters to maximum effect for the message. Other nonprofit cycles can also benefit from a confluence of urgency and effort, but those cycles are often treated as if they are brand new every year. Does your nonprofit do advocacy work? There's probably a pretty well known date for your legislature convening and your lobby day. Does your group do an annual gala?

Plan the rest of your communications work cycle around supporting the themes of the event leading up to key deadlines, like tickets going on sale. Are you attending national conferences this year? Plan a new white paper to be timed with that event.

Not every nonprofit will nail the content calendar the first time out of the gate. Inevitably, there are things that should have been publicized and shared weeks in advance that just didn't get on the radar until too late. That is why your support tools have to be living, adapting documents - so the moment someone in a staff meeting says, "We should have started this two weeks ago," the content calendar for your next year gets an update. The master content calendar can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, as long as each of the objectives gets tied to any other workflow management tool the organization may be using to manage staff time and effort.

See the full article here.