You can view the report for the Nonprofit Social Media Evaluation Survey here.

Later this week I will be posting the full report from the statewide survey sent out to thousands of Minnesota nonprofit organizations this fall. The survey received over 600 responses and provides interesting insight into how nonprofits use social media, whether they evaluate those efforts, and the tools they use for their “evaluations.”

I will be presenting the findings this week on Wednesday, 2/23 at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology and Communications Conference. Click here for  details about the conference and to register.

Photo by Dennis Wong

This is tough, all-volunteer organizations typically have a lot of needs. They need help with data management, program planning, finances, and leadership. In my experience, when an all-volunteer organization finally has the money to hire someone on, the first person they should hire is someone to help with the finances. Here’s why:

1. It’s usually a job no volunteer wants. There’s a reason nonprofits are often looking for a treasurer. In nonprofits that have full-time staff managing finances, the treasurer’s job can be pretty straight-forward. When you consider a nonprofit that doesn’t have any staff, the treasurer becomes that staff person. They are responsible for income, expenses, taxes, filings, etc. Their job becomes so much more than a supervisory/financial leadership role. That is why when  a nonprofit can hire someone, using the money to make sure the person in charge of the organization’s finances is qualified, reliable, and trustworthy is critical.
2. It’s arguably one of the most important jobs (if not the most important) at a nonprofit. This is the person that makes sure your 990 is filed. They make sure you don’t go in the red. While hiring on a leader is very important, making sure you have money to operate and that your finances are handled in a timely manner is critical. Your leader can’t lead if your organization drops the ball on its finances and doesn’t have money to do it’s work.
3. It can make or break an organization.A financial mishap can move your small, obscure nonprofit into the national limelight, cause you to lose all your donors, and your nonprofit status. Yes, one could possibly say the same for a mishap caused by the person in a leadership role – but how many news stories do you see about nonprofit financial misdealing these days?

Hiring a leader for an organization is very important, but I have found that all-volunteer organizations often have great leaders and are really lacking help with their finances. I’ll give you an example. An organization I am familiar with has been all-volunteer for years. Over this time they have had amazing leadership. Unfortunately, due to a lack of volunteer candidates for treasurer (who was responsible for all the organization’s finances) they took on the only person who said they would do the job. That person promptly said they were getting the finances back on track – which was later discovered to be lies, as this person did absolutely nothing for months (didn’t cash checks, didn’t transfer money, didn’t file taxes, etc). This left the organization in quite a bind when it was discovered a few months later. Fortunately, due to strong leadership and a budget that could accommodate hiring outside help the issues were resolved.

What do you think, who should nonprofits hire first and why?

Photo by Tim Patterson

The Fair Labor Standards Act says that you must pay nonexempt employees overtime when they work over 40 hours per week. Most of us are familiar with this law and comply with it. Unfortunately, some organizations that believe they are complying with it, aren’t. They are classifying their employees as “exempt” when they really should be classified as nonexempt.

Many people tend to believe that if you receive a salary, then you are exempt from overtime, this is not the case. A salary does not automatically equal exemption, neither does your title or special benefits such as education reimbursement. Exemptions are based on an employees actual duties (not education, salary, or title).  So, just because your title is “Event Coordinator” doesn’t automatically make you exempt under a professional or administrative exemption – your duties have to fit as well. To be exempt, you must fall under one of three main exemption classifications: executive, administrative, and professional – and your duties must pass that exemption test.

For example, if you are being classified under the “executive” exempt classification, your primary duties must include the management of an organization (or a recognized department or subdivision), you must regularly direct the work of 2 or more employees, and you must be able to hire and fire employees. If those tests aren’t met – you don’t fit the executive exemption. To see the full list of employees that are exempt and for more information, click here.

Also, if you do have nonexempt employees, keep in mind that if they work more than 40 hours per week, they must be paid overtime – even if that overtime was not authorized.

Photo by cambodia4kidsorg

As mentioned in previous posts, Ricardo Millett was a keynote speaker at the 2010 MESI. During his talk, Millett shared that according to the Center for Effective Philanthropy, around 75% of foundations don’t use evaluation for their programs/processes. Additionally, the foundations that do use evaluation tend to expect it from those they fund – they don’t use it internally. The first point is pretty scary to me, the fact that many, many foundations are giving out millions – if not billions of dollars to programs and they are not requiring those programs to be evaluated. Without evaluation, one cannot know whether a program is even effective. Not only that, but then for many of the foundations that do require evaluation – they don’t do any of their own evaluation. They don’t look at their grantmaking and ask, is funding these programs really meeting our goals? This isn’t too surprising though when you consider that many foundations don’t have a strategy for their grantmaking – so how could one expect them to evaluate it if they don’t know what to even measure?

Photo by scarydan

With all the amazing conferences, trainings, webinars, and workshops it’s hard to attend them all. When I miss one, I will often look to the conference website for session handouts and presentations to see what I missed. Last week was the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Technology Conference, and one of the sessions there was about ensuring your organization is web-accessible. This is rarely discussed, but it extremely important when you take a moment to consider the numbers.

• More than 25 million Americans report experiencing significant vision loss.
• About 30 percent of the population over age 60 has a vision loss not corrected by glasses.
• 1 in 3 people over the age of 60 has a hearing loss. By the age of 80, 1 in 2 will have a hearing loss.
• 10% of the population is estimated to be deaf, hard of hearing, or deafblind. In 30 years, this group is expected to double in size.

So, what can you do?

Start by checking out this website to see how a screen reader would view your website.

Then, make some of the changes (resizable text, good text contrast, captions, etc) suggested in this handout from the conference session.

Here, here, and here are the handouts from the session on accessibility that were used in writing this blog post.

To access downloads from the conference (presentations, handouts, etc) click here.

Photo by Leo Reynolds

1. How to be a Critical Consumer of Nonprofit Research by Nonprofit Leadership 601

2. Nonprofit Blog Exchange Roundup #33 by Nonprofit Blog Exchange

3. Data-fest: Great new stats and insights on social media, Twitter, mobile by Katya’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog

Photo by Stellas mom

As mentioned in previous posts, Ricardo Millett was a keynote speaker at the 2010 MESI. During his talk, he quoted Dr. Martin Luther King:

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

This quote was used when Millett was discussing ways foundations can help work towards social betterment. He explained that foundations are in the unique position to be more proactive – to inform policy development to achieve the social and economic impacts we all desire. This was an interesting point for me, I’ve never really thought about foundations and their role in policy development. What do you think? Should foundations be putting more resources into policy development?

Photo by Leo Reynolds

As mentioned in previous posts, Ricardo Millett was a keynote speaker at the 2010 MESI. In his talk, Millett cited the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and said that most foundations believe that it is important to have an explicit strategy to manage and inform decisions for grantmaking – yet few foundations actually have one.

What does it mean to have an explicit strategy? A foundation who says they fund the “environment” does not have an explicit strategy. This is because that is too broad – what aspect of the environment? Pollution? Global warming? Endangered species? Deforestation? Renewable energy? There are a million programs that could fit under that general area. An example of a foundation that appears to have an explicity strategy is the McKnight Foundation. They fund the “environment” – but a closer look at their funding guidlines and one can see that they don’t fund the “environment” in general – they fund specific strategic focuses like water quality or hurrican protection. Can you see the difference?

Now, one must ask, should foundations be that specific? I don’t know. Personally, it’s hard for me to say how specific I think a foundation’s strategy should be. As foundations get more specific in what they fund, it is inevitable that some programs will get left behind because they don’t fit in the new, specific focus. Additionally, Millett pointed out that the “absence of strategy makes whatever investments in evaluation a foundation makes, scattershot at best,” so without specificity foundations will have a difficult time evaluating their own grantmaking and effectiveness. But, Millett made a great point when he said this made him think of a saying from Yogi Bear – “If you don’t know where you are going, anywhere will get you there.”

Photo by Steve Wampler

The NonProfitTimes recently reported that around 12% of nonprofit organizations don’t have any cash on hand – with the majority (61%) having less than 3 months of cash on hand!

Nonprofits should have at least 90 days of cash on hand to ensure they remain healthy financially. To figure out how many days your organization could last with its cash on hand, calculate your defensive interval:

Defensive Interval
The Defensive Interval is a ratio that will show you how long your organization could survive with its cash on hand. Organizations should have at least 90 days worth. To calculate the defensive interval:

(Cash + Marketable Securities)/(Operating Expenses/365 days)

To read more about how to calculate your debt ratio, program expense ratio, and working capital ratio check out “Want to know how your nonprofit is doing financially?” Check out The NonProfit Times additional survey findings here.