Help 4
NonProfits & Tribes INSTITUTE e-Newsletter Building Community-Driven Organizations December
2004 Welcome to the Help 4 NonProfits
E-Newsletter! So this month we thought we would give you a gift, too - a newsletter jam-packed with great stuff to help your organization accomplish more for your community. Weve even written a new workbook just for the occasion!
Please read and enjoy, and pass these new items along! We know it will help you improve the quality of life in your community. And isnt that really why we all do the work we do? ******************************************************* A New Workbook!
With the holiday season (i.e. the Speaking Season) upon us, let this jam-packed workbook start helping your organization right now! http://www.help4nonprofits.com/Tools/SpeakerKit/SpeakersToolbox.htm Seminar Dates -
We guarantee the session - guarantee you will learn, change your thinking, come away rejuvenated - and that you will understand how simple it can be to change your approach to sustainability. Heres just one response to the last session we did: This was a day well spent, packed with critically
important information for nonprofits in the 21st Century. I know this workshop
will make a great difference for AAFB and for our mission.
Ginny
Hildebrand, Executive Director, Tucsons weather in January cant be beat. So come join us in the sunshine, and learn 5 steps that will help you build sustainability into all your organizations programs! http://www.help4nonprofits.com/Workshops/ToughEconomicTimes.htm For more information about our Community-Driven Sustainability Model, http://www.help4nonprofits.com/Workshops/Community-DrivenModel.htm 3
Articles! Updated: 11 Simple Steps for Being Interviewed on
TV An Old Favorite: The Sound a Thank You
Makes Great
Gifts Board Recruitment & Orientation: All Board
Special Phone Hacking
Update (And for those who werent aware of the incident, you can read about it at http://www.help4nonprofits.com/NP_F&E_PhoneFraud_Art.htm ) As background, initially we learned about this incident when both Sprints and AT&Ts fraud divisions called to tell us they suspected fraud and were turning off our long distance. In the intervening months, Sprint has been a true pleasure to work with, which is reassuring, as they have been our long distance provider for over ten years. Sprint provided us with live customer service support through this whole process, and we are happy to say that once we provided them with proof that our system was, in fact, hacked into, they reversed all charges on the calls we disputed. For those who are considering changing long distance carriers, we cannot recommend Sprint enough. Their customer service made it possible for us to continue our business without the agony of a fight over those charges. And we know about that agony, because that is exactly what AT&T gave us! Remembering that AT&T was one of the parties to call to tell us our phones were being used fraudulently, it is hard to think of a way AT&T could have been LESS cooperative from that phone call forward. To point out the most obvious difference between AT&T and Sprint, when you call AT&Ts customer service line, you are told that the only way to dispute charges is to fax your dispute to a fax number. Any attempts to contact a live human lead you right back to that fax line. We faxed AT&T the same documentation we sent to Sprint. In reply, we received an automated response, telling us not only that we are responsible for the charges, but that 18% interest is accruing on those charges. The fax has no number to call for further discussion. As far as AT&T was concerned, regardless of the fact that their own fraud division was the first to notify us of this clearly fraudulent situation, we owe the money - period. Well the good news is we believe we have finally resolved that. And thats because we had the nice folks at the Arizona Corporation Commission intervene. And surprise of all surprises - it appears AT&T does, in fact, have real customer service people, and not just a fax line. All you need to do to get hold of those customer service representatives is to have a government regulator call on your behalf! Our conversations to date with the folks who finally gave us a call seem to indicate that AT&T will also be crediting us for the fraudulent portion of our bill. (We havent seen the final zero on our bill, but we are told it will be happening.) Some people have asked us, if Sprint is our carrier, why do we have to deal with AT&T? It all has to do with those 10-10 numbers you see advertised on TV. Access to AT&T is just a 10-10 call away, regardless of who your main long distance carrier is. And so the perpetrators used our phone system not just to access our own long distance carrier, but any and all others, including AT&T. While it appears our story is almost to its conclusion (thank goodness!), we continue to caution anyone with a multi-line phone system to take precautions to prevent outsiders from accessing your phone system. (There are downloadable forms with tips for how to do so at http://www.help4nonprofits.com/NP_F&E_PhoneFraud_Art.htm ) And lastly, we advise anyone whose long distance carrier is AT&T that perhaps you might want to rethink how you will be treated if this sort of thing happens to you. Share this Newsletter With a
Friend! I stumbled upon your site while looking for fundraising organizations. I am an MBA and founded a non-profit youth and family services organization in 1995. I am very impressed with the information and its organization on this site. I am going to use several of the ideas from various articles I have read. Thanks so much for the information - I only wish that I had found this site earlier. Bob McLeod Because board members so rarely receive information on how to do their job better, please be sure to pass this newsletter along to your board. Or better yet, sign them all up to receive a copy of their own! Sneak
Preview: In the first few months of 2005, we will be unveiling the next in our Community-Driven seminar series - a seminar on Comprehensive Organizational Capacity Planning. At the same time, we will be coming out with our next workbook - this one will get your board happily engaged in drumming up support for your organization. And yes, we said happily! In the 2nd half of the year, the book that details our Community-Driven model will hit the market. And at that time, we will be unveiling other workshops in the Community-Driven seminar series, including the workshop on Governance and Accountability. It will be a busy year here at Help 4 NonProfits & Tribes, and we look forward to seeing how you use our resources to make your communities better places to live. Because improving the quality of life in your community is the only thing that matters. As always, we wish you all the possibilities life holds, for you and the ones you love. Hildy and
Dimitri You are receiving this newsletter because at one time you expressed an interest in Help 4 NonProfits & Tribes; or Hildy Gottlieb and Dimitri Petropolis; or other subsidiaries of their firm, ReSolve, Inc.; or you may have been referred to us by someone who also cares about NonProfits and issues related to philanthropy. To add a friend to our newsletter list, hit reply and give us their name, email address and your name, so we can let them know who sent it! To unsubscribe from this newsletter, simply hit reply and type Unsubscribe in the body of the email. You will be immediately removed from our email list. If you would also like to be removed from our snail-mail mailing list, please note that as well. If you have been forwarded our eNewsletter and would like to subscribe: click here If you would like to unsubscribe: click here |