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e-Newsletter
Creating lasting improvement in our communities
and the world by
Building Community-Driven
Organizations
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June 2003 |
Well, yes, it’s been a while. And yes, this
is supposed to be a monthly newsletter. But life somehow caught up with us
these past few months, and well - here we are, and it’s June already!
(I’ve always said if we were to pen our memoirs, the title would be
“And Then Life Intervened”.)
We have a ton of stuff to share with you. Three new
articles. New resource pages. And 2 new workbooks on the
way!
1) Featured Article: “The Dirty Little
Secret of NonProfit Boards”
2) Featured
Article: “10 Stop Signs on the Road to Board
Recruitment”
3) Featured Article: “Founders Syndrome?
Who, Me?”
4) Featured Book: Board Recruitment and
Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide
5) Featured
Resources: Our New Resource Pages!
6) Featured
Link: Charity Channel’s Boards Discussion Forum
7) Don’t Let Money
Stop You: Creative Ways to Bring the Help 4 NonProfits Team to Your
Organization!
8) Sharing this Newsletter
9) Sneak Preview: 2
New Basic Training Workbooks Coming Soon!
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Please
read and enjoy, and pass all this new stuff along! We know it will help you
improve the quality of life in your community. And isn’t that really why
we all do the work we do?
Before we get into our features this month, we’d
like to address 2 points to those of you going through
budget review.
1) If your organization has a $1million
budget, and you are spending time discussing an item that costs $10,000 or
less, that is 1% of your budget. Get real and stop quibbling. By taking all
that time on that 1% item, you are likely ignoring the part of the budget that
will most affect your community - the other 99%!
2) When it comes
to budget priorities, have you got any? Are there lines your organization
won’t cross? What about program quality? Number of people served by the
mission? If the reason you exist is the community, are
they the priority for your budget? Our
communities need us now more than ever. So what are your budget
priorities?
We now return you to
our features, already in progress....
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Featured Article: “The Dirty Little Secret of
NonProfit Boards”
On
virtually every board there are board members who do not understand how to read
a balance sheet, a profit & loss statement, or any of the other financial
data boards typically review and vote on. Yet the board is still accountable
for what these board members DON’T KNOW! If this sounds like your board,
read on... •>CLICK
Featured Article:
“Founder’s Syndrome? Who,
Me?”
Much has been written about
Founder’s Syndrome, but little of it has been written from the point of
view of the founder him/herself. Because in our “other life” we are
the founders of a small and growing charitable organization, we feel uniquely
qualified to talk about Founder’s Syndrome from both sides of the fence.
If you’re looking for an article on Founder’s Syndrome that pulls no
punches, read on... •>CLICK
Featured Article:
“10 Stop Signs on the Road to Board Recruitment”
We talk a lot about board recruitment, but the thing no
one talks about is WHETHER to
recruit new members to the board. There are actually times when recruitment
could do more harm than good! See how many of
these warning signs apply to your board... •>CLICK
Our Featured
Book: “Board Recruitment and Orientation: A Step-by-Step, Common Sense
Guide”
So
you’ve read the article warning you about recruiting if you’re not
ready, and you are sure your board is indeed ready to recruit (or you feel you
have no choice and are pushing forward anyway). There is no better recruitment
tool than our own step-by-step guide.
Here’s just one of our favorite
testimonials:
An ED
loaned his copy of the workbook to his board president.
As
recruitment time approached, the president confessed the book was so good, he
had re-loaned it to a friend - and the friend never gave it back! “So
please,” came the phone call, “Can I order 3 copies this time?
Maybe then we can actually get to use it!”
If you don’t have your own copy of
Board Recruitment and Orientation: A
Step-by-Step, Common Sense Guide, you are missing an opportunity to recruit your board
the RIGHT way! •>CLICK
New Resource
Pages!
To try and bring more depth to the
articles in our Help 4 NonProfits library, we have begun adding Resource Pages
to the end of each article. These resource pages will provide links to other
articles or other websites, books, forms, and - well - resources! We have begun
with the Boards articles, and will soon be adding Resource Pages to all the
articles in the Help 4 NonProfits library. Please let us know if these pages
are helpful to you!
Featured
Link: Charity Channel
We
often refer to Charity Channel as the Free Tip Worth Its Weight in Gold. If
you’ve never been to Charity Channel, you are missing one of the best
sources for NonProfit Board education around.
•>CLICK
Don’t Let Money Stop You: Creative Ways to Bring
the Help 4 NonProfits Team to Your
Organization!
The
charitable sector has always had to scrimp and save, but these days, times are
even tighter. And if it's harder to fund your programs, it's getting even
harder to fund training and technical assistance!
But if there is one thing we teach at Help 4
NonProfits, it's that there are always creative ways to do what you think you
can't afford to do. So if you really want to bring the Help 4 NonProfits team
to your community,
•>CLICK here and
let us help you figure out how to do just that!
Share this Newsletter With a
Friend!
Every month we
get hundreds of new subscribers, most of whom learn about our site from a
friend or colleague. Here's just one of the comments we received this month,
from Ron Bulmer of Clarity Mentoring in Halifax, Nova
Scotia:
“I enjoy all your
materials, discussion group commentary and work. If I could choose only one
mentor group to use, it would be Help 4 NonProfits.”
With new board members joining your board, consider
signing up your whole board for this newsletter. Board members receive
information so infrequently on how to do their job better, so please - pass
this newsletter along to them!
Sneak Preview:
In the coming months you will be seeing a lot
happening at Help 4 NonProfits. We are planning a website re-do, to make the
site more user-friendly for you. We have new articles to write. And in the next
few months, we will be publishing the next 2 workbooks in the Basic Training
series - the Basic Training 4 NonProfits “Vision Builder” and our
“Organizational Values Guide.” We will let you know as soon as they
are available!
That’s all for
now. We hope these tools (and the other articles at Help4NonProfits.com) help
your organization improve the quality of life in your community. Because truly,
that’s all that counts.
Hildy and Dimitri
Help 4 NonProfits & Tribes
http://www.Help4NonProfits.com
You are
receiving this newsletter because at one time you expressed an interest in
Help 4 NonProfits and
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
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