Of Tax Law Changes, Impact Investing and Mission-Aligned for Profits

Not even a full month into the new calendar year, and we’re seeing reports about the impact the 2017 tax bill changes are having on nonprofits.  We’ve got a survey on our website right now.  I’m not willing to call it research because some is questionable, some preliminary and, some really is just guesswork, especially since many nonprofits concede they are still trying to tally what came in by the end of 2018.  Given those caveats, please read on.

Inside Philanthropy, culling the thoughts of many, Read more

Who Do You Trust?

As we approach the last quarter of the year, the three months when, historically, more dollars come to nonprofits than any other three month period, I’m often asked by reporters and regular folk how to determine if a nonprofit is “donation-worthy.”
Unfortunately, our job at proving our worthiness got harder last year, as trust in nonprofits continued to drop.  According to Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer (which was released the beginning of this year), people from around the world are losing trust in government, for-profits, nonprofits, and the Read more

Giving by Generation

Conflicting data about fundraising is, unfortunately, nothing new.  It is akin to the data on drinking alcohol:  don’t do it; do it in moderation for certain health benefits.  Nor is it new to feel overwhelmed by all the data, even when it isn’t conflicting.  So when three different sources predict that 2018 donations will fall because of last year’s changes to the standard deduction, people pay attention.

The American Enterprise Institute, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and the Tax Policy Center have all said that Read more

Talk to your Donors

No surprise, 2018 has brought a lot of anxious questions about the implications of the new tax bill, especially when it comes to charitable giving.  At this point, we don’t know what is going to happen, but rather than wasting time worrying, let’s learn the facts and be proactive.

As soon as a change to the charitable deduction was proposed, studies came out of the woodwork forecasting how much money would be lost to charities by increasing the standard deduction.  The predictions were all over the Read more

Giving Women

Recently, I watched The New York Times’ Op-Doc “Great Expectations for Female Lawyers” After reading the documentarian’s introduction, I was quite nervous as to what I would see and hear.  I shouldn’t have been, as, unfortunately, I knew exactly what to expect:  as professional women, we still have miles to go before we rest.  Female attorneys still have to make choices about career, family, balance; they are still not climbing the ladder at a pace with men; they are still a minority at the top Read more