Who should pay for a board member’s expenses in serving? Tricky question.

Board Management is a big part of a CEO’s job. Sometimes the details can get in the way of a great relationship. For example, managing the expenses around board members attending board meetings can be tricky. Here is how multiple organizations manage this conversation with sometimes policy, sometimes art, sometimes psychology.

We want to talk about writing. Words. Language. The melodic string of letters and symbols pieced together to form coherent, crescendoing thoughts.

Written words are the transfer point for your passion—for your mission. Words encapsulate all your work, ideas, meetings, ponderings, agonies, and thoughts. They are the filter through which your work must go to get into the world.

Words have power. So we’re saying the quiet part out loud—you need a good copywriter.

When it’s not working, it can sound like this:

“I don’t know how to prioritize my time.”

“INSERTNAME is not a team player.”

“It doesn’t feel like we are moving the needle.”

Building a culture of teams within your organization who are strong decision-makers takes work. And it all starts, you guessed it, with a solid strategic plan.

I use an analogy that no one gets. It is this, said in conversation when I am trying to make sure someone is telling me exactly what they want, “Ok, I have moved the couch a couple of times, and the couch is heavy. Can we agree where the couch should go before I move it again?”

Let me describe the largest couch I have been asked to move: when a board hires a new CEO.

Three years ago, we were in Russia. How the world has changed.  

We traveled to Russia for ten days to teach social fundraising to Moscow-based nonprofits and promote the release of the Russian translation of our book, Dollar Dash. We left with new friends and the expectation that we would return someday soon. Many of our Russian friends have now fled the country. They live in Lisbon, Istanbul, Tbilisi, and elsewhere, unsure of their futures. 

What a whirlwind 2022 has been! Our team at Turnkey has helped a virtual cornucopia of clients with various challenges this year, so we want to reflect on some of our projects and share a peek behind the curtain.

Joan Salerno Russo has been named Senior Director of Private Philanthropy at USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Joan’s deep experience spans organizations addressing cancer, education, diabetes, and more.

Our Turnkey team was with 100-ish nonprofit professionals this past week at the NonProfit POWER Conference in Philadelphia. I gave a presentation on how one’s identity is strengthened by being part of a community — how engaging with like-minded community members is validating and rewarding, the reason people seek out communities to be a part of.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Turnkey’s Katrina VanHuss & Otis Fulton, Ph.D.’s new book Social Fundraising: How to Mine the New Peer-to-Peer Landscape, we are giving you a sneak preview of one of our favorite topics; Recruiting (and Keeping) Volunteer Leaders & Fundraisers.

If you’ve ever attended a Turnkey facilitated event, you’ll know we do not give advice. We share experiences. We’ve also turned that mantra into how we do things in our consulting work with clients. To be a great consulting company, we must have talented consultants with a wide array of experience and the ability to solve almost any kind of problem.

History is unfolding before us; it’s on C-SPAN and most cable news outlets. How can we use what we’re witnessing to help us in social good? Repeat to yourself... people respond to situations. Great marketing and program design create situations that trigger the types of attitudes and behaviors that we’re seeing as a result of the January 6th hearings.

In philanthropy, why do women dominate in number, but not in pay or filling significant roles? This surely devalues philanthropy as an industry, like every other industry where women are present in large numbers, yet are relegated to subordinate status.

I just didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see that attending the Amazon Web Services IMAGINE nonprofit conference would be meaningful in so many different ways.

There I am—sitting in another all-vendor meeting. I hear about all the exciting things the mission side of the house is up to. I feel more connected to the cause than ever before.

We recently wrote about the unfortunate results of “siloing” events and event participants. By doing so we prevent the participant from connecting to the mission, to make the mission a part of their identity.

We have defined “our community” as “the people on our email list” for a long time, but that’s not what community is all about. To our credit, we knew that they (people on our email list) cared about one thing—our mission.

Turnkey recently completed the search for the Chief Operating Officer for the Spina Bifida Association. Mike Wood, with deep experience at the March of Dimes, the Harwood Institute, and United Way Worldwide, will lead the operational side of the Association under the leadership of Sara Struwe, CEO.

It was addictive. I wanted to continue that feeling. It was such an incredible feeling. I wanted more and more. It became something that I loved.

In the past months, we’ve read a lot of “takeaways from the pandemic” articles. So many, in fact, that we thought adding one more to the conversation might be redundant. At the same time, we are still reading them, and it looks like you are too. So here is our take on what we learned.

I am the mother of a thirty-year-old with Down syndrome, autism, and type 1 diabetes. Like me, I'm sure you've been asked to help fundraise for an organization dedicated to helping your loved one. And you thought, “We have a really rare situation. Will anyone donate if this isn’t part of their life?”