What will it take to reset entrenched and ineffective development practices towards a fresher mindset and more effective approach? Our blog this week introduces Fundraising Bright Spots, CompassPoint and Klein & Roth Consulting's just-released report that delves into the experiences and approaches of 16 organizations of various size and type that have established successful and sustainable individual fundraising efforts. What can we learn from these organizations? Read on.
Blog
In this blog, we share our thinking behind our recent organizational shift to Holacracy, a new organizational operating system that features distributed decision-making and greater role clarity and accountability—and that we feel will help us more fully live out our Theory of Change.
In this post, we explore some of the ways in which we’ve seen coaching used as a powerful tool for fundraising leaders, especially development staff of color who are striving to build donor giving programs. Using fundraising coaching and peer coaching groups together can be a powerful resource for development staff as they think about reshaping their approach, breaking old habits, and starting new development practices.
Project Director Lupe Poblano challenges readers—white and people of color—to confront white dominant culture within your nonprofit as the best way to move your organization toward equity. Lupe also provides practical, real suggestions on steps you can take to initiate change.
In our blog this week, CompassPoint's newest staff member, Asha Mehta, shares how positive or negative feelings about a task influenced her perception of the time she allocated to it. It was a wakeup call to understanding how something as mundane as time tracking could serve as a powerful mirror of our own values and judgments – and a starting place for personal understanding and transformation. Welcome, Asha!
Our office has been buzzing over the last few weeks with recommendations for great reads, which lets us know it’s time to share some new reading recommendations with you. Here’s another helping of our Summer Reading Guide, a peek into the authors and ideas that have entertained and inspired the CompassPoint staff and might do the same for you.
Like you, we've been watching with anger, fear, frustration, and deep sadness at the events that unfolded in Charleston this past week. In a year where the trauma of violence against black lives and bodies has been acutely present in our communities, this act of racist terrorism cuts deeply into fresh wounds. Where do we go from here and how do we come together to take on the systems of racism and oppression that lay the groundwork for this kind of violence?
And now for something completely different. Like any good nonprofit employee and consultant, CompassPoint Project Director Lupe Poblano has mastered the use of metaphors to illuminate concepts associated with nonprofit structure, leadership, and strategy. In fact, in this post, we’re pretty sure he breaks the record for the most metaphors about nonprofits in one article (and that's not hyperbole, or a metaphor for that matter). Enjoy.
At CompassPoint, we believe in creating a culture where feedback is shared every day, and that means sharing appreciations (not just developmental feedback) early and often. This week, we're helping you do that by sharing these Valentines with messages for the friends and colleagues in your life commited to moving social change forward.
At CompassPoint, we believe that nonprofit leaders and social change makers are more resilient and can work sustainably when they have a practice of self-care. Embedding self-care into our work has become a theme for our own organization and a fundamental part of how we work alongside others to create sustainable ways of moving toward change.