Brad Rourke

Category: nonprofits

  • Are There Projects You Should Let Go?

    How many projects are you working on that are off-mission or off-topic for you? Why don’t you kill them? Are there clients you should fire, foundations you should let go? Do it! Make room for something better.

  • Take My Strategic Planning Survey

    I am working on a report on strategic planning in the nonprofit sector. I am actively seeking your help.  Please take this survey on strategic planning for nonprofits. As some of my readers know, this is an area where I have worked for some time. Some people enjoy strategic planning, others don’t. I enjoy it and…

  • How To Review Programs: Head, Heart, Hands

    To go along with yesterday’s article and video on three dimensions for reviewing documents, here is a way of looking at programs and program plans. You need to pay attention to head, heart, and hands. Heart: What is the overall intent of the program? Is it on target? Head: Do the plans make sense and…

  • Are You Ready To Switch To Opt-In Marketing?

    Think about how much you send out (whether by mail or by email) that people did not ask for. What if you switched over to entirely opt-in strategies?

  • Danger For United Way, And Similar Organizations

    Twenty-one DC-area nonprofits announced this week that they had suspended their memberships in the United Way and were linking up with a new competitor. The new umbrella organization is called Community1st, and it includes the region’s largest nonprofits. [UPDATE to clarify: Community 1st is the name of the Washington-area campaign. It is overseen by an…

  • Nonprofit Challenges: Waste

    This is the last of my three-part video series on challenges and pitfalls facing nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations. This segment focuses on the problem of waste: As an independent consultant with no real apparatus to speak of (which is by design), it’s easy to spot expenditures in organizations that simply don’t need to be…

  • Nonprofit Challenges: Wanting To Live Forever

    I am in the middle of a three-part video series on challenges and pitfalls that nonprofit organizations face. This second challenge is (like all these pitfalls), not unique to nonprofits, but it does afflict many. That is the tendency to begin to confuse the health of the organization with the effective pursuit of the mission.…

  • Nonprofit Challenges: Too Inward

    I am doing a three-part video series on challenges and pitfalls that face nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations. The first pitfall is “inwardness,” as I discuss here: This is not a new idea. Indeed, one of the drivers of the whole strategic planning movement of the late 1960’s was the notion that businesses needed to…