Students Excel in Recent CAPSTONE RESEARCH PAPERS.

During the past two weeks a number of NMP and SFP students have been finishing up their final coursework and presenting their CAPSTONE RESEARCH PAPERS to faculty and classmates.  The topic of the these 30–page papers are chosen by students and the papers give them the opportunity to explore further a nonprofit topic covered in their coursework, or a topic related to their career advancement.  

This “crop” of papers including the following interesting topics:

*   “Best Practices” for using YouTube videos in nonprofit social media campaigns;
*   Improving one’s managerial effectiveness by using the profiles of different “generations” to anticipate how employees of different ages will perform in various work environments and how they will respond to different types and levels of supervision; 
*   Making the tax-deductibility of donations to a particular “house of worship” contingent upon that “house of worship” submitting a form 990 to the IRS;
*   Evaluating common practices among student phonathon programs; and An examination of how measurement can assist in achieving an optimal fund development strategy.

If you are particularly interested in reading any of these papers, please let me know.  I’ll speak to the author and try to have them posted on the website here.  This is a capacity of the website that we are developing. 

Lastly, the completion of these papers signified that another group of students will soon be graduating from the program. We hope that the social media effort we have started will serve to keep our growing number of alumni connected to us and to each other.  Let me know your ideas for how we can make these efforts more effective.       

501c-4 Nonprofits Acting Like PACs--Its Not a Good Development!

Blog # 2   10/05/12 

Since we are in the middle of a national election campaign, this week I want to speak briefly about how some nonprofits are beginning to function like political action committees (PACs). 

Unfortunately, since the Supreme Court declared in its Citizen’s United decision that individuals and corporations can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns, 501c-4 “social welfare” nonprofits are being formed with the primary intent of influencing the outcome of elections.  Furthermore, these organizations are being used to “launder” political campaign contributions and to circumvent the donor disclosure requirements that are contained in our country's campaign finance laws.  You see, unlike highly regulated PACs that can fund campaigns, 501c-4 organizations are under no legal obligation to disclose the names and amounts of their donors.  The secret funding of political activities is not a good thing for our democracy—the Supreme Court says so right in its Citizen’s United decision-- and having nonprofit organizations conducting these anti-democratic activities cannot be a good thing for the image of the nonprofit sector.  Therefore, nonprofit leaders and the public should be advocating strongly for the vigorous enforcement of existing rules that prohibit 501c-4s from being formed primarily for purposes of influencing elections, and also for a change in IRS rules and regulations to explicitly prohibit nonprofits from using undisclosed contributions to fund election campaigns. 

Recent media articles about the corrosive impact of secret campaign contributions on the democratic process and the inability of the IRS to monitor and restrict the activities of 501c-4 organizations can be found at: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/us/politics/groups-shield-political-gifts-of-businesses.html?pagewanted=all

and

http://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-group-told-IRS-wouldnt-be-political-spent-million-on-ads

Thoughts?  

Jeff Greim

Is the General Public Losing Faith in Nonprofit Sector?

Aside:  I am totally new to social media. So I will be interest to see if I really have something worth sharing each week or so, and whether others will find my “sharings” interesting.

By way of introduction, I’d like to provide some context for what will come.  In particular, I am very concerned about the sustainability of the US nonprofit  sector because I sense that the general public is losing faith in the sector’s promise to actually serve the “public good” in an effective, efficient, and economic manner.  And as public trust in the sector erodes, so will public support for the sector’s preferential tax status that is a cornerstone of how the sector operates. 

At the same time, I am hopeful that through innovation the sector can better fulfill its promise and thereby improve the quality of life in the communities in which we live and contribute to the overall health of our national and global society. With better outcomes will come greater public trust and greater public support for the sector. But developing and implementing this innovation will require the emergence of pro-active and purposeful leadership from within the sector.  

And so I anticipate that you will see these twin themes pop up periodically in my “sharings.” I also anticipate that the inspiration for my content will come from current  media stories and publications, and from class discussion that occur in the graduate nonprofit courses I teach here at Bay Path College. I welcome and encourage comments.  It is through dialogue that we truly learn and grow.  

Thanks, Jeff