E-mail From an Strategic Fundraising Graduate

Bay Path’s MS in Strategic Fundraising and Philanthropy program is designed to help students advance their fundraising careers.  That’s why I was so happy to receive this recent e-mail from Lindsay Jordan, a graduate of the program:

“Hello, Jeffrey! I am super excited to send you the first email with a few more initials behind my name! I passed the CFRE exam! My husband asked me after it was over if it was "easy." Honestly, I wouldn't say that it was hard. But there is definitely a reason why. In my limited 5 years in fundraising, I've never been part of a capital campaign. I've never personally secured a planned gift. I've never done a lot of things, actually, because the fundraising portfolio is huge.

I CAN, however, speak intelligently about all of those things because my education at Bay Path was so incredibly comprehensive. In just a few years, I moved from a special events coordinator to a senior director of development with a master's degree and my CFRE! Every advancement I've seen in my career thus far has been leveraged on the foundation of my education, and I just wanted to thank you for it.” 

Please let me know if I can ever be of service to the school. I hope you have a wonderful week!

PS.  We will be offering a new graduate course next spring called:  Being a Successful Major Gifts Officer.  It will teach students how to engage “high net-worth” donors and secure multi-million dollar gifts. 

Effective Leaders Create "Place" for Stakeholders.

In our NMP 650 course called “Leading Change in Nonprofits” we discuss how effective leaders create a belief among an organization’s stakeholders that they are all working together toward a meaningful common goal. 

This theme is beautifully expressed in the following passage from a commencement address given this year by Atul Gawande at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 

“Ultimately, it turns out we all have an intrinsic need to pursue purposes larger than ourselves, purposes worth making sacrifices for.  People often say, “Find your passion.” But there’s more to it than that.  Not all passions are enough.  Just existing for you desires feels empty and insufficient, because our desires are fleeting and insatiable. You need a loyalty.  The only way life is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater:  a family, a community, a society.  And that is the best part of what college has allowed you to do.  College made it easy.  It gave you an automatic place in the world where you could feel part of something greater.  The supposedly “real world” you are joining does not…..

“One thing I came to realize after college was that the search for purpose is really a search for a place, not an idea.  It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better for others in your own small way.  It could be a classroom where you teach, a business where you work, a neighborhood where you live.  The key is, if you find yourself in a place where you stop caring—where your greatest concern becomes only you----get out of there.” 

Source:  NYTIMES June 15, 2014, Section 1 Page 20. 

On the Web at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/us/2014-commencement-speakers.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&_r=0

Congratualtions to 2014 NMP and SFP Graduates

Congratulations to all the NMP and SFP students who earned their Masters degree this year.  I applaud your accomplishment and wish you the best in the future.  Please stay in touch and reach out to us if I or any other faculty member can assist you in the future.     

Bay Path's graduation is always a special event and I really enjoyed seeing those new graduates who were able to make it to campus for the May 10^th ceremony. 

But because most of you are on-line students and live far away, I’ve gotten this 5 minute “video” of a very power commencement speech given by Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, a 1^st grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School in CT.  The clips speaks for itself.  I’ll simply add that the whole audience couldn’t get to their feet fast enough when she finished to give her a loud and sustained standing ovation. 

https://docs.google.com/a/baypath.edu/file/d/0B2gYm7C0N00VMkNyajIydHhHX2s/

Jeff

BAY PATH IMPROVES ITS CAREER PLACEMENT SERVICES FOR GRADUATE ALUMNI

Bay Path College has joined NACELINK, the largest career network of career services and recruiting professionals in the world. For the first time ever, we have the ability to offer our students and alumni a truly rich careers resource in an online environment. We have named our virtual community The Carpe Diem Career Network (CDCN) and we are launching the foundation resources in late April.  

For more information about this resource, interested students and ALUMNI can contact Bay Path's Career Center at careers@baypath.edu or at at 413-565-1049. 

Detailed information about upcoming introductory and training webinars are available on Facebook and Linked In at Bay Path College Network for Nonprofit and Fundraising Professionals. 

Fundraising is Fun and the Magic of the Nonprofit Sector

In today’s NYTIMES there is a column by Arthur C. Brooks titled,   “Why Fundraising is Fun” that explains why this is so.  So I recommend it to all your fundraisers and donors out there. 

And for all you activists out there, I found that this paragraph toward the end of the piece did a wonderful job of expressing the magical potential and promise of the nonprofit sector:

“Of course, not everyone shares the principles that motivate my institution’s scholars and supporters. But with millions of 501(c)(3)s and houses of worship nationwide, no one needs to wait on the sidelines and hope that politicians will marshal government power in service of their priorities. By investing their own time, talent and treasure, every American can bring his or her core principles to life. That can mean promoting literacy, conserving nature, saving souls or something else entirely.”

Here at Bay Path College's graduate programs in nonprofit management and philanthropy, and nonprofit strategic fundraising and philanthopy, our goal is to help students "bring [their]core principles to life" by excelling in the nonprofit sector.  

The link between Economic Inequality and the rise of 501-c4 "superpacs"

Over the last two weeks, there have been one, two, three, four, five interesting and, by my thinking, disturbing articles in the NYTIMES about the increasing disparity in wealth in the US and the increasing use of 501c-4 nonprofits to hide from the public the massive amounts of “secret” money being spent to influence the outcome of political elections. An explicit link between the two trends isn't made within the articles--but the link is not hard to make. .  

One the one hand, the increasing concentration of wealth is giving a relatively small portion of the electorate the capacity to make outsized campaign contributions and 501c4 organizations are providing this wealthy minority the means to do so in secret.   Nonprofit leaders should not allow the sector to be the instrument of such anti-democratic practices.   They should be demanding that the IRS implement rules that return the nonprofit sector to its traditional role of advocacy and greatly curtail its role in financing political campaigns.  To wit, one of the articles mentions the overwhelming opposition there is to the proposed IRS regulations that would be a first step toward accomplishing that.