Posts Tagged ‘Nonprofit’

The Public Relations Handbook for Nonprofits: A Comprehensive and Practical Guide by Art Feinglass

Nonprofit organizations must employ effective, professional public relations techniques in order to get the recognition, support and dollars they need to fulfill their missions. The Public Relations Handbook for Nonprofits offers you the first comprehensive guide to all the practices organizations need to do well in their efforts to do good. This title examines all the elements, tools and processes involved in an effective nonprofit PR campaign.

Offering a combination of theory and practice, it shows you how to market to your key audiences, both inside and outside of your organization. In addition to helping you understand you target markets and shaping your message for your audience, Feinglass discusses all the key public relations vehicles, including:
news releases, press kits, brochures, newsletters, annual reports, direct mail, advertising, the internet, special events

A final chapter walks you step by step through the process of developing your own comprehensive public relations campaign.

NPC: Tell us a little bit about your organization, Children of the Earth. Why was it started?

Nina Meyerhof: I brought young people from around the world together to attend the World Summit for Children that was being held at the United Nations. I’m an educator and something inside of me was touched that the summit wasn’t “of children,” it was “for children.” I wanted to activate young people so they could see that they have a voice in their own future and destiny; they can participate in declarations that pertain to their own life. It was the first time that young people were able to present. They presented to UNICEF, the Dalai Lama, and to the General Assembly.

I’ve always been in education. I use to run a children’s camp called Heart’s Bend, and it was there that I ran leadership programs for 30 something odd years. I was also a Special Ed Director for ten schools. So what emerges is that I finally stepped out into the world and did global education and multi-cultural education. I started peeling the onion looking at what is the inner core that brings us all together as one humanity. Children of the Earth was booked as an understanding that our spiritual nature is universal and all our dreams are the same; we just have different processes that brings us to that goal.

I traveled around the world and started doing programs in different areas. In the last 3 – 4 years, we received a grant and it’s helped build our capacity by allowing us to put the pieces together as an infrastructure and have a way to tally everything we’re doing. Children of the Earth is building the platform for the voices of young people in the consciousness movement.




NPC: Who does it serve?

Nina Meyerhof: Children of the Earth serves young people who feel within themselves a stirring and knowingness that there can be a better world and that there is hope; they want to participate in the process. We formed spiritual hubs and social action chapters around the world so that young people who follow spiritual principles could work towards aiding their country through different projects. Children of the Earth includes approximately 10,000 young people from around the world. Our long-term goal is to build a virtual platform with mentors, books, and blogging–giving voice to young people so they know there is a home for them in the spiritual movement. Our young people range in age from15 – 30.




NPC: How long have you been in operation

Nina Meyerhof: Children of the Earth was formed in 1990.




NPC: How many people did you serve your first year?

Nina Meyerhof: At first young people visiting our website averaged anywhere from 30 – 50. We are now setting up a pyramid of action by training certain young people and in return they train others and it continues. The pyramid creates a ripple effect that helps get more young people involved.






NPC: What is your most difficult challenge as a nonprofit?

Nina Meyerhof: I think everyone would say finances; trying to find means of sustainability. We need to have our hubs and chapters stand on their own. We support them in different manners, and we have a lot of volunteers. However, volunteers come and go. I would love to give stipends to young people so they can see their life work and find means to really focus on it. Our capacity grant has helped us get on our feet and get organized, but it will eventually run out.




NPC: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a nonprofit?

Nina Meyerhof: The biggest advice is to have a passion for what you’re doing because it’s a long road ahead. The benefits are much more in terms of you fulfilling your destiny and purpose rather than saying I have an income.

NPC: How can people get involved?

Nina Meyerhof: There are so many ways to get involved. Right now we’re setting up volunteer programs in Nepal to help build a school and an orphanage in Rwanda. We’re in need of administrative help and finding young people who are good with social networking. It’s all about volunteering and finding your niche. You have to be strong in what your offering and be willing to work to make it a collective. I’d love to invite young people from the United States to get more involved. We have people all over the world, but the U.S. they come and go like it’s a diversion rather than a life’s work. I have the wonderful opportunity of always presenting at major conferences, and it is my goal to bring young people with me so that they can one day take on that role. It would be really good to have some U.S. contacts.

NPC: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Nina Meyerhof: We’re at the point of how we’re defining ourselves as we go beyond religion into not interfaith but intrafaith. We try to weave the understanding of where is the universal human being and what is the goal of life on planet earth so that there is no division but looking at our sameness’s rather than learning tolerance for differences.

Dr. Nina Meryhof is the President of Children of the Earth. For more information about the organization, please visit the website at www.coeworld.org.

Leveraging Good Will: Strengthening Nonprofits by Engaging Businesses by Alice Korngold

Leveraging Good Will shows how nonprofit organizations can access the extraordinary resources of businesses, and how for-profits can benefit from partnering with nonprofits. Written by Alice Korngold—an expert in matching business professionals with nonprofit organizations—this important resource clearly demonstrates how nonprofits can gain valuable experience, expertise, relationships, and funding that will elevate and advance their organizations while businesses can build stronger relationships with the community and develop the next generation of leaders. Filled with illustrative examples and real-life success stories, Leveraging Good Will is an insider’s guide to what it takes for nonprofits to transform their organizations through partnerships with businesses. Step by step, the book outlines how to create a solid plan based on proven-in-practice techniques.

Non Profits Made Easy by David Bangs, Jr.

The guide that helps you help others.

If you want to spend less time worrying about making ends meet and more time focusing on your nonprofit’s mission, this is the book for you! We’ll show you how to stay financially solvent by applying traditional business planning to the unique challenges of a nonprofit.

This practical, easy-to-use guide:

- Provides proven strategies for cash-flow management so your nonprofit doesn’t have to operate hand-to-mouth
- Enhances fundraising efforts and provides the hard numbers and measured outcomes your donors want to see
- Minimizes overhead and maximizes funds for your primary mission

Extensive checklists, forms and work sheets make the business side a breeze so you can improve your organization and fulfill your mission.

Nonprofit Essentials: The Capital Campaign by Julia Ingraham Walker

Preparation. Planning. Execution. It’s all here!
Finally, a clear and compelling guide to the key components shared by all campaigns. Illuminating case studies, practical tools, proven strategies, and helpful hints displayed throughout the book highlight solutions to common stumbling blocks that can trip up even the experienced campaign professional. Emphasis is given to new tools available through the Internet, such as Web sites for prospect research and the use of electronic media to help make your organization’s case stand out among the competition.

The Non-profit Sector in a Changing Economy by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Recent socio-economic trends, welfare state reform; the emergence of civil society and democracy have highlighted the growing significance of the non-profit sector – a sector between state and market – often associated with concepts such as ‘social economy’, ‘third sector’, ‘voluntary sector’, ‘third system’, ‘independent sector’ and, more recently, ‘social entrepreneurship’. This sector is facing a number of crucial new challenges such as management quality whilst both maintaining the sector’s unique social dimension and fostering social innovation. Drawing on contributions from leading experts and academics, this report provides ground-breaking assessment of new trends; reviews the significant non-profit sector developments in EU countries, the US; Canada; Mexico and Australia; and provides tools on how to finance, monitor and evaluate the sector. This book, supported by statistical data, is for policy makers, practitioners, academics and the corporate sector.

The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management by David O. Renz

Many management concepts and practices apply universally, but nonprofit organizations have many unique aspects that make administration and direction of them different. A few books, most notably Peter Drucker’s Managing the Non-Profit Organization (1990), have considered this. Now Herman, who teaches nonprofit management at the graduate level at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and publisher Jossey-Bass have brought together 28 experts in the fields of nonprofits and management to give us this encyclopedic look at what is sometimes called the third sector. Divided into five major sections (the nature of nonprofit organizations and their context in society, leadership issues, management of operations, development and management of financial resources, and managing people) that address such issues as fund-raising, managing volunteers, lobbying, ethics, and government contracts, the Handbook should become a major reference work for this subject of growing significance.

Players in the Public Policy Process by Herrington Bryce

This book focuses on the nonprofit organization as a social capital asset and agent in all phases of the public policy process–from influencing political parties, platforms, and choice of candidates to the formulation and implementation of public policy including the facilitation of transactions. This book demonstrates the universal utility of the principal-agent paradigm for analyzing nonprofits in foreign or domestic policy, sectarian or faith-based, scientific or social as well as the regulatory (not just participatory) powers of these organizations over market and nonmarket actions as a matter of public, collective policy.

Placing the nonprofit in a principal-agent framework, the book emphasizes such topics as sources of conflict in public expectations and organizational performance, the moral hazard and benefits of organizational self-interest, tax exemption as compensation or a reservation price rather than just a subsidy, the role of social service organizations as managers of adverse social risks, and their inherent competitive advantage (even when faith-based) over firms as agents of choice for social service contracts from a strictly business perspective. It also deals with the role of nonprofits in governance such as over common pool resources, the moral hazard of policy, and the probability that the nonprofit could be an agent of distortions.

Third Sector Policy at the Crossroads: An International Non-profit Analysis by Helmut Anheier and Jeremy Kendall

This book explores key policy issues for the non-profit sector against a background of increasing competition, new public management and ever decreasing budgets.

The 18 chapters comprising this analysis of international nonprofit outfits is vintage Routledge: acadmic, dense, provacative, heavily derivative of earlier scholarly works and unafraid to make reasoned conclusions..
–Joe Vanacore, Sacramento Business Journal

Private Action and the Public Good by Walter Powell and Elizabeth Clemens

Can private nonprofit organizations provide more and higher-quality services than governments or for-profit businesses? Will nonprofits really increase social connectedness and civic engagement? In this book, sociologists, political scientists, management scholars, and others consider the nature of the “public good” and how private or charitable organizations relate to it.