Friday Inspirations, Episode 1 :)
Jan 19, 2018Happy Friday, Generous Changers!
We're about to add a new video, "63 Ways to Thank Your Donor," to Fundraisers' Monthly.
Which got us thinking that we'd like to thank you.
THANK YOU AMAZING CHANGEMAKERS!!. We appreciate you so much.
So we thought we'd begin to celebrate Fridays by sharing a few things that make us happy-dance every week. (We're shamelessly ripping off Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday here, which, btw, we highly recommend.)
Here's what we're celebrating, pondering, fascinated by this week.
We're celebrating the late Maya Angelou's gorgeous quote:
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Making people - donors, colleagues, friends, strangers - feel terrific is a pretty great goal every single day!
We're admiring Pencils of Promise's outstanding tag-line:
250 MILLION KIDS CAN'T READ THIS | Let's change that
Any doubt about their mission? Try to get that brief, that powerful, that aspirational when you describe your work to donors!
We're reading: Engine of Impact: Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector, by Bill Meehan and Kim Jonker. If you are or ever want to be a nonprofit director, check this out. Sentence one: "We are at the dawn of a new era - the Impact Era - in which nonprofits will play an ever more vital role in supporting, safeguarding, and sustaining American civil society." Amen! The rest of the sentences help you maximize your org's impact. Great stuff!
We're pondering: The ever-entertaining and super smart Vu Le, of Nonprofit AF, recently published an excellent and provocative blog that questions how we measure nonprofits' impact. He argues that typically-collected data favors large, mostly-white-led orgs and that race, equity and social justice must ground measures of "effectiveness." Thanks to Kate Meghji for sharing!
Let us know what inspires you? Cuz more inspiration is always better.
Now go on out there and enjoy a fantastic weekend!
- Nancy
