Reports from the IRS study of nonprofit hospitals on how they spend their “community benefit” dollars to maintain tax-exempt status were just released. These reports do not seem to reveal anything we don’t already know…

To-Do Lists: Top Nonprofit Organization Tool (according to the 501cfiles.com unscientific poll).

Keep your sponsors happy by keeping the lines of communication open.

Creative services for free in a 24-hour blitz? This for-profit agency is serving nonprofits with no marketing dollars in a round-the-clock CreateAthon.

There’s a new website called greatnonprofits.org. It was started by some students at Stanford University as a “place to find, review, and talk about great — and perhaps not so great — nonprofits,” according to the GreatNonprofits homepage.
After taking a look around the site, it appears to be very similar to other review sites you would find for restaurants and other services vendors. The idea of being able to post “not-so-great” information about nonprofits on this site might make anyone in the sector a little scared, but it shouldn’t.
The great thing about blogs, review sites like GreatNonprofits, and other forums where …read more

Not everyone in Beijing right now is there to marvel at Michael Phelps. As MSNBC reported the other day, a healthy nonprofit enterprise has sprung up at the Games, with a plethora of Olympic pin collectors set up outside the Beijing Exhibition Center to obtain as many pins as they can through “barter, exchange and trade.” One Canadian collector, who claims to have 40,000 to 50,000 pins in his portfolio, noted that he wasn’t in it for the money:
“I could sell [pins] for a couple hundred bucks,” he said. “But I spent thousands to come here. That’s not what it’s …read more

The notion among the general public that nonprofits should be able to operate successfully while maintaining absolutely bare-bones operations is not only annoying, says a California SPCA official, it is also dangerous. Writing in the Palm Springs Desert Sun, Fred Saunders offers a very cogent reason why:
These are misconceptions that hinder the growth of the organization and become obstacles to achievement of the organization’s mission. The nonprofit organization must be run as if it were a serious business if it is to be successful and continue to exist in a competitive market. To do this, the notion that a nonprofit …read more

Here in the Philadelphia region, where I live, six of the area’s top 10 employers are nonprofits, and a staggering 27 percent of city employees work for nonprofits.
Great news for the sector, right?
Well, that depends on how well the sector’s doing here.
As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday, the Philadelphia Foundation “is commissioning a study to benchmark the state of nonprofits in Philadelphia and its four neighboring Pennsylvania counties.”
It has tapped the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia to catalog and group the members of our nonprofit world, examine their finances and funding sources, and compare them with their peers. The foundation …read more

Consult your accountant, of course — your organization does have one, right? — but if you need an overview of the Internal Revenue Service’s new Form 990, you could do a lot worse than Larry Levy and Cathleen West’s piece currently running in onPhilanthropy. The two mix in explanations about new regulations with “practice tips” designed to get you going in the right direction. Wouldn’t want to get on Uncle Sam’s bad side, right? | 501(c)

Several recent blog posts have examined various benefits to nonprofits of newer online phenomena.
Graduate student Alyssa Walden writes about the sector’s increasing use of social-networking sites to attract donors and volunteers:
MySpace and Facebook are making it easier for non-profits to set up accounts, with both adding Impacts and Causes[, respectively,] for non-profits to use. These social networking sites allow the organizations to connect with a large audience that ranges in age.
Brett Meyer of the Nonprofit Technology Network discusses how nonprofits can quickly (and cheaply) leverage search engine optimization to drive online readers to their websites:
By integrating best practices into …read more