Financial Literacy and Organizational Sustainability
I have long been critical of Land Trust Alliance’s organizational assessment tool, the Assess Your Organization or AYO, because it focuses too heavily on policies and compliance and too little on sustainability. It’s fine that you have a conflict of interest policy and that you monitor each of your 35 conservation easements every year like clockwork, but having only six Board members and 100 members is a problem. It’s not sustainable. Jeanne Bell, Jan Masaoka, and Steve Zimmerman collaborated last year on a new Jossey-Bass published book called Non-Profit Sustainability: Making...
Read MoreRecession Budgeting Blues
October and November are budgeting months for many of us: the annual exercise of trying to match our sense of mission urgency and programmatic ambition with available resources. If your organization is like most, this year presents some special challenges – and opportunities – because it’s smaller now than it used to be. Members – especially those at the lowest levels – have left, foundation support has dried up, travel budgets have been slashed, new equipment purchases have been put on hold, and hardest of all, staff have been let go. Will 2010 be better? There are certainly...
Read MoreDavid Allen, Development for Conservation LLC
I am a fundraising consultant who has devoted the majority of my professional career to the service of land conservation. This blog is intended to help conservation organizations and land trusts pursue excellence in all aspects of their conservation endeavors. I welcome your comments and feedback to these posts. 