At the time this episode is being released, we just completed Giving Tuesday and are heading into the final year end fundraising sprint. A lot of nonprofit professionals are simply wiped out- maybe you’re one of them.

This time of year is fraught with stress, uncertainty, and overwhelm. It’s no surprise, many of us end the calendar year simply burnt out.

What can nonprofits do to prevent nonprofit professional burnout? How can you change course if you feel yourself getting burnt out? Find out more on this episode.

Today we are joined by Vinit Tipnis. Vinit is a PhD candidate in the Operations and Decision Technologies department at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. His research interests lie at the intersection of nonprofit operations management and behavioral operations management.

During this wide ranging conversation, we talk about how nonprofits can best leverage cause marketing as a tool, how nonprofits can strategically schedule volunteers to improve retention, and so much more.

Today we are joined by Dr. Mandi J. Stewart.

Dr. Mandi J. Stewart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration in the School of Public and International Affairs at NC State University.

As a faculty member, she directs NC State's Master of Public Administration program and coordinates their Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management and Nonprofit Studies minor. She has extensive experience working as a nonprofit consultant, evaluator, program manager, and advocate.

During this conversation we talk about executive transitions, how leadership, career, and pipeline development plays a role in successful transitions, how COVID changed the way employees want to work, and much more.

Today we are joined by Dr. Lise Anne Slatten. During this conversation we discuss what web-based accountability is, why it's so important for nonprofits, and specific areas to target your efforts.

Dr. Slatten is the Associate Dean for Administration & Quality in the Moody College of Business Administration and a Professor of Management at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL). Her research areas include nonprofit certification and accreditation, nonprofit governance and management, and entrepreneurship. Prior to teaching, Dr. Slatten spent twenty years working in the nonprofit sector.

Do you use a credit card for any purchases or contribute to a retirement account? If so, then you’ve experienced something called an intertemporal choice. An intertemporal choice is one in which the cost and reward occur at different times.

For instance, with a credit card, you swipe your card to get the item you want right now, but you don’t actually pay the cost until you pay your credit card bill a month or so from now.

With a retirement account, however, the money leaves your account now, but you won’t get to experience the rewards of that cost until way down the road when you retire.

In the consumer setting, how intertemporal choices influence behavior is pretty well established, but can we leverage this idea for charitable giving as well?

That’s the question we’ll be tackling today.

#GivingTuesday is just around the corner and whether this is a huge campaign for your nonprofit or just one small part of your overall fundraising, it’s important to plan for it. You’ll be dedicating time and resources to the day. That means, we want to make sure you have all the information you need to have as successful a Giving Tuesday as possible.

There is a lot of great advice on Giving Tuesday out there and I’m not one to reinvent the wheel, but when I looked into this topic, I found there were five crucial questions we need to consider.

That’s what we’ll be tackling on this episode.

Today we are joined by Nina M. Sooter. Nina is a neuroeconomics researcher at the University of Geneva. Her work focuses on moral and pro-social decision-making.

During this conversation, we dive deep into her studies on how honesty is impacted by acute stress, whether virtual reality can be used as a fundraising tool, and how the B Corps label impacts consumer choices. She’s a big fan of interdisciplinary research and what’s great for us as practitioners is that Nina is particularly motivated to tackle questions that are relevant outside of academia. This makes her research and her advice very applicable to those of us who work in the nonprofit space.

This episode is the second part of our discussion on overhead aversion. In the last episode, we talked a bit about why overhead expenses evolved to become this standard against which nonprofits are compared to one another, and how it became a measure of nonprofit effectiveness.

We also talked about how this thinking is majorly flawed and has led to poor outcomes for nonprofits. As it turns out, too little overhead and too much overhead is associated with poor outcomes for nonprofits, so we rounded out the episode by talking about an exercise or experiment you can do at your own organization to determine the ideal overhead expenditure for your specific nonprofit.

In the last episode, we specified the problem. But still a question remains- how can we talk about overhead such that we don’t turn away donors? That's the question we'll answer on today's episode.

Have you ever had a donor question why your nonprofit spends so much on salaries? Or have you ever had to report on fundraising and administrative costs, keeping them below that magical 20% mark?

It’s undeniable that nonprofits- much like any other business- need these overhead expenses in order to operate. These are not extraneous, but rather a core part of running a functioning business.

And yet, the more nonprofits invest in the very infrastructure needed to operate, the less funding organizations receive. This has been a frustrating challenge for many of us in the sector, but what can we do about it? This is the problem we'll be tackling over the next two episodes.

When we hear that nonprofits should diversify their revenue streams, it sounds like common sense advice. For organizations that are heavily grant funded, growing a community of donors can help weather the ups and downs of grant funding. And, for organizations that rely solely on individual donor support trickling in throughout the year, getting grant support can be a catalyst for launching new programs or expanding current ones.

We hear about the upside of revenue diversification so often that it can be easy to believe there is no downside to the strategy.

But is it the right strategy for every organization?

This is the problem we’ll be tackling today: is revenue diversification a good strategy for your nonprofit?