If your organization serves communities who have experienced trauma, secondary traumatic stress disorder or as it’s better known, compassion fatigue, could be a real issue. Compassion fatigue often shows up as high staff turnover.

Anyone at your nonprofit who has direct contact working with people who have experienced trauma, is at risk of developing compassion fatigue. These symptoms may include feeling emotionally numb, increased irritability, difficulty concentrating, and even panic-like symptoms.

So, if working with people who have experienced trauma is core to your mission, yet compassion fatigue is a byproduct of this work, what can you do? That’s the problem we’ll be tackling on this episode.

Have you ever experienced tension between your board of directors and yourself or your staff? I think it’s safe to say that, especially for nonprofit leaders, navigating board relations is one of the tougher parts of the job.

But, it’s not just our relationships with board members that can create this tension. In our relationships with other volunteers who play mission critical roles, we can find that sometimes the boundary between staff and volunteer becomes a bit blurry.

When that happens, tension may result. So, the challenge we’ll be tackling today is: how can nonprofits navigate the blurry line between staff and volunteer?

Have you ever had the experience of starting a new initiative and desperately trying to find volunteers to help? Whether it was finding volunteers to help plan a fundraising event, volunteer mentors, or finding volunteers to sit on a board committee, sometimes it’s like pulling teeth trying to find people who want to volunteer.

If we’re lucky, volunteers find us and fall into our organizations. More often than not, nonprofits need to proactively seek out volunteers to help us meet our needs. So, the problem we’ll be addressing today is: how can nonprofits recruit volunteers?

It’s undeniable that volunteers are a core part of nonprofit work. From serving on the board to helping us run programs, and fundraising events, even sealing and stamping our direct mail- we can depend on volunteers to do it all.

Building an enthusiastic, reliable, committed community of volunteers is the dream but it’s easier said than done. More often, volunteers enter our doors enthusiastic but fall off fairly quickly. Our reliance on volunteers raises a critical question and a problem that requires scientific thinking. So, the problem we’ll be addressing today is, how can nonprofits retain volunteers?

While the majority of people working in the nonprofit sector identify as female, leadership tends to be male dominated. This huge disparity hurts people who identify as female, it’s hurting every minority, it’s hurting our nonprofits, and it’s hurting the communities we serve.

Research tells us women are more likely to exhibit transformational leadership, teams led by women collaborate better, and nonprofits led by women have higher operating margins.

As Women’s History Month comes to an end, the problem we’ll be tackling today is: How can we get more women in nonprofit leadership positions?

If you’re on the Nonprofit Science email list, you received a request for questions for an Ask Me Anything- style podcast episode. These could be questions could be about topics I've covered on previous podcast episodes or just questions about problems you’re facing and want some research to help you work through them.

So many great questions were submitted and on this episode, I’m going to answer five of them.

Today we are joined by Dr. Jamie Levine Daniel. Dr. Levine Daniel is an Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management and Public Service at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Her research focuses on nonprofit resource acquisition and service delivery within a context of power, policy, process, and practice. Not only is Dr. Levine Daniel involved in teaching and research but she is also the winner of several prestigious research awards.

During our conversation, we talk about why it’s important for nonprofits to think competitively, not just collaboratively. We delve into earned income, specifically how nonprofits can avoid the pitfalls of earned income. And, we get into organizational sense giving- what it is and why nonprofits need to think strategically about it.

Today we are going to dive into donor segmentation and discuss what the literature and latest research suggests are ways we can segment donors to effectively communicate with them and of course, raise more money.

If you’ve been putting off targeted fundraising messages for your donors because segmenting your donors is such a big hurdle to climb, this episode is for you. And if you’re currently segmenting your donors, but it isn’t getting you the results you were hoping for, then this episode is for you as well.

The problem we are going to tackle today is: How can nonprofits use donor segmentation to increase donations?

Today we are joined by Dr. Young Joo Park. Dr. Park is an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on financial management and how organizations can use sound financial management to achieve sustainability. During our conversation, we touch on many topics such as how to predict whether a nonprofit will dissolve or not, whether an earned income model makes sense for nonprofits, and we of course can’t talk nonprofit finances without addressing research into the overhead myth.

Today we'll be discussing new research into a fundraising phenomenon that has captured headlines for the past several years (and I have a hunch we’re going to be hearing about it a lot more in the coming year)- rage donations.

What are rage donations and how can nonprofits mobilize this type of support?

Find out on this episode.