I was recently interviewed by Beth Kanter, an amazing blogger who I really admire and respect. Beth is author of Beth’s blog and contributing editor for Blogher. Thanks Beth!! 

I’m going to this workshop this afternoon at the Foundation Center about Fiscal Sponsorship. It seems like I have been spending the last couple of months thinking about Fiscal Sponsorship not only from the perspective of a nonprofit that provides Fiscal Sponsorship, but also looking at start-up nonprofits and what fiscal sponsorship means to them.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

First, I learned that fiscal sponsorship is not something that nonprofits should just jump into quickly. When I came into Aspiration, we had a fiscal sponsorship agreement in place, however after working with my Attorney and reading the book, "Fiscal Sponsorship—6 Ways to Do It Right" by Gregory Colvin. I realized that we needed to have a stronger agreement with the new organizations we were sponsoring. We are what the book defines as Model C—"A Preapproved Grant Relationship" with the new organizations we sponsor. It took us a while to get all this figured out and we are still working to do this the right way.

So I’m hosting the Blog Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants again this week and I received a lot of great posts this week about general nonprofit management advice. Here are the top seven.

1. In lieu of Hawaii’s big earth quake over the weekend, I thought it fitting to start with Ken Goldstein from the Nonprofit Consultant’s Blog very relevant post about Fundraising for a Disaster.

Also Nonprofit Branding seems to be a hot topic this week; here are a couple of posts that reflect this marketing tool that nonprofits can use.

If your fiscal year is July-June then you already have your annual budget in place, however for those of us that have a fiscal year January-December the budgeting process has begun!

I have a 3 step method for preparing the annual budget for my organization.

1. I make a list of the staff for the organization and then I figure out how many hours each staff person will spend working on each program, as well as how much time they will spend on administration and fundraising time. I do this through conducting a time study—seeing how each staff member spends their time for one particular week, or by looking at staff time allocation from the previous year.

Wednesday we had the first nonprofit operations brown bag lunch discussion here at the Tech Center—which I think went really well.

The topic that everyone wanted to talk about was nonprofits sending out mass e-mails to their clients, constituents or donors. 

John Kenyon a technology consultant participated in the discussion and provided some helpful examples of affordable mass e-mail providers for nonprofits:

• Email Now
• Constant Contact
• Democracy in Action
• Yahoo Groups
• Google Groups
• Vertical Response
• Topica.com
• CiviCRM/CivicSpace
• NPO Groups
  

We also discussed how sending out mass e-mails by your regular e-mail provider is not recommended. The general progression that nonprofits seem to follow is, first they use a free e-mail service first like Google groups, then progress to something that costs $15-$20 a month, like Email now or NPO Groups, and then if the nonprofit wants additional features like a database then they choose something like CiviCRM or Democracy in Action.