Today we tried to have a Nonprofit Ops brown bag lunch about creating an Nonprofit Operations Manual but no one showed up. I'm not sure if it is because this isn't an interesting topic or my poor advertising. Oh well—I did have quite a few people e-mail me and tell me they couldn't make it to the discussion and asked me to send them an Operations Manual template.

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007.  Join us for an interactive Nonprofit Operations Brown Bag Lunch discussion about best practices for creating and maintaining an Operations Manual.

We'll be discussing what are standard sections in an Operations Manual as well as provide an Operations Manual sample/template.

No need to RSVP—just come and join the discussion.

Aspiration's leadership team met a couple of days ago to discuss and update our fundraising strategy for the year. We divided the meeting into three fundraising strategy areas.

1. Individual Donors

2. Corporate Funding/Events Sponsorship

3. Foundation Funding

We are following a different strategy for each fundraising area. If you are new to fundraising or need a refresher course, here's a brief description of each fundraising area.

1. Individual Donors:

In continuation to my earlier post about Fiscal Sponsorship, here is additional information that I learned recently.

Projects and Organizations looking for a fiscal sponsor: 

1. The Foundation Center has a great fiscal sponsorship tutorial for anyone interested in learning more about fiscal sponsorship. 

2. The Community Resource Center in Colorado also has a great step-by-step explanation about fiscal sponsorship and the difference between the term "fiscal agent" and "fiscal sponsor."

I am in the process of preparing for Aspiration’s December board meeting. One thing I am working on is the Board Binder. This binder contains helpful information about Aspiration for the board members to keep and bring to each board meeting.

Contents include:

1. Articles of Incorporation
2. Bylaws
3. Board Member job description
4. Board Roster
5. Organizational Chart/Programmatic Chart
   
6. Organizational Policies/Conflict of interest policy
   
7. Organizational promotional materials
8. Donation Form

The board will also be able to store board meeting minutes from past meetings and other helpful information in the binder.

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.