Archive for the 'Fundraising+nonprofit' Category

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#PDF09 plus Pocantico: lots going on next week

27 June 2009

Headed east tomorrow to #PDF09 (plus some $raising for the Mother Ship) in New York. While the political digerati are enjoying the view from Jazz at Lincoln Center, there will be another conversation going on up the Hudson at the Pocantico Conference Center I’ll very interested in hearing more about: a meeting called by Rosie Rosenthal of the Center for Investigative Reporting and Bill Buezenburg of the Center for Public Integrity on “new models for watchdog journalism.”

First time that many of the new local news projects – MinnPost.com, VoiceofSanDiego.com, TexasWatchdog.com, etc., plus other investigative projects affiliated with university j-schools – will be sitting down together. Part of the agenda will no doubt be talking about some of the ideas Joel Kramer of MinnPost.com and Jon Sawyer from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting pulled together in this paper (link to a PDF on this page)  for another conference back in May.

You can read more about the Pocantico meeting at Ken Doctor’s Content Bridges blog (not to mention my comment on his post). Having been through an almost identical process that led to the creation of The Media Consortium – now a lively network of some 50 independent, progressive media operations  (Tracy Van Slyke is the project director for this gang) – what happens at Pocantico could be decisive in moving investigative journalism towards a more sustainable footing. Definitely worth following.

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Friday Dog Day 19 June 2009: Squirrel! Plus: why money is like water.

19 June 2009

Mingus the Super Dog and I took our lunch break out the door and up past Marin Stables along Wood Lane Creek – here he is doing his best imitation of Dug (“squirrel!”) from the Pixar movie, UP! – and then over the ridge and back down again along Deer Park Creek (these out-the-door hikes being yet another reason I love this town…).

Squirrel!

Squirrel!

Those creeks got me thinking about today’s report from the conservative Philanthropy Roundtable (paid for by the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation), which disputes the right of “governmental authority to regulate the activities of American philanthropists.” (h/t to @sharonschneider – you can read her stuff here). This is but the latest salvo in a spitting war ignited by a recent report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which had the audacity to suggest that foundations ought to straighten up and fly right or risk greater scrutiny from the federales. Imagine that: a watchdog organization that committed the inexcusable philanthropic faux pas of being impolite! Quel horror!

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MoJo v the IRS and what it might mean for non profit newspapers

15 June 2009

Update 15 June 09: Rich Schmalbeck (who is on the Duke law faculty, btw) emailed me his comments on my post re MoJo v. IRS. With his okay, here’s what he said:

The Technical Advice Memorandum that turned the tide in your case has almost certainly been published, though I didn’t look to verify that.  These are documents prepared by the IRS Chief Counsel’s Office, at the request of either a taxpayer or a field office of the IRS, in the context of an audit that raises difficult legal questions.  They had long been completely private, but a Freedom of Information Act suit sometime in the 1970s compelled their disclosure, but with information that might identify the taxpayer redacted.  They are typically not reviewed at the highest levels of the IRS or Treasury, and so are specifically not intended to establish precedent, but are merely supposed to resolve the issues with respect to a particular taxpayer.  But now that they are routinely published, lawyers do consult them, and do sometimes cite them, though with the understanding that a court may not accord them much weight.

I think the Mother Jones Tech Advice is helpful in this issue, but I’m not as sanguine as you seem to be in this piece that it answers all the questions the IRS might raise about a regular, full-service daily newspaper.  Mother Jones is more like Harpers, Commentary, and the like, than it is like the Chicago Tribune.  And my sense from talking with people in the industry is that while they would like to continue publication of at least some newspapers within a nonprofit framework, they would like nearly every other aspect of publication to remain the same.  And that’s where the IRS may say that the operation is not sufficiently distinguishable from an ordinary commercial enterprise to justify tax-exempt status.  But we’ll see.  In the long run, I think the IRS is going to lose on this question of exempt purpose.  But you are quite correct in thinking that no single newspaper wants to head down a road that might involve an IRS audit, followed by litigation in the Tax Court, and ultimately perhaps up to the Court of Appeals level.  So it would certainly make things easier if Congress would simply enact legislation clarifying that newspaper publication was a suitable exempt purpose, period.  But my understanding is that the bill that would do that isn’t making much progress.

A few days ago, I said I would come back to one specific item from the Duke conference a while back on non profit media, so here goes. It’s triggered by an issue raised in a paper prepped for the conference by Rich Schmalbeck, “Financing the American Newspaper in the Twenty-First Century.” Turns out that a battle royale Mother Jones went through with the Reagan-era IRS has some relevance today. It might point to a way to deal w/the IRS for newspapers and other publications looking to convert to non profit status.

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Digidave talks about Spot.us and fundraising

27 May 2009

Here’s Dave Cohn aka Digidave talking about fundraising and Spot.us. Keywords are “transparency, immediacy, and control” (for the donor, that is). Towards the end of the video (btw Dave, are you suffering from bad bed hair, or is that a hat you’ve got on?!) Dave puts a couple of questions on the table for me. I’ve got a day full of fundraising meetings (okay, that’s somehow completely if ironically appropriate), so I’ll get this up now and get a response up later today…Thanks Dave!

(BTW Dave – it’s “May-mon-ih-dees.” Maimonides. Greek for Hebrew.)

more about “Viddler.com – Conversation with Steve…“, posted with vodpod

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Coming up: a conversation with Dave Cohn

17 May 2009

spotusAbout a month ago Dave Cohn of Spot.us responded to a post I’d put up here that wondered how he and his sidekick Kara were doing, and particularly whether and how they were encouraging people who donated money to a specific “pitch” to also make a donation to the organization. He wrote back to say that they’d been thinking a lot about this question in slightly different terms:

Are we a platform that puts weight on the reporters to fund themselves – assuming that most donors are one-time givers.Or are we a community site that is going to try and create a dynamic relationship with our audience and give them more than the single project. More and more – we are trying to become the second.

Good questions for anyone who’s going to push the practice of crowdfunding forward. It’s also a question we deal with all the time at Mother Jones, and so I was especially interested to see how Dave and Spot.us approach it, literally with fresh eyes.

So I asked Dave if he’d be up for talking about the fundraising end of things with me – and that’s what we’ll be doing over the next few days. Keep an eye out for it, and once it gets going, join the conversation. (PS – Dave is threatening to respond via video, which means I may be making the jump into that medium too. . . uh oh, moving pictures…)

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A big smushy kiss to Mother Jones, and thinking about success, however modest.

15 May 2009

smushykissI’ve written posts about some other organizations since I started Maimonides Ladder, so I thought this might be an okay time to say a few words about the Mother Ship, my employer. It also happens that I sent in an application today for a scholarship to attend this summer’s Stanford Publishing Course (at $3950 plus food and lodging, it’s not as if this non profit lifer has the cash to plunk down for a week down on The Farm – and MoJo definitely doesn’t, either).  As part of the application, they asked for a 1000 words describing how Mother Jones “is innovating to create, promote or deliver content for a digital future.”

Hmmm. I swallowed some happy pills (trust me, it’s not all sweetness and light, and the future is looking simultaneously thrilling and terrifying), and this is part of what I wrote (with my commenting function switching on):

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In which Phillip D. Smith attempts to cure me of my curmudgeonly ways

7 May 2009

I’m a big fan of Grist. They do a great job of aggregating the most valuable enviro news of the day, plus they write good stuff of their own (Dave Roberts‘ reporting on cap and trade v carbon tax is some of the best out there – oh btw Mother Jones has pub’d him too; ditto on Tom Philpott’s coverage of the swine flu epidemic ). They’ve also done a terrific job figuring out who they are, what kind of voice they want to have, and how they want to be connected to their community – and they’ve delivered on it consistently, year after year.

Offhand, I can’t think of a website with a more coherent identity than these guys: they’re smart without being in the slightest bit pedantic, funny without being nasty about it (must be something about being based out of Seattle), and they cleverly walk the line between a journalism organization and a community site. I was personally really pleased when Grist joined The Media Consortium, a network of about 50 indy media groups I was helping to pull together a few years ago.

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More on Rick Cohen and the charitable deduction fight

6 May 2009

As I reported the other day, Rick Cohen at the Cohen Report took the NGO trade associations to task for their resistance to – and in some cases outright opposition to -  the Obama administration proposal to help pay for expanded health care by capping charitable deductions at 28% for households earning $250,000 and up:

Though the comments CR [Cohen Report] received here for posting have been uniformly supportive of issues raised in the article, I suspect that the majority of readers is staunchly opposed. Or are we wrong? In at least two forums I’ve been in recently, when I raised generic concerns about the shortcomings of foundation grantmaking, the audiences were pretty much in agreement.  But when this issue was broached, one could feel the change in the rooms.  It as pretty remarkable.  I guess I’d be curious regarding follow-ups about:  (1) the extent of pro and con discussion this proposal is getting versus either strident opposition or, as my article described, public reticence in favor of behind-the-scenes opposition; and (2) how people feel about Brooke’s point that for the very wealthy, the tax incentives is really of little consequence. I’d love to hear feedback from CR readers on these issues and more.

Re the first question: no idea. If anyone out there has thoughts/knowledge on this, would be really interesting in hearing about it.

Re the second question: I’m inclined to agree with Brooke, pretty much. My experience working with wealthy donors is that if it factors in at all the tax deduction plays into the amount they’ll donate but not into the more fundamental decision about giving in the first place.

And that’s for the most part the exception, not the rule: what’s much more important is the value of the pile of assets they’re sitting on, and (just as importantly) their perception of relative wealth at the time the gift is made. The tax deductibility – or in this case, a modest reduction in the amount of that deduction – is a second or even third level factor in a philanthropic decision making process.

I’m not sure about this, but I can imagine one big exception to this, which is when a donor is deciding to set up a donor-advised fund at one of the big firms like Fidelity, or at a communitiy foundation. Only because (and please let me know if I’m completely off base here) this seems to me to be a much more transactional relationship, where the calculus of tax benefits could be seen as a much more important factor. . .

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Rick Cohen takes on the charity biz – again

4 May 2009

Without exception, the best writing on the intertubes these days about the “independent sector” – or whatever you want to call the gaggle of trade associations that claim to speak for the millions of non profits active in the US  – is coming from Rick Cohen at his blog, The Cohen Report. Cohen is the ex-ED of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Well, Cohen just posted an absolutely devastating piece detailing how  the big  charity associations – Independent Sector, Council on Foundations, the Association of Small Foundations, the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, and the rest – have lined up against the Obama administration’s proposal to help fund health care reform by reducing the tax benefits that the top 1 percent of Americans currently receive when they itemize their deductions – including their charitable deductions. Cohen shows how these trade groups have completely failed to look beyond their narrow self-interest to the larger public interest – not to mention to the huge gain that thousands of small NGOs and millions of non profit workers. Here’s his conclusion:

Is the potential loss of a small portion of charitable donations, even if a “small portion” is measured in billions, perhaps $4 billion, maybe even $6  billion, depending on economists’ estimates and models, a price worth paying in order to help finance comprehensive health care reform?  For nonprofits as a whole, the short term savings are clear, the long term benefits undeniable, [and] the nonprofit sector itself is “net winner” from universal health coverage…

You want to know what’s really going on in the non profit biz? Read Cohen.

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@Quixotetilts worth following at Council on Foundation meeting

4 May 2009

If you’re on Twitter, would definitely recommend following @quixotetilts, the Twitter account for the folks at the Quixote Foundation (disclosure: MoJo is a grantee, and Erik is on our parent NGO board of directors). Whoever’s there from Quixote is doing some rock solid live-tweeting at the Council on Foundations meeting underway right now.

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