Not another golf tournament! That was my internal reaction when a friend of mine told me, last week, that the charter school her children attend was holding a golf tournament last weekend as a fundraiser.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard stories of fundraisers frustrated by trying to talk members/donors into attending a golf tournament when really only one or two of the board members are interested, or the group has always held a tournament and is afraid to stop, and so forth.

But I was prepared to suspend judgment. I asked her to fill me in on what happened, afterwards. (Notice I didn’t offer to attend. Golf? Me? Don’t think so.) Her answer:

“One lesson we already learned: don’t have a golf tournament for a charter school with a liberal/hippy type parent base! We only filled half the golfer slots–which is why I played.

“But it was fun, and they had contests on some of the holes for prizes–closest to the pin, longest drive, hole in one (of course I didn’t win any). The hole-in-one prizes are bought with special golf tournament insurance. And we had a dinner and silent auction afterward. People could come to the dinner even if they didn’t play golf. I think we made about $10,000 from all of it put together (50 golfers, 50 dinner-onlies).”

So, not bad as a final monetary take, and some good planning around making it fun for the people who came. But I stand by my original thinking: If you’re going to hold a fundraising event, don’t design the event first and then try to drum up attendees; look first at your attendees’ interests and then figure out what would draw them to come join in.

The Wall Street Journal article title says it all: “Trust in the Lord . . . But Check Out the Church.”

It starts with a shocking statistic from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts: “Of the $569 billion that churchgoers and others are expected to donate to Christian causes this year world-wide, about 6%, $35 billion, will end up in the hands of money launderers, embezzlers, tax evaders or unscrupulous ministers living too high on the hog.”

Yikes. For any non-church nonprofits, the very fact that any group could get away with such malfeasance will come as a shock. The degree of scrutiny of nonprofits seems to increase year by year, as both the IRS and the media amp up their oversight and accountability requirements.

But, as the article points out, churches are not required to file the IRS Form 990 that other 501(c)(3) nonprofits are. The 990 gives the public some basic information with which to check out what’s going on financially and develop further questions.

(For details on what types of groups must fill  out Form 990, see “Nonprofits and the Revised IRS Form 990” on Nolo.com.)

The WSJ article offers various bits of advice to donors about checking out church financial matters before making donations. Turned around, what do those mean for churches that have the good sense not to wait for donors to ask questions, and wish to demonstrate their openness about financial matters from the get-go?

• Be ready and willing to answer questions. Defensiveness will get you nowhere, or worse, lead to suspicion.
• Get your financial house in order. Even if your fundraising aims are laudable, bad management practices such as putting all financial control in the hands of one person will lead to problems. Put professional accounting systems into place with regard to collecting, disbursing, and accounting for money.
• Make donors aware of all the ways to give. For example, if volunteering services could offset the churches need for cash, offer this as an option for those donors who might be financially strapped. Remind church members of the possibility of legacy giving, as well.

By inspiring donor confidence, a church may in turn inspire greater donations.

If your nonprofit publishes a newsletter, magazine, or even a blog, getting volunteer writers can be a great way to both reduce your workload and foster community involvement. But once the piece is written and published, who owns it? For example, if a for-profit magazine wanted to reprint the article, to whom would it pay the licensing fee — your group, or the original writer?

If you don’t know the answer to this, you can bet your volunteers don’t, either — which is why it’s worth figuring out this issue in advance and drafting a short agreement for your volunteers. Luckily, Nolo’s own Rich Stim, an expert on intellectual property matters, gives you the details in his blog post called “Who Owns What I Write for Nonprofit?”

Fundraising by volunteers will be the topic of tonight’s book talk at Oakland’s beloved Laurel Bookstore — specifically the conundrum of how to raise money efficiently when volunteers are seldom willing to use the one tactic that tends to work the best, that is, asking for it directly.

Are special events the only option? If so, how can those be best planned as moneymakers? Come join the discussion; event details here.

A select few groups do raise this amount or more per year on the popular social media site. Unfortunately, it’s less than 1% of those surveyed for the 2011 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report. But the fact any group raises that amount is still astonishing.

The prevailing wisdom is that social networking is, at the end of the day, best used as a friend-raising strategy. Most of the groups surveyed (30%) raised between $0 and $1,000 over the previous 12 months. But have we really tested social fundraising’s possibilities yet, given that the vast majority of groups surveyed reported having invested less than $10,000 and less than 1/4 of an FTE staff person to the task of maintaining their social media presence?

Meanwhile, the return on investment looks pretty good. Unless I’m jamming together numbers that shouldn’t be so jammed, the report seems to say that it took an average of $3.50 to gain a new Facebook fan, and the value of each new fan in the first year was $161. At those rates, I’d be hiring new staff members (probably for the communications department, which is typically the one handling social media).

Facebook isn’t the only social network covered by the report. But with 98% of  nonprofits having established a Facebook presence (though only about half of them attempt to use it to fundraise), and nonprofits actually using their Facebook page more actively than any other social networking site, it’s pretty clear which is the biggest show in town right now.

Sometimes you learn the most about grassroots fundraising efforts from the local — and I mean really local, as in neighborhood — paper. The April, 2012 Rockridge News, for example, is where I came across an interesting story by Don Kinkead, about St. Augustine’s Church’s efforts to raise money for the Tonga Parish Mission.

Apparently Father Mark Wiesner was moved, after visits to Kenya, to raise money to help orphaned children there. The area has been hard-hit by HIV-AIDS. He could have just passed the collection plate and asked that parishioners add a little extra for this cause, but . . .

He chose to do something a little different. And different, in fundraising, is often a great way to get people’s attention. Fr. Mark did pass the collection plate alright, but instead of asking for people to put money in, he asked them to take envelopes out. Each of those envelopes contained some seed money, in varying amounts. The total withdrawn from the church’s coffers for starters was $12,100.

Then he challenged the recipients to go forth and raise some real money. “The excitement has been phenomenal,” he is quoted as saying. As of the article’s publication, results included one man using the money to buy $25 worth of candy to sell at his workplace, which raised $150; a ten-year old girl using her $25 to set up a lemonade stand, raising $184; and 20 parishioners banding together to plan an artisan fair to be held on church grounds, profits yet to be determined.

Maybe. I’ve been working on my taxes this week, and was noticing, as I scanned the list of donors, that each name elicited a different emotional reaction. They ran the gamut, such as:

• “Has it really been that long since I gave them anything?”
• “Grr, I think they used up my whole contribution sending me multi-page, glossy follow-up appeals.”
• “Why didn’t they list my donation amount in their thank-you letter?”
• “Who on earth are they?”
• “Aww, what a nice group.”

Most of those are not reactions you’d want people to have to your group. Rather than me trying to describe what’s behind my various reactions, I encourage you to try the same game as you do your taxes. (Alright, so you’re not such as a latenik as I — as you review your completed return, then.)

Think about what the various groups that you have given to did right — and wrong — and how your own nonprofit can mimic or depart from their model.

Sometimes all it takes is a little twist on an old fundraising theme to capture people’s attention. With its “Shortest Triathlon Ever,” the Bay Area Orthopaedic Sports and Spine Foundation has done just that, in a benefit for the Emery Unified School District’s Health & Wellness Initiative.

I noticed the event because it’s garnering local press coverage, such as in the March edition of the East Bay Monthly.

“[S]o short, anyone can do it!” is the foundation’s catch phrase for this event. It combines a 10o-yard swim, 2.5 mile bike race (on flat ground), and a 2.1 mile run — on a window-shopping course that includes a mall, no less. Kids and people of varying fitness levels are encouraged. (Hey, I think I could even do it!)

By having a shorter race, they no doubt cut down on the hours which they must ask of volunteers, or for which they must get permits or rent facilities. Of course, this doesn’t mean plenty of planning won’t still be required. For in-depth guidance on what’s required to plan this type of fundraising event, see The Volunteers’ Guide to Fundraising.

Last year, donor Bill Knight paid $12,000 at a charity event for a guitar autographed by Gene Simmons of Kiss — and later donated it to another charity for auction. This year, he paid $20,000 for another Gene Simmons-autographed guitar. He plans to give this one away to charity, too. (See “Kids With Cancer Society sets $300,000 fundraising record.)

What a great tradition! It makes you wonder you many memorabilia items are sitting in donor’s houses that they’ve enjoyed for a while — and are maybe ready to pass that ownership thrill onto someone else. (It also makes you wonder how many more Gene Simmons guitars Bill Knight will buy. Stay tuned for next year’s auction . . . .)

No need to wonder, however, whether this picture shows a Gene Simmons guitar. It doesn’t.

Three cheers for Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Venture Partners Seattle, for so eloquently describing what is askew with much of the criticism of Invisible Children, the nonprofit behind the Kony 2012 video. The group has been getting flak for its “failure” to meet idealized ratios of spending on administrative versus other costs.

I have no independent knowledge of this group’s worthiness, but Shoemaker’s article, “Kony 2012: The Great Product Debate,” reminds us that faulting a group based solely on ratios can be a bit hasty. In this case, the criticism is for spending a “low” amount on direct aid — which, as Shoemaker points out, is nonsensical when the group doesn’t actually provide direct aid (or, for that matter, any other programs or services). Shoemaker says, “Invisible Children is an advocacy organization; that’s what they do. They spend money on media (i.e., “non-direct aid”) because that’s their strategy.”

I wish I’d been as lucid in discussing the issue with friends the other day at lunch. His point is so clear it sounds almost obvious — and yet it’s been largely overlooked.

But his larger point can be applied to any type of organization, even those serving clients, providing programmatic and other aid, and otherwise taking direct action on an issue: He says, “too many of us treat all nonprofits as if they operate in the same product category and use a one-size-fits-all set of metrics to measure their effectiveness – including often-misleading metrics like percentage of spending on program vs. overhead.”

I couldn’t  agree more. I’ve had other lunchtime discussions with friends about their suspicions regarding nonprofits whose work they appreciated in every other way, and would like to support — but they wondered if they were being “had,” because the group’s spending ratios didn’t fit the norm. Anyone who has ever created a budget (even a household one) should know that different types of service provisions have different costs. Meanwhile, paying staff salaries is nearly always expensive, and a big part of the “overhead,” whether you’re running a business or a nonprofit. (And that’s true even given that most nonprofits don’t pay too well.)

Let’s say, for example, that we’re talking about a trail maintenance group. The group monitors trail conditions and coordinates volunteers for cleanup activities. But its largest expenditures are for paying the executive director as well as a contract accountant and a part-time fundraiser. If trails are being maintained that wouldn’t have been otherwise, which is a result that people are willing to support; and  if no evidence has emerged that anyone is being overpaid or putting in less time than they’re paid for, what’s the problem?

Designing these metrics was a noble goal. But getting too attached to them just adds one more burden to that of the many nonprofits that are asked to be “efficient” using fewer resources than are realistically adequate for survival.