Nolo

A shout-out to Nonprofit Tech for Good for compiling a list of 30 Online Stores That Benefit Nonprofits, just in time for the start of the holiday shopping season. My family could have used this the year I announced (in classic Berkeley style) that I wanted to reduce consumerism and overconsumption by having us give and get only gifts from nonprofits that year. I think I confused them. I received things like shrunken wool sweaters from Goodwill. Perhaps, like many people I’ve…

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Here’s one you can file under, “Complying With the Letter of the Law Won’t Necessarily Keep You Out of Trouble.” The University of New Hampshire seems to have been, legally speaking, properly handling a testamentary donation when it used one fourth of the $4 million that thrifty library cataloguer Robert Morin saved and left to the college for–are you ready?–a football scoreboard. Mr. Morin had, it appears true, made a mostly unrestricted gift. By law, a nonprofit that receives such a gift must simply put…

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A back-end change to the rating system metrics used by a watchdog organization for nonprofits may not sound like a big deal, or make for snazzy headlines. But the recent announcement by Charity Navigator that it is “upgrading” the way it evaluates charities and ultimately decides how many “stars” each one merits (one a one to four scale) represents a huge change in attitude, and one that will hopefully trickle down through the entire philanthropic community. The main change to…

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Planning a fun theme for a special charity event is an opportunity to exercise one’s creativity, attract a new audience, and . . . receive future nasty letters from lawyers. Just ask Newmindspace, a Toronto-based nonprofit dedicated to organizing free, fun, all-ages events in places like subway cars and city streets. The organization had to change the theme of its popular lightsaber battles to the “Cats in Space Tour” after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the attorneys at Lucasfilm (owner of the Star Wars brand). At…

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