Each year, Greenlights shines a bright spotlight on model nonprofits and programs at the Nonprofit Excellence Awards, but this year we’ll also give a shout out to the amazing people who work tirelessly behind the scenes of nonprofit success!  We’re shaking things up with new organizational categories and a chance to nominate a rock star nonprofit staffer!  Check out the nomination guidelines and nominate today or by May 29, 2012 at 5PM!

Nonprofit Excellence Award honorees receive a $1,000 grant award and will be recognized the evening of September 20, 2012 at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center in Austin, Texas at the Texas Nonprofit Awards alongside OneStar Foundation’s Governor’s Volunteer Awards.  The event takes place on the evening of the first day of the Texas Nonprofit Summit, the premier nonprofit management conference for the state of Texas.

Nonprofit Excellence Awards celebrate Central Texas nonprofit organizations and individuals driving social change through exemplary achievements in the categories of:

Collaboration
The Collaboration Award highlights a successful partnership that a nonprofit has made with another nonprofit, business, foundation, or other entity that has resulted in improved impact and has achieved greater outcomes for both organizations because of their unique association. 

NEW!  Impact
The Impact Award honors a nonprofit organization, or one of its programs, whose notable performance and delivery to the community sets a high standard of quality and impact.  This organization can demonstrate ways in which it continually seeks to measure and improve impact.

NEW!  Innovation & Learning
The Innovation & Learning Award honors a nonprofit organization whose creation and application of new approaches or learning (from a workshop, conference, consulting engagement, book, etc.) to its work has advanced the organization and serves as a model for other nonprofits.  This new practice or approach is being, or has been, incorporated into the fabric of the organization and makes an affirmative enhancement to the operation or core activities of its mission.

NEW!  Board Excellence
The Board Excellence Award recognizes an organization for its success in fostering an engaged and effective board.  This organization can demonstrate the board’s direct linkage to the overall success of the organization, or in areas such as fundraising, advocacy, strategic planning, successful leadership transitions, etc.

NEW!  Nonprofit Leader of the Year
The Nonprofit Leader of the Year Award celebrates a nonprofit staff member whose masterful achievements in their role have directly benefited the organization’s operating capacity and impact in the community.  Individuals from all levels of employment are considered.

2011 Winners:

(pictured left to right)

Collaboration
CLEAN Air Force of Central Texas

Innovation
Capital Area Food Bank of Texas

Learning in Action
Austin Disaster Relief Network

Service Excellence
People’s Community Clinic

Special Recognition
Austin Classical Guitar Society

Check out the nomination guidelines and nominate today or by May 29, 2012 at 5PM!  Questions?  Contact Kate Smallwood at kates@greenlights.org.

Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling to Vancouver with 3 of my Greenlights teammates for AFP’s International Conference on Fundraising. I’m happy to report that we all returned to Austin with some new ideas and perspectives, and it was wonderful to have my colleagues there to discuss what we were experiencing, each through our own particular lens. It was also really fun to simply spend time with Amy, Kate and Katy, and to get to know them better, but that’s another blog!

Most of our discussions after the keynotes and sessions were about the apparent “split” in fund development approaches proposed by young, entrepreneurial social change leaders, like Scott Harrison, Founder and President of charity: water as compared to the guidance shared by seasoned development professionals who have decades of fundraising experience, like renowned author and researcher, Penelope Burk.

Where Harrison implored us all to tackle the world’s problems head-on, directing 100% of donor contributions to programs where donors see concrete evidence of problems being solved quickly, seasoned experts like Burk, provided important insights into what it takes to engage donors in life-long relationships with organizations and their missions.

Harrison challenged the usefulness of the traditional development department, armed with countless stories of how nonprofit organizations dilute their impact and bore today’s results-oriented, fast-paced young leaders into apathy. Burk, on the other hand, encouraged more attention to nurturing those in the fundraising profession, spurred by her research on the small number of fundraisers who know how to secure planned gift commitments that can lead to long-term sustainability of their organizations.

I attended a great session that helped me understand these different takes on affecting change by Jon Duschinsky, Founder of Be The Change, a London-based group that encourages “movements” over “organizations”. Duschinsky defines a movement as “a group of people who come together because they have a common belief system and they want to change something.” That sounds a lot like nonprofit organizations to me, but there are definitely differences. Here’s how I have come to see it (and please forgive the generalizations and over-simplification of both approaches):

For a great example of a movement, we need to look no further than the Kony 2012 phenomenon. Here the movement used social media (a key reason that today’s movements are even possible) to engage a huge number of people in easy, meaningful and very direct ways.

I believe that higher education institutions are examples of nonprofit organizations that have many reasons to be the large organizations they are. Most universities would not be effective or credible as spontaneous, bottom up movements.

I am thrilled and grateful that the “movement” crowd is understandably sick of waiting around for organizations to solve the myriad problems in our world and that they are inspiring a huge segment of our population to get involved in ways that make sense for them. I am also concerned that these new leaders are underestimating the tremendous power of established nonprofit organizations, their development teams and the donors who love them. Their donors tend to be older individuals who value the stability of an organizational structure, but they are just as passionate about changing lives.

Overall, it seems that we all agree that it’s imperative that we treat our donors like the smart, approachable, emotional, results-oriented and busy investors that they are, and that demonstrating the real results we can and do achieve together is where our focus needs to be.

What is your take on these different approaches to driving change?

I realize that we’re almost into February, but I have a tendency to continue forming resolutions several months into the New Year. For 2012, I’m trying to make my resolutions challenging but also attainable, unlike previous goals of “work out 6 days per week” or “read 8 books a month.”  On top of my typical list, I’ve added one that I’d encourage you to put on yours as well – attend at least one Greenlights workshop!

Last year I attended the grant writing series and walked away with a new-found knowledge of nonprofit funders, the grant process and proposals. I even know how to read a 990-PF and write a letter of support now. I also attended our Board Essentials workshop and learned about boards’ focuses, roles, and responsibilities and spent the weekend Googling “joining an Austin nonprofit board”. Of course, I’ve now added that to my rapidly growing 2012 list too! Along with attending Board Essentials, if you’re interested in joining a nonprofit board, mark your calendars for Board Summit on June 7, 2012.

As a Greenlights member, your membership benefits include a free workshop voucher(s) and if you’re not a member yet, this is just one more reason to join! Plus, if you join before February 29, 2012, you’ll be entered to win one free registration to the Texas Nonprofit Summit.

We’ve got workshops posted on our website through April 24, 2012 (with many more coming soon) and I’ve currently narrowed down my choices to Social Media Bootcamp for Nonprofits or Online Fundraising Bootcamp. Along with these workshops, maybe I’ll add returning to boot camp to my list too!

Who am I kidding? Yoga on paddle boards sounds fun and just crazy enough to add to my 2012 exercise goals. So how are you doing on your New Year’s resolutions? Don’t you want to add something easy, like attending a Greenlights workshop?

Kathy LeMay speaking at the Texas Nonprofit Summit

As you probably know, OneStar Foundation and Greenlights teamed up on Sept. 8-9, 2011 to host the annual Texas Nonprofit Summit and, by all accounts, it was our biggest and best nonprofit management conference yet! There was more of everything this year – more attendees, speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, networking, and definitely more staff and volunteer hours invested to make it all happen. It is certainly exciting to see the Summit continue to grow and to have successfully brought together more than 700 new and old friends this time around. But the numbers only tell part of the story, and they don’t tell the most important part.

Beth Kanter speaking to a guest at the Texas Nonprofit Summit

In the new, relative quiet of our offices this week, there is one prevailing sentiment about the Summit that surrounds us: thankfulness. All of us on “Team TNS” are thankful that so many busy nonprofit leaders chose to spend their precious time and energy at the Summit. We are thankful that things went smoothly and that the food was plentiful and good. We are very grateful to have had so many wonderful speakers share their perspectives with the sector, and so many knowledgeable exhibitors share their services and resources. And the thanks we’ve received from those that attended make us especially grateful to have the honor of hosting an event designed to help them “lead the charge for social change” in more impactful ways.

Evan Smith speaking at the Texas Nonprofit Summit

Thank you to everyone that attended, sponsored, presented, exhibited and volunteered to make the Summit great. If you weren’t able to attend, you can still check out the slide decks from several presentations and even watch recordings of the two keynote addresses and Evan Smith’s session (those will be posted on the Greenlights and OneStar sites soon).

We sincerely hope you’ll mark your calendars for September 20 and 21, 2012, when we’ll gratefully do everything we can to make the 2012 Texas Nonprofit Summit even better!

This post was originally published on David Neff’s blog, 501derful.org, on August 23, 2011.

A social media dashboard is an easy way to share a variety of online engagement in a single view. A communications or marketing professional may have a daily routine of checking a variety of pages and accounts to stay on top of the social media conversations relevant to their organization, but it’s just as important that the rest of an org’s staff, board and other constituents stay engaged.

At Greenlights we have a social media dashboard that pulls together a view of our online activities, including tweets by Greenlights and about Greenlights, flickr photos, Google alerts to capture media and blog mentions, Facebook and YouTube content, plus feeds from a variety of blogs our staff reads. Staff and interns at Greenlights are encouraged to set the Greenlights dashboard as their homepage (or one of their homepage tabs) so that they’re always informed about our online presence and can choose to engage in ways they’re comfortable with.

We recently created a social media dashboard for our upcoming event, the Texas Nonprofit Summit. The TXNS dashboard displays tweets about the event, including a twitter search for the event hashtag – #TXNS, a feed created from a twitter list of event speakers, Google alerts to capture articles and blog posts about the event, blog feeds from speakers, a flickr module that gathers photos with our event tags, and a module that simply links back to our main Texas Nonprofit Summit webpage. We’re sharing this dashboard with our entire Greenlights community (not just event participants) via twitter, email and we’re including a QR code to the dashboard in the event program.

Both of our dashboards were created using Netvibes. A free service that’s ideal for setting up personal, private dashboards, but also allows one public dashboard per account.