Tom’s of Maine is a natural care products company that was started back in 1970, by a couple who wanted to simplify their lives. Unable to find the unprocessed foods and pure personal care products they desired, the decided to make their own. Their simple philosophy was that their products would not harm the environment.

Now part of Colgate-Palmolive, Tom’s of Maine still practices the business acumen that made them successful—listening to customers’ needs and coming back with natural, sustainable solutions.

Tom’s of Maine also works with its customers to fund deserving nonprofit organizations (NPOs). This year, they are inviting NPOs to nominate their community programs for a chance to share in a $100,000 Community Action Fund award. To involve more of the community, nonprofits can rally their supporters to vote for them.

This year, Tom’s of Maine is taking the program a step further—and getting volunteers involved, too! Partnering with VolunteerMatch, the online volunteer recruiting and sign-up website, nonprofits can describe their volunteer needs when applying for the Community Action Fund awards.

Through July 2, any qualifying nonprofit with a budget under $2 million can apply online at www.50statesforgood.com. Nonprofits are encouraged to explain how they will use volunteers to benefit their communities. The 50 States For Good program is designed to make it easier for people to find out what charity organizations in their communities need help. Connecting with others and spreading the word about the chance for funding and volunteers is also part of the fun.

40 finalist organizations (in honor of Tom’s of Maine’s 40th anniversary) will have their project and volunteer request showcased on the company’s website. Then in August and early September, voting begins. Five programs will each receive $20,000, to be announced in October.

Tom’s of Maine has always donated 10% of its profits to its community and offers employees paid time off to volunteer in their local communities—up to 12 days per year!

For more information, visit www.50statesforgood.com.

For most non profit organizations, annual events are a big opportunity to raise a large chunk of their operating budget. So most NPOs have a lot riding on these big annual or semi-annual events. How can you make them pay off when you might have few resources?

The key is planning. If you’re new to your NPO management position, gather as much information on how the event was run in the past: find out who was on the committee, what was each person responsible for, what fell through the cracks, and what was successful. Do this for each area of the event: location, catering, entertainment, publicity, donor outreach, volunteer recruitment, auction check-out, etc.

If you were in charge of last year’s event, look at it with a fresh eye. Solicit feedback from committee members, volunteers, and attendees. Put out an email survey to your mailing list through Survey Monkey or a similar service. You want to know if people enjoyed the event, and why—or if they didn’t, you need to hear that, too. “What can we do better/different?” is always the most valuable information to know.

Here are some other ideas for successful event planning:
Pick a date as soon as possible—and don’t let it be too far in the future. Sometimes, having a short timeline means the biggest details are taken care of right away. Longer lead times can lead to procrastination—and possibly losing out on a location or caterer. With a firm event date closing in on the committee, they are forced to work creatively, quickly, and to know exactly what needs to be done.

Involve your audience: create a community around your event on social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter. A Facebook fan page is a great place to announce the event, invite feedback, solicit volunteers, and ask fans for help in publicizing your event. When attendees accept your invitation, their friends will see your event on their pages. This way, you’ll see the numbers of people who are aware of your event grow exponentially. Social marketing is a great way to spread the news quickly among the people who already know about your organization, and the ones who have never heard of it.

Be passionate, and find passionate volunteers to help. You can’t host a successful event if the organizers aren’t all that interested in it. If you’re not passionate about it, then maybe it’s the wrong event for your NPO—so you might want to start thinking of something different for next year. But if you are so into the event that you can’t stop talking about it—that’s a great sign! Ask your friends and contacts to help you and infuse them with your enthusiasm. Passion is palpable, and makes people want to respond.

Big events are fun for your supporters, valuable to your non profit organization, and usually exhausting for the organizer—but they are also necessary to the financial health of most charitable organizations. So take a look at these and other tips to make big events as successful as they can be!

As promised, we continue to offer some best practices tips for volunteer managers. Increase efficiency and stay organized with tips from both the for-profit business sector and other nonprofit organizations.

1. Develop a Volunteer Acquisition Plan: Plans help you keep on goal; your volunteer recruitment efforts will be much more effective if you plan carefully. First, determine how many volunteers you need for each project, ongoing tasks, and events you have in a typical period—one month, six months, one year. Then decide the level of experience you need from your volunteers. Do you need special training, like food service, catering, accounting, truck driving, or traffic control? Or is the project something that is suitable for a family with small children?

Next, make a list of former volunteers, current supporters, and even your friends and business contacts who possess the desired training or expertise. Contact them and ask for their help. Be sure to clearly define your needs, expectations, and their time commitment.

2. Protect your Organization from Legal Harm: As a volunteer manager, you must be as aware of employment laws as any human resource manager. If you lack training in this area, research training opportunities or enlist the help of an HR Law professional for guidance. Some of the applicable federal land state laws are the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (which covers volunteer background screening and credit checks), and anti-discrimination legislation like Equal Employment Opportunity.

Keep staff, served populations and other volunteers safe and your organization out of legal trouble by carefully screening all volunteers. Review insurance policies annually to be sure volunteers are covered when working for your organization. Don’t wait until after a volunteer suffers an injury to find out you are under-insured.

3. Keep Excellent Records: Many organizations are required to track volunteer time. If you are not required, it is still a good idea to do so. Whether you obtain specialized computer software to help, or use simple spreadsheets, it’s vital to keep track of volunteer contact information, interests and abilities, projects assigned and completed, and notes regarding successes and challenges. These notes  will come in handy when conducting evaluations or when your organization is required to report to state or federal officials. If you are challenged for time to track volunteer activity, assign the task to a volunteer.

4. Be Flexible: The ability to switch hats, courses of action, and gears is a valuable one for volunteer managers. If a volunteer is having trouble with a project, losing interest in the organization, or not working out as well as you’d hoped, be ready to communicate, evaluate, and act accordingly. If your volunteer recruitment plan isn’t working as well as you need it to, double your efforts, ask a mentor for help, or simply change your approach. Try spreading the word with social media or free online ads like Craigslist.

Borrowing good management practices from others is an easy way to implement procedures that really work—and can save you valuable time!

As if charities needed another one, a change in the estate tax could prove to be a possible roadblock to fundraising.

Here’s why: the estate tax meant that wealthy Americans, upon their demise, could leave their money to their children or to charity. When left to their heirs, the US Government took 45% and the heirs got 55%. If left to charity, the full amount of their pretax estate could be donated.

As of January 1, 2010, the estate tax is repealed for a full year. Now, that giving to heirs choice looks better—because the 45% tax has vanished—disappeared—poof!  Whether or not wealthy will continue to give, it’s clear that a reason for them to do so has been eliminated.

The impact on nonprofit organizations might depend on a philosophical question: is philanthropy based in goodness, or in tax savings?

The opportunity for charities is to make a real connection with their donors—all of them, but especially the wealthy. Give donors a reason to feel that the money is secondary to the benefits they will receive. Help them feel a part of your organization, of something bigger than themselves.

But how?

• Stay in touch with well-written newsletters.
• Produce a simple video and post in on your website. Feature clients if possible. Show, rather than tell, what good your organization is doing.
• Show the video at your next fundraising event.
• Introduce donors to the people your organization serves, and tell the success stories they are helping to make happen.

Stay tuned for updates on this issue; Congress can decide to reinstate the estate tax and make it retroactive to January 1. We’ll keep you posted!

Budget cuts at the state and local levels are having a huge adverse effect on nonprofits all over the country. Couple budget cuts with the reality that grant makers expect to give fewer grants in 2010, and you have a recipe for another difficult year for nonprofits.

Fundraisers and nonprofit directors need to look at alternative income streams to replace traditional sources operating funds like grants, individual donations, and state funding.

Here are a few ideas for alternative income sources:

1. Earned revenue. The profits from a product or service that people will pay for is a great way to raise needed funds.  A separate, for-profit company is sometimes needed to do this. Some nonprofits open coffee or ice cream shops. Arts organizations set up historic-area or architecture tours in their cities to earn tourist dollars. Others publish books, print t-shirts and mugs, or open thrift stores. The possibilities are endless, with a little imagination.

2. Major gifts. Developing relationships with philanthropic organizations or community groups is crucial. Find out who has money to give and make sure they know your organization’s mission and needs.

3. Rent out empty space. If there are empty offices in your building, offer them to entrepreneurs, other nonprofits, or professionals.

4. Sell assets. Are there assets you own that are not increasing in value or earning a return? If your NPO has not already done its spring cleaning, it may be time to look at what assets you can sell. Vehicles, parking lots, vacant lots, buildings–they should all be considered.

5. Diversifying your outreach. Social media is the answer to getting your organization’s message out to the masses. Smart phones are the new information delivery system, but consumers will only let in information they want or trust. Make friends and fans by setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts, and gather your supporters’ cell phone numbers as a way of mobilizing them when you need to.

6. Diversify your fundraising. Try sponsoring a fun run, a 5K or even a long-distance run. Get a booth at a community event and sell something: t-shirts, hand-crafted items, or food (cupcakes, candy, brownies, or ice cream.)

Creativity and diversifying will be the keys to increasing your nonprofit’s income in  2010!

The top ten rated U.S. cites for volunteering are: Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN; Portland, OR; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Kansas City, MO; Columbus, OH; Oklahoma City, OK; Hartford, CT; Denver, CO; and Washington, DC.

Numbers range from 38.4% of all residents volunteering in Minneapolis-St. Paul (908,900 volunteers) to 30.9% of residents (1.3 million volunteers) in Washington.

The top ten rated US states for volunteering are: Utah, Nebraska, Minnesota, Alaska, Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, Kansas, Vermont, and North Dakota.

Here’s how the state numbers break down: from Utah, with an average annual volunteer rate of 43.5% and 817,200 volunteers to North Dakota, with an average volunteer rate of 35% and 174,800 volunteers.

The top activities performed by volunteers were fundraising, collecting and distributing food, general labor, tutoring and teaching, mentoring youth, and management.

The bottom five states? Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Nevada, and New York. Their numbers range from 20.9% to 18.7% of their residents volunteering.

National trends show 60.8 million volunteers, for a rate of 26.2%. The total number of hours volunteered is estimated at 8.1 billion. The places with the highest number of volunteers are religious organizations (35.7%) and educational or youth service organizations (26.7%).

As the economy continues its climb out of recession, volunteers will continue to serve a vital role in the work and success of U.S. non profit organizations.

Source: Volunteering In America

Last week we reported on the year-end picture for charitable giving: traditional holiday gifts to non profits are likely to be way down in 2009 over 2008. But the study revealed some other interesting statistics, too. Using the data wisely to change your non profit’s year end strategy could be an effective way to boost income.

This year, successful non profits are using the recession as a starting point to re-establish relationships and appeal to new and existing donors. The difference is in the message: avoiding the same, stale, year-end letter is essential. Donors and potential supporters are weary and wary this time of year. Everyone knows that non profits need help more than ever—but most people cannot give to every one of the dozens of appeals they receive this time of year.

So here’s some statistics you can use in your year-end holiday appeal: the same charitable giving study reveals that fully three-quarters of Americans surveyed would prefer to receive gifts that help others, rather than traditional holiday clothing, and electronics. And, an overwhelming majority—95%—want the nation’s holiday focus to be on helping children. A message that speaks to the heart of the recipient could go a long way to standing out from the crowd—and being more effective. The fact is that your donors might not know that most of the folks on their holiday gift list would rather see them give a needy organization a donation than give them a present.

So don’t send out the same message this year to your supporters and donors. You can help make gift-giving much easier—and maybe even increase your donations—simply by pointing out that giving gifts of charity and helping children in need is what everyone on their list really wants this year.