Calendar

Presented for members of the MACC Alliance of Connected Communities, this session focuses on using Facebook as a tool for community engagement on issues related to nonprofits serving specific neighborhoods.

Nonprofits have a unique opportunity to employ the new tools of crowdfunding – getting large amounts of small donations for a specific time and reason. This session will review the common tools (Razoo/GiveMN, Kickstarter, Indiegogo) and the elements of successful campaigns that leverage the unique assets of a nonprofit mission. Presented for participants of the Financial Resiliency & Social Enterprise program.

The communications work of a nonprofit sometimes gets lumped into “management and general” costs and can miss all the resources needed for success. Better understanding of how to cover these costs can create a more complete reflection of program costs, and the hidden value which supports these programs through outreach and partnerships. This session will demonstrate how to cover staff time across the organization as both a function of a program budget and a distinct communications budget using allocations, and provide templates for traditional communications costs. We’ll also look at return on investment for new marketing efforts and compare them to returns from traditional strategies.

This workshop is part of the 2013 Nonprofit Communicator Workshop Series, From Paper to Practice: Real World Communications Planning.

Corporate philanthropy is seeking new partnership with nonprofits. How can your organization leverage money and employee engagement?

This session will address a new way to engage corporate philanthropy. The old model suggested an application for resources and a report at the end of the grant cycle. A new model leverages new tools to engage philanthropy at levels of support beyond just grant dollars.

Join this session to discuss the evolving expectations around developing authentic relationships between nonprofits and corporate partners. Examples of strategies and tools to be covered in this session include:

• Creative ideas for maximizing the relationship between a nonprofit and corporate partner – ideas which move away from a one-time transaction to a long-term relationship.
• Mission advocacy development using corporate employees to amplify the impact of other efforts, such as social media campaigns on Give to the Max Day.
• Dynamics of corporate/association sponsorships including a focus on brand awareness and individualized sponsor packages.
• Skilled volunteer engagements using the expertise of corporate volunteers in mission services outside of board service.
• Software platforms which provide new insights to nonprofits and corporate partners about how corporate employees engage in the mission of nonprofits.
• Team support exercises have been successful in the past (Brush with Kindness, etc…) but new options to engage team support in specific grant work can be discovered using corporate support and serendipity tools.

Outcomes:

• Attendees will learn about trends in gaining philanthropic support from employee engagement. Nonprofits incorporating these themes in grant applications and outcome measurements will continue to increase their competitive advantage in the grant funding cycle.
• Attendees will expand their confidence to seek creative sponsorship opportunities to meet the needs of their mission and the objectives of for-profit partners.

This session is being offered in conjunction with the Minnesota Foundations 2014 session in the afternoon. Register for both workshops and we’ll provide you with a complimentary lunch.

Combined giving is changing as tools for how we give become easier to use and more powerful. Where United Way, the Combined Federal Campaign, and other workplace giving campaigns had a powerful advantage in collaborative giving the in past, new options are quickly changing the game. Crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo opened the floodgates, and were quickly followed by collaborative giving events such as Give to the Max Day in Minnesota and Giving Tuesday.

Join Steve Boland of Next in Nonprofits for an interactive discussion of what is coming in the world of federated giving, and what both nonprofit organizations and giving aggregators should be doing to be ahead of the curve. This hour will include workplace engagement via social campaigns, aligning giving and true engagement via tools such as Your Cause and Benevity, and moving from just crowdfunding to crowdsourcing nonprofit action.

RESCHEDULED. This event was postponed from January 27 due to extreme cold.

How do you link your arts activities to measurable outcomes that show the value and impact of your organization? It doesn’t have to be complicated. This arts-focused session on program evaluation will help you understand the differences between outputs and outcomes, ways quantitative and qualitative measures can be used to reinforce each other, and how to create a theory of change statement that can be the basis of a logic model. While no outcomes-based evaluation is ever perfect, the goal is transparency and clarity of assumptions. You will leave with a with a draft logic model based on a draft theory of change statement, and an understanding of what outputs to measure to demonstrate your outcomes.