Unrelated Income and the Unexpected Consequences to Your Mission

by David LawsonNo Comments
The IRS report on unrelated business income at colleges and universities reminded me of the potential perils of creating revenue from activities unrelated to your mission. I am not thinking about the tax consequences; I will leave that to the folks in Washington. I am pondering the consequences to the mission, and by association, fundraising. This issue first came to my attention while I was working with a well-known university. We were discussing the giving patterns of affluent alums when a major gifts officer lamented about people who only made a gift in a year when they went on the alumni trip. These were not ordinary trips. They were 10-14 day adventures combining exotic locations and encounters with famous people. Faculty who were experts in the areas being explored rounded out the experience. Soon after this I was at a museum delivering their screening results and heard the same comment. Edu-cations had become all the rage and it certainly made sense for the...
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Time for a Mission Underwriters Laboratory

by David LawsonNo Comments
For returning readers you know I'm pushing hard to make the mission the center of the social sector universe and pushing back even harder on the idea of cost-of-fundraising. When you push you get push-back, and some of it has been around the challenges of measuring the mission AKA impact. The difficulty of evaluating impact may well be the reason the watchdog groups like Charity Navigator went for the easy math and created the whole cost-of-fundraising farce. Certainly the IRS 990 doesn't help. It tells as much about what an organization does as the 1040 tells about you and me. What if there was a place that looked only at the mission the way the Underwriters Laboratory only looks at products? The UL doesn't give a wit if the company is profitable. It simply wants to know if the product does what it says it does, and whether it is safe. Here is their mission statement:   Dedicated to promoting safe living and working...
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