Short essays on important current philanthropy issues.
5/3/2004
In this collection of essays, Susan Raymond provides food for thought on diverse issues facing philanthropies. These short essays explore current topics like organizational and benchmarking, the effect of state deficits on nonprofits, and offers suggestions for writing grant proposals that are grounded in analytics and quantitative data. "In the Mission Meets the Numbers: Is it Okay to Lie?" Raymond explores how a nonprofit's failure to perform due diligence or provide legal oversight when validating the claims and data they use to justify needs in their sector can create a lack of credibility that hurts other nonprofits, as well as their own cause. In her essay, "Does Wall Street Matter?" the discussion centers on how market swings affect charities. Raymond focuses on elasticity (a measure of the responsiveness of one variable to another) and urges practitioners to ask questions about finance and the economy—for example, how much must the economy fall before rates of giving decline? The Future of Philanthropy is particularly helpful in its use of supporting data and the sources used in each essay. Best read as a book to get up to speed on philanthropic issues, it also serves as a launching point for discussion and research for those who choose to delve deeper into a topic.