For many of us it is budget season and time to decide how and where we will spend our money next year. Sadly, too many places, especially resource strapped organizations simply take last year's budget and modify it by a percent or two. But there is no excuse for just letting it ride. If you want to achieve your mission you need to take the time to periodically review the effectiveness of your programs. Do you programs support your strategy? Does your Balanced Scorecard or strategy management system reveal the impact of the programs? Or are there corrective actions that are required?

A few years ago, V. Kasturi Rangan from Harvard Business School argued that nonprofits need to have more than just a lofty mission to survive. In his article, entitled "Lofty Missions, Down-to-Earth Plans," he argued that nonprofits need a systematic method that connects their callings to their programs.

Yesterday, InsideNGO kicked off their week-long annual meeting in Washington, DC. The first few days focus on Finance, Grants, Contracts, and Personal/Professional Development. The next few days focuses on Human Resources. Ascendant and one of our clients, Rare, gave a presentation yesterday afternoon.

I get a regular email from HBS Working Knowledge, and today's email had a very interesting article in it. The article was called Trusth in Giving: Experimental Evidence on the Welfare Effects of Informed Giving to the Poor. Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee is doing research with Christina Fong to study whether people give more when they understand the plight of the person they are giving to. They try to answer the questions about how giving changes based on the context of the group being helped. Would you give more or less money to individuals who are poor because of circumstances they control (gambling or drug problems) or circumstances out of their control (children or economically devistated region). His research is interesting.

On June 18, the New York Times in coordination with the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York and Philanthropy New York (the old Regional Association of Grantmakers). Like last year, this event was held in the wonderful NY Times center, and the presentations were excellent.

I recently had the opportunity to lead a clinic at GSMI's Enterprise Risk Management summit in New York. It was a very interesting and interactive session where we really had the opportunity to "roll up our sleeves" and talk about how risk management works (or doesn't, for that matter) in the trenches.

Columbia Business School's "Ideas@Work" blog had an interesting post last week entitled "The Nonprofit MBA." The premise was that in a time of unprecedented challenge for non-profits, hiring a MBA may be a way for social sector organizations to tap into management expertise that can help them survive. (Since MBAs are a lot cheaper now than they used to be!)

There is always a silver lining. The economy has slowed, endowments have lost value and donations have declined. The hard work of the nonprofit sector is as needed now as ever. But this recession may help cure one of the critical crises facing the nonprofit sector today: the Senior Management Shortage.

It has been an interesting seven months since I have written about the potential for Mergers and Acquisitions in the nonprofit sector. The question in my mind has always been about how you would conduct mergers with nonprofits. What would be the incentive? Where would the money come from? The payout might be more efficient delivery of services, but the people that get the services typically are not paying, so they cannot force consolidation in the industry. The New York Times might have answered my longstanding question today.

The Winter 2009 issue of Sloan Management Review had an article entitled Does It Pay To Be Good? For those of us in the social and public sector, the answer is "usually not enough." While this article focuses on the corporate sector, and how for-profit organizations are using corporate responsibility as a marketing scheme, it has a few important lessons for us in the social sector as well.