I had the pleasure of being at the best practices workshop and the awards ceremony at the Washington Post today. This was the 15 year anniversary of the award for excellence in nonprofit management. The Center for Nonprofit Management manages the award program. This year, there were some great finalists.

Did you receive a postcard when you got home from the CLA conference? Our mailing company sent it a week after we wanted, so it would have been hard for you to bring the postcard to our exhibit booth. Don't worry, the offer from the postcard is still good through May 15, 2009.

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!)

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.

I'm very happy to report that the first-ever Mission Driven Performance Management Summit in Washington, DC, was a smashing success! We had over 80 people in attendance and had incredible discussions about how the Balanced Scorecard can be used to drive lasting strategic change.

Okay, so now we have a new President, and the stock market is down about 9% this year already. This is after about a 35-40% drop last year. The market is a good proxy for the economy. Not only did the economy crash last year, but it is still not looking good this year, even with Hope and Change in the highest office of the country. The President yesterday said that is it is time to rebuild what America stands for and time to recommit to our values (more or less). What I heard, was that is it time for a new strategy. This also applies to your organization.

The Wall Street Journal's Carl Bailik wrote a good article in the December 19, 2008 paper about the value of rating charities. He says that most individual donors do not have the time to fully research all of their charitable donations. Most people spend much less time researching their donations than researching their stock picks (clearly, being in the WSJ, this is targeting a certain audience). But donors still want to make sure their contributions are going to good causes, and not just going to pay for overhead or fundraising expenses.

There has always been a big focus in the nonprofit community on helping improve public schools in America. Recently, I have seen a lot of information written about how foundations and others are helping schools use data to learn about what works and to drive results.

For years, management frameworks from the business sector have been foisted upon unsuspecting social sector organizations. Not surprisingly, many of them have proven wholly inappropriate for organizations that are not driven purely by financial motives. So why has the Balanced Scorecard been such a success in the social sector?

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you make something as murky as "strategy" a little more clear. But what should you choose? There's "theory of change." And "logic models." And if you are a regular reader of this blog, we've given you an earful about "strategy maps."