It is hard to imagine Mergers and Acquisitions in the nonprofit sector--especially acquisitions. How much is a nonprofit worth? What would one nonprofit pay another one for its resources? Would there be hostile takeovers or poison pill structures? Probably not. Mergers, on the other hand, might be a good idea. I saw two articles referencing this on Monday of this week, in fact.

The most recent study released by The Boston Foundation, "Passion & Purpose; Raising the Fiscal Fitness Bar for Massachusetts Nonprofits" is an excellent study of the nonprofit community in the commonwealth (http://tbf.org/Home.aspx ).

We are pleased to announce that we have begun inviting nonprofit leaders in the greater Boston area to attend an executive breakfast on managing performance with the Balanced Scorecard. Our keynote speaker is the Balanced Scorecard co-creator, David Norton. The breakfast will be on July 16, 2008.

Ascendant is very interested in learning more about how foundations measure impact across their grantees. As a result, we created a simple survey for attendees of the Council on Foundations Leadership Summit last month. We are now opening up the suvey to foundations that come to our website

A constant problem for many not-for-profit organizations is recruiting, engaging, and retaining volunteers. The volunteer labor force has a lot of benefits: it costs little and is typically passionate about the cause. But volunteers bring baggage, too: there's a lot of turnonver and retraining required and they typically have their own ideas (not all bad) on how to acheive the organization's objectives.