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.

The Obama Administration is proposing changes to the tax code that will cap the deduction for charitable gifts at 28%. The theory is that lower income people pay 28% marginal taxes, and their charitable giving saves them 28%. High income people pay 36% marginal taxes, so their gifts save 36%. Since the savings is greater, this is unfair to poor people, so the logic goes. But the question is less about fairness to poor people and more about the fairness to charities.

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.

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.