Charity Case: How the Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up For Itself and Really Change the World

And because the demand for cheap, prepackaged oversimplifications of complicated subjects is very high and because, in some cases, people are looking for a quick excuse not to give, these off-the-shelf positions proliferate and quickly harden into stereotypes.

The more charities give the public what it wants—low “overhead”—the less those charities can spend educating the public about what they actually do. And the public considers any effort by charities to educate them about what the charities actually do to be wasteful overhead to begin with. The less the sector educates the public, the lower the publi

Bargaineering,

Although targeted toward a single charity, the assertion exemplifies the illogical yet widely held view that money not spent directly on what is perceived as “the cause” is money not spent on the cause at all.

I instead refer to the sector throughout the book as the humanitarian sector. Others call it the social profit sector, the third sector, the independent sector, or a number of other things. Any one of them is better than nonprofit.

If you put these five things together—you can’t use money to attract talent, you can’t advertise, you can’t take risks, you can’t invest in long-term results, and you don’t have a stock market—then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole system cha

Since 1970, the number of nonprofit organizations that have crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier is 144. The number of for-profits that have crossed it is 46,136.25 Eighty-eight

We did this all for a fixed fee that averaged just 4.01 percent of donations—about the same amount banks and credit card companies charge just to process the donations. One hundred percent of every donation went directly to charities, which then reimbursed us for expenses.

Change is a faster caterpillar. Transformation is a butterfly.