Red Rooster Group Promotes Center for Non-profits Conference

As part of our commitment to the nonprofit sector, Red Rooster Group is proud to sponsor and promote the New Jersey Center for Non-Profits’ conference.

Red Rooster Group is providing naming, branding and promotional services for the conference including development of the theme, conference logo, and design of postcards, posters, and website graphics.

Titled, Ready, Set Recover: Succeeding in the New Landscape, theme is intended to convey the practical nature the sessions, with hands-on advice that nonprofits can use to improve their organizations.

The Conference will bring together nonprofits in the state to gain insight into big picture issues and learn practical tactics for 
improving their organizations. Sessions will address the issues of accountability, advocacy, boards of the future, collaboration, human resources, marketing, media, and technology.

The conference will be held on December 9, 2009 at the Crowne Plaza Monroe / Jamesburg, NJ. Other sponsors include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Novartis, Prudential, Bank of America, Mercadien Group and Nonprofit Central.

A Nonprofit Sector-Wide Conference Can Bring Needed Clout

Dan Pallotta calls for TED-like, sector-wide conference for the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds asserting that it will be a perfect vehicle for massive change. I couldn’t agree more. And understanding the reticence of nonprofits to see themselves as a sector, I want to add that another benefit of bringing together the various appendages of the philanthropic world is to generate much needed clout for the nonprofit sector in gaining the goodwill of Congress and the various oversight agencies.Continue reading

CT Nonprofit Conference Challenges Nonprofits to Imagine & Innovate

The Connecticut Association of Nonprofits’s 7th Annual Conference is built around the theme of: Imagine. Innovate. Impact. Keynote speaker William Strickland, the President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation will address the Art of Leadership and the Business of Social Innovation, in what is being billed as a simple, optimistic message for leaders: give people the tools they need, treat them with respect, and they will perform miraculous deeds.Continue reading

The 2009 Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship Conference

I urge you to attend the 2009 Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship Conference on Wednesday, 9/16/09. My friend Darian Rodriguez Heyman will be presenting alongside Ralph Nader, and it promises to be be an exciting, fruitful event.

This confrerence is designed to help executives from nonprofits, social enterprises, and small and medium-sized businesses better understand important trends and key factors for success as they seek to grow their organizations in these challenging times.
The program will feature presentations from:
  • Ralph Nader, former U.S. presidential candidate, consumer advocate and founder of The Center for Study of Responsive Law and Public Citizen
  • Darian Rodriguez Heyman, advisor to the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development and former Executive Director at Craigslist Foundation
  • Dick Sweeney, co-founder of Keurig Coffee
DETAILS

DATE: September 16, 2009
TIME: 8 am – 12 pm
LOCATION: Rothman Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, one of the top 20 entrepreneurship centers in the nation (Princeton Review)

Understanding & Leveraging Your Nonprofit's Lifecycle Stage

I attended the Organizational Health and Nonprofit Lifecycle seminar, held by Don Crocker and John Brother at the Support Center for Nonprofit Management.
Understanding the life cycle is essential to any nonprofit’s continued success, no matter what stage it’s in (Idea/Startup, Growth/Maturity, Turnaround/Terminal Phases).
They first discussed criteria for board development and gave specific advice on steps that a nonprofit in the Idea/Startup phase could take to build a board, including forming a steering committee as a first step, producing an initial event to attract people, and leveraging members’ social networking.
One of the most compelling challenges for all nonprofits, is in marketing and branding. Here’s a short list of key challenges:
• Differentiating your organization from others.
• Investing in fundraising and marketing infrastructure.
• Using the Internet to build your nonprofit’s brand, create visibility, attract a donor base, and develop a community.
They suggest that it is possible to work with other organizations as resources towards addressing these challenges.
Then the audience learned more details on the profile of each stage in a nonprofit’s life cycle, in the areas of Operations, Governance, Leadership, Obstacles, and Opportunities and my realization is that I tend to work with nonprofits in the Growth/Maturity phase.
Here are some specific characteristics of the Growth/Maturity phase:
• Operations: 7- 20 years in operation
• Governance: board turnover policy and strategy is in place, and power is shared between Executive Director and board
• Leadership: since there are many managers on staff, Executive Director must possess good management and communication skills
• Obstacles: remaining client-centered rather than policy-bound, keeping staff motivated around mission, building strong financial footing from endowment or reserve, maintaining a programmatic edge, based on a continued relevancy
• Opportunity: new staff and board introduce new ideas, organization is known in community, adequate resources enable some risk-taking

Do you know what stage of growth your nonprofit is in? At the Non-For-Profit Leadership Summit VII, Don Crocker and John Brother of the Support Center for Nonprofit Management explained the stages:

Idea Phase: Imagine Inspire
Start Up Phase: The Labor of Love
Growth Phase: Ground & Grow
Maturity Phase: Produce & Sustain
Decline & Turnaround: Review & Renew
Terminal: Merge or Close Gracefully

Continue reading

UJA-Federation MAP Program Celebrates 25 Years

Last night, the UJA-Federation held a reception celebrating 25 years of its Management Assistance Program, its internal volunteer matching service to provide help to its 150 funded agencies.

MAP consultants have worked on more than 1,100 projects for UJA-Federation beneficiary agencies. Services have included strategic planning, board development, marketing, branding and creative services.

Red Rooster Group has provided pro bono branding services through MAP. The branding we did for ENGAJE!, a joint educational venture to help foster awareness of Jewish values to early childhood teachers was featured in MAP’s 25th Anniversary program. In addition, I was featured in a video of MAP consultants discussing their experiences.

ENGAJE! Stationery

For the ENGAJE! initiative, we created a logo and stationery items, brand manual, as well as invitations and program guide for their successful launch event. We are pleased that these items were selected as showcase examples to be featured in MAP’s 25th Anniversary brochure (shown above).

Links

Advice-Link Events Help Nonprofits

Sue Green, Founder of Nonprofit Central and Howard Levy, Principal of Red Rooster Group, co-produce Advice-Link events for nonprofits.

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Nonprofits face pressing problems, but often lack the time or resources to vet consultants. Advice-Link events address that need. Nonprofits can sign up for 30 minute sessions with up to three consultants specializing in strategic planning, board development and program effectiveness and other areas of nonprofit fundraising, marketing and management to get specific feedback and direction on their issue.

This event is styled after the successful Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Bootcamp’s Ask the Experts sessions and the Nonprofit Consulting Day sponsored by the Baruch College School of Public Affairs’ Nonprofit Group. Advice-Link is sponsored by ADP and the Change Group.

Advice-Link events are produced independently and are also offered through nonprofit associations as a benefit to their members or as an adjunct to their conferences. The last Advice-Link event on March 24, 2009 was produced for Governance Matters.

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Advice-Link events provide one-on-one advice for nonprofits by vetted consultants.

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Great Response from Participants

“I found the Advice-Link event very helpful and interesting. The structure encourages nonprofit staff to finely hone our  inquiries and truly get to the heart of the matter at hand, depending on who  we are talking to so that in and of itself, is a valuable exercise for those  participating. The time provided by the consultants is greatly  appreciated also, especially these days.”

– Cathy Sharp, Director Of Development & Communications, Greenwich House, Inc.

Red Rooster Group IconRed Rooster Group is a New York based graphic design firm that creates effective brands, websites, and marketing campaigns to increase your visibility, fundraising, and communications effectiveness. Contact us at info@redroostergroup.com.

Ami Dar’s Online Tools for Effectiveness


At the CT Association of Nonprofits 6th Annual Conference, Ami Dar, the founder of Idealist, spoke about using online tools to communicate more effectively within an organization. His 70-person company uses Google Docs to share documents and Skype to hold video calls with each other around the world, using the internet and avoiding phone bills.

He urges nonprofits to embrace these tools, which bypass traditional hierarchies, and create a more streamlined organization. His organization’s adoption of these methods was driven by the younger generation – provided the tools, but without a mandate to use them, they naturally tended to them – a fine formula for nonprofits.

WAKE UP CALL: Will you allow the younger generation to drive change in your organization? What steps will you take to lead the change? The next time you email a document to a colleague, try posting it on Google Docs instead.

RELATED POST: How Lunatic is Your Fringe?

Facing the Recession

Citing a $6 billion state deficit, Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy reported at the recent Connecticut Nonprofits Conference that the last eight years have brought “an assault on social services.”

“Government has an obligation to provide for its citizens.” He delivered a passionate call to fund the state’s safety net, starting with a 1.5% average increase in nonprofit aid. “The needs of the least among us should be taken care of first.”

Fellow presenter and NYU Professor Dr. Paul Light predicted massive consolidation in the nonprofit sector due to recession. Smaller organizations will likely join together to reduce administration costs.

According to Light, nonprofit organizations represent a $1 trillion sector, powered by 11.5 million employees and 61 million volunteers.

He views a reduction in the number of nonprofits as inevitable and a chance to strengthen the sector. Instead of avoiding the situation, we should embrace the opportunity to start a strategic dialogue regarding which organizations should go under and which ones should survive.

WAKE UP CALL: As a member of the nonprofit community, how can you engage peers to begin open, honest communication about the challenging times ahead?