Posted on Wednesday, 23rd June 2010 by chris wignall

MoneySense magazine recently published The Charity 100, a series of ratings of Canadian charities based on several factors with the intent “to be a tool for potential donors researching which charities to give money to”. In the nonprofit world this is the kind of thing that fires up the blogosphere and even earns a twitter [...]

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Posted on Friday, 18th June 2010 by chris wignall

I didn’t get much accomplished from a work perspective last week. I spent several hours dealing with my first ever “at fault” car accident, shopped for a car to replace the totalled one, fulfilled an old promise to take my nephews to the zoo, and celebrated my son’s 4th birthday at least three times.
But I [...]

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Posted on Tuesday, 15th June 2010 by chris wignall

This morning the results of the Stronger Together 2010 collaborative granting project were released (Complete list of grantees here.) Having invested a significant part of the past ten months in the process it is a satisfying thing to be able to notify the successful applicants (selected from a total field of 131) and anticipate the [...]

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Posted on Tuesday, 15th June 2010 by chris wignall

My friend and mentor Fred Smith recently posted an insightful article about the tendency for givers to support active programs but resist funding the administrative and supportive costs those programs require. In part he gives this example:
It’s like a business manager in a school where I taught years ago. He had a closet full of [...]

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Posted on Wednesday, 9th June 2010 by chris wignall

Here we go again with another of my commentaries on how charities use blogs, facebook, twitter, youtube and the like. (Previous thoughts here, here, here, and here).
The Stronger Together 2010 funding process revealed clearly that many Canadian charities are wondering what to do with this new media. And, unfortunately, in my opinion some of them [...]

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Posted on Wednesday, 9th June 2010 by chris wignall

Sometimes opportunity knocks, sometimes it seeps through the basement walls.
When recent rains flooded the basement of Stu Taylor’s home outside Winnipeg he didn’t anticipate it leading to positive news coverage for our partner IDE-Canada. To see how personal frustration was turned into national media coverage watch this clip from the CBC or read the release [...]

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Posted on Wednesday, 2nd June 2010 by chris wignall

We are excited at the news that our partners at International Development Enterprises have just been named the first ever winners of the Nestle prize in Creating Shared Value for work they are doing with small scale farmers in Cambodia.
By taking an innovative and market based approach to agricultural sustainability IDE has demonstrated that the [...]

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