Beverly A Browning - Nonprofit Kit for Dummies

Nonprofit Kit For Dummies, 6th Edition

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946367

ISBN: 978-1-119-83572-1

ISBN 978-1-119-83574-5 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-83573-8 (ebk)

1. Chapter 3
2. Chapter 4
3. Chapter 8
4. Chapter 10
5. Chapter 12
6. Chapter 17

1. Chapter 4
2. Chapter 7
3. Chapter 12
4. Chapter 15
5. Chapter 19

It may sound corny, but we feel a certain sense of mission when it comes to nonprofits. Weve started them, directed them, raised funds for them, consulted for them, volunteered for them, given money to them, and written about them. Weve worked with nonprofits in one way or another for more years than we care to remember.

Why have we continued to work for nonprofit organizations? Yes, we care about others and want to see the world become a better place our values are important to us. But, to be honest, thats not the only reason weve worked for nonprofit organizations for so many years. We believe the reason is that we cant think of anything more interesting or more challenging to do.

Starting a new program is exciting. Securing your first grant is thrilling. Working with the multifaceted personalities that come together on a board of directors is fascinating. Learning a new skill because no one else is there to do it is fun. Seeing the faces of satisfied clients, walking along a restored lakeshore, hearing the applause of audiences all are gratifying.

Thats why we do it.

We try to cover the gamut in this book everything you need to know to start and manage a charitable organization, from applying for your tax exemption to raising money to pay for your programs. We include supplemental information at Dummies.com, including forms to help you create a budget, examples of grant proposals, and links to websites where you can find more help.

We also attempt to give you a birds-eye view of the economys nonprofit sector. When you look at financial resources, for example, nonprofits are much like the rest of the world: Most of the wealth is held by relatively few nonprofit organizations, a certain number of them are in the middle, and many, many more struggle to make ends meet.

Note: When we refer to nonprofit organizations, unless we say otherwise, were talking about organizations that have been recognized as 501(c)(3) nonprofits and are considered public charities by the IRS.

We try to be honest about the difficulties youll sometimes face. You probably wont be able to achieve everything you set out to accomplish, and youll always wish you had more resources to do more things. Still, we cant imagine doing anything else. Maybe youll feel the same way after you jump into the nonprofit world.

As youre reading, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If youre reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as its noted in the text, pretending the line break doesnt exist. If youre reading this as an e-book, youve got it easy just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

To make the content more accessible, we divided it into five parts:

• : Getting Familiar with the Nonprofit Framework
• : Bringing Your A-Game to Nonprofit Management
• : Raising Funds Successfully
• : The Part of Tens
• : Appendixes

When writing this book, we made some assumptions about who may be interested in reading it. Here are some of the readers we imagined:

• You have an idea that will help solve a problem in your community, and you believe that starting a nonprofit organization is the best way to put your idea into action.