As the number of charities has grown in recent decades, so has the gap between the expertise and competency of the professionals in charge of fundraising, and the expectations and desires of their boards. Competition for the philanthropic dollar is intense.

The Fund Development Audit workbook, based on current best practices, covers professional competency frameworks, training programs, books, papers and presentations in order to provide consensus on how best to advance your fund development program.

While the audit tool has significant value on its own, it can be used for input to larger, more comprehensive organizational improvement processes. You will find that once you initiate the dialogue, you are engaged in a change leadership opportunity.

FORA on Leadership - a new series from Canadian Fundraising &Philanthropy. Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, Michael Edwards, former director, Ford Foundation. Here is your opportunity to participate in creating a new conversation about change, one in which civil society teaches business as much as the reverse.  While the assumption that business can fix philanthropy is flawed, we still owe a great deal to the philanthrocapitalists and can work together to create social transformation.

Thursday, June 10, Breakfast, book & presentation, 8 - 9:15 a.m.; additional small group consultation to 11:30. Seating limited for small group session. 89 Chestnut Conference Centre, Toronto.

Option 1 - breakfast, book & presentation, $107.

Option 2 - option 1 plus small group consultation and your choice of newsletter subscriptions, $307.

http://www.canadianfundraiser.com/workshop_Viewer.asp?workshop_ID=384

Leaders of Henvey Inlet First Nation are “pleased and relieved” that the Canada Revenue Agency has revoked the charitable status of the Henvey Inlet First Nation Community Support Organization. “We think this revocation is going to help us in our lawsuit against that organization,” said Chief Wayne McQuabbie, who found suspicious records after taking office in 2007.

He discovered a confusing and complex scheme, and promptly turned the HIFNCSO’s records over to the CRA. The agency’s auditors pieced together a fraud involving hundreds of wealthy off-reserve taxpayers, offshore banks and millions in receipted donations that were not passed on to the First Nation, according to Henvey Inlet’s press release.

He’d run a school board with a $2.2 billion budget and 27,000 employees. As chief of a municipal library system he’d built a widely admired central library and driven new construction and renovation throughout the system.

He was also a confident fundraising volunteer who didn’t hesitate to remind his friends that he had already supported their favourite causes and it was time for their payback.

Yet within six months of stepping into a nonprofit CEO position, Darrell Skidmore was ready to leave the United Way of Burlington and Greater Hamilton.

Did the bottom fall through the floor of charitable giving in 2009? Is direct mail dead and buried in a digital world? Did major donors stop giving last year like our instincts told us they would?

Each year I get the opportunity to look at the data of a number of brilliant Canadian organizations that are part of Pareto Fundraising’s benchmarking cooperative. Their data allows me to cut through the clutter to find out how donors have genuinely behaved.