Social Trendspotter Weekly Blog
Are Performance Reviews Still Relevant? 8 Ways to Make Nonprofit Performance Reviews More Effective
Performance review season can feel like déjà vu: Change the dates on last year’s form and try to remember what happened over the past 12 months. But if an employee hears something for the first time during a performance review, the process has already failed. A good...
How to Write a Nonprofit Business Plan
One of my favorite cartoons is from Tom Fishburne’s “Brand Camp.” It does a great job of illustrating the inner monologue we all have when considering a new venture. I often tell my students that successful entrepreneurship is half about skill (what you know and do)...
How Nonprofits Can Compete and Collaborate Through Coopetition
Should nonprofits act more like businesses? To be sure, nonprofits can learn a great deal from business. Like any business today, we need to use data, invest in talent, understand the full cost of our work to build strong, sustainable organizations. A compelling...
30 Years, One Love Letter and a New Book
This year marks a personal milestone for me: 30 years working in the social sector. Three decades of learning from nonprofit leaders, students, board members, volunteers and communities have shaped how I think about what it takes to build organizations that last. And...
How to Spot Your Nonprofit Competition
I still remember the day I learned one of the most important lessons about competition from an unlikely source: Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s. One of my professors at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business told our class the legendary story. During a campus...
How Social Entrepreneurship Can Become a Movement: Six Shifts Shaping What Comes Next
Every once in a while, a conference does more than fill your notebook with new ideas. Sometimes, in rare moments of true inspiration, you can feel the energy as people and ideas bounce off one another. That is why I often quip, “Innovation happens through collision.”...
The Social Ripple Effect: How Social Change Really Happens
One of my favorite questions to ask students is: Do you believe society can really change? When I first started teaching social entrepreneurship, the answer was almost always yes. My students believed they could make a difference. They debated ideas, challenged...
Hot Nonprofit Trends for Summer 2026
This summer, the World Cup reminded us that halftime is about more than taking a break. It is the moment when teams step away from the action, study the field and ask important questions: What is working? Where are we losing ground? What needs to change before we head...
Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Why Belonging May Be the Next Frontier in Community Design
Long before loneliness became a public health concern, the television show “Cheers” reminded us of something timeless. At its heart, it was never really about a neighborhood bar. It was about having a place where people recognized you, welcomed you and noticed when...
An Emerging Trend in Nonprofit Leadership: Professional Interim Leadership
One of the greatest joys of my work is traveling across the country to speak at conferences and to learn alongside nonprofit leaders tackling some of our sector's biggest challenges. I always come home with new ideas worth exploring. One topic that recently caught my...
