Quote of the Day about Volunteer Work

Rick Cohen commenting in the article Solving Problems Through Service: CAP Event Looks at State of Volunteering:

At a meeting of the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of the speakers said that “70 percent of nonprofits are completely volunteer-run.  That statistic is amazing, but the nation has to ensure that it doesn’t confuse the value that unpaid (or low-paid stipended) volunteers bring with the necessity of creating good career paths with livable salaries in the nonprofit sector.”

Cohen also mentioned that the speakers acknowledged that most volunteers are middle-class suburbanites who can afford to work for free. But when they said it was important to make volunteering more accessible to people in low-income areas, it struck him, he said, as “missing the almost constant mutual aid that occurs in low-income communities that doesn’t get classified as ‘volunteering’ (just like the constant flow of charitable donations as remittances that don’t get counted as charitable giving in minority neighborhoods). Moreover,” he added, “it would be so much better to see low-income people’s employment and income prospects raised so that they don’t have to fear the trade-off between time spent volunteering and time spent earning an income.”

The Math Behind No Good Deed Going Unpunished

City Money: Why Make Non-profits Responsible?

According to the New York Times article “Nonprofit Groups Hopeful but Wary as City Aims to Cut Red Tape,” Mayor Bloomberg’s administration is about to overhaul its system for distributing city money.

Having a centralized office for efficiently distributing money to non-profits is the goal. Currently, non-profits are promised funding for various projects through city council members who then tell the relevant city department to fund the programs. However,  each department has different rules and different deadlines for proposals and reports. I’ve talked to heads of a number of organizations who depend on city funds for soup kitchens and pantries, and they all throw up their hands. The money is always late and the paperwork is arcane.

So anything that simplifies the process is good.

However, I don’t think a simplified process for distributing money is what we New Yorkers need. I think our attention is being misdirected.

Build a reputation for expertise. Create leads.

HubSpot held a free webinar yesterday on “The State Of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation.” HubSpot’s business is helping their 2,500 high-tech clients manage the leads they generate online. Although I don’t think they have many non-profit clients,* some of the research they presented should work for us as well.

HubSpot surveyed their clients, got 1,400 valid answers, and aggregated the results to determine which inbound marketing techniques worked best.

But first, what’s “inbound marketing”?