Picks of the Week: Week: April 11 - 17, 2010

TechWebsite of the Week – Jim Collins

This website offers resources by management guru and author of "Good to Great", Jim Collins. It provides access to the teaching, writing and ideas of Jim Collins including free access to insights, articles, audio files, answers to the latest questions and more. Go to: http://www.jimcollins.com/index.html.

Publication of the Week -- The Power of Legacy and Planned Gifts: How Nonprofits and Donors Work Together to Change the World by Kevin Johnson

From the publisher: The Power of Legacy and Planned Gifts provides practical knowledge and tools nonprofits need to connect with loyal donors, resulting in a stream of future income that will sustain and advance their mission. Filled with illustrative real-world examples and cases, as well as worksheets to guide the reader, the book details a simple, multi-stage process for nonprofits to build a pipeline of future bequest income and offers donors perspective on making their gifts in a way that will best accomplish their goals. Click to preview this book on Amazon.com.


Trend of the Week – Donors Showing More Willingness to Give

Donors are growing more confident in their ability to give to charity as the economy shows signs of stabilizing, according to a new poll of more than 500 donors. Nearly half of the donors questioned said they would give as much as they did in 2009, compared with the 44 percent who predicted they would give the same amount in a poll conducted two months ago by Campbell Rinker, a Valencia Calif. company that regularly questions donors on their confidence levels. Most of the donors said the economy was the main influence on their giving. Donors to religious charities continued to have the most positive outlook, according to the report. To download a copy of the report, go to: http://www.campbellrinker.com.


Resource of the Week – Consensus Building Guide

Robert’s Rules of Order is a fine way to run a formal meeting or a town hall vote, but too rigid for a business meeting where the agenda is to build consensus behind decisions. This is a freely available excerpt from the 1999 book, The Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement, by Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, and Jennifer Thomas-Larmer, and posted by the Public Disputes Program at Harvard Law School. This chapter, “Short Guide to Consensus Building,” provides a no-frills, step-by-step approach to running a creative, productive meeting, down to the level of how to invite participants who might be assuming a legal liability by attending. Go to: http://web.mit.edu.


Tech Tip of the Week -- Insert a Worksheet Based on a Template in Excel 2007

• Right click a worksheet tab
• Select Insert
• Choose the template
• Click OK

You can choose a custom template which you have created, one of the templates available when you click the Spreadsheet Solutions tab, or click the Templates on Office Online button and choose from hundreds of templates available from Microsoft.