Articles by CharityChannel Members
CharityChannel members who have years of experience in their field may apply to join a Contributor's Panel. Once accepted to a panel by the panel's editor, the member will work with the editor to determine article topics and to prepare an article that is ready for publication. With tens of thousands of colleagues in the CharityChannel professional community, this is a key opportunity to give back to your profession by sharing your hard-won expertise and wisdom.
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CharityChannel's WE REVIEW
CharityChannel members who have been admitted to the WE REVIEW Contributors Panel are eligible to receive recently-published books from a variety of publishers (and some self-publishers) to review. Reviews are not limited to books published by CharityChannel Press, the publishing project of the CharityChannel professional community. If you are interested in reviewing books, you are welcome to apply. Note that, even though WE REVIEW has been publishing reviews for over a decade, it has recently been reorganized and re-launched. We took the opportunity to remove prior reviews, since our focus is on newly published books.
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Shaking the Money Tree: The Art of Getting Grants and Donations for Film and Video Projects, 3rd Ed. Review by:
Meredith HancksThursday, March 08, 2012 (1 years 66 days ago)
A must-have resource for those new and veteran to the film and video industry, which also offers terrific insights into fundraising for those of us who are outside of that industry altogether. For those who are working in the film, video, or television industry, it is a foundational text with vital resources. For the rest of us, it offers an insightful look at fundraising that might help us think outside the box a little bit and bring a fresh perspective to our fundraising enterprise.
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Change Philanthropy: Candid Stories of Foundations Maximizing Results through Social Justice Review by:
Meredith HancksFriday, December 09, 2011 (1 years 156 days ago)
Whether you represent a foundation looking to make good decisions about your grantmaking, or you represent a nonprofit seeking to win grants, the stories in this book will give you some amazing insights into the process. These cases help you see how looking at the reasons behind problems, and funding collaborative solutions to those can really make a huge difference in people’s lives. As noted in the foreword, “Social justice philanthropy helps people gain the ability to change their own lives” (p.xiv). We’ve all been invited to learn how to empower communities to create change.
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The Skinny on Time Management: How to Maximize Your 24-Hour Gift Review by:
Meredith HancksWednesday, October 26, 2011 (1 years 200 days ago)
What a fantastic idea for a series! As the author points out in the Introduction to “The Skinny On” Series at the beginning of this book, the “goal is to do the reading for you, identify what is important, distill the key points, and present them in a book that is both instructive and entertaining.”
CharityChannel Press Books
CarityChannel Press is the publishing arm of CharityChannel. Many of the sector’s most experienced, knowledgeable practitioners are part of the CharityChannel professional community. Because of its unique role in the nonprofit sector, CharityChannel Press enjoys a rich pool of prospective authors from which to draw. In addition, the CharityChannel professional community, consisting of tens of thousands of practitioners, forms a natural initial market for the books as does the greater third sector itself. Interested in writing a book or manual?
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Getting Started in Prospect Research: What You Need to Know to Find Who You Need to FindAuthor: Meredith Hancks
Have you recently joined a new organization or found yourself with a new set of duties that include prospect research? Do you believe in the power of data to make informed decisions to help your organization raise more money? Do you want to participate as a valuable member of the fundraising team?
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CharityChannel Press Blog for Authors and Editors
CharityChannel Press is the publishing project of the CharityChannel professional community. In this blogging feature, the authors and editors of our books and manuals share their thoughts, ideas, insights, and advice on topics of interest to busy practitioners. Reading their blogs is a great way to get to know them and to learn about their latest books and manuals. Be sure to jump in and add your comment to blog postings.
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Scheduling Research Blocks Review by:
Meredith HancksSaturday, August 18, 2012 (269 days ago)
Time management is always a tricky thing when you've got a finite number of hours and infinite requests from your colleagues. Scheduling appointments for doing research turns out to be an excellent way to stay on top of an ever-expanding to-do list, and let's you tell people exactly when they can expect to receive the research results. Interestingly, scheduling appointments also makes it easier for you to move things around and do more urgent tasks first, provided you always keep the due dates close at-hand.
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Research for Non-Researchers: Call for Insights! Review by:
Meredith HancksWednesday, April 11, 2012 (1 years 32 days ago)
We are working on the next manual in the Prospect Research series, and we need your ideas! The focus of this book is on those of you in fundraising who do not have "research" in your job title. Perhaps you are a small organization and someone adds research projects as an additional activity, or perhaps you do have a researcher but are in need of some ideas for what you can ask them to find for you. This manual will answer those questions and give you a set of resources to use, whether you're doing the research on the fly, or want to ask the best questions of the researchers around you.
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Private Company Research Workshop - day 1 Review by:
Meredith HancksMonday, April 02, 2012 (1 years 41 days ago)
This month I get to dive into an online workshop on Private Company research and valuation. These types of companies are generally pretty tough to find information about, since they tend to publish only want they want the outside world to know. So I am very curious to learn about new sources for locating information.
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Writing Process, Part II Review by:
Meredith HancksWednesday, March 07, 2012 (1 years 68 days ago)
Writing about writing is fun for me, and allows a way to look at what I'm doing in a different way and see whether it makes sense. In this post, I summarize some of the current writing projects I've got on my plate right now, and discuss some thoughts on the value of writing many things at once.
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Uncovering Donor Intent Review by:
Meredith HancksFriday, February 10, 2012 (1 years 93 days ago)
Trying to determine what a donor's goals were when they gave you a gift decades ago can be a challenging task. Especially when you don't have all the original information, no family members to contact, and the donors are deceased. In this post I briefly explore the journey from the sale of land and creation of the "James and Judy Mars Endowment Fund for Educational Research" (names changed) to the eventual realization that James and Joyce wanted students to be able to study local plant and animal life.
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One letter can make all the difference! Review by:
Meredith HancksWednesday, February 01, 2012 (1 years 103 days ago)
Even though we rarely refer to people with their middle initial, it's a very useful piece of information to have. Many people have written about its importance in the field of prospect research and donor relations, but I was reminded again this week about how much it can facilitate accurate search results and save us time and energy, in addition to getting us the most accurate data. If I hadn't known the middle initial for my prospect, I could have been searching for a very very long time to figure out which of these individuals was the right one, and second-guessing myself all along the way.
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Distilling Personal Correspondence for Prospect History Review by:
Meredith HancksWednesday, January 25, 2012 (1 years 109 days ago)
Creating a prospect profile can be an interesting expedition when you don't even have a database record to start from. We do, however, have a long series of personal letters that were written between a few individuals and stored in the archives at our institution. So in this week's challenge, I set out to uncover which pieces of these letters will be useful for someone essentially making a cultivation call on someone they have never met.
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Writing Process, Part I Review by:
Meredith HancksMonday, January 09, 2012 (1 years 125 days ago)
Writing is a really fun activity for me. So in this first post examining my writing process for Charity Channel, I'm exploring just the first steps when I start a new project.
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Tackling Data Entry Tasks Review by:
Meredith HancksTuesday, January 03, 2012 (1 years 131 days ago)
Sometimes a new year (or even a new week) is a great time to start on a project that's been staring you in the face for a while. This year's activity for my office is to get all the research data into the right parts of the database. We didn't used to have places for it, so we created profiles and stored info in file cabinets. Now we have a place for all of it, so it's time to jump into the mountain of papers.
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Researching Potential Duplicates Review by:
Meredith HancksTuesday, December 20, 2011 (1 years 145 days ago)
Donor record cleanup is (or should be) an ongoing activity in any organization. And it can get
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Prospect Research and Donor Motivation Review by:
Meredith HancksTuesday, December 13, 2011 (1 years 152 days ago)
Prospect research software is pretty robust these days...but how do we research the things that it cannot find? Can we use the data we find and analyze the connections to uncover donor motivations?