Wanted: Director Of Foundation Relations

Are you a nonprofit professional that has significant experience with foundations? If you answered "yes" to this question, the newest featured position from the Nonprofit Job Seeker might be of interest to you.

The North Shore Animal League of America (NSALA) is looking to hire a Director of Foundation Relations to lead the effort to build and sustain relationships with national foundations and to leverage resources of the foundation community to help NSALA’s reach its organizational goals and grow its new national initiative. This will be done with a number of methods, including  identifying new prospects and cultivating and stewarding relationships with program officers at regional and national foundations and corporations.

Other responsibilities include:

• Research and contact foundation and corporate contribution prospects;
• Prepare proposals as well as written research reports;
• Identify new donor prospects;
• Oversee prospect screening;
• Be the lead grant writer and liaison with institutional funders; and,
• Work closely to align grant sources to key strategic initiatives.

The ideal candidate will have at least 10 years of relevant leadership experience in successful corporate and foundation relations and be recognized for significantly expanding support for key initiatives. A demonstrated ability to plan, execute and successfully develop partnerships that lead to transformational support is essential. Confirmed knowledge of, and top-level contact with, major sources of corporate and foundation funding is required. Candidate must have a proven track of authoring successful proposals to foundations and corporations for grants of at least $100,000.  

You can find more information by heading to our career center.

New Grant Opportunity: Families

We are continuing to get more opportunities for our Grant Finder page, which lists available funding sources from across the Internet.

As the new listings come in, we have found that we have to create more categories than we originally started with. That was certainly the case with this newest opportunity from the Walter S. Johnson Foundation. One of its primary areas of concern is helping underprivileged families, so we created the Families category. Here is the first grant available in this new section:


Type of Grant: Families
Grant Name: Family Economic Success
Agency: Walter S. Johnson Foundation
Closing Date for Applications: None


Description:

The Walter S. Johnson Foundation seeks to help establish a financial foundation for families that are “asset poor.”

Eligible Organizations:

Organizations whose work qualifies as charitable, according to IRS definitions, in northern California and Washoe County, Nev. Initial contact should be made to the appropriate staff member. Unsolicited proposals are not accepted. Interim and final reports are required.

You can find more information at: http://wsjf.pfs-llc.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

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You can check out our other available grant opportunities on our website.

Get Your Salary Structure In Order For 2013

As we head further into 2013, many people are already honoring (or breaking) their New Year's resolutions, while some others haven't quite decided what they want to change. If you count yourself among that last group, here's a good suggestion: Make better decisions with your organization's salary structure.

The NonProfit Times' 2012 Salary and Benefits Reports are great resources for nonprofit managers that have questions about whether their employees are being compensated at a level that is up to industry standards. NPT offers five reports that feature the most up-to-date information on salary and benefits based on responses from organizations from across the United States.

The most popular report is the 2012 Nonprofit Organizations Salary and Benefits Report. This detailed  report will give you the salary range for nearly 252 positions in the nonprofit sector, as well as the types of benefits these positions receive (flex days, bonuses, etc.).

The other four reports are:

• 2012 Nonprofit Organizations Salary Report: This one is useful for organizations that already have a handle on their benefits packages, but need information to create competitive salary structures.
• 2012 Nonprofit Organizations Benefits Report: Similar to the report above, this is the one to purchase if your nonprofit only needs help with creating competitive benefits packages for its employees.
• 2012 Nonprofit Organizations Top Executive Positions and Special Perks Report: Nonprofit executive compensation is so important to understand thoroughly. In order to attract the best people to be a part of a nonprofit organization, a very competitive environment, you need to make sure that you offer appealing compensation packages for hiring individuals who you wish to play an important role in your organization.
• 2012 Nonprofit Organizations New York State Salary and Benefits Report: Get the most current information available about nonprofit salaries and benefits in the state of New York. This report provides the latest and most complete salary information available on 170 nonprofit positions from entry level to the executive office including base salary, bonus practices, total cash compensation, salary increases, employee turnover, and more.

All five of these reports are available via our online store.

Nonprofit Manager Arrested On Theft Charges

The manager of a property operated by a nonprofit in Tallahassee, Fl., has been arrested on charges that she allegedly stole rent payments from tenants.

Latangee Hart, 45, turned herself in last Friday and was released on bail the same day, according to a report in The Tallahassee Democrat. She faces a charge of grand theft for allegedly depositing rent paid in cash and money orders into her personal bank account. The property in question, the Maryland Oaks Crossing housing campus, is operated by Good News Outreach, a Christian faith-based nonprofit. The property contains 48 rent-subsidized homes.

Brendan Popp, interim director at the organization, told The Democrat that no other employee was involved, and that policies were being put into place to prevent future incidents of this nature.

Police were tipped off to Hart's actions after a tenant complained in August that his rent payments were not being applied to his account. The property supervisor, Ed Laurienzo, investigated the complaint and found there were multiple rent payment discrepancies and that Hart was keeping poor records of payments. She was eventually fired on Aug. 17, four days after the initial complaint.

An audit later found that a bank account where Hart was allegedly keeping the money. Most of the payments were money orders with the "pay to the order of" portion left blank, where Hart, according to the charges against her, would fill in her name.

You can read the full story in The Tallahassee Democrat.

Payment Processing Basics

Credit cards have been around for a relatively long time, so you would think that payment processing wouldn't be that complicated. You would be wrong.

Processing credit card payments is far from the easiest thing to do precisely because the technology has been around for a while. There are many different ways to accept payments, all of which might require different types of hardware, software, and relationships. It's not realistic to shell out money for every single piece of technology out there, so the burning question out there is which are the best methods?

According to Laura S. Quinn, founder and executive director of Idealware, weighing your options requires a basic understanding of how credit card processing works. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as the information getting sent to you once the user swipes their card; it's a multi-step process that often involves a number of different vendors and entities.

Here are the three basic steps:

• Collect and enter credit card information. To process any payment, you'll obviously need to collect the credit card information from the person making the payment and transfer it -- whether electronically or manually -- to a service that can actually process the payment. This can involve anything from writing down the card information and mailing it to your bank, to typing it into an online system, to swiping the card through a specific kind of hardware.
•  Authorize and commit the charge. Once the payment information has been entered, it is transferred electronically to a payment processor, who checks to see that the credit card account exists and has enough money to cover the charge -- a process called "authorizing" -- and then actually charges the card.
• Deposit money to bank account. Once the card has been charged, you get to a critical step: actually receiving the money. The payment processor always deposits the money in a special kind of bank account called a merchant account. For most of the methods discussed in this article, you'll need to open your own merchant account, either through your own bank or one recommended by your payment processor.  

Now that you understand the basics of payment processing, you can start to figure out which methods work best for your nonprofit.

So, You Want To Be A Chief Executive Officer?

One of the most important roles of any nonprofit or business is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). This individual is responsible for all aspects of the organization, and will have to make many important decisions during his/her tenure. Many of The NonProfit Times' readers hold this important position, but not all of them.

If you ever wanted to hold the position of CEO, our new featured nonprofit job from Homes for Children (HFC) will be of interest to you.

The chosen candidate for this position will be charged with oversight of fiscal and financial affairs, services provided, staff management, and the cultivation of community partnerships. As a strategic business partner reporting to the Board of Trustees, the Chief Executive Officer will reflect a value system that fosters leadership, integrity, and teamwork among staff and volunteers.

Other responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Providing vision and leadership to the organization;
• Providing direct supervision to the leadership and management team;
• Recruiting, training, developing, and mentoring staff;
• Developing fundraising strategies for the organization; and
• Overseeing and managing operational budgets and facilities.

It's no shock that being a CEO necessitates having a significant amount of executive experience. As such, HFC requires all applicants to meet the following requirements:

• An understanding and demonstrated knowledge of budget management;
• Ability to maintain and strengthen relationships with a wide range of constituencies, including internal staff, and external business, government, non-profit and community-based organizations;
• Entrepreneurial capacity to build community connections that will generate new programs and initiatives as well as expand extramural grants, contracts, and private giving to support the organization;
• The ability to advocate, articulate, and promote diversity and inclusiveness;
• Excellent interpersonal, organizational and communication skills; 
• Integrity and ethical qualities of the highest standards; and
• Evidence of strong managerial, administrative and supervisory capacity with staff and volunteer leadership;
• An entrepreneurial management style characterized by transparency and collaboration;

Interested in this job? Head to our career center for information on how to apply.