Support Kansas City's Blog

Nonprofit Compliance – What’s Keeping You Awake at Night? On February 9, 2011, the SKC team of experts partnered with the legal experts at Husch Blackwell to tackle some tough compliance topics that all nonprofits must deal with. Our desks are full of things we could do, or should do, but getting our minds around what we must do can be cause for insomnia! We couldn’t flush out every possibility in a 2-hour workshop, but we did our best. Here are some of the questions the experts tackled as part of their presentations: • Corporate governance – bylaws/articles • State open meeting laws • Corporate sponsorship vs. advertising • Nonprofit fundraising registration and state scrutiny • Excess benefits/self-dealing • Website pitfalls • How to avoid creating solicitations that restrict gifts • What are the rules for recognizing contributions? • 990 policy review – how is the 990 shared with the board before filing? Does the board have policies in place that are asked on the 990? • What is the...

Partnerships build capacity. The most recent publication of The Nonprofit Quarterly (Winter, 2010) has a number of articles reporting innovative ways to build capacity through by shared resources and partnering. These examples include sharing staff between organizations with similar missions, co-locating, advocating as a group, and the changing role of governance in networked organizations. The articles are full of great examples of changes already happening at innovative nonprofits. I think back to the early years of SKC and how innovative we were in our community. I am grateful to the “early adopters” who understood how utilizing our services could help them focus on their mission. After ten years, we are still considered unique. And we continue to be innovative in the ways we help our clients. We believe that we are partners with our clients. One executive director stated it best when he said “I wish my organization had enlisted support from SKC sooner. Our relationship fe...