Blog

Understanding the Authoritarian Mindset (so it doesn’t kill your volunteer program)  

An authoritarian mindset is most often the reason volunteer systems fail. Here we examine the impact of the authoritarian mindset on leaders and followers.

First, authoritarians have good intent. It is true, however, that they operate using a method that often impacts others both significantly and negatively. It’s who they are, and because authoritarianism is held by many in poor regard, most don’t want to see themselves this way.

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Board Management, Speaking Engagement Topics, Org Alignment/Strategic Planning Katrina VanHuss & Laura Schrader Thrall Board Management, Speaking Engagement Topics, Org Alignment/Strategic Planning Katrina VanHuss & Laura Schrader Thrall

Organizational Alignment and the New CEO

I use an analogy that no one gets. It is this, said in conversation when I am trying to make sure someone is telling me exactly what they want, “Ok, I have moved the couch a couple of times, and the couch is heavy. Can we agree where the couch should go before I move it again?”

Let me describe the largest couch I have been asked to move: when a board hires a new CEO.

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Community, Speaking Engagement Topics, Psychology Katrina VanHuss Community, Speaking Engagement Topics, Psychology Katrina VanHuss

Building Community at the NonProfit POWER Conference

Our Turnkey team was with 100-ish nonprofit professionals this past week at the NonProfit POWER Conference in Philadelphia. I gave a presentation on how one’s identity is strengthened by being part of a community — how engaging with like-minded community members is validating and rewarding, the reason people seek out communities to be a part of.

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Recruiting (and Keeping) Volunteer Leaders & Fundraisers

To celebrate the upcoming release of Turnkey’s Katrina VanHuss & Otis Fulton, Ph.D.’s new book Social Fundraising: How to Mine the New Peer-to-Peer Landscape, we are giving you a sneak preview of one of our favorite topics; Recruiting (and Keeping) Volunteer Leaders & Fundraisers.

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Speaking Engagement Topics, Press/News Kate Barnette Speaking Engagement Topics, Press/News Kate Barnette

Meet the Turnkey Team

If you’ve ever attended a Turnkey facilitated event, you’ll know we do not give advice. We share experiences. We’ve also turned that mantra into how we do things in our consulting work with clients. To be a great consulting company, we must have talented consultants with a wide array of experience and the ability to solve almost any kind of problem.

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Republican Party Shows Us How to Fundraise

History is unfolding before us; it’s on C-SPAN and most cable news outlets. How can we use what we’re witnessing to help us in social good? Repeat to yourself... people respond to situations. Great marketing and program design create situations that trigger the types of attitudes and behaviors that we’re seeing as a result of the January 6th hearings.

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Women in Philanthropy (and Everywhere Else)

In philanthropy, why do women dominate in number, but not in pay or filling significant roles? This surely devalues philanthropy as an industry, like every other industry where women are present in large numbers, yet are relegated to subordinate status.

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Let Us Talk For a Minute About What a Community Is

We have defined “our community” as “the people on our email list” for a long time, but that’s not what community is all about. To our credit, we knew that they (people on our email list) cared about one thing—our mission.

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6 Lessons We Learned From the Pandemic

In the past months, we’ve read a lot of “takeaways from the pandemic” articles. So many, in fact, that we thought adding one more to the conversation might be redundant. At the same time, we are still reading them, and it looks like you are too. So here is our take on what we learned.

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Help For Your Hesitant Volunteer Fundraiser

I am the mother of a thirty-year-old with Down syndrome, autism, and type 1 diabetes. Like me, I'm sure you've been asked to help fundraise for an organization dedicated to helping your loved one. And you thought, “We have a really rare situation. Will anyone donate if this isn’t part of their life?”

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