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Nonprofits are society’s unsung heroes.

Sadly, however, many see themselves as victims and supplicants, or at least act as if they are.

Nonprofits are heroic because they address the symptoms and causes of urgent social and global problems that government and business cannot or will not take on.

Nonprofits work hard for little pay, continually are expected to do more with less, and face growing scrutiny and expectations from funders.

And in the current economic recession, with rising demand for services, nonprofits face growing pressure to reduce costs and increase their fundraising and impact.

With those kinds of seemingly intolerable working conditions and stress, people who work at nonprofits often feel alone, under siege and burned out.

They stick with it, however, because they care, and because they find fulfilling the job of making a difference and working with people in need and with other people who care.

Yet, needing revenue to meet their payroll and pay their rent, and fearing they lack the know-how to map a business strategy to sustain their organizations, they are too quick to swallow funders’ demands and consultants’ advice without critically questioning it.

Nonprofits are not victims and should not underestimate the knowledge of their staff and board, the value of their programs and services, the extent of their impact in the communities they serve, or their potential to generate even more contributed and earned income.

Rather than falling prey to the herd hysteria the recession has unleashed in the giving sector, nonprofits should treat the economic crisis as an opportunity to get back to basics and recognize the value and impact of the work they do and the untapped potential they possess to do more and do it better.

That means scrutinizing their mission, board, staff, operations and programs with brutal honesty.

It means using common sense to look for ways to improve their efficiency, impact, fundraising and communications.

And it means finding smart supporters and partners who care about their cause and understand that getting involved by making a donation, volunteering, serving on a board, collaborating or even merging requires recognizing the organization’s true needs and potential.

Nonprofits play an indispensable role in America, serving both as the safety net for the most vulnerable among us, and as the research-and-development arm to find ways to fix our biggest social and global problems.

America’s economic crisis has underscored nonprofits’ role and value, and compounded the challenges they face.

To fulfill their role, expand their value and meet those challenges, nonprofits must stop acting like victims and start thinking and working as independent and entrepreneurial agents for social change.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

The Internet has changed the way non-profit organizations solicit and donors research giving. Successful nonprofits use online tools.

Survivors of acquired brain injury can face a challenging road of recovery. For some, Marin Brain Injury Network's rehabilitation program becomes part of this journey.

A pleasant silent auction payment process is an important piece of an overall excellent experience for donors at a fundraising event.

Keep bidders happy and reduce non-paying bidders with advance planning for organized, quick check-out procedures.

When silent auction bidding ends, a well-planned and efficient close exhibits professionalism and ensures fairness for bidders.

Formalizing silent auction rules and guidelines minimizes confusion, makes bidding fair and fun for participants and allows volunteers to better assist during the event.

After months of planning, organizing and setup, a successful silent auction all comes down to just a handful of hours (or minutes) of shopping and bidding.

Effective presentation of silent auction items and packages attracts more bidders and increases overall bids.

Silent auction set up is an important step to maximizing bidder interest and ease of locating items.

President Obama has sent a powerful message to the American public since taking office: Social innovation can play an important role in rebuilding a stronger country. With the passage of stimulus packages in areas such as clean energy, national service, and climate change, it's clear that the White House is approaching national challenges in new ways. In this panel, hosted by Full Circle Fund and sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, key staff in the Obama administration provide the broad outlines for these exciting changes.

These past days have been a fascinating time for those studying social media. Even as Iranian authorities continue to prevent most mainstream journalists from reporting on citizen protests, Twittering citizen reporters have been able to bypass government censorship to share events on the ground as they unfold. Many of their rapid-fire, 140-character dispatches are uncommonly empathetic, hyper-personal, and unforgiving, prompting even some of the more sober and astute observers of the Net’s impact on society to recently wax hyperbolic.

“That a new information technology—[so-called “now media” such as Twitter, cellphones, mobile vlogs]—could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times,” blogger Andrew Sullivan gushed in a post titled, ”The Revolution Will be Twittered.” “ …You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.”

Meanwhile, political blogger Maegan Carberry told last week’s 140 characters conference in Manhattan, the nation’s first all-things-Twitter thoughtfest, that “social media are pushing us into an era of post-partisanship,” where political parties become far less important as wider and more personal communication among groups start to blur the political distinctions that authoritarian institutions of government have previously used to divide us and mute our penchant for dissent.

That statement followed remarks by NYU new media scholar Clay Shirky to TED interviewers earlier in the week that “we are living through the the largest increase in expressive capability in human history” and that the surge of Twitterized news reporting out of Iran has made the Iranian uprising historically unprecedented. “This is it. The big one,” he told TED. “This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Iran, of course, isn’t the first world hotspot where social media have played an abrupt and interventionist role in focusing the world’s attention to urgent social causes and events happening on the ground. Text-messaging and vlogging (video-blogging) was instrumental in revealing government corruption around foreign aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma last year. Social media also helped to leak word out to the world about the pro-democracy uprising by Burmese monks, hardline censorship by Chinese authorities during last summer’s Beijing Olympics, and the extent of the devastation of the Chinese earthquake —details of which, says Shirky, would have otherwise taken months to go public.

But whoa, Nellie. Indeed, while Twitter with its velocity to spit out information can expose the undercurrents of dissent and the underbelly of corruption, hunger, and the abuse of power in often shocking detail, social media haven’t been able to drive those undercurrents of dissent, nor bring about widespread reforms—at least not yet. For every successful social media-fueled protest, such as the Facebook-fueled protests last year to destabilize FARC in Colombia, there are at least a dozen more digitized uprisings that end when authorities shut down the Net or, as in the case of the as-yet unmutable Twitter in Iran, track down the people whose tweets have been most prominent and revealing and “disappear” them, creating a chilling climate of self-censorship that all but cedes power to those abusing it.

More significant, perhaps, is how Twitter and other forms of social media are accelerating the rate at which events play out, regardless of outcome, and how that speed can be potentially destabilizing, in and of itself. Jason Calacanis, a social media entrepreneur and cofounder and CEO of mahalo.com, speaking on a panel I convened and moderated for the recent Milken Global Conference 2009 on social media and politics, said: “The good news is that the Internet is an accelerator, probably the greatest accelerator since the advent of the written word. Truth gets wrestled away from the rumors more rapidly now; if you’re on the wrong side of society, you get outed in hyperspeed.” Further, he says, activists are better at the conversations spawned by social media because “those on the right side of society are the most willing to engage in conversation; when you’re on the wrong side of an issue, it’s very hard to be involved in a discourse because if you are involved in one, the quicker you get to the inevitability of being wrong.”

Just how much power, ultimately, social media can have will be debated again widely at next week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, which opens Monday with a late-addition workshop entitled “Social Media and Iran.” Such debates are likely to go on for months, if not years.

As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey queried the a standing-room-only crowd of Twitterati at the 140 characters conference:  “We have this brand new tool to help us in this experiment in democracy but where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology and how are we sustaining these concepts of immediacy, approachability and transparency to open up the process of every social community from families to the largest governments in the world?”

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Since 1951 The Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta has been connecting community members, nonprofits and donors to help strengthen the community through philanthropy.

Via Lucy Bernholz’s twitter feed, I followed along earlier this month with the DonorEdge Conference. During the conference Jacob Harold of the Hewlett Foundation’s Philanthropy Program gave an address. Jacob talked about the “Elephants in the Philanthropic Room” and said there were two of them:

• Some nonprofits are better than others
• Some donors are better than others

On their face, these don’t seem like elephants, they seem like statements of the obvious. But I remember the heated debate that exploded when at the second NetSquared conference someone suggested “some nonprofits just suck.” To many, this was an intolerable comment (even though, it is objectively true). The fact is, while they try hard and are good people, some nonprofits are not very good. Some of them are even doing harm. The resources these organizations are using are being wasted and could be used by a better organization to make a real difference in the world. The nonprofits that can do more good with the available resources are better than other nonprofits.

Are some donors better than others? In a recent post I talked about a shift from thinking about philanthropy as the act of making a gift to thinking about it as the achievement of impact. When we measure philanthropy by looking at the gift, then it is hard to argue that some donors are “better” than others. Maybe more generous. Maybe more rich. But better? However, when we think about philanthropy as the achievement of impact we begin to see that by making gifts to the right nonprofits in the right way, some donors can achieve more impact than other people who give the same amount of money. These donors are better donors.

This same conversation came up again at the recent National Convention on Volunteering and Service. In a panel I spoke on with Sonal Shah, the head of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement, Shah said that it should be OK if there is not a spot for everyone who wants to volunteer. While this seemed heretical to suggest at a conference on volunteering, I think Shah is right. Just like some people are better employees than other people. Some volunteers are better than others.

All this makes many people uncomfortable. These really are “the elephants in the philanthropic room.” But why? It doesn’t seem to make us uncomfortable if someone tells us they think Honda is better than Toyota, or Starbucks is better than Dunkin’ Donuts. We’re all free to believe that some investors are better than other investors or argue over whether the 1998 Yankees were better than the 1986 Mets.

Say it after me: Some nonprofits are better than others! Some donors are better than others! Some volunteers are better than others!

Its OK! That’s how life is. Just because some donors, nonprofits or volunteers are better than others doesn’t mean the others aren’t good people who are trying hard. Doing good is hard work. Really hard work. And some people and organizations are better than others at doing this hard work well.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is a principal and director of Tactical Philanthropy at Ensemble Capital Management. Ensemble Capital provides families both traditional investment management and philanthropic planning. He is the author of the blog Tactical Philanthropy and writes the column Tactical Philanthropy for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Reem Rahim and her brother Ahmed don’t always agree. But the two cofounders of Oakland, Calif.-based Numi Tea were both skeptical when the nonprofit B Lab approached them about certifying their business as a B Corporation. B—“beneficial”—Corporations use “the power of business to solve social and environmental problems,” according to B Lab’s Web site. Yet Numi Tea had already received organic and Fair Trade certifications, so the Rahims did not understand why they also needed to earn their B Corp bona fides. They questioned whether B Corporation certification was just another marketing fad. And they wondered whether customers would even care that Numi was a B Corp. But as false claims of social and environmental stewardship increasingly cluttered the corporate landscape, the Rahims sought the B Corp seal of approval. “We were concerned about ‘greenwashing,’ or attempts by typical companies to portray themselves as something that they are not,” says Reem. Although different organizations offered environmental, labor, quality, and governance certifications, no one offered a single, independent, comprehensive standard for a company’s overall social and environmental responsibility. As a result, consumers struggled “to tell the difference between good marketing and good company,” explains Jay Coen Gilbert, one…

Nonprofits need to raise their sights, move beyond their panic-driven goal of simply surviving for one more day, and start leading America out of its economic crisis.

Because that crisis is rooted in a widespread breakdown in ethics across the government, for-profit and giving sectors, nonprofits need to lead by example in doing the right thing.

That is the view of Tim Delaney, the president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, who says nonprofits can best serve their mission and communities by “focusing on their core missions and then acting with purposeful attention to ethical leadership.”

The first step, he says, is for nonprofits to “see the broader context in which they operate” and then set high ethical standards and build them into their thinking, planning and operations.

Speaking last week to a lunch ‘n’ learn workshop in Charlotte, N.C., sponsored by the Philanthropy Journal, Delaney said a widespread “moral meltdown” led to America’s current “economic meltdown.”

To show the context in which massive ethical failures have eroded public trust, he cited dozens of recent headlines about scandals in all sectors, often involving groups “previously seen as pillars of community values.”

To help America rebuild its economy, Delaney says, nonprofits need to lead the way in “rebuilding the public’s trust that has been breached.”

Rebuilding public trust, he says, starts with organizations intentionally gearing themselves to make sure they always do the right thing.

Delaney suggests 12 steps for creating a responsible ethics program.

Those steps range from recognizing the need to set ethical expectations, naming an ethics officer and assessing the current state of the organization’s ethics to involving all stakeholders in developing an ethics policy, continually monitoring compliance and tweaking the policy, and making sure the organization’s leaders serve as ethical role models.

In the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, nonprofits face rising operating costs, growing demand for services, and the fear that individual donors, foundations and corporations will cut back their giving.

Instead of panicking and worrying only about the survival of their own institution, nonprofits can best serve their missions and communities by setting high ethical standards and organizational aspirations, Delaney says.

By doing the right thing and truly practicing what they preach, nonprofits can help lead America out of its moral and economic mess and move on to the job of addressing the symptoms and causes of our most urgent social and global problems.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

When it comes to online giving market places, the adage is: If you build it, few will come. So how do you drive enough people to such online spaces to make them work? In this talk, sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, William Meehan, McKinsey senior director, talks about the opportunities and challenges in making online giving marketplaces successful, and what lies ahead in this area for organizations dedicated to making a genuine sustained impact in communities.

Understanding what is expected is key to the optimal functioning of a board of directors. Listing responsibilities aids in recruitment, orientation and smooth operations.