Once upon a time, prior to January 1, 2010, the Associated Grant Makers (AGM) was available to struggling non-profits (ie the public) however some changes have been made. After 1/1/10 this Boston based resource center, that once provided an onsite librarian and a publicly accessible library and online database, allowing non-profits to search for funders with similar goals and missions, closed it’s doors to public. AGM now charges a fee. As I have come to understand they were having a hard time making ends meet and now they have to close their doors to non-partnered members (to be an affiliate it costs a minimum of $85.) Non-profit partners have a list of levels that they may choose from and the more access you desire the more expensive your affiliation dues. Now that is the bad news, they are not just giving it away for free, or are they.

During the same phone conversation it was told to Tuesday that the AGM database is still available via satellite locations. Tuesday has not yet been able to check-out any of these locations but if you have and know any more details please feel free to comment and leave us a message, we now have a goal for the next two weeks, get to a satellite location and see if AGM can help us Boston based non-profits.

When we first sat down on that First Tuesday we made contact lists for possible Board members.  We immediately thought of people who have experience working with the demographic of people that our mission is focused on: formerly homeless and formerly incarcerated. We listed mentors, people we volunteered with, educators that we know and respect…all people who have firsthand experience working in related fields.

Through subsequent research, we have since learned that this initial list will serve not as our Board of Directors, as we originally thought, but as our Board of Advisors.  This we explain below, so stay tuned…

What we have decided to do is create an Interim Board while we are in the process of creating a Board of Directors and a Board of Advisors.

Interim Board:

As we learned when we filed Articles of Organization, in Massachusetts you are required to have three positions that must be filled in order to create a legal entity: President, Secretary, and Treasurer. These positions how ever can be the same individual.  Interesting, and convenient to two people like us looking to get started on a short timeline.

We at tuesday, inc.  decided that we wanted to find a single individual who’s experience showed that they would be capable of filling all of these roles in the interim. What type of indivduals would be a good match to fill these roles ?

As much as most people find it tragic to have lawyers as friends, every now and again it pays off.  (that one is for you, J.) We chose a corporate attorney with a background in tax law to fill the three positions on an interim basis. This symbiotic relationship provides our attorney friend J. with experience working on Board of a nonprofit, and provides tuesday, inc. with a valuable resource: an attorney that can work  pro-bono during our startup process and answer ad hoc legal questions.

If you do not happen to have any attorney friends, think creatively about an accountant, an educator, or someone that could contribute to your startup process. We also strongly encourage choosing someone netural to your organization or partnership. Also, make sure you sit down and outline the conditions of the Interim position (in writing) and outline what possible continued involvement might look like.

Board of Advisors:

The advisors that we have looked at would be indivduals that we thought would have a excellent perspective on our ideas and more importantly have direct experience working with our target populations and/or in related fields.  We also plan to structure this so that one or more of our Advisors sits on the Board of Directors, so as to keep the two closely linked and so that the Advisors have a say in the formal structure and programming at tuesday, inc.

Our Board of Advisors will be the people who immediately came to mind when starting tuesday, inc. These are the people we have worked closely with and some whom we are still meeting, but they are people who in large part have devoted their lives and careers to a similar mission of tuesday, inc. and can therefore get behind the organization’s mission and help guide the services we will provide.

Board of Directors:

Finding a Board of Directors will be more challenging. We have learned, through various articles, conversations with friends in the nonprofit arena, and even webinars, that the Board of Direcotrs needs to be two things: a source of funding sources and people who have experience running a large organization.

Here are some other things to keep in mind when thinking about a Board of Directors:

For tuesday, inc. this means that many of the Directors will most likely be people we haven’t even met at this point, as most of our present contacts will fill Board of Advisors. Where are we going to find Directors? We will start here, lucky us!

Lesson # 1,387: Personalize your Twitter background.  (thanks @sd913!)

T & I are the first ones to admit that we are social media amateurs. We are constantly googling things like “How to find people to follow on Twitter” and “How to create a Facebook page for an organization”.  (That last one we still haven’t quite figured out yet).

Social media is very important to our mission here at tuesday, inc. We wanted to help connect the community of people interested in starting, or already part of nonprofits. Why? Because as the saying goes, two heads are better than one.

Our social media strategy (and we use the term “strategy” lightly) has consisted of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach. We google everything, and have joined all the sites we can think of, reading all the ‘how to’ articles we can find along the way:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Reader
• Google Buzz

What have we learned? Well, asidef rom learning how much we just don’t know, we’ve learned that there is an active community of people who are available at the click of a button, who are knowledgeable and ready to offer advice.  We now know that when it comes to many topics we can learn more on Twitter in five minutes than in hours of research.

 A lot of our friends are not on Twitter, and they scoff at the idea. When we ask them “why not?” they say because “I don’t have anything to say” or “I don’t have anything to promote”. Our answer, to them and to any startup is that there is always something to learn. There was an article in the New York Times  a few days ago that talks about just this, stating that there are 50 million messages posted on Twitter, daily! Approximately one-fifth of these posts contain a link, which means that there are 10 million posts per day that could be news articles, blog posts, or other resources relevant to you and your organization.

Not only that, but it is a community. And for a startup nonprofit, or for any type of project, or any person for that matter, communities are vital to success.   

How has social media played a part in your growth – as a nonprofit? a business? And, if you are thinking of starting one, how to you envision using social media?

Click here to read about tuesday, inc. in Metro newspaper!

We are very excited over here at tuesday, inc. ! The last five weeks have been busy, and the last week in particular has been completely full-out chaos.  We filed Articles of Organization, and continued to work diligently on paperwork, and have been doing our best to create a social media strategy as amateurs. We’ll be honest, the hardest part so far has been Facebook. So if you have any tips or trick for us, please let us know!

The article gives you, our readers, a new hint as to what we are up to… 

T. and I met while volunteering teaching at a local correctional facility.  As the article states, tuesday, inc. was prompted through our experience volunteering and is becoming what we “..hope will be an organization aimed at breaking negative social cycles like homelessness and incarceration.”  Read the rest here. 

We  will continue to update you on our start-up process, compile resources we find, report our Tuesday meetings, and even let you in on our struggles.

We will continue to give us more hints about the organization along the way, and we will reveal ourselves and the organization at the end of twelve weeks: April 20, 2010.

Thank you to our readers, friends, and supporters…and all the people who have shown interest.

Thanks to Yue Huang for  finding us and writing an excellent article.

Our favorite answer came from Dr. Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation. She is quoted, “How would I give away $10 Billion? I wouldn’t. I would invest in innovations that have the potential to mobilize multiple billions more.”

This is the spirit that is at the the core of social entrepreneurship.  Sustainable, innovative change.  Nice work, Dr. Rodin!

We here at tuesday, inc. asked ourselves the same question. Our answer? Similarly, we would create ripple effects. Ripple effects of change by starting self-sustaining organizations that have the power to alleviate systematic social problems through the creation of a new system.

Wait a minute….Isn’t that what we are doing over here? Hey Dr. Rodin – Look at us!!!  

We don’t have $10 Billion, nor do we need it. We have very little capital at this point, and the capital we will need is nowhere near $10 Billion. We are, by our bootstraps, starting a social enterprise as a nonprofit that will be self-sustainble within a very short amount of time.  And we believe tuesday, inc. can make $10 Billion worth of change in the world.

What would you do if you had $10 Billion to give away? Or, How would you give away $100 “creatively”?

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There is no doubt that social media is changing the way that business is being conducted around the world. There are more than 5 million people/organizations that have Twitter accounts that combined produce more than 50 million tweets per day. WOW!

The resources that are now available at the click of a button are vast and almost excessively daunting from time to time. Facebook is another tool that Tuesday, Inc. will look to focus on in the coming weeks. Facebook has 400 million members; that is a huge number. I read a statistic the other day that if Facebook were a country it would be the fourth largest in the world. Operating your nonprofit or business within that entity is just smart business these days.

Many companies have started to create full-time positions so that a single individual can create and foster these networks and blog postings. How do two people, starting a non-profit, share their resources, split their time and focus on both creating funding resources and filing documents AND allow social media to play a big enough role? Tuesday, Inc. is giving it a shot.

If you have any ideas or for us, please comment below!

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tuesday, inc. is officially a legal entity!

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Business partnerships can be challenging. And starting a nonprofit is a huge undertaking. Take those two things, and add a twelve-week deadline, and what do you get? Last night we realized last night that we have put this project in a pressure cooker.  As we are trying to be realistic about this process and share our progress with you, our readers, we thought it only fitting to share our challenges as well.

In the midst of all the planning, research, and hours of work, we failed to see the biggest challenge we faced: how to work together in a way that economized our time, didn’t overlap, and moved the project forward while keeping us on the same page.

Our plan thus far has been to use Google Docs and Google Buzz and conference call whenever we could. We were both working on Articles of Organization, both researching funding, and both writing…well, you get the pictures. It was a “jump right in and figure it out approach”.

That was our first mistake.

By not defining roles, even at an early stage, we both began to drive the same processes.  With two strong personalities, both of us with experience as entrepreneurs, we are working on a project that we both feel very passionate about for the same and different reasons. This means adrenaline, emotions, and personalities are in high-gear.

Thus far, this has generated a lot of energy that has propelled us forward, but also caused a collision of the minds yesterday at our meeting. We were stuck (and clashing) in details like a specific blog posting or a specific sentence within the Articles, or when to do what, or who will do what…and all of our organization and neat and tidy plans came apart.

We ended up spending most of the meeting sorting through our hopes for Tuesday, Inc. And we had to figure out how to work together. This is what we learned:

• Define roles early. right from the beginning, discuss what your long-term goals are and where you might see yourselves in the mature organization.
• Discuss how you want to work. This may sound silly, but agreeing on logistics can prevent a lot of stress. (We ultimately decided that calls during work hours, even quick ones, unnecessarily elevated stress levels and increased tension. We will now only email)
• Keep the big picture, and let the details go. Whether you are as crazy as we are to work with a 12-week deadline or not, the important thing is to move the process forward. Details will fall into place as long as you both agree on the core principles (which chances are, you discussed this before getting started).
• Put the organization first.  Leave egos, past experiences, and claims for credit out of it as much as possible. This may sound obvious, but when you feel passionate about something, it can be hard to do.

Ultimately, we realized our different perspectives will be assets to Tuesday, Inc.  We both have different experiences and areas of expertise that will be helpful. With a new plan, humility, and a shared task list that updates the other on what we are working on, and, most importantly, a respect for each other as business partners, we are starting our fifth week with more motivation and commitment to our mission than ever.

Do you have any partnership advice for us? any war stories of your own? Let us know!

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Before I highlight some key takeaways (and there were many),  there is some preliminary information that may be useful to you, our readers:

What is IRS Form 990?

IRS Form 990 is the tax document that nonprofits file.   IRS made major changes to reporting requirements beginning for the filing of 2008 taxes, issuing the NEW Form 990.  I remember hearing murmurings about this being a big change, but honestly had no idea what the implications were until today.  

Apparently, as stated in the webinar today, this regulation “was driven of course by  some abuse [of compensation] around the country and some perception that governance needs to be much more active”. 

In short, the New Form 990 requires more disclosure of compensation and potential conflicts of interest. This information can be used by the IRS, obviously, but more importantly and more poignantly by funders and/or potential funders of an organization. The New Form 990 doesn’t just mean tighter tax regulation for nonprofits, it provides more transparency and accountability for compensation, and even changes in responsibilities for members of the Board.  Click here for IRS New Form 990 FAQs.

What does this mean for us and for you, our readers?

• It is very, very, very important that compensation for your organization be considered “normal”. This means finding data for your industry or other nonprofits to make sure that compensation is within this somewhat ambiguous ‘reasonable’ and ‘normal’ range.
• It is not necessary to have a separate committee review compensation, but it is critical to have the Board approve compensation.
• The “conflict of interest” piece requires transparency to ensure that no member or Board Members serves to benefit financially from the orgnization. This doesn’t mean that members cannot provide a service to the organization for a fee, but that the fee must meet all scrutiny.

So, The New Form 990 is something to keep in mind long before your organization’s first tax season, as early as decided on organizational structure and thinking about potential Board Members.  Very good to know!  Thank you to The Chronicle of Philanthropy for another helpful discussion!

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