Graduate Certificates in Nonprofit Management

Overview

Nonprofits are held to a standard most businesses are not. A funder can ask how every dollar was spent, a board can ask why a programme exists, and a regulator can ask whether the organization still qualifies for the status it operates under. Meeting all three while delivering the mission is the job, and almost nobody is trained for it before they are doing it.

Two graduate courses, taken in sequence.

The first covers the breadth of senior leadership in the sector: strategic planning, fundraising, stakeholder engagement, governance, marketing and performance management. It also looks at where the field is moving, including social entrepreneurship and the technologies, social media among them, that are changing how organizations reach people. The emphasis is on leadership that flexes, because the same person may run a two-person organization and later a two-hundred-person one.

The second goes to the machinery. The legal framework that tax-exempt organizations operate inside, organizational design, fiscal management, fundraising, grants, contracts, assessment and planning. It covers governance in practice, the effective use of volunteers, and the part most programs skip: how to run an organization whose funding comes from individuals, foundations and government at the same time, each with different reporting expectations.

What you will learn

By the end of the certificate you will be able to:

• Write and defend a strategic plan for a nonprofit, and explain to a board why it is the right one
• Run a fundraising effort across the sources nonprofits actually draw on: individual donors, foundations, grants and government contracts
• Work with a board rather than around it, and understand what nonprofit governance requires of you in practice
• Operate inside the legal framework that applies to tax-exempt organizations, and recognise when a decision puts that status at risk
• Manage the finances, including fiscal management, grant and contract compliance, and reporting to funders with different expectations
• Design the organization, matching structure to the size and stage it is actually at
• Measure performance and assess programmes, so that "it is working" becomes a claim you can evidence
• Deploy volunteers effectively, which is a management discipline rather than a staffing shortcut
• Market the mission, and engage stakeholders whose interests do not fully align
• Judge where the sector is heading, including social entrepreneurship and the technologies reshaping outreach, with attention to information integration and assurance
• Lead at either scale, applying the same skills to a small organization and a large one across its life cycle