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A recent Financial Times piece (Alan Beattie and James Boxell, July 5, 2011 “Lagarde faces tough ethics regime at IMF”) describes how the new International Monetary Fund (IMF) Director Christine Lagarde will be “subject to the same heightened ethics rules as all IMF staff and will also undergo internal training” as a term of her employment. According to this interesting article this requirement appeared in a published letter sent to Ms. Lagarde from the IMF’s Executive Board. I should start this blog by saying that while I have always found Ms. Lagarde to be a highly respected public figure, I...

Traduction en cours. (more…)

The news this week, whether the financial markets, the Syrian government’s next steps, the Greece/Spain/Italy saga, the riots in London, or the Horn of Africa, all offer one common theme: highly complex uncertainty. This blog is a short plea for non-profit organisations and anyone working with them from governments to individual and institutional funders to the beneficiaries of their services: don’t lose track of the need to manage uncertainty in all areas of the organization. (more…)

Ce blog propose des recommandations pratiques sur un sujet d’actualité très débattu: l’usage des ratios à des fins d’évaluation des entités à but non lucratif. La seconde partie de ce blog portera sur la recherche actuelle à propos de la pertinence (ou le manque de pertinence!) des ratios. Le secteur à but non lucratif, y compris les agences de notation et de certification, se focalise de plus en plus sur deux ratios clés: (i) le coût de la collecte de fonds (le montant dépensé pour lever des fonds, parfois exprimé en cents par dollar collecté dépensé dans la levée de fonds) et...

This blog offers practical recommendations on the hot topic of the use of ratios to assess non-profit organizations. Part II of this blog will address current research on the relevance (or irrelevance!) of ratios. The non-profit sector, including rating and certification agencies, has become increasingly focused on two key ratios: (i) the cost of fund-raising (i.e., the amount spent to raise funds, sometimes expressed as cents per dollar raised spent on fund-raising) and (ii) the relative amount of revenue allocated to administrative costs and program costs. (more…)