Dallas Fort Worth Nonprofit Business Journal

Category: Opinion

  • Outsourced IT: 4 Reasons It’s a MUST for Today’s Nonprofit

    Nationwide, nonprofits spend an average of 5.2% of their budget on technology. Yet, almost 30% describe themselves as barely maintaining, or failing to maintain, their technology systems that propel their missions.

    It’s tough to manage technology with limited budgets and internal expertise. Outsourcing your IT can make it possible to deliver mission advancement on a fixed, monthly budget.

    Outsourcing your IT can:

    1. Identify and leverage special discounts available only for nonprofits

    There are technology providers and nonprofit technology-related networks that provide heavily discounted or free products and services.  An experienced managed IT vendor will have experience and success in identifying and obtaining these discounts and products.

    1. Reduce your technology costs by extending the life of the equipment you already have

    Proper inventory and analysis of your current equipment can identify cost effective repairs that will extend the life of that equipment.  An experienced managed IT vendor will conduct a thorough repair vs replacement cost analysis and make recommendations on the cost effectiveness of both.

    1. Increase your credibility and compliance by securing donor and client information

    Although every organization can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks, nonprofit organizations are particularly vulnerable because they are often rich with donor payment information as well as client personal information. An experienced managed IT vendor will conduct a full security analysis, identify your areas of greatest vulnerability, and make recommendations to keep your data safe and compliant.

    1. Save staff time by coordinating and managing IT-related vendors

    Most organizations have several IT-related vendors that provide services or equipment that support your organization.  Supervising these vendors requires valuable staff time that is often taken at the expense of other more mission-critical needs.  An experienced managed IT vendor will troubleshoot problems, supervise service and assess vendor performance to support the overall health and maintenance of your IT infrastructure thus freeing staff to focus their efforts elsewhere.

    Managed IT services can add critical expertise and capacity to your team that will assist and guide your organization through the fast-paced, ever-changing world of technology.  Technology should propel your mission and many organizations have found success with outsourced IT services.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    As the CEO of Networking Results, Jeff Howard found his passion – building one of the happiest places to work with the most talented employees, and helping great organizations here in DFW do what they do best – make a difference! Networking Results is committed to increasing nonprofits’ use of technology as a means of growing their organizations and their impact on the community we share.

    Find Jeff on LinkedIn.

  • Art Review – Dalí: Poetics of the Small 1929 – 1936

    Sometimes tiny works have the greatest impact. The “Dalí: Poetics of the Small 1929 – 1936” exhibit at the Meadows Museum on the SMU campus in Dallas makes my point better than 1,000 words ever could.

    Spanish artist Salvador Dalí was one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Certainly, he was one of the most influential in the Surrealist movement. Best known for his “melting clocks” as in “The Persistence of Memory,” Dali masterfully layered his paintings with deep symbolism and a personal mythology.

    You might not appreciate the mastery of Dalí’s precision so much on a large canvas. But when its shrunken down to a small scale, the viewer is drawn in to get really close to study the amazing detail. You might be surprised at how talented he was as a realistic painter. But, that’s the beauty of Dalí: his balance between realism and raw imagination…the contrast between the inspiration of 17th century Dutch Masters such as Johannes Vermeer and the influence of modern contemporaries like Joan Miro.

    The “Dalí: Poetics of the Small” exhibit is in a second floor gallery, deep inside the Meadows. You can’t miss it as there’s a large photo of Dalí and his trademark handlebar mustache over the gallery entrance.

    Inside the first room, on the far wall against a dark background, “The Accommodations of Desire,” an 8 3/4 x 13 3/4 inch oil and collage on wood painted in 1929, beckons the viewer to explore. Look closely. It’s hard to separate the collage (a detailed illustration of a lion’s head in the foreground) from the painted elements. The closer you look, the more amazed you’ll become at the detail in each vignette. But these elements are not meant to be analyzed independently, but rather are parts of a greater whole.

    What’s the deeper meaning? I’ll leave that to your own interpretation.  For me, that’s the intensely personal aspect of an exhibit such as this. Besides, it wasn’t any single work of art that attracted me to this intriguing exhibit. There are nearly two-dozen small pieces of art, most matted and framed, with some behind glass or in a shadow box. All in all, they represent works from each of his early years in Surrealism. The journey as a whole is much more rewarding than a snapshot from a single destination.

    The exhibit’s largest work, “Vegetal Metamorphosis,” is only 16 1/8 x 12 3/4 inches. The smallest, “Dreams on a Beach,” a mere 3 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches. Both were painted in 1934. All are hung low, so they are comfortably eye level or lower for most people.

    They seem tiny against the large, dark wall until you get close. Really close. There is an intimacy to being inches away from pure genius…or madness, depending on your perspective.

    In stark white letters on a dark wall just inside the main entrance is a poem, which works as a mission statement:

    “Poem of the Small Things

    To Sebastia Gasch, with all antiartistic delight

    There is a very small thing placed high in some spot.

    I am pleased. I am pleased. I am pleased. I am pleased.

    The sewing needles plunge into small nickels soft and sweet.

    My girlfriend has a hand of cork full of Parisian fine lace.

    One of my girlfriend’s breasts is a clam sea urchin, the other a swarming wasp’s nest.

    My friend has a knee of smoke.

    The small charms, the small charms, the small charms, the small charms, the small charms, the small charms, the small charms, the small charms, … THE SMALL CHARMS PRICK.

    The partridge’s eye is red.

    Small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things, small things…

    THERE ARE SMALL THINGS, STOCK-STILL LIKE A LOAF OF BREAD.”

    ~ Salvador Dalí

    L’Amic de les Arts, 1928

    I worked my way slowly from piece to piece. Studying the detail. Trying to comprehend the message he was trying to reveal/conceal. Dalí was all about contradictions.

    At the very end, in a small room off the last gallery, stood a monitor with a touchpad so the viewer could pull up a sharp electronic image of each work to study it in the most 21st Century way. In contrast, on the adjacent wall, was another quote from Dalí: “Always I saw what others did not see; and what they saw, I did not.”

    I wonder what you will see.

    “Dalí: Poetics of the Small 1929 – 1936” runs September 9 – December 9, 2018 at the Meadows Museum at SMU. Directions, hours and more information is available at https://meadowsmuseumdallas.org

    Photos and story by David Alvey.

  • UT Southwestern Medical Center launches outreach campaign for students to discuss mental health

    UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Dr. Madhukar H. Trivedi (pictured above) recently posted an opinion piece on the organization’s website announcing that he and his team have launched an outreach campaign into area school districts, bringing trained facilitators, under the supervision of a psychologist, into classrooms to discuss mental health and suicide prevention with middle and high school students. He states that, so far, his team has reached more than 8,000 students, and schools report that more teens are opening up to teachers, guidance counselors and parents and seeking help.

    In the piece, Dr. Trivedi, a psychiatrist, explains that this effort is in response to the lack of mental health screening available for teens, and the increase in teen suicides in recent years. He states that: “Suicides, the No. 2 cause of death for teens, have risen dramatically in recent years – up about 70 percent between 2006 and 2016, according to federal statistics. Nearly 13 percent of adolescents age 12 to 17 had a major depressive episode in 2016, up from 8 percent in 2006. The rise of online bullying, family and school stresses, trauma and substance abuse are among the factors contributing to this problem.”

    Dr. Trivedi explains that both primary care doctos and parents are often reluctant to assess a teen patient’s mental state because they haven’t had adequate training or are afraid to make the teen feel worse. He emphasizes the importance of mental health screenings by saying: “Unfortunately, our society tends to ignore the mental health of teenagers until there’s an overdose or other tragedy. The time has come for doctors to reach out to teens who need help before they have a crisis.”

    In addition to the outreach program, Dr. Trivedi’s team has “developed an innovative web-based application, VitalSign6, to enhance health care access and the standard of care for those affected by depression. Through its use, physicians have access to validated depression screening and assessment tools that measure associated symptoms and provide clinical decision support for treating depression.”

    Dr. Trivedi concludes with: “There remains a stigma attached to mental illness in our society, but continuing a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach is not the way to go. We are losing too many of our children. Routine screening for mental health conditions, as well as early diagnosis and intervention, can change the course of – and perhaps even save – a young person’s life.”

    Read the full article here.

    Madhukar H. Trivedi, M.D., is director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute in Dallas. Photo courtesy of UT Southwestern Medical Center.

    ABOUT UT SOUTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER

    UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution’s faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 22 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 15 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The faculty of more than 2,700 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 100,000 hospitalized patients, 600,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 2.2 million outpatient visits a year. Find out more on the organization’s website.

     

  • Connecting to the Cause: The Dallas Bike MS 2018

    As a professional fundraiser and seasoned consultant, I am generally skeptical of the impact special athletic fundraisers have on serving a nonprofit organization’s cause and intended donor population. I’ve attended and even managed several charitable sporting events and am so often struck with the participants ambivalence to the cause they are supporting. Most of us are in it to stroke our athletic prowess and ego with little care for the cause. Additionally, all too often the charity is not walking away with a healthy event bottom line or authentically new donor relationships.

    I am writing this blog because the Dallas Bike MS 2018 in May proved a wonderful exception to my skeptical mindset.  My husband Mark and I rode the Dallas Bike MS that traversed 150 miles of north Texas from Frisco to Sundance Square in Fort Worth.  We were part of Fort Worth’s Health Angels team, one of many teams that together comprised the 1700 cyclists who participated in the two-day event. In addition to the cyclists, I am told there were nearly 1000 volunteers, police officers and local Multiple Sclerosis Society staff to serve the multitude of safety, healthcare, nutrition, shuttle and seemingly any other number of needs the cycling participants had.

    “I expected to ride my bike. I didn’t expect to get connected to the cause!” – Missy Gale, CFRE, President, M. Gale & Associates

    Admittedly, I joined the Health’s Angels team as a personal athletic journey within my birthday month. It was about my ego and me.  But this organization expertly changed that along the way.

    Our team, headed by a very passionate donor/volunteer who grew up with a mother afflicted by MS and wheelchair bound, led the team by example with every email, conversation and Facebook post sharing that whether we ride one mile or the entire distance, we are helping people like his mom.  He encouraged the team to fundraise for the cause and together the 65 or so of us who rode last weekend raised over $80,000. We were only one of many teams and while we won’t know the entire net proceeds of the ride until after fundraising ends in July, I suspect well over $1 million will be raised. In addition the MS Society kept in constant contact with us individually to encourage, support and steward me as a participant, and more importantly a donor.  Plus they periodically sent me information via email on what they are doing with the money we raise.

    When I arrived at the hotel site in Frisco, I was greeted by dozens of smiling volunteers and happy (not grumpy overworked) staff and vendors offering everything from bike checks and maintenance to the logistics for my bike and my bags for the two overnights and locations involved in this event. I also met several people with MS, all of whom said “thank you for riding and for your help for MS”.

    Throughout the next two days as I rode through the beautiful north Texas countryside and chatted with cyclists along the way, I heard dozens of stories. Many were riding FOR MS and many were riding WITH MS.  These riders shared that this event has provided over a billion dollars for research to slow the progression of and help find a cure for the debilitating disease of the central nervous system.  And many also shared stories about how this research has actually yielded medicines that have positively affected outcomes for themselves or their loved ones.

    This four-month engagement with an organization I had not previously connected with humbled me in a way that I could not have imagined. I was moved from my athletic self-interests to actually caring about this cause and the people MS affects.  The ride itself turned out to be very doable I believe because of the joy and gratitude that filled my heart as I rode. I am giving some of my highest praise and a THANKFUL SHOUT OUT to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and Texas team, to Fort Worth’s Health Angels, and to all of those with and without MS who participated in last weekend’s ride.

    Y’all did this RIGHT!

    *Photos courtesy of Missy Gale

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Missy Gale, CFRE

    Missy Gale is a professional philanthropy advocate who works with nonprofit organizations looking to expand their mission impact.  Missy founded M. Gale & Associates in 2001 to bring the transformative power of relationship management to nonprofit organizations all over North Texas.  From arts to education and from social services to health care, M. Gale & Associates has taught hundreds of organizations the art and science of collaborative philanthropy.

    Missy lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband, Mark, of more than 25 years.  Their children have successfully launched and are currently chasing their dreams!  Missy and Mark’s personal philanthropy includes support of the arts and social services at the local and national levels.

  • Review – ‘Casanova: The Seduction of Europe’

    Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth
    Exhibit ends Dec. 31

    By DAVID ALVEY


    I didn’t know much about Giacomo Casanova, other than the vague knowledge of his autobiography, “Historie de ma vie” (Story of My Life) and his self-proclaimed reputation as the “World’s Greatest Lover” or a scandalous womanizer, depending on your perspective. And I really didn’t know what to expect from the “Casanova: The Seduction of Europe” exhibit at the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth. But I was entranced; I dare say, “seduced,” by the experience.

    It is more than a collection of mid-18th century art and artifacts. The curators delivered an exquisite taste of the elegance and extravagance that defined Casanova and the Rococo age. They created a very moving experience with everything from soaring masterpieces by Tiepolo and Titian to delicate porcelain figurines and ornate everyday objects such as counting boxes to bejeweled timepieces. The fabrics on display are meant to provide further details rather than make a statement about the fashions of his time.

    There’s an audio guide available upon request, and it was very helpful in establishing the appropriate mood as the story unfolds.

    The entrance to the exhibit resembles a large Venetian plaza. Printed on a panel in the entry is one of only a few images of Casanova in the show. It’s a drawing of Casanova as a senior statesman. It’s the type of image that might be minted on an ancient nation’s coinage. But don’t come looking for iconic images of Casanova. Rather, the exhibit seeks to capture the essence of the man, his travels and the era. It’s more of a fantastic journey than a stale history lesson.


    Upon entering the first room of the exhibit, there are several dramatic paintings of Venice, Casanova’s birthplace.   As soon as you round the first corner, you’ll appreciate just how different this exhibit will be. There’s a pair of opulent Italian armchairs flanking an ornate chest of drawers with a painting in a gilded frame hanging above it on the wall (“The Coronation of the Virgin,” 1754, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.) It’s easy to imagine Europe’s pampered royalty relaxing amid such opulence. And just as natural to imagine Casanova in the company of the elite.


    As you progress through the exhibit, paralleling a timeline of Casanova’s life, there are numerous salacious paintings alluding to Casanova’s loose morals. While they are masterful works of art taken in any context, together they build on a sultry ambiance.


    Rounding another corner, there’s a diorama of a seated boarding school student, separated by a trellis from her male suitor. Both mannequins are clothed in fine fabrics. But more than mere examples of fashion, the scene weaves a tapestry of Casanova’s tale. A mysterious third figure stands off to the left with mask in hand. An actor? A lover? The interpretation is up to you.

    The exhibit takes a dark turn with sketches of a prison and the revelation of Casanova as a scoundrel and fraud. Cavorting between regal boudoirs and backstreet brothels, he often found himself running afoul of authorities.


    Make sure you take time to examine the intricately detailed artwork on simple, everyday objects like snuffboxes and folding fans. The diversity of furnishings and figurines, tea sets and tureens, candelabras and caricatures, are resplendent.


    The most stunning piece in the show for me was a richly decorated sedan chair, made of painted wood panels and glass with silk upholstery inside. Imagine a member of the aristocracy being carried through the crowded, filthy streets of Paris so they wouldn’t soil the hand-sewn hem of their finery.


    Not that this exhibit makes any attempts at political statements. It merely lets you immerse yourself in the many facets of society that Casanova experienced as he traversed Europe and abroad. He even traveled to St. Petersburg to meet Catherine the Great of the Ottoman Empire. He also entertained visiting dignitaries such as American patriot Benjamin Franklin, who arrived in Paris five months after signing the Declaration of Independence. French artist Joseph Siffred Duplessis, official portrait artist for King Louis XVI, duly noted Franklin’s visit with a noble oil portrait.

    Tickets are $12 for children 6 – 11 (under 6 – no admission charge); $14 for students with IDs and seniors 60 and over; $16 adults. Tickets are half-priced on Tuesdays as well as Fridays 5 – 8 p.m. More details at http://casanova.kimbellart.org.

    All photos taken by David Alvey