December 11, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential
by Dan Pallota
“This book advocates a reversal of almost everything we have been taught about doing good, in order that we might achieve good on a scale not previously imagined,” writes Dan Pallotta, a nonprofit and advertising consultant and founder of Pallotta TeamWorks, which created AIDS fund-raising bike rides and other events to benefit charities.
Mr. Pallotta writes that nonprofit organizations have much to learn from free-market capitalism. In his first chapter, he argues that nonprofit employees should be paid according to their value to the organization, and that charities are unable to attract talented individuals because society believes people have to sacrifice comfort and money in order to do good.
He also says that nonprofit groups shouldn’t be discouraged from using their money for advertising, and that the nonprofit philosophy of spending money on programs or services prevents groups from planning and investing money for the long term.
In another chapter, Mr. Pallotta says charities need to stop measuring their efficiency by comparing fund-raising costs to dollars spent on program services, because that misses the point.
“When I ask only, ‘What percentage went to overhead?’ I am told nothing about how intelligently it spent the remainder,” he writes.
The book closes with a case study of Mr. Pallotta’s own business, Pallotta TeamWorks, which was a for-profit company raising money for nonprofit causes; the controversy surrounding the business; and the results it achieved for nonprofit groups concerned with AIDS and breast cancer.
(Read an interview with Mr. Pallotta here.)
Publisher: University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon, N.H. 03766-1446; (800) 421-1561; fax (603) 448-9429; http://www.upne.com; 340 pages; $35; ISBN 978-1-58465-723-1.
