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Marc Pollick runs the Giving Back Fund, an umbrella nonprofit that manages foundations of athletes, entertainers and others. Pollick's pitch is simple: quick startup, low overhead and no scandal. And he guarantees noncharitable overhead will be no higher than 5% for the minimum donation of $250,000, down to 1% for a $5 million gift.

The usual question echoing in the hallways of nonprofit organizations is, What do donors want? The more pertinent question is, What do donors need? One way to answer this question is to examine the remarkable success and consequent challenges of one of the fastest growing sectors of American philanthropy: community foundations.

Editor's Note: this article applies Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the nonprofit world.

Nonprofit organizations should focus on building a lasting organization and on developing effective performance metrics. To make this possible, donors must change their approach to philanthropy.

Teach For America learned the importance of building organizational capacity the hard way.

The federation structure remains a viable model for nonprofit organizations - if managements transform themselves and affiliates collaborate more closely.

Business plan competitions are a powerful way to help nonprofits turn ideas into sustainable commercial ventures.

We have business and we have government. For too many intents and purposes, we have nothing in between. This distinction has framed the great social debate for more than a century: capitalism versus socialism, markets versus controls, individualism versus collectivism, privatization versus nationalization, "free enterprise" versus "democracy of the proletariat." The debate features no cooperatives, no NGOs, no not-for-profits, no volunteer organizations, not because they don't exist--clearly they are present in large numbers--but because they have been forced aside by this simplistic divide. In a sense, this is a problem of labeling.

Corporations aren't alone in focusing on governance; rigorous oversight of management and performance is increasingly important for nonprofits too.

Nonprofit managers who develop social purpose ventures to generate revenues to support a social mission have limited opportunities to share their experiences with others in the field or to learn from the experiences of others. Many nonprofit managers also have modest business backgrounds. Yet, despite these challenges, the movement toward income generation by nonprofits continues to grow. Some of these ventures succeed, yet many more fail to meet either their social or financial goals. Clearly, the field lacks well-defined criteria, standards, and strategies for achieving success in this area. The potential payoff from the diffusion of learning appears to be substantial. This paper offers a first step in the process.

Recent studies raise an uncharitable question: Is nonprofit accounting off track?

Donors are placing nonprofits on the hot seat to measure social performance. Problem is, there is little agreement on what those metrics should be. Professor Alnoor Ebrahim on how nonprofit managers should respond.