Fund-of-funds Books

I bought this book when I started my first pharmacist job. All my investments are mutual funds and this is the only book I ever read on mutual funds. According to Quicken my ROI today is ranging 23-33%. I'm happy with what the book taught me.

I loved this book. I have not read another book like it regarding nonprofit fundraising. It strikes me as kind of odd that one has not been previously written. But now one has! Awesome. Use it to establish a data-driven approach to fundraising in your nonprofit organization. There are 9 chapters in this book as follows:

1. Overview of fundraising analytics
2. Understanding your constituents
3. Analytics and prospects
4. Analytics and campaign planning
5. Data-driven prospect management
6. Annual giving analytics
7. Selecting data for mining
8. Descriptive analysis: Basic statistics and scoring models
9. Regression analysis

So much of fundraising involves building a database of donors. Then building relationships with the donors who want to get more involved with the organization. But how does a fundraiser funnel that database of donors into a filter so the donors with the commitment, connection, and capacity can be fully hosed down? The answer: fundraising analytics.

This book covers it all when it comes to fundraising analytics. And what it doesn't tell you can be easily dreamed up by the reader as she reads along. I particularly enjoyed the first Appendix entitled "Final Thoughts on Fundraising Analytics." However, I think it should have been included as a conclusion in the main body of the book. And the glossary included as an appendix was good, too. 5 stars!

PS. Don't expect to learn what tools or computer programs one should use to make all this analysis happen. But that is best saved for another book that I don't think has been written.

A real gem. Kim Klein shares not only her widely reknowned wisdom and guidance, but she really helps you stay focused on and enthusiastic about the social change your nonprofit is committed to. Especially during these times of tightening budgets and limited resources, this book is a fantastic resource.

My board read this book and it opened their eyes IMMEDIATELY to a slew of mistakes we've been making as far as raising money is concerned. It's a quick read, easy to understand, and digestible even for those new to fundraising.

Does your congregation find it difficult to talk about money? Do you succeed at raising funds for special projects (like a building campaign), but then have trouble raising more for your ongoing operation? Fundraising With a Vision provides answers to these and other important fundraising challenges. Beginning with tips on how to get your congregation confortable with the topic of money, this book guides you step-by-step through the basics of planning and running a well-organized annual canvass - from creating a committee, recruiting canvassers, and planning a kickoff event, to doing canvass follow-up....

Packed with helpful resources like a Sample Canvass Calendar and a Suggested Share Giving Guide, Fundraising With a Vision is an invaluable tool for canvass committees, church boards, ministers, and anyone else who cares about securing the resources to fund their church's vision.
--- from book's back cover

Frank Sennett's FUNDRAISING: 50 PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESSFUL SCHOOL FUNDRAISERS is an excellent, basic handbook offering new approaches to traditional fundraising efforts. From ethical issues and common fundraising mistakes to lists of potential partners and sponsors and tips on grantwriting, here's a series of action-packed options schools and educators will appreciate.

This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution. In Burke's book Reflections on the Revolution in France, he penned a diatribe against the evils of the French Revolution, believing that there was a pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians joined by money-jobbers whose aim was to topple not only the old regime in France, but to export their "plague" throughout Europe. Thus, Burke astutely understood and abhorred the influence that Radical Enlightenment ideas had on the French Revolution. One instantly detects, in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a conservative philosophy by which he not only understood his own society, but the entire human civilization. Much of his work was an appeal to a politically conservative notion of a "created order" of the world, which from this reading seemed to be universal to all European nations. This reader sensed that Burke's Reflections were written as a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow the model of change embodied in the French Revolution, and to adopt the steady reforms that took place in England.

Burke found no social redeeming value in the French Revolution and when he wrote Reflections, the worst of the "reign of terror" had yet to come. In fact, if one used Georges Lefebvre's notion of "four acts" to the Revolution, Burke poured out all his criticism against the first two acts, the aristocratic and bourgeois revolts. This reader found Burke's long sections on British history used to buttress his case; that change should have come to France within a more staid social order as either ignorant of the complex socio-economic and political factors that led up to the Revolution, or as a naïve belief that that the French people were so culturally close to the English that they should both react in similar fashion to socio-political upheaval. Burke delivered a literary "tongue lashing" to the French for how easily they turned their backs on their socio-political traditions. "You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you" (31). This reader found Burke's argument on this point a little disingenuous. He lectured how Britain's "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 should have been the model for reform. However, he barely mentioned the bloody English Civil War that Cromwell staged, including the regicide of Charles I. In addition, one's impression of Burke's information is that he had received a very narrow view of the history leading up to the Revolution and its opening days, which seemed confined to correspondence from a small circle of friends. Burke had high praise for the First and Second Estates. His opinion of the nobles he knew was that they were, "...for the greater part composed of men of high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour....They were tolerably well bred; very officious, humane, and hospitable" (115-116). Not the impression one is left with after viewing the movie Dangerous Liaisons! In describing his personal contacts with the French clergy, he noted that, "I received a perfectly good account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties" (123).

Burke essentially observed a "cabal" that planned the opening of the Revolution to include a pronouncement of aristocratic intentions to abolish feudalism, the National Assembly's adoption of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," and the confiscation of Church property. Burke blamed two evils for the old regimes' demise. First, he blamed the philosophes whose atheistic literature he believed provided the influential ideas necessary to set the Revolution in motion. "The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion" (94). "Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind" (95). Second, he blamed the doubling of the Third Estate's representation in the National Assembly who were led by an overabundance of undistinguished lawyers and whose ambitions were to grab the reins of power. Burke described these men as "the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession" (36). Burke also ascribed to this cabal; the desire to reorder society through the confiscation of property, which he decried in his Reflections. "I see the confiscators begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end their" (128). Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion. "They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).
Alexis de Tocqueville noted how Burke misjudged the Revolution. "At first he thought it meant that France would be weakened and virtually destroyed" (94). Burke also feared that this "irrational" revolution would infest his own countrymen similar to a plaque. "If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it." (76).

Burke was no stranger to enlightened ideas. After all, he had been a supporter of American and Irish liberty. Burke was a Conservative Enlightenment figure, defending "reason" with tradition and religion. However, what Burke, was condemning in its earliest form is what we now recognize as ideology. And what he understood with great foresight is the power of modern intellectuals, acting as a literary clerisy, to produce it. Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion. "They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).

Recommended reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, enlightenment history, and the French Revolution.

The future of digital money may be a way to effect economic government -- the replacement of the coercion of the state by voluntary institutions. According to this book, advances in encryption will allow digital money transactions to be verifiable by induplicatable signature, yet encrypted to be utterly indecipherable by states (or other busybodies). The Future of Money in the Information Age is a great collection of essays that together paint an optimistic picture of a near future in which states will find it more and more difficult to exercise control of money -- their lifesblood. Highly recommended.

...Daniel Dancocks.

What a waste, that the author should have died so tragically at so young an age. He left behind a legacy of excellent works, including this, possibly the finest, most intimate history of a Canadian First World War infantry battalion ever written.

The book tells of the glory (60 MMs in a single battle alone!!) in a most understated way, and talks of the bad episodes - the rum incident, the execution of a soldier of the battalion for cowardice - frankly.

The book may bog down slightly with its insistence on mentioning every award winner in the text of the book (with 60 MMs along at Hill 70, one can appreciate the need to simply list the names rather than discuss each and every citation in turn).

Nonetheless, given the amount of time that had elapsed from the end of the war to the publication of this book, it is amazing how solid a grasp Dancocks was able to get on the subject matter.

A thoroughly excellent summary and description of what it was like for Canadians in the Great War, and some thoroughly good character sketches. I especially liked the historical sidebars, set apart from the main text, and very convenient.

Excellent afterword also, describing the battle honours and the oak leaf badge of the postwar perpetuates. And a complete listing of all honours and awards bestowed the individual soldiers of the battalion.

Also an astonishing number of photographs directly pertinent to the text, amazing given the era of the subject matter.

This book provides the undergraduate as well as the graduate student with an introduction to fundamental problem solving in gas reservoir engineering through practical equations and methods. Although much oilwell technology applies to gas wells, many differences exist. This book helps students understand and recognize these differences to enable handling gas reservoir problems appropriately