by Christine Searle, CIA, CRMA, Searle Business Solutions, LLC 

It’s no secret that many donors make their gift decisions by looking for non-profits with the lowest overhead percentage. For some reason, non-profits are expected to run their business on a shoestring. This expectation often results in limited funds for non-profits to invest in the necessary people and systems to perform effectively. How can non-profits get help to break the “overhead myth” about keeping overhead costs trimmed to the bone? How can non-profits shift the conversation from overhead to performance and impacts?

The Chamber’s Community Action Committee provided that help in its recent Non-Profit Forum, “Moving toward an Overhead Solution.” The forum featured a representative from GuideStar USA, Inc., an information service that collects, organizes, and reports data about U.S. nonprofits. GuideStar and other organizations in the non-profit space used their research to form a business case to help non-profits debunk the “overhead myth.”

Non-Profit Forum participants learned about the “Five Steps for Charting Impact” to help non-profits and their advocates direct donors’ attention to impacts and results instead of just focusing on overhead percentages. When non-profits address these Five Steps, donors clearly understand the value of their charitable gift.

1.  Clearly document your non-profit’s objectives and intended impact. This not only informs your donors; it also sets the framework for measuring your impact and telling your story.
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2.  Describe the strategies employed by your organization to achieve its stated objectives and impacts. Donors are more inclined to support non-profits that connect strategic goals with action plans and expected results.

3.  Discuss your capacity to deliver the programs and services necessary to meet your non-profit’s objectives. Include any plans to invest in capacity and increase impact, to help donors understand the need for infrastructure to support programs.

4.  Tell donors how you measure your progress. This communicates that you are monitoring the achievement of your organization’s goals and helps donors trace the impact of their gift.

5.  Share results from recent work and describe additional results that you want to achieve. Illustrating how successful projects add up to achieving you non-profit’s long term goals helps donors visualize their gift in action.
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Charting your non-profit’s impact is one way to compel a donor to give. More tools and information to help non-profits to re-direct donor conversations from the “overhead myth” to performance and results can be found at www.guidestar.org and www.overheadmyth.com. 

by James Korman, Shareholder, Bean, Kinney & Korman, P.C. 

Not every divorce has to be a nuclear war. Going to court is always an option. But it is expensive, stressful, slow and at the end a judge who doesn’t know you or your spouse is going to make a decision that can affect the rest of your life, not to mention your business and your fortune. Should court be a last resort rather than a first choice?  Is there an alternative? Absolutely.

Alternative Dispute Resolution (“ADR”) is the trial of the new millennium. Nowadays, I have ADR in more cases than not.

What is alternative dispute resolution? As the name suggests, it is an alternative to going to court to resolve your issues. ADR is often the first choice to resolve disputes related to a divorce. The most common types of ADR are mediation, neutral case evaluation, collaboration and arbitration.

In most cases, these are voluntary. Both parties have to agree to participate.  

Neutral Case Evaluation (“NCE”)

An experienced and impartial professional, usually a divorce lawyer or a judge, looks at a summary of the facts and issues in the case with supporting documents.  The summaries are prepared by the parties’ lawyers. In addition, each party usually gives the Neutral Case Evaluator any settlement offers that may have already been shared with the other side, and as yet undisclosed confidential settlement proposals.  

The NCE can then offer his/her opinions about how realistic each party’s positions are. Sometimes parties do not believe what their own lawyer is telling them. But when an experienced neutral person tells them their position is unrealistic, there should be a better chance to move closer to settlement.  

Mediation

Mediation is the most frequently employed ADR method in divorce cases. The parties hire a mediator, although some courts will provide mediators without charge. The mediator is generally an experienced judge or lawyer. Occasionally parties might employ a mental health professional to mediate issues involving custody of children and other parenting issues. The mediator doesn’t decide the issues. His/her job is to get the parties to “yes”. Often, the mediator will evaluate each party’s respective positions on various issues.  Why else would you employ a mediator who is an expert?

It is customary to give the mediator an advance statement of each party’s position and to designate the issues that have to be mediated.  You can mediate with or without counsel present.        

On the day selected for the mediation, the mediator, the parties and their attorneys assemble. Usually, the mediator will shuttle back and forth between the two parties and see if the gap between their respective positions can be bridged. There can be no settlement of any issue unless both parties agree to terms on that issue.  

It is advisable, to say the least, to memorialize in writing any agreements that are reached at mediation, and do it then and there. Delay can undo everything that everyone worked so hard to resolve. 
Before signing an agreement, I always say to my clients, “You have to be okay with this deal five days from now, five months from now and five years from now.”  

Collaboration

The parties sign contracts with lawyers who are certified in Collaborative Practice. The contract commits the lawyers to work with the parties to settle the case. If the case does not settle, the collaborative lawyers will not represent you in court. You will each have to retain another lawyer to handle that. At a collaborative session, the parties and their counsel work on settling the case with the assistance of financial advisors, mental health professionals, accountants or whatever experts might be able to help. At collaborative sessions the advice attorneys give, which you might expect to be confidential, is openly shared with all present.  

Again, the goal is for the parties to reach a written agreement resolving their issues.  

Arbitration

An arbitrator is in essence a judge you pay. So why wouldn’t you go to trial and use a judge the state pays? With arbitration you can choose your judge, you can choose your schedule and the proceeding is private. While arbitration is not a court trial, it is not a negotiation. Formal rules of evidence may be more relaxed, but it is essentially a trial. Both sides offer their testimony and evidence, both sides argue their case and the arbitrator decides the case.

Conclusion

With ADR, you get control over the schedule, privacy, input and flexibility. If you go to trial, the judge makes his/her decision, and that’s it.  If you don’t like it, all you can do is appeal. More expense, more delay, more stress.  

With ADR, if someone makes a settlement proposal, you can suggest another approach or fine tune certain terms.

For example, one party can offer to give up the equity in the house in exchange for his/her interest in the business. By contrast, a trial judge is likely to order the house sold and the proceeds divided.  Neither party will have the house. 
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If ADR doesn’t resolve everything, you can still resort to the courts, if you have to. Ultimately, how you choose to proceed is up to you.

by Karen Bate, President, KB Concepts P.R.

We all know that having a strong brand is important to our business success. But what exactly is branding and how do we know if we’re doing it right? 

Branding is all that you – and by extension your business — represents at its authentic core. To have a strong, successful and effective brand, you have to first know who you are and what you do better than anyone else.
If your audience's perception of your brand isn't what you want or need it to be, it's time to take the reins.But how?

The Arlington Chamber Communications Council, which I am pleased to co-chair with Maritza Lizama of LiMon LLC, will hold the first of three events that answer this crucial question on Friday, April 24.  If you want to strengthen your brand to reach new levels of success, this session is the place to start.

Moderated by Communications Council member John Matthews of Gryphix Coaching & Development, LLC, Raise the Bar: The Power of Your Personal Brand, will feature Melanie Spring, Chief Inspiration Officer for DC-based Sisarina, a brand strategy agency, and a renowned national expert on this topic, and Don Larson, Founder & CEO of the Sunshine Nut Company in Mozambique, Africa, a visionary who truly personifies his brand. This dynamic duo will share their wisdom on the power of personal branding and how critical it is for every organization’s success.

Topics they’ll address in the session include how to: 
 

• Determine who you are and what you stand for
• Decide what qualities you'll become "known for" and how to leverage them in every situation
• Break through the clutter and become memorable
• Build an emotional connection between your brand and your audience
• Create instant value by helping others first
• Make sure your brand is consistent across all channels
  
  

The second event in the Raise the Bar Series, scheduled for Friday, June 5, will focus on The Power of Visual Content. With the explosion of social media channels such as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and Snap Chat, along with the major role images play on websites, in the media and in all forms of communication, photos, graphics and videos are vital to successfully telling your story and reaching your audiences in the most meaningful ways. 

On Friday, October 2, the final event in the series will explore The Power of Influencer Marketing. More and more companies are turning to this increasingly popular way to reach their target audiences through influential people who have large followings on social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. These “influentials” can share messages and promote products far more effectively than traditional advertising, especially to millennials, and often for a fraction of the cost. 

From its Back to Basics series two years ago to the Beyond the Basics series last year, the Communications Council takes its efforts one step further in 2015 to help Chamber members and other businesses and organizations Raise the Bar on their communications and marketing strategies. Sessions are $30 for members and $50 for non-members. Members can also reserve a spot for all three sessions for $75.
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For my money, this series is another excellent content offering from the Chamber that provides business leaders in Arlington and the surrounding region with the latest tools and information they need to meet and exceed their goals.  I hope you join me in taking advantage of these terrific sessions with nationally respected expert speakers. To register, click here.

by Marcio Silveira, CFP, CFA, CAIA, Pavlov Financial Planning 

Do you invest too much where you live?

If you are like most people, your answer is “yes”.  The majority of investors act this way because familiarity builds confidence. The problem is that this confidence does not really mean knowledge and expertise. Investing too much where you live can mean missed opportunities and taking too many risks. The technical term for this behavior is the home-country bias.

U.S. and International

For U.S. based investors this tendency is not a very serious problem. This is simply because the United States has a large share of global investable stocks and represents roughly 40% of the global stock market.

Being based here in the United States allows us to invest in any part of the world in a very cost effective way, but we generally miss this opportunity because our home-country bias is skewing our investment decision-making. We typically have over 80% of our stock portfolios based in the U.S.  Burton Malkiel, a professor at Princeton University, discussed the home-country bias in this interview. 

This tendency is much more serious in smaller countries, however. Investors based in Canada, for example, hold the majority of their stocks in Canada, but their market is less than 5% of the global market. These investors will also have a disproportionate exposure to some specific industries that are prominent in each market. In the case of Canada, there will to a very large exposure to commodities in general and mining in particular. It is certainly too much risk that is easily avoidable.

Immigrants and Expats

The problem persists when investors move. Immigrants in the United States keep investing too much in their countries of origin. There is a false illusion that they know what is really going on. The reality is that most immigrants know very little about the drivers of stock market performance in their countries of origin, and they invest there simply because of familiarity and the confidence associated with it.

U.S. Expats in other countries also tend to have too much of their investments in the United States, but they also invest in their new countries of residence. The result of neglecting other countries is an investment portfolio that can miss opportunities for better returns in relation to the risk taken and, in some cases, reckless risk exposures.

Owning the World

The most sensible approach to benefit the most from diversification (which reduces the risk while keeping the expected return) is to have a globally diversified portfolio. This is accomplished very easily by a U.S. based investor with very simple portfolios of less than 5 Exchange Traded Funds – ETFs. In the extreme, this global diversification can be accomplished with just one security. An interesting example is the Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (ticker: VT) 

Having a true global exposure allows investors to keep the course of consistent investment with controlled risk because of the very broad exposure.

Recent Performance and Opportunity for Non-U.S. Investments

In the past 3 years, U.S. Stocks have performed significantly better than International Stocks (including Developed and Emerging). This means that the relative stronger performance further increases the weight of the US in the global stock market. For example, the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (U.S. Stocks) has returned 20.5% over the past 3 years and the Vanguard Total International Stock ETF (International Stocks) has returned 8.94%.
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The conclusion is that investing internationally in a meaningful way is always sensible, and right now there seems to be a particularly good opportunity to do so.

by Noemi B. Riveira, Director of Real Estate Development, Habitat for Humanity of Northern Virginia, Inc.

There’s been more and more good news lately about the state of the job market. That’s encouraging for jobseekers, but could cause some anxiety for HR professionals in Arlington. Companies in metro areas like ours are finding it harder to recruit and retain lower-wage employees who cannot afford to live near their jobs. It’s no surprise as the median sales price of an Arlington home tops $500,000, according to data from RealEstate Business Intelligence.

With the improving job market, it’s only a matter of time before these essential employees look for work closer to their homes to shorten their long commutes, and reduce their transportation costs and their housing expenses. The County’s February 2015 draft Affordable Housing Master Plan highlighted this challenge to the economy: “…workers in lower-wage jobs across all industries form the backbone of the County’s economy, supporting business functions, providing resident-based goods and services, and serving the thousands of visitors who come to Arlington each year. Without a sufficient supply of housing affordable to lower-wage workers, it will become increasingly difficult for the County to attract and retain a diverse workforce and to continue to grow a vibrant, sustainable local economy in the future.”

Employers can take steps to help address this issue. One approach, Employer Assisted Housing (EAH), is gaining more attention recently with the introduction of a bill (“Housing America’s Workforce Act”) sponsored by New York Congresswoman Nydia M. Velázquez. The bill would offer employers a tax credit for providing their employees with housing assistance.

There are some interesting EAH programs around the country that local employers could replicate, which the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, highlighted in a recent article. Typical forms of EAH include down-payment assistance, forgivable loans and homeownership education classes. Some EAH strategies, such as the initiative championed by the Metropolitan Planning Council serving the Chicago area, emphasize public- and private-sector incentives.

Universities are among the employers at the forefront of EAH programs. The University of Chicago’s EAH program offers forgivable loans to encourage its employees to purchase a home near its campus. Locally, George Mason University created an award-winning workforce housing development, consisting of 156 rental units for its employees and graduate students, through a public/private partnership.

We, at Habitat for Humanity of Northern Virginia, see first-hand how affordable housing transforms lives in our area. Stable housing, like that offered by affordable homeownership, provides increased financial security, a sense of pride and an environment in which children can thrive. Providing more of these opportunities in Arlington would help employers recruit and retain talented, lower-wage employees who otherwise could not afford to own a home in the County.
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Noemi B. Riveira is Director of Real Estate Development for Habitat for Humanity of Northern Virginia. You can reach her at 703-521-9890, est. 101, or noemir@habitatnova.org.