There’s an ongoing discussion in the nonprofit world about our relationship to for-profit businesses - specifically if nonprofits should be run more like them. Throughout different parts of my career I have fallen on different sides of this argument, but today I think we’re asking the wrong people the wrong question.

Here are things that I wish nonprofits would allow themselves to do in the way that for-profits do: put real value in branding and marketing; invest in market research; experiment; pay generously; have comfortable offices.

But of course the problem isn’t as simple as “allow themselves to do.”

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