Trail Blazer, Non-Profit and Political Talk!

While the historical statistic is that 90% of incumbents win elections.   Trail Blazer clients continued to do better than that statistic again this year. 

Out of our clients that were candidates challenging an incumbent, we have a 2008 win percent of 16%.  It should be noted that over 20% of our challengers were 3^rd party candidates while none of them won several did very well – more on that later.  Our incumbents won 100% of their races.  In open seats we had a win percent of 42%.  We had one client drop out very early in the 2008 election cycle - they dropped out in December 2007.

We had victories in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Colorado, California, Louisiana and our home state of Minnesota.

We want to congratulate all of our clients on hard fought campaigns.

Our political clients are city council and state house level clients.  Most are small grassroots efforts with volunteers and not a paid staff.   

We are a nonpartisan firm and look forward to continuing to work with candidates from all parties.  I stated before that over 20% of our clients that challenged incumbents were running under a 3^rd party ballot line.  Most note worthy of those this past year was former senator Dean Barkley.  The Barkley for Senate campaign started in the polls at around 4-6% or they were not included in the poll at all.  In the end he received over 15% of the vote total for that U S Senate race.

Trail Blazer would like to thank all of our clients who are/were candidates in 2008.

Good campaigning to you!

Visting another Blog ran across an interesting project, people creating yard signs.   http://myyardourmessage.com/ has a whole bunch of yard sign's, some are pretty partisan, below is my favorite.

Just got my copy of this fall 2008’s “Nonprofit News” and came across an article from Jon Pratt (Executive Director for Minnesota Council of Nonprofits’) on 990 changes.

In it he points out that the new Part VI – Governance, Management and Disclosure – has 22 new yes/no questions about organizational policies and board procedures.  The suggestion he has is to take a dry run at the document now, if you have not already done so.

This is very good advise and I am hoping that everyone reading this will take that advice and make sure they can answer the questions, just don’t leave it to the accountants to do.

Traditional wisdom is that nonprofits have a delayed recession effect.  But we are hearing that nonprofits are being hit very hard right now.  Our thoughts are with everyone struggling.  

We are building new tools and partnerships to improve our performance and the results that you see in your fundraising and your activism.

With that in mind we joined the “Minnesota Council of Nonprofits” about a year ago and I came across a link that might help some of you on their web site.  http://www.mncn.org/moneysavingtips.htm

Hope it helps.   

Last week the RNC was in St Paul and Minneapolis.  It was an interesting time, some of us were able to get tickets to the convention hall and I can tell you it was very interesting.  Since we work with all stripes, in regards to our political clients, here at Trail Blazer we looked at the event as interested observers.  I have to tell you if you have never been to a political convention they have some very colorful people attend, and this national convention was no exception.  Everyone was very nice, very talkative and very much in love with their party.  Lot’s of delegates collected pins and buttons, t-shirts and hats.

I have to say we at Trail Blazer really enjoyed the time we spent at the convention events.

Breakfast this morning (9/3/2008) for Oklahoma and Louisiana was something we did to thank the many republican clients we have in Louisiana.

While we are a non-partisan firm with so many of our clients in Louisiana being republicans we thought this breakfast was a good way to thank them and there supporters.

The Oklahoma delegates were very nice.

The speaker that was lined up for this breakfast was amazing, former congressman from Oklahoma  J.C Watts, Jr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JC_Watts) he was dynamic and funny and really kept the audience in his grasp.

After the breakfast we handed out our information to the many people who attended.

Later that day I just happened to walk by the area was the Oklahoma delegates were getting their photos taken for the convention.  I got stopped because they had questions about Trail Blazer.  It was very nice to see that so many people remembered us and asked more questions about Trail Blazer.’

We at Trail Blazer have some friends in Louisiana and Gustav has caused a lot of concern.  With the RNC happening this week we joined some of our friends who are with the Louisiana delegation to the RNC for breakfast this morning.  It was announced that Cindy McCain would appear to say a few words but who should appear with her but Laura Bush.  That was a good treat.  They had kind words to say and good wishes for all in the Gulf Coast area.  We here at Trail Blazer are thinking of all the Gulf Coast area in this time of bad weather.