Dick Taft is president of the J. Richard Taft Organization, Inc., headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area. He has spent most of his professional career helping social, educational, and cultural organizations solve fundraising, marketing, communications, and organizational-planning problems.

After holding several philanthropic, marketing and publishing positions in New York, Dick came to Washington and, with the support of five national foundations, established the Washington Foundation Center and the tax-information system that made possible the development of broad, national information on philanthropy.

He subsequently founded the Taft Group, dedicated to helping nonprofit institutions to improve their financial resources and management. The company grew into a leading international marketing, fund-raising, training, and communications firm with nonprofit clients throughout the world. Some years later the Taft Group launched an information technology subsidiary that ultimately grew to be the leading  publisher of reference products, periodicals, and professional books on fundraising, marketing, communications, and management, with 100,000 subscribers and customers worldwide.

Dick’s own consulting assignments have included many leading institutions and associations, among them: Harvard University, the National Institutes of Medicine, Oxford University, Yale New Haven Hospital, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Hebrew University, the Kennedy Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, the World Wildlife Association, Morehouse College of Medicine, Howard University, the American Friends Service Committee, the Getty Foundation, and the Institute for Museum Services. The Taft Group developed the slogan, Profit Thinking for Nonprofit Organizations, and is widely credited with having pioneered many advanced marketing and management concepts for 501-C-3 organizations.

The Canadian-based Thomson Corporation, a multi-national publishing conglomerate, acquired The Taft Group information technology division in 1991. Dick continued to serve as president and chairman for a number of years and then founded the J. Richard Taft Organization, which has provided marketing, fund raising and communications services to various major institutions, among them the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Natural History, the American Council on Education and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. Recently the company also conducted planning and development studies for the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the U.S. State Department’s proposed National Museum of American Diplomacy.

Dick is a graduate of Dartmouth College. He has served on the boards of such nonprofit organizations as Friends of Libraries, the L’Enfant Trust, the Dance Project, the Newsletter Publishers Association Foundation, and Templeton College of Management at Oxford University. He is the author of two highly popular books, Understanding Foundations (McGraw Hill), and How to Rate Your Development Office (a National Association of Fundraising Professionals “best book of the decade”). He also served as editor of Foundation News, published by the Council on Foundations.

Under sponsorship of the U. S. State Department, Dick has lectured, or conducted institutional seminars, on marketing, management, communications and fundraising, in Europe, South America and the Far East. He has trained minority fundraisers under grants from the Ford and Phelps Stokes Foundations, published the first directory on American Indian philanthropy, and assisted the National Endowment for the Arts to establish its national challenge-grant program. He recently served on the advisory board of a Ford Foundation/Lilly Endowment-funded study designed to improve the financial outlook for historically black colleges and universities.