PhilanTopic

NPO Job Openings (April 2012)

After surprising on the upside in January and February, the job numbers for March and April came in below expectations, reviving fears that, without further Fed easing, the economic recovery could stall.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm payrolls grew by 154,000 in March and only 115,000 in April, while the number of unemployed in April fell to 12.5 million from 12.8 million and the unemployment rate dropped a tenth of a percentage point to 8.1 percent (the lowest level since February 2009). BLS also revised upward the February (from +240,000 to +259,000) and March (+120,000 to +154,000) payroll numbers.

(Chart courtesy CNNMoney)

Here at PND, our own completely unscientific gauge of the economy's health -- i.e., submissions to the PND job board -- tells a slightly different story, with monthly job postings in April down on a consecutive and year-over-year basis, though not enough to set off alarms. Indeed, for the first four months of the year, the number of jobs posted to the job board eclipsed, by almost 5 percent, the number posted over the same four-month period in 2011, suggesting that the nonprofit sector, like the economy in general, is recovering (albeit slowly) from the disaster of 2008-09.

Unsurprisingly, given the tough funding climate, demand for nonprofit development and fundraising professionals remains strong. And we're also seeing a lot of postings in the finance category -- up 8 percent on a year-over-year basis -- perhaps because of increased merger and restructuring activity in the sector.

It might be overstating things to say the optimism we felt in January has faded. But with Greece on the ropes and the seventeen-country Eurozone at risk of falling into "severe recession" -- or worse -- the next couple of weeks will be crucial. And then there are the elections in November, with control of all three branches of government at stake, and, looking a little farther down the road, the dreaded "fiscal cliff" our elected officials in Washington seem determined to explore. How it all shakes out, and what that might mean for the nonprofit sector, is anyone's guess (though we're betting against a Thelma and Louise-style finale). In the meantime, we'll be keeping our eye on the May job numbers, to be released June 1, for clues.

-- Lauren Brathwaite

[Infographic] Playgrounds That Build Communities

Nice infographic from the folks at KaBoom!, a national nonprofit dedicated to creating great playspaces with the participation of community members, and the Knight Foundation, which today announced that it is providing $1.5 million to the organization for the construction of nine additional playspaces in Akron, Ohio, Miami, and Detroit.

 

The grant announcement coincides with the release of a report, KaBOOM!: Playgrounds That Build Communities (exec summary, 10 pages, PDF), that provides lessons for groups seeking to engage volunteers in community change efforts. Based on a Public/Private Ventures evaluation of Knight-funded KaBoom! projects in five states and the District of Columbia, the report found that:

• The majority of KaBoom! project planning committee members believed they had developed or improved in a variety of skills related to organizing, leading, and executing large-scale change efforts.
• Most of the respondents to the survey reported positive changes across a variety of skills, abilities, and attitudes related to their community.
• All the community partners showed increases in their organizing and leadership skills, and many went on to apply these skills to other efforts post-playground build.
• Much of the effort involved in building a KaBoom! playspace is mutually reinforcing: Planning committee members and community partners become more skilled and confident through the effort, which enables the participating organization to employ participants' skills in other and more ambitious tasks.
• After participating in a KaBOOM! project, planning committee members expressed a greater sense of hopefulness that they can improve their communities by working with others.

To download the full report (58 pages, PDF), click here.

 

Weekend Link Roundup (May 19-20, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Advocacy

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Lisa Ranghelli gives a shout out to the Alliance for Justice's new site, Bolder Advocacy, noting that the "'A' in advocacy used to be akin to the adultery committed in Hawthorne's novel,...a symbol of failure to adhere to the mores of the community, a sign of risky behavior, even law-breaking."

Communications/Marketing

There's an opportunity for nonprofits to improve their organizational stories with data beyond presenting the information in a simple chart, writes Susan Stehling at the Minnesota Council on Foundations's Philanthropy Potluck blog. Indeed, software like Microsoft Excel has made it too easy for organizations to create bad graphs and charts. To avoid such a fate, Stehling suggests that nonprofits follow in the steps of Cole Nussbaumer, people analytics manager at Google, who advises them to "step back and answer some basic questions" before creating their next chart.

Philanthropy

On her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz wonders whether "the next ten years [will] see the creation of hybrid foundations -- a capital investing form structured specifically to allow greater flexibility in how funds are used for social good?" Few of today's "institutions...look as much like their forebears as do philanthropic foundations," writes Bernholz. "It's illogical that this century's wealth creators are going to be content with last century's philanthropic forms...." Interesting discussion in the comments section, as well.

Responding to news that a second closed-door meeting of Giving Pledge signatories was held earlier this month in Santa Barbara, Philanthrocapitalism authors Matthew Bishop and Michael Green ask why the billionaires are being "bashful" about sharing their giving stories, successes and failures, with the general public. "The importance of failure as a way to learn is now well understood in the world of business," write Bishop and Green.

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs wear their first disastrous start-up or two as a badge of honour. Philanthropy, by contrast, has long missed out on the feedback loop from failure that is so valuable to business, and so often ends up frittering away scarce resources on projects that someone else has already found wanting. Thus it is excellent news that in Santa Barbara the leaders of America's new generation of philanthropists started to take their failed efforts at giving seriously enough to learn from them. Nonetheless, how much better if at next year's gathering they open up and let the rest of us learn those lessons from failure too....

As if anticipating Bishop and Green's concern, James Irvine Foundation president Jim Canales and Kevin Rafter, the foundation's manager of research and evaluation, describe the Irvine Foundation’s approach to performance assessment and discuss three lessons the foundation has learned over the past six years in an article the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In the first in a series of six blog posts, Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan suggests that "the nonprofit sector may be losing the public battle to define itself" to those who espouse a "business-as-savior perpesctive." Yes, writes Buchanan, we must "push harder to maximize the effectiveness of foundations and other nonprofit organizations....But we need to do our work

in a way that is rooted in a deep understanding of the particular role and context of nonprofit organizations, rather than in a way that assumes that “business thinking” and market approaches represent the secret formula for nonprofit success. We must be clear that the advocacy of those pushing market-based solutions for all of our social problems, which sometimes takes on a cultish feel, is misguided. It won’t work, and it threatens to undermine the public’s understanding and appreciation of the vital role of the nonprofit sector as distinct from business and government....

Social Entrepreneurship

On the Social Velocity site, Nell Edgington reviews Billy Parish and Dev Aujla's Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money and Community in a Changing World, "a career guide for the generation that finds themselves on the precipice of some pretty monumental global challenges."

Social Media

In a guest post on Beth's Blog, Geri Stengel, founder and president of Ventureneer.com, explains the benefits of LinkedIn groups for nonprofit professionals and asks readers to weigh in on a discussion about the ethics of accepting "tainted" money.

Science/Technology

On the Growthology blog, Dane Stangler, shares findings and a great map from a recent study published by the Center for an Urban Future, a Kauffman Foundation grantee, which found that technology startups have boomed in New York City over the past few years.

Although the semantic Web envisioned by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee "might be able to reduce donor 'friction' -- the many steps and processes that interpose themselves between a donor's initial desire to give and her consummation of a gift," it may be years before it becomes a reality, writes Greater New Orleans Foundation president Albert Ruesga on the White Courtesy Telephone blog. In the meantime, there are things nonprofits can do to "maximize their online success," including putting "Give Now" buttons on multiple pages of their Web sites.

Transparency

And in a post on her blog, Allison Fine commends the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for its effort to "go beyond the busy-ness of social media to get to the 'so what' of it for social change."

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

Social Media and the Law: 5 Questions For… Andrew J. Hollander, Of Counsel, K&L Gates

In an age when an individual can improve or harm an organization's brand in 140 characters or less, having a clear understanding of the social media law of the land has never been more important.

"It's understood by employers that employees are going to use social media," Eric B. Meyer, an employment lawyer based in Philadelphia, recently told the Wall Street Journal, "but hopefully they won't run afoul of their company's rules and potentially harm the employer." That's exactly what happened recently at the fashion retailer Francesca's Holdings. The Houston-based company's CFO, Gene Morphis, was fired after "improperly communicat[ing] company information through social media." Apparently, loose lips do sink ships.

But what about other sticky situations in which an employer might find him/herself that are not covered by existing law? For example, can someone who managed an organization's Twitter account take the account's thousands of followers with her when she leaves? And who really "owns" the passwords to a company's blog and social media accounts?

Situations like those may not be covered by law, but there are things an organization can do to protect itself in the still-evolving world of social media. For starters, explained Andrew J. Hollander, of counsel at K&L Gates, during a recent 501 Tech NYC event hosted by the Foundation Center, an organization can have a social media policy or clause attached to its broader company guidelines that outlines who owns what.

After the event, PND had a chance to chat with Hollander about copyright infringement, the simple things nonprofits can do to protect their brands online, and a few good social media clauses worth embracing.

Philanthropy News Digest: The Library of Congress has begun archiving public tweets. Who "owns" an individual's or organization's tweets?

Andrew Hollander: There's an argument made that public tweets are just that -- public -- and for that reason they can be re-used for different purposes. Some people may have privacy concerns about how that publicly available data gets used. But are the tweets at the Library of Congress easier to re-tweet than those published to your or your organization's public Twitter feed? Yes. That's just one of many issues that need to be addressed, but like many things in social media law there may not be a clear answer right now.

PND: What is the single biggest intellectual property concern for nonprofits that rely on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter?

AH: Copyright is always a concern when it comes to the Internet. It's sometimes easy, too easy, to make a copy of a copyrighted work and put it in a different place. What organizations should do before hitting "Ctrl+C" is ask, Do I have the right to take this copyrighted work and put it on my Web site or platform? There are fair-use issues that can be raised, but as a general rule one should be careful not to over-rely on fair use as a defense.

But the broader answer is that there are things nonprofits can do to enhance the protection of their rights, and one of those things is to have understandings with their employees and third-party partners in which it's clearly stated -- and documented -- who will own what IP rights that might arise during the course of employment or a contractual relationship. I always recommend that clients be mindful of these things at the start of a new relationship, and to hammer out an understanding to the extent that they can to avoid problems later on.

PND: What are some simple things a nonprofit can do to protect its brand online?

AH: One is to have a terms-of-use license giving conditions whereby third parties are able to use the nonprofit's brand or trademark. Nonprofits also can see whether there are third parties using their brand as a username online through Web sites like KnowEm.com. Another way to monitor their brand online is by using a site like socialmention.com, which is a search engine for mentions on social media platforms in the way that Google is for the Web as a whole.

PND: What are some examples of good social media clauses?

AH: There are many, but a few come to mind. IBM has a clause that essentially says, "Here are our social media guidelines, but note that these guidelines are part of our overall business conduct guidelines for employees." Basically, they're saying that just because you comply with their social media guidelines or understand them doesn't mean that they replace the broader company guidelines. Intel also has a good clause which sets up a nice framework that essentially says, "Disclose but protect." Disclose who you are, your role and what youre doing, and be honest about it; but protect your company's intellectual property, protect confidential information, and use common sense. I think that's a neat way to package things. Ford, the automaker, also has, to my mind, a nice set of social media guidelines. They give five core principles that live within an even broader set of Ford guidelines, but they're presented to employees in a visually appealing way.

PND: What are some of the pitfalls organizations should try to steer clear of?

AH: One has to do with employment and labor law. The National Labor Relations Board has said to certain employers who have terminated employees based on their social media activities that they couldn't. And the reason they couldn't is because the employees were engaging in activities protected by the National Labor Relations Act. As a result, some of these so-called Facebook firings have been found to be improper, and some of the social media policy clauses that these employees were terminated under were found to be too broad. For example, a clause may say you shall not disparage anybody in any way. But the National Labor Relations Board would say that's a little too broad, because you have to enable an employee to exercise his or her rights under the National Labor Relations Act.

-- Regina Mahone

A Strategy for Nonprofit Hospitals

Over the last few years, eight- and nine-figure gifts like those received by New York University's Langone Medical Center and Sandford Health have obscured the fact that not-for-profit hospital revenue is growing at its slowest rate in two decades.

Indeed, a new report from Wilmington Trust suggests that one of the drivers of revenue growth in the sector, however modest, has been high-net-worth families -- households with a net worth of over $1 million or net income of $200,000. In 2009, for example, 70 percent of high-net-worth families gave to healthcare organizations, compared to 23 percent of the families in the general population.

In response to this trend, a growing number of not-for-profit hospitals and healthcare organizations are establishing standalone foundations to lead their development efforts. According to the report, the benefits of such an arrangement include increased leadership and volunteer opportunities for trustees; clearer lines between the fundraising/administrative functions of the hospital and its core operations; a more focused marketing and branding strategy; and the flexibility and security that comes with having a separate endowment.

The report includes results from Wilmington Trust's own research, which found, among other things, that 70 percent of the healthcare organizations it surveyed in the mid-Atlantic region had foundations, as well as a short profile of one medium-sized nonprofit hospital, Ellis Medicine in Schenectady, New York, that has raised $12.1 million over the past five years and even managed to boost its fundraising revenue in 2009, thanks largely to the efforts of its foundation.

To download the report (8 pages, PDF), visit the Wilmington Trust site.

-- Mitch Nauffts

Movement Building and System Change

The bad old days of the '70s and '80s are a distant memory for many, but New York City in 2012 isn't without problems. The list includes a public education system that fails too many kids, a chronic shortage of affordable housing, immigrant populations that lack basic protections, and rising income inequality.

The city is home, however, to roughly ten thousand nonprofit organizations, some 70 percent of which provide direct services to constituents. A sizable percentage of these groups work at the grassroots level and many have a social justice orientation, working in and with communities and populations that are marginalized and underresourced.

How the good work of these groups can be leveraged more effectively to drive social change was the topic of an interesting panel discussion hosted by Philanthropy New York I was fortunate to attend earlier this spring.

Moderated by the Foundation Center's Lisa Philp and featuring Hugh Hogan, executive director of the North Star Fund, Ana Oliveira, president and CEO of the New York Women's Foundation, and young leaders from four grassroots nonprofit organizations, the discussion focused on strategies that funders and donors can pursue to help community-based nonprofits create a more fair, just, and compassionate New York.

Early in their respective careers, both Hogan and Oliveira realized that social justice -- a concern "for those who are the least well off politically, economically and socially" -- would shape and inform their life's work. Hogan's "a-ha" moment came in Senegal and Namibia, where he spent nearly a decade working to reverse a legacy of colonialism and apartheid. That experience eventually led him to the Open Space Equity Campaign for the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which he served as director from 1999 to 2003. Back then, Hogan told us, eight out of ten communities affected by environmental problems in NYC were communities of color; today, seven out of ten are immigrant communities.

Oliveira worked in the health and human services field for over twenty years, developing programs for vulnerable populations in New York, and then served as the first woman and Latina director of Gay Men's Health Crisis, one of the oldest and largest AIDS service organizations in the country, before joining NYWF in 2006. The organization, which is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, was established, Oliveira noted, around what many people at the time thought was "a crazy idea": that women from all walks of life and with different interests could come together to address the root causes of economic injustice. But come together they did, and the organization flourished. Today, NYWF funds women leaders and women-led organizations seeking to create positive change in the lives of women, girls, and communities in the metro New York region and works closely with its grantee partners to incorporate their "front-line" expertise into its grantmaking strategies. Or, as Oliveira put it, the organization is "intentional [about] following its grantee partners and leading its donor partners."

As impressive as Hogan and Oliveira were (and are), the real stars of the afternoon were the four young nonprofit leaders who had been invited to talk about their work: Jaron Benjamin, an organizer at VOCAL-NY, which works to organize low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, drug use, and incarceration; Priscilla Gonzalez, executive director of Domestic Workers United, an organization of nannies, housekeepers, and elder caregivers that led the six-year campaign for the nation's first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights; Daniel Gross, co-founder and executive director of Brandworkers International NY, a nonprofit that works to protect and advance the rights of retail and food employees in the city; and Kris Hayashi, co-director of the Audre Lorde Project, an LGBTQ center for community organizing.

All had compelling personal stories to share and all were poised beyond their years. They also were quick to give at least partial credit for their effectiveness as advocates to the coaching they received through North Star's Movement Leadership Program. Launched in 2010, the program was created in response to requests for technical assistance that the fund was getting from grassroots groups. The goal in creating the program, said Hogan, was to free up the leaders of these groups to think more strategically about how to run their organizations, to give them an opportunity to learn from their peers, and to get them thinking more in terms of a movement-building framework.

In its first year, the program awarded two-year grants of $50,000 (the fund's largest grant previously had been $15,000) to five organizations: New Immigrant Community Empowerment, Brandworkers International, Families for Freedom, VOCAL-NY, and DWU. Each organization also was invited to send a three-member team (the executive director, a leader from the board, and a member leader) to a series of workshops and trainings focused on the building blocks of community organizing: base building, leadership development, campaign strategy, and strategic communications.

While movement building as a strategy in these distracted times might strike some as quixotic, it was obvious to anyone in the room on this particular afternoon that the program had succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. And indeed, earlier this year North Star decided to fund a second group of grantees through the program that includes the Child Welfare Organizing Project, which works to transform the quality of services provided to New York City families through the city's child welfare system; DAMAYAN, a grassroots group that advocates for the rights of migrant workers; FIERCE, an LGBQT youth organization; VAMOS Unidos, a Bronx-based social justice organization founded by Latina/o and immigrant street vendors; and Picture the Homeless, a grassroots advocacy organization founded and led by homeless people. All are "in the process of expanding their organizations and work to a broader scale," says North Star program officer Walter Barrientos, and that's good news for the poor, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised in New York City.

But it's a drop in the bucket. As Hogan noted toward the end of the event: "If someone comes into a room with a bad cut on his leg, most people will say, 'We've got to get you to a doctor and get that taken care of'. But if a dozen people, each with a bad cut on his or her leg, walk into the room, sooner or later you have to ask, 'What the hell is causing all those cuts?'"

Social justice work is hard and not for the faint of heart. We've made progress as a country on a lot of fronts in the fifty-plus years I've been around. But there's more to do. It's heartening to know that passionate, talented leaders like Jaron Benjamin, Priscilla Gonzalez, Daniel Gross, and Kris Hayashi are working hard every day to make ours a more just and compassionate society, and that organizations like the North Star Fund and the New York Women's Foundation are willing to try new things and take risks to help leverage their efforts.

To learn more, click here.

-- Mitch Nauffts

Weekend Link Roundup (May 12-13, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

On her About.com blog, Joanne Fritz says nonprofit communicators don't always "make it easy for people like me to share their information" via social media. If they really want to get their message out, adds Fritz, organizations should blog frequently, add images to their posts, use video when possible, encourage retweets on Twitter, and add RSS feeds to their online platforms.

Fundraising

On the AFP blog, Reed Stockton shares findings from a recent study which found that nearly $1.5 billion was raised through some 350 crowdfunding platforms globally in 2011.

On the Minnesota Council on Foundations' Philanthropy Potluck blog, Anne Bauers looks at the Nonprofit Finance Fund's recently released State of the Sector survey, which found, among other things, that many nonprofits are "feeling distant from their funders."

Maybe, as the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Sean Dobson notes, that's because the percentage of foundation grant dollars awarded for general operating support remained stuck at 22 percent in 2009 and 2010. It's a shame, writes Dobson, because in an uncertain economy, general operating support is "an endowment-friendly way [for foundations] to build stronger... grantees." 

Philanthropy

Ellen Remmer, president and CEO of the Philanthropic Initiative, explains why a growing number of community foundations are making investments designed to "produce a social (including environmental) and financial return." Writes Remmer:

They believe they can have a deeper and more sustained impact in their communities by adding this tool to the toolbox, particularly for some issue areas such as housing, sustainable economic development, healthy lifestyles (think local food), etc. They are compelled by the opportunity to "recycle" philanthropic dollars and augment the amount of capital committed to social change. And they believe that a broader group of social investors will be attracted to this approach for community improvement than their traditional cadre of donors.

Could community foundations become standard bearers for impact investing? Could they play an educational, brokering or even leadership role for donor investors and the recipient organizations? There are plenty of barriers to realizing the full potential of this evolving form of social investment; but my bet is that community foundations could -- if they choose -- play a key role....

Poverty Alleviation

Over at the Huffington Post's Impact blog, Maurice Lim Miller, founder and CEO of the Family Independence Initiative, reminds us that charity can be a double-edged sword. "The ability to make choices, determine our plan of action, and be in control are essential to achieving mobility and stability in our society," writes Miller. But while

everyone faces problems and needs help at some point, the programs and services for low-income people treat them as unable to make their own choices -- as charity cases. A charity case isn't simply someone who needs resources; the term carries pathos. "Charity case" does not breed confidence, self-respect, or affirm any sense of self-determination. If we really want people who are low-income to have the opportunity to get ahead, we need a new model....

Social Media

Last but not least, Allison Fine suggests in a post on the Harvard Business Review blog that what it means to be "professional" in the workplace has changed. "For most people over forty," writes Fine,

it means wearing a uniform of some kind, talking in a certain language, carrying a briefcase (or more recently a Blackberry or iPhone), and perhaps, most important, keeping one's private life private. Gen Y, or Millennials -- late teens to thirty year-olds -- have a vastly different notion of what it means to present oneself to the world wearing their business hat (so to speak). The huge organizational chasm between Gen Y and Gen X and Boomers is less a technological problem than a psychological one, and it manifests itself in the use of social media....

Is she right? Do older professionals view social media as a threat to professional behavior? Is it changing what it means to be "professional"? Use the comments section to share your thoughts.

And drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org if we missed something. Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

-- The Editors

A 'Flip' Chat With Helena Monteiro, Executive Director, Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support

(This video was recorded as part of our "Flip" chat series of conversations with thought leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. You can check out other videos in the series here, including our previous chat with Courtney O’Malley, vice president of the Starr Foundation.)

Founded in 2000 by a group of philanthropy support organizations, Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support, or WINGS, today comprises a hundred and fifty philanthropic "infrastructure" organizations representing fifty-four countries that work to strengthen philanthropy and a culture of giving through mutual learning and support, knowledge sharing, and professional development. Among other things, the network, which is headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, hosts a global peer-learning event every four years and provides its member organizations with an online community where they can connect and share resources, including research reports, news, and capacity development opportunities.

In partnership with the Foundation Center, WINGS also is working to build a global data platform that provides a comprehensive view of:

• the size, scope, and characteristics of the infrastructure for philanthropy;
• global trends in institutional philanthropic giving; and
• how data can be used to support global philanthropy.

Last week, PND sat down with WINGS executive director Helena Monteiro to discuss the Global Philanthropy Data Project, the challenges associated with developing a standardized global data collection system, and the importance of supporting philanthropic infrastructure.

(If you're reading this in an e-mail, click here.) 

(Running time: 6 minutes, 19 seconds)

Have a thought or comment you'd like to share? Use the comments section below....

-- Regina Mahone

Pride & Prejudice: (What) Can Nonprofits Learn From the For-Profit World?

(Richard Dare is managing director and CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and an entrepreneur. The article below, which appears here with permission of the author, originally was published on the Huffington Post's Culture blog.)

No one, least of all I, would argue nonprofits do anything less than important work.

In addition to providing vital art, theater, and music experiences, as Senator Bradley once noted, nonprofits have done everything from creating the polio vaccine to building the Sesame Workshop to inventing the nationwide 911 system we all benefit from. They've protected endangered species, played a crucial role in bringing down apartheid, helped rebuild civil society in Eastern Europe, de-mined war zones, cared for aged patients, fed and sheltered the homeless, and continue to provide help for schools nearly every day of the year. About half our nation's hospitals, colleges, and universities are nonprofits. And yes, nonprofits even play music.

For the purpose of this discussion, let's stipulate that nonprofits do some pretty amazing things, and we'd all like to do them properly, without compromising our integrity one iota. We can talk about what the good things are and why they matter later, perhaps, in a future article.

But for now, because I identified a structural fissure in the underlying nonprofit business model the last time I wrote, let's focus on some fundamental steps nonprofits might take if they are to follow their financially more perspicacious siblings in the for-profit sector toward a brighter financial future.

And lest we forget the reality of our situation, consider the 2012 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey released by the Nonprofit Finance Fund last month. That report surveyed 4,500 U.S. nonprofits, including arts, education, and human service organizations. Taken as a whole, the survey found that 85 percent of all nonprofits experienced an increase in demand for their services in 2011 (and 88 percent are expected to experience an increase in demand again in 2012), while only 57 percent of all nonprofits have enough cash on hand to last them three months. No business in the for-profit sector would tolerate this state of affairs on an ongoing basis. It is certainly more than a bit precarious if sustainability really is one of our goals.

Like everyone else in the business world, we nonprofits need money to operate, folks, and lots of it.

But suggesting to the nonprofit sector that it might learn something by studying the habits of their for-profit brethren is a bit like suggesting a priest could learn something from a rock-and-roll promoter. It upsets people. But who knows? Maybe the priest should take a gander at the fellow in the next auditorium. I'm not suggesting nonprofits give up pursuing donations. There's a value to the giver, too. It's clear, however, we need to supplement our old strategies with newer ones if we're going to accomplish the goals society needs us to accomplish because the numbers show that the old methods are not working. So to prime the conversation, here are a few ideas, set within three broad strategic categories.

Strategy One: Side Ventures 

The most obvious way nonprofits already earn unrestricted revenue is through operating side businesses -- gift shops, cafeterias, renting out performance space, parking garages, and the like. For the most part, this is pretty mundane stuff, not worth rehashing here, but a category nonetheless.

For a somewhat more sophisticated example of a successful side venture, consider the 56-story condominium Museum Tower atop the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which was conceived as a revenue-producing business meant to support the museum's operations. The details are a bit complicated to go into in a short discussion like this, but the innovative bond the city developed to finance the effort and the tax structure it operates under both seem like wins to me.

To provide a significantly simpler, street-level example, consider this idea from the for-profit world. A friend of mine in San Francisco bought a restaurant after selling a successful business. He thought it would be a good retirement project, but in retrospect it was a vanity purchase -- and one he soon regretted, after the restaurant only made $300,000 in revenues its first year and operated at a loss. By the end of the first year, he was at his wit's end.

One day when I met him at his place to console him, I noticed that the restaurant was situated on a corner next to a fairly quaint alley. I asked him why he didn't try closing off the alley and having some sort of block party there. "What would it hurt?" he must have thought. "I'm almost broke as it is." So on the weekend before Valentine's Day, my friend roped off the adjacent alley and went online to advertise a party for sweethearts -- mostly cocktails, not much food.

He sold $80,000 worth of booze on Saturday. And another $80,000 on Sunday. ("All cash," he told me later.)

Now he throws five two-day festivals in his alley every year -- on Valentine's Day, Saint Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, Independence Day, and Columbus Day -- and makes about $800,000 from those parties, in addition to the $300,000 his restaurant brings in.

Okay, so my friend isn't a nonprofit. But he may have something to teach those of us who work in the nonprofit sector about being flexible. My friend wanted to sell food and drink, and now he does. He wanted a restaurant, and now he can afford to operate one. How can we do the same in the nonprofit world?

I understand, by the way, that consultants generally advise nonprofits not to become distracted by side ventures for fear they'll stray from their core missions. My own view, however, is that losing focus is more a function of weak leadership than of structure.

Strategy Two: Grown-Up Partnerships

Jason Saul tells an interesting story about a nonprofit foodbank that struggled to make ends meet doing things the old-fashioned way: begging for money from government agencies, foundations, and individual donors. It would then spend the funds it received on food for the hungry -- not a bad plan, so long as you don't need to scale in any meaningful way.

But the organization had a problem (one familiar to most nonprofits): because of the relentlessly growing demand for its services, it was never able to fulfill its mission of feeding everyone in the region who was hungry. Clearly, the organization needed a better business plan.

Its goal was, of course, to feed people. But under its existing business model, it was only able to feed some of its constituents a single meal a day. How could the organization get to three squares a day and still have money to keep up with growing demand?

Then the organization had a new idea based on the fact that many people paid for the other two meals they needed with food stamps and the biggest percentage of food stamps in America is spent at Wal-Mart stores. So the foodbank approached Wal-Mart and proposed the following:

What if we took every person we feed and registered them for food stamps (which would help to solve the problem of finding an extra two meals a day for them). In the process, we would give every person who signed up a discount coupon and a letter inviting them to shop at their local Wal-Mart. Assuming we fed roughly 100,000 people a year and were able to sign them all up, and assuming that the average food stamp benefit is about $133 a month, the program could generate as much as $13 million a year in new sales for local Wal-Marts. In other words, real money.

The foodbank then asked Wal-Mart if they would contribute roughly 7 percent of their marketing budget (as opposed to the company's much smaller philanthropic budget), or about $1 million, to help the foodbank grow and expand its business. Long story short? Today, the foodbank is doing fine.

I have no idea whether this story is accurate, but that's not the point.

Setting aside your personal feelings about food stamps or big-box retailers, there is a fundamental lesson for nonprofits in this story: the foodbank in question identified a for-profit partner that could help it change its business model from asking others for money to selling its impact in a commercially viable way that did not compromise its core mission (to feed the hungry), but instead improved its capacity to achieve that mission.

What about an orchestra, or any other nonprofit, for that matter? We plead for money then ladle out music and education, much like the foodbank in the story doled out food. Once the performance is served up, it's gone, even though we know people will be hungry for another serving in no time. How can we apply the lesson learned by the foodbank to our own efforts to achieve a similarly effective result?

Look around. There are a wide variety of these sorts of partnerships, with both for-profit companies and government agencies -- partnerships that produce value for both sides and not just one. I'm reminded of TerraCycle, an impressive company that teaches kids to recycle things like Capri Sun drink pouches. Through the partnership, the kids learn about recycling, the school makes a little extra spending money, and TerraCycle uses the waste items to make nifty handbags, purses, and other consumer items. A virtuous cycle, if there ever was one.

On the government side, New Yorkers are quite fortunate to have a Department of Cultural Affairs that is positively brilliant at helping arts organizations develop effective partnerships with government agencies, for-profit companies, and other nonprofits in order to stimulate a robust arts ecosystem in the city. Agencies like these are well worth approaching as you begin to brainstorm your ideas for beneficial partnerships.

Strategy Three: New Money from Your Core Business

A few years ago, I owned a clothing business in Asia, and my experience there might have some lessons for nonprofits. Here's the gist of it:

It was a large company that sold casual clothing with the names and logos of various rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop bands printed on each garment. The company made a lot of money because people liked the clothes. Indeed, selling clothing was the core business of the company in much the same way that cultivating donors is the primary business activity for many nonprofits.

But there was a part to the clothing company story most people overlooked -- one that accounted for an awful lot of additional revenue at the end of the day. And that extra revenue allowed us to do more of what we really wanted to do, which was to make our stores cooler, invent new things, and connect with new audiences -- all things that a lot of arts organizations want to do, too. What was the little secret hidden inside our business plan?

Well, it had to do with the way we picked the clothing we chose to sell. There was a big open stage in the middle of the company's headquarters, and every week we would invite a new indie or hip-hop band to perform during lunch hour. The performances gave employees a pretty good look at the items we were selling as well as good insights into the popular music scene.

Then each quarter, the company would pick a few of the bands that had performed and would offer to hook them up with concert gigs, help get their songs into iTunes, and so on. As a result, the bands got some exposure and grew their audiences, while the company secured exclusive rights to make and sell T-shirts, pins, and hats with the bands' names and logos, as well as partial ownership of the songs it was sponsoring.

If a band succeeded in selling a million downloads of a song, the company would sell its share of the mechanical and recording rights of the song to a major record label and sell its share of the distribution rights to a large retailer or distributor like Wal-Mart or Target. It was a win-win: the band had developed a huge following and was free to do its own thing, while we made a ton of money selling the rights. Hardly anyone knew what we were doing, or that that our parent company was responsible for generating more platinum singles than any record studio in America. Wild, right?

The for-profit business world is full of complex strategies like this, which is part of the reason so many for-profit companies are able to weather stormy economic downturns better than the nonprofit that are most needed during such downturns. And somewhere in this little tale may be the kernel of an idea for a new business model for a nonprofit that is able to look beyond the complexity and deconstruct what it has to teach us.

Making These Ideas Useful

Some readers, of course, will object to the three strategies I've described. Remember, they're intended to be a starting point for discussion, not a how-to manual. So play with them. Adapt them. See which ones might align with your activities and work. Improvise and experiment with your business model, just as you do with your art.

When I say existing nonprofit business models are not working anymore, I'm not trying to be provocative. I'm just saying the ceaseless pleading for funds infects everything we do. At the most fundamental level, it means the only way we can do what we believe is right is to wait for someone to give us money to do it. It means we can't grow as fast as successful organizations in the for-profit sector because we are forever relegated to working in the beneficent shadow of our supporters. It means we must tread lightly with and around those supporters because we depend on them for our existence. We are forced to oblige the person who funds us rather than trade value equally with those we are really trying to reach with our work. It is a paradigm that ultimately dead-ends in a master-servant relationship. Its effectiveness is waning. And we should be looking to change it. Starting now.

I'm confident the nonprofit sector can resolve this fundamental structural problem -- but only if it gets over the conceit that the laws of economics do not apply to nonprofits because our work is so meaningful and important. Instead, we must face the reality of our situation with the same vision and gusto we deploy in pursuit of our core missions.

Can we nonprofit leaders make the change? Or will our pride and prejudices consign us to a future as zombies?

-- Richard Dare

'The Art of Being Unreasonable' Launches in New York City

I had the pleasure Sunday evening of attending "A Conversation With Eli Broad" at the 92nd Street Y, an hour-long event marking the launch of Broad's memoir The Art of Being Unreasonable. At the event, Broad chatted with broadcast journalist Charlie Rose about his long and successful career (highlights of which are shared in the book's appendix). Broad, who turns 79 this summer, has helped build two Fortune 500 companies, KB Home and SunAmerica, and created with his wife, Edythe, the Broad Foundations, which focus on public education reform, scientific and medical research, art and culture, and civic projects in Los Angeles.

Rose began his interview by asking Broad for thoughts on the state of the economy, which Broad said will not recover until the housing market improves (in 2013?), before shifting gears to focus on the book.

While Broad doesn't consider himself to be unreasonable -- as he told the audience, "I don't think I'm unreasonable; other people think I'm unreasonable" -- he writes in his memoir that he believes "being unreasonable has been the key to my success." Throughout his career, he took chances that many said he was foolish for taking -- building homes without basements at a time when such a thing was unheard of, for example -- and succeeded because he and his partners did their homework and found a "niche where we could flourish."

During the Q&A portion of the event, one of my colleagues asked Broad -- who was instrumental in creating the first biomedical research institute in the world devoted to genomics, launching the largest urban education prize in the country, and has done much to nurture the burgeoning contemporary art scene in Los Angeles -- to share some of the ways in which his foundations assist nonprofit organizations and social causes other than through grants or philanthropic investments. "Foundations have to be innovative," said Broad, especially during tough economic times. The Broad Foundations, for example, offer their grantees lots of advice and counsel and, through the Broad Superintendents Academy program, provide business leaders with the training needed to make a successful transition to leadership positions in urban school districts.

That said, the one constant in Eli Broad's long career, which has spanned five decades and four industries, is a paperweight he received from his wife inscribed with this quotation from George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

And sometimes that means asking "Why not?" instead of accepting "no" for an answer.

Were you at the event? What did you take away from the conversation? And what do you think foundations should be doing, beyond awarding grants, to address the many social, political, and economic challenges we face? Use the comments section to share your thoughts...

-- Regina Mahone

Weekend Link Roundup (May 5-6, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Advocacy

On the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Lisa Ranghelli offers a positive review of Learn Foundation Law, a new online training tool for foundation program officers that was developed by the Gates, Packard, Moore, and Hewlett foundations.

Arts and Culture

On the Minnesota Council on Foundation's Philanthropy Potluck blog, Anne Bauers explains why it's critical for arts organizations to focus on audience-building efforts. Writes Bauers, "The [uncertain economy] challenges arts organizations to make smart and cost-effective decisions about strategies to attract and retain audiences, sustaining practices that work, and modifying or dropping those that don't. It also challenges organizations to change themselves in ways that encourage risk-taking, innovation and learning...."

Communications/Marketing

NTEN's Holly Ross discusses how the organization improved its e-mail open rates by sending mobile-friendly versions of its newsletter to subscribers, many of whom manage their e-mail on smartphones.

Fundraising

Something of a skeptic when it comes to social media as a fundraising tool, Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks looks at a recently published Nonprofit Social Network Report which found that the average cost of a Facebook "like" is $3.50, while the average value of a Facebook "like" over the twelve months following acquisition is $214.81. Among other things, writes Brooks, fundraisers should consider the following questions as they examine their organization's data to determine whether a robust social networking presence is worth the time and effort:

• Does giving increase after a current donor becomes a Facebook follower?
• Does donor retention improve among those who "like"?
• Is the increase in value, if any, enough to make the $3.50 cost a good investment?
• What types of Facebook engagement creates the best return?

Hosting April's Nonprofit Blog Carnival, the folks at the Rad Campaign share a selection of posts that explore the ins and outs of social fundraising.

Governance

Writing on the Huffington Post, Alice Korngold says that given the significant strategic and financial challenges and opportunities confronting nonprofits, nonprofit boards need to rethink the way they function. That process should start with a conversation about the organization's goals over the next several years, followed by a discussion about its revenue model. After that, the board should dive deeper into the expectations of individual board members and develop a system of accountability; determine the proper size and structure of the board; develop a plan for board composition based on board members' expertise, experience, background, and networks; and adopt best practices with respect to leadership succession.

International Affairs/Development

In a post on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Impatient Optimists blog, Gerry Power of InterMedia highlights a report that looks at "how we can communicate about aid in a way that people understand and are encouraged to act upon." Key takeways from the report include:

• Instill a deep understanding and appreciation for the objectives of international development when people are young and where values are nurtured;
• Do not underestimate the challenge of leveraging public opinion as a means to influence policy; and
• Facilitate more effective information and data gathering and sharing strategies for government decision makers.

Philanthropy

Writing on the Council on Foundations' blog, Michael Moody, the Frey Foundation Chair for Family Philanthropy at the Johnson Center for Philanthropy, suggests that "a theory about philanthropy as essential because of the failure of the other sectors is not so useful. What we need is a theory about philanthropy as essential to the other sectors."

On the Philanthropy 411 blog, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy executive director Rusty Stahl announces the launch of Generating Change, a new initiative that aims to "create deep discussion about the challenges and opportunities for nonprofit talent and leadership development; illuminate new ways funders can address this critical need at all levels; and increase investment in talent and leadership development at the individual, organization, movement, and sector levels."

Social Media

Last but not least, Rosetta Thurman shares a list of things every nonprofit leader should know about social media.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

The L.A. Riots, Twenty Years Later: A PubHub Reading List

Last Sunday, April 29, was the twentieth anniversary of the start of what became known as the Los Angeles Riots -- four days of civil unrest and violence sparked by the acquittal of white LAPD officers who had been captured on video in March 1991 brutally beating Rodney King after a high-speed car chase through the San Fernando Valley. In the days that followed the verdict, Reginald Denny, a white truck driver, and a Guatemalan immigrant were brutally beaten by a mob in the South Central neighborhood, home to many of the city's low-income African Americans; buildings were torched; stores were looted; and more than fifty people lost their lives. The prevailing view at the time, as captured by New York Times reporter Don Terry, was that "the acquittal...was only a spark put to a tinderbox of anger constructed from years of deep poverty, governmental neglect, racism, charges of police abuse and high unemployment."

Twenty years later, how much has -- and has not -- changed?

According to Reparable Harm: Assessing and Addressing Disparities Faced by Boys and Men of Color in California (126 pages, PDF), a report from the RAND Corporation, African-American and Latino men and boys continue to be negatively affected by structural racism and a variety of socioeconomic, health, and education disparities. Young African-American and Latino boys are more than three times as likely, for example, to live in poverty as their white counterparts; almost seven and more than three times as likely to have HIV/AIDS; more than five and almost three times as likely to end up in prison; more than sixteen and five times as likely to be a victim of homicide; and nearly twice and almost seven times as likely to drop out of high school. Funded by the California Endowment, the report calls for a range of targeted interventions, including more effective foster care and prisoner-reentry policies; community-based zoning laws that address the social determinants of health; and mentoring and school-based programs for children traumatized by violence. The California Endowment itself has funded the National League of Cities Institute's Gang Prevention Network and the Healthy Returns Initiative.

One nonprofit that has worked with disadvantaged and at-risk youth in Los Angeles since before the riots is the PUENTE (People United to Enrich the Neighborhood Through Education) Learning Center, which offers preschool, kindergarten, tutorial, and college preparation programs as well as job and computer skills training, English as a second language, and literacy programs for adults. Of, By, and For the Community: The Story of PUENTE Learning Center (21 pages, PDF), a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, describes how the family-focused organization -- which had a thriving center in the Boyle Heights neighborhood -- was offered the site of a burned-out ARCO station by the ARCO Foundation in the wake of the riots. "The embers were still warm, and the total damage had not been tallied," recalled former ARCO Foundation president Russell Sakaguchi. "We wanted somebody to provide hope and relief to that very visible corner. We wanted an organization that wasn't going to flounder, that was sensitive to the shock in that community [and] had faith in its ability to deliver."

Starting with two trailers, PUENTE eventually built a state-of-the-art facility with ten classrooms serving a thousand students of all ages, one-third of whom are African-American and two-thirds Latino. (As of 2005, the population of South Central was 45 percent African-American, 47 percent Latino.) One of the organization's keys to success, the report notes, is its sharp focus on its educational mission, which enables it to address issues even more fundamental than racial disparities or cultural differences. "Our mission," says PUENTE vice president Luis Marquez, "is not about any particular ethnic group; it's about people. It goes way beyond ethnicity and race. It's about humanity."

Among other things, the riots highlighted the serious racial/ethnic tensions that existed between long-established African-American communities in Los Angeles and the more recently arrived Korean and Latino communities. The influx of immigrants into historically African-American neighborhoods has continued in the two decades since, and racial/ethnic tensions have become more pronounced as unemployment rates have climbed. All Together Now? African Americans, Immigrants, and California's Future (66 pages; 7.15MB; PDF), a report from the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California, examines the potential of inter-ethnic alliances to address tensions created by demographic and economic changes. But bringing the various communities together first requires a forward-looking agenda. To that end, the report notes,

• A number of community-based organizations have developed new mechanisms to both manage tensions and build toward a common ground. Leadership development is key, but the first step is creating the space for new and honest dialogue about what is shared and what is different.
• Seemingly specific issues can be effectively connected to both populations. The criminalization of black (and Latino) youth has its parallel in the excessive enforcement of a broken immigration system; the racial profiling embodied in Arizona's 2010 immigration law echoes an experience all too familiar to African Americans. If [minority groups] pursue economic opportunity and fair treatment for all residents, the [focus on] difference[s] can give way to a concert of common interest.
• A common and unifying agenda should be based on a vision of everyday social justice. "Everyday" means three things: address[ing] daily needs around education, the economy, and the social and physical environment; ensur[ing] that dialogues go beyond a more comfortable middle-class and multi-ethnic elite and reach grassroots participants; and realiz[ing] that this will require effort every day and over the long haul.

Funded by the Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, James Irvine Foundation, and John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the report calls for an approach which recognizes that "African Americans have laid the groundwork for America's commitment to equality and fairness" and "that immigrant rights will be insecure as long as African Americans remain vulnerable to racial profiling and economic despair."

All three reports suggest that twenty years after the L.A. riots and almost fifty years after the Watts riots, the City of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the nation still have a long way to go in addressing the racial and socioeconomic disparities that made South Central such a tinderbox on the eve of the Rodney King verdict. At the same time, all three reports suggest that we have only begun to tap the potential of civic engagement, advocacy, and community organizing efforts to bring communities together and advance the cause of social justice. And, of course, funders have a role to play here. Funded by the California Endowment and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the NCRP report Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing, and Civic Engagement in Los Angeles notes that for every dollar invested in the advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement efforts of fifteen Los Angeles County nonprofits between 2004 and 2008, $91 in benefits were generated for marginalized communities.

To learn more about the factors contributing to enduring socioeconomic, health, and education disparities in Los Angeles (and across the country), the demographic shifts that sometimes exacerbate racial/ethnic tensions, and efforts to address these and other problems, see also:

Why Place & Race Matter
PolicyLink; California Endowment

State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation Brookings Institution

Critical Condition: Examining the Scope of Medical Services in South Los Angeles
California Endowment

Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities
Brookings Institution

Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions: An Agenda for Rebuilding America's Older Core Cities
PolicyLink

What do you think? Have we made as much progress, as a country, as we should have in the twenty years since the L.A. riots? And if not, what is holding us back? Use the comments section to share your thoughts....

-- Kyoko Uchida

If You Say You’re Innovative, You’re Probably Not

(Derrick Feldmann is the CEO of Achieve, an Indianapolis-based consulting firm that works with nonprofits. A version of this post originally appeared on the Achieve blog, and it is reprinted here with permission.)

One of the best parts of my job, beyond working with some great clients, is traveling to speak about the latest trends in fundraising and millennial engagement. After most presentations, individuals will come up to personally ask for advice. I love this one-on-one time with folks willing to wait in line just to get one burning question answered.

Many of these conversations start with an all too familiar opening: "My organization is innovative because..." Usually, the individual will go on to describe why the services offered by his or her organization are unique and unlike other nonprofits'. Indeed, this claim of innovation is becoming more and more common. Unfortunately, while some nonprofits truly do have unique program models and service delivery approaches, most do not.

For example, I just did a quick online search and found three nonprofits with the following statements on their Web sites:

"We are an innovative organization pairing youth with adult mentors throughout the city."

"We are an innovative organization designed to help people achieve self-sufficiency."

"We are an innovative nonprofit working in an economically disadvantaged community to help people come together to solve social problems."

Alas, the more I explored each organization's site, the more I found there that wasn't unique or different. So maybe it's time we had a discussion about what truly makes an organization innovative.

When I look at innovative nonprofits, several traits come to mind:

They find creative solutions. Innovative nonprofits are driven by leaders willing to take risks and be at the forefront of new ideas and change in their communities. Innovation doesn't mean you create a process and come back to it five years later to see how things went. Truly innovative nonprofits constantly evaluate their processes and work to make their service delivery better every single day. They are never satisfied with the answer "it is what it is."

They are not afraid to fail. Innovative nonprofits are not afraid to test new concepts -- or to see them fail. They approach research and development in the spirit of discovery and are willing to push the envelope in the interest of improvement. Truly innovative fundraisers say, "We will test text-to-give platforms and learn from our mistakes and successes." They never say, "I wish we would've..."

They know when to pivot. Innovative nonprofits don't wait till next month's board meeting to address a project or program that has gone off the rails. Instead, they pivot when change is necessary and are not afraid to make a move in order to achieve a desired result. Innovative nonprofits understand how fluid the current environment is and know that today's complex problems demand maximum efficiency and effectiveness from every organization and sector. They never say, "We need to hold that idea till next month."

At the end of the day, innovation is more about people letting their networks know about an innovative organization they've discovered, rather than about an organization endlessly promoting itself as innovative. If your nonprofit is truly innovative, it doesn't need to tell the world. Its actions speak for themselves, and we'll know it's innovative because we haven't seen anything else like it.

For more on the DNA of innovation, check out this Fast Company article.

What do you think? Is innovation something you "walk" instead of "talk"? Or, in an ever-more crowded media environment, is it better -- indeed, essential -- to tout your organization's innovativeness at every opportunity. Use the comments section below to share your thoughts...

-- Derrick Feldmann

A Big Win for Affirmative Action (and Philanthropy) in Brazil

(Bradford K. Smith is president of the Foundation Center. In his last post, he explained why some questions in philanthropy are unanswerable.)

Last Thursday, April 26, Brazil's Supreme Court voted 11-0 in favor of affirmative action. As reported by Latin American News Dispatch: "The decision reaffirmed a policy adopted by a number of Brazilian universities to institute the practice of affirmative action in university admissions as a tool to combat racial inequality and improve access to higher education for Brazilians who identify as negro (black) or pardo (brown)." This is a big win for countless Brazilian activists, scholars, politicians, and everyday citizens, but it's also a win for one of America's largest and most prestigious philanthropic institutions -- the Ford Foundation.

Let's go back a bit in time. Brazil's early economic development depended on the slave trade: more slaves were trafficked to Brazil than to the United States. Emancipation came only in 1888, years after other nations in the Americas had abolished slavery. And it came without formal segregation and the kind of civil rights movement that galvanized significant parts of American society. Racial discrimination lived on in more subtle ways under a prevailing ideology of "racial democracy," making it challenging for Brazilians to combat and difficult for outsiders to appreciate.

Enter the Ford Foundation. As early as the late 1970s, Ford supported the first studies linking poverty to race in Brazil. Brazil's military rulers, having seized power in a 1964 coup, repressed those studies -- despite the fact they had been done by a government research institute -- fearing that a U.S.-style radical "Black Power" movement take root in the country. But Ford kept working patiently, supporting scholars who slowly built the statistical proof that no matter what anyone chose to believe, it was impossible to escape the fact that the darker one's skin, the poorer they were likely to be. When Brazil's military departed in l985, after twenty-one years in power, Ford began to support NGOs, the growing "Movimento Negro," and others in Brazil who saw an opportunity to advance the cause of racial equality. Today, some 51 percent of Brazil's 191 million people declare themselves to be black or mixed-race in the census.

The Ford Foundation will soon celebrate fifty years in Brazil, and the Supreme Court vote is the culmination, to some degree, of decades of philanthropy. In Brazil that philanthropy spanned the Cold War, a military dictatorship, a rocky return to democracy, economic busts and booms, the flourishing of social movements, and the birth of new political parties. Within Ford itself, it spanned the tenure of four foundation presidents, eight country representatives, and as many program officers. It was a style of philanthropy based on values, including a strong belief in diversity, and the conviction that working in other cultures requires hiring the right people and trusting them to represent you around the world.

Could anyone have drawn up a logic model or theory of change in l962 when the Ford Foundation entered Brazil that would have predicted the Brazilian Supreme Court's vote fifty years later? Was Ford's role strategic, effective, tactical, catalytic, or any of the other adjectives that have come to dominate the discourse on philanthropy? Would it have been possible if Ford had been subject to the narrow interpretation of donor intent from which its critics feel it has strayed?

If we truly believe in philanthropic freedom, we should celebrate Ford's achievement in Brazil for all it represents about what is unique about philanthropy -- the ability to take risks, to remain independent, and to commit to the long term in tackling some of the most challenging issues faced by society. Ford cannot and would not take credit for the enormous economic, political, and societal transformations that have brought Brazil to this moment, but it did make critical choices to invest in people, organizations, and ideas along the way.

I admit to not being entirely neutral on this subject: I served as Ford's Brazil representative from l991 to 1995. But to have played even a small part in one foundation's efforts to uphold the rights and opportunities of 97 million Brazilians is an enormous privilege. By any measure, the vote of Brazil's Supreme Court is the kind of result for which philanthropy is always searching.

-- Brad Smith

Postscript: The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has also played a historic role in Brazil and in 2009 announced a $25 million pledge "to help establish an endowment fund with the Baoba Fund dedicated to racial equality for all Brazilians."

Most Popular PhilanTopic Posts (April 2012)

Two terrific Q&As, two posts by our favorite story expert Thaler Pekar, and a nice post by frequent contributor Laura Cronin -- just some of the great content featured on PhilanTopic in April:

• 5Qs for...Karen Zelermyer, President and CEO, and Andrew Lane, Chair, Funders for LGBTQ Issues
• Simple Stories and Complex Narratives
• Emotion and the Search for Meaning at SXSW
• Five Qs for...Douglas Bauer, Executive Director, Clark Foundation
• The Art of Inclusion: New York Funders Mobilize to Make the Arts More Accessible

What have you been reading/watching/listening to lately?

 

Weekend Link Roundup (April 28-29, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Advocacy

Responding to news that "Covering the Night," Invisible Children's offline event in support of its KONY 2012 campaign, was less than a rousing success, Allison Fine writes on her blog that the organization failed to attract widespread support because it "overlooked a fundamental tenant of networked activism: do what you do best and network the rest." Adds Fine:

Invisible Children has spent years honing its expertise in online organizing. And it showed in the initial outburst of support associated with the video and [the fact that] tens of thousands of people signed up to participate [in] Cover the Night....I think [the event] fizzled because on land organizing is simply not what Invisible Children does best. A better approach would have been to partner with an organization with the core competency of on land organizing, a group like Oxfam perhaps...."

In a guest post on the Communication Network's blog, Spitfire Strategies senior vice president Erin Campbell Boltz and former Greenpeace USA executive director John Passacantando offer a checklist for nonprofits that are planning issue campaigns. Their recommendations include: set a clear goal, know the opposition and arm yourselves to face them, play to your strengths, and engage the right coalition partners. Developed by Spitfire and the Communications Leadership Institute with funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Just Enough Planning Guide provides an interactive step-by-step framework for mapping out a public advocacy campaign strategy.

Economy

Courtesy of the Browser, MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu, co-author (with James Robinson) of the book Why Nations Fail, discusses four books and one paper that explain how and why the United States and other Western societies have become less equal over the last thirty years and what it means for the future.

Fundraising

"The charitable marketplace is consumed with big talk about the need for transparency, yet many nonprofits, along with their boards and their funders, operate with their heads in the sand," writes Todd Cohen on his Inside Philanthropy blog. "If nonprofits, boards, and funders do not wake up soon, nonprofits will continue to struggle, leaving as victims the clients who count on them to provide the programs and services they need more than ever in our shattered economy...."

Innovation

Guest blogging at Beth's Blog, Laura Quinn and Chris Bernard of Idealware share a case study included in the report Unleashing Innovation: Using Everyday Technology to Improve Nonprofit Services that demonstrates how technology can spur innovation and improve service delivery.

Philanthropy

In a long piece on the National Education Association site, Alison R. Bernstein, director of the Institute for Women's Leadership and a former vice president at the Ford Foundation, looks at the growing corporatization of philanthropy -- and doesn't much like what she sees. Writes Bernstein:

Corporatization is important because it is rapidly becoming the preferred way of doing the "business" of grant making and it is influencing both new and older foundations, large and small, in ways that I believe may undermine the diversity of the philanthropic world. Just to put all of this in context: there are approximately 72,000 foundations in the U.S., half of which have been created in the last 30 years. This explosive growth in philanthropy is proof that numerous individuals got very rich during the Reagan Revolution. In looking for models of how to give away money, more and more corporate givers, family foundations, and community trusts are modeling themselves along the lines of Gates, not Ford or Mellon. The question is why? Why do they think Gates is a more effective model? Why is large-scale grantmaking intrinsically better than carefully scaled efforts to make a difference? Why are leaders and practices from the corporate sector preferable to those of the nonprofit sector? Why are phrases like "strategic grantmaking" dominating the discourse of the day? (Parenthetically, would anyone proudly claim to be an unstrategic donor?) And where is evidence that this is happening?...

On the White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president/CEO Albert Ruesga proposes a set of principles that would govern the way progressive funders collaborate so as to strengthen their collective efforts. Inspired by the Sullivan Principles, which were adopted voluntarily by more than a hundred companies with operations in apartheid-era South Africa, Ruesga's principles include: the Do 'With' Rather Than 'To' Principle; the Maximize Coordination Principle; the Drop Everything Else You're Doing Principle; the Get the Money Out of Politics Principle; the Everything Is Connected Principle; and the Empowerment Principle. With the hope that his post sparks an actual conversation, Ruesga writes, "I see the development of these principles as much more than another idle flipchart exercise."

Manwhile, over on NCRP's Keeing a Close Eye blog, Niki Jagpal commends Ruesga for his post and adds two principles to his list:

• The provision of unencumbered long-term support -- i.e., core support of sufficient duration to address pressing social needs.
• Bolstering the capacity of our (limited) think tanks because conservative funders have succeeded at moving a policy agenda by funding similar institutions that feed policy to the Hill.

In a recent Forbes article, Rahim Kanani interviews Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin about the foundation's centennial celebrations and how the foundation views its anniversary as a critical opportunity to raise the effectiveness of its work and advance solutions to pressing global challenges.

On Health Affairs' GrantWatch Blog, Tom David challenges foundations to take the information shared at their annual conferences and networking events -- many of which are held in the spring -- and "actually go out and make them happen." Writes David:

Whether it's collective impact or impact investing or whatever the big idea of the moment is, considerable buzz is generated [at these events], blog posts are published, tweets are tweeted, and then we return to our respective corners of the country. What's waiting when we arrive home is often a pile of grant applications and files awaiting action. The pressure to meet the deadline for the next board meeting too often trumps our best intentions to apply those new ideas from the conferences to the way we do business.

Meanwhile, the context in which we operate is...chronic crisis mode. The economy may be slowly recovering, but the human toll of unemployment and foreclosure and lack of health insurance and underperforming schools continues to mount. Governments are stretched to the limit in their ability to maintain even basic services. To someone observing the situation in the United States from afar, it would be clear that this is not a time for business as usual....

Social Media

On her Nonprofit Marketing blog, Network for Good's Katya Andresen shares an infographic that highlights the most popular social networking sites and how best to use them.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

A 'Flip' Chat With Courtney O'Malley, Vice President, Starr Foundation

(This video was recorded as part of our "Flip" chat series of conversations with thought leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. You can check out other videos in the series here, including our previous chat with Jennifer McCrea, a senior research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the originator of the "exponential" approach to fundraising.)

Established by Cornelius Vander Starr, an insurance entrepreneur who founded C.V. Starr & Co. and other companies later combined by his successor, Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg, into what became American International Group (AIG), the New York City-based Starr Foundation is one of the biggest foundations you've never heard of. Chaired by Greenberg, the foundation, which earlier this week announced a $50 million gift in support of the Tri-Institutional Stem Cell Initiative (Tri-SCI), a project of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College, ranks forty-ninth on the Foundation Center's list of the largest U.S. foundations by asset size and forty-fifth by total giving but keeps a relatively low profile.

Earlier this month, PND sat down with foundation vice president Courtney O'Malley, one of ten full-time staff at the foundation, to talk about the foundation's history and areas of interest, its no-unsolicited-proposals policy, and its approach to transparency.

(If you're reading this in an e-mail, click here.)

(Running time: 6 minutes, 2 seconds)

 

The Foundation Center has an entire Web site, Glasspockets.org, dedicated to foundation transparency. To learn more about our efforts to bring transparency to the world of philanthropy, check out this Powerpoint presentation narrated by FC president Brad Smith.

Have a thought or comment you'd like to share? Use the comments section below...

-- Mitch Nauffts

Curtailing Democracy

(The following post was written by Mark Rosenman, a Washington-based scholar-activist and director of Caring to Change, a D.C.-based effort to promote foundation grantmaking for the common good, and Gary D. Bass, executive director of the Bauman Foundation and affiliated professor at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute. In his previous post, Rosenman wrote about widening inequality in the philanthropic sector.)

Nonprofit organizations have fewer rights today than they did last year. Thanks to language pushed by Republicans in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, charities face yet another coordinated campaign by conservatives to quash popular democracy. And unlike past "defund the left" efforts, this legislation wasn't caught in time by charity leaders to prevent its passage.

Those efforts began in 1981 with a proposal from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, were pushed by the Reagan White House throughout the early and mid-'80s, morphed into major Republican congressional legislative activity in the mid-'90s, and have come back around in various forms since then. Some have tried to limit what charities can do with private contributions; others have tried to expand the types of activities that are prohibited by charities that receive federal funding. Most of these prior attempts were stopped by watchdog organizations -- sometimes working as part of a broad-based coalition -- but only at considerable expense.

And yet conservatives continue to try to chip away at the right of nonprofit groups to engage in advocacy. For example, there is now a law on the books that prohibits nonprofit social welfare (503[c][4]) organizations that lobby from receiving federal grants. Similarly, grantees of the Legal Services Corporation face greater restrictions on advocacy than do other federal grantees.

Over the years, many grantmaking foundations have been alarmed by these attacks. Like much of society, they recognize that a strong, vibrant nonprofit sector helps to build a strong, vibrant democracy. A key element in that equation is the ability of nonprofits to speak out on public policy issues, to challenge institutional power, and to encourage people to get more involved in democratic decision-making. One legacy of earlier attacks on nonprofit advocacy was that a small number of foundations provided support for nonprofit sector watchdogs to monitor these attacks and to help build nonprofits' capacity to engage in advocacy. Alas, while laudatory, that funding was limited and episodic.

Strikingly, over the past few years even the modest amount of foundation funding available for watchdogs and advocacy capacity-building efforts has been scaled back. Key organizations no longer have staff dedicated to monitoring these issues and some organizations that devoted all their work to this cause no longer can. As these trends continue, we should expect that nonprofits will be even less prepared for future assaults on nonprofit advocacy.

The newly enacted appropriations law expands the long-standing and widely accepted prohibition on using federal grant funds for nonprofit lobbying to include "any activity to advocate or promote" any "proposed, pending or future" tax increase (at any level of government) or any "future requirement or restriction" on a "legal consumer product" (e.g., tobacco and alcohol products, junk foods and beverages) -- even when such efforts reflect the very purpose of public funding. None of these key terms is defined, and the scope is disturbingly vague and broad.

The new law also restricts the use of federal funds for many types of regulatory and administrative actions. This means that many groups that comment on state regulations, for example, will no longer be able to under their federal grant. Combined, these changes significantly restrict the advocacy rights of the nonprofit sector as well as the core functions of the public sector to promote and protect people's and communities' interests.

The law is limited at this point to programs funded through the appropriations bill that covers the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education, as well as several independent agencies. But it is easy to see that conservatives will likely want to extend these restrictions to other spending bills that affect the arts, the environment, and many other issues across the nonprofit world.

Consider a few illustrations: a charity might receive federal funding to address the scourge of cancer by reducing tobacco use. To that end, it might launch a public service campaign about the health dangers of cigarettes, especially for minors. Or a charity might get a federal grant to combat the epidemic of obesity in the U.S. They might promote ideas for raising funds for obesity-prevention campaigns or to help reimburse government for the costs of treating obesity-related diseases, including a surcharge on sodas and other sugary foods.

Under the new law, charities would likely no longer be able to undertake these types of activities. Charities are already not permitted to use federal funds to lobby, but they certainly should be able to use federal funds to educate and suggest ideas to the public and policy makers on social issues when consistent with the purposes of a grant. It strengthens our communities when policy makers receive information from independent nonpartisan parties such as government grantees. And their research and policy ideas often are vital to improving the quality of life in our communities. All of this has been made more difficult and in many cases prohibited under the new law.

Let's be clear about this: The new legislation really is a case of the public interest losing out to private ones. Charities tend to advocate on and for issues and in debates where the voices of average people aren't really heard; they work to promote the common good. Additional restrictions on charities' free speech rights are a pointed example of how moneyed interests impose their will on ordinary people and the groups that try to serve them -- and of the need for nonprofit advocacy.

The new law was developed by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) and is supported by a number of powerful industries, including the American Beverage Association. Why would a trade association want new restrictions on nonprofit advocacy? Maybe it's because it wants to kill federal funding of programs that address anti-obesity and other public health campaigns that could affect the public's attitude and behavior with respect to sweetened drinks. Knowing how hard that is, they go after the speech rights of public health charities that get federal funding -- all part of a continuing conservative attack on nonprofit speech.

Participating in the broader assault on nonprofit advocacy rights is Cause of Action, an organization established a few months before the restrictions were enacted that's directed by a former staffer to Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-CA) Oversight and Government Reform Committee (and before that a legal associate at one of the militantly free-market/limited government Koch Family Foundations).

Cause of Action has written to at least twenty grant recipients of a federal program that funds anti-obesity and -tobacco activities warning that they may have engaged in illegal lobbying activities. It was writing, it said, only "as a convenience" and to let the organizations know that they may be subject to civil penalties and private lawsuits.

Both are tactics reminiscent of right-wing efforts dating to 1980s to stifle charitable advocacy work. Back then, the threat or actual filing of SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) had a chilling effect on nonprofits' efforts to build democratic participation and otherwise affect public policy for the common good. Often filed by corporations and deep-pocket conservatives, the practice became so frequent that it earned its own acronym. You can be certain that the threat of lawsuits implied by Cause of Action will have a similar effect.

Democracy depends on ordinary people having a voice in policy decisions that affect them, and ordinary people depend on charities to advocate for and promote initiatives that improve their lives and the well-being of their communities. Efforts by conservatives and big business to deny charities some of their power to increase democratic participation limits charities’ ability to address critical problems and issues, and, ultimately, is corrosive of society and representative government itself.

Foundations must understand -- and embrace -- the absolutely critical role they play in providing support for charity watchdogs working to protect the advocacy voice of the nonprofit sector. At a time when the wealthiest people and corporations in this country are hell-bent on rigging the political system for their own gain, it is essential that private philanthropy step up and fund the people and organizations who are working to build a stronger voice for the common good.

-- Mark Rosenman and Gary Bass

The Art of Inclusion: New York Funders Mobilize to Make the Arts More Accessible

(Laura Cronin is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she spoke with Douglas Bauer, executive director of the New York City-based Clark Foundation, about the foundation's efforts to build the capacity of its grantees.)

If a person with a serious vision, hearing, or mobility impairment came to your office on business or joined your organization as an employee, you would do whatever you needed to to accommodate that person so he or she could do his or her job. Indeed, most people would be embarrassed if their employer failed to create an accessible work space for such a guest, while failure to do so for a new employee is illegal.

But what if everyone at the office gathered around the virtual water cooler on a Monday morning to share their excitement about the latest blockbuster exhibition at the local art museum or the holiday performance at the local concert hall? Would your colleague have been there on Saturday along with everyone else? Would the museum or concert hall have been equipped to accommodate a patron who is blind or hearing impaired? Would any of their foundation grant dollars have been dedicated to figuring out how to make it possible for that potential audience member to enjoy its offerings?

Gains won as a result of the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are now so familiar -- curb cuts, kneeling buses, signs in Braille -- that it is tempting to assume that issues of concern to people with disabilities have been embraced by the field of philanthropy. Unfortunately, the data tell a different story. According to the Disability Funders Network (DFN), of the $45.7 billion in foundation grants awarded in 2011, only $559 million -- less than three percent -- was directed to disability issues.

Kim Hutchinson, president/CEO of the Disability Funders Network, and her DFN colleagues are mobilizing to make access to arts and culture a central focus of their education and convening efforts in 2012. In February, after a New York City funders briefing with Hutchinson and colleagues from the MetLife Foundation, the New York Community Trust, American Express, the American Foundation for the Blind, the FISA Foundation, the Kessler Foundation, and the Reader's Digest Partners for Sight Foundation, several New York-based foundations agreed to form a special task force to promote inclusive practical strategies that nonprofit cultural institutions can use to better welcome the disabled audience. To date, the group has identified and generated over $3 million in new philanthropic grant dollars to promote arts access for people with disabilities in New York City.

DFN believes too many funders are stuck thinking about people with disabilities as a group whose needs are addressed through healthcare programs rather than as individuals eager to take part in all aspects of community life. By promoting a more complete picture of people with disabilities as students, workers, athletes, theater goers, music lovers and neighbors, DFN is making the case that disability should be part of any grantmaking program concerned with education, employment, diversity, civic participation, and, especially arts and culture.

According to Nina Levent, executive director of Art Education for the Blind/Art Beyond Sight, by funding accessibility and inclusion, grantmakers not only support audiences that identify themselves as visitors with disabilities, their families, and their caregivers, they also support millions of people who have "invisible disabilities" such as gradually diminishing sight, hearing, or physical stamina. By helping to make cultural programs more accessible and promoting employment of people with disabilities at cultural institutions across the country, the philanthropic community can broaden its impact. After all, the graying of the U.S. population means that the disability community will only grow in size, with one estimate placing the total number of people in the United States living with a disability at 150 million by 2030.

People with disabilities are natural constituents for every type of grantmaking initiative. And in an era when arts and cultural organizations are looking to develop new audiences, promoting accessibility can be good for the bottom line. The new affinity group within the DFN network invites all arts and culture funders to consider whether they are paying enough attention to disability in their own funding and is eager to collaborate on projects to ensure that people with disabilities have greater access to all that our visual, literary, and performing arts have to offer.

-- Laura Cronin

Scan 2.0: New GrantCraft Guide Helps Funders Scan in the Digital Age

(Lisa Philp is vice president for strategic philanthropy at the Foundation Center and director of GrantCraft.)

When funders want to do more than just make good grants, they often seek targets of opportunity -- places where their support could be especially influential, help develop a new direction or innovation, or align with others to accomplish more. Activities that accomplish these goals are what we mean by "scanning the landscape."

A new GrantCraft guide, Scanning the Landscape 2.0, is filled with examples of scans that have helped funders find a strategic direction, hear from key constituencies, understand emerging issues, map the funding environment, and synthesize information and find gaps. An update of a 2004 publication, the revised edition retains perennial wisdom from the earlier piece and, through fifteen new interviews with funders in the U.S. and Europe, explains how technology is making scanning faster and easier than ever before.

Whether formal or free-form, what scans have in common is a focus on gathering information from disparate sources, making sense of it, and learning from the information that comes in. Among the take-away points in the guide:

• Think of scanning as a golden opportunity to pause and listen to key constituencies, but also those beyond your usual networks.
• Check in with colleagues at various points along the way so they can help you see things you don't see and make connections. Consider teaming up with other funders to scan together.
• Investigate and take advantage of technology tools such as searchable databases, news and research streams, and data visualizations to scan effectively.
• Give yourself permission to scan continuously, even if you need to find ingenious ways to fit it into an overly busy schedule.

Scanning the Landscape 2.0 can be downloaded at no charge from the GrantCraft Web site. (New users will be asked to complete a free registration process.)

-- Lisa Philp

Weekend Link Roundup (April 21-22, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Civil Society

In the Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, writer, activist, and sometime PhilanTopic contributor Michael Edwards bemoans the lack of clarity around the term civil society and attempts to restore some precision to the debate over its meaning. In the process, he reminds us that "Recognizing that civil society does indeed mean different things to different people is one of the keys to moving forward, because it moves us beyond false universals and entrenched thinking."

Communications/Marketing

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen shares four trends, including the growing popularity of peer networks, likely to shake up nonprofit marketing. "People listen to each other more than us, so we need to stop viewing social media as another form of getting our message out," writes Andresen. "Its primary value is that it allows other people to get the message out, for us."

Entrepreneurship

On the Kauffman Foundation's Growthology log, Dane Stangler looks at the evolution of entrepreneurship and how the very definition of the word entrepreneur has broadened over the years. Writes Stangler: "In its original use by Jean-Baptiste Say, it was someone who undertook economic activities and capitalized on arbitrage opportunities. Joseph Schumpeter ushered in the modern way in which people typically use the term by equating it with newness -- new products, services, combinations, business models, etc. Israel Kirzner saw entrepreneurs as those who targeted and eliminated disequilibria in the economy (for Schumpeter, entrepreneurs created those disequilibria)." Today, however, "the word has come to be so overused as to potentially lose a great deal of meaning...."

Environment

In a guest post on the Knight Blog, Shannon Dosemagen, director of community engagement at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a 2011 Knight News Challenge winner, explains how the decision by Google to license community-created aerial maps from the lab's archive could lead to better policy and replace commercial and government data as a recognized representation of sites of civic and environmental concern.

Higher Education

The New York Times' Room for Debate series takes up the question of whether wealthy colleges deserve their tax breaks, with contributions from economist Sandy Baum; Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation; the American Entreprise Institute's Frederick Hess; Barbara Gitenstein, president of the College of New Jersey; Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute; Osamudia James, an associate professor of law at the University of Miami; and Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

International Affairs/Development

About.com's Joanne Fritz reminds readers who are thinking about doing a little "voluntourism" this summer to use common sense and follow these tips from the Center for Responsible Travel.

Philanthropy

On his Inside Philanthropy blog, Todd Cohen offers his take on some of the investment strategies that have emerged in recent years to scale up or expand proven nonprofit programs.

Regulation/Oversight

Idealist researcher/blogger Putnam Barber reminds nonprofit organizations, many of which do not have to file their Form 990s until May 15, to make sure they have answers to three important questions:

• When is our filing deadline?
• What do we need to know to be sure we stay current with all the rules and regulations?
• Who is going to file our Form 990-N?

Social Entrepreneurship

Over at Dowser, J. Gregory Dees, a professor in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and creator of the first course in social entrepreneurship in the U.S., challenges New York Times' columnist David Brooks' characterization of social entrepreneurship as something young people do to "avoid political participation and...[tackle the] 'corruption, venality, and disorder head-on'." Writes Dees:

Social entrepreneurs do not discourage political participation -- they invent new mechanisms for achieving the public good. Quite often solutions to problems require not just mobilizing political support but actually demonstrating how to solve problems that have confounded others.... Social entrepreneurs serve as society"s "learning laboratory," developing, testing, and refining new approaches to problems in ways that government agencies, with all their budgetary, bureaucratic, legislative, jurisdictional, and political constraints cannot do. These innovators represent the kind of decentralized problem solving that Nobel laureate Douglass North identifies as essential for any society to achieve what he calls "adaptive efficiency," the ability to adjust and thrive in the face of new challenges and shifting problems....

Social Media

On her blog, Allison Fine weighs in on the value of a Facebook "like." Writes Fine:

The notion of creating a direct equation of how much it cost to get one person to like a Facebook page and how much that person bought or gave as a result might satisfy the bean counters, but misses the larger point of why social media are so much more powerful than broadcast media. If you’re just looking for one, or ten, or one hundred thousand stand alone customers or donors, then there is no extra value in using social media. You could have just sent out a direct mail piece for that. The value in using social media is that every person, every like, comes with their own network that can be activated in an instant, and at no additional cost, for the organization. And that value, the value of having an army of your most ardent fans, affects far more than the development department....

Transparency

On the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Mark Hager, associate professor of nonprofit studies at Arizona State University's School of Community Resources and Development, explains how students in his Theory and Practice of Philanthropy course are using Glasspockets indicators to evaluate private foundations and "reflect critically on the value of transparency and how well the Glass Pockets assessment captures the concept." In the coming weeks, Hager will share thoughts from the student who "presented the most interesting observations about foundations, transparency, and the 'Who Has Glass Pockets' indicators." Stay tuned.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

Investing in the Environment: A PubHub Reading List

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she highlighted reports that address some of the issues and legal questions raised by the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate.)

Protecting the environment has long been a priority for many philanthropic organizations; the Goldman Environmental Prize, for example, is now in its twenty-third year. But what about public and private investments in the environment? With global climate change threatening to halt and even reverse the social and economic gains we've seen in the developing world since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one would think that policy makers, multilateral agencies, institutional investors, and private philanthropy would be eager to collaborate to help mitigate the worst of its effects. In honor of Earth Day, today we're highlighting two reports that look at aspects of the clean energy landscape.

According to Impact at Scale: Policy Innovation for Institutional Investment With Social and Environmental Benefit (64 pages, PDF), a report from InSight at Pacific Community Ventures and the Initiative for Responsible Investment at Harvard University, the emerging field of impact investing -- investing with the intention of generating measurable social or environmental benefit in addition to financial returns -- will only gain traction when it succeeds in attracting large institutional investors. Indeed, with total assets of more than $20 trillion worldwide, institutional investors (e.g., pension funds, insurance companies, and private endowments) are key players in global capital markets and could do much to legitimize impact investing as a viable alternative to more traditional investment approaches. To unlock the potential of the field, however, public policy must be adjusted to incentivize institutional impact investment by offering, among other things, co-investment opportunities, tax credits, and subsidies for industries and sectors that meet specific impact goals.

For example, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 created incentives for solar energy development that, according to the report's authors, helped boost U.S. solar manufacturing capacity:

The legislation created a federal investment tax credit (ITC) incentive for solar energy equal to 30% of expenditures on commercial and residential solar energy systems. Initially applicable for only two years, the tax credit was extended for an additional year with the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, and again for eight years in 2008 with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. This last version also allowed utilities to qualify for the tax credit. Between the creation of the ITC in 2006 and year-end 2010, U.S. solar manufacturing capacity quadrupled, with the vast majority of growth in 2009 and 2010. While not solely responsible for the market expansion, the ITC was a substantive driver and policy certainty provided by the eight-year extension has helped to catalyze private investment in the field....

Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the report notes that institutional investors' fiduciary duty to fund beneficiaries can be a constraint:

Institutional asset owners have the potential, through their investments, for delivering social and environmental impacts at scale. But for public policy to help achieve this goal, it must take into account the nature of asset owners as investors and, in the near term, overcome perceptions of impact investing as a new, idiosyncratic, or niche market....

According to the report, targeted engagement of institutional asset owners should include: 1) an "enabling" strategy directed at investors to provide flexibility and "investability" in target markets; 2) an "integrative" strategy directed at intermediaries; and 3) a "developmental" infrastructure-building strategy to support nascent markets.

Where do we stand, then, in terms of investments in clean energy? Global investment in solar, wind, biofuels, and other renewable energy sources, as well as energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies, reached a record $263 billion in 2011, according to Who's Winning the Clean Energy Race? 2011 Edition (56 pages, PDF), a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts and Pew Environment Group, with the G-20 countries contributing 95 percent of the total and more than half of that, some $128 million, going into solar. The report also found that the U.S. reclaimed its global leadership position in 2011 -- after falling to second place in 2009 and third place in 2010 -- with $48.1 billion in clean energy investments, an increase of 42 percent, followed by China ($45.5 billion) and Germany ($30.6 billion). "At the end of 2011, more than 565 GW of clean energy generating capacity was in place globally, 50 percent more than installed nuclear generating capacity," the report notes.

And what role did public investment play in supporting the sector? "In response to the global economic crisis...,

government stimulus plans allocated more than $194 billion for clean energy efforts. By the end of 2011, almost three-fourths of those funds ($142 billion) had reached the sector. More than $46 billion in stimulus funding for clean energy was spent in 2011, more than half of that by the United States and China together. Of the $53 million that remains, 67 percent ($35.7 billion) is expected to be spent in 2012....

But even though the U.S. led in total clean energy investment, as well as investments in solar, energy efficiency technologies, and biofuels, its leadership "is likely to be short-lived"  because of policy uncertainty. Indeed, nothing "appears likely to stem the long-term shift in the clean energy sector's center of gravity as investment swings from the West (Europe and the United States) to the East (Asia) and from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern."

Both reports suggest there is an urgent need for long-term public policies which incentivize institutional and other private investment in businesses that deliver environmental and social benefit. Without a policy framework to guide those investments and a market infrastructure to support them, however, the U.S. could end up losing the clean energy race and suffer the environmental, social, and economic consequences.

Eager to learn more about investments in clean energy, clean energy technology, and the economic impact of global climate change? Check out these reports, all of which can be found in PubHub:

• The Business of Innovating: Bringing Low-Carbon Solutions to Market
  Pew Center on Global Climate Change
• Clean & Green: Best Practices in Photovoltaics
  As You Sow
• United States Building Energy Efficiency Retrofits: Market Sizing and Financing Models
  Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors; Rockefeller Foundation
• Guidelines for Identifying Business Risks and Opportunities Arising From Ecosystem Change
  World Resources Institute; Meridian Institute; World Business Council for Sustainable Development
• Financing Stormwater Retrofits in Philadelphia and Beyond
  Natural Resources Defense Council
• The Economic Impacts of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on Ten Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States
  Analysis Group
• From Barracks to the Battlefield: Clean Energy Innovation and America's Armed Forces
  Pew Charitable Trusts

Have a report or comment you'd like to share? Use the comment section below...

-- Kyoko Uchida

Justice Matters | Filmfest DC

(Kathryn Pyle is a frequent contributor to PhilanTopic. In January, she blogged about the lessons a new generation of activists can learn from the civil rights documentary Freedom Riders.)

How do you tell a new story about the Palestinian conflict, one that touches audiences in a different way, goes beyond the nightly news images, and sparks new ideas and discussion?

For filmmaker Emad Burnat, co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, which is being shown as part of the Justice Matters series at Filmfest DC in Washington this week, the answer was personal. "There have been many films made about Palestine, but the filmmakers didn't live the situation, didn't know the reality. I live there; and I was always filming. My cameras were part of the non-violent resistance that my village, Bil'in, mounted against the Israeli occupation of our lands. I used my camera to protect myself and my friends and the other villagers. And when it came to shaping a story out of the seven hundred hours I'd filmed over seven years, I realized that it had to be my story; the story of my own experience."

That personal connection has struck a chord: 5 Broken Cameras premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) last fall; showed at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it won the World Cinema Directing Award for documentaries; and has gone on to screen at numerous festivals and win many more prizes. This summer it will be featured in several Israeli festivals and on Israeli television and will open in the U.S. as well.

Burnat, who had been a farmer, got a camera to film his new baby in 2005 and then turned it on the conflict in his village, sharing his extraordinary footage with international news agencies. He met his co-director, Guy Davidi, an Israeli there to film a documentary, and together, with support from the Global Perspectives Project of the International Television Service (ITVS) and IDFA's Jan Vrijman Fund, they created 5 Broken Cameras.

About fifty D.C.-area filmmakers gathered on Saturday morning at Busboys & Poets, a restaurant-cum-progressive cultural/community center at 5th & K Streets for a "salon" event with several directors and producers in town for Filmfest DC, which opened April 2 and runs through April 22. Two films that are part of the 2012 Justice Matters program -- Burnat's and Ravida Din's Pink Ribbons, Inc. -- were featured.

"This is the third year for Justice Matters," said Filmfest DC director Tony Gittens, who founded the festival in 1987. "Justice Matters has proven to be very successful and has given us a way to offer something special to the metropolitan Washington audience. Every festival tries to take advantage of its locale, to reach out to the people who live there. D.C. is unique because so many people here are interested in policy issues: it's in the newspapers, in the workplace, and around the dinner table. Justice Matters is a natural for us."

Conceived and programmed by Linda Blackaby and supported by the CrossCurrents Foundation, this year's Justice Matters series is showing Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, Blood in the Mobile, Brothers on the Line, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, The Island President, and Pink Ribbons, Inc., in addition to 5 Broken Cameras.

Funding from the Wyncote Foundation makes possible the other component of the program: the Impact Project, which concentrates on community partners -- organizations that, according to Blackaby, "have some kind of stake in the issue the film addresses. We identify the community partners, often in collaboration with the filmmaker, and they range from grassroots groups to large NGOs."

For instance, the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank that works on the Middle East as well as other issues, is paired with 5 Broken Cameras. At the screening of Pink Ribbons, Inc., an expose of corporate appropriation of the breast cancer cause, representatives of Breast Cancer Action were there to respond to the film. Another Pink Ribbons, Inc. partner is the National Breast Cancer Awareness Coalition, which shared information about its Breast Cancer Deadline 2020 petition drive to improve research results.

"This model, of linking social issue films with local organizations working on the issues presented in the films, is not new," said Blackaby. "The San Francisco Green Fest, an environmental film festival, strongly promotes these action-partnerships, but they're an activist festival by definition. What's unusual is a more generalist film festival that shows a variety of good new films on various topics, especially international films, supporting those community partnerships. A few festivals do it and do it well, like the Cleveland International Film Festival, and more festivals express an interest. But even festivals that have a real commitment to this approach find it requires a lot of staff time to make meaningful connections."

As the series has grown, the festival has learned how to do it more effectively.

"This is the first year we've had partners for every film, more than twenty in all," notes Blackaby. "They're listed on the Web site as links that take visitors directly to their own sites. Their participation depends on the issues, and activities vary. Some partners send staff to the screenings to engage in the post-screening discussions and distribute literature. This year, the Guatemalan Human Rights Committee/USA has an intern dedicated to bringing a Guatemalan audience -- there is a large population here in the metropolitan region -- to see Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, about the international criminal case against a former Guatemalan military leader."

In addition to IPS, 5 Broken Cameras partners include Docs in Progress, Peace Café, and Reporters Without Borders. Busboys and Poets' owner and festival supporter Andy Shallal moderated the film's post-screening discussion and asked Burnat what his goals for the film were. Simple, said Burnat: educate people about the experience of his village, which includes the arrest of children and other violations of international law. "I don't trust the politicians. My hope is in ordinary people; they can bring about change."

Individual voices and community-based activism is also the solution presented by Pink Ribbons, Inc., which remembers the women who protested the excessive use of mastectomies and takes a highly critical view of "race for the cure" programs. Speaking at the post-screening discussion, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Coalition's Vernal Branch said that "Twenty years of fundraising for research on treatment has resulted in only incremental improvements -- a few weeks or months more of life. What we need is research on the environmental causes of breast cancer and prevention."

In addition to the post-screening discussions, the Impact Project "takes the films off campus," adds festival director Gittens. "The filmmakers talk with students in the schools and connect with associations that are working on the issues raised in the film. And this year, we're going to Capitol Hill with Brothers on the Line, which is about the United Auto Workers and the history of the labor movement. Representative John Conyers has arranged a screening with members of Congress: you can only do that in D.C.!"

-- Kathryn Pyle

Simple Stories and Complex Narratives

(Thaler Pekar is a regular contributor to PhilanTopic. In her last post, she wrote about narrative, big data, and the future of communication.)

Invisible Children's Kony 2012 video, the most viral ever, is an almost perfect mashup of up-to-the-minute advocacy messaging and tactics: the personal story frame; the clear antagonist and invitation to the viewer to imagine him or herself as the hero; the explicit call to action executed across multiple platforms; the use of simple narrative; even the appeal to young people's concern that mass media ignores their voices.

That said, I find many things about the video to be unsettling. Never mind its strong support for a militaristic solution, or its use of a questionable dominant narrative (an issue that was addressed in the organization's follow-up video); I want to address the global conversation the video has sparked around the telling of complex versus simple stories. Is there a place for simple stories in advocacy? If your organization is seeking to solve a complex problem, must it always share complex stories?

Invisible Children has a clearly defined goal: "to arrest [the warlord Joseph Kony], disarm the LRA and bring the child soldiers home" -- and Kony 2012 invites viewers to engage with that story solely on the basis of the organization's proffered solution. Detractors of the video rightly note that the story of conflict in Uganda is far more complex than the video presents -- precisely because they themselves view the conflict through the lens of complex systemic change.

I don't happen to think simple stories are needed to share complex narratives. (I use "narrative" to refer to the larger story and frame, and "story" as the small episodes and moments that encapsulate the larger narrative.) People are emotionally complex, live complex lives, and can relate to authentic, emotionally complex stories. The longevity of The New Yorker, the popularity of This American Life, the respect and attention paid the deeply reported journalism of ProPublica attest to our willingness to thoroughly engage with complex long-form narratives.

Too often, however, advocacy organizations lose sight of the solution they were created to advance and instead focus on larger systemic issues that their work addresses only in part. Their communications drift toward addressing an entire society rife with systemic problems, rather than actively shaping and providing a specific response to an essential aspect of a systemic problem.

In other words, not every call to action must address a complex and systemic social problem. It's important to remember that the people we seek to engage not only have a role to play in the provision of partial solutions to bigger problems, they welcome that opportunity.

Not that crafting simple stories is easy. In a recent post ("Juggling Advocacy, Audience and Agency When Using #Video4Change"), Sam Gregory of WITNESS offers some caution and guidance with respect to how and when simple stories distort complex narratives:

• Simple is too simple if the initial action participants are asked to take is not followed by a next step in a ladder of engagement. (I would add that Invisible Children explicitly notes that the video is a "first entry point" to engagement.)
• Simple is too simple when it models a solution that misdirects an audience's understanding of the systemic causes of an issue.
• Simple is too simple when an entry point does not allow viewers/participants to easily drill down and engage with the underlying complexity of the issue.

Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, an international community of bloggers, explains the "ladder of engagement" concept in a post titled "The Passion of Mike Daisey: Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention":

Even if an initial message is simplified, some percentage of the people who watch the video will become engaged and learn more about the situation, expanding from a black and white picture to a more complex and nuanced one. Given the challenges of getting people to care about a situation like child soldiers in Central Africa, or dangerous labor practices in China, perhaps the best we can do is offer a simplified explanation and hope others will delve deeper....

And Zuckerman points to another indicator of when "a simplified narrative becomes too simple" -- when "villains are transformed into heroes."

I've quoted Jean-Luc Godard before, and I'll do so again: "Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form."

So the question becomes, How can you place complex issues into understandable and actionable contexts? What are the discrete solutions needed to solve a complex problem, and how can your organization share a story or stories about each of those solutions? What does your organization need to do to share stories with its audiences that increases their emotional engagement, understanding, and, ultimately, ability to solve a complex problem? Use the comments section below to share examples of how your organization, or an organization you admire, is sharing discrete stories in support of complex narratives.

-- Thaler Pekar

Weekend Link Roundup (April 14-15, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Accountability

Thanks in part to the proliferation of social media and a loss of faith in institutions of every kind, foundations and nonprofit organizations must rethink how they communicate and hold themselves accountable, argues Lucy Bernholz on her Philanthropy 2173 blog. "The kind of organizing that led Komen to change its decision and that is now calling for change from Gates is easier than ever," writes Bernolz.

It can be turned on in an instant and reach unprecedented scale at unprecedented pace. Boards of directors of nonprofits and foundations need to know this, they need to expect it, and they need to engage with both critics and supporters. They need, in other words, to govern in a new landscape in which each and every decision they make may be the one that transforms supporters into critics (Komen) or turns educational policy grants into part of national outrage about gun laws and racial justice [i.e., Gates Foundation support for a conservative advocacy organization known as ALEC].

Is this about a social media policy? I don't think so. Is it about governance, engagement, conversation, accountability, structural consistency, clarity of mission, and a willingness to remain civil while participating in difficult areas of work riven with disagreement? Yes. Nonprofits are part of civil society which thrives only when it is filled with multiple points of view and diverse approaches to problem solving. The "public" will not agree with every decision a foundation or nonprofit makes and they have a right to express that disagreement. Foundations and nonprofits have a right (and a responsibility) to make their decisions and expect a public response to them....

Communications/Marketing

On her Getting Attention blog, Nancy Schwartz "nonprofitizes" a list of content marketing tips from top chefs originally compiled by MarketingProfs.com. Her list includes:

• Use fresh ingredients. Fresh content retains its natural flavor. Avoid stale or processed content -- your supporters will know it and hate it.
• Keep the menu simple. Don’t overcomplicate content or muddy the dish with too many flavors.
• Experiment in the kitchen. Try new forms of content and solicit feedback so you know what's not working -- and what is.

Visit GettingAttention.org for the complete list.

Journalism/Media

On the HuffPost Media site, Kevin Murphy, president of the Berks (PA) County Community Foundation, suggests that the death of traditional journalism is going to force philanthropy to step up and fund alternatives. "[A]s foundations realize the profound impact of losing the communications vehicles that tie our society together," writes Murphy,

they're going to recognize the imperative of supporting journalism in their field or community. At a global level, funders rely on journalism to help the public understand challenges like world wide poverty, climate change and human rights violations.

Without the ability to hear from, and communicate with the populations they serve, foundations will find their mission nearly impossible to accomplish. So, they'll solve that problem....

Leadership

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen shares management lessons from Steve Jobs included in a recent Harvard Business Review article by Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. Her favorite -- "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." -- was something Jobs told Isaacson he had first come across in that icon of '70s counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalogue.

On her blog, Rosetta Thurman offers a few suggestions for organizations interested in supporting the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Among other things, Thurman advises nonprofit executives to increase the number of professional development opportunities availble to young staffers and to require each employee to draft a career development plan.

Philanthropy

In advance of the annual conference of the Global Philanthropy Forum later this week in Washington, D.C., Jane Wales, president and CEO of the World Affairs Council and vice president of philanthropy and society at the Aspen Institute, considers the philanthropic legacy of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and connects it to some of the tools and approaches championed by a new generation of philanthropists.

On the BlackGivesBack blog, Tracey Webb announces the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Cultures of Giving Donor Challenge, a ten-day online competition designed to boost funding for nonprofits working to address the critical needs of communities of color.

Social Entrepreneurship

Writing on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, Jason Saul, the founder/CEO of Mission Measurement, shares five takeaways from the 2012 Skoll World Forum: it's okay to make an economic return from trying to solve a social problem; measurement is no longer optional; it's cool to be corporate; people want to move the needle; and we're entering a new age of social entrepreneurship.

Social Media

In a guest post at Beth's Blog, Frank Barry, Internet strategy manager at software company Blackbaud, shares findings from the 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report. Writes Barry: "We learned a lot of things, but one prevailing theme stood out -- despite limited budgets and staffing, nonprofits continue to find great value in their fast-growing social networks."

In the latest installment of her Chronicle of Philanthropy Social Good podcast series, Allison Fine chats with Alliance for Youth Movements co-founder Stephanie Rudat about how and why a few recent social action movements, including Kony 2012 and Change.org's Trayvon Martin petition, went viral.

Social Media for Social Good author Heather Mansfield discusses hashtag spamming, which "can do more harm to your nonprofit's brand on Twitter than good." Writes Mansfield: "Too many hashtags in one tweet can look messy or nonsensical, decrease click-through rates, and subtly communicate to your followers than you are a hashtag spammer -- i.e., you're not really monitoring or participating in the conversation around a certain hashtag, just spamming it in hopes of getting more followers, which doesn't work by the way." What do you think? Is less more when it comes to hashtags in tweets? Use the comments section below to share your thoughts.

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

5Qs for...Karen Zelermyer, President and CEO, and Andrew Lane, Chair, Funders for LGBTQ Issues

For the past thirty years, Funders for LGBTQ Issues has worked to mobilize philanthropic resources for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities and has regularly published reports on the progress of the sector. Forty Years of LGBTQ Philanthropy 1970-2010 (44 pages, PDF), its most recent report, found that over the past four decades nearly eight hundred foundations invested more than $771 million in support of LGBTQ issues, with 86 percent of that funding awarded in the last decade. And while the amount represents just 0.13 percent of all giving by U.S. foundations over that period, it represents a big leap forward for the gay rights movement.

Prior to joining Funders for LGBTQ Issues in 2005, Karen Zelermyer was deputy director of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice and also served on the Funders for LGBT Issue board from 1999 to 2003 (the last two years as co-chair). Lane, executive director of the Johnson Family Foundation, previously served as president of the Paul Rapoport Foundation. In 2011, he was appointed by the White House to the Executive Committee of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, where he serves as co-head of the alliance’s LGBT Populations Task Force.

Philanthropy News Digest: Although the first known foundation grant to a lesbian and gay organization was awarded in 1970, grantmaking to such organizations didn't really pick up until the early 1980s. How did the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s alter the funding environment for LGBTQ issues and organizations?

Andrew Lane: The report tells the story of the LGBT philanthropy movement, but there's a parallel story, which is that of the gay rights movement in this country. As a relatively young social justice movement, it grew tremendously during that period. The HIV/AIDS epidemic also transformed the organizational landscape within the LGBT community and our approach to doing policy and advocacy work. I think it really galvanized our willingness to make demands and fight hard to see that those demands were respected. I think there is an analogous story around LGBT philanthropy. As the movement matured, our community of grantmakers also matured and began to take a much more aggressive approach to advocacy in terms of our issues. The other dynamic the report touches on is that we lost many, many gay and bisexual men to AIDS, some of whom were very wealthy and left their estates to be used specifically for LGBT or HIV/AIDS causes.

PND: How important was the work of celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana in shining a light on the needs of the LGBTQ community? And is there anyone on the scene today with a comparable impact on the visibility of LGBTQ issues?

Karen Zelermyer: That's a complicated question, because while both Elizabeth Taylor and Diana clearly were strong allies and friends of the LGBT community, their focus was HIV/AIDS, not LGBT issues specifically. So in some ways I think the question is have there been other celebrities, today or in the past, who have played the same role for the LGBT community that those two played for HIV/AIDS. Andrew and I had an interesting conversation earlier, and we both came up with the same name. Care to guess?

PND: Lady Gaga?

KZ: Right. I mean, there certainly have been others who helped to focus attention on LGBT issues. Rock Hudson, for example, whose HIV diagnosis was covered up until his death, when both it and his homosexuality sparked widespread public discussion. Or Ellen DeGeneres.

AL: Yes. Although, I don't really think of Ellen as operating within an institutional frame the way we do. It will be interesting to see where Lady Gaga goes with her support and advocacy. But there's every reason to feel good about her passion and generosity. It's good to have allies.

PND: According to the report, between 2007 and 2010 the share of LGBTQ funding from foundations going to organizations focused on the needs of LGBTQ people of color increased from 9 percent, or about $7.8 million, to more than 14 percent, or almost $45 million. To what do you attribute the increase?

KZ: There were two major factors, and I think we were one of them. In 2007, amid the strategic planning process for our LGBT Racial Equity campaign, we determined that if any part of our community was left behind or not supported, we would not have succeeded in reaching our goals. We also set a high bar for our original goal, which was to move funding for people of color issues to 15 percent of overall LGBTQ funding, recognizing that while it was not as high as it needed to be, it represented a significant increase.

I think the other big factor has been the Arcus Foundation, which over the last five years has focused on issues of racial equity as a funding priority. The foundation, which has put enormous resources into addressing the needs of LGBTQ people of color, actually accounts for a significant portion of that increase.

PND: The fatal beating of college student Matthew Shepard in 1998 served to highlight the hatred and violence faced by many LGBTQ people. Research suggests that in the years following Shepard's death, grantmakers invested nearly $70 million in efforts to address hate crimes nationwide. Has the recent increase in cyber-bullying had a similar impact on giving to LGBTQ groups?

AL: Well, I would broaden it beyond cyber-bullying to bullying in general. In the report, we note that a great deal of money -- more than $64 million in the last forty years -- has been awarded in support of education and safe schools. Not all that funding addressed bullying, and not all of it was in support of school work. But bullying definitely has become a big issue. It's also worth noting the fact that young people are coming out of the closet at earlier ages. In the same way that the LGBT community is facing a graying of our population, my guess is we're going to see growth in numbers at the younger end of the spectrum.

Still, for me personally, it has been very frustrating to see how challenging it has been to affect change around the issue of bullying, particularly at the federal level. There is tremendous need, but figuring out how to create the kind of impact that really improves kids' lives has been challenging. I think there's a tendency sometimes, particularly on this issue, for funders to focus on supporting efforts aimed at enacting new policies. Some assume that if an anti-bullying law passes, everything will be fine. But the reality is that kids' lives in school are much more complicated than that. New legislation may be the least effective solution.

KZ: Changing the law is hugely important, but unless we're able to figure out how to change people's hearts and minds around these issues, the gay rights movement will be where the reproductive rights movement is right now. The laws can change, but to what end if the culture doesn't?

PND: Projects and organizations working to address issues and rights related to relationship status received more than fifteen hundred grants totaling $75.2 million between 1970 and 2010, making it the single largest funding area among LGBTQ funders. Now that a number of states have legalized gay marriage, with more expected to do so in the not-too-distant future, do you think that trend will continue? And what are some of the other needs in the LGBTQ community that need to be addressed?

AL: Well, there is no question that we have achieved some significant victories in the last decade with respect to marriage and relationship recognition, but we still have a long way to go. As a result of the media coverage, however, we have had a unique opportunity to engage people about the realities of LGBT life. There is no question that this has been one of the important ways in which we have been able to humanize our community.

That said, there are still tremendous needs in the LGBT community. We've already noted, briefly, the needs of queer youth and aging LGBT people. Research also shows that LGBT people are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, and that LGBT people of color continue to experience health and well-being disparities. Let's not forget hospital visitation. Even though it doesn't get anywhere near the level of attention that marriage or bullying or suicide do, that single act on the part of the Obama administration probably will do more to affect the lives of LGBT people -- whether they're single, partnered, or married -- than any in recent history.

One of the unique things Funders for LGBT Issues tries to do is to give voice to the diversity represented in the community. But LGBT philanthropy has to recognize that we're moving ahead on twenty different fronts at any given point in time. Marriage is one of them, and it's an important one. But we are perfectly capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. One of the reasons we feel so passionate about the need to grow this sector is because we see the range of needs involving the transgender community, for example, whose organizations are much less developed and generally smaller. A bigger sector will enable us to address a more diverse range of needs.

KZ: We're at an exciting moment, both within philanthropy and within the social justice movements we support. There is value in working together. We're much stronger together than alone, and we've seen this in the many cases around marriage equality issues, where organizations like the NAACP and United Farm Workers of America have stepped up. Or the ways in which the LGBT movement has stepped up in support of immigration and a host of other issues not LGBT-specific. Right now, there are somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty foundations making grants annually in support of LGBT issues. At the same time, there's a greater openness within philanthropy to LGBT issues, part of a cultural shift that is happening. Andrew and I hope we'll be able to inspire some of those other foundations to turn that openness into actual support. It's certainly a challenge for us, but it's also a challenge for the field.

PND: A challenge and an opportunity?

AL: Absolutely.

KZ: For all of us, yes.

-- Regina Mahone

Weekend Link Roundup (April 7-8, 2012)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Advocacy

On Wednesday, the Case Foundation announced the winners in the "Fearless" category of this year's DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards." The winning organizations, which "used their videos to experiment and...take risks," are Invisible People, the Global Health Media Project, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation for the Benefit of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities, and Partnership at Drugfree.org.

On her Getting Attention blog, Nancy Schwartz says that while the second Kony 2012 video from nonprofit Invisible Children addresses a number of the criticisms voiced after the organization's first video became a global YouTube sensation in March, the video ultimately falls short. "[CEO and narrator Ben] Keesey is spot on in recognizing the necessity of building the organization's credibility," writes Schwartz. "But this video just doesn't do the job for me: it's beautifully produced emptiness...."

Fundraising

About.com's Joanne Fritz shares findings from a new Convio report which found that online giving is "growing just about as fast as retail e-commerce, and sometimes more," including 16 percent in 2011, compared to 15 percent for e-commerce.

International Affairs/Development

Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch received two Peabody Awards -- a rare honor for a nongovernmental organization -- for two multimedia features it produced in 2011: one on civil society activists in Russia and the second about abuses against people living near the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Congrats to HRW on its excellent work.

On her Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog, Saundra Schimmelpfennig is curating blog posts in support of A Day Without Dignity on April 26, a 24-hour event conceived as a "counter-campaign" to the TOMS One Day Without Shoes, which aims to raise awareness of "the impact a pair of shoes can have on a child's life."

Leadership

Rosetta Thurman, who recently celebrated her five-year blogging anniversary, takes a closer look at The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today, a new book by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd which notes, among other things, that "by the year 2020, there will be [five] generations working side by side in the workplace, with Millennials (professionals born roughly between 1980-2000) representing 50% of the workforce."

Philanthropy

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Yna Moore shares a list of ten questions she believes broadcast journalist Charlie Rose, who has a reputation for asking hard-hitting questions, would ask an executive at a private foundation. Her list includes:

• Have you ever regretted providing a particular grant to a nonprofit? And conversely, is there a nonprofit whose grant request you turned down previously but now wish you approved?
• You give out about 5-6 percent of your foundation's assets in grants each year. How are you using the other 95 percent of your assets to achieve your mission?
• Some critics say there's a double standard when it comes to what people view as appropriate pay for executives at a large foundation compared to acceptable compensation for executives of nonprofit grantees. Where do you stand on this issue? Should there be a cap when it comes to executive compensation for leaders of foundations?

A great start. What would you add to Moore's list?

On her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz offers a great set of links related to data and stories, data and philanthropic transparency, and data and change.

Back from the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, Philanthrocapitalism authors Matthew Bishop and Michael Green explain why philanthrocapitalists "have a crucial role to play in the new model for global problem-solving."

And Tactical Philanthropy blogger Sean Stannard-Stockton makes it official: After five years as one of the most thoughtful and widely followed bloggers in the philanthropy space, he's calling it quits. Writes Stannard-Stockton, "It [has been] a magnificent five years for me and the most intensively intellectually stimulating experience I've ever had....But that time is done for me. Having put off officially ending this blog by declaring myself on sabbatical for the past five months, it is now time for me to face the fact that I'm not coming back to philanthropy blogging any time soon."

That's it for now. What did we miss? Drop us a line at rnm@foundationcenter.org. And have a great week!

-- The Editors

The Individual Mandate: A PubHub Reading List

(Kyoko Uchida manages PubHub, the Foundation Center's online catalog of foundation-sponsored publications. In her previous post, she highlighted reports about efforts to improve access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene in the developing world.)

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments with respect to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's so-called "individual mandate." But how much of the debate did you really understand? Framed by the media as a choice between the power of the federal government to coerce individuals to purchase something they may not want and the significant costs associated with "free-riding" in the healthcare system, the debate tends to give short shrift to the nuances and complexities of the legislation and existing legal precedent. (To cite one example: a March 2011 Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that "opposition [to the legislation] falls markedly when people are told that the mandate will not change the existing health care arrangements of most Americans.") With that in mind, this week we're taking a closer look at a couple of reports that address some of the issues and legal questions raised by the individual mandate.

According to The Individual Mandate in Perspective (3 pages, PDF), a new issue brief from the Urban Institute, "if the ACA were in effect today, 94 percent of the total population (93 percent of the non-elderly population) or 250.3 million people out of 268.8 million non-elderly people — would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay a fine." That's because 33 percent of those under age 65 are exempt from the requirement due to income level, while of those who are not exempt, 86 percent will keep the employer-sponsored, nongroup, or public insurance coverage they already have.

So if the vast majority of Americans are exempted from the requirement or will remain covered under their existing plans, who is subject to the mandate? According to the report, roughly

26.3 million Americans who are currently uninsured will be required to newly obtain coverage or pay a fine. In this group, 8.1 million people will be eligible to receive free or close-to-free insurance through Medicaid or CHIP and can avoid the mandate penalties if they do so; hence our finding that 18.2 million Americans (6 percent of the total population, 7 percent of the non-elderly population) will be required to newly purchase coverage or face a penalty. Of that 18.2 million, 10.9 million people will be eligible to receive subsidies toward private insurance premiums in the newly established health insurance exchanges, but will have to make partial contributions toward their coverage. About 7.3 million people -- 2 percent of the total population (3 percent of the population under age 65) -- are not offered any financial assistance under the ACA and will be subject to penalties if they do not obtain coverage....

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the issue brief also notes that by keeping currently insured healthy individuals in nongroup and small group markets and attracting newly eligible healthy individuals, the mandate will help to stabilize premiums.

What, then, is the legal basis for challenging the constitutionality of the individual mandate? According to Examining the Evidentiary Basis of Congress's Commerce Clause Power to Address Individuals' Health Insurance Status (21 pages, PDF), a report from the Bureau of National Affairs that also was funded by RWJF, the question is whether the Commerce Clause of the Constitution gives Congress "the constitutional power to apply a 'minimum essential coverage requirement' on most non-elderly Americans." In other words, does "being uninsured [amount] to an activity that substantially affects interstate commerce"? Congressional findings with respect to the relationship between the individual mandate and interstate commerce are based on a wealth of evidence, the report notes:

Evidence amassed and analyzed by health services researchers sheds considerable light on the economic spillover effects of being uninsured, not only on individuals and their families, but more importantly in the context of the minimum essential coverage requirement, on community and regional health care systems and the economy as a whole....

The Courts of Appeal for the Sixth and D.C. circuits both upheld the constitutionality of the requirement, and in doing so considered that:

Virtually everyone participates in the market for health care delivery and they finance these services by either purchasing an insurance policy or by self-insuring....Thus, set against the Act’s broader statutory scheme, the minimum coverage provision reveals itself as a regulation of the activity of participating in the national market for health care delivery and specifically, the activity of self-insuring for the cost of these services....

In contrast, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Alabama, Georgia and Florida, focused narrowly on the requirement that individuals enter the health insurance market and rejected any link between the requirement and an individual's activity in the broader economy:

Because the Supreme Court's prior Commerce Clause cases all deal with already-existing activity -- not the mere possibility of future activity (in this case, health care consumption) that could implicate interstate commerce -- the Court never had to address any temporal aspects of congressional regulation. However, the premise of the government’s position that most people will, at some point in the future, consume health care -- reveals that the individual mandate is even further removed from traditional exercises of Congress’s commerce powers....

The Supreme Court's decision, expected in June, will depend in part on how the court frames the problem the Affordable Care Act is intended to solve, the report concludes. How Justice Antonin Scalia's framing of the "broccoli question" during oral arguments ("Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food. Therefore, everybody is in the market. Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli") plays out in terms of the final ruling, on the other hand, is anybody's guess.

Interested in learning more about the individual mandate provision? Check out these reports, all of which can be found in PubHub:

• A Guide to the Supreme Court's Review of the 2010 Health Care Reform Law
  Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
• Eliminating the Individual Mandate: Effects on Premiums, Coverage, and Uncompensated Care
  Urban Institute
• Newly Insured Californians Would Fall by More than 1 Million Under the Affordable Care Act Without the Requirement to Purchase Insurance
  Center for Labor Research and Education at University of California, Berkeley; UCLA Center for Health Policy Research
• Health Affairs/RWJF Health Policy Brief: Legal Challenges to Health Reform
  Health Affairs; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

And feel free to use the comments section to share other reports of interest on the topic, as well as your thoughts about the mandate and the upcoming Supreme Court decision.

-- Kyoko Uchida

On 'Exponential Fundraising': A 'Flip' Chat With Jennifer McCrea, Senior Research Fellow, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations

(This video was recorded as part of our 'Flip' chat series of conversations with thought leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. You can check out other videos in the series here, including our previous chat with Big Duck principal and founder Sarah Durham.)

On Monday, the Nonprofit Research Collaborative announced findings from its latest report on charitable giving. Among other things, the Nonprofit Fundraising Study, 2011 (47 pages, PDF) found that 53 percent of the 1,602 charities surveyed saw donations increase in 2011, while 70 percent said they expect to see additional growth in 2012. Even so, the economy remains a concern for many nonprofit organizations, with about a third of respondents saying economic issues, nationally and globally, pose the greatest challenge to the success of their fundraising efforts in 2012.

Absent a tooth fairy or mega-millions lottery for charities, fundraisers in the nonprofit sector must use a variety of techniques to boost their organization's income in these uncertain times. Enter "exponential fundraising," an approach coined by Hauser Center senior research fellow Jennifer McCrea that aims to alter the buyer-seller dynamic that often characterizes donor-fundraiser relationships.

"We get very stuck in....this transactional mindset of 'what have you done for me lately', instead of actually having real conversations with people," explains McCrea. "Our work is so much more powerful if we can remove that buyer-seller dynamic and we can actually allow our passion for making a difference together shine through…."

For almost a quarter-century now, McCrea has worked to share her approach to fundraising with others -- most recently through a year-long course she teaches at Harvard's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, as well as on a one-to-one basis with nonprofit leaders from a wide range of fields.

(If you're reading this in an e-mail, click here.)

(Running time: 6 minutes, 41 seconds)

Do you raise funds for a nonprofit organization or charitable cause? What's working for you in this uncertain post-recessionary environment? And has anyone tried McCrea's "exponential" approach? If so, we'd love to hear what you found worked (and maybe didn't). Use the comments section below....

-- Regina Mahone

2012 State of the Sector Survey

The U.S. economy seems to be on the mend, the stock market is on a tear, and the 2012 presidential election looks as if it'll be contested by two relatively pragmatic moderates.

Business as usual, right?

Not according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund's 2012 State of the Nonprofit Sector survey.

The survey reveals that nonprofits, especially frontline service providers, continue to face significant challenges two years into what is supposed to be an economic recovery but for millions of Americans feels like something altogether different.

Among the survey's findings:

• 85 percent of nonprofits experienced an increase in demand for services in 2011; (compared to 77 percent in 2010, 71 percent in 2009, and 73 percent in 2008);
• 88 percent expect to see an increase in demand for services in 2012;
• 87 percent don't expect their financial outlook to improve in 2012;
• 58 percent of human service organizations were unable to meet demand in 2011; 60 percent say they won’t be able to meet demand in 2012;
• 56 percent of human service providers received federal government funding or contracts in 2011; 69 percent received state or local funding;
• 52 percent reported late payments from the federal government; 62 percent said state or local government payments were late.

Of course, if House Republicans have their way, the situation almost certainly will get worse before it gets better. As reported today by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 62 percent of the cuts in the so-called Ryan budget passed by the House last week will involve programs for low-income Americans, while 37 percent of the proposed tax cuts in the plan will benefit Americans earning more than $1 million. Translation: Less money for social programs, more Americans falling into poverty, greater demand for frontline nonprofit services.

"Nonprofits are adapting to continued economic pressure in all sorts of creative and substantive ways, but for many these are stopgap measures that won't make up for the bigger forces at play: decreasing government support, the unwillingness of some private foundations to evolve funding practices, and a lack of necessary support from some boards," said Nonprofit Finance Fund CEO Antony Bugg-Levine. "We must rethink the way we fund solutions to our most pressing problems."

How we might do that is the subject of a post I hope to have up later in the week.

In the meantime, you can do a deeper dive on the survey data with the NFF Survey Analyzer, download a summary of the results in brochure or PowerPoint form, or download the full results in an Excel spreadsheet.

-- Mitch Nauffts