PhilanTopic

Weekend Link Roundup (June 15-16, 2013)

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

Civic Engagement

Guest blogging at Beth's Kanter's blog, Kate Wing, a program officer at the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, shares some of the exciting new developments in the civic engagement space she heard about at the 2013 Personal Democracy Forum conference.

Corporate Philanthropy

"Stop bending over backwards for corporate partners," Denise Lillya, a senior research at the Directory for Social Change in the UK, tells nonprofits. "[C]ompanies usually want to hear what they're going to get out of any giving; they are receptive to arguments that it is a saving, an opportunity, an investment," Lillya writes, but "it's clear that too many companies continue to regard philanthropy as a means by which they can benefit -- ironic as that is."

Data

Christian Villum, community manager for Open Government Data at the Open Knowledge Foundation, announces the Global Open Data Initiative, a joint effort of the foundation, the Open Institute, Fundar, the Sunlight Foundation, the World Wide Web Foundation, and Open Knowledge to share principles and resources with governments and other stakeholders on how to harness opportunities created by opening government data.

Leadership

On Thursday, the Minnesota Council on Foundations announced the appointment of Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, as its next president. To learn more about Harris, watch this "Flip" chat we recorded with her back in 2011. And congratulations, Trista!

Philanthropy

In latest installment of the Cohen Report, the Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen looks at foundation funding for rural nonprofits in the U.S. and concludes "that the best rural community development organizations in the nation have a hard row to hoe in tapping foundation support." What's more, Cohen writes, the funding situation for rural nonprofits is likely to get worse before it gets better in part because "foundations have started to lose interest in supporting housing and community development."

In the latest installment of Bloomberg's Good Talk series, Lewis Lapham, long-time editor of Harper's Monthly and founding editor of Lapham's Quarterly, talks to Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, about the "theory and practice of philanthropy." As Lapham notes, no one knows more about the latter than Gregorian.

And on the Philanthropic Initiative's Deep Social Impact blog, TPI managing partner Ellen Remmer addresses the same topic -- "the understanding and practice of philanthropy" -- through a global lens.

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

--The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (June 8-9, 2013)

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

Collaboration

"The idea behind nonprofit mergers isn't cost savings -- in a high-touch world like ours, there is only so much excess you might be able to trim in a merger," writes Boston Foundation president/CEO Paul Grogan in PhilanTopic. "Rather, it's all about service. Organizations that merge and/or collaborate build capacity to do more of what they do best, and do it even better...."

Communications/Marketing

On the Knight Foundation blog, Elizabeth Miller highlights conversations from the 2013 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations conference about how funders can better communicate what they learn:

Prioritize the audience. Know specifically whom you're trying to reach with your findings so that what you're learning is shared in the right circles.

Market determines method. Understanding who will benefit from these insights may determine the best way to deliver them. Different platforms or social media outlets may be your "friends" in distinct cases.

Enlist the evaluated. Work with grantees to help disseminate the findings.

Reflect and refine. Take time to measure the success of your efforts. Measurement is as important as the planning process in terms of understanding what works. Use specific analytics to determine whether dissemination methods were effective, whether you targeted the right audiences, and how you could improve on the overall strategy next time.

Beth Kanter, co-author of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, shares findings from a recent report on video use among nonprofits by Edelman, See3, and YouTube. Based on a survey of five hundred nonprofits as well as interviews with experts in the field, Into Focus: Benchmarks for Video and a Guide for Creators found that while video is important now and will become even more important for nonprofit groups over the next three years, more than half of respondents said their budgets do not support more video production.

Diversity

In a video on the Bush Foundation blog, Jennifer Ford Reedy, the Minnesota-based foundation's president, talks about the foundation's new Resident Fellows program, which will offer three-year staff positions to a variety of individuals "in order to inject new ideas into the foundation and provide a launch pad for the fellows' subsequent career opportunities."

Grantmaking

In another post on the Knight Foundation blog, Jenna Buehler recaps three tips on learning from failure shared by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Rafael López, the Henry P. Kendall Foundation's Courtney Bournes, and Knight's own Michael Maness at the GEO conference's opening panel discussion: 1) Confront it; 2) Be a champion for change and ask the hard questions; and 3) Give it time. "[I]t's important to allow time and space for ideas to incubate and grow," said Maness. "Offering context and information on the practice itself can help to warm up leaders prior to the big pitch."

Human/Civil Rights

On the Open Society Foundations blog, Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch and David Holiday look at recent attempts by human rights groups to get governments to adopt drug policy reforms aimed at ending the failed War on Drugs.

Impact/Effectiveness

Philanthropy 411's Kris Putnam-Walkerly urges funders to think about three questions when evaluating a grantmaking program or initiative:

1. What do you want to know?
2. Who needs to know it?
3. How will the evaluation findings be used?

Leadership

In a recent article for her On Leadership column at WashingtonPost.com, Jena McGregor wonders why Nancy Brinker is still listed on the Susan G. Komen for the Cure's Web site as the organization's CEO nearly a year after the cancer charity announced that Brinker intended to step down from the position. The charity, which was widely criticized for its February 2012 decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood affiliates -- a decision which it subsequently reversed -- is in the midst of a "very thorough executive search," Komen spokesperson Andrea Rader told McGregor. Maybe so, but "it may be that much harder to find and attract incoming CEO candidates," writes McGregor, "when they know the founder will be sticking around in a yet-to-be-well-defined role."

Social Media

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is asking for help in naming its new podcast, which is scheduled to launch next month. Hosted by Christine Nieves Rodriguez, program associate of RWJF's Pioneer Initiative, the podcast will "provide listeners with insight about the types of ideas in which the Pioneer team wants to invest,...[and] will include conversations with program officers, grantees, and friends, as well as news about grants and events." Have an idea for a name? Share your suggestions here.

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

--The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (June 1-2, 2013)

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

Communications/Marketing

Guest blogging on the Inside Philanthropy blog, Katherine McLane, vice president for communications and external affairs at the Livestrong Foundation, explains how the organization plans to move on from the doping scandal involving its founder, international cycling star and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong. "None of us anticipated the rapid and radical changes that are now the new normal," writes McLane. "But we're dusting ourselves off and keeping the focus where it should be: helping people with cancer...."

Community Improvement/Development

The folks at the Philanthropy Potluck blog give a shoutout to MCF member the Bush Foundation, which has launched two new grant programs designed to "enable, inspire, and reward community innovation" in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and the twenty-three Native nations that share the same geography.

Fundraising

On the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog, Carol Weisman, an international consultant who specializes in fundraising, governance, and volunteerism, shares some advice about "what to do when donors say 'no' or 'I'm not sure'."

Grantmaking

On the GrantCraft blog, Rosien Herweijer shares links to a handful of "visual summaries" for grantmakers in Spanish, French, Italian, and Turkish.

Leadership Development

"What if, instead of barreling ahead, relentlessly focused on keeping their organizations afloat (until they burn out trying), effective nonprofit leaders started delegating more and more responsibility to staff -- at once paving the way for a next generation of leaders, and freeing themselves to think about their own leadership in more expansive ways?" asks Stefan Lanfer, knowledge officer at the Boston-based Barr Foundation. "And what would emerge if, at the same time, a critical mass of these great leaders become a great network?" These are the questions the foundation set out to explore in creating the Barr Fellowship, a network of nonprofit leaders whose stories of personal, organizational, and city transformation are now featured in three short films: Reflection and Rejuvenation, The Power of Disruption, and Social Capital & Emergence.

Regulation/Oversight

As the Internal Revenue Service continues to deal with political the mess created by its exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, Lucy Bernholz suggests on her Philanthropy 2173 blog that the real issue has more to do with the money flowing into political campaigns and less to do with "incompetence and mismanagement" at the IRS. "For this there are two...solutions," adds Bernholz.

[F]irst, fund candidates and parties directly and require full disclosure of all such gifts. This is was what campaign finance looked like before Watergate revealed the cracks in the system and we responded by taking the first steps to today's broken system. The second...is to provide public money for campaigns and not allow private gifts above a certain percentage. This is what Larry Lessig has been promoting with Rootstrikers. It's appealing, but even Lessig recognizes it's very slim chances of happening under current conditions (which is why he's also calling for a Constitutional convention).

There is a third way that has nothing to do with stopping the flow of money in, but instead focuses on the flow of money out. Most of the dollars raised go to broadcasting candidates’ messages. If we made air time (television and radio) free to candidates and campaigns, limited the length of campaigns to a certain period of time and gave everyone the same amount of airtime (on those publicly owned, privately leased airwaves of ours) we’d kill the beast of demand and supply would wither in response....

Social Media

According to analyst Mary Meeker's annual review of Internet trends, mobile usage globally will continue to grow rapidly over the next twelve months, writes Katya Andresen on her Non-Profit Marketing blog. According to Andresen, Meeker also predicts that multimedia content will continue to dominate on the Net, that social media usage will continue to grow, and that organizations will discover "it’s nearly impossible not to have full transparency -- whether that’s coming from your organization or those talking about you."

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

--The Editors

(Long) Weekend Link Roundup (May 25-26, 2013)

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

Advocacy

Change.org founder and CEO Ben Rattray proudly announces that the organization, a certified B-corp, recently raised $15 million in investment capital through its first outside financing round, with the bulk of the funds provided by Omidyar Network. Rattray, who has said the organization will never go public, plans to use the investment to build tools that "more effectively empower hundreds of millions of people around the world;...enable people to build long-term movements on our platform; [and] personalize each user’s experience to better connect people to the issues and organizations they care most about....'

Communications/Marketing

On her Getting Attention blog, Nancy Schwartz shares a few tips from Amy Sample Ward and Allyson Kapin's new book Social Change Anytime Everywhere for nonprofits looking to improve their next multichannel campaign.

Community Improvement/Development

Ed Skloot, director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University, announces the publication of a new installment in a series of "occasional essays" written by thought leaders in the sector. In Changing the Game (48 pages, PDF), Boston Foundation president/CEO Paul Grogan reflects on the state of philanthropy and "the compelling strengths of community foundations as seen from his perch." Among other things, Grogan, who has served as president of the Boston Foundation for more than a decade, explains how "contemporary community foundations can become more agile, energized, relevant, and not least, consequential in their communities."

And on the CNN site, John Bare, vice president of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and executive-in-residence at Georgia Tech's Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship, looks at how foundations, the Hudson-Webber Foundation among them, are rethinking their giving in Detroit to achieve maximum impact.

Education

For anyone who spends time training others, Beth Kanter has a fascinating post on her blog about "learning design." In her post, Kanter shares a few principles from Sharon Bowman's Using Brain Science to Make Science Stick that you'll want to incorporate into your next training session:

• Movement is better than sitting.
• Having participants talk is better than listening.
• Images are better than words.
• Writing is better than reading.
• Shorter is better than longer.
• Different delivery options are better than the same old.

Impact/Effectiveness

Our colleagues over at the Transparency Talk blog share a transparency-focused call to action from Hallie Preskill, managing director at FSG Philanthropy Advisors, that was included in the D5 coalition's annual State of the Work report (34 pages, PDF). In her article, Preskill notes that while she is excited to hear that foundations are paying lip service to the idea of being more transparent, she has yet to see "much evidence that many are truly embracing th[e] idea of transparency when it comes to sharing evaluation findings and other types of grantmaking data." Although "there are many reasons organizations may be hesitant about sharing evaluation results," adds Preskill,

a true learning organization will understand that with any good evaluation, there are important insights and lessons that deserve to be shared both internally and externally. A learning organization also knows that a good evaluation must start with sound data on who the organization is trying to impact and the contexts in which they operate, including data related to demographics.

This doesn't mean foundations have to publicize mean scores, quotes from those interviewed, or volumes of evaluation findings. Instead, it means being committed to collecting relevant, credible, and useful information that is strategically informative; being open to sharing what was learned from engaging in the evaluation process in ways that that help others think about their own work more critically; growing and adapting their practices to be more effective; and finding ways to achieve greater social impact. When evaluation and research activities and findings are made transparent, they can be a powerful catalyst for facilitating individual, group, organization, community, and field learning.

Philanthropy

On the Philanthropy Potluck blog, MCF communications associate Susan Stehling shares a few highlights from Practices That Matter (34 pages, PDF), a new report from the Grants Managers Network and Project Streamline that provides, among other things, a number of tips designed to help grantmakers improve their application and grantee reporting processes.

Commenting on the release of a new set of fact sheets in his organization's Philanthropic Landscape series, NCRP executive director Aaron Dorfman sees "hopeful signs that more foundations are giving in ways that benefit those that need philanthropic support the most," before adding that "only time will tell [whether] the...trends will hold."

Regulation/Oversight

The disclosure last week that the Internal Revenue Service had subjected to extra scrutiny a hundred and thirty or so groups applying for tax-exempt status as "social welfare" organizations because they had "tea party," "patriot," or some other politically charged word or phrase in their name certainly created a stir. But before we tear up the tax code and get rid of the IRS, write ProPublica's Kim Barker and Justin Elliott, let's keep in mind six facts that seem to have been lost in the scandal:

• Social welfare nonprofits are supposed to have social welfare, and not politics, as their “primary” purpose.
• Donors to social welfare nonprofits are anonymous for a reason.
• The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision meant that corporations could pay for political ads, anonymously, using social welfare nonprofits.
• Social welfare nonprofits do not actually have to apply to the IRS for recognition as tax-exempt organizations.
• Most of the money spent on elections by social welfare nonprofits supports Republicans.
• Some social welfare groups promised in their applications, under penalty of perjury, that they wouldn’t get involved in elections. Then they did just that.

Social Media

And in the middle of writing a new book, tentatively titled Our Biggest Small Towns, Allison Fine wonders whether digital acts of kindness are making society as a whole kinder and more generous. What do you think? Share your thoughts here or in the comments section below.

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

--The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (May 18-19, 2013)

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

Data

We're big fans of data visualization whiz Hans Rosling, and so is Humanosphere blogger Tom Paulson. But, writes Paulson, Rosling "is strikingly upfront about the limitations of data. Sometimes, the problem is that different countries measure things -- like unemployment -- in different ways....In other cases, there are real uncertainties in the data that must be assessed: child mortality statistics are quite precise, whereas maternal mortality figures are not; global poverty measurements are infrequent and uncertain." And so on. Still, when it comes to telling stories with numbers, few can rival Rosling, as the video Paulson embeds in his short post well illustrates.

Education

In a post on the Huffington Post Impact blog, Chris Gabrieli, co-chair of the Time to Succeed Coalition and founder and chair of the National Center on Time & Learning, and Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas discuss the progress the coalition, which works to ensure that children in high-poverty neighborhoods have access to more and better learning time in school, has made since its was established a year ago.

Fundraising

On her About.com blog, Joanne Fritz gives a thumbs up to Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks' The Fundraiser's Guide to Irresistble Communications. Among the things she liked, writes Fritz, is Brooks' admonition that "our biggest mistake in fundraising is thinking that what we like is what works. We're self-centered, rather than donor-focused. And, frankly, we are soooo off the mark."

International Affairs/Development

On the Mashable site, Casey Brown announces the creation of G-everyone, a "24-hour digital convening" that, on the eve of next month's G8 Summit in Northern Ireland, will unite local groups around the world to discuss the pressing issues addressed at the summit. According to Brown, "G-everyone will provide an open dialogue around the G8's core themes of 'Open Economies, Open Governments and Open Societies.' [And] Mashable will crowdsource the best ideas and thoughts from our community...and report back to the leaders at the [summit]."

Nonprofit Management

David La Piana draws some important lessons from a merger involving two Texas providers of adoption services that ultimately failed to save the weaker of the two organizations. The case, writes La Piana, "offers a reminder that merger is not designed to change the underlying market dynamics an organization faces. A good merger can strengthen management, improve strategic positioning, and bring needed scale, but it cannot move a marginal or declining operation into the black if demand is just insufficient or the economics of the activity don’t pencil out."

Philanthropy

On the GrantCraft blog, Rosien Herweijer takes a closer look at the newest GrantCraft guide, Foundations Moving On: Ending Programmes and Funding Relationships. As Herweijer notes:

All funders somehow have to deal with exits. Venture philanthropist and limited-life or spend-out foundations tend to be very deliberate about exits, but other grantmaking or operating foundations also change strategic priorities, leave fields, or leave countries. And on a smaller scale, project funding ends automatically or -- in rare cases -- has to be withdrawn. You cannot wait for all the complicated questions to pop-up once an exit decision looms. And once you make and communicate a decision to exit, you need a lot of answers....

Social Media

In the latest installment of her Social Good podcast, Allison Fine chats with Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, a network of a thousand women bloggers using their influence to drive attention to a range of social causes.

Transparency

On the Keeping A Close Eye Blog, NCRP executive director Aaron Dorfman compares a three-decades-old report from his organization that ranked and scored more than two hundred foundations on their ability to meet a standard of transparency with a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy that surveyed 138 nonprofit leaders on what they'd like to see from foundations in the way of transparency. According to Dorfman, the old NCRP report found that "60 percent of foundations in the sample did not meet an acceptable standard of transparency," while findings in the new CEP report reveal that the more things change, the more they stay the same. "I see many parallel findings between that report and CEP's...report," writes Dorfman.

A full 33 years later, nonprofits are still clamoring for more information about how foundations make funding decisions and they want clear and open communication about priorities. They want to know whether it's worth their time to cultivate a relationship and pursue funding. And despite an explosion of glossy annual reports and fancy Web sites, leaders of grantseeking organizations are still highly frustrated by the lack of clear communication about a central element of foundation activity, namely how foundations decide which organizations to fund....

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (May 4-5, 2013)

What a gorgeous weekend! Hope yours, wherever you are, was half as nice. Here, a little late, is our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Communications/Marketing

The Catalytic Network, an interesting new initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation, aims to share tools and stories which emerge from the foundation's work with innovators around the globe. In that spirit, Michael Myers, a senior policy officer at the foundation, lays out the 5 Golden Rules of a Great Pitch on the network's site to help nonprofits better tell their story.

The five rules are:

• Keep it under two minutes.
• Know your audience, and know the ask.
• Talk about the problem you are solving -- in one sentence.
• Give two reasons why your approach is unique.
• Leave them one memorable, repeatable story.

Data

On the Harvard Business Review blog network, Mark Bonchek, "chief catalyst" at Orbit & Co, argues that without Little Data -- "what we know about ourselves. What we buy. Who we know. Where we go. How we spend our time" -- Big Data "has a tendency to become Big Brother," and that without Big Data, Little Data "is incomplete."

Fundraising

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen, the host of the April Nonprofit Blog Carnival, shares two dozen posts from nonprofit bloggers and readers on the theme "the best career advice you ever received."

Impact/Effectiveness

Amit Bouri, managing director of the Global Impact Investing Network, flags five themes for impact investors to keep an eye on: the emergence of better tools and improved infrastructure; a growing need for strong fund managers; the importance of supporting the "demand side" of the impact investing equation; the growing interest of "retail" investors in the field; and the growing acceptance of and emphasis on impact measurement.

Philanthropy

On his White Courtesy Telephone blog, Greater New Orleans Foundation president and CEO Albert Ruesga takes a long look at philanthropy's "uneasy" relationship with the social sciences. "We make grants because we predict (or at least fervently hope) that our interventions will shift human behavior in certain hoped-for ways," writes Ruesga. And after "we make our grants, we test our predictions and adjust our grantmaking accordingly. Those of you with grantmaking experience know, however,

that our interventions seldom, if ever, unfold as we predict they will. Our inability to predict human actions with a high degree of accuracy has been understood and discussed by philosophers, psychologists, social scientists and others longer than the field of organized philanthropy has been in existence. Yet those of us who work in foundations ignore these fundamental truths about the difficulties of predicting human behavior when, for example, we construct elaborate theories of change, or worse, when we inflict them on our grantees. These truths don't absolve us of the responsibility to change or inspire human behavior, but they do place limits on our attempts to anticipate or direct the many twists and turns of the human heart.

If the idea of philanthropy as an experimental social science unnerves you as much as it does me, how would you re-conceptualize it in a way that the most "results-oriented" among us would find compelling? If the idea appeals to you, how would you suggest that philanthropy capture and teach the lessons learned long ago in allied fields, especially those lessons that might help save our grantees and the communities we serve from unnecessary suffering?...

Like pretty much everything Ruesga writes, the post is worth your time.

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, shares a list of six tips designed to help you become a (social justice) philanthropy rockstar.

Writing on the GrantCraft blog, the European Foundation Centre's Rosien Herweijer looks at a new study from the Association of German Foundations that explores how German foundations approach their mistakes and failure. Not surprisingly, the study found that larger foundations tend to do more evaluation and documenting of mistakes than smaller foundations, while operating foundations tend to be more self-critical than general grantmaking foundations.

In a post musing on the "changing landscape of philanthropy," Senay Ataselim-Yilmaz says that the annual Global Philanthropy Forum should "pay more attention to the rising impact of diaspora [contributions] in global philanthropy."

Women

In an op-ed on the CNN site, legendary investor Warren Buffett argues that women are the key to America's future prosperity. "No manager operates his or her plants at 80 percent efficiency when steps could be taken that would increase output," writes Buffett. "And no CEO wants male employees to be underutilized when improved training or working conditions would boost productivity. So take it one step further: If obvious benefits flow from helping the male component of the workforce achieve its potential, why in the world wouldn't you want to include its counterpart?"

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (April 27-28, 2013)

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

Communications/Marketing

Our friends at the Communications Network have a nice Q&A with Lucas Held, director of communications at the Wallace Foundation, who, among other things, calls Diffusion of Innovations, a theory developed by the late Everett Rogers, "the most useful tool I have ever encountered for communications."

Data

In a long, fascinating piece in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer Schoenberger look at the emergence of "big data" and how it's changing the world. "Using great volumes of information," they write,

requires three profound changes in how we approach data. The first is to collect and use a lot of data rather than settle for small amounts or samples, as statisticians have done for well over a century. The second is to shed our preference for highly curated and pristine data and instead accept messiness: in an increasing number of situations, a bit of inaccuracy can be tolerated, because the benefits of using vastly more data of variable quality outweigh the costs of using smaller amounts of very exact data. Third, in many instances, we will need to give up our quest to discover the cause of things, in return for accepting correlations. With big data, instead of trying to understand precisely why an engine breaks down or why a drug’s side effect disappears, researchers can instead collect and analyze massive quantities of information about such events and everything that is associated with them, looking for patterns that might help predict future occurrences. Big data helps answer what, not why, and often that's good enough....

Philanthropy

Kevin Bolduc, vice president of assessment tools at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, shares some lessons from the organization's efforts to scale up a data visualization tool called "Strategy Landscape" and the reasoning behind its decision, announced earlier this week, to pull the plug on the tool. "A few...in particular stand out," writes Bolduc:

The incredible motivation and interest of a few early groups of funders that really craved this kind of information led us to overestimate the demand and believe that examples of use would snowball and generate further enthusiasm. We were wrong. (We should have realized that earlier, and avoided turning a little bet into a somewhat bigger one.) We also didn’t accurately anticipate the level of technological flexibility the tool would need when, inevitably, groups wanted to use the tool differently than we had anticipated. We fell down on both of those counts....

We still believe that visualizing customized information about how grants across foundations roll up into common categories of strategy, geographic targeting, and tactics (policy, direct service, etc.) could be very useful as funders work to address common issues. But this just wasn’t the right tool at the right time....

On the GrantCraft blog, the European Foundation Centre's Rosien Herweijer chats with Luc Tayart de Borms, managing director of the Belgium-based King Baudouin Foundation, about Lucy Bernholz' annual industry forecast, Blueprint 2013, and how it relates to European foundations.

Writing on her own Philanthropy 2173 blog, Bernholz highlights a new Sunlight Foundation article in which the government watchdog argues that e-filing of 990 forms is important because "990 data helps to ensure that the system isn't being abused." Bernholz says there is another reason the data should be made readily available in machine-readable form: American patriotism and pride. "[T]he Canadians do it," she writes, so "shouldn't we?" Indeed, adds Bernholz, the Canadian company Ajah.ca offers both "both federal AND provincial open data on charities, government contracts, and foundation funding."

Social Media

Beth Kanter, co-author of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, discusses a recent Twitter chat on social media measurement hosted by Zoetica Media and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In her post, Kanter focuses on mapping your network to measure the engagement of network members. As Kanter explains, "Social network analysis maps are useful for helping you understand your network, developing a baseline visual, and identifying strategies for making your network stronger."

Social Media for Social Good author Heather Mansfield has some advice for organizations looking to make their press releases shareable. "I have no proof these tips will help your nonprofit get more media coverage," writes Mansfield, "but at the very least they will help your nonprofit’s press release get more exposure on the social Web." Among other things, Mansfield suggests organizations include their Twitter handle, a photo, and add social networking icons on press releases.

Transparency

Over at Transparency Talk blog, our Foundation Center colleagues share a number of videos from this year's Global Philanthropy Forum that relate to philanthropic transparency in a digital age.

Last but not least, Pablo Eisenberg, in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy remember Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause, who passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of 69. "We are truly grateful that Bob Edgar served on NCRP's board," writes NCRP board chair Diane Feeney. "He was relentless in his work to clean up money in politics, but also to ensure that philanthropy benefited the underserved and marginalized. We will miss him sorely."

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (April 20-21, 2013)

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

Communications/Marketing

On her Getting Attention blog, Nancy Schwartz has some recommendations for nonprofit communications officers (here and here) on how to communicate during a time of crisis.

Current Affairs

In the wake of the horrific bombing at this year's Boston Marathon, Philanthropy 411's Kris Putnam-Walkerly has curated a list of resources for anyone interested in learning more about philanthropy's response to the tragedy. As of Friday, the One Fund Boston, which was created by Boston mayor Thomas Menino, had raised more than $10 million to help victims of the attack.

As if the marathon tragedy wasn't enough to rattle Americans, on Wednesday a fertilizer plant in the Texas town of West caught fire and exploded, killing at least fourteen people and injuring hundreds of others. According to ThinkProgress economic policy editor Bryce Covert, the plant hadn't been inspected in five years. Covert goes on to explain that the main federal agency charged with the enforcement of safety and health legislation, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, "is chronically understaffed, which means that a given plant like West Fertilizer can only expect to get a state inspection once every 67 years on average." And what's more, OSHA is "slated to take a huge cut under the sequester...."

Data

On the O'Reilly Strata site, Mike Loukides, vice president of content strategy for O'Reilly Media, reminds us that data science, like science itself, needs to be built on a foundation of skepticism. "Skepticism about data is normal," writes Loukides,

and [that's] a good thing. If I had to give a one line definition of science, it might be something like "organized and methodical skepticism based on evidence." So, if we really want to do data science, it has to be done by incorporating skepticism. And here's the key: data scientists have to own that skepticism. Data scientists have to be the biggest skeptics. Data scientists have to be skeptical about models, they have to be skeptical about overfitting, and they have to be skeptical about whether we're asking the right questions. They have to be skeptical about how data is collected, whether that data is unbiased, and whether that data -- even if there's an inconceivably large amount of it -- is sufficient to give you a meaningful result.

Because the bottom line is: if we're not skeptical about how we use and analyze data, who will be?

New York Times columnist David Brooks has some interesting thoughts of his own about the uses, and misuse of, big data. "One of my take-aways," writes Brooks,

is that big data is really good at telling you what to pay attention to. It can tell you what sort of student is likely to fall behind. But then to actually intervene to help that student, you have to get back in the world of causality, back into the world of responsibility, back in the world of advising someone to do x because it will cause y.

Big data is like the offensive coordinator up in the booth at a football game who, with altitude, can see patterns others miss. But the head coach and players still need to be on the field of subjectivity.

Environment

In the first of a series of "dialogues" on the Nature Conservancy's Talk blog, TNC president Mark Tercek chats with environmental activist Bill McKibben about climate change and the state of the environmental movement.

Impact/Effectiveness

Still a little confused about social impact/pay for success bonds? Not to worry. The experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco devote the most recent issue of Community Development Investment Review to the topic, with contributions from George Overholser and Caroline Whistler, Daniel Stidt, Jonathan Greenblatt, Kristina Costa and Sonal Shah, and many others.

International Affairs/Development

Writing on PhilanTopic, Jeff Falkenstein, vice president of data architecture at the Foundation Center, recaps the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development's annual Global Forum on Development, which this year was held in Paris. Among other things, Falkenstein highlights some of the gains achieved through the Millennium Development Goals process, which is slated to end in 2015, and asks what role, if any, private foundations should play in a post-MDG world. What do you think? Share your thoughts here.

Philanthropy

Beth Kanter was in San Francisco earlier in the week for the 2013 Global Philanthropy Forum and, on her blog, recaps a session from the event on the topic of "building an information infrastructure" for philanthropy. Among other things, the session highlighted the need for more current data; the challenge of making the data we do have more meaningful; the benefits of data mining; and building organizational capacity to take advantage of open data. For more information on the session, check out this curated list of blog posts and other resources from Kanter.

On the other side of the pond, our friends at Alliance magazine are pleased to announce the winners of the first Olga Alexeeva Memorial Prize: Jane Weru and Kingsley Mucheke of the Akiba Mashinani Trust, in Kenya.

Professional Development

Network for Good's Katya Andresen has some advice for social sector professionals who are "stuck on replay." "'Replay' can be somewhat effective if you're sticking to what works well," writes Andresen. "The problem is it can also create an autopilot state of mind that dulls your senses to changes around you -- like shifts in the political landscape, your donor base or constituencies -- that require a new approach."

Social Media

And on the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation interim vice president of research and evaluation Debra Joy Perez shares insights into the foundation’s use of social media as well as some of the metrics it uses to understand the value of that work.

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (April 13-14, 2013)

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

Fundraising

Future Fundraising Now blogger Jeff Brooks says to forget about donor fatigue; what's really happening is fundraiser fatigue.

Health

This might be "shaping up as the year of crowdfunding medical needs," writes Lucy Bernholz on her Philanthropy 2173 blog. "These medical crowdfunding site are fascinating to me. In many ways, they are returning us to the time before national health services and social security, when turning to one's community for financial assistance with medical needs or college costs was the norm."

Impact/Effectiveness

Over at Forbes, Jessica Joseph, associate director of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation, explains how social impact bonds "went from concept to execution faster than any other social innovation [in years]."

That may be, writes Kyle McKay, a policy analyst with the Maryland General Assembly, on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog. But while SIBs are interesting as "endeavors in financial creativity," their risks for cash-strapped governments and nonprofits may outweigh their benefits.

The Social Progress Index launched this week, and Ben Baumberg, a lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Kent in the UK, has some really interesting thoughts about what the folks behind the index have done well -- and could do better.

Journalism

The Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen recaps a panel discussion from the Council on Foundations' annual conference that looked at the future of journalism and why it matters to philanthropy. "[I]f there was an overwhelming message [from] the panel," writes Cohen, "it was [the Center for Investigative Reporting's Robert] Rosenthal's contention that funders have to understand a new generation of journalists motivated by creative ways of storytelling."

Philanthropy

In a nice profile on the Bridgespan Group's Give Smart site, actor, philanthropist, and Parkinson's sufferer Michael J. Fox shares four key lessons he has learned from his philanthropic work: involve beneficiaries in guiding your philanthropy; pinpoint the role your philanthropy can play in adding value to existing efforts; bring expertise in-house and use it to drive change; be pragmatic and urgent in your drive to get results.

Regulation/Oversight

GuideStar president and CEO Jacob Harold says the provision included in the White House's FY2014 budget that all nonprofits file their tax forms digitally and that the government make that data available in structured machine-readable form is a potential game-changer. "The nonprofit sector (and GuideStar in particular) has had to invest immense resources in aggregating, organizing, and presenting financial information from the Form 990," writes Harold. And the changes in the 2014 budget

could free up those resources and let us focus on a set of even more important questions: What are nonprofits accomplishing in their communities? What can we learn from their stakeholders? How can the nonprofit community work with government and business for a better world?"

There's no doubt that if these changes pass, they will erode some parts of GuideStar's business model. That's OK. In fact, that's great. The world is changing quickly, and we're ready for it...."

Social Media

On her About.com blog, Joanne Fritz announces the winners of the 2013 DoGooder Video Awards.

And Beth Kanter has some advice for senior nonprofit leaders looking to make time in their busy schedules for online media. Among other things, writes Kanter, they need to get started with small steps, understand the benefits of their efforts to their organizations as well as professionally, and be able to connect any online social activity to what they're already doing.

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (April 6-7, 2013)

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

Advocacy

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Rosenberg Foundation president Tim Silard discusses the foundation's recent decision to increase its payout this year to 6.1 percent to help advance immigration reform. "Our hope," writes Silard, "is that this major step by a mid-sized foundation can go a long way toward encouraging more of us in philanthropy to stretch our funding even further...to respond to this unique window of opportunity."

Communications

In a post on the Council on Foundation's Re: Philanthropy blog, Rita Soronen, president and CEO of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, reminds us why storytelling matters. Indeed, it is "at the heart of all emotions," writes Soronen. "And nonprofits simply must use communications -- storytelling -- as a very important tactic to steward current donors and secure new funders."

Fundraising

Jeff Brooks, author of the Fundraiser's Guide to Irresistible Communications, explains that fundraising is "a two-way conversation" and if you don't know that, you're missing an opportunity to engage your donors in a real way.

Impact/Effectiveness

Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan considers the role of foundations in the emerging impact investing space. Writes Buchanan:

In many of the accounts heralding impact investing as the potential solution to the world's ills, foundations, with their more than $300 billion in assets, are featured prominently. They are portrayed as leaders, or likely leaders, in this new realm....

Clearly, there are some major foundations that have taken significant and important steps into impact investing, such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (see CEO Sterling Speirn's excellent post on Kellogg’s experience for the CEP Blog) and the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. But, beyond a handful of much discussed examples, it is unclear how much of the talk about impact investing is just that -- talk -- and how much is reflected in actual practice....

Buchanan goes on to explain that he has heard "many foundation CEOs and board members eschew the idea that they'd ever seek anything other than maximum returns for their foundations' endowments." To that end, Buchanan writes, more research needs to be done "to bring the prevalence of this practice into focus."

Can't get enough of the impact/metrics debate? The Nonprofit Quarterly kicks it up a notch with a great point/counterpoint debate featuring an entertaining post ("Charity Navigator 3.0: The Empirical Empire’s Death Star?") by William Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, and an equally sharp rebuttal ("Debating the Realities of Ranking Charities") from CN's own Ken Berger.

International Development

Ariel Schwartz, a senior editor at Fast Company's Co.Exist operation, looks at four ideas that Melinda Gates believes will drive the next wave of advances for people in the developing world: M-Pesa, a mobile money system; Digital Green, an organization that helps farmers in India and South Asia create educational videos for other farmers; contraception education and access; and local development.

Nonprofit Management

On the Valcourt Group blog, Jim Jewell looks at seven reasons why nonprofits often fail or flounder.

Regulation/Oversight

The Charitable Giving Coalition (CGC), a group of sixty nonprofits that includes the Association of Fundraising Professionals and Independent Sector, has launched a new Web site, ProtectGiving.org, to help preserve and protect the charitable tax deduction in its current form. Visitors to the site will find a variety of resources (reports, fact sheet, FAQ) designed to raise awareness about the importance of charitable giving in America, examples of the impact nonprofits make in our communities, and a "Take Action" section that includes talking points, a message and media guide, and op-ed and elected official letter templates.

Social Entrepreneurship

Writing on the Gates Foundation's Impatient Optimists blog, GOOD magazine's Mary Slosson announces the launch of the Global Citizenship Project, which will offer five global innovators each a "pop-up fellowship to elevate and expand their work in order to create more equitable and successful neighborhoods."

Social Media

Beth Kanter urges nonprofit leaders to embrace social media -- and "the benefits of effective social media integration that personalizes your organization’s brand with the voice of its leader" -- by making time for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other tools on a regular basis. As a start, Kanter suggests that execs and senior managers start by asking their communications teams:

• What do you spend time doing now that you could do better via social?
• What other executive directors that you respect, follow, or feel inspired by are using social creatively?
• What are your strengths and preferences and what is the best match in terms of social channels?
• How will social improve things you already KNOW and value

Citing the experience of Udi Ofer, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Kanter points out that Twitter not only enables Ofer to comment "on his organization's most important cases and issues," but also to display his human side and inject "warmth into the organization."

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (March 30-31, 2013)

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

Black Male Achievement

Here on PhilanTopic, the Open Society Foundation's Shawn Dove, whom we spoke with back in December, announces the launch of BMAfunders.org, a Web portal designed to "facilitate engagement, collaboration, and strategic decision making among funders, nonprofits, and policy makers working to promote positive outcomes for black men and boys in America."

Communications

In a guest post on Kivi Leroux Miller's Nonprofit Communications Blog, Jen Charney, communication manager at the Save the Redwoods League, explains how the organization redesigned its Web site to attract more "uniques" and increase online donations and e-mail subscribers.

Environment

Environmental "cause days" such as Earth Day are great, but what about the other 360+ days of the year, asks Geoff Livingston, author of Welcome to the Fifth Estate, in a recent post on his blog.  "If our culture intends to adapt to climate change," writes Livingston, "our efforts need to increase. First of all, let's not poo-poo the small acts taken. Instead, let's build upon them...."

Impact/Effectiveness

On the Skoll World Forum Up for Debate blog, Darin McKeever, deputy director of the Charitable Sector, Global Policy & Advocacy program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, asks the important question: "How might we accelerate [the] conversation about Big Data into one about Big Information, Big Knowledge, and Big Wisdom?"

Philanthropy

The excellent "forum" feature in the March/April issue of the Boston Review looks at the pros and cons of private philanthropy in America. With a lead essay by Stanford University professor Rob Reich, who argues that private foundations are plutocratic by nature, the package includes essays in response from Paul Brest, Rick Cohen, Pablo Eisenberg, Stanley N. Katz, Larry Kramer, Gara LaMarche, and Robert K. Ross, among others. Highly recommended.

Writing on her Philanthropy 2173 blog, Lucy Bernholz wonders whether proposals submitted to foundation-funded open challenges could serve a larger purpose. "For example, if you were trying to understand the 'state' of community information efforts, would the applications to the Knight News Challenge be a useful source of data in terms of understanding what people out in the world think is important," asks Bernholz. "Do you know anyone who has looked at them as such?"

GiveWell's Holden Karnofsky explains why his organization recommends so few charities, and the concept behind the GiveWell approach. "We recommend few charities by design, because we see ourselves as a 'finder of great giving opportunities’ rather than a 'charity evaluator,'" writes Karnofsky. "In other words, we're not seeking to classify large numbers of charities as 'good' or 'bad'; our mission is solely to identify, and thoroughly investigate, the best."

Social Justice

On the Huffington Post, Janell Ross discusses findings from The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, a new book written by Rutgers University professor Nancy DiTomaso and published by the Russell Sage Foundation. Based on DiTomaso's research, writes Ross, the book argues that

most white Americans engage, at least a few times per year, in...activities that foster inequality. While they may not deliberately discriminate against black and other non-white job seekers, they take actions that make it more likely that white people will be employed -- without thinking that what they're doing amounts to discrimination....

Social Media

Nonprofits using video to engage their supporters should focus on telling stories about people, not programs, ListenIn Pictures co-founder Annie Escobar argues in a guest post on the Getting Attention blog. "The best use of video is not to inform and educate," writes Escobar. "It's to make your audience feel something and through that emotional response, create a connection to your work."

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (March 23-24, 2013)

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

Black Male Achievement

On the GuideStar blog, Zeina Fayyaz, manager of the Social Innovation Forum and Social Innovation Accelerator at Root Cause, announces a call for applications to the 2013-14 Black Male Achievement Social Innovation Accelerator. Modeled after the Social Innovation Forum, the accelerator program will provide, over twelve months, capacity-building and coaching support totaling more than $150,000 to five BMA Innovators, along with opportunities to network with funders and the chance to become a national leader in the field of black male achievement.

Higher Education

Is student debt the new subprime? Writing on the Demos blog, Thomas Hedges thinks it may be. "Education itself, which many considered a right thirty years ago, has become a market product," writes Hedges. "University presidents are, in the end, fundraisers, soliciting large donations and encouraging students to take out loans that will take decades to pay back. The costs of tuition, which are cleverly obscured for low-income students, slam students years after they graduate, once they realize what paying off, say, $30,000 in student debt means." As one 30-year-old woman with $120,000 in student loans tells Hedges: "The grim truth is that universities and student loans are no longer creating the American dream, they are destroying it, one wide-eyed dreamer at a time.”

Impact/Effectiveness

On the Arabella Advisors blog, Cynthia Muller, director of the firm's impact investing practice, is encouraged by signs that the strategy is gaining traction.

On his Gift Hub blog, Phil Cubeta shares an "open" letter addressed to venture philanthropy pioneer and Leap of Reason author Mario Marino. Writes Cubeta:

I work with financial people. When they learn they can keep clients from giving money out from under management by selling them a feel good story about a “social venture portfolio,” the social economy will shift from nonprofits to for-profits. What will be lost are the local, small, inept organizations that formed you. Like the parish. That is, unless we show respect for these informal orgs and love them back as they loved us, when we were weak

And Mario responds.

"Debates in the private sector have devolved into an existential struggle between two camps: one which believes that privacy is dead and profit is king, and one which fears that any reuse of data beyond the original purpose for which it was collected is a potential threat to privacy and civil liberties," writes Robert Kirkpatrick, director of the UN's Global Pulse initiative, on the Harvard Business Review blog. "[Our] goal is to insert a third pole into this discussion: Big Data is a raw public good, and we must work together to find ways to harness it for massive social impact, both safely and responsibly. For this to happen, data philanthropy has to become a private sector priority."

Nonprofit Management

Nonprofits need to lose their fear of failure, writes Ashley Good, founder and CEO of Engineers Without Borders Canada's Fail Forward project, on the Idealist.org blog, "because almost everything we do has elements of both success and failure." To get beyond that fear, Good suggests six strategies designed to "encourage communication about failures, support collaborative learning, and break down much of the fear associated with taking action."

Charity Navigator's Sandra Miniutti defends the charity evaluator's recent decision to factor out joint cost allocations from program expenses and allocate them to fundraising costs. As a result of the change, sixty-six charities in the CN database now have lower ratings, leading one of the nonprofits to compare CN to the hall monitor from the animated South Park series. Writes Miniutti:

[A]re we offended to be called the "mean-looking hall monitor from South Park?" No, we can take it. This type of response is in the nature of what happens when you make judgments and rate organizations....But what really concerns us is that wasting time calling us names doesn't change anything. Where is the outrage in the sector with regards to excessive joint cost allocations? Where are the charities that refrain from this practice? They should be standing up and demanding that other charities change their ways....

Philanthropy

To mark the centennial of the Rockefeller Foundation, the the Rockefeller Archive Center has created a Web site to tell the story of the foundation’s first hundred years. The site includes an overview of the foundation's work by subject area; a sampling of internal reports and memoranda, correspondence about Rockefeller Foundation projects, excerpts from board meeting dockets and entries from the diaries of foundation staff members; and an interactive map to help visitors to the site navigate the material. Nicely done!

Social Media

Social Media for Social Good author Heather Mansfield shares five types of tweets nonprofits should avoid sending. The list includes: 1) truncated automated tweets from Facebook; 2) automated tweets announcing new photos posted on Facebook; 3) tweets with too many hashtags; 4) poorly formatted tweets; and 5) tweets with semicolons (who knew?).

Best-selling author Seth Godin suggests that we create a standard for online communicating that encourages fairness and generosity. "Online communities are quick to form, but they're just as quick to fade, to become less open and to become less trusting because sometimes we have a cultural orientation toward taking, not giving," writes Godin. "We forget to feed the network first, to take care of those we care about."

Women & Girls

On the Huffington Post, veteran journalist Evelyn Leopold recaps the UN's recent Commission on the Status of Women conference, which concluded with all UN member states agreeing to a code that condemns violence against women and girls.

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (March 16-17, 2013)

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

Communications/Marketing

Over at Katya Andresen's Non-Profit Marketing blog, Kari Saratovsky and Derrick Feldmann, co-authors of the recently published Cause for Change: The Why and How of Nonprofit Millennial Engagement, explain how developing a platform to engage Millennials can better position an organization for success.

Impact/Effectiveness

"[M]ost social good organizations...[are] focus[ed] on reproducing the institution, not reusing...data," writes self-described data wonk Lucy Bernholz on her Philanthropy 2173 blog. "This needs to change in two ways," adds Bernholz. "First, nonprofits should be using their data for social purposes only....[And, second] when it comes to enterprise level data, the default should be to share all the data you can."

On Arabella Advisor's Greater Good blog, Katrina Briddell and Lauren Marra share five keys to effective donor collaboration.

The Inter-American Development Bank's Lina Salazar Ortegón shares five things investors need to know about impact investing metrics:

1. Reporting requirements should be simple and in line with the client companies’ operations.
2. It's necessary to involve both investment officers and investee companies in the measuring and tracking process, training them on the importance of metrics and reporting.
3. To the extent it contributes to everyone speaking the same language and using the same type of indicators, tracking performance contributes to better communications with stakeholders.
4. Investments aren't the only thing that need to be tracked. Grant-funded projects with potential to become profitable and sustainable business models also need to be monitored from the start.
5. Metrics must be negotiated during the due diligence process and be formally included in the loan agreements.

Ortegón invites readers to learn more about the challenges the bank faced, the improvements it made, and the lessons it learned by reading the OMJ IRIS User Case, which was published earlier this year by the Global Impact Investing Network.

On the PBS Newshour site, Newshour economics correspondent Paul Solman talks with Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin about social impact bonds and how one such instrument is being used to address (and hopefully break) the cycle of recidivism in New York City.

Innovation

To help you and your organization circumvent the "idea-killing apparatus" that exists in almost every nonprofit, ace consultant David LaPiana shares half a dozen "lifesaving suggestions" designed to keep new ideas alive.

Journalism/Media

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Elizabeth Miller shares some advice from a South by Southwest panel discussion for new journalists looking to establish themselves in the rapidly changing field:

1. Don't be a jack of all trades. Go deep with one tech skill.
2. Be passionate.
3. Use academic opportunities to experiment.
4. Never underestimate the value of being able to construct a sentence.
5. Learn to code. (And even if you aren't willing to learn how, get up to speed with the possibilities of what good code can do.)
6. Don't be afraid to measure success (or failure).

Philanthropy

Based on the findings of a paper titled the Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Determinants of Success and Failure, the Kauffman Foundation's Mindee Forman highlights some of the factors that contribute to a successful crowdfunding campaign, including the size of an organization's network, whether the campaign has a strong geographic tie-in, and duration of the campaign. (Shorter is better.)

Social Justice

"How can grantmakers boost the impact of their contributions to a more just society?" Niki Jagpal asks on the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's Keeping a Close Eye blog. "The answer might well lie in fusing strategy and justice in the ecosystem of the nonprofit sector. Consider the interconnectedness of the issues that funders are addressing and it becomes clear that our sector functions much like any system such as the human body: if one part of it changes, the entire system is affected...."

Social Media

In the last post in a series about her experience at this year's South by Southwest conference, Beth Kanter offers some metrics and measurement advice to nonprofits, including "don’t be a zombie repeating the mistakes of the past" and analyze your data using various methods.

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (March 9-10, 2013)

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

Communications/Marketing

In a two-part series on her Non-Profit Marketing blog (here and here), Katya Andresen shares highlights of a discussion she had with Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward about the key themes in their recently published book Social Change Anytime Everywhere, including how nonprofits can use online tools to advance their work.

On the Communications Network blog, Courtney Williamson, the network's community manager, shares slides and video from Avoiding the Blind Spot: Telling Your Story With Pictures, a recent network webinar featuring Resource Media's Liz Banse and Scott Miller. Among other things, Banse and Miller outline three principles of good communication: 1) people are visual first, verbal second; 2) people's decisions and actions are based on emotional reaction more than rational thought; and 3) visuals are the most effective communications vehicles for evoking emotion and getting people to take action.

Disaster Relief

On the techPresident blog, Julia Wetherell looks at findings from a new Internews report on the effectiveness of crisis mapping following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. Among other things, the report found that the crisis map created on the Ushahidi platform was "not as critical to [the humanitarian] response" as previously thought, in part because many victims of the disaster weren't aware of it. "The accessibility of crisis mapping was also dependent on the availability of Internet service," says Wetherell. To address that shortcoming, the report recommends strengthening IT infrastructure, particularly in less connected rural areas, before the next disaster hits.

NPR has a good interview with reporter Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster.

Women

Daily Beast contributor Caroline Linton announces the launch of the Half the Sky game on Facebook -- a clever use of social media that seeks to turn virtual donations made by players into real-world donations to organizations that support women and girls around the world, including the Fistula and United Nations foundations, Girls & Education Mentoring Services, Heifer International, ONE, Room to Read, and World Vision. As Linton explains, the game "helps educate the players to some of the challenges women face around the globe, especially as [the Indian woman narrator] Radhika travels to far-off lands such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Kenya."

Writing on the For Women blog on Friday, Ms. Foundation for Women senior strategist reminded us that "we still have miles to go in [the United States]" in terms of advancing women's rights. As the organization's most recent report notes:

• The U.S. economy marginalizes women and consistently relegates women of color to the lowest-paying jobs;
• Quality, flexible and affordable child care is inaccessible to working families, particularly those headed by women;
• Control over women's bodies is legislated by people who often prioritize political posturing over women's health;
• Gender-based violence remains a prevalent and complex problem, despite important policy victories like the recent renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

"[So on this] International Women's Day," writes Kay, "let's set high goals for the U.S. and challenge ourselves to make this a place in which a woman may obtain justice and equality regardless of her race, socioeconomic status, age or immigration status," writes Kay. "The U.S. should be a beacon of rights, rather than a place that offers privilege to some while turning a blind eye to others' inequality."

And while Congress did recently vote to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, extending protections to homosexual and Native American victims of violence, more needs to be done, writes Niki Jagpal on NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, especially since "many of these community members do not report the crimes committed against them." To help address the problem, Jagpal urges grantmakers to prioritize "underserved communities intentionally and [fund] social justice work heavily, including funds for advocacy and community organizing by or on behalf of these communit[ies]."

Last but not least, Beth Kanter marked International Women's Day with a nice discussion of the Global Mom Relay on her blog. "Every time you share a relay post on Facebook, Twitter, or email or donate $5 or more as part of the relay," writes Kanter, "a $5 donation (up to $8,000 per day) will be donated by Johnson & Johnson and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to one of four initiatives [-- Girl Up, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action, and Shot@Life --] that are helping women and children lead healthy and happy lives."

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

-- The Editors

Weekend Link Roundup (March 2-3, 2013)

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

African Americans

Washington Post reporter Vanessa Small recaps a recent networking and panel discussion devoted to "young black philanthropy" hosted by boutique marketing firm Friends of Ebonie at National Council of Negro Women headquarters in Washington, D.C. "At one point, the conversation turned to whether wealthy African Americans are doing enough to give back," writes Small, "and by the end of the night, a consensus developed that all African Americans need to do more to hold one another accountable for how they give their time and money."

On one of the last days of Black History Month, a post on the Case Foundation blog celebrated the charity of African Americans:

Giving back and helping others is the fundamental premise of philanthropy and this premise has been a central tenet of African American culture. The distinguished researcher Mary Winters notes in her study on Endowment Building in the African American Community that perhaps out of survival, "Black Americans have been compelled to share and give back from the moment they arrived on the shores of this country. When they have money to give, they give; when there was no money to give, a generous heart, a strong back or a keen mind. As a value, 'giving back' is firmly rooted in black history." Research funded by the Kellogg Foundation supports this belief. The report, Cultures of Giving: Energizing and Expanding Philanthropy by and for Communities of Color, shows that African Americans give 25 percent more of their income [annually] than white Americans. These findings go to show just how deep the spirit of giving runs within the black community....

Communications/Marketing

On her Non-Profit Marketing blog, Katya Andresen shares some highlights from a post by Steve Daigneault at M+R Research Labs about what the Obama reelection campaign got right -- and not so right -- in terms of its digital outreach efforts.

Impact/Effectiveness

In a guest post on the GuideStar blog, Social Solutions co-founder and vice president Adrian Bordone discusses the importance of measuring outcomes, as opposed to outputs, when it comes to social change work.

Meanwhile, over at Social Fish, Jamie Nutter, vice president of organizational effectiveness at Management Solutions, argues that actionable data is better than big data -- and learning trumps both.

Looking for some inexpensive (as in free) productivity apps? Google apps -- Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and others -- are now available free of charge to any nonprofit that has joined the Google for Nonprofits program. Not a member? To learn more, click here.

Leadership

On the Harvard Business Review blog, John McKinley writes that when it comes to identifying leaders who can effect lasting social change, what matters most is resilience. According to McKinley, who manages the Acumen Fund's Global Fellows Program, the three key characteristics of resilient leaders are:

1. Grit: Short-term focus on tasks at hand, a willingness to slog through broken systems with limited resources, and pragmatic problem-solving skills.
2. Courage: Action in the face of fear and embracing the unknown.
3. Commitment: Long-term optimism and focus on big-picture goals.

What's more, says McKinley, "resilience can be trained." At Acumen, he writes, "we focus on building not only the fellows' financial and operational skills, but also what we call "moral imagination," which requires balancing opposing values -- humility and audacity -- to see the world as it is and to imagine the world for what it could be.

Philanthropy

In the latest installment of her Making Change podcast, Hildy Gottlieb, author of The Pollyanna Principles, chats with Foundation Center president Brad Smith about why foundations should pay attention to radical thinkers and six factors that are driving social change globally.

On the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s Keeping a Close Eye blog, Niki Jagpal and Kevin Laskowski remind us that foundations have been supporting social justice movements for decades. "The Ford Foundation, for example, was a critical source of funding for groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)," they write. And as the social justice movement presses on, "philanthropy has a special opportunity to strengthen American democracy. All of us in the third sector, especially leaders and supporters of nonprofits on the frontlines of fighting injustice, can keep this momentum going by being effective advocates for social justice giving."

The first issue of Philanthropy Impact magazine, a UK-based quarterly that aims "to make sense of and inspire philanthropy in a domestic and international context," is available has a free download (8 pages, PDF). The issue, which was guest edited by Philanthrocapitalism co-author Michael Green, includes articles on the urgent need for better data to understand and strengthen giving, why narratives matter in philanthropy, and why impact assessment tells us little about whether charities are effective and deserve our support.

Social Change

And on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, Kristen Grimm, president of Spitfire Strategies, a PR firm that works exclusively with foundations and nonprofits, identifies seven common blind spots that sneak into change strategies and a four-step process for identifying and eliminating them -- before they sabotage even the most worthy campaigns.

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

-- The Editors