Here's this week's roundup of noteworthy posts and articles from and about the nonprofit sector....
Communications/Marketing
Handling the press effectively can be one of the most valuable, cost effective, and efficient marketing strategies for any nonprofit. On her Getting Attention blog, Nancy Schwartz offers guidelines for doing it right.
Diversity
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy made news last week when it released Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best: Benchmarks to Assess and Enhance Grantmaker Impact (142 pages, PDF). The paper, which according to NCRP offers "the first ever set of measurable guidelines [designed to] help foundations and other institutional grantmakers operate ethically and maximize the impact of their dollars," urges funders to provide at least 50 percent of their grant dollars to lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized communities; 50 percent of their grant dollars for general operating support and as multi-year grants; and 25 percent of their grant dolars for advocacy, organizing and civic engagement activities that "promote equity, opportunity, and justice in society." Writing on his blog, Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest acknowledges the validity of the paper's underlying premises, but then takes NCRP to task. Writes Brest:
Even for someone who shares NCRP's concerns about marginalized communities, its hierarchy of ends is breathtakingly arrogant. Its prescriptions of means are more of a mixed bag. Many of the 70,000 foundations in the United States might actually contribute more to society if they followed some of the Criteria. But the tremendous social good done by others would be severely compromised. In aiming for the lowest common denominator, NCRP pushes the entire sector toward mediocrity....
Brest has much more to say in his post and promises, in a series of posts to follow, to repond to the issues raised by NCRP recommendations.
Economy
Author (What Would Google Do?), blogger (BuzzMachine), and j-school prof Jeff Jarvis argues that the economic crisis we are living through is not a recession, not a depression, not even a compression; it's a great restructuring "of the economy and society, starting with a fundamental change in our relationships -- how we are linked and intertwined and how we act, nothing less than that." (And don't miss Lucy Bernholz' great post, from a nonprofit perspective, on the same topic.)
NPR's Wendy Kaufman talks to executives at the Gates and Pittsburgh foundations, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University about the challenges states and municipalities are likely to encounter in doling out large sums of economic stimulus dollars. Running time 3 min 45 sec. (H/T: Lucy Bernolz)
On the Business of Giving blog, Seattle Times reporter Kristi Heim talks to Kiva co-founder Matt Flannery about the impact of the economic crisis on the wildly popular microlending site as well as its future plans.
Education
Several foundations have pledged $200 million toward efforts to improve the public school system in Washington, D.C. But as Ian Wilhelm points out on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's Give & Take blog, the funds are "contingent upon the district’s superintendent, Michelle A. Rhee, hammering out a labor agreement with the teachers union that gives the city the ability to reward high-performing individual teachers with increased pay and to quickly remove underperforming ones." Rhee has declined to name the prospective donors, although the Washington Post earlier reported that the Gates, Broad, Dell, Robertson, and Walton Family foundations are supporting the plan. The Washington Teachers' Union is uneasy with the foundations' involvement, saying teacher pay levels should not be driven by philanthropic money, and Jim Horn, an outspoken critic of foundation involvement in education reform, writes on his blog School Matters that the entire plan is a bad idea. All of which has Wilhelm wondering what the approriate role of foundations in assisting D.C. schools should be and whether they should remain anonymous.
Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson blogs about the "Hacking Education" event he and his partners hosted on Friday in New York City. (Click here for the list of participants and their CVs.) Here are some of Wilson's takeways from the event: students are increasingly taking control of their education; alternative forms of education are on the rise; teachers are more important than ever; credentialing and accreditation in the traditional sense will become less important as students' work product becomes more available to be sampled and measured online. Union Square will post the complete transcript of the six-hour session as soon as it's ready.
Fundraising
Based on a recent positive experience with a Save the Children canvasser, Robin Hood Marketing author Katya Andresen reminds fundraisers everywhere that "nothing beats the personal touch." "I'm not saying you need to hire a group of canvassers like Save to do face-to-face appeals," writes Andresen, "but do try to make your asks more personal."
Donor Power blogger Jeff Brooks offers some good advice to nonprofits hoping to attract gifts from donor-advised funds.
Nonprofit Management
In the second of two posts dedicated to Charity Navigator, "America's largest independent charity evaluator," Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest offers a number of recommendations that the organization's president, Ken Berger, should consider if he wants to contribute to building an outcomes-driven culture in the nonprofit sector. They include:
- Gathering better programmatic data from nonprofits as a short-term substitute for the long-term goal of data on outcomes (DonorEdge is doing this)
- Gathering data from experts (Nonprofit Knowledge Network is working on this)
- Gathering data from other constituents (GreatNonprofits is working on this)
- Rating nonprofits on how transparently they report outcomes (IntelligentGiving in the UK does this
Brest also recommends that Charity Navigator partner with "other organizations that [already] gather and aggregate" this information so that nonprofits will not have to submit the same information to multiple rating sites.
Philanthropy
Tactical Philanthropy's Sean Stannard-Stockton responds to an article ("Learning From the Farmer's Market") by Hewlett Foundation program officer Jacob Harold in the current issue of Alliance Magazine in which Harold suggests that those who argue for more market discipline in philanthropy could do worse than look to farmers' markets as a model. "The current crisis is not a condemnation of markets in general," writes Stannard-Stockton, "but of certain rules (or the lack thereof) that came to dominate the market over time." This is not the first -- and will not be the last -- time that "excesses of various types severely disrupt the market’s functioning." That said, Stannard-Stockton applauds Harold's analogy, which reminds us "that the core principals of markets is not financial derivatives, overpaid executives and excessive debt, it is people coming together to exchange those things which they value dearly."
In response to Stannard-Stockton's post, Gift Hub's Phil Cubeta provides his take on Harold's analogy. Cubeta:
If building a caring community is part of what philanthropy is about, the whole question of "scale" looks different. Marriage is hard. Children are hard, let alone several generations. Neighborhood is harder. Farmer's markets and small schools sort of work. But try markets and governments for State, Region, Country, and World. Giving for some of us is our way to participate in a local world, an intimate world, with those we like to think of neighbors, civic friends, and supporters of our own felt sense of identity. We vote, yes, for all the difference it makes, but giving and volunteering is a way to make a difference you can feel, touch and taste, like an apple in that farmer's market....
Social Media
Beth Kanter recommends that nonprofit organizations "set their content free" with a Creative Commons license. "I've always wondered whether or not when someone makes a gazillion dollars on one of my photos or my blog posts, will I be sorry? No....[What] is more likely to happen is that people will use the work, use the license honestly, and improve the work." Kanter ends her post with a few examples of how she has "remixed" other people's work or other people have remixed her work -- to everyone's benefit.
Last but not least, in the fourth installment of the Social Good podcast series, social media expert Allison Fine talks with Andy Carvin, National Public Radio’s social-media chief, about the NPR's social media strategy and how smaller nonprofit groups can incorporate social media into their outreach efforts.
That's it for this week. Have a great week!
-- Regina Mahone and Mitch Nauffts
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