Weekend Link Roundup (August 25-26, 2012)

Our (slightly delayed) weekly roundup of new and noteworthy posts from and about the nonprofit sector....

Environment

On NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog, Niki Jagpal commends the Kresge Foundation for a recent grant of $500,000 to Princeton-based Climate Central in support of efforts to provide decision makers and the public with information about future coastal flood exposure and sea level rise. "Kresge," writes Jagpal, "is leading the way by example: focusing specifically on socially vulnerable populations is precisely what environment and climate philanthropy expert Sarah Hansen recommends for environment and climate funders in Cultivating the Grassroots: A Winning Approach for Environment and Climate Funders."

Leadership

Philanthropy 411's Kris Putnam-Walkerly shares a post from Trista Harris, executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, in which Harris explains what an informational interview is for those "too embarrassed to ask."

Social Entrepreneurship

In a post on his Harvard Business Review blog, Uncharitable author Dan Pallotta discusses how he went from building Pallotta TeamWorks, one of the most successful charity event businesses in the country, to losing everything -- including four hundred full-time employees and sixteen U.S. offices -- after his biggest client jumped ship.

Social Media

On the NTEN site, social media vet Beth Kanter offers a few good Pinterest tools, tips, and resources, and gives a shout out in the process to Chris Sietsema's "advice about taking a birds' eye view of your organization's content to determine whether every bit of that content is integrated into an overall communications strategy. If a certain kind of content isn't, writes Sietsema, maybe it's time to abandon it.

Meanwhile, in a guest post on Kanter's own blog, Darren Barefoot of the Mountain Equipment Co-op discusses a recent digital collaboration with pop musician Sarah Harmer to raise awareness around threatened Canadian landscapes. Among other things, Barefoot suggests that nonprofits interested in adopting an "unorthodox" approach to a planned advocacy campaign can improve their chances of success by looking to the Web for examples of campaigns that have succeeded.

Technology

On the Knight Blog, Elizabeth Miller and Chris Sopher take a second look at a handful of Knight-funded digital technology projects designed to help Americans become more informed and engaged in the democratic process and introduce a new one: the SuperPAC App, which, through the use of audio fingerprinting technology, enables iPhone owners to find out which people and groups are behind presidential election TV ads. The post also mentions Politifact, which is developing tools to make its fact-checking information available on demand; TurboVote, which makes registering to vote "as easy as renting a Netflix DVD"; the Wesleyan Media Project, which "is monitoring the large amount of money expected to be spent on political advertising in the 2012 elections"; and the the Internet Archive's TV Research Database, a platform to make TV news content available and searchable in real time.

Transparency

And in a two-parter -- here and here -- on the Foundation Center's Transparency Talk blog, veteran nonprofit sector leader and muckraker extraordinaire Rick Cohen addresses the role of transparency in philanthropy and how foundations can do a better job of being transparent.

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

-- The Editors