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 [email protected]. And have a good week!

--The Editors