Weekend Link Roundup (January 26-27, 2019)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy items from and about the social sector. For more links to great content, follow us on Twitter at @pndblog....

Communications/Marketing

In a guest post on Kivi Leroux Miller's Nonprofit Communications blog, Peter Panepento, philanthropic practice leader for Turn Two Communications, shares ten mistakes you need to avoid if you want to get more media coverage.

Corporate Philanthropy

New research from Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues at the University of Chicago  that matches charitable-giving data of Fortune 500 companies with a record of public comments submitted to the federal government on proposed regulations between 2003 and 2015 shows how individual corporations influence the rulemaking process via gifts to nonprofits. Christopher Ingraham reports for the Washington Post.

International Affairs/Development

Nonprofit organization Verra has launched the Sustainable Development Verified Impact Standard, or SD VISta for short. Under the standard, which sets out rules and criteria for the design, implementation, and assessment of projects designed to deliver sustainable development benefits, projects must demonstrate to the satisfaction of a third-party assessor that they advance the SDGs. Amy Brown reports for Triple Pundit.

Nonprofits

Nonprofit AF's Vu Le seems to have struck a nerve — eighty-two comments and counting — with his latest: Why nonprofit staff should not be asked to donate to the organizations they work for.

Over at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies site, Lester Salamon, the center's director, announces the release of the 2019 Nonprofit Employment Report, which found, among other things, that for-profit companies are making significant inroads in key nonprofit fields, cutting into nonprofits' market share.

Philanthropy

Center for Effective Philanthropy president Phil Buchanan checks in with a stout defense of philanthropy, including three examples of trending philanthropic critiques that seem to be "a bit iffy." 

In his latest, Nonprofit Chronicles blogger Marc Gunther suggests that the important thing about wealthy people like the late Jack Bogle, the "father of the index fund," is how they make their money, not how they give their away.

Thanks to some good, old-fashioned reporting by The Guardian's Mark Harris, we now know a lot more about Elon Musk's secretive private foundation than we had previously. 

On the Ford Foundation's Equals Change blog, Hilary Pennington (executive vice president for program), Bess Rothenberg (senior director, strategy and learning), and Megan Morrison (officer, strategy and learning) explain what the foundation learned from the most recent Grantee Perception Report it commissioned from the Center for Effective Philanthropy and what it is doing to strengthen its relationships with grantees.

Whose voices should foundations listen to when they are ready "to engage meaningfully with those who would question their grantmaking strategies?" asks Ryan Schlegel on NCRP's Keeping a Close Eye blog. In other words, asks Schlegel, who has power and privilege in a changing country and world? And who should?

In a post on The Philanthropic Initiative blog, TPI president Ellen Remmer announces the launch of Invest for Better, a field-building initiative aimed at mobilizing women "to invest their personal, philanthropic, and institutional capital for good." 

Transparency

And philanthropy writer and communications strategist Elaine Gast Fawcett shares a few stories on the Transparency Talk blog that illustrate how family funders are thinking and acting when it comes to transparency.

That's it for this week. Got something you'd like to share? Drop us a note at mfn@foundationcenter.org.