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News for July 2006
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 27 July 2006 |
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| Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar |
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Our new LifeWork programs are picking up steam. Today, I'm thrilled to announce: Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar. This online, two-part workshop will be held on September 8th & 15th, 2006, Noon - 1:30 pm (PST). If like me you have dedicated your life to making a difference, but you're not sure that the difference you're making is everything you want it to be, then this workshop is for you. I promise you it will be rich, challenging, and -- if you choose to make it so -- transformative.
Posted: 7/27/06; 7:42:04 PM # |
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23 July 2006 |
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| SANGONeT Thethas |
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Thetha is a Nguni verb meaning talk, discuss, debate and share opinions. In southern Africa, SANGONeT is organizing a series of regional thethas to promote discussion and engagement on the topic of ICTs, development, and civil society. I had the pleasure of meeting Nthabiseng Taole, the manager of these events, when I was last in Johannesburg and it's exciting to see them take off.
Posted: 7/23/06; 10:12:27 PM # |
| Pew Bloggers Survey 2006 |
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The Pew Internet and American Life Project has put out another survey, on the topic of bloggers (33 page PDF). The weakness of this study is that in conflates every type of blogger into one large category, blurring what we can learn about particular models of blogging as they might apply to civil society. But you can look at it this way: It's highly likely that one in twelve of your online stakeholders is a blogger and that two in five is a reader of blogs. If you are interested in leveraging the power of networks in support of your mission, you would do well to consider those numbers.
Posted: 7/23/06; 10:08:22 PM # |
| C&T 2007 Call for Papers |
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The third Communities and Technology Conference, which will be held at the Michigan State University in June 2007, has issued a Call for Papers. The topics that they are addressing look great. They include: virtual community formation and development, communities of practice, knowledge sharing and organizational learning, communities and innovation, system platforms for e-community research, design methods for communityware, social capital and communities, and numerous others.
Posted: 7/23/06; 9:59:37 PM # |
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21 July 2006 |
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| Getting Started with Blogging Software |
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It took me a little while to review it, but Idealware has done another great job with their latest report on Getting Started with Blogging Software. They leave off Manila, which is the blogging platform that in many ways started it all and which is certainly still one of the most powerful for a network of blogs. But other than that omission (and the fact that I can't find a way to get the whole thing as a PDF, which made it harder to review), the report covers all the important platforms and more importantly, in their How to Choose section, they give you the right questions to ask yourself about your blogging needs. Fabulous work!
Posted: 7/21/06; 12:17:33 PM # |
| The CIVICUS Civil Society Index |
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The CIVICUS Civil Society Index is a fantastic project that has stimulated some good thinking and some even better action around the world. It attempts to assess the state of civil society in a country through four measurements: (1) Structure: What is the internal make-up of civil society? How large, vibrant and representative is civil society in terms of individuals and organisations? (2) Environment: What is the political, socio-economic, cultural and legal environment in which civil society exists? Are these factors enabling or disabling to civil society? (3) Values: Does civil society practise and promote positive social values? (4) Impact: What is the impact of civil society? Is it effective in resolving social, economic, and political problems, and in serving the common good?
Posted: 7/21/06; 12:12:32 PM # |
| Why It's a Bad Idea to Send Microsoft Word Documents |
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I've been known to joke that the virus with the biggest economic impact was the Microsoft Word document. Just think about it. I only recently came across Tristan Miller's very sober analysis of Why It's a Bad Idea to Send Microsoft Word Documents. He provides plenty of great alternatives, of course. These are his reasons: (1) Microsoft Word documents cannot always be read by other word processors. (2) Documents produced with one version of Microsoft Word cannot always be read by other versions of Microsoft Word. (3) Microsoft Word documents are not guaranteed to look and print the same way on every computer and printer. (4) Microsoft Word documents are extremely large compared to other file formats. (5) Sending Microsoft Word files can violate your privacy. (6) Microsoft Word files are a security hazard.
Posted: 7/21/06; 12:08:38 PM # |
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20 July 2006 |
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| Write a Book in One Year: The Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop |
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I am thrilled to announce that we are finally bringing our popular Keystrokes Book Plan Workshop to the Internet, on August 25 & September 1 (in two parts). Previously, we taught this only face to face, but we've spent the last year developing a model to teach it online. This workshop is for those who have a book they want to write, but whose lives present challenges to a project that large. In essence, we'll be teaching you how to write a book in one year.
Posted: 7/20/06; 10:28:59 PM # |
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19 July 2006 |
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| Twelve Ways To Fail at Email |
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My article on the Twelve Ways To Fail at Email has been available up to this point only in our Journal and in the Guide to Nonprofit Email. With the second edition of the latter out , (along with a lot of new, exclusive content), I've decided I want to share this piece more broadly. Here are the twelve big mistakes, as I see them: (1) Not Collecting Email Addresses, (2) Buying Email Addresses, (3) Investing More in Their Web Site than in Email, (4) Not Having an Email Strategy at All, (5) Not Responding to Email, (6) Communication Lacks a Human Voice, (7) Not Converting People to Online Communication, (8) No Email Newsletter, (9) Not Testing, (10) Not Giving Stakeholders Control, (11) Not Acting upon the Profile, Preferences or Behaviors of Stakeholders, and (12) More Concerned with Content than the Relationship.
Posted: 7/19/06; 1:17:26 PM # |
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14 July 2006 |
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13 July 2006 |
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| RSS Grants Channels Survey 2006 |
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In the eighteen months or so since I wrote an editorial advocating the use of a simple standard format (RSS) for the near-real time publishing of grant awards by foundations, genuine interest has begun to build. Quietly, a few grantmakers have started to offer public news feeds of grants made and more than one organization is looking forward to the exciting potential for aggregating this information. I would like you to take a 90 second survey on this subject. It doesn't matter whether you raise money, earn money, or grant money in the sector. I am very interested in your perspective.
Posted: 7/13/06; 1:01:37 AM # |
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9 July 2006 |
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| Organizational Change as an Orchestrated Social Movement |
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I finally got around to reading David Strang and Dong Il-Jung's 2002 paper entitled Organizational Change as an Orchestrated Social Movement (25 page Word document by FTP). Strang has done some excellent work on management fads and this earlier work is illustrative of his thinking. The focus of this piece is on change initiatives that focus on appeals by leaders, rather than new rules or roles or new resources to accomplish changes in direction and the research reveals the fragility of this approach. Given how many change measures in civil society organizations take the form of exhortation rather than structural adjustments, this paper is valuable reading for consultants and leaders alike.
Posted: 7/9/06; 11:09:46 PM # |
| HIV/AIDS and Capacity Building |
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The International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC) wiki has an excellent page on HIV/AIDS and Capacity Building. The contents of the page are a set of well-annotated links to nine praxis notes (describing case studies), twelve links to international AIDS organizations, and 48 references to papers.
Posted: 7/9/06; 10:47:55 PM # |
| Linux's Difficulty with Names |
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Published back in December 2005, Sal Cangeloso's brief exploration of Linux's Difficulty with Names is of much broader application than just operating system adoption. Yes, it's amusing to compare "Gnome Toaster" to "iTunes" or "The GIMP" to "Photoshop", but what particularly interested me in this piece is the insight that naming is a user interface decision. I know I have some things to learn from this.
Posted: 7/9/06; 10:07:36 PM # |
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6 July 2006 |
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| About the Free PDFs We Offer |
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We've developed quite the library of Free PDFs over the last few years and we've finally organized a page that lists and describes them all, in three categories: Collections, Research Reports, and Individual Articles. We have also just added a new publication which collects the three Nonprofit SiteAnalyzer reports we did a number of years ago.
Posted: 7/6/06; 1:46:31 PM # |
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3 July 2006 |
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| How Failure Breeds Success |
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How many foundation executives stand up before their board and say "You will see some failures. As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process." But that's exactly what Coca Cola (not a company I otherwise admire) CEO Neville Isdell told his shareholders, as he described multi-million dollar soft drink flops the company had attempted. Business week takes a close look at How Failure Breeds Success, presenting critical lessons that should be learned by nonprofits and funders alike.
Posted: 7/3/06; 1:00:28 PM # |
| Do Images Help or Hurt? |
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Hat tip to Ms Finn for pointing out this email related research paper from M + R Strategic Services asking: Do Images Help or Hurt? (for some reason, a 4 page PDF rather than a web page). The conclusion is quite interesting. Images appear to have no statistically significant impact on email results. I am reassured in my abstemious ways.
Posted: 7/3/06; 12:55:38 PM # |
| Calculating the Cost of Increased E-Mail Frequency |
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I've been warning for several years now that, the moment nonprofits caught on about email, they would start treating it like any other medium with which to deluge their stakeholders. (Recall last week's image of the statement: "We don't need another call to action. We need a call to stillness.") Now there is interesting research
Calculating the Cost of Increased E-Mail Frequency. This really starts to add weight to the idea that we need to back off on "scaling up talking" and start focusing on "scaling up listening".
Posted: 7/3/06; 12:50:56 PM # |
| The Ten Most-Ignored Best Practices |
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As you have heard me say before, "best practice" is a meaningless term unless you present criteria where you compare those practices against others. Nevertheless, I am recommending EmailLab's article on The Ten Most-Ignored Best Practices, by Loren McDonald and Stefan Pollard. We ignore some of these at Nonprofit Online News as well and they may be worth considering. The ten practices are: 1. Provide a subscription-administration center in each message. 2. Provide a site search function. 3. Provide a forward-to-a-friend link. 4. Provide a subscription link. 5. Add-to-safe-senders-list request. 6. Link to a Web version. 7. Provide a telephone contact number. 8. Display the recipient's email address. 9. Provide navigation links within the email and to the Web site. 10. Provide an email address for feedback or sender contact.
Posted: 7/3/06; 12:47:33 PM # |
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