[Printer Friendly Version]

News for December 2006

28 December 2006

The Gilbert Center is Ten Years Old - Part 2
	In Part 2 of our series on the first ten years of The Gilbert Center I talk about: the Internet Nonprofit Center, the Nonprofit FAQ, early nonprofit content management, our early articles, and an exploding mailing list. Posted: 12/28/06; 12:42:58 AM #

27 December 2006

Storytelling by Design

As you probably know, I am a strong believer in designing communication tools and practices around the relationships they are supposed to serve. In Storytelling by Design, David Seah looks at the role of storytelling in helping us do this. He starts with a familiar theme - the failure of thing-focused design - and then explores the reasons why storytelling is such a compelling technique. Posted: 12/27/06; 5:54:06 PM #

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires

Dirk Knemeyer has written a thoughtful article entitled Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires. He challenges some of the conventional notions of user centered design and proposes that we go even further. His innovations include five levels of success in design: participation, engagement, productivity, happiness, and well-being. I'm looking forward to seeing how these ideas develop. Posted: 12/27/06; 5:43:55 PM #

More Money, More Demand: Results of the 2006 GuideStar Nonprofit Economic Survey

In More Money, More Demand, Suzanne Coffman presents the highlights of GuideStar's 2006 Nonprofit Economic Survey. I would question whether most nonprofits have the tools in place to accurately assess demand for their services. (And what exactly does "demand" mean for social change groups anyway?) Nevertheless, these results (also available in more detail than these highlights) are consistent with the devolutionary trend in the U.S. nonprofit sector. Posted: 12/27/06; 5:21:17 PM #

22 December 2006

Five Organizational Influencers on Emotional Skills

In my ongoing exploration of The Authentic Organization, my most recent thinking has been about the emotional skills of staff and stakeholders and how they are effected by the organizational environment. I propose that there are Five Organizational Influencers on Emotional Skills: recruitment, intake, structure, consequences, and leadership. I would be very grateful for any examples, counterexamples, and critical thinking you could offer. Posted: 12/22/06; 11:44:49 PM #

Network Learning Management Skills Resources

Network Learning has some very impressive resources available online for people doing development work, in both the North and the South. I was particularly impressed with their collection of management guides, which includes How to Build a Good Small NGO (83 pages), Information - Its Collection and Use Throughout the Project Cycle (30 pages), Better Ways to Manage Meetings (18 pages), and Guidelines for Writing Reports. Posted: 12/22/06; 11:35:49 PM #

21 December 2006

2006 Year End Holiday Sale

In honor of the Winter Holidays that are celebrated by many of the readers of Nonprofit Online News, we are putting nine of our most popular products on sale, organized into bundles for executive directors, development and communication professionals, nonprofit technologists, and officers of organizations. Discounts run from 10% to 40%, depending upon the mix and configuration. Take a look at the order page to familiarize yourself with this further. We set this up so that you can buy either individual items or pre-packaged bundles, either for yourself as part of your plans for renewal in the coming year, or as a gift for a colleague. This offer will only be available for a few days. Posted: 12/21/06; 7:01:44 PM #

An Inconvenient Truth DVD Giveaway for Teachers Entry Form
	Remember when the national science teacher's organization rejected 50,000 copies of An Inconvenient Truth, the global warming documentary? It seems they were more concerned about getting money from Exxon, which in my opinion is just shameful. Now the producers of the film are offering those free copies directly to teachers. Posted: 12/21/06; 6:58:30 PM #

Anger

There is a lot of suppression of difficult feelings among people in civil society. Whether there is more or less of that than there is anywhere else in our various repressive cultures, I don't know. But I see the impact in the nonprofit sector up close. I would love to see some discussion of this. I recommend Asher Bey's great advice on anger and corresponding exploration of how people who have influence on others have a responsibility to deal with it mindfully. Posted: 12/21/06; 5:08:43 PM #

20 December 2006

Nonprofit Online News Journal: December 2006 Edition

Despite holiday delays and a twenty year storm, we have completed the December 2006 Edition of Nonprofit Online News Journal. We have Andrew Himes on reconciliation, Grantcraft on executive transitions, and GBN on scenario thinking for nonprofits. There are twenty-two annotated resources and five book reviews. I've contributed my blog survey report and another original Quicksheet (with which I'm particularly pleased) that presents the After Action Review technique in nonprofit terms. Posted: 12/20/06; 12:16:55 PM #

18 December 2006

Storm Knocks Us Offline

The storm that recently knocked over a million homes and businesses offline, hit The Gilbert Center pretty hard. We went down Thursday night along with both of our ISPs. Our generator brought us up partially on Saturday, but our ISPs did not restore reliable service until today. They say this was a twenty-year storm and this is the worst outage we have had with our services and online presence in our history. My local colleague and I have managed to stay warm ourselves. We hope to be completely back in business tomorrow, with a few publications a bit behind schedule. Thanks for your good wishes and your patience. Posted: 12/18/06; 7:59:12 PM #

The Art of the Start Video

If you are not familiar with Guy Kawasaki's speech The Art of the Start (based on his book of the same title), then you are in for a treat if you watch it online. I recommend it to beginners and seasoned social entrepreneurs alike. At least, you will be humorously reminded of what you already know to be true about start-ups and sometimes that re-learning is exactly what we need. Posted: 12/18/06; 7:45:16 PM #

Creating Passionate Users: "Dignity is Deadly." - Paul Graham

Quoting Paul Graham, Kathy Sierra says that Dignity is Deadly. Damagingly serious demeanors are indeed a problem, in the nonprofit sector as much as anywhere. But I also see a fair number of tech oriented nonprofit efforts projecting a cool demeanor without nearly the substance that I would say is needed to back it up. I appreciate the spirit and character of openness that is communicated, but I don't like it when it's just hip. Posted: 12/18/06; 7:41:55 PM #

Hungry For a Month

During this period of high consumption in the rich north (of which I am, like many of you, a conflicted participant), we are often in need of a little extra consciousness raising. To that end, I recommend Hungry For a Month, in which Evan Stein, a young man of otherwise fairly common American privilege, documents his month of eating on one dollar a day in East Lansing, Michigan. Posted: 12/18/06; 2:01:55 PM #

13 December 2006

The HIMS Matrix: A Tool for Assessing Listening

I've been talking a lot about what "organizational listening" means and I plan on talking about it a lot more in the coming weeks. I want to start by sharing The HIMS Matrix: A Tool for Assessing Listening, which explains how stakeholders can end up feeling Heard, Ignored, Misunderstood, or Spied Upon. Take a look and see if you can use this framework to help you do more than just talk at your stakeholders. Posted: 12/13/06; 7:24:26 PM #

Deadline for IT in Social Change
	The deadline for initial papers to be submitted for the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change is this Friday, December 15, 2006. The journal is a project of Nonprofit Online News and the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network and will be published in conjunction with the Nonprofit Technology Conference in the Spring of 2007. Posted: 12/13/06; 10:50:35 AM #

12 December 2006

Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills (Online Seminar)

During the last year, as we wrote and edited the second edition of Communication Centered Technology Planning, we learned a lot more about the practical realities of nonprofit technology consulting. We've incorporated those lessons in our upcoming seminar series: Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills. We cover the basics of communication centered planning, how to be an effective and responsible technology advocate, and the common flaws in most consulting relationships. At each step, we'll focus on the practical skills and tools needed. Posted: 12/12/06; 6:13:17 PM #

11 December 2006

Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid For by Taxes - New York Times

The courts are finally taking a hard look at some of the more religiously coercive "faith based" programs funded by U.S. government. In Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid For by Taxes (time limited New York Times article), Diana Henriques and Andrew Lehren take a fairly close look at the systematic blurring of the lines between church and state, the separation of which is one of the things that keeps civil society strongly rooted in the people. Posted: 12/11/06; 10:04:03 AM #

SANGONeT Newsletters
	Even if your work isn't focused on the developing world, I want to recommend that you take a look at the two email Newsletters of the Southern African NGO Network. They have turned into insightful compendia of resources and a valuable source for me each time they arrive. Posted: 12/11/06; 9:56:49 AM #

10 December 2006

How to Launch a Career With Your Blog
	Leslie Taylor writes about How to Launch a Career With Your Blog in Fast Company. Drawing mostly on commercial anecdotes, she nevertheless paints a good picture of the range of scenarios that can play out for the successful blogger. Indeed, I owe much of my own early success in the field of nonprofit technology to Nonprofit Online News. Posted: 12/10/06; 8:12:17 PM #

NGO Accountability
	Fazila Farouk's editorial on NGO Accountability comes to some important conclusions. Although I was impressed with its unity as compared to the United States, civil society in South Africa is now too diverse for there to be deep common agendas. She suggests that peer accountability is perhaps the best way forward. Posted: 12/10/06; 8:09:18 PM #

IT4D: VoIP-4D Primer
	IT4D has released a free VoIP primer, a 40 page guide on building low cost telephony systems, suitable for both technical and non-technical audiences. Posted: 12/10/06; 8:04:06 PM #

Independent Sector's Leadership IS Award
	The Independent Sector's Leadership IS Award is open for nominations until February 15, 2007. The $10,000 award recognizes organizations that invest in the people of the sector as they pursue their mission. Posted: 12/10/06; 8:01:24 PM #

Does technology make managers lazy?

Keeping his spot as one of my top-referenced authors, Gerry McGovern asks: Does technology make managers lazy? I appreciate this question. A fair number of managers would like nothing more than to have to deal less with their subordinates or to have some tool take the place of potentially conflict-laden interactions. The managers who inspire me are the ones who see ICT as an opportunity to connect more deeply and, perhaps, to do those routine things that computers are good at. I also think that, sometimes, ICT can be good at depersonalizing certain exchanges of information, but that is a hard line to draw. Posted: 12/10/06; 7:58:55 PM #

8 December 2006

Blogs on the Rise
	In Blogs on the Rise, Peter Panepento looks at the growing role of weblogs in the field of philanthropy. Using examples both tame and daring, this piece helps demonstrate the extraordinary range of the weblog as a medium for community empowerment. Posted: 12/8/06; 1:38:42 PM #

What is the 1% rule?
	Charles Arthur of The Guardian explains the one percent rule as the proportion of people in an online community who will take the lead in contributing content, whether it's starting a blog or uploading video. Another ten percent will contribute and comment. This sort of perspective is valuable when it comes to setting expectations for any given forum in a community. Posted: 12/8/06; 1:36:17 PM #

4 December 2006

Readers as Resources: A First Look at our 2006 Blogging Survey

I had the pleasure today of finishing my first look at the 2006 Blogging Survey that we just completed and the result is Readers as Resources. It compiles the basic results of the three core questions about blogging, social bookmarking, and informal sharing, and wraps up with a few fairly obvious, but very actionable insights for organizations and their stakeholders. Posted: 12/4/06; 11:57:56 PM #

3 December 2006

National Science Teachers Association Rejects "An Inconvenient Truth"

A reader asked recently about the tension between funding and authenticity in organizations. Recent news provides us with a sad example. After being offered 50,000 free copies of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", the National Science Teachers Association decided to reject them because it would, in their words, place "unnecessary risk upon [their] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters is Exxon Mobil Corporation. I credit my science teachers with giving me some important tools for integrity that have served me well into adulthood. Too bad they can't live up to the lessons that they teach. Posted: 12/3/06; 8:11:26 PM #

How to Use the Internet for Group Fundraising
	In How to Use the Internet for Group Fundraising, Peter Deitz has assembled a nice introduction to some of the services out there for supporting small scale, distributed fundraising efforts. Posted: 12/3/06; 8:03:45 PM #

Four New Entries at The Authentic Organization

Our exploration of The Authentic Organization continues. Last week's entries include: Grief and Loss in Organizations; Mission Drift in a Social Enterprise; The Influence of Dysfunctional Leadership; and Do Be Do Be Do (addressing questions about the relationship between authenticity and action). The last three of these were each based on input offered by readers of Nonprofit Online News. Posted: 12/3/06; 7:52:29 PM #

Call to Our Guiding Institutions

As part of my ongoing interest in coalition building, I have been learning more about a number of global organizations, including the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions. Back in 1999 they prepared something of a vision statement, which they called a Call to Our Guiding Institutions (56 page PDF). This call for peace, justice, and sustainability represents the work of five hundred people from a wide spectrum of the world's spiritual communities. Such a document could easily be nothing but poetic generalities, but I found that there were more than enough specifics in here to give most of the world's great institutions something to chew on. Posted: 12/3/06; 2:53:10 PM #