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News for March 2007
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 30 March 2007 |
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| Digital Asset Management Systems Specs and Pictures |
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I'm often frustrated by the tunnelvision that afflicts many software projects in civil society. One version of that tunnelvision is the way we falsely map personal needs and perspectives onto the communication needs of a group. It's amazing how hard it is for some people to take a systems perspective. Not so with Gavin Clabaugh who has written a lengthy piece (complete with screenshots) describing a Digital Asset Management System he designed recently. It's built on Sharepoint, but don't let his use of that platform (which despite its proprietary nature is very systems oriented) deter you from studying this. This is a great example of combining a bird's eye view with common sense design.
Posted: 3/30/07; 8:22:54 AM # |
| Introduction to Screencasting |
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Idealware has done it again, this time with a great Introduction to Screencasting by the clear and thorough Beth Kanter. Screencasts are movies that capture tasks performed on a computer and I've found them to be very powerful communication tools. Beth gives examples, in the form of software tutorials, web project demonstrations, conceptual explanations, knowledge capture, and beta testing. Other than missing one key consideration on the topic of hosting (the copyright policies of the host), Beth also gives solid resources for every step of the screencast creation process. This is a must if you are at all interested in this medium.
Posted: 3/30/07; 8:10:56 AM # |
| For Health’s Sake |
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One of the most important roles played by history in contemporary society is the way it frames things. What we say about the past gives us both metaphors and facts with which to understand the present. For Health’s Sake, Phil Bereano weighs in on how the New York Times - ironically called the "paper of record" - can be strategically forgetful about recent history.
Posted: 3/30/07; 8:04:10 AM # |
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29 March 2007 |
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| Promoting Donor Resilience & Preventing Donor Fatigue |
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It is with considerable pride that I announce the immediate availability of a new publication: Promoting Donor Resilience & Preventing Donor Fatigue, by Charles Maclean. This 101 page book takes a donor centric view of fundraising and turns it into solid, practical steps for making both giving and the encouragement of giving into the truly wonderful thing it can be. In our culture, with all its troubled relationships to money, donor fatigue is a very serious problem. I experience it. I'll bet you experience it. And civil society organizations and their supporters pay a deep price as a result. But it doesn't have to be that way.
This book, which we deliver to you in both our usual versatile form as a PDF or in a paper edition, includes: proven assessment tools, case studies, genuinely effective role playing exercises, related research, and resource lists. It teaches its techniques from both the top down, in the form of research based strategies, as well as from the bottom up, in the form of tested tactics and tips. Charles is also generously including updates delivered by email for twelve months and a money back guarantee.
Charles Maclean of Philanthropy Now is teaching people about giving as a way of life. He is the author of numerous tools for professional fundraisers and donors, including Protocol for Ethical Cause-Related Marketing, Report Card for Rating Giving Opportunities, and Better Donor Allocation In Half The Time. He recently traveled for six months on a philanthropy journey sharing and learning best giving and asking practices from Atlanta to Auckland, San Francisco to Singapore, Dallas to Sydney, Lansing to Melbourne.
Posted: 3/29/07; 6:56:16 PM # |
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27 March 2007 |
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| Website Reinvention & Improvement Seminar |
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I've had so much fun recently applying the principles of Communication Centered Design to specific projects that I've decided to expand my chance to do that, in this case with nonprofit websites. Our newest seminar, entitled Website Reinvention & Improvement, is a hands-on, two-part workshop that will give people both professional and peer review. The takeaways include both immediate practical improvements and a framework for long term development toward making the most of your website as a medium for leveraging relationships with donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders.
Posted: 3/27/07; 8:06:27 PM # |
| The Advanced Student |
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Asher Bey's latest post at The Guru's Handbook is about The Advanced Student. What I like most about this piece is the way it deconstructs the very notion of what it means to be advanced. I tend to think an "advanced student" is one that asks advanced questions. (Ironically and delightfully, advanced questions are often the fundamental ones.) If you've ever had to divvy up your material into different levels, felt like you were sometimes teaching in circles, or had to deal with a diverse group of students, then you will benefit from Asher's thinking.
Posted: 3/27/07; 1:45:47 PM # |
| Holding Horses |
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I had a vague idea of what "Holding Horses" meant as a metaphor, but never enough to use it in my communication and management consulting work. Gavin Clabaugh's latest post clears it all up for me with a great story of time and motion studies of artillerymen and some questions about how many people in civil society are standing around holding horses that are long dead.
Posted: 3/27/07; 10:39:37 AM # |
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22 March 2007 |
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| Three Practical Steps for Scaling Up Listening |
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Tomorrow I am teaching a seminar on the topic of Scaling Up Listening as a method of dramatically improving your relationships with stakeholders, whether it's for fundraising, grassroots activism, or community building. I'll be covering strategies, evaluation, long term planning, and specific domain application, as well as a number of useful tactics. Today, in my latest feature article, I want to share three of those tactics with you: the Most Important Thing, the Progressive Depth Signup, and the Two Minute Personal Response.
Posted: 3/22/07; 2:44:24 PM # |
| Nonprofit Technology Conference Backchannel |
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Thank you to Katrin Verclas, Holly Ross, and anyone else at NTEN who helped make this happen. I know I'm not the only one who, year after year, has wanted to see proper Wifi and backchannel support at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. Now, for the 2007 conference coming up in two weeks, not only have they done it, but they've done it well: free and ubiquitous wireless access, eight major sessions with community moderated chat, unmoderated chat throughout, a mailing list, and some experimenting with both Twitter and texting. They are encouraging people to tag posts and bookmarks with '07NTC' for aggregation of distributed commentary. Obviously, they will themselves be blogging on the N-TEN site. It's an impressive effort.
There are plenty of ways to improve all this. They are using the web-based Gabbly for discussion, which I suspect will frustrate many people. Traditionally, IRC has served the backchannnel very well at other conferences. Perhaps someone can set one up informally? More importantly, they are not making any provisions for serving the presenters needs in regard to facilitating the engagement of participants. I know we're not there yet and that we have to live with some tension and chaos as we look for new models of interaction, but it would serve everyone's interests if presenters could tap into and influence the backchannel, just as they currrently facilitate questions and answers or small group discussion. Presenters give a lot and at the NTC they are almost all volunteers. They need to be able to focus energy and channel input constructively, but the cross-media options for doing that are far from obvious.
Posted: 3/22/07; 2:41:28 PM # |
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21 March 2007 |
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| NTC Video Contest |
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This year's Nonprofit Technology Conference (coming up in two weeks) has a Video Contest, featuring submissions by organizations who are leveraging new technology for civil society work. You can watch the finalists online and vote on your favorites.
Posted: 3/21/07; 8:25:06 PM # |
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19 March 2007 |
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| Iraq War Cost Estimator |
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Today is the 4th anniversary of the Iraq War, possibly the greatest political crime of our times, If you want a conservative idea of the dollar value of the costs, take a look at the Iraq War Cost Estimator, prepared by the Bookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. What that chart does not show is the economic interests who benefit from this crime. But it does show a figure that is roughly five times the total of all US grantmaking last year.
Frankly, I see the Iraq war as an organizational development project for mercenary organizations, military contractors, and the oil industry, funded by public money and human lives. I'm confident it would have been cheaper just to give them the money. I wonder what civil society could have accomplished with that money.
Posted: 3/19/07; 10:16:58 AM # |
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18 March 2007 |
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| Nonprofit Congress 2006 Video |
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I missed this back in November when it first came out, but I have finally gotten around to watching Esther Baker's video documenting The 2006 Nonprofit Congress. A project of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, the Nonprofit Congress is intended to encourage nonprofits into greater collaboration through networking and the articulation of common values. The video does a fine job of communicating the many different themes and desires that come together under this agenda. Some people yearn for collaboration in the context of a mass movement. Others see the foundations of civil society being eroded in the context of the headlong rush toward a world organized to meet the needs of global capital. Still others see great opportunities in the sharing of organizational resources. And others are just tired of the loneliness of fragmented work. Personally, I think that this is a potentially radical agenda (which I support), but one that may elude the gatherings as they strive for agreements with which everyone is comfortable. (I hope I'm wrong about that.) What do you think? This movie will help you figure that out.
Posted: 3/18/07; 7:47:24 PM # |
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15 March 2007 |
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| Network Philanthropy: Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll |
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Douglas McGray, a fellow at the New America Foundation, has written a good profile of Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll entitled Network Philanthropy. The article is not a critical evaluation of their approach to philanthropy. Rather I think it succeeds in capturing the culture and the character that the two eBay billionaires bring to their social change work. If you want a feel for a leading aspect of "new" philanthropy - with its emphasis on markets and networks - this article is a good place to start.
Posted: 3/15/07; 4:31:11 PM # |
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14 March 2007 |
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| The Mission-Resource Matrix: A Framework for Evaluating Civil Society Projects |
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The field of for-profit business consulting has benefited enormously from Bruce Henderson's development of the Growth-Share Matrix at the Boston Consulting Group in the early Seventies. By mapping market growth rate against relative market share, he created an instant classic that spawned a vast field of useful analysis. But very little of this analysis has benefited civil society organizations or its funders, except for those specific situations where nonprofits are pursuing strict earned income enterprises. Civil society needs an analytical framework of its own.
I propose the Mission-Resource Matrix as a simple framework for evaluating civil society projects. In this article I start with a capsule description of the matrix (including a diagram), continue with an exploration of some of its implications, and conclude with seven questions for future development of this tool.
Posted: 3/14/07; 9:03:00 PM # |
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13 March 2007 |
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| Nonprofit Knowledge Management: Online Seminar |
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The field of knowledge management has taken on renewed importance in the last year, as more and more organizations are looking to their stakeholders and their social networks for insight and action, especially online. So, I'm very excited to be offering an all-day seminar on Nonprofit Knowledge Management on April 20th, 2007. We'll be covering the best practices for planning successful projects, building readiness in organizations and among stakeholders, and most importantly, how to leverage networks and communities of practice.
Posted: 3/13/07; 4:07:09 PM # |
| Faster: The Challenge to Teachers of Managing the Pace of Learning |
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Many of my readers are teachers of one kind or another. Some have been given that title formally. Some, like myself, have found that it's one of the most important ways to look at what they do. Some, like many managers and leaders, know that it's an every day part of their job. I continue to be delighted by the work of Asher Bey at The Guru's Handbook. A recent article entitled Faster looks at something I struggle with all the time: managing the pace of learning. I lean toward pushing people toward a radical understanding of the fundamentals, on the assumption that this will give them the greatest leverage in the long run. I often forget that immediate practicality, even if poorly understood, is often a great motivator. Maybe you have similar things to learn about your role as a teacher?
Posted: 3/13/07; 8:13:56 AM # |
| The Poison of Faux Realism |
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Have you ever had anyone take the air out of a perfectly good conversation about how to make something better by scoffing at how unrealistic your idealism is and how you need to be pragmatic? It's a half truth at best and nasty tactic at worst. Over at my book blog - The Authentic Organization - I write a bit about this phenomenon in a post called The Poison of Faux Realism.
Posted: 3/13/07; 8:05:50 AM # |
| Opposing the Iraq War: Heroes of Resistance |
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I am often deeply frustrated by the way people with foresight - across a wide range of fields and topics - are ignored, while what might better be called "large followers" are canonized. No doubt you have your own examples of this. Nowhere is this more apparent right now than in the current discussions about the despicable war in Iraq. So, it is with enormous pleasure that I point to Opposing the Iraq War: Heroes of Resistance by John Tirman, which at least names the people - including many public intellectuals and people from civil society - who saw through the lies from the beginning and said something about them.
Posted: 3/13/07; 7:51:37 AM # |
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12 March 2007 |
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| State of the South, a Report on Southern Philanthropy |
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The division in the United States between northern and southern states remains a grave one of profound political, economic, and cultural interest. The State of the South is a report on southern US philanthropy, available as a free PDF from MDC. Its subtitle -- Philanthropy as the South's "Passing Gear" -- reveals its major theme. The five core findings are: (1) A quarter of a century of dramatic advancement has made the South a magnet for jobs and for a diverse array of people who want to work. (2) In the first years of the 21st century, the South fell into a trough of economic stagnation and widening income gaps. (3) A thriving region that works well for all people must pursue two goals simultaneously: competitiveness and equity. (4) Now is the time for an economically vibrant South to produce more of its own philanthropic assets. (5) The South needs a philanthropy that is bold, innovative, and visionary - philanthropy that serves as the
region’s “passing gear.”
Posted: 3/12/07; 5:08:20 PM # |
| Gavin’s Digital Diner, March 2007 |
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I've really been enjoying Gavin Clabaugh's early march posts at Digital Diner. Gavin brings gentle humor and insight even to the topic of Daylight Savings Time. His recent post on the topic of how music is a social phenomenon really helped me look at my own behaviors around recommendation and transmission of ideas. Between these personal insights and the more systematic perspective that Cory Doctorow brings to the topic, I have been thinking hard about the topic of future business models for people (like myself) who trade in ideas.
Posted: 3/12/07; 9:19:45 AM # |
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