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Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship Guidelines

The Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship is a carefully conceived program for financing social enterprises that are at the stage where they can scale up or be replicated. Projects should address one of these program areas: environmental sustainability, health, tolerance and human rights, institutional responsibility, economic and social equity, or peace and security. Although it's a year round program, if you have a project that you think should be included in the 2008 Skoll World Forum then your deadline is September 24, 2007. Posted: 8/26/07; 2:04:42 PM #

Customers control your message (and why that’s a good thing)

Using the example of iRobot - the company that makes the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner – Paul Gillin writes about how customers control your message and why that’s a good thing. It's pretty obvious how this might apply to civil society organizations as well. Here are his five steps for tying into the conversations of our stakeholders: Tap into the conversation. Listen. Enter the conversation. Co-opt (not the greatest word choice) the enthusiasts. Create affinity programs. Posted: 8/26/07; 1:54:54 PM #

Your Project and Its Outcomes

Charities Evaluation Services has published a primer entitled Your Project and Its Outcomes (26 page PDF). The booklet presents frameworks for understanding outcomes and a number of specific methods for developing and working with them. I didn't like the use of notoriously flawed self reporting techniques as an assessment tool, but they did provide a number of other mechanisms. I particularly liked the simple outcome monitoring sheet. Posted: 8/26/07; 1:42:47 PM #

Human Resource and Volunteer Management
	Idealist has launched online resource centers for both Nonprofit Human Resource and Volunteer Management, as well as those areas in which the two fields overlap. There are scores of contemporary, well-annotated materials here. Posted: 8/26/07; 12:31:23 PM #

Anatomy of a Plagiarism

In Anatomy of a Plagiarism, Hildy Gottleib describes her discovery and response to the wholesale appropriation of her 2001 article on "Why Boards Micromanage and How to Get Them to Stop". It's not just that this article was reprinted without her permission, but the author submitted the article as his own to a respected educational journal, where it was accepted. One jaw dropping fact: The culprit was a university professor at a leading university - teaching ethics and leadership. Posted: 8/26/07; 12:27:43 PM #

CARE Turns Down Federal Funds for Food Aid

A lot has been written in the last week about how CARE Turned Down Federal Funds for Food Aid. Despite the New York Times headline, it seems that these so-called funds actually come in the form of heavily subsidized American farm products, that are then sold by aid agencies to raise money for their actual anti-poverty work. CARE turned down $45 million worth of this food because the act of dumping it on African markets undermines the local food production capacity. Other agencies have yet to follow suit and, as might be expected, quite the argument has broken out about this. Given the lengths that nonprofits will go to raise money and how limited the systems thinking can be in many organizations, I can only hope that CARE receives the attention it deserves for this leadership and vision. Posted: 8/26/07; 12:16:23 PM #