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News for December 2008

24 December 2008

Free 60 Page Training Catalog Now Available

Things have been quiet here for some reasons I'll tell you about soon. In the mean time, I want to share with you a publication that I think has been long overdue: The Gilbert Center Winter 2009 Training Catalog: In-House, Online, Pre-Packaged, and Custom (64 page PDF). In one place, you can (1) look up our seminars by your topics of interest, (2) evaluate more comprehensive training packages, and (3) consider our entire training offerings at once. As you consider the increasing need for affordable capacity building in 2009, I encourage you to download and circulate this catalog among your colleagues. Posted: 12/24/08; 1:29:02 PM #

17 December 2008

Money on the Table Seminar Now Available On Demand

We didn't want to wait until next week, in the middle of the Winter Holidays, to announce this workshop, seeing as how we're all facing some challenging financial conditions in the months (and possibly years) ahead. So, we've just added the following seminar to our On Demand Catalog: Money on the Table: The Financial Opportunity of Converting Your Stakeholders to Email. Everything in our On Demand Catalog can be set up to accommodate your schedule and includes a private telephone consultation with the instructor, to answer questions and address issues that are specific to your circumstances. Posted: 12/17/08; 5:44:28 PM #

10 December 2008

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
	The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Do we have to go through something like the hell which preceded that moment in order to find the collective will to implement it? Posted: 12/10/08; 7:37:18 PM #

9 December 2008

Building Your Online List - Seminar Now Available On-Demand

List building is a key element of our online communication workflow. Without permission to correspond, there is nothing else we can do - no cultivation, no stewardship, no organizing. That's why we felt our on-demand seminar catalog would be incomplete without this latest addition: Building Your Online List: A High Integrity Model for Reaching Large Numbers on the Internet. Posted: 12/9/08; 12:32:28 PM #

8 December 2008

What's Wrong with Online Seminars: Three Small Problems and One Big One
	In a couple of days, I'm teaching a workshop on Delivering Online Seminars. My focus in that workshop is less on content and more on sustainable infrastructure, but in writing my latest article I decided to check on my gut feelings about online seminars in general. What's Wrong with Online Seminars: Three Small Problems and One Big One is what I found. Posted: 12/8/08; 6:36:06 PM #

7 December 2008

Who Do You Trust?
	Trust is a fundamental theme in civil society and a bedrock of the social capital we depend upon to raise money and organize people. The current issue of Greater Good Magazine examines the issue of trust from numerous angles, including the role of truth, building and regaining trust, betrayal, first impressions, and the political role of trust. Posted: 12/7/08; 10:09:43 PM #

Real Advice Hurts

Readers of Nonprofit Online News and anyone who has ever taken a seminar of mine will know that I believe the term "strategy" is often misused in the field of nonprofit training. The word is one of the many victims of our desire for quick fixes. You see this in conference workshops, online seminars, articles, and weblogs. In Real Advice Hurts, Merlin Mann takes on this issue from the perspective of blogging and issues a challenge to seek and accept real advice. Posted: 12/7/08; 9:59:05 PM #

Where's the Bailout for Nonprofits?

I think we're in the midst of a truly unprecedented looting of the public purse in the United States, one that leaves me slightly sick to my stomach and avoiding thinking about the repercussions to come. (Avoiding thinking about social and political dynamics is not my usual style, but this is truly scary to me.) That said, a number of people, including Teresa DeCrescenzo, a social worker from Burbank, CA, are asking the obvious question: Where's the bailout for nonprofits? Posted: 12/7/08; 7:10:28 PM #

Mailer Mailer 2008 Email Marketing Metrics Report

For obvious reasons, I don't tend to link to reports put out by software vendors. But Mailer Mailer's 2008 Email Marketing Metrics Report (32 page PDF) is worth it. Although I risk contributing to the problem where organizations fail to develop their own meaningful metrics and instead just judge their success by metrics that allow them to compare their standing with other organizations, I think there's some enlightening stuff in here. For example, did you know that people are opening their email sooner, most likely as a result of mobile access? Or that open rates are stabilizing after a period of decline? Posted: 12/7/08; 7:05:40 PM #

2 December 2008

Website Reinvention & Improvement Seminar - January 14 & 21, 2009

One of our most popular seminars is a two-part, hands-on workshop called Website Reinvention & Improvement. It will be offered next on January 14 & 21, 2009. Already a highly interactive workshop - with assignments related to your own website planning in between the two sessions - we'll be leveraging some resources that allow us to respond even more to the specifics of your circumstances. As always, we offer both immediate fixes and strategic opportunities in the scope of our training. Posted: 12/2/08; 6:12:55 PM #

1 December 2008

Seattle WTO Shutdown 9 Year Anniversary: 5 Lessons for Today

On the anniversary of the Seattle WTO Shutdown, David Solnit shares Five Lessons for Today. I was breathing tear gas, being pepper sprayed, having flash-bang grenades go off in my face, and running from lines of police all because I had the audacity to step out of my home and ask why my neighborhood had been invaded by paramilitary forces. Many people faced far worse than me for doing things of which our nation's founders would have been proud. The upside was, we won. So, we should take as many lessons from it as we can. Solnit's, which he describes in some detail, are: (1) Uproot the System, (2) Organize Strategically, (3) People Power, (4) Experiment in the Laboratory of Resistance, (5) Tell Stories. Posted: 12/1/08; 6:09:16 PM #

Verdict Against Holy Land Charity Could Have a Chilling Effect

I find the recent criminal verdict against The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development on terrorism charges (for financing social services that are also supported by USAID) to be profoundly disturbing. I sincerely hope that other grantmakers rally behind the foundation in an effort to get this overturned. Read about the trial and the evidence and tell me if this doesn't creep you out as much as it does me. Posted: 12/1/08; 5:56:40 PM #

It Died: A Compendium of Services and Companies No Longer Available Online
	If you read It Died: A Compendium of Services and Companies No Longer Available Online you will be scared off of ever making your organization dependent on free online services. Please note that prominent services from Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all recent entries on the list, so it's not just obscure startups that are going under. Posted: 12/1/08; 5:51:53 PM #

The Care and Framing of Strategic Innovation Challenges

Although it's very focused on commercial innovation, I was recently very pleased to read the ideas in Arthur VanGundy's 2005 paper on The Care and Framing of Strategic Innovation Challenges (18 page PDF). His main criticism of most idea-gathering processes is that they miss the most important aspect of innovation: defining or redefining the problem. (The amount of poorly framed or utterly unframed idea-gathering going on right now in the wake of the Obama election is pretty mindboggling. Of course, most of it focuses on what Obama should do, while I tend to think the strategically interesting question is what we should do.) Have you seen as much of this poor framing of innovation in the nonprofit sector as I have? Posted: 12/1/08; 5:46:42 PM #