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Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in North Carolina

The second Grantmaking for Community Impact report has been released, examining the results of advocacy and lobbying spending by organizations in North Carolina. The evidence is pretty strong that such spending is very effective in leveraging resources for the issues that concern the organizations involved. The authors of the report fully concede the limits of their methodology, in that we can't really know how much any particular activity contributed to the policy or funding changes claimed for it. (Nor can we know whether those policies would have happened anyway; I've been around plenty of organizations that claimed credit for things that happened simply because the political climate was ready for it.) Their report claims that "For every dollar invested in their advocacy and organizing work, the groups garnered $89 in benefits for North Carolina communities." Even if they are off by an order of magnitude, that's a very strong case for bringing such spending into balance with direct service spending. Posted: 5/11/09; 9:37:24 PM #

Nonprofit Social Network Survey

I have several concerns about NTEN's recent Nonprofit Social Network Survey (17 page PDF), although I nevertheless recommend that you take a look at it. (1) The methodology section is one-sentence long, doesn't describe its sampling methodology, but nevertheless asserts a 95% confidence in its results. If this is online self-selection, as many of our own surveys have been, then the overall numbers are of less interest that the comparison between subsectors and the cross-tabulations. (2) I haven't been able to find a clear definition of "social network" in the report and it's not made clear whether there was one in the survey. I am under the impression it means any kind of online community or discussions, except for those conducted across sites, such as blog networks. But I'm not sure. Still, I can't help but be intrigued. For example, "not enough money" is a fairly common reason to not pursue social networking, but "having more money" is rarely cited as a way to do it better by those who are already doing it. What does that mean? I really want to know! Posted: 5/11/09; 9:28:27 PM #

Impact Assessment of ICT-for-Development Projects: A Compendium of Approaches

In an effort to promote better and more frequent evaluation of ICT for development projects, the Institute for Development Policy and Management has published Impact Assessment of ICT-for-Development Projects: A Compendium of Approaches (cover page for 160 page PDF). This substantial report covers the strengths, weaknesses, methods, variants and references for 11 different overarching frameworks of evaluation, which they enumerate as follows: (1) Cost-Benefit Analysis, (2) Project Goals, (3) Communications-for-Development, (4) Capabilities, (5) Livelihoods, (6) Information Economics, (7) Information Mapping, (8) Cultural-Institutional, (9) Enterprise, (10) Gender, and (11) Telecentres. On top of this, it includes an annotated bibliography of impact assessment resources including ones that are specific to certain disciplines, issues, and sectors. This is an extraordinary contribution to the field. Posted: 5/11/09; 6:34:21 PM #

Survival of the Fittest Tag

My old company Social Ecology supported tagging and folksonomies in its original intranet product as far back as 1999 and my fascination with emergent taxonomies goes back even farther. In this month's issue of First Monday, Alexis Wichowski takes an evolutionary approach to the topic in Survival of the Fittest Tag: Folksonomies, Findability, and the Evolution of Information Organization. I like the approach, particularly his use of findability as the selective pressure. This ecological and evolutionary approach is one way of bridging the gap between the chaos of random keywords and the rigidity of restricted vocabularies. Posted: 5/11/09; 7:59:06 AM #