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Building National Campaigns: Activists, Alliances, and How Change Happens

Oxfam International has tremendous organizational experience in supporting campaigns around the world. They are also doing their best to share that experience with others. On Building National Campaigns: Activists, Alliances, and How Change Happens (cover page for 115 page PDF and hard copy order, Dave Dalton describes and analyzes five campaigns in Colombia, Morocco, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Among other things, he digs into the practical aspects of building and maintaining alliances in the face of hardships and developing sustainable strategies. Too many case studies barely scratch the surface of replicable lessons and insights and that's often why I don't like them as a teaching tool. But in this case, it's all organized in terms of those lessons and how they can be generalized. I highly recommend it. Posted: 6/23/09; 6:24:09 PM #

Glossary: A Quick Reference for Consultation and Dialogue

I throw around a lot of terms in Nonprofit Online News and I expect readers to know what they are or be willing to look them up. Words and phrases like asynchronous, blog, content management, engagement, and stakeholder. I'm rather pleased to see a good many of these words collected and defined in one place in a glossary of consultation and dialogue terms (9 page PDF) produced by DialogueCircles. Posted: 6/23/09; 6:15:19 PM #

Competition or Collaboration?

Several years ago I had a discussion with a well-known nonprofit technology funder who argued that large results from online nonprofit projects could best be achieved through a winner-take-all model. This was important enough that he even funded an excellent report in support of the argument, and I wanted him to consider funding an alternative point of view: that open standards, open APIs, good business models, a little arm-twisting, and visionary (but not necessarily substantial) funding could accomplish much larger results through nourishing open information ecosystems, innovation, and win-win collaboration. The example at hand at the time was interoperability (or rather lack thereof) between the major online volunteer opportunity databases. So it's with great interest and the investment of years of my own passion for this topic, that I direct you to a conversation on Competition or Collaboration at Social Edge. It's being hosted by Peter Dietz of Social Actions and the trigger once more is interoperability of volunteer opportunity databases! It's already a great discussion. Posted: 6/23/09; 6:09:35 PM #