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News for March 2010
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 22 March 2010 |
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| 10 Take-Aways from SXSW for Nonprofits |
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South by Southwest Interactive is not one of my usual gatherings during the year. But it's always fun to read the breathless coverage produced by the brilliant, but often twitterpated, participants. One of the calmer summaries was produced by Matt Kolterman, who shares 10 Take-Aways from SXSW for Nonprofits: (1) Tell stories about your constituents that speak to the heart and inspire action. (2) Ensure cross-channel brand and message consistency. (3) Get your message across in as few words as possible. (4) Make sure your website behaves like an approchable and likable person. (5) Support other nonprofits involved in your cause. (6) Segment your constituents and develop a targeted communications strategy. (7) Create and maintain an editorial calendar. (8) Empower your super-advocates. (9) Experiment frequently and iterate rapidly. (10) Create content that people will talk about and share.
Posted: 3/22/10; 5:52:47 PM # |
| The Robber Barons of Social Change |
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Mark Engler's review of Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards is a must-read. (So is the book he's reviewing.) In The Robber Barons of Social Change, Engler and Edwards take on the "philanthrocapitalists" who seem to claim that there is no problem of capitalism that can't be solved with more capitalism. I worry that we as a sector swing between two unbalanced mindsets: We alternatively worship the ground that business people walk on and outright reject fantastic tools because they are culturally associated with business. Neither of these approaches are the least bit useful. Neither Engler nor Edwards are arguing for a knee-jerk reaction, rather they just point out that philanthropy has no reason to look to the business sector as a model of virtue.
Posted: 3/22/10; 5:47:08 PM # |
| Nonprofit CEOs Who Want For-Profit Salaries Should Work at For-Profit Companies |
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Rosetta Thurman says something that I wish I had said myself: Nonprofit CEOs Who Want For-Profit Salaries Should Work at For-Profit Companies. She makes several great points: Good pay does not mean excessive pay. Million-dollar salaries are not sustainable for the sector. High salaries do not equal effective leaders. Excessive salaries turn donors away. We need to be more concerned with paying all nonprofit staff better, not just CEOs.
I would add three thoughts: First, there are a lot of intangibles being exchanged in the employment of nonprofit leaders (such as the values themselves) and those intangibles account for at least some of the difference in salaries. Second, the more nonprofit leaders become culturally interchangeable with business leaders, the less civil society will be able to maintain distinct values. Third, excessive for-profit salaries are often the result of ugly non-market forces (such as stock volatility and senior executive comments) that we in the nonprofit sector want to stay as far away from as possible.
Posted: 3/22/10; 5:39:29 PM # |
| Quince UX Design Patterns |
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The more our technology partners in the sector move in the direction of user involvement, the more we are all exposed to these things called "design patterns". We already know what these are. When we say "but on Twitter it works like this and it's easy", we are probably talking about a design pattern, a user experience element that you see as portable from one context to another. Whether you think of yourself as a techie, a designer, or just a smart user, it doesn't hurt to expose yourself to a range of patterns, organized as such. For example if you spend a little time with the Quince UX Design Patterns Library, you'll start seeing things in the sites you use that you probably never saw before.
Posted: 3/22/10; 5:11:19 PM # |
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18 March 2010 |
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| Just Awards Nominations to Close on March 30, 2010 |
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Nominations for the Just Awards will be closing on March 30, 2010. We have two great awards to present in our inaugural year: Narcissism in Philanthropy will be awarded to a foundation, corporation, trust, or donor for displaying amazing narcissism during 2009 in the practice of philanthropy. Abominable Media Coverage of the Nonprofit Sector will be awarded to a newspaper, magazine, website, radio program or other media reporting on U.S. nonprofit organizations and/or the U.S. nonprofit sector, for abominable press coverage in 2009. We have a Who's Who of nonprofit leaders and thinkers as our judges for two awards. (Take a look at the latest additions to this team, if you haven't already.) We all have experiences with funders and press who deserve a good natured jibe, so please spread the word and submit your nominations by March 30th!
Posted: 3/18/10; 6:11:12 PM # |
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15 March 2010 |
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| What is Online Community Organizing? (Free Video) |
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We're continuing to put out free content from our seminars. We just put up a short piece exploring online community organizing and what it actually means. In it, I focus on the way in which the organizing paradigm changes the relationship between campaigns and groups of stakeholders. I then show how that relates to the classic organizing model which says that if you build community, you are building social capital, leadership, and ultimately, power. Check it out! (Click the image on the right, under the header: Video Highlight.)
Posted: 3/15/10; 4:00:14 PM # |
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12 March 2010 |
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| Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea |
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I think most of us in the nonprofit sector, myself included, routinely misuse the word "strategy". It ends up with a much broader and less useful meaning than it could. I try to correct this by clearly delineating between strategy and tactics in my teaching and consulting work. I do this in part to help offset our obsession with quick wins, tips, and tricks, and in part to help people identify the enormous returns we can get when we choose the right strategy for our projects. That's the context in which I read Mark Kurlansky's book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
We can look at civil society as a sector that concerns itself deeply with power. In social service work, we focus on empowerment at a personal level. In social change work, we focus on redistribution of power. (I personally subscribe to the notion that there can be deep synergies between these two approaches.) Nonviolence is about as far from being a "quick tip" as you can get. It is a strategy for power that changes the way we think about everything we do.
Living as we do in a time of perpetual war, it doesn't take much to rally people, even most of civil society, around violent action. We tend to think we are being "realistic" when we do so. But the history of violent and nonviolent action reveals that the former almost never really works and that, at least sometimes, the latter does. Kurlansky's book should be required reading in today's schools, but failing that, strategic thinkers in the nonprofit sector owe it to themselves and society to know these things.
Posted: 3/12/10; 6:28:40 PM # |
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11 March 2010 |
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| Gilbert Center Training Catalog, Spring 2010: 29 Seminars, Training Packages, Live & On-Demand |
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The Spring 2010 Edition of The Gilbert Center Training Catalog (83 page PDF) is now available. You might find this catalog useful for planning your training for the coming months, which will save you time and money over responding to ad hoc announcements. Plus, if you take a look at our various packages, you'll see how we can work with you to develop a curriculum and a teaching model that will have the highest possible impact on your organization. If you're not already familiar with our seminars, now would be a good time to browse.
Our seminars are organized into 12 categories: Capacity Building, Civil Society, Collaboration & Community, Email, Fundraising, Knowledge Management, LifeWork, New Media, Social Media, Strategic Communication, Technology, and Writing. Every workshop aims to make both an immediate difference and a lasting, strategic impact. And we avoid all the flaws of contemporary online learning, with not a single seminar being a sales pitch, nor comprised of nothing but tips and anecdotes. This is the real thing.
Posted: 3/11/10; 2:44:00 PM # |
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9 March 2010 |
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| Making Social and Email Work Together |
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Community building is the key to online capacity, but because the phrase "social networking" is used to refer only to a narrow set of well-hyped commercial tools, it's hard to keep our eyes on the real prize: building and enriching connections between our stakeholders. One of the specific consequences is the way in which people have gotten distracted from email, which remains the most powerful online social tool of all. "Making Social and Email Work Together" by Jeanne Jennings is a short post that will help get you re-oriented around using all the media that your stakeholders use, in concert.
Posted: 3/9/10; 5:49:49 PM # |
| The Wrong Kind of Green |
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I've wondered for years what was going on with the increased funding of major environmental organizations by some of the world's most egregious polluters. It's been going on for years, but I'm not enough of a policy analyst or environmental news wonk to really discern the impact. Well, in The Wrong Kind of Green, Johann Hari spells it out. Frankly, it's deeply disturbing. We need independent advocates for the environment more than ever, but after twenty years of cooptation, many of the biggest players are, at best, neutralized. This is scary.
Posted: 3/9/10; 5:43:40 PM # |
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