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January 2006 Edition

Nonprofit Online News Journal

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Jan. 15th, 2006: 2005 has come and gone and we are certainly looking forward to 2006 with a sense of renewal, a sense that it's an opportunity to take a step back and try once more to help bring about a kinder world. One of the things I feel that we did well last year, was develop this journal. I am very pleased to bring you the first issue of 2006. We have some great articles this month: Katha Pollitt of The Nation looks back on 2005 and finds some bright spots. I've known Andy Himes for twenty years and it is a pleasure to finally be able to write about this extraordinary man in a profile about his work. Phil Cubeta dives headfirst into the issue of the awkward fragmentation of the field of philanthropy. We are publishing the results of the 2005 DonorTrends survey, from Cravers, Matthews, Smith, and Company. Stever Robbins offers some excellent ideas for dealing with email overload, in an organizational context. We have our usual features: The 60 annotated resources are organized into dozens of useful categories and include nine book reviews. This month's Quicksheet is on the process of deciding to implement a wiki.

Table of Contents

 
Letter From the Editor ... 7
Contributors ... 8
About the Journal, & Subscriptions ... 9

Articles:

It Wasn't All Bad ..... 10
By Katha Pollitt
Much of what drives us in our sector is a sense of hope and unless we take a very narrow focus indeed, recent history has seemed a little hopeless at times. This wry retrospective on 2005 offers us fourteen bright spots on the social and political landscape.

Opening the Heart: Andy Himes & Voices In Wartime .....13
A Profile by Michael Gilbert
Andy Himes is the founder of Project Alchemy and the producer of Voices in Wartime. In this profile of his recent work, we learn a bit about how one very creative person has blended art, activism, scholarship, and social entrepreneurship, to great effect.

Philanthropy As a Field of Practice ..... 17
By Phil Cubeta
The first part of this provocative essay explores the profound divisions within the field of philanthropy and how those divisions keep the field from developing as a community of practice. The second part starts a conversation about how we might bridge those divisions and benefit from each other's creativity and commitment.

Keep Your Postage Meter ..... 25
By Craver, Matthews, Smith, and Company
Here are the results of the DonorTrends survey of 2333 American adults in July of 2005. Although it suffers from all the flaws of self-reporting, this survey reveals some very interesting facts about the attitudes of online donors today. There is consistent support for the idea of building our online work around our best offline donors, because those people are most likely to want to give online.

Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload ..... 39
By Stever Robbins
Almost everyone deals with email overload to one degree or another. These ideas are especially valuable to managers and organizers, because they go beyond the obvious and take into account the organizational and relationship contexts in which email overload happens.

Other Resources:

A Wiki Decision Tree Quicksheet ... 46
News ... 47
Book Reviews ... 105
Classifieds ... 109

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