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September 2006 Edition

Nonprofit Online News Journal

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September 2006: This month's articles are mostly about relationship building. Michael Gilbert's piece on ''The Permeable Nonprofit'' looks at how organizations can walk the middle path as the world of communication changes radically around us. "Harnessing the Word-of-Mouth Power of Influentials" reminds us that we are part of a web of relationships and that the web itself needs tending. "The Taxonomy of Public Communication Campaigns" will help you think critically about how purpose, scope, and maturity affect the planning and evaluation of your communication efforts. "Please Don't Send Me Microsoft Word Documents" reminds us that we can care for the web of our communities through our choice of tools. Finally, Michael Gilbert's look at ''The Dialectics of Knowledge Management'' presents four recommendations on how to be mindful as we prepare ourselves for the vast amount of learning that will be expected of us in the years to come. We have our regular features: a light Summer selection of annotated resources, a few classified ads, and a Quicksheet. This month's Quicksheet is devoted to a common dilemma in both evolution and organizational decision making: The Problem of the Local Optimum. Are you stuck at the top of a short hill?

Table of Contents

 
8 - Letter From the Editor
9 - Contributors

Articles:

10 - The Permeable Nonprofit
By Michael C. Gilbert
The boundaries of traditional nonprofit organizations are under relentless assault by new patterns of communication and association that are stronger than the corporate model of governance and stronger than nonprofit brands. The pressures and ideas converging on nonprofits include: collaboration and mergers, ASPs, Web 2.0, network centric advocacy, blogging, social bookmarking, and many other forms of social software and networks. Although our mainstream commentators are not on this yet, this convergence foretells a radical restructuring of the nonprofit sector.

13 - Harnessing the Word-of-Mouth Power of Influentials
By Idil Cakim, Howard Kaushansky, David Lytel, and Brad Fay
At the 2006 Politics Online Conference there was a session on word of mouth marketing. The panelists focused on identifying the influential people among your stakeholders and enrolling them in your campaign efforts. The highlights of the session are captured here.

23 - Voices for Change: A Taxonomy of Public Communications Campaigns and Their Evaluation Challenges
By Lori Dorfman, Joel Ervice, Katie Woodruff - Berkeley Media Studies Group Search
The purpose, scope, and maturity of a communication campaign strongly influence the means by which organizers should go about evaluating and learning from their efforts. This taxonomy, along with nine case studies, go a long way toward providing an effective framework for assessing the use of our resources to influence public opinion, behavior, and policy.

66 - Please Don't Send Me Microsoft Word Documents
By Tristan Miller
It's been said that the virus with the biggest economic impact was the Microsoft Word document. The author of this recommendation might agree, citing a wide range of reasons to avoid them as attachments including: security, privacy, document size, consistency, and interoperability.

72 - The Dialectics of Knowledge Management
By Michael C. Gilbert
Social change, social service, and consulting work each embrace a kind of split personality. We work with one foot firmly planted in the world as it is and another in the world as we wish it were. This dialectical abstraction has very real, very practical implications for knowledge management projects.

Other Resources:

77 - Quicksheet: Trapped at the Top, The Problem of the Local Optimum
78 - News
109 - Classifieds

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