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More Unique Content, More Unique Voices

By Michael C. Gilbert, February 6th, 2007
 

Nonprofit Online News was launched on the first weekend in April of 1997, a few months after The Gilbert Center itself was founded. Over the course of the coming months, we will be announcing ten improvements that we're making for our readers. This will conclude with a big announcement sometime after the tenth anniversary of the publication. We've been building toward these announcements for the last two years, ever since our readers helped us fund the last round of changes back in 2005.

Not long after Nonprofit Online News saw its first surge in popularity back in 1997, I was briefly tempted to move to a more traditional, pseudo-objective editorial tone and content. Readers protested and rightly so. They didn't want another dry headline service. They wanted unique content and a unique voice. For ten years, we have stuck to that model and now, we are scaling it up.

I'm very please to announce #10 in the countdown toward a new Nonprofit Online News: More Unique Content, More Unique Voices. We are delivering that in four ways: more feature articles, revised selection of news items and resources, inside perspectives on and involvement in our work, and the new Gilbert Author's Network.
 

More Feature Articles

We have 83 feature articles on Nonprofit Online News and of these, thirty were published in the last 24 months. Recent articles include The Permeable Nonprofit, Asking the Wrong Questions, Streaming Grantmaker Knowledge, A Practical Approach to Collaboration, Nonprofits and Weblogs, The Role of the Executive Director in Nonprofit Technology, and How to Write a Book in One Year, as well as many others.

Making that unique content available through other media - particularly PDFs - has proven surprisingly popular. Our articles have found new audiences through our omnibus publications, through our Journal, and through our free white papers.
 

Revised Selection of News and Resources

In response to your input, we've slowly shifted the mix of content that we publish in our regular stream. We're less likely to point to content that's widely circulated in other nonprofit outlets, unless we have a unique perspective to add or we think that absolutely everyone ought to know about it, even if they hear it twice.

We're also responding to the popularity of book reviews and links to substantive resources by making the former a bit longer and the latter a bit more common. My personal hope is that this will help every civil society professional develop their own unique library of resources.
 

Inside Perspectives

In keeping with the ideas set forth in The Permeable Nonprofit, we are opening up access to the inside workings of The Gilbert Center. We started that by using ourselves as a case study in our Everyday Software series of articles (on publishing, webcasting, and email), but these don't reflect the idea of permeability because they are finished works. We'd like to take the idea of permeability further than that.

Our first step in that direction is the launching of The Authentic Organization. Because my own work in the next couple of years will involve writing several new books, I've decided to share the raw, unfinished writing process with our readers. The working title of the first book is The Authentic Organization and it will focus on issues of integrity in organizational life.

I hope you'll continue to peek in the back door and offer your thoughts, both on the book and on our other work, as we put more and more of it out there within view.
 

The Gilbert Author's Network

The final part of this commitment to more unique content and more unique voices is the new Gilbert Author's Network. This is already taking shape as a network of new weblogs, written by people whose work I want to promote much more profoundly than the occasional enthusiastic link. Personally, I strive to be a first reader for each of these authors or at least their number one fan. Organizationally, we hope that the network and its authors will help to dramatically increase the quality of the content that you get from us, in every form.

The first three authors in the network are already online and writing. At The Guru's Handbook, Asher Bey writes about teaching as a calling and a craft. In one way or another, most of us find ourselves in the role of teacher at some point. In just a few months, Asher's work has caused me to think through how I approach my own teaching, especially online. In Tropes of the Times, my mentor Phil Bereano is exploring how certain far-from-sensible frames of reference shape contemporary discourse, to our detriment. His working material is the so-called "paper of record", the New York Times. Gavin Clabaugh joined the network last week at his Digital Diner, with his thoughtful deconstruction of topics ranging from technology and knowledge management to futurism, books, and wine.
 

Between now and early April, I encourage you to keep an eye on each of the four trends of our commitment to more unique content. Feel free to write to us to let us know whose voices speak to you. Better yet, bookmark and blog about this new material liberally and let me know you've done so. After all, you are the most important part of this new direction.

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