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News for February 2005
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 25 February 2005 |
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| Corporate Blogging Primer |
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Fredrik Wackå is a Swedish communication consultant. He has published a Corporate Blogging Primer (16 page PDF) that has many lessons for nonprofit organizations. His six types of corporate blogs don't quite match up to the nonprofit context, but his 14 steps toward blogging certainly do.
Posted: 2/25/05; 12:31:24 PM # |
| KCRW.com Giveaways |
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It's great to see radio in the United States start to adopt the podcasting model of distributing their shows. Starting March 1, 2005 KCRW in Santa Monica will be packaging up their programs so that you can download them automatically and listen to them when you feel like it. I would love to see nonprofits in general start doing this!
Posted: 2/25/05; 12:27:10 PM # |
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24 February 2005 |
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| Writing for the Web |
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The team at Business Logs, Mike Rundle, Paul Scrivens, and Matthew Oliphant, have produced a guide to Writing for the Web (6 page PDF), and it's a must read for anyone preparing content for online distribution. He covers issues such as writing styles, audience, voice, length, scanability, and humor.
Posted: 2/24/05; 10:56:52 AM # |
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21 February 2005 |
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18 February 2005 |
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| SANGONeT Conference & Exhibition 2005 |
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I will be speaking at the SANGONeT Conference & Exhibition on March 1 - 3, 2005 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Some very exciting changes are coming to the South African nonprofit world and I'm looking forward to contributing in some way. I'll be be helping set the scene at a plenary session and I'll be speaking about online fundraising, marketing, and advocacy.
Posted: 2/18/05; 6:25:14 AM # |
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17 February 2005 |
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| Executive Briefings on Nonprofit Technology, March 2005 |
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Last month's online Executive Briefings, focusing on the role of the executive director and senior manager in nonprofit technology, went very well. We have scheduled this series again for the end of March. The topics are: (1) What Every Executive Director Should Know about New Technology, (2) Creating Synergy between your Technology and Communication Staff, and (3) Organizational Change Management and New Technology.
Posted: 2/17/05; 5:50:41 PM # |
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16 February 2005 |
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| Pragmatic Politics |
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In a hard hitting editorial called Pragmatic Politics (MS Word document), Rick Cohen of the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy makes his case that "something grave is missing from the moral compass of the nonprofit sector at this point in history". In particular, he looks at nonprofit complicity in issues such as the elevation of Rick Santorum in the Senate, the passage of even more tax cuts, and targeted IRS investigations. I worry about his conclusion that, as a sector, we are too easily bought off.
Posted: 2/16/05; 12:43:31 PM # |
| WKKF Logic Model Development Guide |
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The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has an excellent guide to logic model development (64 page PDF). This is a great resource for project planners and proposal writers, covering techniques for modeling your theory of change, your implementation, and your evaluation process.
Posted: 2/16/05; 12:06:56 PM # |
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15 February 2005 |
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| Content Syndication with RSS |
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Several years ago I started advocating for simple content interoperability between nonprofit websites. That hasn't really happened yet, of course, but with the success of the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) format, some nonprofits are starting to catch on. Ben Hammersley's book Content Syndication with RSS is an invaluable guide to the process. RSS got its start in the form of news feeds at Netscape, really blossomed when weblogs took off, and is now being used to share content of many different kinds. The book is a technical guide and covers the basics of content syndication, how to use the RSS formats, how to extend them to meet new and interesting needs, and the XML essentials required for implementation. I highly recommend it to the more technical among you who are looking at this.
Posted: 2/15/05; 8:26:11 AM # |
| Essential Blogging |
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There are several books out there about weblogs, but still one of the most practical and valuable ones is Essential Blogging, authored by a group of talented bloggers and weblog software developers. It's a software guide, not a guide to writing. Despite having been published several years ago, the introductions to various platforms are still useful and I recommend it, as a solid survey, to the technical staff of clients who are considering weblogs. I also have to mention that I'm charmed by the cover: In honor of the basic character of blogging, it's a jumble of cats and kittens, headed every which way.
Posted: 2/15/05; 8:16:51 AM # |
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13 February 2005 |
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| The Childcare Collective and Social Movement |
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Slingshot has published an article that takes a personal look at the relationship between childcare and social movements. The author, writing under the name paseo, highlights the work of the Bay Area Childcare Collective and makes a solid case for the power of real "family values" in the context of social change work.
Posted: 2/13/05; 5:56:00 PM # |
| U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings |
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A lot of nonprofit advocacy work is based on science. We aspire to advocate for programs that actually work and where that is supported by real research among professionals who have something at stake for doing honest science. Nowhere is this more true than in the environmental movement. It is therefore deeply disturbing to read about how scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been told to alter their findings. Not just a handful, either, although that would be scandal enough. One out of five of the government scientists responding to a survey on the matter said they had been ordered to alter technical information and more than half had been ordered to alter their scientific findings.
Posted: 2/13/05; 5:45:53 PM # |
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11 February 2005 |
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| Federal Dollars, Local Impact |
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In Federal Dollars, Local Impact, Jan Richter of Connect for Kids goes into some detail about how the proposed Bush budget will defund local programs, both through grants to local governments and through the federal connection to local nonprofits.
Posted: 2/11/05; 4:02:57 PM # |
| Salon.com News | Bush's lean and mean new budget |
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In my recent editorial on the impact of the 2004 election on the nonprofit sector, I asserted that at its core the sector should have kindness as a value. In contrast Julia Scott, of Salon Magazine, describes Bush's new budget as mean (free ad supported day pass required). She explores the cuts in child care, heating bills, housing and public parks. Meanness has somehow elbowed its way to the center of American politics.
Posted: 2/11/05; 3:58:38 PM # |
| A Breathtaking Budget (washingtonpost.com) |
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In A Breathtaking Budget (free registration required), The Washington Post lays out a mainstream response to President Bush's budget proposal. Even from the perspective of a mainstream newspaper, rather than from the perspective of the nonprofit sector, the priorities are all wrong.
Posted: 2/11/05; 3:46:50 PM # |
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10 February 2005 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Journal January 2005 |
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This month's issue of Nonprofit Online News Journal (34 page PDF) is continuing in the direction we have already set: We are reprinting my article on The 2004 Election and The Nonprofit Sector, which includes links to scores of resources on the impact of the current U.S. administration on many of the major categories of nonprofit organizations. We are also reprinting some of the best reports and articles that we pointed to recently: (1) Communication For Peace: Contrasting Approaches, (2) How To Include the Poor In Community Events, and (3) How Nonprofit Careerism Derailed the “Revolution”. We have compiled all 44 of the annotated resources from the month of January, which includes two book reviews.
Posted: 2/10/05; 5:56:14 PM # |
| The Economics of Sharing |
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The Economist has published a nice little piece on The Economics of Sharing. While it's always entertaining to me to watch economists try to explain everything through the narrow lens of greed, it pleased me to see reciprocity and networks extolled in this article. Still, I think the nonprofit world has a better handle on the concept.
Posted: 2/10/05; 5:11:21 PM # |
| PaperLens conference topic visualization |
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There is some interesting research that Microsoft is doing on "Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment". I found the Paper Lens (Flash animation) project particularly interesting in the way it helps the eye pick up patterns of topics of interest over the course of many gatherings of a community of practice. It was developed to reveal trends, connections, and activity throughout a conference community.
Posted: 2/10/05; 5:04:26 PM # |
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6 February 2005 |
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| Lifemapper |
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I continue to be fascinated by data visualization as a tool for knowledge building. The Lifemapper tool is one great example. It uses data from the Internet to compute the ecological profile of a species and map both its potential and its actual habitats.
Posted: 2/6/05; 5:43:54 PM # |
| NIH reveals open-access policy |
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I'm very excited about the explosion of innovation and knowledge distribution that could come from the open access policy of the National Institutes of Health. I would still love to find a similar model of free and easy publishing of the research findings of all grantmakers.
Posted: 2/6/05; 5:35:17 PM # |
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3 February 2005 |
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| Briefings: The Email Newsletter Marketing Model |
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Our online briefings are proving even more popular than we had hoped. We're pleased to have developed a third series, this one targeted at communication professionals. Based on our groundbreaking research and writing on the subject, we'll be teaching about Email Newsletter Marketing. The three session topics are: The Email Newsletter Marketing Model, Common Flaws of Nonprofit Newsletters and How to Fix Them, and Creating Effective Content for Email Newsletters. The workshops will be held online on March 15, 16, and 17, 2005.
Posted: 2/3/05; 6:52:02 PM # |
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