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Myself and the Nonprofit Millennial Blogger Alliance are proud to announce the launch of a new website: NonprofitMillennials.org: “We blog about the millennial generation and nonprofits!”

The Nonprofit Millennial Blogger Alliance is made up of young writers collectively bringing important issues about the nonprofit sector to the forefront. While each of us looks at the sector from a different perspective we share the view that millennials offer something valuable to nonprofits.

By sharing our knowledge and experiences from within Generation Y we can help prepare the next generation—and engage current generations—in addressing the pressing issues that continue to shape the nonprofit sector and the world

The website aggregates posts from all members of the alliance in one place, making it easy to find a fresh article, subscribe to everyone’s RSS feed all in one place, or easily find us on Twitter (@npmillennials) where new articles are posted too.

I led the technical development and design on the website and am very proud of the outcome. The concept for a central aggregating website had been batted around for several months and I was able to take the lead as closer. We wanted a straightforward website that would highlight but not overshadow the writings of individual bloggers. It’s built on WordPress, and posts are aggregated via the FeedWordPress plugin (which does an awesome job linking all posts back to their original author’s website, not ours!). Because the main focus is on our authors, not their content, there is a little secret sauce holding it all together.

So if you’re a millennial blogger writing about social change or the nonprofit sector, please consider joining us. And don’t forget that “millennial” has 2 N’s (I do, all the time).

Last week I was contacted through LinkedIn by a stranger asking for help in forming a nonprofit organization. I get these types of requests not infrequently—whether directly through this blog, LinkedIn or Aardvark—or on mailing lists like Mission Based Massachusetts. My response is usually “Why does your cause necessitate its own 501(c)3? Have you considered Fiscal Sponsorship?”

I subscribe to the belief that when you’re working within a formal organization, 50% of your time goes towards maintaining organizational function and only the remainder actually goes towards achieving your external mission. Bringing a mission to scale may require a formal organization eventually, but if you’re trying to fail faster, is incorporation necessary now?

The nonprofit sector is already rich with existing organizations and platforms from which you can act. While I don’t share in the delusion that it’s one big lovefest, there are structures in place to incubate unincorporated projects, give tax-exempt status, and even provide administrative, finance, legal and payroll support. Sure, Fiscal Sponsorship usually carries with it an administration fee (shop around), but even at 20% it could be less than the opportunity cost of you doing all that yourself while trying to achieve your mission.

So that’s how the nonprofit sector lets you do more with less: you don’t even need your own nonprofit to participate.

This post is created in conjunction with other members of the Nonprofit Millennial Bloggers Alliance. Our posts this week (all with “Zilch” in the title), explore perspectives on how nonprofits can do more with less. Check out other members’ posts and get in on twitter conversations regarding these posts by using the hashtag #NMBA.

• Giving: a gift. “Please take this dollar. Have a nice day.”
• Mercy: a gift to someone of lower social class. “Please take this dollar. But don’t buy beer with it.”
• Charity: a gift to someone of similar social class. “Here is 50 dollars for your cause. Have you tried the shrimp?”
• Donation: an exchange with the expectation of tax deductability. “Here is 50 dollars. Can I please have a receipt?”
• Philanthropy: a gift of social magnificence. “Here is 1,000 dollars. Do you have my name spelled correctly for the placque?”

Note: There types do loosely overlap; charitable donations probably make up the majority of transactions.

I’ve been kicking this idea around my notebook for a while; I hope it requires no further explanation.

From the Organizational Development Network:

Definition of OD

Organization Development is a dynamic values-based approach to systems change in organizations and communities; it strives to build the capacity to achieve and sustain a new desired state that benefits the organization or community and the world around them.

Principles of Practice

The practice of OD is grounded in a distinctive set of core values and principles that guide behavior and actions.

Values-Based

The practice of OD is grounded in a distinctive set of core values and principles that guide behavior and actions. Values-Based Key Values include:

• Respect and Inclusion – equitably values the perspective and opinions of everyone.
• Collaboration – builds collaborative relationships between the practitioner and the client while encouraging collaboration throughout the client system.
• Authenticity – strives for authenticity and congruence and encourages these qualities in their clients
• Self-awareness – commits to developing self-awareness and interpersonal skills. OD practitioners engage in personal and professional development through lifelong learning.
• Empowerment – focuses efforts on helping everyone in the client organization or community increase their autonomy and empowerment to levels that make the workplace and/or community satisfying and productive.

Supported by Theory

Draws from multiple disciplines that inform an understanding of human systems, including applied behavioral and physical sciences

Systems Focused

Approaches communities and organizations as open systems; that is, acts with the knowledge that change in one area of a system always results in changes in other areas; and change in one area cannot be sustained without supporting changes in other areas of the system.

Action Research

Continuously reexamines, reflects and integrates discoveries throughout the process of change in order to achieve desired outcomes. In this way, the client members are involved both in doing their work, and in dialogue about their reflection and learning in order to apply them to achieve shared results.

Process Focused

Intervenes in organizational or community processes to help bring about positive change and help the client work toward desired outcomes

Informed by Data

Involves proactive inquiry and assessment of the internal environment in order to discover and create a compelling need for change and the achievement of a desired future state of the organization or community. Some methods include survey feedback, assessment tools, interviewing, focus groups, story telling, process consultation and observation.

Client Centered

Focuses on the needs of the client in order to continually promote client ownership of all phases of the work and support the client’s ability to sustain change after the consultant engagement ends.

Focused on Effectiveness and Health

Helps to create and sustain a healthy effective human system as an interdependent part of its larger environment.

Since November I have been working on print layout for the Winter 2009/2010 edition of Survival News. “The voices of low-income women”, Survival News is half-yearly-ish compendium of news, personal stories, and advocacy information. Nearly half of this edition is devoted to Survival Tips, a collection of services and advice from legal aid to food programs in 3 languages (English, Spanish and Vietnamese).

At 40 tabloid-sized pages, this edition is 52 square feet of pictures and copy. Survival News has a circulation of 4,000, so altogether that’s enough newsprint to cover 1/3 of Boston’s tallest skyscraper, the John Hancock Building: papering it to the 20th floor. Not bad.

I don’t often find myself in InDesign, the layout program I used, but I still had fun with the project. Due to time and process constraints I couldn’t be as free with the design as I would have liked, but I am proud of the outcome. In keeping with the existing style and editorial demands, my goal was to normalize the ideas and voices within the text. I am sympathetic to criticism of this approach. From David Barringer in his essay “Left Wanting”, writing on the conservative design of liberal magazines:

Timid political art. Stale design. The money excuse. The market dynamic in which political speech is toned down for a presumably thin-skinned public. Artistic cowardice masquerading as commercial sensibility. These are the charges, but what is the role of design in political magazines? Is it to perpetuate a stylistic template? To signify stability?

…

“Design is order, economy, teaching people beauty, creating individuals,” says [Mirko] Ilic [designer for the Village Voice]. “Good design is subversive. And because it’s subversive, good design is left wing.”

If I do the next edition, I hope to be able to spend more time on good design.

An article that confirms my anecdotal experience: “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle” from the Stanford Social Innovation review:

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.

That quote is from the brief, yet the last sentence is misleading. According to the article change starts at the board:

Nonprofits must then speak truth to power, sharing their real numbers with their boards and then engaging their boards’ support in communicating with funders. Case studies of organizations that have successfully invested in their own infrastructure have repeatedly noted the need for a shared agenda between the leadership team and the board.

And the article is chock full of fun, familiar anecdotes:

Not only do funders and donors have unrealistic expectations, but the nonprofit sector itself also promotes unhealthy overhead levels. “The 20 percent norm is perpetuated by funders, individuals, and nonprofits themselves,” says the CFO of one of the organizations we studied. “When we benchmarked our reported financials, we looked at others, [and] we realized that others misreport as well. One of our peer organizations allocates 70 percent of its finance director’s time to programs. That’s preposterous!”

From Mission Measurement by way of Entry Level Living’s Allison Jones. Illustration by David Plunkert (it’s included in the article).

My boss pointed me to the NY Times obituary of Elizabeth Clare Prophet (a featured radiobituary on Bubbles in the Think Tank):

In the late 1980s, Mrs. Prophet issued warnings of an impending nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 of her followers left their homes and gathered at the church’s compound near Corwin Springs, Mont., near the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.

Mounting tensions with local residents subsided when the predicted attack did not occur, and church members began returning home. At the same time, a looming face-off with the United States government was averted when church leaders agreed not to store weapons in return for a reinstatement of the church’s tax-exempt status, which had been revoked in 1987.

And yet the IRS claims that “charitable, educational, religious, scientific, literary, fostering national or international sports competi- tion, preventing cruelty to children or animals, and testing for public safety” are the only exempt purposes…

At work we’re pushing the idea of Honest Practices over Best Practices. Honest Practices are stories and analysis that include both successes and failures—the latter being something nonprofits often omit (or reframe). Our focus on developing Honest Practices stems from frustration with the meaninglessness of many “Best Practices” that are out there. From Wikipedia:

A Best practice is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive or reward that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc. The idea is that with proper processes, checks, and testing, a desired outcome can be delivered with fewer problems and unforeseen complications. Best practices can also be defined as the most efficient (least amount of effort) and effective (best results) way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people.

Despite the need to improve on processes as times change and things evolve, best-practice is considered by some as a business buzzword used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use for management, policy, and especially software systems.

As the term has become more popular, some organizations have begun using the term “best practices” to refer to what are in fact merely ‘rules’, causing a linguistic drift in which a new term such as “good ideas” is needed to refer to what would previously have been called “best practices.”

I really want to toss {{Citation Needed}} after the suggestion that “good ideas” is a suitable replacement for what was formerly known as Best Practices. But that would be too Honest.