I would say just start with Bloom's Taxonomy:

1. Blog quotes from other articles, blogs, reports, etc. Shit, quote your own emails if necessary. No commentary, just a one sentence citation/context. If you can't do this, don't move on to the next steps (heck, if you can't do this, you clearly are not engaged at all with your work). Duration: 15 min (assuming light editing/anxiety over appropriateness)

2. Same quotes as #1, but this time lightly criticize, compare or contrast between them or somehow contemporize. If you've built up a collection of quotes, it's fairly easy to pull 2 contrasting ones and write a light paragraph to fit between them with your analysis. Length: 30 min.(assuming you already have the quotes and can bang out a quick explanatory connection).

3. Write down a conversation that has already taken place. This requires a higher level of literacy, but you're basically rehashing the arguments you've already made---with maybe a brief conclusion where you say "I should have explained x better" (but don't actually explain it, just acknowledge you recognize the holes and let them sit). Duration: ~1 hour (depending on complexity and your level of honesty in narrative)

4. Original analysis: avoid at all costs. People who can bang out 500-1000 words of original, longform analysis are in full-time academic, strategy, creative or executive roles where they can probably carve out 4 hours for writing (writing may be their only job) and be none the worse. Or else they are top 1% writers. Or are sociopaths. Duration: longer than most of our jobs allow.

I originally wrote Maslow's Hierarchy instead of Bloom's Taxonomy... but whatever, a pyramid is a pyramid.

Related posts:

1. Belief-based design Matt Webb posted “Inbox Hero” about a month back (via AJ): Rand: The question isn’t who is going to let...

Chris Anderson's graphic of the same thing is below (C is Consumer, P is Producer, A is Advertiser):

This model of Free is very similar to the standard nonprofit model of giving: Foundations/Donors (D) provide support to Nonprofit Organizations (NP) which then provide free services to Clients/Constituents (C):

That all being said, the nonprofit model doesn't quite have the same symmetry. In fact, it's missing a piece that, at least in my experience, very rarely is talked about: what is the relationship of Foundations/Donors to the Clients/Constituents?

I've previously explored some of the reasons why nonprofits have arisen in the way they have, including middle-class guilt about the disparities between the affluent and the poor; wealth-transfer mechanisms for the rich; dissatisfaction with the profit motive as an incentive to extract work and induce consumption; greater abundance in society general; and the inability for government agencies to provide services to meet growing needs as a result of the widening gap between rich and poor.

Putting those in context of clients/constituents, the actual people being served, there isn't that much of a relationship: as a person receiving assistance, one would not care much weather it was coming from the Ford Foundation or the Carnegie Foundation---it is the quality and efficacy of the services that matter, and those are being delivered via the nonprofit.

One way to look at this (and there are many), is to think of the Clients/Constituents as just one part of the larger Society (S):

In this case, what is being transferred between Foundations/Donors and Society in general: reputation, legitimacy, restitution, validation....? That's an interesting question.

Related posts:

1. A reminder that it’s still about power Mark Rosenman impeccably synthesizes the need for building political power in the philanthropic sector. Writing for Philantopic (emphasis mine): Grantmaking...
2. Irrefutable gerunds Gerunds were referenced in yesterday’s post. Below is from William Easterly’s “Foreign Aid for Scoundrels”, published in the New York...
3. Where rhetoric is substance From Chris Rabb’s Invisible Capital on business plan competitions. As a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator,...

A nonprofit job is not the only way to make a living and make a difference in the world.

In the comments, I think I hit upon the real issue, which is the lack of Civic Literacy I see among people in my age/social group. I don’t mean “young people are lazy/apathetic/ungrateful/whatever”, but that we don’t know how to effectively participate and initiate change in our communities and society—for no lack of interest. We’re having to make things up as we go along, which as I think my parent’s generation would agree, didn’t work out quite the way they thought it would.

So below are three suggestions I have for the intelligent, well-educated (or seeking to be), self-motivated and upwardly mobile individual who can be an ally of the nonprofit sector, but not necessarily employed by it.

1. Serve on the Board

   Executive Boards are the driving force behind nonprofit organizations. Boards set broad goals and provide important oversight for the functioning of the organization. Many boards have term-limits for serving, which means they need a constant influx of knowledgeable and engaged individuals. Boards often run by the Three-G’s—Give, Get or Get out—but an active board will provide great opportunities for involvement beyond fundraising.

2. Start a Family Foundation

   You can turn the typical fundraising experience on it’s head by offering a Request for Proposals, and get a tax write-off as well. Starting a Foundation allows you control social priorities by controlling the purse-strings. Because you’re offering a grant and not an individual gift, you have a better opportunity to target specific programs or objectives with increased accountability and oversight. Did someone say “site visit”?

3. Write your Public Representative

   There was once a time in America when people believed it was the federal government’s responsibility to offer many of the services that the nonprofit sector now provides. Regardless of your political-philosophical position, the government still provides massive amounts of funding to social causes. Contact your local, state or national representative and request support for your particular cause. You might not be able to target a particular organization for earmarks, but a rising tide raises all the boats.

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Assuming that you are an intelligent, well-educated (or seeking to be), self-motivated and upwardly mobile individual, your interest probably spans a combination of two distinct (or should be in your mind) issues:

• You want a job, with a modicum of stability, freedom, and disposable income.
• You want to change the world, or a least do it less harm than otherwise.

My advice for you:

Find a corporate job that you like, or don’t feel too guilty about, and that provides you with plenty of disposable income and time. Find a small, local nonprofit (or church, or social group) that meets your standards for doing good, and invest your disposable income and time with them. Join their governing board, connect them with your professional and personal networks and help them grow in a direction you believe in. You will enact more change from a higher level than you could, in most situations, by being a direct employee of that organization.

Non-categorical rationale:

Nonprofits have jobs, but they don’t have a lot of them and it’s hard to break into one that distinguishes you from your peers: you can find a job answering phones, but it’s difficult to get one with responsibility and authority. Nonprofits are bad (or relatively worse than their commercial peers) at: recognizing ability, enabling it, and rewarding it.

Nonprofits are insulating. Because you are constantly understaffed, under-budgeted and under-resourced (time, training, equipment) it is difficult to find the time to truly reflect. It is difficult to critically look at what you are doing and what you have done; to connect with other practitioners and look at what you are doing as a group; to reach outside the sector to learn from others and see how you fit into that broadest context.

A job is a job, wherever you’re working. This may sound selfish (and it probably is) but you should be concerned that, whatever your job is, you:

1. are challenged
2. are encouraged to try and learn new things
3. are acknowledged (even celebrated on occassion)
4. can advance to greater responsibility and authority
5. are provided a separate personal life
6. are afforded physical and mental health (no 80 hour weeks or screaming matches)
7. have fun or enjoy your work a majority of the time (no puritan work ethic for me)

By looking after yourself on an individual level, you will ultimately be in a better position to have compassion for those around you and be better positioned to act upon that compassion.

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Last week I attended NTEN’s 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.

I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.

The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below.

Community building talent is the single most important resource in the modern world.

How to engage and mobilize members

A Communications framework for thinking about how organizational objectives are met through interaction. The correlating Development framework is in parenthesis.

1. Welcome (Prospect)
2. Educate (Cultivation)
3. Ask (Involvement)
4. Thank (Stewardship)

The Seven Steps

1. Assessment: Defining your goal (What behavior are you trying to change in undertaking a communications strategy?), audience (an explicit, targeted “who” and their values), evaluating your infrastructure (orthodoxies, structure, time, leadership)
2. Awareness: Start by searching NTEN, TechSoup, Idealware, etc. (Link Research)
3. Training: A discipline of doing things. How are stories told, infrastructure built and actions communicated to regular people?
4. Content Production: “The currency of the new world”
5. Technical Support: An example: how to know when to build and when to buy
6. Partnerships: Who is going to stand up for you?
7. Planning: What are the components that revolve around your goal?

Other Links

• Strategic Communications Plan Generator from The SPIN Project
• Tech Savvy Communications Toolkit Aloha, Scooby-Doo rip from NPower Seattle
• Storytelling: Andy Goodman, Seth Godin, The Gilbert Center

I shot this video with a Casio EX-S600, which shoots full-frame (640 x 480) MPEG-4 video. With a two gigabyte SD Card it can shoot approximately an hour and a half of video at medium quality before its battery dies. The Casio’s AVI wrapper is incompatible with iMovie (or any Quicktime decoder), so I first used VisualHub to repackage the video as an MP4 before importing into iMovie to add titles. I exported from iMovie as DV and then converted that with VisualHub into MPEG-4. Compressed and at quarter-frame (320 x 240) the entire video was 105 MB. This time I uploaded to Google Video since Blip.tv stalled out.

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He was asked by someone in the crowd something along the lines of “In what areas do you want to see nonprofits develop into the future?”

Ami Dar responded that an area that he saw as important was acknowledgement of nonprofit competition. His brilliant reasoning was this:

In for-profit companies, everyone accepts that competition takes place; it’s a given. Businesses identify the areas in which they compete, and from this, also gain an understanding of the areas in which they don’t compete. In the areas in which they don’t compete, businesses can cooperate. Nonprofits, in general, are not aware of, or acknowledge that they compete (and they do), and because of this, they cannot collabrate as efficiently or as effectively as possible.

My own example of this is the Detroit automakers. Ford and GM are incredibly competitive in car production, features, pricing, dealerships, etc. But at the same time, they have an incredibly strong combined lobby for setting safety and emission standards, things that affect the entire industry. They know where they compete and therefore know where they can work together.

So this has been rattling around in my head until I read two things:

This first was “Learning How to Learn” by Joseph D. Novak, D. Bob Gowin, and Jane Butler Kahle, which lays out some very interesting models and heuristics for visualizing information.

The second was A Typology of Nonprofit Competition: Insights for Social Marketers by Robin J. Ritchie and Charles B. Weinberg.

Putting them together, I made this using OmniGraffle:

Download the PDF

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