Nonprofit Online News has been in continual publication by the good people at The Gilbert Center since April 1997. It provides a commercial free stream of tightly edited, well annotated news and resources related to emerging issues in the nonprofit (social profit) world, with a particular emphasis on communication and new technology. You are reading the news here through their online RSS feed. All information on this page has been compiled, edited, or authored by staff of The Gilbert Center and they retain their copyrights.

Making Social and Email Work Together
Community building is the key to online capacity, but because the phrase "social networking" is used to refer only to a narrow set of well-hyped commercial tools, it's hard to keep our eyes on the real prize: building and enriching connections between our stakeholders. One of the specific consequences is the way in which people have gotten distracted from email, which remains the most powerful online social tool of all. "Making Social and Email Work Together" by Jeanne Jennings is a short post that will help get you re-oriented around using all the media that your stakeholders use, in concert.

The Wrong Kind of Green
I've wondered for years what was going on with the increased funding of major environmental organizations by some of the world's most egregious polluters. It's been going on for years, but I'm not enough of a policy analyst or environmental news wonk to really discern the impact. Well, in The Wrong Kind of Green, Johann Hari spells it out. Frankly, it's deeply disturbing. We need independent advocates for the environment more than ever, but after twenty years of cooptation, many of the biggest players are, at best, neutralized. This is scary.

Zynga Insists Its Haiti Charity Was Not a Scam
As far as I can tell, the target of "what is cool" keeps moving, but the dynamic and the consequences are always the same. When we're motivated by hype, we are likely to lose more than we gain. Take the case of recent fundraising for Haiti by Facebook game company Zynga. They may deny that taking more than 50% of donations intended for the people of Haiti was a scam, but I don't think any of our readers would consciously hire a firm that did that.

Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, and the Campaign to Kill Community Organizing
Something terribly unsettling is going on in the world of community organizing. The phrase itself and possibly the concept are under attack by the right-wing meme machine in the US. David Neiwert summarizes a lot of what's going on in this post at Crooks and Liars: Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, and the Campaign to Kill Community Organizing. He opens with a video (which I can't really tolerate watching) of Beck doing his bizarre schtick against ACORN. Looks like ACORN itself may dissolve as a national organization, despite the independent investigations vindicating the organization. But acorn itself is not the only target. Funding for community organizing is muddled in general as is the entire dialogue. This ongoing strategy to use sleaze and innuendo and propaganda to undermine the language of civil society is deeply disturbing to me. I for one don't plan to stop using the phrase "community organizing". It's a noble practice that contributes to the heart of our democracy and economy and, in many respects, is the antidote to much that ails us as a society.

"Collaboration and Community" by Scott London
I'm teaching a workshop soon on Online Community Organizing and I took the time to re-read Scott London's super essay on Collaboration and Community. It's jam-packed with insights that we keep ignoring in our online efforts. For example, London lists five key weaknesses of collaboration in general: (1) Collaboration is a notoriously time-consuming process and is not suitable for problems that require quick and decisive action. (2) Power inequalities among the parties can derail the process. (Boy is this a big one that we ignore, especially when funders are at the table.) (3) The norms of consensus and joint decision-making sometimes require that the common good take precedence over the interests of a few. (I find this is exacerbated by our tendencies to want to pretend these issues don't even exist.) (4) Collaboration works best in small groups and often breaks down in groups that are too large. (5) Collaboration is meaningless without the power to implement final decisions.

New Judges for Just Awards: Aaron Dorfman, Alana Conner, Paul Light, and Rosetta Thurman
The Just Awards nominations are getting some good attention. (Thank you for spreading the word.) Since I last wrote about the awards, we've added four new people to our panel of judges: Aaron Dorfman, Alana Conner, Paul Light, and Rosetta Thurman. We have short bios (and photos) of each, but briefly: Aaron Dorfman is the Executive Director of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy. Alana Conner is a Senior Editor at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Paul Light is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service, and Rosetta Thurman is a prolific blogger at places such as Perspectives from the Pipeline and Change.org.