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.

What is Online Community Organizing? (Free Video)
We're continuing to put out free content from our seminars. We just put up a short piece exploring online community organizing and what it actually means. In it, I focus on the way in which the organizing paradigm changes the relationship between campaigns and groups of stakeholders. I then show how that relates to the classic organizing model which says that if you build community, you are building social capital, leadership, and ultimately, power. Check it out! (Click the image on the right, under the header: Video Highlight.)

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea
I think most of us in the nonprofit sector, myself included, routinely misuse the word "strategy". It ends up with a much broader and less useful meaning than it could. I try to correct this by clearly delineating between strategy and tactics in my teaching and consulting work. I do this in part to help offset our obsession with quick wins, tips, and tricks, and in part to help people identify the enormous returns we can get when we choose the right strategy for our projects. That's the context in which I read Mark Kurlansky's book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. We can look at civil society as a sector that concerns itself deeply with power. In social service work, we focus on empowerment at a personal level. In social change work, we focus on redistribution of power. (I personally subscribe to the notion that there can be deep synergies between these two approaches.) Nonviolence is about as far from being a "quick tip" as you can get. It is a strategy for power that changes the way we think about everything we do. Living as we do in a time of perpetual war, it doesn't take much to rally people, even most of civil society, around violent action. We tend to think we are being "realistic" when we do so. But the history of violent and nonviolent action reveals that the former almost never really works and that, at least sometimes, the latter does. Kurlansky's book should be required reading in today's schools, but failing that, strategic thinkers in the nonprofit sector owe it to themselves and society to know these things.

Gilbert Center Training Catalog, Spring 2010: 29 Seminars, Training Packages, Live & On-Demand
The Spring 2010 Edition of The Gilbert Center Training Catalog (83 page PDF) is now available. You might find this catalog useful for planning your training for the coming months, which will save you time and money over responding to ad hoc announcements. Plus, if you take a look at our various packages, you'll see how we can work with you to develop a curriculum and a teaching model that will have the highest possible impact on your organization. If you're not already familiar with our seminars, now would be a good time to browse. Our seminars are organized into 12 categories: Capacity Building, Civil Society, Collaboration & Community, Email, Fundraising, Knowledge Management, LifeWork, New Media, Social Media, Strategic Communication, Technology, and Writing. Every workshop aims to make both an immediate difference and a lasting, strategic impact. And we avoid all the flaws of contemporary online learning, with not a single seminar being a sales pitch, nor comprised of nothing but tips and anecdotes. This is the real thing.

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.