Footnotes

State of the Practice: It's Got Me Thinking

2011-06-17T11:10:00.013-05:00

The Communications Network has just released its most recent survey of foundation communications professionals, asking them questions about, among other things: what they do, how they spend their time, who their audiences are, what their priorities are, and what their deepest communications wishes might be.

The responses from 155 of these folks include some good news, some bad news, and some downright confusing news. I won't summarize the findings here, since Bruce and Michael do that well enough in the report, but I do want to comment on some specific findings that are stuck in my mental craw. I'd love to hear what's stuck in yours!

1) The majority of respondents (59%) work in organizations with a communications staff of two or less.

This is not the first time we have heard this and yet we often ignore this reality when talking about innovative communications practices, new communications technologies, and solutions to communications gaps and shortfalls in the sector. No staff of two people can adequately manage the number of information sharing opportunities and technologies that are out there without a) the resources to get outside help, b) a super clear strategy for what they will focus on and internal support for that focus, and c) sector wide technologies and services that support and facilitate information sharing capacity for the entire sector not just one organization at a time.

(The effort to keep up with "time-saving" communications platforms sometimes reminds me of when the washer and dryer were invented to "save" housewives time only for those same women to end up spending nearly as much time as they did a century ago on housework.)

2) A majority (65%) of foundation communicators said their top objective is “increasing public understanding of the issues our foundation concentrates on”.

We at IssueLab find this to be very good news. Focusing on the very issues that motivate and inform the sector's work is completely right on. Yet, what's disconcerting is that only 30% of respondents viewed "providing research to others in the field" as a priority. I know we are biased here at IssueLab but I would like to think that research is in fact one of the fundamental tools for increasing public understanding. Perhaps so few respondents prioritized research because the survey question framed research as an objective rather than a tool but the responses do make me wonder about exactly how foundation communicators do view the role of research. Is it a knowledge base they can draw from for content development and awareness building or just another grant product to be promoted?

It's true that many of us struggle with making research more relevant and meaningful but it's critical that we recognize its fundamental value. As long as foundations continue funding research -- primarily as a means to increasing the understanding of complex issues -- we should be prioritizing it as a rich source of knowledge for our communications and education efforts.

3) "Increasing public understanding" is a top communications objective and yet the "general public" is a low-priority in terms of targeted audiences.

This is good news -- if -- it means that communications professionals no longer accept "the general public" as a vague, catch-all audience category that can no more be targeted than it can be measured. But it's not such good news if we have simply replaced the "general public" with other vague catch-all audience categories such as "influencers". The majority of respondents say that their top targets are policymakers (56%), community leaders (54%) and current grantees (53%), relying on a different mix of communications tools (phone, email, websites, blogs, and social media) to reach out to these audiences. But the majority of foundation communicators (56%) also are not using any kind of audience research to develop strategy. So how we are identifying influencers and how do we know what works best in reaching them?

Communications evaluation and measurement are notoriously hard (how does one for instance measure public understanding?) but if we are going to make public understanding our top objective and we believe policymakers and community leaders are key to changing that understanding then really we need to answer 1) who are the influencers and what kind of influencers are we talking about? 2) which communications tools seem best suited to reaching those influencers?, and 3) did we change their understanding? My guess is that most communications professionals have hunches about each of these questions. I am a strong believer in hunches but so that we don't slip right back into the "general public" trap it might be good to articulate some of these hunches and back them up with audience research and evaluation.

4) Almost three-quarters (74%) of respondents say they go through a process that produces a written communications plan. But only about a third (36%) say that their communications plan really guides their daily work.

I will keep my comments on this one short because it is really fodder for a much larger conversation. But in a nutshell I don't find this to be bad news. Why? Because the study goes on to report two related findings: organizations that do plan differ from those that don't in that they are 1) more likely to recognize failure, and 2) more likely to have other organizational departments engaged in communications efforts. These two things alone make planning worth it, whether we consult those plans on a daily basis or not.

Ok, so there are actually more than just four things that got stuck in my mental craw - which is in its own sense a measure of a report's success. But since we are all so short on actual time to read, (some might say poverty-stricken in this "attention economy" :), I will leave you with just one more finding that both delighted and intrigued me. It made me think of every blog post, discussion board message, and piece of strategic advice I have read over the last ten years encouraging nonprofits to behave more like businesses.

"There is another finding that seems to demand more research: Those with written communications plans most frequently said that before joining the foundation they had previously worked in a nonprofit organization, whereas those without written communications plans most frequently said they had worked in a for-profit company."

Thanks to Communications Network for cultivating discussion and debate on all these topics.

IssueLab Likes LikeMinded - A Lot!

2011-03-31T12:01:00.010-05:00

Exciting news! The Craigslist Foundation has launched a new website aimed at helping community activists share stories of success, failure, and best practice, and IssueLab's collection of nonprofit knowledge is an integral part of it!

The site, LikeMinded -- an online tool for offline action, officially launched today. The site focuses your attention first on broad social policy issues -- Arts, Health, Education, Crime & Safety, Environment, Economy, Government, Community. However, in just a click you find yourself dealing with social policy on the ground -- local stories, unique perspectives, and supporting resources.

Speaking of resources....chances are very good that you will find an IssueLab-hosted research report under every LikeMinded category. This IssueLab/LikeMinded data partnership is just one example of how IssueLab makes the findings and analysis of the nonprofit sector discoverable and accessible to those who seek it.

So when you get a chance, give LikeMinded a look-see. Post a story, read a story, get a new/expanded/different perspective on activism and community.

And a special note to IssueLab Research Contributors: Sharing just one or two reports through IssueLab and yet you have dozens more reports that you could share? Consider this your motivational blog post! Add more/all of your sought-after research, and let us help you get it in front of the people who can use it!

Nonprofit Blog Carnival: Openness in the Third Sector

2011-01-28T09:03:00.016-06:00

The diversity of submissions to this month's carnival speaks to how truly relevant the cultural and rhetorical move towards "openness" is to the work of nonprofits.

The demand for openness is affecting nonprofits in almost every dimension of our work, including: fundraising, research, marketing/communications, operations, evaluations, and outcomes. But we have a long way to go before openness in our practices and approaches could be considered the norm.

Each of the posts in this month's carnival makes its own argument for why nonprofits not only have to accept this cultural shift but also why its to our real benefit to do so. Here are some choice quotes from this month's submissions:

"Ultimately real dedication to openness means to publish every piece of relevant data in a searchable format for the world to look at, to search and to analyze." Good Developments

"“How open do I need to be?” … It seems fairly obvious to those of us steeped in the world of social technologies — you just are open, authentic, and transparent. But for many people where Facebook and Twitter represent alien planets fraught with danger, this is a very valid question. - Charlene Li

"The social media policy for one organization may not be appropriate to your association. Your policy should to be tailored to address your exposures and needs." - Social Fish

"Openness is a broad concept. It implies being truthful and honest in what you say, communicating information freely to stakeholders, and being held accountable to those you serve. It touches on much more than just your communication strategy, extending to how you run your programs and what sort of governance mechanisms you have." - WiserEarth

Nonprofits are doing everything from circulating open RFPs for potential merger partners to applying creative commons licenses to all of their research. What are you doing? Let us know in the comments!

Opening Up: Nonprofit Transparency
Kerry Vineberg from WiserEarth brings us this awesome big-picture look at the question of openness, while providing valuable advice on the small and practical steps your nonprofit can take to be more open.

Wikileaks and Its Consequences for Openness of Nonprofits
To put this all in a bigger cultural context the good folks at Good Developments bring a nonprofit perspective to the wikileaks phenomenon. Would your organization survive having all of its data published?

Nonprofits and Information: Sharing Our Stories
The Edmonton Social Planning Council talks about why stories are worth sharing and how several nonprofits (including IssueLab) are working to share as much and as often as possible.

Science of Giving 6: The donation box-How do social norms, price & scrutiny affect what people do?
Katya Andresen puts her spin on the benefits of openness, looking at how being open about the donations you receive might affect future gifts.

Successful fundraising is not for the thin-skinned
And right after you open up about your donations you may need Pamela Grow's advice on how to manage feedback from donors. Make sure to check out the comments on this post for some real-world insight about openness in fundraising.

True Tales of a Department of Education Grant Reviewer
For an example of a process that is integral to our work in the sector but unfortunately almost completely lacks openness, Jake Seliger shares a post from an anonymous reader about grant reviewing.

Foundations Fail at Failing
Speaking of foundations, Michael Remaley's recent post about foundations' openness about failures and lessons learned challenges grantmakers to start walking the talk on the kind of openness we used to call transparency. Be sure to check out the comments

How to use to Social Media without getting Panned
Maureen Carruthers brings us some great tips on how to be open and authentic in social media, without the dreaded over-sharing.

Peering Behind the Curtain of Advocacy Email Campaigns

Rob Pierson from BeaconFire gives us valuable insight into how being more open in our email campaigns might actually help address legislators' fears that emails aren't authentic, making our campaigns that more effective and meaningful.

Risk Management and Open Community: More Similar than You Think
Social Fish gives us some insight on how to manage the risks associated with creating open communities.

How open are you? Conduct an Openness Audit to Find Out
And finally, now that you've read all these other posts make sure to check out this interesting approach to understanding exactly how open your organization really is. Charlene Li, get ready for this -- shares -- her Openness Audit tool.

Thanks to everyone who shared a post with me. Although not all of them fit the topic closely enough to be included I read and appreciated each one.

Sandra Sims has just posted the February Nonprofit Blog Carnival's call for submissions. It is up at Mission Connected and is titled, Submit Your Blog Posts About Nonprofit Jobs to the February Nonprofit Blog Carnival. Check it out!

(Picture generously shared under a CC BY 2.0 license by Monica's Dad)

Set That File Free

2011-01-12T11:29:00.000-06:00

We handle a lot of PDF files at IssueLab. We save 'em, duplicate 'em, convert ‘em into other formats for various purposes (eg., Scribd), copy text out of 'em, and generally hype ‘em when they contain nonprofit-produced research! So yeah, PDFs are sort of a 24-7 thing in this neck of the ‘net.

So, you can imagine our frustration (and confusion) when we receive PDFs that are "locked". If someone has produced a research report, saved it as a PDF, and put it on the World Wide Web presumably to share it broadly, why then render it all but useless by locking people out of printing it or copying text out of it (to name just two things one can do to a PDF via document security options)?

Before you “secure” your PDF-bound research report against being printed or having text copied out of it, we beseech you to think again. By locking your document you effectively relegate it to on-screen reading only. What if a reader wants to quote something from your report in their own work or presentation? Most readers don't have the time to re-key text that could so easily be copy/pasted from one document to another. What if they want to print something out to read rather than reading it on their computer screen or maybe they want to print it out to share it with someone who doesn't have ready access to a computer? A locked document prevents both these things from happening.

So please, before you “secure” your PDF against being used, and useful, return to the impulse that led you to place your file on the internet in the first place: sharing. Set that file free by making sure your security settings aren't keeping your work from being read or shared.

Image graciously provided under a cc license

Nonprofit Blog Carnival: Call for Posts on Openness

2011-01-04T12:30:00.005-06:00

This month IssueLab will be playing host to the Nonprofit Blog Carnival, a long-running monthly series which collects blog posts on topics relevant to the sector.

As this month's host we are calling for blog posts that address the issue of openness in nonprofit communications! If you're anything like me you have attended more than your share of conference sessions that speak to the necessity of dialogue and openness in effective online communications. But what does that mean? What does it look like? How do we get our organizations to loosen up about brand management and start engaging in the kind of online dialogue that builds awareness online?

There's really no rule on what posts should look like. Essentially, we're looking for any advice, experience, tips, anecdotes, stories or examples of how nonprofits have opened up! Bloggers can submit their posts by emailing the permalink to nonprofitcarnival@gmail.com by Thursday, January 27th. You're also welcome to send in articles written in the past. We look forward to your insights and stories!

IssueLab Switches to Scribd: Good for us, good for you!

2010-09-13T22:34:00.005-05:00

IssueLab is now using Scribd to provide site visitors, contributing organizations, and data partners with real-time dynamic views of the research documents we archive.

Our decision to switch away from Issuu to Scribd, “the largest social publishing and reading site in the world,” was based on a number of considerations including:

Scribd's application programming interface (API) enables us to more easily work with our documents.
Scribd makes access statistics available via their API so that we can now provide our contributors with this important metric.
Scribd is actively working to move their entire document sharing platform away from proprietary Adobe Flash to open-source HTML 5. This means IssueLab users will soon be able to access documents on their mobile phones and other devices.
Bonus: Scribd provides all of its services for free.

We completed the transition to Scribd last week. Users will experience no change to our document contribution or access work-flow. As well, contributors can still easily embed a dynamic view of their documents anywhere they like on the web -- embed code is available in the “Edit Listings” area of Research Contributor accounts.

Scribd’s vision: “to liberate the written word, to connect people and organizations with the information and ideas that matter most to them.” We couldn’t agree more!

Walking the Talk of Collaboration

2010-09-13T11:04:00.014-05:00

When we ask nonprofits to contribute their research to IssueLab we talk a lot about the importance of knowledge sharing and the necessity of collaboration. We remind them (you) that in order to avoid recreating the wheel we simply have to share what we know with our colleagues in the field. Given the importance of our work and the scarcity of resources we can't financially or ethically afford to duplicate efforts. In essence by sharing our knowledge we build our capacity as individual organizations and as a sector.

But knowledge sharing requires more than just nonprofits sharing research with information hubs like IssueLab. It also requires that in turn IssueLab shares those resources and that research with other hubs, platforms, and online communities -- getting it into as many relevant online places and spaces as possible. In other words, walking the talk of collaboration.

One of the areas where nonprofits are constantly developing new strategies and looking for more efficient and effective approaches is in the area of volunteering. How can I best recruit volunteers? Do I need to manage online volunteers differently? How can I tap into the number of retiring baby boomers who are looking for meaningful volunteer opportunities? How can I best measure the value of volunteer contributions? Well matched and well managed volunteers directly contribute to an organization's capacity to deliver its services. And by extension when we share case studies, white papers, evaluations, and operational templates about volunteering we also build our capacity as a sector.

So forgive the long lead up -- but all of this explains why we are so excited to be collaborating with VolunteerMatch and IdeaEncore on making these resources more readily accessible to nonprofit practitioners. In partnership with IdeaEncore we are now sharing all research that addresses the topic of volunteering through the new Volunteering Resource Library. This library is directly available to the more than 73,000 nonprofits who use VolunteerMatch and are already looking to improve the way they recruit and manage volunteers.

There is a lot of talk about collaboration in the sector, from merging back office operations to developing joint programming but not a lot of this talk focuses on one of the most simple yet critical acts of collaboration -- knowledge sharing. The Volunteering Resource Library is a simple example of how much more we can do when we do it together.

Valuable nonprofit knowledge + a willingness to share = increased capacity.

If you know something about volunteering or you are looking for information about how to improve your volunteer program, plug yourself into this simple equation. We did!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/111201180/ CC licensed: Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

WiserEarth Members Get Wise to IssueLab's Research Collection

2010-07-08T09:27:00.004-05:00

Exciting news! Starting today, WiserEarth begins carrying research titles from IssueLab's collection! Any IssueLab listing carrying a 2007 or later publication date and related to social justice and the environment will now automatically become available to WiserEarth's members and site visitors on a weekly basis.

WiserEarth's mission is "to help the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build alliances in order to address and solve the world’s problems." WiserEarth's community includes over 40,000 members around the globe and a plethora of groups where members can engage in discussion, post and share resources, and collaborate on projects. The WiserEarth directory is the world’s largest international directory of nonprofits and socially responsible organizations (110,000 in 243 countries). Of interest to our gentle-readers, WiserEarth boasts a taxonomy that is the "world’s most detailed classification of issue areas related to social justice and environmental restoration". Love it.

We view this partnership as a terrific opportunity to: 1) introduce activists and advocates to effective nonprofit organizations and research resources; 2) forge new, vibrant collaborations; and, ultimately, 3) create new knowledge that gets us all closer to a more just and peaceful global society. I know - it's a win-win-win!

We're confident that WiserEarth's community – individuals who care deeply about the state of the natural and social world, and who actively participate in social change through collaboration, knowledge sharing, and deepening their own understanding of the issues – will surely benefit from having immediate access to the research and analysis shared through IssueLab. We are very excited to share our collection with WiserEarth and all of its members.

And ... an important note of gratitude: Luise Barnikel, a former and much missed IssueLab team-member, started conversations with WiserEarth in early 2010 and pursued this collaboration for many months. Truly, without Luise this whole partnership may never have happened. Thank you Luise for your tireless work on this project!

Happy collaborating!

Guest Post: Five Steps to Translate Your Research Reports into English

2010-04-29T11:49:00.018-05:00

Today's post is from Susan Parker's Clear Thinking eZine. It's a great publication about reading, writing and communicating research - you can subscribe for free here.

Five Steps to Translate Your Research Reports into English

Word count: 908

Estimated read time: Less than 4 minutes

When I was in graduate school, I had a very proper British professor who had brilliant insights about the role of women in society. I believed that her ideas mattered and needed to be heard beyond our classroom and the obscure academic publications that she wrote for.

One day after class, I beseeched her to write in a way that would reach more people. I told her that I would help--and that my goal was to get her featured in a popular magazine. She looked bewildered at my suggestion. And she never took me up on it.

While I did not succeed with her, I have "translated" scores of evaluation and research reports into clear English--and I am convinced that there is a rich supply of groundbreaking reports and important evaluation results that many people can benefit from. But this information is often buried in dense, jargon-laden language. As a result, the work does not make the impact that it might.

Foundations and other nonprofits spend millions of dollars each year commissioning research and evaluation projects that may end up on a shelf and read by no more than a few people. One reason these reports do not make an impact is that they are just too hard to get through. We have to make this important work inviting for people to read and learn about.

Here are a few things I have learned that can help you reach a wider audience and disseminate your valuable information:

1. Determine the key audience that you want to reach. It is one of the most important first steps. Don't say the "general public" or even "policymakers." That's too vague. You need to have a clear picture of the key people you really want to read this report. You also need to understand why they would care about what your research says. It's helpful if you can picture one person as you revise this report.

For example, your audience could be a three-term state legislator in California who serves on an education committee. He's heard about the childhood obesity epidemic, but he has not thought much about the connection between healthy students and positive educational outcomes. Your report provides timely data that makes the case that students who are obese or come to school with chronic illnesses do not achieve as well as healthy students do. That's the information that the legislator needs to help convince him to start considering health issues in his policy work.

It is critical to have a particular person in mind as you revise the report. By getting that specific about your audience, ironically, you will reach a much larger group.

2. Get the context. Most research and evaluation reports don't provide readers with enough context to make sense of the findings. You will likely need to add context to the report to make it relevant to the audience that you want to reach.

In a blog post, Jim Canales, president of the James Irvine Foundation, wrote that Irvine's board members spoke of how important contextual information was in making sense of the information that the foundation shared with them.

You may be able to get the context through the research or evaluation proposal. Or you may need to do a little more research.

3. Read the report with the audience in mind and see what jumps out at you. What strikes you? What seems new? What's confusing? Make a note of it. Because you are not steeped in the subject yourself, you have a perspective on what could be truly interesting.

4. Talk to the person who wrote the report. This is imperative. The evaluator or researcher often writes for a particular purpose and narrow audience (sometimes just a program officer at a foundation). Because of this, she won't necessarily include some of the details that might be useful to the people you are trying to reach.

Ask the researcher for her three major findings. Most researchers and evaluators write in the muddy middle, that is, they don't take a step back and report their overarching findings or themes. If the researcher is the least bit unclear, keep asking follow up questions.

These conversations are fun to have. People are often clearer about their work when they just chat about it then when they write about it. And this is work they are passionate about. That passion will come out and you can convey that in the revised report.

5. Find a story to tell. It may be buried in the report or mentioned tangentially. Stories bring flesh and blood to findings. Find a story or example that illustrates each of the top three findings. These stories do not have to be long, but they need to paint a picture that accurately illustrates the key findings.

For example, if a research report talks about the importance of schools working with their communities to achieve better health outcomes for students, find an example of a specific school working with its community to lower smog levels.

Try some of these ideas and, unlike my graduate school professor, the insights in your research and evaluation reports will reach the large audience it deserves.

By Susan Parker of Clear Thinking Communications.

Please visit Clear Thinking Communication's web site at www.clearthinkingcommunications.com for additional tips on communications for foundations, nonprofits and progressive businesses.

Our KM Toolbox and Social Source Commons

2010-04-08T11:22:00.006-05:00

This is a cross-post from the Social Source Commons Blog, where Matt Garcia recently wrote about IssueLab and Knowledge Mobilization.

In case you haven't yet, check out Social Source Commons. It's a great resource and:

"a place to share lists of software tools that you already use, gain knowledge and support, and discover new tools. It’s a place to meet people with similar needs and interests and answer the question: what tools do they use?"

IssueLab recently used Social Source Commons to compile a set of tools that are helpful for Knowledge Mobilization. This includes many free online tools that our staff uses for both internal (collaboration) and external (dissemination) purposes. Matt writes that,

"I thought this was an interesting toolbox in that many organizations, nonprofit and otherwise are constantly combing the internet in some kind of fashion for information and data related to their work. Each has its own technique of capturing relevant information and sites. Whether it is using Delicious bookmarks or covering a wall in Post-It notes, it's valuable and important to take a step back to see how your organization is collecting and storing data and resources that are organizationally relevant."

Continue reading the entire post and check out our KM Toolbox here!

Three New Widgets & Three Reasons to Grab One

2010-03-03T12:19:00.015-06:00

Do you blog about nonprofits or education? Is one of your goals to educate a website audience about social issues? Then I know you'll find value in IssueLab's new Widgets...because we created them just for you!

The Widgets bring fresh social and policy research directly to your readers, all within your own online environment. Each resource in our archive is manually approved, making sure we share only quality work created by nonprofits, foundations and academic centers.

Creating these tools is part of IssueLab's ongoing commitment to promote and disseminate nonprofit-produced research to a broader audience - and you can take an active part by embedding one for your audience. Why?

1. For you: It's a simple way to offer relevant, vetted, and up-to-date content.

2. For your audience: It's free and easy access to quality research by and about nonprofit issues.

3. For nonprofits everywhere: It's an effective way to bring their knowledge to a broader audience that relies on it for policymaking, direct service, grantmaking, advocacy and more.

What are you waiting for? Grab one today!

And don't forget to let us know what you think in the comments below.

You Learn Something New Every Day

2010-02-26T15:12:00.004-06:00

I love the cliche, "You learn something new every day". I love the implication that there's more to learn in this world than we can ever grasp. If the concept of a limitless body of knowledge is as exciting to you as it is to me, you're on the right blog.
In my job as Collections Assistant here at IssueLab, my learning is less haphazard than most--I'm often actively looking for new organizations and research that will fit into our next CloseUp collection. I'm lucky enough to learn LOTS of new things every day. Right now I'm working on finding research on aging out of foster care, and this is definitely one of those topics that is chockfull of startling, interesting, and occasionally enraging new information and statistics. I decided to keep track of some of the new things I've learned today.
Without further ado, here is the list of just a few new things I learned today:

The term permanency is pervasive in research on foster care, followed in frequency by kinship care
There is a nationwide, comprehensive data collection project that will start in October, 2010. The National Youth in Transition Database will allow for more thorough, longitudinal tracking.
The racial distribution of youth in foster care is fairly disproportionate, with African-American youth often comprising over 50%, but this varies from state-to-state (not surprisingly)
As of mid-decade, about a quarter of youth in Foster Care were living with relatives.
There are some programs that provide funding for recent Foster Care graduates in supervised living facilities--but does this include college dorms?
Since there are a number of different residential possibilities for foster care youth, especially teens, face a wide range of changes and challenges upon aging out. Many are not coming from a temporary family situation.

For more facts, details, and reports from which some of these tidbits were drawn, visit IssueLab starting in April to see our full Aging Out of Foster Care CloseUp!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfv/2739621207/ CC licensed: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic

And The Winner Is...

2010-02-01T14:35:00.006-06:00

IssueLab is pleased to announce the winner of the Research Remix video contest!

Contestants were asked to remix facts or data from one of over 300 openly licensed research reports on the IssueLab website into a video. At launch for Open Access Week 2009 and throughout the submission deadline, the contest generated lots of buzz and interest from nonprofit and video communities alike.

Our congratulations go to Erin Costello and her video remix "Girls Risk High Morals: Online," featuring research by the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Judge Allison Fine (Senior Fellow at Demos) notes that "the video creators have combined riveting visual images with a dramatic narrative to forcefully impact the viewer on the dangers of the online world for girls."

Learn more about the Research Remix video contest and read the original research here.

Thank you to Research Remix participants for sharing their creative interpretation of research on pressing social issues. The video is available under a Creative Commons license, open for use and remixing (for noncommercial purposes) by anyone!

Additional thanks go to the panel of judges, to Creative Commons and the Public Library of Science, as well as the many promoters and supporters that spread the word about this unique opportunity giving voice to nonprofit research.

P.S.: There are still many more contest packages with t-shirts to give away, so we encourage any additional submissions to the Vimeo Research Remix channel! If you've got remixed media and can incorporate openly licensed nonprofit research, share your art and views with everyone!

Online Outreach on a Budget - January Nonprofit Blog Carnival

2010-01-28T14:09:00.006-06:00

This month we spent some time collecting posts about nonprofit communications on a budget. Below you'll find a combination of great resources that were submitted, and information I've found useful in my own research on online outreach. So bookmark this post and take the time to apply this knowledge to marketing and communications at your organization - it's cheap (or free) and has worked for others!

Webinar Recap: Connecting Advocacy to Fundraising

Thanks very much to Care2 and their presenters for sharing this webinar recording. Check out the slides for great case studies for online campaigns that work, as well as solid tips to building an advocacy program (and it can be done on a budget!!).

DIY strategic communications planning for nonprofits: Step 2—Key Audiences

Gayle of IMPACTMAX says that, "by the end of this exercise, you’ll have a list of most important categories of people who can advance your change agenda." A little planning goes a long way.

Guest Blog: Justine Yu on Social Media for Nonprofits

This post has great examples of how Journalists for Human Rights (where Justine is an intern) uses social media and creates online campaigns. She writes, "start a campaign that’ll give all of your supporters (regardless of age, profession, or location) a chance to actively engage in the process of whatever it is your organization is striving towards."

Presentation - Integrating Direct Mail & Online Marketing to Engage Constituents & Raise Funds

Already doing direct mail? Ignitus Strategies shares this great presentation for how to integrate mailings with free online techniques for reaching out to your fundraising audience.

6 Benefits of Using Twitter for Nonprofit

This guest post comes straight from a nonprofit think tank to Pamela's Grantwriting Blog. If "our limited communications budget means that we can’t pay a PR firm" sounds familiar, read this post. Especially if your organization produces research.

How to Engage Your Blog's Community

Blogs are one of the major (free) ways to communicate with constituents online. In his 31 Day Challenge, John Haydon gives some great tips on how to engage casual readers in real conversation.

API - Tweetatcongress.com

Thanks to @noah_cooper for this great free tool. Integrate it into your website to "give users a way to look up and tweet at their legislators." Neat idea!

Nonprofits e-mail free!

In this overview of free e-mail services, Maureen Carruthers from the Low Hanging Fruit blog explains "the free part." Besides, if your nonprofit holds events, she's got a sweet post about Nathan Fillion's style of promoting events on Twitter.

Q&A: PETA's "Gorilla" Marketing Tactics

With a quick free registration, you'll be able to read this interesting MarketingProfs interview with a PETA Marketing Manager on how this organization uses social media and word-of-mouth initiatives (already in 2007!).

Worksheet - The Online Fundraiser's Checklist
"Check the boxes on these six worksheets and if you don't score well, use the helpful (and free!) resources listed on the bottom of each page to improve your online fundraising practices."

Coming up: The February Carnival will be hosted by Katya Andresen at the Nonprofit Marketing Blog. The theme will be your best and/or worst moments as a nonprofit professional – and what you learned from them. Submit posts here.

"Pennies" image credit goes to Pdphoto.org - thanks!

Research Summary: Addressing the Needs of Female Professional and Amateur Athletes

2010-01-20T11:57:00.008-06:00

Addressing the Needs of Female Professional and Amateur Athletes
Women's Sports Foundation

I expected this report, which presents focus group results from 1999, to primarily center on unequal pay and facilities. Although the report included this information I was much more interested by the unexpected focus on communications, representation and promotional issues faced by female athletes.

It is hard not to wonder how many female athletes are still facing challenges in these same areas. Although this report was written a decade ago and important deep lasting attitudinal changes have certainly been made by women in sports, it describes some of the more insidious ways that female athletes have been held back in their professional pursuits, forms of sexism that by their very subtlety sometimes escape open analysis and criticism. I encourage you to read about some of the challenges these athletes experience in regards to communications, representation, and promotion and let us know if you think things have changed or mostly remained the same.

Communication issues include getting late notice on training camps or events, which results in many women having trouble accommodating these schedules with the one (or two, or more) jobs they have to maintain to pay for training. There are also problems with coaches, who many women feel don't listen adequately.

Representation issues manifest in a few different ways. National governing boards must be comprised of at least 20% athletes. Though this is followed, most athletes don't feel their needs are actually represented by those athletes on boards. A broader criticism was the lack of women athletes administrating on governing boards or in other visible positions. Lastly, though finding agents has become easier for women athletes, especially soccer and basketball players, it still remains far more difficult than for male athletes.

Promotion presents problems since the media coverage is imperative to a sports popularity today. Athletes felt their sports and games weren't promoted well. Furthermore, when promotion does happen, it sometimes plays on the sexualization of these women. When they express resistance to wearing unnecessarily skimpy outfits or being exploited as sexual objects, they are met with indifference and hostility (which ties into communication and representation issues).

From a design and organization perspective, this 16 page report starts with an executive summary and has graphs throughout. I really appreciated the bold, concise titles and subtitles. By clearly labeling and keeping each section brief, readers can easily skim and find the issues most relevant to them. This may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how few reports are well-marked internally.

What do you think? Are these obstacles still alive and well?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/ / CC BY 2.0

Call for the Nonprofit Blog Carnival: Posts About Online Outreach on a Budget

2010-01-04T13:20:00.002-06:00

This month, IssueLab is glad to host the Nonprofit Blog Carnival! As we move into this new year with many challenges, we want to provide nonprofit communicators with ideas on doing online outreach on a budget. This means thrifty, effective Internet marketing and advocacy without big spend or big PR firms.

There's really no rule on what posts should look like. Essentially, we're looking for any advice, experience, tips, anecdotes, stories or examples of how nonprofits can do more with less. Topics might include how you find and reach constituents online, how your organization uses social media and networks to share research and knowledge, or a case study for an activism or dissemination campaign that was done on a small budget.

Bloggers can submit their posts by emailing the permalink to nonprofitcarnival@gmail.com, or by using the Blog Carnival submission form by Thursday, January 28th. You're also welcome to send in articles written in the past. We look forward to your tips!

What We Don't Find When We Search

2009-12-29T15:39:00.016-06:00

Last Sunday the New York Times ran an interesting op-ed on the subject of search neutrality, the principle that search engine results should be "comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance", rather than on any particular editorial policy (or commercial incentives).

Given our reliance on search engines as the standard first step in seeking and filtering information you'd think search neutrality would be a bigger topic of discussion. But aside from periodic grumblings and misgivings about how Google has aided and abetted political censorship in China, we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about other ways that search engines exclude, censor, or bias our searches for information.

Of course online researchers like Mary Ellen Bates, educators who are trying to get their students to do more than just cite Wikipedia, and frankly the whole field of search engine marketing talk about this subject plenty. But the topic isn't one that is picked up on very often by nonprofits who have a unique stake in search neutrality or by most individuals who simply use search engines to find basic information.

Maybe this is just one of those topics we don't want to have to think or talk about, something we would rather believe just takes care of itself. Kind of like we prefer to believe that people have equal access to the polls, that town hall meetings are "open", or that anyone can get a letter to the editor published. Ugggh, can't we just assume it's being taken care of? Well, as Adam Raff's op-ed reminds us, no we can't.

Because Raff's op-ed focuses largely on Google, let me come clean right away. IssueLab has a pretty longstanding love affair with Google. We use Google apps to collaborate, Google mail to communicate, and Google maps to navigate research on IssueLab. We are grateful for a Google grant that allows us to leverage AdWords and we even publish our quarterly board reports using a Google site. Yet at the same time when we explain what IssueLab does we often start by explaining what Google doesn't do. We spend a lot of our time finding and sharing hard to find research because we know that it isn't coming up in Google search results. We explain how Google's algorithms, bless their little binary hearts, sometimes privilege the largest and most popular nonprofits by including link popularity in the ranking of search results. I am not saying this isn't a relevant measure but it's worth our while to ask whether it's a neutral measure and to question what all goes into link popularity itself, such as organizational resources and brand awareness. (Despite the number of online contests that give prizes to those nonprofits who can garner the most votes, popularity is not an accurate measure of an organization's impact or for that matter the quality or relevance of its research.)

But link popularity is just one example of potential bias in search results and Google is only one online space for us to consider and challenge. As nonprofits it's worth our time to think about other ways that our knowledge or the information we want to share might get left out of search engine results and other data mining projects. Is our knowledge and information tagged with the kinds of metadata that make it "ready" for inclusion? Is our research licensed in ways that allow it to be included in the growing number of search functions that return only openly licensed content? In what other ways might information from smaller nonprofits or information on more marginalized subject areas get excluded?

These may all be examples of what my friend and colleague Anne Elizabeth Moore calls accidental censorship, when information is disappeared almost without intention because of how fields of information or knowledge are organized and how access to that information is institutionalized. (Just in case you wanted something else to keep you up at night ;) We can have debates about exactly how "accidental" this kind of censorship is, but in the end, search neutrality will depend on some kind of intentional intervention by those of us who know that search results do not adequately represent all the information that is out there. They are a good start but they are simply not neutral.

Maybe the solution is something along the lines of the kind of legislation Raff calls for, maybe it's about making sure our information is more "ready" to be included and accessed, or maybe it's about making the extra effort to complement search engines with other kinds of information filters such as relying on our peers and trusted librarians. Whatever the solution is, I guess I just want to make sure that we at least take the time to recognize and discuss the problem.

"Google coupon" image:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bramus/ / CC BY 2.0

Geotagtastic Subcategoodness!

2009-12-11T13:36:00.003-06:00

We are very excited to share a couple of new ways to view our collection, each adding a new perspective on nonprofit research. We're all big-picture-meets-devil-in-the-details over here, and a whole new meta-take on nonprofit produced research is aloft!

Subcategories - Our Research Contributors have been busy creating a tres unique tag cloud for all of us research wonks. In addition to cross-referencing research in up to three issue areas, subcats let our contributors interrelate research on a much more descriptive and nuanced level. An example: browse the subcat "at-risk youth" and you'll find listings under Children and Youth, Crime and Safety, Education and Literacy, Employment and Labor, Health and Medicine, Nonprofits and Philanthropy, and Religion. Pretty cool, no?

Access subcat information by visiting our new "Browse by Subcategory" option. As well, clickable subcats now appear on any listing page that has been subcategorized. Look for these cute little subcats in the "Related Research" area on the right-side of research listing pages.

Coverage - You can now take a look at our listings from about a gazillion feet up -- literally if you like. Approximately 1,000 research listings in IssueLab's archive now include information about the geographic area covered by the research in question. Our coverage data runs the gamut from continents to neighborhoods/points-of-interest. Two ways to get geo with IssueLab:

1) Any listing that includes coverage information now includes a Google map and clickable list of locations. Click on a location and get a drill-down view of listings with similar geographic info. Or,

2) Visit our new "Browse by Coverage" option and take a trip to your favorite locale via our clickable list of geo points.

Enjoy!

Common(s) Sense for Communications Staff

2009-11-17T12:34:00.018-06:00

Would you password your website? Or make twitter updates private? How about hiding your facebook fan page so it doesn't appear in search results? That wouldn't make much sense. Neither does using restrictive copyrights for work you produce to further your nonprofit mission. Yet, a majority of the third sector still has difficulties using Creative Commons.

Is it because we're unfamiliar with the options? Are nonprofits worried about how their writing and research might be used by others? Beth Kanter is an avid supporter of Creative Commons (another reason to jump on the bandwagon!) and this post includes great resources, articles, and remixes that make a strong case for open licensing in the nonprofit framework.

For foundations, the choice may be a bit more difficult. As this Berkman Center for Internet and Society report notes, foundations don't usually apply open licenses to funded work (with a few notable exceptions!), since it's often produced by consultants or grantee organizations. Still, blogger and philanthropy consultant Lucy Bernholz advocates for opening up foundation content and has some good ideas on information sharing and creation.

Here at IssueLab, we're big supporters of open licensing. Whether you work for an advocacy or direct service organization, a research institute or a foundation – here is why you should start thinking about using Creative Commons (CC):

1. Increase your exposure – Share and share alike. It's a simple concept and can work wonders for your visibility online. When readers know your research (photos, website, video, etc.) carries a CC license, they know it's ok to share your work. The rules are clear, and your constituents don't have to ask for permission when they want to use your ideas, which is a huge deterrent for online sharing. Remember: the more you share with others, the more they'll use, quote, recommend, share, and reference in turn.

2. Sustain impact of your work – There are many reasons why restrictive copyrights stunt the potential impact of your work. Open licenses = open access, and this means you can be in more spaces online for the life of your organization and beyond. Publishing a report is not the end of the line; your CC-licensed work can continue to circulate and inform audiences independently of your active outreach and organizational capacity.

3. Expand innovation in your field – Depending on the CC license you choose, your audience has the opportunity to be really creative with your ideas. One of the main goals of nonprofit research, after all, is to evaluate what works and to build upon lessons learned. This is how we find practical solutions and spur social innovation. Applying an open license to your work can encourage people to repurpose or remix information into ideas, programs, events, data or campaigns that have never before existed. Imagine the possibilities!

4. Get credit – Don't we all like to get credit for our content and ideas? Creative Commons makes it easy (yes, easier than the old standard copyright) to receive proper and specific attribution for work you share. Contrary to what you may have heard, an open license like Creative Commons doesn't just make your content a "free for all," but actually requires users to credit and cite you explicitly in a manner of your choosing. The CC-image used in this blog post? Check out the citation at the bottom - it's a simple copy & paste from the "some rights reserved" link on the flickr photo page. Easy!

Not convinced yet? Agree completely? No time for licensing issues? I'd love to hear your comments!

"Common Sense" image:

simone_brunozzi / CC BY-SA 2.0

What Makes Nonprofits Laugh?

2009-10-28T15:52:00.011-05:00

Ok, I'll admit it. I spend a lot of time, probably too much time, thinking and talking about the subject of identity. Not just any identity but specifically the group identity of the nonprofit sector. I admit it, it's a bit niche, but so is this blog. So I figure I am in safe company bringing it up. Actually I am hoping that I might even get an answer to my latest question on this topic.

The fact is I am not alone when it comes to this obsession with "nonprofitness". For a taste of just how big this question is and how active the discussion around it is you can just look at the comments elicited by Tony Wang's blog post "Where is Philanthropy's Community" from a few months ago . Or for that matter check out the 10+ years of discussion on Charity Channel's listservs for an incredible glimpse into how the nonprofit group identity has been developed and negotiated over time. There is of course no shortage of interesting writing (both academic and practitioner based) being done on this subject. When I can carve out some time in the near future I will definitely post a bibliography on the topic!

But this off-hours obsession isn't just a hobby, it also directly informs our work here at IssueLab. In many ways we are trying to walk a fine line between wanting to cross-pollinate niche communities within the sector (which most often attach to either issue areas or professional roles) and recognizing that people primarily use our site to find research on a particular topic. I have talked about the interdisciplinary nature of our work on this blog before and regularly talk to folks in trainings and presentations about how the lack of a single "water cooler" for the sector affects our strategies for knowledge sharing. And for the most part I encourage people to accept this reality while still trying to get the folks who work on housing issues to read my emails about art education.

So last night I started to wonder about the role of humor in all of this. Because, honestly I was thinking about what a nonprofit version of the Onion might look like. "Nonprofit Logic Model Proves to be Illogical" "Beth Kanter Launches Print Newsletter"?

Is the fact that the sector doesn't have a resident satirist or that the Chronicle doesn't run a regular cartoon evidence that we take ourselves too seriously (and then blog about it no less)? Or are we simply concerned that other people won't take us seriously? Or is it more evidence that we don't really have a nonprofit group identity? I mean a joke really only works when it resonates with the common experience of the audience. When I first moved to Chicago I actually interviewed for a job with a labor cartoonist. That's right - all he did was cartoons about the labor movement and people ate it up! Could we even accomplish something like this for the nonprofit sector?

Maybe this is a question for the Nonprofit Congress or the Independent Sector but I am not sure they would add it to the agenda so I thought I would ask you instead. What would your Nonprofit Onion headline be? I know it's sort of silly but I kind of think it's worth thinking about and playing around with. Because after all, those NP Onion headlines might represent the places/spaces/topics where we come together, where we cross-pollinate ideas and experiences, and er um where we might even share knowledge.

Image provided under a CC license by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonymadrid/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Nonprofit Career Month: Discover Your Niche

2009-10-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

Really, there's no better way to learn about the third sector than from those who know best: nonprofits. Whether you're preparing for a career at a nonprofit or just researching the landscape you're looking to change, keeping in touch with your field is important. To help narrow the search, we've put together a tagged collection on nonprofit employment that includes information on leadership development, nonprofit governance, community organizing, employment and wage data, and much more.

For more information on Nonprofit Career Month and to find additional resources, be sure to visit www.nonprofitcareermonth.org It's the pilot year for this Idealist campaign, which “dispels common myths about nonprofit work, provides individuals with entry points to the sector, and allows current and aspiring nonprofit professionals to share expertise.” There, you'll also find the full version of my post on the topic with more details on what's in our special collection and how to use it!

What's your niche? Have you found research on IssueLab that was helpful in your new job? Leave a comment to let us know!

FRPAA: an acronym we can (and should) all get behind

2009-09-01T16:39:00.007-05:00

IssueLab just posted a statement in support of FRPAA. FRPAA stands for Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373) and that stands for good.

In a nutshell, (and I'm swiping this paragraph from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) folks because they said I could):

FRPAA legislation would require that any federal agency with a budget of $100,000,000 or more earmarked for extramural research develop a policy on public access to publicly funded research. Among other things, the legislation would require government funded research papers to be made available in publicly accessible Internet archives within six months of publication in a peer reviewed journal, and would ensure the long-term preservation of, and free public access to, the published research finding in a stable digital repository.

Being an open access archive of social policy research, IssueLab is very much in support of the FRPAA. Social policy research, just like scientific, technological, and medical research, builds on past attempts to dissect, understand, prescribe, evaluate, and ultimately share newly generated knowledge, which in turn starts the process of furthering knowledge all over again. Mandates such as the FRPAA encourage and strengthen this process. Improving access to publicly funded research will only help researchers from all backgrounds, including those at nonprofit organizations who work toward solutions to social ills, build on past findings, accelerating innovation that can improve countless lives.

Please check out ATA's very informative site re: this legislation and join us in supporting this cause!

Branching Out Online – A Case Study in Getting Seen

2009-08-20T14:41:00.027-05:00

Are you feeling a bit overwhelmed by the multitude and complexity of the many channels for nonprofit communications? I am too.

In the past months, I've been watching NeighborWorks America – an organization that creates opportunities for people to live in affordable homes, improve their lives and strengthen their communities – do an excellent job of both navigating these many channels and putting them to work for the organization's communication strategy. All it takes is a bit of listening, innovation, and just plain reaching out to make meaningful connections.

Here are a few of the ways NeighborWorks has branched out and become visible:

Blog: As a featured example of shared

outcome reporting in this Idealware blog post, NeighborWorks gets to share its innovative work within the framework of a previously established conversation on the topic. Consider getting in touch with bloggers who already cover a particular issue, methodology or program to which your nonprofit contributes unique perspective.

Contextualize: Since NeighborWorks produces a great number of research publications, it only makes sense to use a current topic to draw attention to this work. So, Neighborworks came to IssueLab with the idea of putting together a special collection of research on foreclosures (which includes reports from many more organizations than just Neighborworks). Besides reaching out to collaborate on initiatives like this, it's also a great idea to offer your experts for an interview or a short quote, as exemplified in our accompanying blog post.

Partner: By recently teaming up with Justmeans, NeighborWorks has broadened the reach for its programs and events to potential corporate partners and the entire CSR community. Justmeans also reposted many research reports, press releases and articles that were then picked up by larger news distribution sources online. Go and find your partners online – it's a great (and often free) way to combine forces.

Gather: Just this week, the Social Media Symposium 2009 took place in Chicago. NeighborWorks not only organized this conference, but also generated lively Twitter discussion (#nti) and wove in training sessions for local community revitalization organizations. Check out the conference site for summaries and videos, and take a few hints on how you can use knowledge sharing to reach out!

Full Disclosure: NeighborWorks America is one of our beloved data partners. IssueLab hosts and disseminates the NeighborWorks digital library of research – which is yet another way this organization has chosen to branch out online!

What Is Quality Research? Part 1

2009-08-17T15:56:00.009-05:00

(guest post by Claire Reeder)

As the summer research & editorial intern here at IssueLab, I sometimes feel like I jumped into the nonprofit sector pool – and now I'm soaked and confused, but exhilarated!

In this way, I am like many of IssueLab’s users in that I don’t spend everyday immersed in the nonprofit research world. The plight of the summer intern is trying to quickly get up to speed - just in time to head back to school! As such, I was filled with questions.

One question in particular kept arising in a medley of forms, but boiled down to this: What is quality research?

From my outreach and dissemination work with the Arts Education CloseUp this summer, I had learned that "quality" could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. The set of case studies drew from large organizations to smaller community arts programs, from national initiatives to local development projects, and aimed at reaching audiences everywhere in between. It became clear that there was no “one size fits all” answer for what made research useful, applicable, of “good quality,” for every user.

While working on another project later in the summer, I confronted the basic equation that “size and reputation of researcher equals quality of research.” But from what I had seen so far, I wasn’t sure about this - I had more questions: Is it is a valid assumption? What other implications of legitimacy or effectiveness does it bring up? Who does this equation empower? Who does it leave out? And who gets to decide any of it?

There a million angles to examine, to debate, to tease out. This question concerns every actor on the chain: funder, research contributor, research user, practitioner, policymaker, teacher, the list goes on. And it is just as worthy of consideration for those experienced in the field as for those like me still learning to tread philanthropic water.

“What is quality research?” is a question that directly interests us here at IssueLab. As we situate ourselves as intermediaries between many users, we hear answers from all the points on the spectrum. We see that all these points are connected, but that “quality” means something different to each one.

Just as we strive to better understand and further healthy dialogue on social issues by opening up access to nonprofit research, we are hoping to open up a conversation and debate on a big issue in the nonprofit sector. This series of blog posts by our staff members will cover a number of the topic's facets.

So what do you think? What is “quality” research? Jump on into the deep end with us on this one!

(Image provided under a cc license by KB35)

Featured Research Makes You Want To Dig Into the Data

2009-08-05T10:57:00.009-05:00

This month's featured research "6 questions/2430 answers" is a set of survey results gathered and presented by the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis. The data, which represents 2,430 responses from 405 different artists, offers a unique perspective on questions about what it takes for artists to earn a living from their art.

Although the responses are incredibly interesting the main reason we chose to feature this report is because the design itself so successfully encourages exploration. Once you click into this report you actually want to browse the 2000 plus responses, not just skim a table and move on. You can read all the answers from one artist, all the responses to a particular question, or all the responses within a particular arts discipline. In addition, by providing us with the raw data, the actual answers from the survey, McKnight Foundation allows readers to draw some of their own conclusions rather than just reporting on their own analysis.

But here's the real kicker, this report was put together in 1999, almost 10 years ago! So why do we still see so little research presented in a way that makes you want to dig into the data and play around? We have some ideas but would love to hear what you think!

Reflections on the Upcoming Environmental Justice CloseUp

2009-07-24T11:37:00.005-05:00

(The CloseUp on EJ has since launched - check it out!)

As collections assistant, I spend the month or two before each CloseUp collection exploring a whole new field, compiling a list of relevant research and then contacting the organizations that produce it. Each time, I immerse myself in a field I knew very little about just a short time ago, diving headfirst into the wide ocean of work that exists in cyberspace. The August/September CloseUp is on the topic of environmental justice, and I'm certainly learning a lot. Like, for example, what environmental justice is.

I now know environmental justice (EJ) is (very generally) how environmental policy and practices affect disadvantaged or minority groups disproportionately. This is not to say that once I understood the definition it was a piece of cake from there. I wish it was--I love my job, but if it included more cake, I wouldn't mind. Each CloseUp presents its own set of challenges. Some observations I've made while delving into Environmental Justice:

Lack of online forums: In an effort to acquaint myself with an issue, I will look at forums and online communities that serve as resources or communication venues (through listservs, forums, blogs, etc). Despite a very large section of environmental justice being driven by local activists, I could find few central, well-designed online gathering places. However, these do exist for the larger topic of environmentalism, so there are opportunities for EJ discussions within those venues.
Fewer central directories: One of the most valuable resources for me as I look for research-producing non-profit organizations are directories or extensive "related resources" sections on non-profits sites. Though many EJ sites include these sections, and I was able to locate a few directories (like this one), there were significantly fewer than I've come across in other CloseUp topics.
Design: Though plenty of websites devoted to EJ and local movements exist, often they can be hard to navigate. I would not deem most of these websites to be "user-friendly". Since most people don't dwell when information is not readily available, this could result in people not finding what they need, even if that information is there.
Prevalence of university research centers: Neither a good or a bad thing, a lot of the results and links lead to university based centers. IssueLab accepts work from both nonprofits and university-based research centers, though they can be different beasts. This work tends to be more dense and formal, and generally comes in more traditional, longer formats

I am very excited about the CloseUp on Environmental Justice. Personally, I'm so used to hearing about environmentalism that I sometimes feel like I've heard it all. Exploring the subtopic of environmental justice was a valuable reminder that there are issues within the environmental field (and every field for that matter) that are not getting the exposure they require to instigate wholesale change.

If you produce research on environmental justice, or know of an organization that may want to contribute research to this CloseUp, please create an account or e-mail me at stacy@issuelab.org.

(Image provided under a cc licence by Knokton)

This Crisis Is Far From Over - Foreclosures in America

2009-07-08T11:12:00.008-05:00

As part of our larger collection on the issues of housing and homelessness we have pulled together a special collection on the topic of foreclosures.

In order to get some much-needed perspective on this subject we asked Lindley R. Higgins, Applied Research Manager at NeighborWorks America to give us his summary of the issue and why it's so important for all of us to read up on just how we got here and what might be coming next.

"The foreclosure crisis in the United States has not only caused banks to fail and investment portfolios to collapse, but it has also devastated families and communities. And the crisis is far from over.

The run-up in foreclosures began with subprime loans that were heavily concentrated in low-income, minority communities. Risky products were sold to unprepared borrowers in a housing market that seemed to know only increasing values. As long as prices continued upward, the weakness in underwriting and the overextension of credit were obscured. After the housing bubble burst, problems spread beyond subprime; now, the majority of foreclosures are on prime loans.

As of mid-2009, foreclosures continue to increase, housing prices are still declining, most loan modifications are leading only to re-defaults, and unemployment’s continuing rise threatens additional mortgage defaults. A second wave of foreclosures from Option ARMs—particularly risky mortgages that can take as long as five years before interest rates spike—will test the strength of the financial system. It will be years before the worst of the crisis is behind us.

IssueLab has assembled a collection of research that can inform responses to this crisis. The papers here range from descriptions of local effects to strategies for mitigating foreclosures’ impacts. Researchers and practitioners can read about how foreclosures have affected Atlanta or Chicago, or the relationship between foreclosures and homelessness, or foreclosures and crime. The papers here help in understanding the very important question of how we got into this mess in the first place, with varying perspectives presented.

The current crisis will one day recede into memory. But the lessons learned should remain with us for a long time to come. IssueLab is making this possible by assembling the latest research from the institutions most involved in solving this crisis and making it easily accessible to a public that has a real need to know. "

(Image provided under a CC license by Andrew Ciscel)

Featured Report: Open Educational Resources

2009-07-08T10:54:00.008-05:00

Building Open Educational Resources from the Ground Up: South Africa's Free High School Science Texts

This month's featured report from the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education offers a truly useful case study in how open education projects can not only survive but also thrive. The report follows the development and unexpected growth of a project whose goal was to create a free high school science text for all teachers and learners in South Africa.

The study provides other organizations working in the field of open education not only with a set of best practices unique to our field but also with on-the-ground ideas about how to assess, track, and share our learnings in ways that are in keeping with the spirit and goals of the relatively new field of open educational resources.

Some of the key points in the case study included:

The important role that face-to-face collaboration played in sustaining momentum during the development of this online project.
The necessity of having content facilitated and vetted both from the top-down and bottom-up, ensuring its relevance at the same time as ensuring that it would meet broader standards.
An organizational culture and work process that valued experimentation and adaptation.

There are many more interesting lessons and insights to gain from this short report. If your work even touches on educational content, open access, online archiving, knowledge sharing, nonprofit evaluation, or nonprofit management, give this one a read.

And for more research on the subject of open education resources, check out IssueLab's OER research repository.

Lucky #7: Ways IssueLab Gets Exposure for Your Work

2009-07-01T15:21:00.017-05:00

I consider myself a thrifty nonprofit communicator. And in my book, nothing beats free – especially when the return value is as cool as an entire organization working to get more eyes on your research.

Luckily, IssueLab is much more than an archive. We work tirelessly to generate awareness about your research. Here are seven ways we do it, and seven reasons for your nonprofit to participate!

www.issuelab.org: Our publishing forum is a go-to place on the web to learn about social issues, and to locate and access research produced by the third sector. Your organization and research titles become a part of IssueLab as soon as you add them and they are approved for publication.
Social Media-Ready: It's easy for IssueLab's audience to interact with your research using Web 2.0 tools. Our users can review, tag and rate your research, save it to personal libraries, and easily share it with their own social networks using bookmarks, facebook, Twitter and so much more.
Content Partners: Our content partners carry news about IssueLab's research holdings as part of their own content offerings. If your listing falls under a partner's content criteria (and you give us permission to share it), it's automatically available for syndication on other sites.
RSS Notifications: Our comprehensive and 35 issue-specific RSS feeds let subscribers everywhere know that your newly added and categorized listing is available on IssueLab.
Data Harvesting: Since IssueLab is an Open Archives Initiative-compliant data provider, 'harvesters' from around the world can receive raw data about our research holdings. Any group or person interested in our research (that includes data about your listings!) can easily grab it.
IssueLab's CloseUp: We delve into a variety of topics all year long by creating special research collections about a spotlighted issue. If your listing pertains to the current CloseUp feature, it's included in the collection and gets all the attention we can garner for two months.
One-On-One Dissemination: We actively promote the research we archive. Our daily activities include pushing your research out to bloggers, online communities of practice, social networking groups, and other places where your audience is already gathering online.

Sound enticing? If you're a 501(c)(3) and have research (evaluations, case studies, data sets, policy briefs etc.) you'd like to share, get started with a free contributor account! We even include access statistics to show how often your research is viewed, downloaded, and interacted with by our user community.

Speaking of free: IssueLab is offering a Webinar to share its ideas and lessons learned about online dissemination of research. If you're a nonprofit communicator and want to join the discussion (at no cost to you), here's more information.

Identifying Innovation

2009-06-22T11:17:00.011-05:00

I want to return to an issue that sparked some healthy debate a few weeks ago but didn’t go far enough in my opinion.

When Michele Obama first announced the Office of Social Innovation, bloggers like Allison Fine posed some really important questions about what is meant by innovation and how to ensure that the government doesn’t just reward the largest and most tested programs in lieu of smaller, sometimes newer, and even untested efforts at innovation. I’d like to pose this same question to the philanthropic sector.

How does innovation get funded and are we ok with the way it currently works?

Everybody knows that these are tough times for nonprofits and even tougher times for new nonprofits, IssueLab among them. We frequently hear from foundations that they are only supporting their existing grantees or that they aren't currently accepting proposals from organizations they don’t already know. (A recent online discussion about grantwriting at Charity Channel only underscored the fact that we are hardly alone in this experience.) It’s not that I don’t understand the pressures foundations are under but if they aren’t going to fund newcomers for the next two years how exactly will innovation get funded? And what sorts of innovative projects will simply disappear because they don't have the necessary funds to continue their work?

The difficulty in even introducing new ideas to potential funders reflects what I think are two conflicting values at work here. Foundations (and the government) want to support innovation but at the same time they place enormous value on legitimacy. We see this everyday in the work that we do at IssueLab. One of our core missions is to build visibility for the work of smaller nonprofits. There is no shortage of great research coming from organizations that maybe produce one or two reports a year. But these reports don’t get the kind of search engine rankings, graphic treatment, traffic, or audience that are too often confused with legitimate research.

Anyone who has ever read anything about job training programs knows the critical role that legitimacy plays in the vicious cycle of poverty. If you don’t look the part you don’t get the job and if you don’t get the job you will never have the resources to look the part. The second nasty thing about legitimacy is of course the question of access. Organizations and individuals who lack legitimacy also lack access. And in the case of funding innovation, they simply lack access to funding opportunities and to exposure for their ideas. At IssueLab we spend a great deal of time actively searching for research from smaller organizations. It’s key to the work we do and it’s why our collection can include research from a small after-school media project alongside research from the MacArthur Foundation. What will foundations and the Office of Social Innovation do to identify innovative projects?

What are the equivalent measures in the sector for judging the legitimacy of organizations? Other funders, name recognition, buzz, scale, earned income revenue, the ability to measure results and impact? How many innovative startup projects and organizations can claim all these measures? And will they have access to either the Office of Social Innovation or to ever scarcer foundation funding?

If as a sector we don't answer these questions, I am afraid we won't even know what we're missing!

(Image provided under a cc license by General Wesc)

Numbers vs. Humans

2009-06-15T14:45:00.006-05:00

The good news is, you don't have to choose. Much of the recent discussion about the use of individual stories as the best way of evoking emotion and effectively representing a cause has gotten my attention. It's my take that stories are a big part of telling a nonprofit's story, but that adding data, numbers and statistics tells it even better.

I completely agree with the fact that people don't donate to an organization, they donate to a cause. Still, there are ways to make great arguments for and elicit powerful emotional responses to a cause that are not rooted in a protagonist, a personal struggle, or vivid imagery.

In a recent training for Network For Good, Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies argued that numbers and data often stand in the way of making an emotional connection with supporters. Surely we all feel for the polar bear clinging to the last floe of ice, and even more so the pleading eyes of a hungry child. But what about us nonprofits that don't have a strong narrative to make our case? Better yet, what about that supporter out there who is much more affected by numbers, percentages or a shocking look at the bigger picture?

Even organizations that have clear service-oriented messages who could rely on the use of images and individual characters sometimes choose to mix up their messaging with important statistics and verbal cues to reel in supporters.

For example, the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago balances human interest photos with a good load of numbers to convey the desperate need for its work in the community. To me, knowing that Catholic Charities provides food, clothing and shelter to more than 10,000 people each month is just as persuasive as seeing the face of a person who needs this help. In fact these two pieces of information mutually support each other, giving me a clearer picture of both what Catholic Charities does and what the need is in the local community.

Another organization that uses data to tell its story is the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board. Un- and underemployment have significant effects on a variety of social issues in that city, but the PWIB lets the research speak for itself and the root problem at hand: “40% of all Philadelphians in the labor force have incomes below the poverty level.” An astonishing number that runs no risk of putting the audience to sleep.

Whether considering a website, email appeal or simply a supporter update – keep in mind that there's power in numbers – and that numbers too can tell a story!

For further reading on how to put your numbers to work for you, see this recent IMPACTMAX post on “Social Math” and relating the unfamiliar to the familiar.

2009-06-04T11:16:00.015-05:00

Given the nature of what we do here at IssueLab -- archiving and disseminating research created by others -- well, let's just say copyright is one of our biggest issues!

Most of the research that is shared through IssueLab carries what seems to be a crystal chandelier clear "all rights reserved" notice. We've all seen this copyright tag-line on gazillions of web sites right? Get this: it doesn't mean anything. Truly, it's simply restating the obvious.

Copyright occurs the minute you put pen to paper. You write it, you own it -- all of it. In other words, you hold the rights to how your work is or isn't used/reused. Now, "all rights reserved" does have that out-loud-and-in-your-face "you better not!" quality to it, but let's think about those three words in that particular combination for just a minute.

Putting your written work out there in the interest of sharing and then telling the people you are sharing with, "you do anything with this information and you are in big trouble", well..., it's sort of a mixed message, no? Think about what you really want to get out of sharing your work. Maybe you want to make sure that you are credited. Or that your work is cited correctly. Or you want your work to be part of a discourse or collaborative effort.

There is a way to safeguard your work, clearly inform others of just how they can use it, and share it worry-free: Creative Commons (CC) licensing. We push CC licensing because of its granular nature and its ease of comprehension on both sides of rights notification.

"With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit -- and only on the conditions you specify." -- Creative Commons, "License Your Work"

Now, does "Copyright 2009 Me. All rights reserved." convey sharing? Does the word "collaborate" come to mind when you read that sentence? Do you really want the information you hold to go no further than you holding the information? If you answered "no" to any of these questions please consider Creative Commons licensing. It's definitely a step in the right direction.

Happy sharing!

Interpreting Research

2009-06-02T13:52:00.005-05:00

Interpreting Research Studies by the Guttmacher Institute
I often hear, and struggle with, the question: What constitutes research? In all cases the work in IssueLab's archive is data-driven and includes citations, but beyond that we leave decisions on the work's validity up to the end-user. Different people have different standards. So while a report may cut it for a high school student's term paper, that same report may be dismissed as unfounded dreck by a professional researcher.

I found the brief, "Interpreting Research Studies" by Guttmacher Institute to be a great resource on this very question. Overall the Guttmacher Institute does an exemplary job of balancing rigorous research reports with briefs, fact sheets, and mixed media. This specific piece is a quick four pages of clearly-written guidelines on standards for research in the social sciences. It guides the reader through a series a questions one should consider. These questions are:

What makes the study important?
Do the findings make sense?
Who conducted the research and wrote the report?
Who published the report?
Did the researcher select an appropriate group for study?
If comparison groups are used, how similar are they?
What has changed since the information was collected?
Are the methods appropriate to the research purpose?
Does the study establish causation?
Is the time frame long enough to identify an impact?
Could the data be biased as a result of poor research design?
Are the results statistically significant?

The questions I ask myself as I consider work for inclusion in IssueLab are usually less extensive. Do the authors demonstrate where they got their information? Will a reader have some idea where to turn for further information?

What standards you judge research by are not nearly as important as being aware of the need for standards in the first place -- identifying your needs as a consumer of research, and then developing criteria to make sure those needs are met.

I see a lot of work in the nonprofit community on information sharing that focuses on the sharing aspect. How to reach new audiences, how to use social networks, how to tweetblogfacepost. As nonprofits tailor their work for this ever-changing landscape, it's useful to be revisit our expectations for the information half of information sharing.

Research Summary: A Tale of Two Colleges

2009-05-21T13:51:00.005-05:00

This is the first installment in a series of research summaries meant to tease out some key points, facts, or figures from interesting nonprofit research.

A Tale of Two Colleges (2004)
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
http://www.issuelab.org/research/tale_of_two_colleges_a

This case study delves into the information and technology challenges facing a community college district in California between 1999-2002. Written in a clear, user-friendly tone and format, it traces the evolution of two district departments, Institutional Research (IR) and Information Technology (IT). Besides detailing the chronological events which transpired that are particular to this case, several themes are isolated and extrapolated that might be useful to other districts in similar situations. These themes are:

Internal and External Demands for Data: Outside policy changes introduced needs for new data to fulfill new standards of accountability. Meanwhile, internal data collection needs and techniques were often inadequate.
Centralization and Decentralization: Problems stemming from organizational structure and institutional politics caused rapid changes that made progress difficult. Much resistance stemmed from an established distrust of the IT and IR departments.
Data Reliability and Attitudes Toward Validation: A track-record of unreliable data affected even the IR department, who displayed initial apathy toward striving for data accuracy. Changing internal attitudes was a first step. It was more difficult to change attitudes throughout the rest of the college community, especially after failure implementing an institution-wide comprehensive Student Information System.
Access & Control: Members of the IR and IT departments had trouble accessing the data they needed to implement their ultimate, broad changes.
Continuity and Leadership: Several specific technology projects were dropped when their proponents stopped working at the college. High turnover made momentum difficult and had the opposite effect of inertia. Also, the resignation of the chancellor threw the question of technology as a top priority into doubt.
Development of a Culture of Inquiry and Technology: Focus on a culture of information is key to creating an environment that values inquiry, learning, and improvement. When expectations conflict with barriers of access or a culture of resistance technological implementation becomes much more difficult.

To me, the best part about this research was the obvious consideration for their audience. By adding to the narrative by repackaging their information into themes and timelines, and by explicitly detailing the possible uses for the information, multiple points of engagement are offered. These multiple points of engagement make it easy for a broad range of readers to find and take the specific information they need from the case study. And let's face it--if that doesn't happen, then what's the point?

[picture courtesy of izzymunchted]

Three Steps to Making Your Research Report More Usable

2009-05-20T16:40:00.015-05:00

Policymakers, journalists, nonprofit practitioners and activists rely on nonprofit research to do their jobs. Are you giving them what they need?

Your research provides valuable insight into critical social issues and in the right hands, this information can be influential at many levels - from creating advocates to shaping policy. To generate the biggest impact from the knowledge shared, your research report should be engaging to the various audiences it will touch, and not simply to a narrow group of analysts or academics. Today, a very wide range of readers engages with nonprofit research, not only because of a growing desire to learn and educate about causes individuals support, but also because Web 2.0 and initiatives like IssueLab have made it increasingly easy to locate, access and share research.

So here are three easy things to keep in mind when you are planning and designing your next research report.

1. Make your research usable, and re-usable. We understand the time and effort that goes into creating a thorough research report. Still, choosing a restrictive copyright can discourage readers from sharing or using your information - even for a good cause. Certainly you want to be credited for your work and cited properly, but there are copyright options that also allow your audience to use the information in a wide variety of ways and even build upon it to create original research. An easy way to apply non-restrictive but legitimate copyrights to a document is using Creative Commons. IssueLab encourages its contributing organizations to use Creative Commons, because it "increases sharing and improves collaboration."

Example: The Committee for Economic Development licenses most of its work with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. This means that the work can be easily distributed, downloaded and shared, as long as others mention and refer back to the original author. Other Creative Commons licenses allow for others to remix, change and build upon your work to varying degrees - for commercial or non-commercial uses. It's up to you!

2. Leave Them Asking for More. The research abstract can be a great way to generate further interest in the entire body of work, but really it should tell a journalist on deadline everything they need to know. Abstracts that leave out vital information - or are too long to read quickly - can actually deter readers from downloading the report to learn more. There's a fine line between cliffhanger and information overload, but those who are truly interested in reading your report will ultimately do it when they have the time. So, distill valuable information, make the abstract comprehensive and quotable, but don't just copy and paste the executive summary.

Example: Sentencing Project does great work, and knows how to summarize. The abstract for "Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity" is clear, concise, and hits the mark. It conveys important statistics, gives research results and recommendations, and still makes us want to read more. Audiences finding this report through Sentencing Project's Website, through IssueLab, or any other way online will know exactly (much more than abstractly) what the research is saying.

3. Get the facts out there. Once your report is released, go through it and extract short phrases, quotes, and statistics that can easily be shared online. Micro-blogging (sending brief text updates) has become an increasingly important skill and tool for organizations that wish to keep constituents informed. Sure, condensing a great research report in 140 characters is not easy, but stating a simple fact is. You can also create graphic summaries or pull charts that can be posted on Facebook or displayed alongside the abstract. It's a great way to generate interest in your work without boring everyone with: "A new research report on..." Lastly, always make sure you include a direct link to your report listing page or .pdf - nothing worse than not finding the source of good information!

Example: The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) frequently shares reports with fans on Facebook. Simply sharing a link to the report page on CEPR's website creates a post that appears in fans' newsfeed as well as on the CEPR Page wall. Not only is the post widely visible, but it includes report title, an eye-catching graphic, and an interesting statistic. By extracting different "micromedia" from your research, you can create content that is easily passed along and organically spread throughout social media environments.

Connecting the Dots - Interdisciplinary Thinking In the Third Sector

2009-05-20T10:59:00.010-05:00

One of the reasons we started IssueLab was to help connect the dots. What does this mean? Well, we wanted for instance to connect the dots between research being done on senior housing with research being done on issues facing older LGBTQ folks. We wanted to connect the dots between practitioners developing after-school programs using video with researchers who are studying digital literacy. And we wanted to connect the dots between advocates using one kind of policy intervention with other activists using a similar intervention in service to a totally different social cause.

For the most part that is exactly what we do. Whether it's through cross-referencing research on the Issuelab web site or for instance disseminating research about felony disenfranchisement to researchers focused on open source voting technologies, we are pretty busy connecting dots.

But we have also identified some rather persistent structural reasons (and some very entrenched psycho-social reasons) for why people don't want their derned dots connected! Some of this is certainly about the ways that networks work and the tendency for "birds of a feather to flock together". (This was only reinforced by John Kelly of Morningside Analytics's recent presentation at NTen. MA does some amazing visualizations of how networks of bloggers do and do not overlap in the topics they discuss but also in the language they use to discuss those topics.)

But I think it's about more than just the structure of networks, it may also be about (and these are just theories mind you):

The structure of foundations, which for the most part continue to organize their grant making along program area lines. Often times when we talk to foundations about the work that IssueLab does there is confusion around exactly how they might support a project (or research) that crosses over multiple program areas.
The seeming lack of a professional identity for policy analysts and nonprofit researchers that extends beyond the specific issue they work on. This means that they most often circulate in issue specific silos and have very few venues to share more general questions about methodology or funding for research.
The possible bias that tools like Twitter and StumbleUpon present in connecting individuals with other individuals based on keywords. Obviously these same tools offer real potential for cross-pollination but you have to be pretty intentional about it.
The necessary exercise of defining our audiences pretty narrowly when we start communications, networking, or marketing efforts. This is of course a critical piece of any successful communications practice but it also has its consequences. What if we made cross-pollination a goal as well?

We could go on and on with examples of how this all gets articulated -- affinity groups, information clearinghouses, sector wide portals organized by issue areas, or even IssueLab's own targeted dissemination efforts to niche groups. But the point is that there is a lot of talk in the sector about cross-sector collaboration, coupled with a clear understanding of the interconnectedness of social problems and social solutions, and yet we continue to travel the same network paths over and over again.

It all begs the question -- does inter-disciplinary thinking even matter? There is no doubt that we all need to be part of smaller, niche groups in order to thrive and function but at IssueLab we continue to believe that we also have an enormous amount to learn from people working on related (and sometimes even unrelated) issues and that we have an enormous amount to gain from cross-pollinating our ideas. But what is the right venue for this and whose responsibility is it? Are tools like Twitter helping or hindering this work? What role can foundations play in facilitating these kinds of collaboration? Can/do nonprofit professionals who carry their skill set from one cause to another play this role? Are they encouraged to do so? Or are intermediaries like IssueLab, consulting firms, or bloggers by default taking on this role?

What do you think?

[picture courtesy of antares]