How Should Nonprofit Groups Make Business Decisions? Plus More: Friday’s Roundup
By Maria Di Mento
Senior Editor
May 28, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
- On the blog Social Citizens, Kristin Ivie, of the Case Foundation, discusses why it is important for nonprofit organizations to make decisions based on both mission and money. She says that organizations that maintain a balance between pragmatism and idealism are the ones that get the best results.
- On the blog Philantopic, Cynthia Bailie, director of the Foundation Center-Cleveland, argues that when too many nonprofit organizations are trying to accomplish the same mission, the infrastructure to support them weakens. She says that communities would be better served if nonprofit groups collaborated more.
- Will the financial crisis and spiraling government debt in developed countries mark the end of the “brief golden age of aid” to fight poverty and disease in the developing world, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, the co-authors of Philanthrocapitalism, ask on their blog.
- Stanley Katz, a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, says on the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society’s blog that America is now witnessing an era of the “active, immediatist, and pragmatic foundations.”
- On the blog A Small Change, Jason Dick writes about the book The Life You Can Save, in which the author, Peter Singer, suggests that people cut back on things like coffee and bottled water and donate the money to organizations that seek to fight global poverty. Mr. Dick, a college fund raiser in Redmond, Wash., argues that giving up luxuries isn’t going to solve any problem. He also says that donors will respond more generously when they have an opportunity to understand what their giving can mean.
- Nonprofit organizations should synchronize their Twitter accounts to their MySpace pages to freshen up often idle pages, Heather Mansfield, a social-media consultant writes on her blog, Nonprofit Tech 2.0. While traffic to MySpace has slowed considerably, she says, the site still has 57 million visitors each month, and the age, race, and class demographics of people on MySpace users is different than that on Facebook and Twitter.
- Finding the right job after serving as a Kiva fellow took some time in the midst of the recession, Teresa Dunbar writes on The Kiva Chronicles, a blog hosted by Social Edge. Ms. Dunbar started a food cart in San Francisco serving her favorite Cambodian and Filipino desserts before she eventually found a job with another microfinance organization, Oikocredit USA.
