Three Nonprofit e-Newsletters to Subscribe To and Learn From. My e-newsletter is by far the driving force behind Nonprofit Tech 2.0. Those 27,000+ subscribers produce more return on investment (ROI) in terms of bringing in new clients and webinar attendees than my 600,000+ Twitter followers and 40,000+ Facebook fans combined. And even though a recent report pointed out that email open and donor response are dropping in the nonprofit sector, I can’t help but wonder if current (yet old) e-newsletter design trends have a lot to do with the results. Most e-newsletters today seem to be stuck in the design best practices of 2006 and take little account for the rapid rise of social media and the fact that the number one activity on smartphones today is reading email. 1.
Top of e-Newsletter: 1. Middle of e-Newsletter: News content that can be shared on Facebook and Twitter. Bottom of e-Newsletter: 1. 2. Top of e-Newsletter: 1. Middle of e-Newsletter: 1. Bottom of e-Newsletter: 1. 3. Top of e-Newsletter: 1. Middle of e-Newsletter: 1. 3 Questions To Ask When Evaluating Your Grantmaking Initiative | Philanthropy411 Blog. If your foundation is developing a new grantmaking program or initiative, it’s critical to concurrently develop plans for how you will evaluate success.
But before jumping into methodologies and measurements, think about these three questions: What you want to know? Who needs to know it? And How will the findings be used? This will help you focus your evaluation design and scope. 1 – What do you want to know? 2 – Who needs to know it? 3 – How will evaluation findings be used? Kris Putnam-Walkerly is a philanthropy expert and consultant. Posted by Kris Putnam-Walkerly © Kris Putnam-Walkerly and Philanthropy411, 2013. Like this: Like Loading... Understanding Donor Behavior: Insights from FirstGiving 2007 - 2010. East Africa Fellows Program. Hundreds of NGOs exist in East Africa, and millions of dollars in foreign assistance reach the region each year, yet many are still living in poverty. 75% of East Africa’s population lives in rural areas, most of whom are smallholder farmers living on less than $2 per day.
In urban areas, 60% of the population live in slums and lack basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity. The next phase of development in East Africa must take a drastically different direction, a direction guided by a new generation of East African leaders who are willing to challenge broken systems, who possess an unwavering moral compass, and who can see opportunity where others see only challenges. Acumen’s East Africa Fellows Program is providing the opportunity for emerging leaders to receive world-class training and collaborate with like-minded individuals so that they can be the change that East Africa needs.
The Push for an Enabling Legal Environment for Philanthropy. Various Foundations and Trusts participated in a forum hosted by the Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF) on the 20th November 2012 to support and advocate for the proposed Public Benefits Organization Bill. This is a new bill to provide for the enactment by parliament of a new act for the formation, operation and growth of CSOs; to establish a regulatory and institutional framework within which civil society can conduct their affairs and for such other connected purposes. While CSOs in Kenya are diverse in nature, there are also many registration and regulatory regimes for CSOs in Kenya, making it difficult for effective legal and statutory compliance and accountability for CSOs. The East Africa Association of Grantmakers has been instrumental in the development and advocacy for the Proposed Bill representing interests of Foundation and Trusts as a member of the CSO Reference Group; an umbrella body of Civil Society Organizations formed to push for its enactment.
Like this: Meet The Newest Generation Of Philanthropists. UpliftingProj : @EAAG_Africa Happy Saturday! Oxfam Dips Toes into Impact Investing with a $100 Million Fund. By Melissa Ip on 10 Oct 2012 / 0 Comment The Small Enterprise Impact Investing Fund (SEIIF), an initiative of Oxfam, the City of London Corporation, and Symbiotics, an investment firm specializing in microfinance and small and medium enterprise (SME) impact funds, officially launches with the first $1 million loan to a Mongolian machinery and equipment leasing company Xac Leasing.
The SEIIF will make “impact investments” in SMEs in emerging markets. Since its inception in July this year, the City of London Corporation has invested $500,000 in the fund, with further investments from Oxfam, Symbiotics, and private and institutional investors. The target size of the SEIIF is $100 million after three years, which will be invested in a portfolio of debt and equity instruments, targeting those with low risk, high impact profiles. “We are determined to prove to the investment industry that its scale and influence means it could play a significant role in eradicating poverty. EAAG_Africa : 1. #SaveOurHeritageKE while...
Happiness Increases From Giving When There's A Social Connection, Study Shows. Giving makes us feel happy, and giving to someone we actually know makes us even happier, a new study suggests. New research published in the Journal of Happiness and Development shows that social giving -- where you're giving to a person who you know, or your giving leads to a social connection -- seems to foster more emotional benefits than giving without the social aspect.
"While additional factors other than social connection likely influence the happiness gained from pro-social spending, our findings suggest that putting the social in pro-social is one way to transform good deeds into good feelings," the team concludes. The study included three different experiments. For one of them, 68 young men and women were surveyed on their general levels of happiness. Then, the researchers had all the study participants report their life satisfaction, happiness and positive and negative affect using different scales. For some health benefits of gratitude, click through the slideshow below. Incentives & Opportunities for Scaling the ‘Impact Sourcing’ Sector. Larry Kramer: On Collaborating with Other Foundations. Charity Navigator: Oreos and Charity – Teaching Kids To Be Philanthropists. What could be more daunting than trying to teach the concept of philanthropy to a bunch of 5 year olds?
Having to go after the parents that work at Kraft and who had the kids make their own Oreo cookies! This was the conundrum I was up against a few weeks back when my child’s kindergarten teacher extended an invitation for all the parents to come in and talk about our careers. Considering what I was up against, it went great. First, taking a cue from some lesson plans I found online, I introduced the word philanthropy. We talked about how it means to share your time, talent and treasures for the common good. All the kids got a chance to answer the question “I’m going to be a philanthropist because I’m going to …” They did a great job and had some thoughtful answers.
Next, I read them the book Strega Nona’s Harvest. Before I left, I gave the teacher some handouts to stick in each kid’s backpack. How to be a coffee bean: a conversation on social impact investment with East African philanthropists. Bathylle Missika ‘My dad taught me that there are three kinds of people in this life: carrots, eggs and coffee beans. Carrots are orange flashy and hard, eggs are fragile and have to be held in one’s hand cautiously while coffee beans are small but strong.
Life goes sometimes gets tough, like we are being put in boiling water. The showy orange, hard carrots become all mushy, the eggs get harder while the coffee beans remain unchanged, just plain and simple. But they turned the boiling water brown. This story was told by Sitawa Wafula, a young woman who won the youth philanthropy award last week at the East African Association of Grantmakers (EAAG) annual conference in Mombasa.
I had been invited by EAAG to speak about ‘the future of social impact investment in East Africa’. First of all, I highlighted that social impact investment in East Africa is still in its infancy. Then why isn’t it more widespread? Second, the philanthropic sector has to admit it just cannot do it alone. Think. Speak. Tweet. Like. Share. FREELY. Taking a stand while finding a position: Africa’s evolving philanthropic discourse. Jenny Hodgson Africa, as we are often told, is rising. The continent has been dubbed the “next economic powerhouse”, its countries “lions on the move” which include six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies. With this growth has come the arrival of a new set of African foundations on the philanthropic scene, which is becoming both more vibrant and more diverse.
New networks – such as the African Grantmakers Network and the African Philanthropy Forum – have also emerged to support the fast-growing sector. The rapid changes in the African philanthropy scene were brought home to me recently when I attended the East Africa Grantmakers Association conference in Mombasa, Kenya. I had last attended an EAAG conference in 2010 in Nairobi. Fast forward three years and this year’s EAAG conference was back Kenya, this time Mombasa. Philanthropy, or the use of private resources for public good, has and will always been fraught with tensions and contradictions. EAAG_Africa : Creatively saving our elephants... Process Matters: How Inclusion Can Be a Feedback Game Changer. [Guest Post by Patricia Dorsher is the Feedback Labs Launch Editor at Ashoka and James E.
Jernberg Public Service Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Feedback Labs is a consortium of like-minded organizations, including Ashoka and Ushahidi, who are committed to citizen engagement in the fields of aid, philanthropy, and development. A previous version of this post was originally published on Feedback Labs on July 31, 2013.] In feedback loops, not all mechanisms are created equal. You can get useful and accurate information by increasing citizen participation in feedback giving, but the process of eliciting information may be just as important as the data itself. In a study recently added to the growing bank of literature on Feedback Labs, Kathy S. Participation is distinguished as “efforts to increase public input oriented primarily to the content of programs and policies.” Practical Applications.
The Consequences of Impact Investing on Philanthropy | Mitchell Kutney. As the investment culture expands from simply the bottom line of profit to an increased focus on the triple bottom line (social, environment and profit), philanthropy will continue to be an essential catalyst in unlocking the potential of impact investing. This is because these game-changing funding models may not achieve the necessary scale to produce a profit without some initial subsidies.
In this new climate, it is difficult at times to keep up with the jargon and modern nomenclature. Many articles interchangeably refer to fledgling terms, such as venture-philanthropy, mission related investing, blended value finance, impact investing and social finance, etc. Also, because of the proximity of these terms, they are often treated as instruments of philanthropy, when they are much better represented in the investment domain. What is of concern is that these terms are often also used to describe "new ways of being philanthropic," which is where the discourse goes off track. ONE Act a Week: Nominate your favorite local nonprofit for a feature on the ONE Blog. Action: 43. Time: 15 minutes. Level of difficulty: Moderate Here on the ONE Blog, we love to spotlight small nonprofits and organizations that are helping to reduce poverty in the developing world. Not only does it expose their work to ONE’s audience of activists and create a little publicity, it also helps generate much-needed buzz around the their issues.
Arnel Eugenio performing a dentistry procedure in Haiti. So here’s a chance for you to pay it forward. Nominate the nonprofit in the form below. Good luck, and we’ll be checking the ONE Blog next Monday. Africa: Should Access to the Internet Be a Human Right? | Tech World Africa. International News: Government announces “overhaul” of payroll giving. Tim Lehmann: Rebels Without a Cause? Beyond Heroic Social Entrepreneurship in Davos. The grand narrative of social entrepreneurship is everywhere: heroic individuals build innovative solutions to transform the texture of the world's social fabric. What have we learned in a decade of emergent debate on the topic?
What are the effects of a topic nobody, be it policy makers, professors, students, or parents, can avoid touching upon one way or another? A decade ago the topic was eclectically discussed, infusing small circles of dispersed professional communities such as development experts, nonprofit managers, and small elites of foundation visionaries and its beneficiaries. Today professional communities, career trajectories, and financial and political resources navigate around the topic. Social entrepreneurship diffused through a multiplicity of linguistic labels.
The innocence of social entrepreneurship, however, is over. How and where will and should these discussions take place in a decade or so in the future? Why Impact Investing Is An Emerging Paradigm Shift In Philanthropy. Two-Thirds of College Kids Think They’re Going to Change the World. But they’re cynical about the priorities of others at the same time.
Writer Peg Streep is writing a book about the millennial generation and she routinely sprinkles great data into her posts at Psychology Today. Recently she linked to at study by Net Impact that surveyed currently-enrolled college students and college-graduates across three generations: millennials, gen xers, and baby boomers. The questions focused on life goals and work priorities. They found significant differences between students and college graduates, as well as interesting generational differences. First, students have generally higher demands on the world; they are as likely or more likely than workers to say that a wide range of accomplishments are “important or essential to [their] happiness:” In particular, students are more likely than workers to say it is important or essential to have a prestigious career with which they can make an impact.
Wealth is less important to students than prestige and impact. On the Ground at SOCAP. Nothing But Nets Campaign. Welcome to Forbes. Peter Buffett Is Right to Call for Philanthropic Change - Opinion. By Phil Buchanan When Peter Buffett took to the pages of The New York Times to lament what he calls a “crisis of imagination” in philanthropy—a failure to envisage a way for our society to function that puts an end to what he calls a “perpetual poverty machine,” he ignited a quite a debate. Mr. Buffett, chairman of the NoVo Foundation and son of Warren Buffett, critiqued our capitalist system, while being careful to emphasize that he is not calling for an end to it.
Sitting in meetings with people who are “searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left” has left him frustrated, he writes. Like many others, I have real critiques of Mr. First, my criticisms: I question his understanding of the nonprofit world and where philanthropy money goes. He cites the $316-billion given in 2012 (without acknowledging that this remains below the 2007 peak) and writes that “philanthropy has become the 'it’ vehicle to level the playing field.”
EAST AFRICAN PHILANTHROPISTS HONORED. Social enterprise training – the facts | Social Enterprise Network | Guardian Professional. 'Strategic Philanthropy' Shifts Too Much Power to Donors | Pablo Eisenberg. How to help someone with mental illness: depression, bipolar, anxiety. Hunderclap: Go Orange for No Kid Hungry! Economic and Social Council. How To Increase Employee Engagement Through Volunteering. SOCIAL JUSTICE PHILANTHROPY: WHY SHOULD IT MATTER? Defining Corporate Philanthropy - Double the Donation. Syrian Refugee Relief Fund. Your Mark On The World. EAAG_Africa : 3. How much can an elephant... Policy Guide to Scaling Social Innovation 2013. Why Saving is Not a Luxury. From Foster Care to PhD. Is Philanthropy Ready For System Change? EAAG_Africa : 6. I miss you - Nakumiss...
Investors' Circle - Our Funding Process. EAAG_Africa : 5. Sum Ting Wong... Insights And Credit Suisse Reveal Results Of New Study Examining Philanthropists' Approaches To Tackling Global Poverty. So your nonprofit wants to start using social media? China’s tribe of billionaire philanthropists growing. Gerry Salole said a good reason to set up a foundation is guilt – or did he? Why Profits, Entrepreneurship, And Social Good Are Not Incompatible. 5 Ways to Build a Year Round Fundraising Community | StayClassy Blog. EAAG_Africa : 4. It takes all of us... Media Cause | 5 Steps to Set Up Google Analytics For Nonprofits - Media Cause. Global development: How to add billions of dollars to GDP. Cajabamba Market - Intel For Change. Philanthropy as a Business Model? East Africa attracting more venture capital. The 60 Minute Plan for Increasing Your Fundraising by 100% this Year.
Are emotive appeals effective in persuading people to give to charity? | Voluntary Sector Network | Guardian Professional. 25 Years of Conservation. Uniting East Africa Through Music | Dr Nicholas Kimani. International Day of Charity - 5 September. Innovative Cause Marketing: The Justice League Presents 'Darkness & Light' How To Plan & Manage Your Next Project | Crowdvance Blog. The 850 Days Question: Are We Doing All We Can to Save Women's and Children's Lives? Champion the #childrenofsyria. The Forbes 400 Summit On Philanthropy: Change The World. Meaning and Money Intersect at Social Capital Markets Conference | Business. Careers - Company - Blackbaud. Gen Y Engages in Social Change. Plastic Bank: Harvesting Waste Plastic to Reduce Poverty Through 3D Re-purpose Center for Social Plastic & Ocean Bound Plastic.
How to Build the Perfect Philanthropy. Q&A: Jon Miller and Lucy Parker on Big Business Driving Social Change | TechnoServe - Business Solutions to Poverty. International Day of Charity: 5 Ways to Get Involved.