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Tuesday, 24 August 2010 13:15 |
By Diana Hsu.
::image::I’ve been dreaming about vegetable gardens lately. So what if the wildflower seeds I planted in my window boxes look more like alfalfa sprouts? Or if all of my plants have kitten-bite marks on them? No matter! To balance out my concrete-filled New York life, I like to keep my apartment an oasis of luscious, hearty green. I drool at the thought of a little plot of dirt somewhere, a place to let my inner gardener run wild. How about you? Maybe your thumbs are a bit... |
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Monday, 23 August 2010 09:56 |
By Jeremy MacKechnie.
::image::Almost everyone has felt the effects of the less than stellar economic performance in the first half of this year. This is no less true for the majority of nonprofit organizations as seen in GuideStar's report on The Effect of The Economy on the Nonprofit Sector for the first half of 2010 released last week.
Nonprofit organizations have been particularly affected this year on two fronts. With unemployment rates barely moving and the number of people coming off... |
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Thursday, 19 August 2010 10:31 |
By Put Barber, who most recently reviewed the book Brandraising.
::image::Let's say you're thinking about your work—maybe changing jobs, maybe finding one—and you'd like what you do for a living to be interesting, pay enough, and, at the end of the day, make a positive difference in the world. Sounds like you might be looking for some sort of a job in public service – working for federal, state or local government, a nonprofit organization, or a for-profit firm that’s involved in some... |
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Tuesday, 17 August 2010 16:42 |
By Celeste Hamilton.
::image::When I was little, I didn’t really understand the theme song from the iconic American TV show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. I didn’t get that the line “Won’t you be my neighbor?” was an invitation for me to share more of my candy and knock on playmates’ doors with less hesitancy. But years later, the message stuck. I can now recite those song lines verbatim, and believe that while his cardigans were corny, what he had to say wasn’t. Mr. Rogers got it... |
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Thursday, 12 August 2010 08:17 |
By Amy Potthast.
::image::I was talking with a friend in her mid-20s recently who was feeling a lot of pressure from friends and family to name her career destination.
The problem with that is, if she isn’t exactly sure what role she’d like to play, or what issues she’d like to tackle, or even what sector she’d like to work in, it’s impossible for her to pick a career destination out of thin air – or at least, it’s not wise. She could randomly pick a career goal that isn’t... |
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Thursday, 12 August 2010 08:17 |
By Amy Potthast.
::image::I was talking with a friend in her mid-20s recently who was feeling a lot of pressure from friends and family to name her career destination.
The problem with that is, if she isn’t exactly sure what role she’d like to play, or what issues she’d like to tackle, or even what sector she’d like to work in, it’s impossible for her to pick a career destination out of thin air – or at least, it’s not wise. She could randomly pick a career goal that isn’t... |
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Thursday, 05 August 2010 11:42 |
By Jeremy MacKechnie.
::image::The nonprofit world is abuzz this week with the news that 40 U.S. billionaires have signed on to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. That's some serious cash and might make you think twice about the benefit of your own donation to your favorite local cause (by you, I mean a non-billionaire like myself).
While some of the money will go directly to nonprofit organizations, the majority will end up in the private foundations that the donors started themselves, like The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and will then be funneled into other nonprofits through grants or used to support the foundations' programmatic work, like the Gates' recent $10 billion commitment to research, develop and deliver vaccines to the world's poorest countries.
With all these billionaires' names attached to foundation giving, you would think that this represents the single largest source of private contributions to the nonprofit sector. But, guess what? Individual donations (like yours) currently make up 75% of U.S. philanthropy while foundations make up only 12%. Collectively, individual donations are more than six times larger than those of our friends in the billionaires' club.
Are you as surprised as I was? The power of individual donations, no matter what size, is real. Take the Hope for Haiti Now benefit concert for example. In just a few days, people donated over $57 million, mainly through small text based donations of ten or twenty dollars each. Our own donation appeal has raised over $280,000 (and counting!) with the average donation size being just $30.
We can't all be billionaires, but we can all make meaningful donations, no matter how big or small, that become a powerful source of support to the nonprofits that we believe in. To find more information about United States giving trends, please visit The Foundation Center's website. |
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Tuesday, 03 August 2010 09:19 |
By Celeste Hamilton, who most recently blogged about the one-day film event One Day on Earth.
::image::I’ve been catching up on documentaries lately and have been thinking a lot about what an awesome job a documentary filmmaker has. Which leads me to contemplating the “how†of actually becoming such a filmmaker. Where do you start? Where do you get the money to fund your film? And how do you get the word once its finished? Luckily, The Good Pitch and SnagFilms are around to... |
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Friday, 30 July 2010 09:24 |
By Joanna Eng.
::image::As you may have heard, we're working on a new version of the site! If you're curious, we're showing off some of the changes and documenting the process on the Idealist.org Development Blog.
Here are a few recent posts: Sneak Peek: Personal Profile: See a sample of what Kermit the Frog's profile might look like on the next version of Idealist.
We're Listening: Learn how we're making it easier for people who administer organizations on Idealist.
Sneak Peek: New Look and... |
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Thursday, 29 July 2010 09:02 |
By Put Barber, editor of the Nonprofit FAQ.
::image::Two months ago, we called U.S. nonprofits' attention to the deadline for checking in with the IRS by filing a Form 990. New rules passed in 2006 require nearly every exempt organization (houses of worship are the exception) to do this; previously, only organizations with more than $25,000 in annual revenues needed to do it.
An organization that misses three years in a row will be automatically removed from the list of approved tax-exempt... |
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Tuesday, 27 July 2010 09:24 |
By Diana Hsu.
::image::For someone who spends eight-plus hours a day in front of a laptop, working at an organization with an Internet domain for a name, I am really, embarrassingly, behind on my current events. I usually make an effort to scan through a few major headlines, but this obviously has its flaws (I offer you two words: Balloon Boy).
Today, I’m thanking my lucky stars that I’ve been clued in to two awesome sites that tell the other stories – the ones that we... |
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Monday, 26 July 2010 09:02 |
By Jeremy MacKechnie.
::image::Use of social media has surged in the nonprofit sector in the past year, according to the Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report by NTEN, Common Knowledge, and ThePort Network. Most interestingly, social media use is becoming much more varied as organizations commit more staff time and resources to their presence across various social networks.
Facebook headed up the list of most popular social networks with 86% of the 1,173 small to large sized nonprofits... |
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Friday, 23 July 2010 09:21 |
This post by Elena Martín originally appeared in Spanish at Idealistas.org. Thanks to Jeremy MacKechnie for the adaptation.
::image::Spending time volunteering is a great first step in defining and setting goals for your career and it doesn't just have to be a selfless way of supporting a cause that you feel passionately about. If you want to work in the nonprofit sector, it's practically required that you have some volunteer experience, so it's OK to volunteer with your own future best... |
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Wednesday, 21 July 2010 09:13 |
By Diana Hsu.
::image::If you visit our site often, you probably know that we run a series of graduate degree fairs every year. The idea is to bring together prospective students with representatives from all sorts of graduate programs whose graduates go on to serve the public good.
To complement the fairs (or to supplement them, for those who can't make it in person), we have created a series of "degree overviews" – snapshots of several types of graduate programs you may be... |
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Tuesday, 20 July 2010 09:12 |
By Celeste Hamilton.
::image::As I write this post, it's 2:19p.m. in Portland, Oregon. Over the last 24 hours I've played Bananagrams, eaten bulgogi, walked through a rose garden, read a few pages from a novel, wrote a paragraph in my short story, and was introduced to zumba. But what about the rest of the world? What did my friends in Buenos Aires do? Or the Guyanese host family I used to live with when I first started the Peace Corps? On 10/10/10, thanks to One Day on Earth, I'll be able to... |
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Monday, 19 July 2010 09:55 |
By Erin Barnhart.
::image::This past January, in response to the many requests we received from people seeking information on how to volunteer in Haiti following its devastating earthquake, we blogged that one of the best things would-be volunteers could do was donate money to those organizations with trained personnel already in-country and then wait for the situation on the ground to stabilize before seeking to volunteer themselves. We also advised that the work of recovery and rebuilding... |
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Friday, 16 July 2010 10:42 |
By Joanna Eng.
Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows its users to share where they are—down to the specific building, park, business, etc.—with their friends. Users earn points and badges for locations that they frequent, and can even become the Foursquare Mayor if they have "checked in" to that spot the most. For many users, it's like a game (or scavenger hunt?) that helps them explore their city.
So what does all this have to do with nonprofits? At first, I was... |
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Tuesday, 13 July 2010 13:46 |
By Diana Hsu.
::image::One of the biggest changes coming when we launch our new website this year will be how our members—individuals and organizations—will be able to interact with each other. With dynamic new connections soon to be possible on our own site, we thought it might be time to better define the interactions we are hoping to foster across our larger community.
We have profiles on a several sites—including Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others—each with its... |
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Friday, 09 July 2010 09:41 |
By Joanna Eng.
::image::News reports have been pointing to signs that we are finally coming out of this recession, and the numbers on Idealist seem to agree.
In the beginning of 2008, before the economic crisis hit, an average of about 5,000 jobs were posted to Idealist every month. The number of job listings on our site started to drop off in the fall of 2008, and hit a low point in February 2009, when only 2,811 jobs were posted.
But the numbers have been increasing again lately, and in... |
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Tuesday, 06 July 2010 09:35 |
By Put Barber.
::image::"Brandraising" blends fundraising with marketing to outline a new way of thinking about a nonprofit’s communications with the public. Brandraising (a new book by Sarah Durham) is an easy to read, easy to use guide to bringing this new way of thinking to bear on the work of all types of public benefit organizations.
Brandraising (the concept) is building “a strong framework for communication” that rests securely on vision, mission and values – “the core... |
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