Order Free White Papers & Reports Here
Get free White Papers & Reports today by subscribing to Nonprofit Online News and telling us a little more about yourself.
This is a complete list of the available Free White Papers & Reports, with descriptions.
Collections of Articles and Resources:
- A Civil Society Library: Book Reviews and Recommendations
This report compiles 125 book reviews from Nonprofit Online News 2001 – 2006, organized into 29 categories, including Evaluation, Planning, Strategy, Collaboration, Communication & PR, Leadership, Software, and Knowledge & Learning. It also presents three related articles: Our Readers’ Top 30 Books, the Learning Partners Reading List from the Kellogg Foundation, and so that you might contributversion of this list, How to Write a Book in One Year, by Michael Gilbert. - Nonprofit Online News: The Best of 2005
This report compiles 127 of the best resources from Nonprofit Online News in 2005 organized into 44 categories, including Evaluation, Strategy, Leadership, Communication & PR, Software, Community Building, Knowledge & Learning, Collaboration, Planning, and a good number of cross cutting issues. - Nonprofit Online News: The Best of 2004
This report compiles 92 of the best resources from Nonprofit Online News in 2004 organized into 36 categories, including Development, Marketing, Leadership, Strategy, and Regulation. - Nonprofit Online News: The Best of 2003
This report compiles 63 of the best resources from Nonprofit Online News in 2003 organized into 38 categories, including Development, Marketing, Leadership, Strategy, and Regulation. - Nonprofit Online News: The Best of 2002
This report compiles 71 of the best resources from Nonprofit Online News in 2002 organized into 27 categories, including Development, Marketing, Leadership, Technology, and Regulation.
Research Reports:
- Site Analyzer Reports
This one publication includes three reports: (1) The Vitality of Children and Youth Web Sites, (2) The Interactivity of Environmental Web Sites, and (3) The Accessibility of Disabilities Web Sites. - Disconnected: The First Nonprofit Email Survey
This reports the research results of our survey of over 900 nonprofit organizations and their use of email.
Individual Articles:
- The Mission-Resource Matrix
The field of for-profit business consulting has benefited enormously from Bruce Henderson’s development of the Growth-Share Matrix at the Boston Consulting Group in the early Seventies. By mapping market growth rate against relative market share, he created an instant classic that spawned a vast field of useful analysis. But very little of this analysis has benefited civil society organizations or its funders, except for those specific situations where nonprofits are pursuing strict earned income enterprises. Civil society needs an analytical framework of its own. Michael Gilbert proposes the Mission-Resource Matrix as a simple framework for evaluating civil society projects. In this article he starts with a capsule description of the matrix (including a diagram), continues with an exploration of some of its implications, and concludes with seven questions for future development of this tool. - Asking the Wrong Questions
Michael Gilbert has long been frustrated by the technocentrism inherent in most nonprofit technology planning. He jumped at the chance to write about this for N-TEN in January and we’re pleased to share his thinking with you here in the form of a new feature article entitled Asking the Wrong Questions: Challenging Technocentrism in Nonprofit Technology Planning. In this article he looks at three issues: What should planners in general ask? What are nonprofit techies (to the best of his discernment) asking? And how can we fix this (move away from asking technological questions that yield technological answers)? We have long worked with methodologies that are tightly focused on nonprofit communication and business processes, but we are definitely interested in the methods that others use. - The Permeable Organization
The boundaries of traditional nonprofit organizations are under relentless assault by new patterns of communication and association that are stronger than the corporate model of governance and stronger than nonprofit brands. The pressures and ideas converging on nonprofits include: collaboration and mergers, ASPs, Web 2.0, network centric advocacy, blogging, social bookmarking, and many other forms of social software and networks. Although our mainstream commentators are not on this yet, this convergence foretells a radical restructuring of the nonprofit sector. Read this article for the big picture. - Toward Network-Centric Philanthropy
In 2006, we completed a survey of our readers and of the members of a couple of other organizations involved in broad civil society work. We’re sharing some of the results of that survey here in this article entitled Toward Network-Centric Philanthropy: Some Insights from the RSS Grants Survey. - The HIMS Matrix
Michael Gilbert has been talking a lot about what “organizational listening” means and he plans on talking about it a lot more. We start by sharing this article: The HIMS Matrix: A Tool for Assessing Listening, which explains how stakeholders can end up feeling Heard, Ignored, Misunderstood, or Spied Upon. Take a look and see if you can use this framework to help you do more than just talk at your stakeholders. - Understanding E-Relationships
Michael Soper has written a great piece called Understanding E-Relationships. It could also easily be called by either of its two subheadings: Real Relationships are Rich in Options, or Beyond the Unsubscribe Link. If you do any kind of email relationship building with your stakeholders, you’ll find Michael’s thinking to be the source of many good ideas. - To Be Heard Above the Din
Samantha Moscheck has written a great feature article for us, entitled To Be Heard Above the Din: Communication, Nonprofits, and Spam. She covers all the core issues, including how spam threatens nonprofits (both individually and as a sector) and what we can do about it. We’re particularly pleased with her specific recommendations to funders. This is a must read for anyone doing online relationship building. - How to Write a Book in One Year
As usual, Michael Gilbert is interested in sharing the process of his work as much as the product. A few years ago, we launched the Keystrokes pilot project, in support of writers who want to develop their discipline, rather than just their craft. One of the products of that pilot project is a simple, but effective model for helping people develop the vision and practice needed for completing large writing endeavors. He has outlined this model in this article. - The Role of the Executive Director in Nonprofit Technology
In the last twelve years, nonprofit leaders have faced a series of sophisticated decisions related to the opportunities and challenges of information and communication technology in their organizations. Because nonprofit leaders rarely have the time for conferences or workshops outside their issue areas, the potential to make the same mistakes over and over continues to be an issue for many organizations. In this article, Michael Gilbert explores The Role of the Executive Director in Nonprofit Technology. - A Practical Approach to Collaboration
This article is inspired by research on models of cooperation and collaboration between organizations by Michael Gilbert. Here he shares one insight and a related example. The example is a very successful campaign he ran a number of years back. The insight is this: The only agreement you have to have to collaborate is an agreement on what you are all going to do. That’s it. - Nonprofits and Weblogs
This article is derived largely from an interview of Michael Gilbert by Beth Kanter. It covers the origin of Nonprofit Online News (one of the two oldest weblogs still around), the potential of blogging for nonprofits, the nature of the motivation to blog, and some thoughts on the subject of information overload and focus. We think you’ll enjoy it. - Online Donor Cultivation
This article is based on a section of Michael Gilbert’s Frictionless Fundraising seminar. He believes that two of the great opportunities of online fundraising are the ability to cheaply cultivate relationships with many donors and the ability to track that cultivation numerically. He addresses the latter issue here. - Seven Knowledge Management Mistakes
This article is based on a section of Michael Gilbert’s Logic of Learning workshop. The seven mistakes that he explores are called: 1. Let’s Go Shopping!, 2. Taxonomy Too!, 3. Mixed Messages, 4. “Best” Practices, 5. Documental Illness, 6. Another Thing to Read, and 7. The Work of Art. - RSS Grants Channels
Michael Gilbert shares an idea he has been mulling for awhile. He believes grantmakers should publish information about the grants they make in RSS news channels. - Everyday Software: Workshop Webcasting
Our first series of online workshops required coming up to speed in a whole new category of technology for us. In this feature article on Everday Software, Michael Gilbert describes how we webcast the workshop. Although we used commercial tools in a couple of cases, the entire workflow can be done with free or open source software. - Learning Partners Reading List
Over the last few years, The Gilbert Center has partnered with the W. K. Kellogg Foundation on some interesting projects. It’s been a pleasure to work with an organization that takes learning and systems thinking as seriously as they do. This “Learning Partners” Reading List is from a program of the foundation in which 40 participants are going through an intensive curriculum spanning over one year. The program is designed to build organizational learning in the areas of aspiration, generative conversation, and systems thinking. I was so impressed by the list that I wanted to share it as a blanket recommendation with my readers. - Email Newsletter Marketing Model
This article is a description of what has emerged in the last few years as the canonical form on email centric online marketing. - Everyday Software: Email Tools
This is the first in a series of articles that explore Michael Gilbert’s everyday software environment — the tools he uses, both on his desktop and on various servers. he has decided to start with a description of the three email tools he uses most often. - Frictionless Fundraising: How the Internet can Bring Fundraising back into Balance
This is Michael Gilbert’s treatise on how we can avoid the false turns of both technocentricity and old media thinking, and realize the genuine promise of online fundraising. - Our Readers’ Top 30 Books
In January 2003, we surveyed our readers with questions about books, news sources, and successful use of email. This short feature is the first result of that survey. When we asked our readers what book most influenced their work last year, we got hundreds of titles. But of those, these thirty received more than one vote each. - Our Readers’ Favorite News Sources
In January 2003, we surveyed our readers with questions about books, news sources, and successful use of email. Here are the news sources that received more than one vote in that survey. We first published this article on the sixth anniversary of the founding of Nonprofit Online News, to honor all these other wonderful sources of news used by nonprofit readers. - Chaperoning: The Alternative to List Rental and Spam
Ever since Michael Gilbert started talking about Chaperoning as an alternative to list rental and spam, he’s been asked for details. In this article, he describes why it’s an important technique and how to do it. - Preventing the Nonprofit Spam Epidemic
It’s become increasingly clear to us that we are on the verge of an epidemic of nonprofit spam, which Michael Gilbert explores in this article. The potential damage to the reputation of individual organizations and to the public’s trust in the nonprofit sector concerns me deeply. - Nonprofit Knowledge Management
On March 7th, 2002, Michael Gilbert appeared on a panel at the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Conference. As part of that presentation he was asked to prepare this short introduction to the principles, lessons, questions, and resources of value to people considering nonprofit knowledge management initiatives. - The Email Savvy Organization
In this article Michael Gilbert describes the five characteristic practices that define a nonprofit that uses email successfully. (This is also a companion piece to “Disconnected”, the research report mentioned above.) - The Gilbert Email Manifesto
Nonprofits are wasting money on websites when they could be investing in email. This article unleashes a rant that had been building up for two years now. (First published April 2001, this article still gets a lot of attention.) - Making Peace with Time
Michael Gilbert: People ask me what I used to do “before the Internet.” One of the things I used to do was help people in nonprofit organizations develop their personal and interpersonal time management skills. Time may be precious, but it doesn’t often feel as though it is treated that way in the midst of organizational pressures. Internet time has made this even worse. So now is a good opportunity to reprint a very popular piece of mine, which originally appeared in In Context Magazine, now called Yes Magazine. All of the principles in this article are now even easier to apply than when I first wrote this, because of the flexibility of computer mediated communication.
Order Free White Papers & Reports Here
Get free White Papers & Reports today by subscribing to Nonprofit Online News and telling us a little more about yourself.