Picks of the Week: July 3-9, 2011

Website of the Week – CreateAthon

CreateAthon is a 24-hour, work-around the clock creative blitz during which local advertising agencies generate advertising services for local nonprofits that have little or no marketing budget. Since the program’s expansion from a single market to an international effort in 2001, 40 agencies have joined the CreateAthon network, holding CreateAthon events in their cities. This effort has benefited 833 nonprofit organizations with 1,809 projects valued at $7 million. Go to: http://www.createathon.org.


Publication of the Week -- Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee

From the publisher: "Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds. Most organizations, however, don't find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.

Click to preview this book on Amazon.com.


Trend of the Week – Donor Preference Trends

An in-depth study commissioned by Russ Reid Company shows only a minority of religious donors support specifically religious work through non-profit organizations. The study also shows Black donors are twice as likely as White donors to support higher education. And the causes people choose to support are often quite dependent on their political views. These findings are from Heart of the Donor conducted by Grey Matter Research & Consulting of Phoenix, Arizona. The study explores how Americans interact with nonprofit organizations. “Donors” refers to people who had made a financial contribution to a nonprofit organization other than a church or place of worship in the 12 months prior to the study. Key findings include:

• One of the myths that proved to be untrue is that religious people only support specifically religious causes. Among donors who attend religious worship services on a regular basis, just 41% supported a cause they described as “religious,” other than any contributions they made to a place of worship. In fact, donors who attend religious services are more likely to have given toward disaster relief (68%), domestic hunger or poverty relief (66%), helping people with disabilities (56%), health care or medical research (54%), and veterans’ causes (52%) than they are to have supported specifically religious work.
• The study also demonstrates that there are substantial differences in the kinds of charitable work different types of donors support. Political liberals are more likely than conservatives to put their donor dollars toward animal welfare, the environment, human rights, education, cultural, and public policy causes, while political conservatives are more likely to give toward veterans and religious causes.
• Younger donors favor human rights, child development, childhood education, and cultural causes more than do older donors, while older donors are more likely than younger ones to support domestic hunger and poverty, religious, disabilities, and particularly veterans’ causes.

Additional detail and data can be found at http://www.greymatterresearch.com.


Resource of the Week – Daring to Lead 2011 — National Study on Executive Leadership

CompassPoint has just released Daring to Lead 2011–a national study of more than 3,000 nonprofit executives. Two out of three leaders anticipate leaving within 5 years, though some have delayed transition because of the recession. Indeed the recession has raised executive anxiety levels and forced one in four leaders to shrink their organizations. To download the complete report and access an interactive website where you can search all of the findings on compensation, turnover, and more, go to: http://daringtolead.org.


Tech Tip of the Week -- AutoFill with Week Days

Hopefully you are already familiar with the Excel AutoFill feature for filling ranges with the months or days of the week. But what if you need to fill an Excel range with just weekdays? Here’s how:

• Enter the starting day into a cell
• Place the pointer over the lower right corner of the cell until you see the copy/fill handle (a thin black plus)
• Right click the handle and drag to select the range you want to fill with weekdays
• When you let up on the mouse button a menu will appear
• Select Fill Weekdays

This tip works in Excel 2007 and 2010, as well as earlier versions.