Picks of the Week: September 14 - 20, 2008

Website of the Week -- Keystone

Keystone's mission is to improve the effectiveness of organizations working in the human development field by developing new ways of planning, measuring and communicating social change Keystone seeks to influence development practice through a model of civil society accountability that views accountability as a potential driver of social activity and performance rather than a constraint upon organizations. A highlight of the website is a downloadable tool for developing a theory of change. Go to: http://www.keystoneaccountability.org/about.


Publication of the Week -- Strategic Communications for Nonprofits: A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the Media, 2nd Edition by Kathy Bonk, Emily Tynes, Henry Griggs, and Phil Sparks

From the publisher: This is a new edition of Strategic Communications for Nonprofits, which was first published in 1999. It is an up-dated, nuts-and-bolts guide to helping nonprofits design and implement successful communications strategies. The book offers a unique combination of step-by-step guidance on effective media relations and assistance in constructing and developing an overall communications strategy aimed at creating social or policy change. It first explains the basic principles of a strategic communications strategy that will define the target audiences you need to reach and tells how to develop the messages and messengers you use to reach them. The book then goes on to address specific issues like earning good media coverage, building partnerships to increase available resources, handling a crisis, and more. This second edition builds on the earlier work and includes new case studies, new trends in media and branding, ethnic media issues, and trends in technology. Click to preview this book on josseybass.com.


Trend of the Week -- Poverty Reduction Linked to Race and Gender

A new report by the Great Lakes Alliance of the YWCA, “Economic Empowerment: Poverty Reduction With Race And Gender At The Center” links poverty reduction to race and gender. The study finds that women have higher poverty rates than men; African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are twice as likely to experience poverty as whites. African American and Puerto Rican women experience a “double disadvantage,” where the combined impact of racialized and feminized poverty results in disproportionately high poverty rates. In nearly every community in the Great Lakes Region where a YWCA exists, single women with dependant children are most likely to live in poverty. The dynamics of poverty for women and people of color in the U.S. are diverse and complex, but they are also amenable to change. Key strategies include:
• Advocating to protect working families through living wage policies, extending paid sick days and health care to more workers, establishing universal early childhood education and connecting women and people of color to higher education.
• Advocating to protect financially vulnerable consumers by demanding protections against predatory lending, extending financial literacy and consumer education programs to young women, and advancing public policies on behalf of those working to gain and maintain economic self-sufficiency.
• Advocating to make poverty a priority in each community and state by seeking the establishment of state-level poverty reduction benchmarks and adopting targeted, timely, collaborative community-level poverty reduction strategies.
• Advocating for employees who may be economically vulnerable themselves, to ensure that they are equal recipients of efforts aimed at “economically empowering” women.

To download a copy of the report, go to: http://www.ywca.org.


Resource of the Week -- Logic Model Resources

The Center for Civic Partnerships has compiled an extensive collection of resources on development and use of logic models to guide program and service development. Go to: http://www.civicpartnerships.org.


Tech Tip of the Week -- Change Font Size in Word

To change the font size in Word, select text and press:

Ctrl ] (right square bracket) to increase font size by one point, or
Ctrl ] (left square bracket) to decrease font size by one point

This tip works in Word 2007 as well as earlier versions.