“So What?” – Your Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Christine Ferris
The Long Haul… And Make it Snappy
Whiplash can be instructive, as we recently discovered reading this gee-whizzy HuffPost piece questioning the relevance of the “traditional, smaller non-profit model” in the tech-savvy, short-attention-span world of “Charity 2.0.” But consider this Center for Effective Philanthropy post on the “right” staffing for foundations focused on long-term community change. And this Chronicle of Philanthropy piece on a similar theme. Whether you’re a Charity 2.0 type or an ol’-fashioned 1.0-er: change takes time –and the right people for the job.
Fail Fast. Fail Forward. Fail Like You Mean It!
The Pelican listserv had a vibrant, colorful thread this week on what we can learn from, well, stuff that didn’t work. The valued folks at Valuing Voices talked about valuing failures. Another participant directed us to Admitting Failure and we made our way – without falling over — to the Fail Forward guide for nonprofits.
How Many Stars for TSA? Anybody?
We like transparency and communication between the government and the public; let Uncle Sam hear the voice of the people. But is Yelp the best earpiece? As Niam Yaraghi writes in this Brookings blog post, the GSA’s recent agreement with Yelp to allow agencies to receive and respond to reviews may be “letting the genie out of the bottle” – a genie that federal agencies may be ill-equipped to respond to – or even make sense of.
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visithttp://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep.
