Upcoming Advocacy Evaluation Breakfast: Wednesday, January 30th at 8:15AM
For roughly nine years, The Connect U.S. Fund supported advocacy coalitions working on issues critical to America’s foreign policy. Now, as the Fund prepares to close shop, Executive Director Alex Toma is sharing lessons learned on coalition building, donor collaboratives, and rapid response grantmaking. She’ll be joining us here at the Aspen Institute on Jan. 30th for a scrumptious breakfast, liquid caffeine, and plenty of tawk about those complex things called coalitions. RSVP here.
Jets vs. Sharks or…Quants vs. Humanists?
Advocates, consider this question: how do you know that your media initiative is achieving the desired impact? While there’s no single answer for all contexts, Stephen Baker’s latest opinion piece for the New York Times—“Can social media sell soap?”—gets at a few cross-cutting takeaways. For example, influencing folks through social media isn’t just about numbers; you must think carefully about the combination of data points that’ll tell you something you need to know and can act on too.
If You Can’t Say it in English, Try Chinese Instead
That networks are everywhere isn’t news. In fact, the Stanford Social Innovation Review has a cool new article about one type of network model that’s been scaled up across the country to help Baby Boomers transition into non-profit work. This one, though, takes the cake for most awesome network yet. A Taiwanese design student has put together a web of words in various languages that express related but oh-so-subtly-different emotion s. Where English fails us, another language may say it even better than flowers.
