As I sat in the lobby before a recent meeting at a nonprofit, I saw a woman carrying a stack of folders in one arm and tugging at her luggage with her free hand. She tripped, but caught herself before she spilled the stack. As she made her way out the door, I wondered if [...]

I recently presented an infographic learning session using Google+ Hangouts on Air. While I’ve scheduled virtual learning sessions through my affinity group and another organization in the past, registration numbers for these events have usually topped out around 70. But this event grew to almost 160 registrants. In order to understand why, I conducted a [...]

2013 Knight Community Information Challenge from Knight Foundation
Starting May 1, Knight Foundation will again be offering matching funds to community and place-based foundations seeking to make an impact by funding news and information projects. This year, however, the Knight Community Information Challenge is evolving.
While the challenge will continue to [...]

This nation has a proud history of journalism, long tied most closely to newspapers. But the newspaper industry, as we know, has experienced a severe decline in recent years. The signs of this decline were evident to many of us in my hometown of Detroit back in 1987, when our two highly competitive newspapers, the Detroit [...]

Over the last several decades, accountability reporting, especially at the local level, has contracted dramatically, with potentially grave consequences for communities, government responsiveness, and democracy. Nonprofit media has the potential to partly fill this vacuum but faces obstacles as a result of outdated IRS rules.
A report by the Nonprofit Media Working Group (NMWG) of the [...]

I recently gave a presentation and created an infographic that shared what I learned about conducting a financial analysis of a nonprofit. I passed out copies of the infographic for those that couldn’t make the initial presentation, but realized they could have benefited from more than what was shared on the page. Was there a [...]

You’ve probably heard of Google+ Hangout and perhaps even used it to connect with family and friends over the holidays. But have you thought about the uses it could have for foundation staff and grantees?
I started thinking about the possibilities after using Google+ Hangout for a team project and a virtual meeting. I’ve created a [...]

If you’re a busy professional, you may be interested in locating apps that can help you be more effective. But with more than 700,000 apps currently available in Google Play, finding the right ones to install on your Android phone can be difficult. With that being said, here are five free apps I’d like to [...]

While at a food court for a late bite to eat, I overheard other diners talking about a young woman who had her unattended phone stolen. While some privately chided her for leaving it unattended, I started to think about how common it is for others to run into a similar situation. As a result, [...]

I recently had an eye-opening experience that helped me realize that many organizations promote their content but do nothing to ensure that it is being utilized appropriately. While some nonprofits allow others to make use of their content with proper attribution, some content users decide to make use of content inappropriately. Specifically, I am referring [...]

As a grantmaker, you may be familiar with the usual measures of impact for a program that you have helped fund. But have you ever thought about measuring the impact of the publications that may be produced as a result of your program work? If you are interested in learning more about measuring the spread [...]

As the current chair and webmaster for an affinity group, I decided to create a Flash-based website because I believed it would be more aesthetically pleasing than a site coded in regular HTML. I have been pleased with the results, but recently found out that Android’s new mobile operating system, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), would [...]