What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

Non-Profit Blogs

RSS feed of most recent posts from Non-Profit Blogs


SSE news in January 2009: recruitment.....Yesterday
Just a quick post to say that SSE is recruiting on two fronts:a) Staff: we're looking for a super-keen, wonderful, dynamic, confident development person to become our Network Sustainability Officer: supporting and developing the growing UK franchise network. See here...505433474
Can randomized evaluations defeat economic gangsters?Yesterday

I just finished reading Economic Gangsters, an excellent little book that summarizes in popular form a lot of recent evaluation work on corruption and violence. (See earlier posts here and here.) Although the book covers a hodgepodge of topics, from witchcraft in Tanzania to smuggling in China, it is held together by a particular approach to international development - namely, a call for randomized evaluations or one of its close kin to assess the utility of development interventions. Authors Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel put it rather bluntly when discussing the particular case of the Millennium Village Project:

We genuinely hope that the Sauri [millennium village] model proves to be the great innovation that solves the problem of global poverty...But a serious program evaluation is needed to understand how and why its successes did (or did not) take place. Otherwise, we'll have learned little, and Sauri and the other Millennium Villages will likely join the long list of well-intentioned but ultimately inconclusive (and quickly forgotten) attempts to make poverty history.

I agree with their critique, but I wonder in turn what the limits are to the

“Creating Entrepreneurial Opportunities for Youth in Rwanda”Yesterday

Young people form a vital component of every countryâs productive workforce. In Rwanda, youth between the ages of 17 and 35 account for approximately 60 percent of the population. Therefore, the countryâs success depends directly on the achievements of its young people who must act as leaders in society, education, and business. Still, the full potential of youth in Rwanda is yet to be realized.

In this Feature Service article, Umutoni Rosie, winner of the 3rd place in the âEntrepreneurship and Leadershipâ category in CIPEâs 2007 International Youth Essay Competition, explores the ways in which Rwandaâs youth can play a more active role in their countryâs development. Rwandan Government must address the shortcomings in infrastructure, human resources, and institutional capacity that prevent youth from assuming entrepreneurial and leadership positions in the society. In turn, young people must strive to improve their skills, work habits, and attitudes in order to become the agents of change their country needs.

Above all, young people should be given a chance to help formulate policy answers to the problems that Rwanda faces. Rosie explains, âYouth, as future leaders, can become agents of community improvement by becoming involved in identifying community needs and opportunities. (â¦) A new wealth of ideas and information gener

Hints for powerful subject linesYesterday

If you're communicating with donors by email, you should be putting a lot of energy into crafting great subject lines. More than any other single factor, subject lines determine the success or failure of e-fundraising. So here's some help from iMedia Connection: How to craft irresistible subject lines. Good advice includes:

  • Give a sense of urgency.
  • Consider current spam trends -- the filters can knock you out of contention if you aren't careful, and the words they're looking for are ever-changing.
  • Limit subject lines to 30 or 40 characters
  • Hackneyed old cliches like "tips," "tricks" or "secrets" can really work magic for you.

Thanks to BeRelevant for the tip.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, email, nptech

donor_power_blog?i=ezLBHb.P
Barista Training in ChicagoYesterday
From the Chicago Sun-Times today:

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

And apparently these machines weren't intended for the teacher's lounge:

"We also look at it as a waste of money because the schools didn't even know they were getting the equipment, schools didn't know how to use the machines and weren't prepared to implement them into the curriculum," Sullivan (the Inspector General) said.

A new barista training program, perhaps?505376979