December 2007 Archives

I love the choice of image in this ad. Y'mean I'm supposed to conserve nature so bears can eat endangered wild salmon?

I just returned from a walking break that passed by this very spot, where I took a moment to think about what this must have looked like after the Civil War. Then I checked my RSS feed when I got back to the hotel and, quel coincidence, got the answer.

While boarding and getting off my planes yesterday, I noticed the walkways festooned with signs for mega-charities. Which somehow reminded me of this quote from last year:

"Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking."

Traveling today, typing in front of the MacDonald's by LaGuardia USAirways Gate 5. To the left: a column with an outlet (hooray). To the right: my nifty Belkin retractable cable travel pack, which enabled me to upload this very photo.

Isn't the internet wonderful? My next project is to take a photo of myself every time I chew, and then after five years put them all up on YouTube in a music video.

You have been warned.

"Designed by Zara Traugott & Jodie Varenya Franco, Goddress clothing is perfect for yoga . . . and apres-yoga . . .supporting a sustainable lifestyle! All of our luxe knit fabrics are organic and hand dyed."

Wired News today has a year end feature story on sexy geeks from 2007. Click the link, though, and you'll find an error message informing you that sexy geeks = not found.

From today's WWD, a description of how licensing Warholia has generated millions of dollars for The Andy Warhol Foundation, which in turn gives money to artists and funds The Andy Warhol Museum:

Started in 1987, the nonprofit foundation has given out more than $200 million in grants — both through cash and art. According to Hermann, this year the organization will donate $11 million to other art organizations through art sales, investments and endowments. Last year, Warhol's licenses generated more than $2 million. Previous partnerships include Burton snowboard apparel, Levi's, Seiko and Royal Elastics footwear by Gwen Stefani.

Back in the eighties--before (ulp!) most of my students were born--a popular advertising campaign for seatbelts featured the misadventures of Larry and Vince, a couple of crash test dummies. Click over to Osocio for a contemporary variant on this classic campaign, complete with hot crash dummy sex.

The folks who own the rights to Vince & Larry probably won't sue, but surely a lawyer or two deserves a few bucks to write a CYA memo just in case!

I just got back from a sneak preview of 27 Dresses, the new romantic comedy featuring Katherine Heigl and James Marsden. Whatever one may think of the film--I don't think I was its target audience--from a marketing and design perspective the evening was fun. At the theater the publicity team had a couple women standing still--a la the stationary statues of liberty and mimes ubiquitous in Central and Battery Parks--while wearing dresses patterned after the poster to the left; the point, I gather, was to induce people to take pictures to send to friends & upload to Flickr. The movie also had a clever closing credit sequence that is itself worth the price of admission, at least if, like me, you're into credits & graphic design.

But what really stood out for me was the degree to which green was embedded into the film. Not green as in an ugly bridesmaid's dress, although that's there too. I mean green as in slacktivist eco-chic. Besides the not so subtle product placement for Seventh Generation, the guy in 27 Dresses who typifies Successful Male Hunk is the embodiment of sustainability. He's into eco-travel; he's committed to corporate social responsibility; he's a Big Brother; he's a vegetarian. Except for his taste in women he doesn't have a single frickin' flaw, and even that is arguably true to form.

One of my law class students asked me about certain popular arguments made by tax protestors. It's a subject well known to pretty much anyone who has ever clerked for a federal appeals court, because the courts get a fair number of these cases coming through every year and they always lose. Big.

The IRS explains why in its comprehensive new point-by-point refutation of the leading tax protestor arguments.

Everybody has their little secrets. Here's one of mine.

I read Women's Wear Daily.

Now you might be wondering, what in the world does that have to do with social enterprise?

A lot, actually.

Exhibit A: Today's page 10.

One story concerns the efforts of a couple leading industry trade associations (them's nonprofits, kids!) to impose new standards for models, a movement that grows out of concern for both the health of the models themselves and the negative cultural impact of portraying hyper-thinness as beauty.

The story below that also concerns standardization and nonprofit trade groups. This time the issue is environmental sustainability and the certification of organic products, one of many controversial issues that emerging as we move beyond trendy do-gooding slogans.

The story on page right, though, is perhaps the most interesting: a fashion line whose proceeds benefit a prostitutes' rights charity. Not only is the cause controversial, but it also chose a name that close resembles a mainstream label, which in turn triggered an intellectual property dispute.

Hey, it's a helluva lot more fun than Tax Notes Today.

Marshall McLuhan spoke of how electronic technology retrieved the media environment of tribal society. Among the most salient implications of the shift: the emergence of the information hunter-gatherer as the person most adapted to survival. This was one reason why McLuhan argued that why lecture-based education is obsolete--we should instead lead students in engaging their surroundings, "probing and exploring . . . for clues to the nature of the times they lived in, seeing worlds of significance in street lamps and automobiles."

Forty years later the academic mainstream is finally catching up. Neuroanthropology has the scoop on the latest re Cavemen in the Classroom.

That's the theme of a, um, viral marketing campaign for SF Connect, which aims to inspire people to volunteer in San Francisco. In typical California fashion, the effort imbues its dash of naughtiness with new agey spiritual affirmation--volunteering makes you truly attractive by giving you higher self-esteem and inner beauty.

Here in New York, we jump to right to the point. Leading Page Six on Christmas Day, this inspiring tale of how volunteering for nonprofits can help a guy get laid:

"SCORING a gorgeous chick can be as easy as visiting your nearest flophouse. In "Dr. Z on Scoring - How to Pick Up, Seduce and Hook Up With Hot Women," out in February from Fireside Books, Victoria Zdrock suggests guys "up your philanthropist score by becoming a volunteer at a homeless shelter or a hospice. The women that work there are naturally giving, caring, and friendly even to the scruffiest of men. And kindness is one of the qualities women most look for in a male. Be sure to have a good sob story handy about the times you were 'down on your luck' and now want to 'pay back' the community. Next thing you know, you'll be enjoying soup in her kitchen." Zdrock, a columnist for Penthouse, also says men on the make should hit women's conventions. "Contrary to your instinctual aversion to women's lib, National Organization for Women meetings are the perfect breeding ground for available horny women," she writes. "Liberated women are much more likely to cast away outdated notions of courtship and chivalry . . . and you just might get laid on the first date." Merry Christmas!"

Via

Gawker raises a telling question about the work of anti-commercial artist Packard Jennings, featured in today's New York Times article on anarchist shop-dropping:

if you find yourself in San Francisco in January, he'll have a new show at Catharine Clark Gallery. (But how will he disrupt his own commodification in the gallery???)

No, this isn't about latte lotharios who hit on coffee-drinking women sitting alone, although that can be interesting to watch. Rather, it's part of a new strategy for battling depression in twenty-somethings:

Realizing that primitive societies like the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea experience virtually no depression, Stephen Ilardi, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, is now testing a cave-man-esque approach to treatment with promising results. His 14-week Therapeutic Lifestyle Change program entails large doses of simulated hunter-gatherer living in people suffering from prolonged, unremitting depression. Participants sign up for 35 minutes of aerobic exercise (running, walking briskly, biking) three days a week, at least 30 minutes of daily sunlight or exposure from a light box that emits 10,000 lux, eight hours of sleep per night, and a daily fish oil supplement containing 1,000 mg of the fatty acid EPA and 500 mg of the fatty acid DHA.

They also get plenty of time surrounded by the “clan,” in the form of frequent social gatherings with family members, Starbucks dates with friends, and volunteer work. “Hunter-gatherers almost never had time alone,” says Ilardi; even a generation or two ago, people grew up supported by extended family and much more engaged with their community. Too much time in isolation, he says, means “opportunities to ruminate,” the modern scourge.

As the always thought-provoking Neuroanthropology blog observes,

Comparing a Starbucks date to life as a cave-man seems absurd. But it certainly sounds like a healthier and more holistic treatment than what goes on in traditional psychiatric institutions.

A provocative meditation from the Washington Times' Belief Blog:

"It's hard to describe this massive combo of embroidery, applique, beadwork and photography, put together by 130 Xhosa villagers in the small South African coastal hamlet of Hamburg.

The Keiskamma is the name of a river. It is modeled after Matthias Grunewald's Issenheim altarpiece of 1515, created in response to the horrific diseases of the 16th century. . . It has some of the grimmest imagery imaginable about the crucifixion. It is very Christo-centric and is world-renowned for its graphic detail.

The Keiskamma piece, also about 22 feet wide and 13 feet tall, depicts the horrors of AIDS in Africa. The altarpiece, which is directly behind the high altar at Saint Mark's, shows scenes from village life. It opens like a cupboard to reveal not Christ and His saints, but an AIDS widow, a prophet who dances on the sand dunes, some of the respected village women. The anonymous widow, not Christ, is at the center. Istead of Mary Magdalene and St. John, there are AIDS orphans. The embroidery is truly stunning and it's definitely a work of art, but...something is missing.

Is Keiskamma devotional and does it belong in a cathedral? That part continues to bother me as I witness folks go up after Sunday services and sit for presentations about the altarpiece, where AIDS is substituted for the passion of Christ. Seeing the Issenheim altarpiece, one definitely learns that a sacrifice has taken place to appease the wrath of God. With the Keiskamma piece, there's no divinity involved. The message is community empowerment, transformation and hope.

I never thought I'd see an altarpiece with no cross. But that day has arrived.

-- Julia Duin, assistant national editor/religion, The Washington Times"

More pictures here.

In the nineteenth century, a loose network of educators, journalists and other prominent community leaders laid the groundwork for modern sociology and social reform. These revolutionary thinkers challenged the atomistic assumptions of traditional charity. Instead, they called for a more critical analysis of social systems, one that analyzed the complex roots of social problems and called for applied theory over more simplistic and unquestioned forms of giving.

But those aren't the people mentioned in the title of this post, who apparently were a feverish delusion induced by reading too many books.

No, critical social analysis was discovered just a few years ago by a group of disruptive change agents. And now it even has its own website.

Who knew?

(Image via CrunchGear)

Here's another look at the irony of the seasonal protest against the commercialization of Christmas, as the Denver Post not-so-coincidentally publishes a survey of the burgeoning Christian retail market. The tagline: "Evangelical buying power is growing, and more companies are answering the call of the almighty ... dollar."

The backbone of Christian retail remains the 2,050 stores that are members of the Colorado Springs-based CBA, which was formerly the Christian Booksellers Association.

In 2006, there was a 15 percent rise in the number of CBA retail locations, and sales through the stores and the Christian Retail Channel rose to $4.63 billion, a 16 percent rise compared with 2000, Anderson said.

At Heart & Home Christian Store in Arvada, one of 33 Christian retailers in Colorado, a shopper can find nativity scenes and ornaments.

They can also buy inscribed license-plate frames —"In case of Rapture, this car's yours"— and David and Goliath dolls.

There is an archaeological-themed game called "Lost Bible Treasures," with replica relics kids can dig up. . . .

The store carries family-friendly video games and a doll called "Faith," whose chief accessory is a tiny Bible.

Near the home-schooling texts is a board game called "Champions of Faith" and the "Chronicles of Narnia" ice castle. . . .

Last Christmas' big hit was "Dance Praise," an interactive DVD featuring Christian music, replete with dance-steps floor pad . . . .

While Christian DVDs may be a part of a natural progression from Christian books, now there appears to be no limits to the types of Christian products.

Haroz Vintners of Norcross, Ga., is offering wine, called The Grapes of Galilee, produced in the Holy Land where Jesus is said to have turned water into wine.

Drudge today featured a story about a man protested the commercialization of Christmas by displaying an image of Santa on a cross:

"Santa has been perverted from who he started out to be," Conrad said. "Now he's the person being used by corporations to get us to buy more stuff."

Which struck me as an ironic thing to say, since, as even Snopes concedes, an old Coca-Cola ad campaign "had a great deal to do with establishing Santa Claus as a ubiquitous Christmas figure in America." This article from the Toronto Star has more, with some particularly interesting observations on how our commercial Christmas emerged out of the Industrial Revolution, mass education and the modern domestic ideal.

Which gives rise to the question: What next?

Applicatory preaching for social venturers over at Gift Hub.

The Pin Up Dolls aren't the girls in the picture, but a reference to the designer--namely, Pin Upshaw's Pin Up Dolls Boutique in Second Life. Click the pic for details on the silent auction benefit and read Pin's blog for more about the fashion.

If you want to write a screenplay and you're stuck for a plot, you can always trot out the shopworn "big bad profit-seeking corporation threatens to evict humble do-gooders" motif. Or you could be really trendy and flip it: big bad charity threatens to evict humble entrepreneurs.

We've already mentioned here the eviction of CBGB by its landlord homeless shelter. Today brings a couple more stories:

• Carnegie Hall cites charitable mission in evicting artist tenants
  
• Charitable status gives elite school right to evict rent-controlled tenants
  

Among the victims in noted in these articles: a celebrated photographer and, um, a lawyer.

Y'know, it says something about the diminishing reputation of charitable landowners in this city that they're making even lawyers seem sympathetic. As one scholar said in response to the recent decision to approve Columbia's West Harlem expansion:

“The record of this commission is that their allegiance is only to other wealthy people,” Michael Henry Adams, an architectural historian, told Newsday. “I guess the rest of us can just go to hell and die.”

With all the excitement over GiveWell, more traditional approaches to nonprofit accountability can easily get lost in the shuffle. F'r instance, Crain's review of the largest NYC-area nonprofits. It has the metrics you're probably used to by now, including a charity's bete noire: how much income goes to programs vs. operations. The magazine also surveys executive salaries. Below, a chart with the top five:

The guy from the Met really stands out, doesn't he? Perhaps next time I'll taking advantage of the (all-too-little-known) fact that the Met's admission charge is merely just a suggested donation.

Remember the controversial ransom note ad campaign run by NYU? You know, from two days ago?

NYU killed it. Too much bad buzz.

Below, the one that used to be by my office, snapped a few minutes after I wrote my earlier post.

I can see why the University pulled this; it's not clear from the copy whether the poster is an ad for a child care center or the VH1 bio of the Olsen twins.

Seriously, this is indeed a chart from the 1913 New York Times, but its true significance isn't funny at all. This chart is an artifact from what is arguably the darkest moment in the history of twentieth-century charity: the eugenics movement, in which the nation's leading schools, churches, hospitals and foundations joined with government leaders to eradicate people deemed to be defective. Hitler didn't devise the Final Solution on his own; the blueprint for genocide was drafted by American philanthropy.

Ave Maria School of Law is selling the naming rights to its new building.

If your last name's Lucifer or Bastardo, now's your chance to have some fun.

Sometimes it pays to be deceptive.  Below: a disaster preparedness mobile billboard in San Francisco from the Red Cross.  The theme: "What do we have to do to get your attention?"

And for their next trick, the Red Cross will make your money disappear!

No, really. For Festivus jewelry and other socially conscious goodies, hie thee to the Festivus Market in New Orleans:

Festivus is a holiday market for the rest of us! Staged each December, we provide a human-scale alternative to the loneliness of on-line shopping or the hassle of big box holiday parking lots by featuring the best of local cottage industries whose business reflects our core values of ecology, fair trade, craftsmanship and personal customer service. 12 noon to 4 pm on the first 3 Sundays of December.

 

Pictured above: a homemade donation card inspired by the classic Seinfeld episode "The Strike."  In this episode, George Costanza tries to get out of giving Christmas gifts at work by giving them a card acknowledging a Human Fund donation in their name.  The hitch: the Human Fund does not exist; it's all just a scam George is pulling to avoid having to shell out any cash.    

The scheme seems to work until the company decides to give its annual $20,000 charitable gift to the Fund.  As George's boss explains when handing him the check,

I'm suppose to find a charity and throw some of the company's money at it. They all seem the same to me, so, what's the difference?

When the company's accountant discovers that the Human Fund does not exist, the jig is up--which prompts George to claim that he perpetrated the fraud to avoid religious persecution for celebrating Festivus.

It's all good fun--and a reminder that someone's always gonna try to get away with something, no matter how many rules we impose. 

Speaking of embedded giving, what better way to describe the intersection between Bill Clinton's charitable endeavors and Hillary's campaign for president? 

The Times today traces a bit of the network overlap, but the real story lies in the reputation effect of Bill Clinton's conveniently timed mass media push for social entrepreneurship.  

C'mon, we're all adults here. Just as a commercial business strategically builds builds trust by leveraging the goodwill of the charities it supports, Bill Clinton is just the latest in a long tradition of politicians seeking to win over voters by aligning themselves with good works. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nonsense like this . . .

As the presidential campaign got under way, foundation officials began working to ensure that none of their enterprises would have political repercussions for Mrs. Clinton.

is just another example of why it's important to distinguish between law and the rhetoric of design.  Done well--and Bill Clinton is a master of PR--charity can be used for political ends with nary a complaint, but the key phrase here is "done well."  It's going to work only if you know what you are doing and how it will look. 

However, tell yourself that you're safe because you're within the current limits of the law and you're begging for corrective discipline.  For example, in 1969 Congress imposed stringent limits on private foundations because of their perceived entanglement with political activity.  What they had been doing had been legal, but it provoked a negative response and so as of 1970 it was not. 

The same fate may yet lie in store for public charities if their political entanglement seems too overt.  After all, you know what they say:

Politics makes strange embed-fellows.      

Nowhere is safe.  Tonight I turned on my TV for dinner-time brainwash and got Clash of the Choirs,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

an NBC reality show in which those-aren't-really-gospel-choirs-honest compete to win . . .

. . . drumroll please . . .

$250,000 for their favorite charities.

As Darth Vader once said, "Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!" 

Which makes this as good a time as any to put down my cheeseburger and type a few words about the "embedded giving" meme that went viral in the charitable world over the past week. 

Think I'm being a bit dismissive by insinuating--hell, by flat-out saying--that all this talk about embedded giving is just a mindless fad?

Here's a simple fact: before the New York Times articles on the topic, variants of the phrase "embedded giving," in the sense of cause marketing or corporate philanthropy, appear in the Lexis database precisely four times, and none of those before a Home Depot Katrina press release in May 2006. Google shows variants popping up on  websites in the interim, picking up steam earlier this year.   

(Historical linguistic errata: the ever-engaging Lucy Bernholz is smart and cool and all, but, contra the Times, the embedded metaphor and even "embedded giving" were circulating before she tagged it as one of the year's leading buzzwords.) 

What we have, in short, is less a discrete movement than unconscious memetic behavior, widespread semantic diffusion tipped by the validation of an attractive term in a respected information hub.

What made "embedded" resonant to the point of going wide?  Not so much the echo of embedded reporters, which is a bit too inside journalistic baseball to go far.  Rather, its more direct antecedant appears to be embedded objects on a web page, such as a video from Youtube:

This semantic link is not insignificant.  Just as embedded video went viral in part due to the way it simplified and standardized an action that was otherwise difficult and complex, "embedded giving" has gone viral in part because of the way it reduces a complex array of commercial actions into a simple and familiar phrase. 

On the one hand, the viral quality of the "embedded" metaphor can be positive for those engaged in the practice, as the usage by Home Depot illustrates.  Embeddedness is helpful--you see it everyday on your computer--and by embedding charity a business makes giving more accessible to both to would-be givers and to folks who are in need.  

Yet it's precisely this propensity toward replication that can make the practice itself seem so troubling.  The more a value trends toward hyper-aggregation--whether that value is a buzzword, a song, a dance or money--the more we are likely to react against it. 

The psychology behind this behavior is a topic for another day, but the effect is immediately evident.  For example, just a few days after "embedded giving" leapt from the influential pages of the New York Times, a U.S. Senator announced that he would introduce a bill to regulate it.  Did the Senator and his staff spend the previous two days conducting rigorous studies on documented abuse?  Nahhhh.  But once the term went viral charitable business seemed to be everywhere and out of control.

Unfortunately, a substantial amount of nonprofit regulation emerged out of the same negative impulse, with the result being an increasingly oppressive web of rules that do little to control the supposed problem.  Do we really think we're going to make the world a better place to live by forcing folks to file umpteen forms with the IRS and Attorneys General because they want to broadcast a TV show in which ersatz choirs lay the smacketh down for charity? 

Perhaps if time were an infinite resource for nonprofit staff, but last I checked, it's not.

Speaking of which, the show's over.  Looked dopey anyway.  Time to get back to work.

And for our next lesson in realistic metrics, a Minnesota coalition aims to end homelessness by 2010.

Good luck.

Today's New York Times is just over the moon about the alleged success of online university lectures, whose popularity seems to be approaching the stratosphere previously reached only by folks selling dog food on the web.  Sometime when it's not right before the holiday I'm going to post my own thoughts on this, but for now, some notes:

(1)  A few emails to an MIT prof aren't all that significant a metric--as the ghost of DotComGuy said in Web of Dreams, "Post it and they will come."  I'm curious as to why the article doesn't include such stats as number of downloads or--perhaps more significantly--the number of downloads outside the mit.edu domain and whether there's a scale-free drop beyond the most popular links.  The same goes more generally for Apple's iTunesU.

(2)  Speaking of iTunesU, a quick glance at the top downloads highlights an interesting trend:  a number of 'em are from celebrity lecturers, such as Steve Jobs, David Lynch, Al Gore, Michael Dell and Dan Rather.  Also right up there:  a KQED radio show and a performance by the Duke Chapel Choir.  All of which proves the success of  professorial lectures, um, how exactly?

(3)  The prof featured in the article spent "25 hours preparing each new lecture," and that's *with* the assistance of an MIT tech department to handle such things as lighting and professional-quality video.  That's wonderful, but is it scalable?

(4) Remember, video killed the vaudeville star.  Acts captured on film lost the market for real-world repetition over time and place--unless, y'know, they became ice capades or big budget musicals.   It's great that folks can get these lectures on the web, but how will students in class three years from now feel about paying 35 grand a year for repeats of lectures that were online for free back when they were in high school?

I've been thinking about questions like this for a while now, which is one reason why last semester I decided to toss out all my old lecture notes.  On which, more later . . .

LETTER TO THE EDITORS UPDATE:

The Times has a comment thread on this article that holds some items of interest. 

Most of the comments are of the "learning is wonderful and I love this!" strand.  They're nice words, but such well-meant comments are ultimately as useful for media strategy as eulogies are for understanding the dead--let's face it, people said lots of nice things about Mr. Wizard, but there's a reason you never saw him on prime time network TV.  

What strikes me as on target:  the comments about distinctions in the online vs. real-world media environments.  More later on the theory; here are a few key observations from the thread:

• On-line sources can carry much of the information load, the way assigned texts do/did but more pointedly selected and organized to meet the objective of the specific class, leaving actual class time free for the more more important exchange, (discussion/debate, etc.), between teacher and student and among students . . .

• The live interaction of students with professors in the classroom or laboratory is the learning in a course.

• As a physics major at MIT, I have to point out that Prof. Lewin's lectures are only enjoyed by non-physics-majors at the institute- we can't stand it. My god, the man spun a speaker in a GRADUATE LEVEL SEMINAR to show the doppler effect. Its nauseating.

Also, shame on you for comparing him to Feynman. Feynman is the physicist's physicist, who happened to be great at popularization but also at teaching upper-level physics (see the Feynman Lectures). Lewin is the non-physicist's window into the wonder of physics, maybe, but my god is it awful to take an upper-level class from him. 

Now this is interesting.  From the Social Enterprise Reporter:

Note to Current SER Subscribers:

SER, in its monthly PDF format, has not proven to be feasible as an enterprise sustained by subscription revenues.  So look for changes at SER in the New Year that will feature articles and interviews available online without charge or subscription fees.

Osocio notes the following NY Child Study Center ad campaign has sparked a bit of controversy:

I can see why, I guess, but my own gut reaction--and this is typical of how any number of people react to earnest PSAs--was to make fun of it. I want to run right down to the nearest bus stop and cover up "Depression" with "Love," "The Knicks" or "New Jersey." In fact, for me the ad immediately brought to mind an old Woody Allen stand-up routine in which he recounts his experience when taken hostage as a boy:

The FBI surround the house, "Throw the kid out,", they say, "give us your guns, and come out with your hands up."

The kidnappers say "We'll throw the kid out, but let us keep our guns, and get to our car."

The FBI says "Throw the kid out, we'll let you get to your car, but give us your guns."

The kidnappers say "We'll throw the kid out, but let us keep our guns - we don't have to get to our car."

The FBI says "Keep the kid."

I know, I know--I'm making light of A Serious Subject. But that's the point. Ads like this practically beg you to laugh at them. From "The More You Know" to "your brain on drugs" to the smug self-righteousness of the Truth campaign, the real scandal of goofy PSAs isn't that they Transgress Boundaries, but that people spend money to make them.

Steroid-scandal-addled pitcher Roger Clemens was scheduled to speak at the Texas High School Baseball Coaches Association next month. The topic: how his training regimen enabled him to keep playing so well for so long.

Since pretty much everyone now knows the answer to *that* question, the Association has removed Clemens' name from its website.

The issue is one that any nonprofit must face when one of its donors or honorees gets tarred by scandal: cut ties or soldier on? Since steroids are the third rail of sports, the answer for a baseball group connected to youth is no doubt clear cut. But there's at least one Texas charity for whom news of Clemens' chemically-induced athletic success would seem most appropriate:

A quick word of advice to the next person who emails asking to "illicit feedback" . . .

The word's "elicit."

That is all.

CORPORATE SOCIAL IRRESPONSIBILITY BONUS:

While the New York Times agonizes over whether its artsy fashion photo of a seventeen-year-old girl qualifies as kiddie porn, over in Europe reborn CSR poster child Hewlett Packard is using paint-by-numbers lolicon to sell laser jets.

“Starbucks now pays more each year to insure its employees (over $200 million) than it pays for its raw coffee beans.”

Folks upset with Warrington town council obviously haven't been window shopping in New York.

Pictured above: a scene from the Green is the New Black window display at Barney's. Rudolph the Recycling Reindeer, Al Gore and the (oh noes!) peace sign make the environment the reason for the season.

The display is just one aspect of Barney's new green marketing campaign. But as this NPR report asks, when causes become trends, who wins?

Don't get Facebook? You're not alone. Click through the link for an interesting discussion in the comments--even Facebook-agnostics such as Wallstrip nonetheless accept it as an unavoidable part of the landscape. Fan or foe, however, you'll also want to check out this parody predicting what Facebook will be like thirty years from now.

A few weeks ago the New York Times did an article on the green grinch, the person who insists on giving you eco-friendly presents that suck. In merry old England the Warrington town council seems have topped 'em all with its "Recycle for Warrington" display in the town center.

Christians allege that this is the vanguard of a sinister secular plot to rebrand Christmas with "a corporate message about waste management." The town council, on the other hand, is calling on Christians to get a grip:

"All the traditional symbols of the season have pride of place in Warrington - we have the crib showing Jesus in his manger right in front of Warrington's famous Golden Gates, we have two giant Christmas trees, and we have all the usual festive lights, reindeers and Father Christmases - as we have had for years in the borough.

"One addition this year is one sign on one street, commissioned by the council's recycling team, to promote the message that with all the Christmas cards, trees and festive wrapping that will be generated at this time of year, it is good for people to remember to recycle."

Lost in all the shouting: whether the best way to promote concern for the environment is through a FRAKKIN' ELECTRIC LIGHT DISPLAY!!!!!!

Had a good conversation on the subject last week with the Washington Post's Zach Goldfarb, who asked a number of excellent questions. His article, with a couple of quotes from yours truly, is here.

From ScienceDaily, a report of a new study suggesting how charities can target their fundraising appeals to increase returns:

In a sample of almost 1000 participants the researchers found that people with a pro-social personality gave more money to charities and other noble causes. For instance, with donations to ‘third world organisations’, 52% of people with a pro-social personality gave money, compared to 42% of people with an individualistic personality and only 21% of people with a competitive personality.

Overall pro-socials donate more to all kinds of charitable and noble organisations – including health, environmental, charity, education/research and arts/culture organisations – than individualists and competitors (the only exception being donations to local community and church groups).

The team’s findings raise the possibility that donations may be enhanced not only by appeals emphasising empathy (eg concerns for other’s well-being) but also by appeals emphasising fairness (eg everyone deserves an equal chance in life).

This Greenpeace ad warns wanderlusters to get going before Bangkok disappears!

Where I wish I'd been yesterday: the Cause/Effect conference at Parsons.

Otherwise occupied, alas, but here are a couple useful write-ups of the goings-on.

Man, I wish I'd had this news item when designing my law class's final exam:

A story in yesterday's Greenville (North Carolina) Reflector, provides useful fodder for classroom discussion of the IRC 170(b)(1)(A) requirements to acheive "public charity" status. The story relates the struggles of a small charity to achieve the 33 1/3 percent of support test and states that if the organization fails to meet that test it will be subject to the burdensome private foundation rules. Although the facts given indicate the organization might meet the 10% test in Treas. Reg. 1.170A-9(e)(3), the author makes no mention of that potential solution.

I've had several Boomers tell me there hasn't been any real music since the 1960s. Now it looks like they're going to make sure it stays that way. According to the latest Crain's New York, charitable contributions to the performing arts are plummeting. Instead, Boomers are giving to health care, the charity of choice for a generation convinced of its own immortality.

The article also makes an interesting point about the redistributive effects of focusing on quantifiable metrics, but that's not as funny.

Got an invitation to a Second Life nonprofit event today; figured I'd check it out & watch.

Let's see . . .

Register with some second name chosen from a list of names that are supposed to sound funny . . .

Check.

Download and install SL client . . .

Check.

Complete tutorial . . .

Ch--

Oh, there's another step . . .

Find a torch . . .

Find the other steps in the tutorial . . .

Someone called BiteUWithMy Clawtooth is walking by with a naked giant . . .

And . . .

That's it. I'm out. No more patience for this.

Oh well. At least Linden Labs can claim they have another resident.

Just what a mild bout of insomnia needs--a legal question about coffee. CNN Money takes a stab at the question here.

Gotta admit, as a recovering lawyer and law professor, I have a few quibbles with the legal analysis offered by the article's expert, and selling the congregation shares of a church-run for-profit cafe seems to me to be a sure-fire recipe for a church split. But whatever the folks who sent in this question choose to do, I hope they don't call their coffee shop Son Bucks.

I see this ad and my mind wanders back to the snowy winter nights of my rural Pennsylvania childhood. The rabbits call out to me from the back yard: "Jeff, get the shovel and clean out the rabbit pen. NOW!"

Then I realize that's not the rabbits, that's my parents, but I just want to stay inside and watch TV. Man, I wish someone would get rid of those $%!# pet rabbits once and for all, because they're a pain in my--.

Hmmmm, maybe I'm not this ad's ideal audience.

OK, here's a perfect example of how we perceive old things as new: "Georgia monks find sustainable route to preserve monastery," which describes how an ancient order has a new commitment to economic and social sustainability. Which would be a wonder to relate, except for the fact that monks have supported themselves through commercial enterprise for centuries. In fact, one could argue that the biggest problem for the monastics historically was the rise of mendicants who subsisted off of charitable donations wherever they could find 'em, which gave all monks a reputation for being lazy leeches.

Stripped of the jargon, the real story from Georgia is far less sexy: the monks realized that their old business model was tanking, so they commissioned a study and reorganized. Smart move, but not exactly a miracle.

Via GigaOm:

Kids’ plush toy social network Webkinz.com has started running advertising, a move that, if recent articles in New York Times and Silicon Alley Insider are to be believed, has greatly upset parents. In fact, whatever controversy exists seems to have been manufactured by a nonprofit group with an idealistic agenda. . . .

So who is creating the controversy if not parents of Webkinz toy owners? The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, whose mission seems like a well-meaning but impractical idea. The CCFC itself points out that Webkinz is, from the ground up, a commercially-oriented site, a fact that Webkinz purchasers surely understand.

This seems like a huge mismatch: a nonprofit activist organization that wants all commercials removed from childrens’ lives joined with a set of parents who choose commercially-based online playtime. Parents willing to buy their kids the Webkinz plush pets that allow them entry into the Webkinz.com site are likely practical enough to accept some limited amount of advertising along the lines of what Ganz is doing.

The real story here is parents and companies relating directly to each other and figuring out what’s agreeable to both sides.

It's an old strategy: an interest group projecting its values onto a more sympathetic community.

A couple quick notes sparked by Robert Blinn's post on last night's Designism 2.0 event.

First, his opening anecdote about the inefficiency of a corporate lawyer's volunteering at a soup kitchen. Right on target, not least of all because it highlights the core tension between charity as a means of serving others and charity as an extension of one's own personal identity. For the lawyer who volunteers at a soup kitchen, helping the poor is only secondary. The primary goal is to create a sense of self beyond the reductionistic values of the law. Both are valid aims, but the latter has the potential to transform charity into narcissism. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, the key to the Narcissus myth is that Narcissus didn't see himself as self-absorbed--he thought he was looking at someone else.

Next, a thought about the 2.0 of Designism 2.0. Blinn:

If any conclusion was to be taken away from this event, then, it seemed to me that the design that catalyzed people like Wolff, the young questioner, and indeed the audience itself simply had to be socially inclusive. In the sixties, inclusion could be as simple as "getting it," while in our era perhaps socially relevant design is typified by the Dove campaign where the Talkbacks are full of opinions (good or bad), or Ji Lee's bubbles, where even the passerby can see just how involved the public has become with the issue.

Nicely stated, but I also think there's something else at work here, especially in regard to the Dove campaign. In contrast to the dull social activism exhibit (conservatives are Nazis! The life saver's a condom!), the Dove campaign shrewdly adopts the design rhetoric of the petit bourgeoisie. Self-esteem, a media conspiracy, mothers and daughters--the reason people talk back in comment threads and flock to Dove's seminars is that the company is using their language. You can see a similar dynamic in the viral appeal of Ji Lee's work--he's using comic book bubbles, reminiscent of what has (until recently) been a junk medium associated with childhood.

This is what I was referring to last night when I said that social activist design needs to learn how to speak Red State. Activist designers--whatever their cause--don't have to become what they behold, just understand it so they can transmit their messages more effectively. Conformist transgression is dead; long live transgressive conformity!

It seems the come-on line for horny high-school boys everywhere has become the animating moral principle of progressive online charity. Rigorous metrics are essential when evaluating those shopworn traditional charities, but buy a trendy bag on Amazon for $59.95 and wham-o, you've enabled the UN to feed a child for year. Add that to all the rice you magically bought by playing a vocabulary game and you're a virtual Mother Teresa!

O RLY?

Hate to be buzzkill, but damn, people, this is the UNITED NATIONS we're talking about, the veritable poster child for corruption and fraud in humanitarian aid. If efficiency is the touchstone of social enterprise, hooking up with the UN is not exactly the best way to maintain a reputation for unsullied virtue.

And what about the integrity of oft-quoted numbers such as "1 click = 20 grams/rice" or "1 bag = child's food/year? Where do we get these stats? Is anyone checking them? Glibly buying into too-good-to-be-true promises of disproportionate return is a hallmark of a bubble economy, and just because it's social enterprise instead of subprime loans doesn't mean we're immune from collapse.

To get a view of the landscape, putting people first isn't a bad place to start. Its focus: user-centered design. This review of a new book on humanitarian aid gives a sense of their sensibility:

While written about developmental economics, poverty, foreign aid and the grand plans designed to save the poor from themselves, Easterly proposes an alternate approach based on the principles of the user centered approach to design of systems and solutions. Do exploratory research, understand the needs of the users, observe them and the systems they already have in place for addressing the issue or existing grassroots solutions [jugaad or bottom up innovation], use these as prototypes for the design of replicable successful programs, cross pollinate ideas that work across different regions or countries, adapt programs and plans to local culture and social customs - basically the user centered approach to the implementation of aid programs.

That's the approach I pressed for years in Russian nonprofit legal reform, to no avail, alas. It's great to see user-centered system design emerging as the new standard.

That was the theme that dominated the discussion following what had been a mind-numbing display of self-congratulation at the keynote panel of Designism 2.0, a conference at NYC's Art Directors Club on design and social change. Details after the jump:

BONUS UPDATE: The always enlightening Core77 has a more comprehensive summary from a design professional. One of the pics shows me in the audience looking cranky, which is only appropriate.

The Minnesota Supreme Court has stripped a nonprofit of its state property tax exemption due to its commercial character and the limited scope of its charitable activity:

In the Red Wing case, the Minnesota high court ruled in a 4-3 decision that a child-care center doesn't qualify for tax exemption because it charges full price for all its services, offers no scholarships, retains the right to dismiss children if their parents are unable to pay the fees, and offers no discounts for participants whose fees were paid by county or tribal governments. As such, the center can't be exempt from paying property taxes.

Just a little reminder that just because an organization qualifies for federal tax exemption under 501(c)(3), that doesn't guarantee it tax exemption for all purposes under state law.

Blah.

From wishbookweb.com, a fabulous archive of scanned department store catalogs. It's not just a reflection of past values; it's also full of snapshots from my toybox from back in the day.

Yes, I had both of the items featured on this page.

At least I think that's the message of this 1954 ad:

No, this isn't a post on color-blindness.  It's a question raised by the New York Times in today's Style Section.  For a broader look at the is-green-green theme, also check out Valleywag's Snappy Answers to Stupid Hippies.

From Good Magazine, a critical look at the future impact of carbon offsets: "But if offsets are a bridge, where do they lead?"

Osocio, which features "Social advertising and non-profit campaigns from around the globe."

Craig Weinrich of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York left a comment below with some useful resources.  So no one misses it, here it is, with links:

NPCC usually gets about a dozen calls a week on starting a nonprofit, and although we do not assist in this area, aside from the checklist, we refer people onto Community Resource Exchange (www.crenyc.org) who have a fantastic book called "From Vision to Reality" as well as workshops and consultants to help. Additionally, we refer people to both Lawyers Alliance for New York (www.lawyersalliance.org) and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (www.nylpi.org) for legal assistance.

Via Found:

The motto of Manhattan's elite Trinity School is "Labore et Virtute"--work and virtue. While we now think of virtue in terms of moral purity, it can be useful to remember that in Latin, virtus can also connote power, especially in reference to abstractions or inanimate objects.

Take, f'r instance, real estate. For decades the Trinity School has taken advantage of a New York subsidy program to keep the apartments in the building it owns accessible to the less than rich. Property values have escalated, however, and so the School has announced that it will opt out of the program and sell the building.

Which points to a dilemma facing a number of charitable property owners in areas with escalating property values. On the one hand, selling property or raising rent would seem to be the best way for the board to fulfill its fiduciary duties & fulfill the organization's mission. Yet it can also lead to the reverse Robin Hood effect, handing lower-to-middle-class apartments to the rich or kicking out a historic local club.

Perhaps the single greatest weakness of the social enterprise movement is its belief that it is new.

Go back to the deepest origins of human society and you'll see it fused with what we would now call social ventures--in fact, the integration of commerce, charity and civic identity was arguably more thorough than what we celebrate today. The allegedly moribund nonprofit sector is itself the legacy of periodic waves of innovation; if we could swab it and put the cells under a microscope, we'd see the DNA of countless tributary shifts. You don't have to be a historian to see the evidence for this--hospitals, universities, thrift shops, even the lifestyle focus of contemporary commercial advertising all functioned as social/business hybrids long before the so-called revolution of social entrepreneurship.

But if social enterprise is so old, why people perceive as a radical innovation? The linguistic concept of the "recency illusion" provides a clue:

Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky coined the term, and he defined it on the Language Log linguistics blog as: "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent". A typical example discussed on the blog involved a blogger who believed that the sports expression "pulled within two points" was a recent invention, probably by US sportscaster Marv Albert. In reality, variations date back to the 19th century.

Instead of an unprecedented revolution, what we might be seeing in social enterprise is just the latest in a series of selective attention cascades, in which a new generation of do-gooders--a web of students, researchers, retirees and emerging entrepreneurs--clusters around an organizational metaphor that seems new to them. What is new, though, is not so much the underlying structure as our awareness of the metaphor itself.

Going beyond the bubble is a critical part of learning, which is one reason I try to read as much as possible outside the normal rounds of news re nonprofits and social enterprise. Tonight I was catching up on my Advertising Age when I came across this interesting article on the spike in visitors to websites for consumer packaged goods--y'know, like Kraft, M&Ms, Coke, etc. I was particularly intrigued by the surge in traffic to Uncle Ben's, so I clicked on through the prompts . . .

Sigh. Is there no refuge for the weary wanderer?

No vocab list today.  Instead, here are some helpful references:

• Nolo's intro article covering basic elements in forming a nonprofit organization. 
  
• The Foundation Center's instructive tutorial (with sample documents) on starting a nonprofit.
  
• A thorough checklist of "things ya gotta do" from the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York
  

Jack Siegel runs a blog on nonprofit corporate governance that is essential reading for anyone who needs to know the latest in the field.  For example, here's a story about how one Massachusetts nonprofit managed to avoid serious penalties in an investigation by the State AG.

The issue:  whether the charity had paid excessive compensation by approving a 1.265 million dollar retention bonus.  The AG

ultimately was comfortable with the process because of the following factors: (i) the board was consistently involved in setting Spaulding's compensation and reviewing his performance; (ii) independent comparables were used by the compensation committee in developing Spaulding's pay package; (iii) there was no evidence that Spaulding attempted to assert undue influence; (iv) the amounts of the deferred bonus were consistently disclosed in regulatory filings; and (v) with one exception, the minutes reflected the major decisions.

Re the last point, Siegel highlights a recommendation that I also make to my nonprofit law classes:

The most significant problem that Spackman [the AG] pointed to was a missing set of minutes for an important meeting (the May 3, 2001 one). Spackman made it very clear that the decision, including the reasoning behind it and the economic analysis, should be reflected in the minutes of the board and the committee. This simply reinforces our continuing belief that meeting minutes should be more detailed than many lawyers currently prefer. In our view, boards and their lawyers make a serious mistake when they claim they are avoiding potential board liability by stripping meeting minutes of any meaningful content. As we continue to observe practices, we find that more detailed minutes often would have avoided embarrassment and provided a solid defense for board decisions.

I once read that in an early draft of the Matrix, the humans were originally linked together as a giant parallel processor. However, the studio had the Wachowski Brothers change this to batteries because ordinary people would understand bodies-as-energy better than distributed computing.

But that clearly isn't stopping IT professionals in the real world. Pictured above: Beth Kanter documents what appears to be an early stage experiment in harnessing human brains to computers to enhance nonprofit tech!

RED PILL UPDATE:

Wanna know the real story?  Check out Beth's description of her visit to Portland's Free Geek, a nonprofit that "looks at two problems: e-waste and access to technology and throws them at each other in a way that saves the earth and gets computers into the hands of people who would not otherwise have them."  In the piece she includes a cool music video (with said head) and meditates on the critical issue of tech recycling, a problem that we as a nation have been dealing with mainly by hiding it in landfills or, what's worse, passing it on to other, poorer countries.

One sentence, though, particularly caught my eye:  "I'd make jewelry out of the parts, but don't have time."  I can relate.  For examples of creative computer recycling by folks who do have time (and, in contrast to me, actual talent!), check out my blog on spirituality and material culture as well as Beth's Flickr page and the work of Diana Eng.

Another expression of creative genius, as Andy Kaufman uses mimetic repetition to flip the figure and ground of ritualized musical performance:

OK, the video below may provoke a response unlike Eric Cartman's in the South Park movie: "the animation's all crappy." But what you're seeing is a true landmark in media history: the first animated cartoon series made for television.

What strikes me about this video is the way the creators were striving to transcend the limits of the medium. The viewer's fuzzy picture (no HDTV back in 1949--the screens truly sucked); the fast-turnaround time of a weekly show; the lack of a motion-picture-size budget (up 'til then, cartoons were shown before movies). Watch carefully and you'll see strategies similar to those used in the most successful videos in the Youtube era. It's also akin to the way Charles Schulz flipped the limitations of space and his artistic talents into Peanuts, a strip that redefined the genre.

That's view jitsu: leveraging the constraints of your media environment into a transformative advantage.

HT: WFMU and the Saturday Morning Blog.

An interesting discussion on Slashdot. The value of the data + the value of the ad-free ethic = something people will pay to read online.

A shot looking up from the bottom of a power line.

Man, this is smart: Tide has a truck that goes to disaster areas & washes clothes for free, in partnership with  nonprofit-corporate-uber-connecter America's Second Harvest. 

Proof of the concept's appeal:  The Tide folks don't only use this to induce you to purchase their product--they get you to help fund their PR by "donating" through the purchase of a vintage Tide t-shirt.  Which, of course, is another way to advertise Tide.

When you want to put an image on your website or blog, you can either host the image yourself or embed an image hosted elsewhere. Embedding an image from, say, Flickr or Youtube usually isn't going to cause you much trouble besides a blank space if it's removed. However, if you embed an image from someone else's personal or business site, you risk serious embarrassment if they decide you're just a leech. Case in point: this decidedly NSFW tale of website that brazenly copied another's design, even down to embedding the original's picture logo. Trust me, you don't want something like this to happen to you. Lesson: if you're going to borrow an image from someone else's site, place the copy on your own server and acknowledge the original source.

The ad above is from the October 1923 National Geographic. Note the theme, linking a fueled engine with clear air.

Cynical manipulation?

Nope. Back in the day, internal combustion engines were a means of *cleaning* the air from noxious pollution--the pollution that arose of horse manure. Your average urban environment was not only choking on the stench; people breathed in harmful particles released into the air by vehicles treading over manure. They also tracked sh*t into the house on their shoes.

The car promised to bring the countryside into the city. Instead of leaving behind a tangible reminder of its presence, its only by-product was a mostly invisible vapor that wafted harmlessly into the clouds.

Or so it seemed . . .

It's easy to mock with the benefit of hindsight, but there's a lesson here for the modern sustainability movement. Green on the front-end does not necessarily mean green at every level. A key question to ask of every eco-friendly product: what are the harmful effects we don't see?

Yadda yadda yadda:

Via Putting People First:

Richard Titus, acting head of user experience at BBC Future Media and Technology, quotes on his blog an excerpt from an interviewRolling Stone did with William Gibson (author of Neuromancer and Spook Country, and coiner of the term Cyberspace).

“Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you’re not gonna know when you’re on or when you’re off. You’re always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it’s a drag.”

From New Scientist via BLDGBLOG:

Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry, warns a new report.

Global Action Plan, a UK-based environmental organisation, publishes a report today drawing attention to the carbon footprint of the IT industry in the UK.

"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

List and descriptions available in the magazine's centerfold (!) or here, unfolded, online. The first thing that jumps out is how familiar most of the winners are. We may say that the long tail rules, but lists like this reinforce the "rich-get-richer" dynamic of our scale-free nonprofit network.

What really caught my eye on FC was this blog post about how venture capitalists are, despite the hype, quietly moving away from green investment.

In the never ending cycle of green paradoxes, many consumers say they would pay more for green technology, but the VCs have slowed their investments there. Granted consumers were talking about home electronics and the VCs referred to alternative energy, but it still shows how market forces aren't suddenly going to solve our climate problems.

Primary beneficiary of the shift: defense. Another symptom, I think, of green consumerism being a luxury good: its viability depends on the continuation of what has been a twenty-year+ market boom.

View of Manhattan from the Statue of Liberty in 1901, via Shorpy. Click here for a larger version.

The twin domes in the middle used to mark the world's tallest building--at a dizzying height of 391 ft., 30 floors! Originally the New York Times HQ, now the building is owned by Pace University. Look carefully and you might be able to find it (and the domes) in my window view:

The words just keep on comin'.  Several of the linked items today are excerpts from Bruce Hopkins' Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations (although from the previous edition to the one most current).  When you want detailed info on questions related to exempt orgs, private foundations and charitable deductions, you should think about taking at look at Hopkins' comprehensive volumes from Wiley, which are also available to read for free at the Foundation Center library. 

Another ad that illustrates the blurred line between cause marketing and commercial ads. Nail biting is commonly viewed as a health problem, albeit one that has not to my knowledge inspired any celebrity telethons. Commerce steps in to save the day.

The Coolhunter speaks for us all when it says, "Let's just hope a hemorrhoid cream company does not launch their own version."

More vocabulary with basic instructional links:

Here are the periodicals I mentioned in class last night:

• Chronicle of Philanthropy
• Exempt Organization Tax Review
• Nonprofit Times
• Nonprofit Quarterly

Also, here's the Foundation Center website.

Yesterday in my law class we reviewed how good record-keeping can be key to defending a lawsuit against a nonprofit's directors and officers.

But what if you lose?  Or, even if there isn't a lawsuit, how can you minimize the risk of loss for your organization's leaders?

Directors and officers insurance.  More here.

 

 

Allan Benamer provides insight into how nonprofits can benefit from the new data-sharing feature on Salesforce. 

The impact for non-profits? Non-profits can now sit down in a circle, hold hands, sing Kumbaya AND share their data with one another. It’s going to be a slow process but it WILL happen.

For example . . .

Here in New York, I can imagine it being used as a way to create an HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) that would be spread over multiple non-profits so that they could share eviction prevention information with one another. It would certainly beat the faxes (yes, faxes!) that are still being sent from one non-profit to another. I’m sure there are even more applications if non-profits were willing to share data.

Great poster; more here.

In tonight's nonprofit law class, we chatted about fundraising, which electronic media have made just a teeeeeeeeensy bit complicated. In addition the chapter in Bruce Hopkins' Nonprofit Law Made Easy, here are some helpful links:

Concise explanation at nonprofit.about.com

Guidestar's guide to state fundraising regulation

Basic FAQ overview (dated, but still useful)

Multistatefiling.org

NASCOnet.org

Here's the latest one from Techsoup.  

Of course, not all eco-friendly material is as nasty as the baseball cap featured earlier. From today's Women's Wear Daily, news that environmental sustainability will repeat as a major theme at this year's Material World cycle of trade shows:

Continuing the theme of environmental sustainability begun last year, the fabric areas will feature renewable resources such as bamboo, soy, Ingeo and corn fiber, along with fabrics that offer performance features, such as moisture management, antibacterial properties and thermo regulation.

Birch bark, peat and a wooden button: "It was a pilot model for some kind of ecotourism souvenir venture that never got off the ground. It is extremely uncomfortable to wear but might go well with a hair shirt if you happen to own one."

Somehow, I don't see Derek Jeter wearing this anytime soon.

We cover a lot of ground in my nonprofit law course, and at times it may seem that the penalties on groups that do wrong have little application to mainstream charities.

After all, we're all good here, aren't we?

Except good intentions can lead to any number of bad acts--and because these things are done in the name of doing good, even the most respectable group won't see anything wrong.

Here's an interesting case study from California.  Although some legal details may differ from state to state--not all states would apply the language of trust law to gifts to a corporate charity, for example--the core principles and lessons remain the same.  In a nutshell, a California United Way spun off a separate charity to manage charitable contributions, and then . . .

When you cut through the numbers, the problems and issues are relatively straightforward. The court concluded that PipeVine was undercapitalized when it split off from United Way, with the result that PipeVine was forced to use new contributions to meet its obligations to remit amounts attributable to older contributions. The court also concluded that Pipeline's financial statements, as a result of an adjusting entry, hid these facts by overstating PipeVine's worth.

Click the link for a full summary and essential advice.

Accountability works only so long as we know how to read the numbers.  Case in point:  this Harvard Crimson op-ed condemning gross fiscal irresponsibility by some of the nation's leading charities:

For all their publicity stunts and feel-good lines, many of today’s powerhouse nonprofits are extremely inefficient. They commit the majority of their resources to pulling in potential donors through razzle-dazzle, so that there is little left in the way of resources for their actual causes. Inevitably, every organization has overhead costs, but a staggering number of charities today are falling out of control in this respect.

Sounds bad, doesn't it . . . until you read the corrections:

The May 15, 2006 op-ed, “Corrupt Charities,” incorrectly stated the percentage of donations to several charities that goes towards the people and programs that the charities exist to serve. According to Charity Navigator, a non-profit organization that reviews charitable groups, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation spends 76.2 percent of money on its causes, not 13 percent. The Greenpeace Fund spends 78.8 percent on its causes, not 18 percent. The March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation spends 75.1 percent, not 18 percent. Charity Navigator does, however, rate the efficiency of Greenpeace and March of Dimes as deserving only two stars, which signifies that it “needs improvement.” The Komen Foundation received a three-star “good” rating.

These significant mistakes occurred because the writer did not correctly read the information on the organizations listed on Charity Navigator’s website. Though Crimson policy is that all pieces must be fact-checked by an editor, the editor of this piece also misread the numbers.

The Crimson will investigate how the writer, the editor of the piece, and two proofers missed the factual inaccuracies, and will move to ensure that existing fact-checking policies are strictly followed so that similar errors will not happen in the future.

Quel scandal!

Continuing the list with explanatory links:

UBIT (and exceptions)

fiduciary duties

Supporting organization (and types)

990

990-N

Vehicle donations

One of the most important yet least understood aspects of running a nonprofit is managing its intellectual property.  This podcast interview with Professor Susan Scafidi covers the basics. 

All the questions in the interview were drawn from actual questions I've received from students, nonprofits or other social enterprises.  And here are a couple follow-ups:

Q:  Can a nonprofit get a trademark, since it's not a business?

A:  Yes.  A trademark is a symbol used to identify the source of goods or services in the marketplace.  Even if a nonprofit does not perceive itself as a business, it may actually enter the marketplace in any number of ways, not least of all by fundraising.  For more on nonprofits and trademark, check out the article linked here. 

Q:  When I start my nonprofit, do I have to register its name as a trademark?

If you are going to use the name on goods or services, then it's a good idea to protect yourself by registering the name as a federal trademark rather than simply relying on common law trademark protection. On the other hand, the name of a nonprofit (or for-profit) organization cannot be registered as a trademark unless it is also applied to goods or services.   

Q:  Can a church get a trademark?

A:  Yes.  Here's an example of how the Presbyterian Church (USA) uses trademark law to avoid confusion with other churches and to prevent unauthorized use of its name.  Similarly, here's the trademark policy of the Seventh Day Adventists.  Religious groups may generally be full of peace and light, but mess with their trademarks and they can get pretty badass.

And finally, here are the web sites noted in the podcast, plus one extra:

• counterfeitchic.com
• "Son Bucks"
• uspto.gov
• copyright.gov

In some bathrooms, looks like brown is the new green:

Via

Luxe designer brand Hermes has created a limited edition scarf for Lafayette College and is selling it exclusively at the college store.  Bonus good karma to any of my students who can suss out why this is arguably not subject to the unrelated business income tax.

Man, there's nothing like prescription Tussin nectar to put away a late-night cough that's kept you from sleeping the past couple days.  Of course, you sleep until noon, but them's the breaks.

TechCrunch has an informative post today with links to the emerging market in web design without code.  Their featured provider:  Doodlekit.

Doodlekit . . . goes even further by providing a suite of advanced features, all of which can be set up with a few clicks of the button: forums, customizable forms, shopping carts, advertising, user accounts and profiles, restricted areas for approved members, file uploading, full site search, RSS feeds, photo albums, blogs, basic site statistics, and domain mapping. Some of these features are available for free, but many will require that you pay $15 or more per month. 

If you don't mind a little hands-on designing, you might also want to use the tools in a desktop program such as Dreamweaver.  Here's a set of free video lessons providing a basic overview of Dreamweaver; you can also find free instructions on specific tasks online.  Here, for example, are various options of designing your own forms for gathering customer input.

"You are not in my extended network" T-shirt available here.

The revolt against commercialized social networks has been getting a bit of media play, particularly following the backlash against Facebook's Beacon ad system.  In today's International Herald Tribune: a feature on Kaioo, a nonprofit social network designed to serve as a more-or-less noncommercial alternative.  Of particular interest:  note who's funding it.

The founders pledge that its mission is to create an international haven from networks like Facebook and MySpace, where advertising and the sales pitch are becoming as elemental a social ritual as flirting. And Kaioo says all the profit it might make from limited advertising will be donated to charity.

"Users want to have an independent, democratic system that they feel is theirs," said Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, chief executive of the music giant Sony BMG, who is financing the initial start-up of Kaioo out of his own pocket with €500,000, or $730,000. "The biggest asset that we have is credibility and this platform can only grow if users feel that this is real and totally independent."

There's a conceptual link here to politics, where the emerging conflation of independence with wealth.  Autonomy: the ultimate luxury good?  

Russian elections? 

Venezuelan constitutional referenda? 

Nahhhh, the biggest story this weekend is the announcement that Viacom is going to archive the complete South Park online.

For free.

For folks who know where to look, of course, getting South Park for free online isn't all that difficult.  But what's so great about this latest development is that it'll be completely legal.  Viacom's success in archiving the Daily Show--making all the episodes available for free was followed by a jump in the ratings--has apparently led it to conclude that the best way to promote broadcast television is to give shows away online.

Which pretty much confirms what I've been thinking about online distance education.  Y'see, there are a bunch of hearty noble souls out there in nonprofit university land who see online education as a potential goldmine.  Blogs, podcasts, wikis--the assumption is you'll pay for 'em at full price tuition or a little less.  Post it, and they will buy.

Nope.  Sorry.  Not gonna happen.

If popular entertainment such as South Park hasn't able to find a sustainable fee-based model, I don't see how higher education--which is far less funny--is going to draw a critical mass of paying customers.  Sure, a few places on the margins might be able to make a few bucks that way--a Phoenix for non-traditional students and elites like Harvard or Stanford for folks who want to backdoor into the brand names--but for the majority of academic institutions the returns just won't be there.  People aren't going to pay to watch or listen to most lectures, and your average professor--myself included--doesn't have the time to transform forty-five hours of a real-world seminar into professional-quality ten-minute instructables, particularly ones for which you'd be willing to shell out twenty-grand a year.

Instead, I see online education primarily as a marketing tool.  Professors and, yes, students give information away for free, and maybe, if we're bit lucky, folks will want to join the real-world community themselves by paying tuition.  It's a gambit, sure, but it's also 'liberal" education in the truest sense of the word--and it may be the key to the survival of the university itself.       

This question flows from one of the tax code's more insidious and retrograde provisions with regard to tax exemption. 

First, some background.

In a nutshell, the Internal Revenue Code divides 501(c)(3) organizations into two major categories: public charities and private foundations.  Both are 501(c)(3)s, but private foundations are subject to a few more restrictions.  (Folks who want a short-and-sweet summary should really click that last link.  Really.)  In order to avoid these restrictions most 501(c)(3)s prefer to be treated as public charities. 

But how do you get recognized as a public charity?  The right side of the chart below sums it up:  you want to meet the standards set out in one of the sections in Code Section 509(a).  For most organizations the path lies in sections 509(a)(1)-(3), although 509(a)(4) also provides a way out for organizations testing for public safety. 

The groups listed above "Section 509(a)(1)" take us to our main question.  Publicly supported public charities have to meet complicated mathematical tests, as do 509(a)(2) public charities.  509(a)(3)s have to meet complex tests relating to organizational structure, and they're also subject to some additional rules.  However, churches, schools and hospitals have it easier--if they fit the relevant definition, they don't have to bother with the mathematical or structural tests.

What are the relevant definitions? They can be a bit hard to remember, but fortunately the main details are spelled out for you in the application for recognition as a 501(c)(3) organization, IRS Form 1023--and I've clipped the pertinent parts here.

Read the standards carefully and you'll get a sense as to why this subset of 509(a)(1) organizations is sometimes referred to "traditional public charities."  The standard explanation for the grouping is that churches, schools and hospitals have traditionally been associated with serving the interests of the general public, but the definitions follow tradition in deeper sense:    

To qualify as a church, school or hospital, your organization has to look like something out of 1954. 

A church has such things as a hierarchy, a place of worship, a code of doctrine and Sunday school.

A school has a faculty, curriculum, buildings (or other physical "facilities") and enrolled students. 

A hospital is, well, a hospital, a real-world facility providing discrete medical services to patients.

And that's the real story.  These organizations were not given privileged treatment because they are most responsive to the public--if they were, the standards would be written so as to allow the categories to adapt as society itself evolves. Rather, this is yet another example--all too common in law--of the wealthiest, most powerful organizations using their influence to get out of burdensome rules that apply to less well connected groups. 

An established "church" doesn't have to meet either the mathematical or supporting organization tests; an upstart "religious organization" does, in part precisely because its approach to worship is non-traditional.  No accident, this--at the time the rules were written, mainstream Christian churches were a central component of America's civic identity.  Similarly, private schools and hospitals were seen as an extension of the governmental system of education and medical care, with entrenched bureaucracies, a fixed infrastructure and centralized control.

In sum, the grouping of these three institutions is designed to keep privileged social status as the status quo, all in the guise of protecting the organizations most responsive to ordinary people. 

Bah.

Probably the most influential writer in the development of my feeble little mind has been Marshall McLuhan, whose "Understanding Media" and "The Medium is the Massage" I read to pieces when I was tyke. Back in the day McLuhan was dismissed by most of his academic colleagues as a loopy pop phenom. Now academics declare the brilliance of supposedly innovative insights that McLuhan tossed off forty years ago.

Today's New York Times highlights a particularly telling example: the emerging theory that the web is ushering in a return to a tribal society more reflective of oral, pre-literate culture.

Oh really? Could it be?

As I note in my web class, this was one of McLuhan's oft-repeated predictions--in the words of one commentator, "for McLuhan the coming of the electronic age will precipitate a return to the tribalism and diversity that collapsed in the age of movable type"; for much more, see McLuhan's landmark Playboy interview. To its credit, the NYT article does point the connection to the work of one of McLuhan's most influential students, Walter Ong.

Readers interested in a blog that provides consistently insightful McLuhan-inspired commentary, check out Mark Federman's What is the (Next) Message?

McIwo

Economists Art Durnev and Sergei Guriev have published an insightful analysis of how good corporate governance and business success can lead to over-regulation and an increase in corruption. Their case study: the oil industry.

Our argument is straightforward. During the periods of high oil prices, corporate profits in the natural resource industries represent rents that are relatively easy for governments to capture. Firms in such industries face a trade-off. On the one hand, in order to attract external capital, they need to be transparent. On the other hand, higher transparency involves a greater risk of expropriation. Transparency with respect to corporate profits can attract scrutiny by politicians and various forms of government expropriation, such as the extortion of bribes, overregulation, confiscatory taxation, and the outright seizure of firm assets. Transparency would therefore be lower in industries that are more vulnerable to expropriation, particularly in countries that have poor protection of property rights, especially when oil prices are high.

Durney and Guriev use the nationalization of Russia's Yukos oil company as an example of this historical pattern, but I wonder if we haven't seen a similar principle at work in the charity biz. Perhaps the reason for UBIT, private foundation regs and the heightened focus on accountability among public charities is not a response to bad governance, but good. Increased transparency and responsible management could make wealthy charities--charitable enterprise, feeder corporations, foundations, donor-advised funds, popular public charities such as the United Way and the Red Cross--more attractive targets for taxation and stricter government control.

Via

This video first made me laugh. Then I was fascinated by the waves of chocolate.

And then I saw the comments (plus the reactions of folks watching it over my shoulder). Could this video provide profound insight into the nature of evil? If so, what does that say about me?

My twenty-five years of being a Manhattanite in therapy begin . . . now!

As my web design class students know, I've been thinking a lot about the all too common disconnect between producer and consumer. Of course, it's not always the best thing for a designer to follow the consumers' wishes to a t.

Pictured above: one of several cool keyboards designed by elementary school children in Amy Tiemann's Laptop Club. If the girl who designed this keyboard had her wish, every computer would have a hotkey for Harry Potter trivia! Still, it's quite a revelatory document: note how the letters are scrunched up to the top, while the primary interface focuses on shopping, pets, shopping, entertainment, shopping, and email. Not to mention shopping. There's also the truly wonderful key in the center that's so evocative of childhood: "Private Code."

For more, check out the slideshow at the top of this interview.