December 2008 Archives
It's about time.
New Year's Eve, a time for profound reflection.
Like, what the #!%? happened to NYC's cupcakes?
Watching the evolution of NYC cupcakes has been quite interesting, from a systems perspective. The cupcake fad began with normal proportioned cakes and a sense of a styled upgrade on a comforting childhood cliche. Now it's a heap of sugary junk.
For example, I just got back from Chelsea Market, where the cupcake bakeries are chock full of the stuff pictured above: mounds of icing and sprinkles and candy and oreos and other gloop piled on a relatively routine (i.e., extra-sugary) cupcake base.
You can probably chart the feedback loop yourself, as Sex and the City + the spread of the haute urban fad to mass market hubs favors the emergence of cupcakes that are cheap, standardized, big and gimmicky.
Basically, the red tide of dessert.
Fans anxious to know whether Watchmen will be released in March as scheduled will have to wait a few weeks. The New York Times is reporting that the judge in the Watchmen case has decided to refrain from ruling on the injunction sought by Fox until after a hearing set for January 20, 2009.
For anyone who wants more details on the judge's 12/24 ruling, I've uploaded a set of documents that includes not just the Christmas Eve order, but both parties' motions for summary judgment as well as fascinating material filed by Fox just yesterday.
These three filings in particular provide detailed allegations as to how Warner Brothers got into this mess. In a nutshell, Fox claims that it has evidence that Warner Brothers initially relied on an inaccurate chain of title provided by Paramount. Once Warner Brothers was aware of Fox's documented claims, it nonetheless decided to proceed in a deliberate "business calculation" that it would be more profitable to deal with a court case than clear the rights before making Watchmen.
Fox's claim that Warner Bros. has an established "studio practice" of bad faith in clearing title is central to its argument that the court should enjoin Warner Bros. from releasing the film.
Besides these documents, I also recommend checking out Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily and Rodney Perkins' Film Esq., which provide detailed analysis of the latest developments.
Above: a resident of the Lutheran Home in Topton, PA--a senior citizens facility near my childhood home--participates in the popular Wii bowling league:
Senior citizens, who are sometimes presumed to be averse to technological innovation, are embracing Nintendo's video game system.
"It's surprising how they've taken to the Wii technology," said Sue Fogel, activities coordinator at The Lutheran Home. "Once they got the knack of it, they were hooked."
On the Nintendo Wii console, seniors are bowling, golfing and playing baseball and tennis without venturing outdoors. . . .
When it comes to moves, few can match 83-year-old Ted Jentsch's sidewinder-style body language.
Coaxing the ball into the groove with a nod here and a nudge there, Jentsch nailed three strikes in a row - called a turkey - and finished a round with an impressive 193.
The performance made his day.
"I was feeling lousy all weekend, and I almost didn't make it," said Jentsch, a retired pastor of St. John's Lutheran in Sinking Spring. "Playing like this, though, gets me energized."
Jentsch, who once taught sociology and anthropology at Kutztown University, offered an academic's view of Wii bowling.
"This is an interesting way that modern technology has made it possible for people who can't perform vigorous physical activity to have a social experience and enhance their feeling of self-esteem," said Jentsch, who walks with a cane.
Proof that the third sector is a source of social innovation that promotes capitalist democracy--we lived off government handouts long before commercial enterprise!
This panel featuring the Marvel comics character Jack of Hearts thoroughly rocks my world.
I've been reading a number of documents not covered (or not summarized correctly) in the press coverage of the Watchmen case. I've been waiting for the full ruling, but will probably post on Blog@ in a day or so on how things stand.
Amazing stuff from a legal perspective, gotta say.
This is a t-shirt for Una Mano per i Bambini ONLUS, an Italian charity.
What is ONLUS? It's an Organizzazione Non Lucrativa di Utilita' Sociale.
As you might have guessed, the holiday has led to a bit of a hiatus for the blog. I'll be posting more this week & will resume at full speed after the upcoming New Year's weekend.
One of the things I've been doing over the (alleged) break is catching up on my research. Included in my reading: the invaluable DC Vault, a "museum-in-a-book" that not only chronicles DC history, but reprints some material that I've been wanting to see for a while.
A prominent theme in the book: the relation between comics and "public service." The image above is from one of the reprinted documents: "Superman and the Great Cleveland Fire," a comic that ignorant 11 year old me did not buy for a quarter at a flea market when he had the chance. The comic is a pitch for a Cleveland fund collecting money to expand and to build nonprofit hospitals.
Read the text in the last page (reprinted above) and you'll see a compelling example of effective fundraising. The ad links infrastructure to discrete personal benefits, which is a powerful way to get people to see overhead as a social investment. It also highlights an aspect of the culture of health care that deserves more attention--note how the emergence of health insurance sparked a demand for more health care facilities, which in turn helped give rise to a demand for more insurance.
A festive celebration of the nature of form, via Neurophilosophy.
MTV has 'fessed up to bogarting grant funds intended to go to its citizen journalists project. 2173 has a thorough roundup.
I'm probably going to be light-to-nonexistent here for a couple days, so happy holidays!
In the meanwhile, if you have a lot of free time to kill on the web, feel free to check out my thoughts on obscenity law, anti-censorship strategy & tragic choice theory over at Blog@.
As if on cue, more news about puppies and charity. Pedigree dog food is advertising in the 2009 Super Bowl--and it could be a test case for the perceived effectiveness of cause marketing:
But rather than hawking its chow, the pet-food maker will be pushing a cause: pet adoption. The advertising strategy of promoting a cause instead of peddling one's wares more directly in tough times -- especially in such a fiercely competitive product category -- could fall short. The estimated $11 billion U.S. dog-food business is expected to grow only 3% next year, according to market-research firm Euromonitor International, after 5% growth forecast for this year. Pedigree didn't disclose what it is paying for the spot, but ad time during the big game isn't cheap, with companies forking over as much as $3 million for 30 seconds. That's a big investment for an oblique message.
Pedigree, which has never advertised during the big game, says the cause-marketing approach is the way to go. "It's the right message to send out at this time," says John Anton, Pedigree's director of marketing. "More dogs are going to end up in shelters because of home foreclosures." He adds, "Every time we run this campaign, we see increased sales."
Via AdPulp
I once had a conversation with a charity leader who expressed frustration with the fact that images of homeless people and recovering drug users had little fundraising appeal compared to other charities' pictures of babies and puppies. It's a fair point--evolutionary scientists note that we're coded to want to protect cute, soft, dependent li'l critters. Babies are the reason, of course, but canines have managed to leverage our instincts by mimicking the traits of human infants and young children well into doggy adulthood--which is perhaps one reason the tax code defines charitable activity to include "the prevention of cruelty to children and animals."
It's something I've been thinking about a bit this holiday season, thanks to attempts to raise funds or market products with commercials set to Silent Night--a musical expression of the help-the-baby drive. The first is for the ASPCA. The second, a popular Pampers commercial that has been used not just to sell diapers, but for a cause marketing tie-in. The third--Silent Night in the rainforest.
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has this interesting observation about the state of the workplace and business:
The goal of the people at the top now is to create what I call confusopolies. The barriers to entry to almost any business are so low now - any company can get into any business, just invest some capital and get your product made cheaply in China or somewhere - so everything is basically a commodity. So you have to make your product so complicated that people will pay more for it, just because they are awed by the complexity of it. This is what happened on Wall Street. You know, before the big meltdown, somebody asked Warren Buffett to explain how certain derivatives and credit-default swaps worked and he said he didn't understand them - and, although he was too modest to say so, what he was implying was that, if he didn't understand them, then nobody did. Well, that turned out to be true. The big investment banks were the ultimate confusopolies.
In my work I hear a lot about how for-profit/nonprofit cause marketing partnerships. The emphasis is usually on the positive--doing well by doing good, changing the way we do business, and so forth. What we don't see enough of are detailed reviews of how such projects actually work in practice, warts and all.
I especially want to emphasize those last three words. I've read plenty of rah-rah case studies where the critical analysis echoes the oh-so-clever answer every law student gives when a firm inquires as to one's greatest weakness: "I work too hard." But, like people, joint ventures are much more complex, and they'll never reach their potential if we pretend that even their weaknesses are above average.
Case in point: the breaking controversy of the Knight Foundation/MTV Young Creators' Award. The Knight Foundation's News Challenge program has produced a heap o' fantastic work--in fact, in the interests of full disclosure, I personally know and recommended one of the winning teams in a different (i.e., non-MTV-related) grant program.
However, the Knight/MTV partnership has generated a considerable amount of unhappiness among the young people who worked for it. Like Willy Loman, the correspondents in the Knight/MTV community journalist program worked unto exhaustion, long hours (allegedly) without pay--and what's worse, it's pay they were contractually obligated to receive. Since the experience seems to have spawned some disillusionment, attention must be paid.
The lesson now has become so relevant to the news we were covering - and our experience with MTV at the intersection of our nation’s financial crisis, the meltdown of traditional news media - and how the innocent idealism of youth that helped change a nation’s course - was exploited. What happened would wake us all up - on the Street Team, to the Real World.
EricaAmerica has the inside scoop; Gawker is looking for more.
In a charity polar bear event.
I'm dealing with end-of-the-semester stuff today--e.g., grading!--so as much as I want to chat about Carl Bialik's useful article on charitable metrics I'm going to have to hold off until later. As you might expect, it's a subject I've thought about quite a bit.
In the meantime, here's the Russian button I mentioned in my post about FORGE: The Karandash Happy People Club. Karandash is the Russian word for "pencil," which is why the artist has a pencil for a nose.
I got this button at the Chelsea Antique Collectible Flea Market, which is a lot like flea markets of old--a bunch of tables of cheap old stuff. One guy is Russian (or at least speaks it) and has a lot of Russian trinkets; there are lots of record albums and even, last I checked, boxes of cheap comics--unbagged, unboarded, ungraded--from the seventies and eighties.
Growing up I spent a lot of time at flea markets, both as a buyer and sometimes as a seller. At their motley best they are truly a social enterprise--you meet people with common interests, compare relative values (haggling!) and engage the past.
And here's something most folks don't know: the Chelsea Antique is on a parking lot owned by a local charity, like another local flea market used to be until Mary Help of Christians sold 'em out!
For reasons that should become obvious next year, I've spent a bit of time over the past decade studying towers. Here's a nice shot of one in Sukkur, Pakistan.
The U.S. Postal Service has temporarily shut down its annual Operation Santa Claus, in which individuals "adopt" children who write letters to the North Pole, after a postal worker recognized one gift giver as a registered sex offender.
"This is a program that we have promoted for 100 years that is very near and dear to the Postal Service," said Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the program. "Everyone wants to believe in Santa. For us to stop this, we feel we are doing the right thing."
At first, the Postal Service said the program would not resume until next year because the problem could not be fixed quickly. Later on, it said it planned to reopen the Manhattan program on Saturday, with procedural changes. It doesn't know about other cities.
Under the fixes, the program will acquire an anonymity that might drain it of some of its warmth. Names and addresses will be blacked out and letters will be numbered. Instead of sending gifts directly, gift-givers will need to take wrapped presents to the post office and provide the recipient's number. The post office will then send them out.
The idea of personally delivering gifts to children in the city's poorest corners -- a step that many program participants most enjoyed -- is now completely unthinkable.
This transformation of personal gift-giving into a black box is but one example of how questions of privacy affect the way groups implement the ideal of open connectivity. Human connections become mere abstractions, if they aren't prohibited completely. Yet if we open the system without making considerable expenditures of time and money to screen out untrustworthy givers, we run a real risk of equally, if not even more inhumane acts. It's a classic tragic choice.
Articles on the Madoff implosion highlight ripple effects beyond the loss of money & closure of prominent charities. Last night in my nonprofit class we discussed the tension this is creating within nonprofit boards, as well as its potential impact on nonprofit governance. Below, an excerpt from one news story highlighting the scandal's effect on local social networks:
"This is a very wealthy area, a place where there are a lot of philanthropic people. The fact that a lot of charity money has been lost is maybe the hardest thing for people to swallow," he said.
The local Palm Beach Post reported a frosty exchange at a birthday party Saturday night at Mr. Trump's ultra-exclusive Mar-a-Lago Club, where several furious Madoff clients confronted Robert Jaffe, who not only invested heavily in the disgraced financier but also received a fee for steering other clients to Mr. Madoff.
With Mr. Trump looking on, Mr. Jaffe came close to a physical confrontation with one particularly unhappy Madoff investor. "There were a lot of unhappy campers there," Mr. Trump told the newspaper.
The just-released January '09 Vogue has a lengthy photo-shoot titled "Supermom," in which a woman and her daughter dressed in 1950s-inspired clothing interact with Superman. The spread deliberately "strikes a mood of American optimism."
This evocation of post-Depression and post-WWII domestic icons raises interesting questions about what's next.
In a response to my post on FORGE, global health and Islamic banking consultant Jody Ranck reflected on how refugee services "reinscribe the camp." It was a comment I really appreciated, because it referred to a model of moral nihilism that was quite influential on my extensive (and, I hope, to be published next year) research on uncivil society. The theory in question: Giorgio Agamben's work on the state of emergency (or "exception").
If you're interested in the unintended consequences of good work, I highly recommend checking out Agamben's writings, especially these three books. Here's a useful excerpt on The Camp as Nomos.
Agamben's research has applications way beyond refugee work, especially in the U.S. One thing I'm working on myself for next year: ways to move beyond the matrix of dependence that shapes the relation between philanthropy and what are perceived in the U.S. as minorities. If Obama's campaign reminded us of anything, it's that immigrant and ethnic minority communities have strong institutional resources that arguably provide stronger models for effective strategy than investment banks and hedge funds. Rather than reinforce the superior/inferior cognitive frame by pondering yet again how charity can "help," do-gooders would do better to study what we can learn.
Which--along with this UK Times article on celebrity and social enterprise--reminds me of one of my favorite all-time satires of charity: Ricky Gervais on celebrity appeals for Africa. As McLuhan was wont to say, behind every joke is a grievance, and here you can see a brutal takedown of how charity has come to serve commercial colonialism:
Turn the kaleidoscope, and a local mall transforms from a commodified conformist culture-free zone into a nexus of community:
Both Birnbrey and Susan Wachter, professor with University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Real Estate Department, warn the social and economic impact of empty stores can be devastating.
"One of the biggest consequences [of store and mall closings] is the loss of a sense of community," Birnbrey said. "I am a big believer that malls are an essential part of Americana. A mall is a place where people gather and socialize."
Birnbey is an industry rep, but his point is nonetheless valid--malls are social spaces, and a well-designed mall builds on our tendency to connect. A number of malls, however, are designed as if their sole function is to line up a strip of stores, and my thoroughly uninformed guess would be that these are the most vulnerable.
Susan Wachter has done lots of interesting work on real estate, economics and society, such as this 2005 article on The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context.
That's what one professor after discovering that his sister's life savings were lost in the Madoff Ponzi scheme.
But that's just part of this wrenching autobiographical account of how Madoff hurt the family of a prominent financial journalist whose wife lost her foundation job when the charity lost its endowment.
We'll no doubt be studying the Madoff scandal for years to come. It's like the description of the Ponzi wine pictured above: "The finish is long."
[Madoff story via tech journo extraordinaire Angela Gunn. And Ponzi wine is no Ponzi scheme--it's a leading Oregon vineyard active in important nonprofits & charity, and its wines are quite good!]
Over the past few weeks several folks, including students, have expressed an interest in my opinion on FORGE, the Africa charity that became a social enterprise cause celebre when its founder, Kjerstin Erickson, decided to blog about its financial problems on Social Edge.
I've been puzzling over what to say here for a while, because, well, I have the pleasure of meeting & working with a lot of young leaders of charitable start-ups, and as folks who know me in the real world can tell you that when I'm dealing with 'em one-on-one, I'm a real up-with-people person.
No, really. I even have a Russian badge that certifies me as a member of the "Happy People Club"!
Anyway, my preference is to encourage the good and, where there are missed opportunities or areas of potential improvement, to make my suggestions with a suitable amount of moral support. You don't get to see that on the web, where even the broadest smile gets reduced to cold digitized letters--one reason, by the way, I like to illustrate my posts with pictures.
Since the stakes are so high with FORGE--literally, the organization's survival could be at stake if it does not hit its long-term fundraising goals--I was reluctant to join in with my own SWOT analysis lest it be misconstrued as a takedown. And that's not an idle concern--though social enterprise talks a lot about being more businesslike, there's an unfortunate tendency to see departures from "yay you for being the most revolutionary amazing successful innovator ever" as a personal attack.
Still, folks are not just fundraising for FORGE but holding it up as a model for other charities to follow, and FORGE has been gracious enough to welcome public scrutiny of its actions. So I tell ya what--here's the EULA for the rest of this post:
By reading the rest of this post, I agree that Jeff, as a certified member of the Happy People Club, is aware that Forge is providing social benefit and deserves my support if I want to provide it. I also agree that Jeff is never, ever wrong except when he is, which he's not, generally, except sometimes, when, hooooo boy, is he ever!
If you want to know what it's like to chat with charity folks experiencing Madoff effects, their reaction is a lot like the picture above.
From Mad magazine #44, back in 1959.
"So many years, so many changes, with Fortuna wending through them like Theseus' thread."
That's what I wrote back in February when Cafe La Fortuna closed its doors for the last time. Ten months later, I still regularly find myself about to suggest another trip uptown for coffee and community, only to remember that it is gone. Today, it's on my mind because Newsday has posted a nice commemorative photo gallery.
Every so often I hear a sincere nonprofiteer going on about how for-profits are corrosive while nonprofits propagate social values. At times like that I think about Fortuna . . . and the contractor who saw his work on homes as a way to build community . . and the auto mechanic whose passion for learning--and personal library--rivaled that of the professors and grad students who flocked to chat with him at his garage.
Social values are not a zero sum game. By recognizing the organic connections among all forms of personal identity, we don't diminish nonprofits--rather, we come closer to understanding what they mean.
Got my MacBook back today--new case, new innards, a real Heraclitus moment.
The whole experience threw a wrench in my plans for filmed reviews for my class, but I'm more or less set for next semester. Now I'm off to reload Final Cut . . . . and everything else.
I'm in the midst of preparing the final exam + review for my nonprofit law class, but I couldn't help but get caught up in the Blagojevich criminal complaint. Nonprofit and tax-exempt organizations are central to the indictment, which alleges, based largely on taped conversations, that the Illinois governor sought to enrich himself and punish his critics through deals involving a campaign fund, state finance authority, a hospital expansion program, a union, a charity and a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.
Really, I could have used the complaint as a springboard for half my course.
As someone who practiced law in Chicago, I find several aspects of the complaint sadly familiar--let's just say Gov. Blagojevich is not the first Illinois public official to cultivate a quid-pro-quo culture for getting permission for nonprofit projects. (See the complaint pages 21-23 and 36 for some killer stuff on this score.)
Also interesting from the perspective of charity history is Blagojevich's attempt to trade his Senate appointment replacing Obama for a well-paid position as head of what Blagojevich calls a "private foundation," but in context meant a nongovernmental charity. (see pp. 57ff). Historians of philanthropy will no doubt recall that the alleged use of charities as lucrative way-stations for politicians between posts was a factor in the enactment of the extensive tax reforms in 1969 that gave us much of the present law regarding so-called private foundations and public charities.
Porn DVDs for Africa inspire this compelling cri de couer on charitable marketing from Wronging Rights, via Blood and Milk.
Isn't there something peculiar about placing added value on products that somehow involve people who have been raped, tortured, infected with HIV, diarrhea'd to death, or otherwise atrocitied? Kate and I have been waiting for "sex toys made by sex slaves," which we assume would be the ultimate victim craft. If you're going to combine rampant consumerism with a prurient interest in other people's suffering, you should really go for it.
The key issue here isn't the porn DVD that inspired this post; it's the extent to which charity has become the new colonialism. We're not as different from the nineteenth century as we would like to think.
The NY Times has a revealing article on the implosion of the market for recyclable goods. As recycling becomes unprofitable, localities are sending their separated recyclables to landfills--which raises serious questions about the values beneath the professions of virtue:
The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.
Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.
But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.
If you want to understand a major influence on my understanding of and advice to the social enterprise movement, read this useful new research paper from Santa Fe: "Language is a complex adaptive system."
This past Saturday in Iowa, Cup o' Kryptonite--a coffee & comic book shop--rang in the holiday season with an amazing charitable fundraiser:
Cup O' Kryptonite will serve as a drop-off site for Toys For Tots on Saturday. Customers may have gifts wrapped for a donation, which will benefit Animal Lifeline of Iowa, a special-needs, no-kill shelter on the south side. Additionally, proceeds from items purchased at the Geek Boutique will go to Iowa Public Television.
Children can make Christmas ornaments or write letters to Santa throughout the day. Darth Vader and others from "Star Wars" movies are scheduled to appear, with Santa Claus on hand later in the day.
The festivities end with holiday family movies - "Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - from 5:30 to 9 p.m.
"Our whole reason for being here is the community," said Matt Johnson, co-owner of the store, who also lives on the south side. "We're supported by our friends and family. We need to then give back to the community in ways like this."
It's another example of how the lines between nonprofit/for-profit, public/private, social/business and so forth are not coherent.
And as I said when writing about the Superman case on Blog@Newsarama, "Siegel and Shuster did not just create a character. They created a community."
Master marketer Schmuel Tennenhaus has created a creative and popular guerilla ad campaign for Vista--so of course, Microsoft wants to shut him down.
Maybe there's a way to compromise--like, say, putting the Vista logo on a yarmulke!
Well, that's it. After dealing with multiple crashes I tried to reinstall Leopard again, and the implosion when I plugged in the computer with a couple minutes left on the install confirmed that the problem lies with the hardware. Now the Mac goes into a box to disappear . . . forever?
Good thing the once-dead school Dell was miraculously revived. From now on I'm calling it Jason Todd.
Sony has taken over Grand Central, sponsoring the Kaleidoscope light show & the AQUOS Experience LCD tree. Well, OK, not a tree, but an ecumenical "tower."
As in, you know, Babel.
Anyway, for a sense of how the tree looks and sounds, watch below. You might also want to check out this video for the whole tree, though the music is washed out by the crowd noise.
As you might suspect, that's not the only reason I spent time around this particular holiday tree. No, what particularly grabbed me: the charitable tie-in and accompanying PR about the AQUOS Experience as a "symbol of hope." Perhaps the hope & charity part would be more convincing if it dropped the biz-speak, such as the references to "each individual consumer" and "enhancing the holiday atmosphere in the terminal."
I also like the explanation, in the blurb just linked above, as to how the affiliated charity's Green Collar Project "aligns well with Sony's core vision of creating energy-saving and energy-creating products"--as if making products that actually *consume* energy is just an unfortunate accident.
Anyway, here's the beginning of the official explanation of the charity connection:
Sharp designed the AQUOS Experience, which will be on display throughout the month of December, enhancing the holiday atmosphere in the terminal. As part of this initiative, Sharp will be making a significant donation to The HOPE Program, a charity that equips its participants with the skills they need to find, keep, and advance in jobs. With Sharp's donation, The HOPE Program will be able to launch the "Green Collar Project," a new program to help people find green collar jobs in an environmental field. This will not only allow participants to become economically self sufficient, but will also help preserve the environment.
"We created the AQUOS Experience as a symbol of hope, especially important during this holiday season, and chose to work with The HOPE Program to help those who are out of work," said Doug Koshima, chairman and CEO, Sharp Electronics Corporation.
It's only appropriate that the front cover to JK Rowling's new Tales of Beedle the Bard sports an axe and tree stump, cuz there must have been about a million trees cut down just to make the copies stacked up in the Union Square Barnes & Noble.
Still, I'm not writing this post because I've gone on a sustain-a-frenzy. The story that interests me more is the tie-in with Rowling's charity, the Children's High Level Group. The sale of a handwritten version of the book has already raised $4 million for the charity, and now Scholastic is donating to CHLG the "net proceeds" of Beedle's mass market edition.
Yes, it's a good thing--I'm not questioning that. But I also wonder if there wasn't an equally good argument for allocating some of those proceeds to Scholastic itself. After all, the publisher is in the education business, and between the financial crisis and the end of the main Harry Potter series, the company is facing substantial losses.
As GiftHub has pointed out, the nonprofit world is somewhat lacking in satire directed at itself. However, there's no shortage over at the Art Museum Toilet of Art, a website that skewers the visual rhetoric of museum culture. Visit the giftshop; become a member; learn about the different ways you can give. There's even a pricey collectable catalog!
Via Animal New York
DC may be looking to preserve the brutalist architecture of a prominent religious congregation, but here in NYC we're knocking 'em down like bowling pins. Even if charitable landmarking issues aren't your scene, check out the NY Times article just for the cool slidey-picture-widget-thing enabling you to compare the brutalist Jewish Child Care Association with its replacement, a new but traditional LDS meeting house.
The past seventy-two hours have been round-the-clock busy, but one of the virtues of class night is my ritual of clearing out time for a decent rest afterwards.
But afterwards is now long past, so up up and away and all that.
That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? The above video promotes a seminar on the new Form 990, and as the host, Greg Bader, dryly observes it is about as exciting as the above pull quote indicates. Still, it's free--unlike a lot of other web video on the 990--and it explains why the IRS decided to expand the form, about which you can find a handy detailed breakdown here.
If it's no-holds-barred fun you're after, watch Greg Bader's Holiday Party, in which Mr. B provides a rather handy & detailed guide to the legal and management issues throwing a nonprofit shindig for your staff. Click through the video below for Part II. Pretty much the only issue not covered-- the intellectual property implications of indiscrete use of the photocopy machine!
No Sasha, just Fierce:
As the recession deepens, Fitch has changed its outlook for the not-for-profit hospital sector to negative, from a previous status of stable. Fitch noted that the recession has hit hardest on hospitals that entered the economic downturn with weaker credit ratings.
As we have already noted, fewer patients are seeking healthcare, and more are unable to pay, which is stressing the not-for-profit hospitals even further. Worse still, budget deficits are piling up at both the state and federal levels, which could hurt hospitals that depend on publicly funded health plans.
The ticking time bomb: debt-financed expansion. Defaulting on bonds = not good, which is why I've included bonds, dissolution & related issues in my law for nonprofits class.
Via Tactical Philanthropy, Lucy Bernholz raises key concerns about the effects of the financial crisis.
Two areas of potential impact of the crisis concern me. First, will fear about the future make people turn away from community, look for ‘others’ to blame, and be divisive and destructive to civil society? Certainly history can provide plenty of examples of this type of civil withering. We can also find examples in which uncertainty brings out the best in people. Have we learned anything about fostering the latter and avoiding the former? Second, while individual philanthropic impulses always continue, what will happen to the ‘business of giving’ in view of the scale of current uncertainty? Assumptions about large-scale transfers of wealth have to be re-examined, as plans for retirement, medical care and family financial security are radically realigned. We also don’t know whether and how online giving marketplaces, social enterprise, social investing and other innovations born in good times will stand a downturn, short or prolonged, and how those changes will ripple across longer-standing practices.
The reference to assumptions re generational wealth transfers particularly stands out for me. The "people are dying and we'll get rich" meme has cycled around before in the charitable world--just like they weren't the first to discover sex and social change, baby boomers weren't the first to retire and write wills. Time and again it turns out to be an illusory dream, Lucy's football to do-gooders' Charlie Brown.
Believe it or not, this actually has something to do with the X-Men defeating in hunger in Africa. Progressive Ruin has more about 1980s comic book charitable fundraisers.
Via Journalista.
An invitation from last year's fundraiser for The Gift Foundation. This year's theme was Rock Stars and Groupies, about which probably the less said the better!
Here's an interesting expression of art transforming the mundane: a South Korean performance artist who fashions his props out of garbage. More here.
“It’s our job to breathe new life into things that are thrown away and considered useless,†said Hong. “We find joy in discovering possibilities for old materials. For us, there is no such as something useless. The best part is that anybody can play these instruments. That is why as we perform, we become one with our audience.â€
On the way back home from writing this afternoon, a huge vacant space on Park Avenue South provided a stark reminder of how much the city has changed in the years since I used the nearby Starbucks as my writing perch.
Speaking of which, as Paul Light reminds us, commercial stores and real estate aren't the only things affected by the financial crisis:
Of the nearly 1 million nonprofits up and running, as many as 100,000 will fail over the coming six months.
Yikes.
The woman sitting across from me at Starbucks is diligently studying her LSAT prep tests.
I remember those days well. I even taught LSAT prep for a company that went belly-up after a co-worker and I ferreted out that its founders were engaged in accounting fraud--or as it was known a few years later, financial innovation!
In its current fundraising appeal, the Wooster Group uses the financial crash to its own advantage by positioning itself as a better short-term investment than the stock market.
I'm writing at a local Starbucks I used to frequent a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. In keeping with the new Accepted Wisdom that charity tie-ins can boost business, Starbucks taken its CSR reports out of the rectangular file and joined its brand with Product (Red).
Will it boost sales? My guess is not any statistically significant way, especially once you factor in the boost in traffic from holiday shopping. While associating with charity pulls key cognitive triggers--taking the seller beyond self-benefit and exchange--the burgeoning popularity of this strategy is its greatest enemy. Signaling power weakens as the signal grows ubiquitous, while the economic downtown increases the value of benefit--especially low prices--delivered directly to the consumer.
More thoughts on this later, but since I started raising questions about this promotion my free wifi has cut out five times. Coincidence? I think not--Big Coffee is watching!