Capacity Building Resources - Jan 16

The following are various resources intended to help you grow the capacity of your East of the River organization. These resources below are provided courtesy of our friend Susie Cambria

Tools and Resources

  • Infographicreator.com offers a free version (with their logo at the bottom and for online viewing only).
  • Take a look at Nonprofit Tech for Good's 2018 Cause Awareness & Giving Day Calendar if you do fundraising. (image from Nonprofit Tech for Good)
  • Need data from a website? Try Listly. It scrapes structured data from the web and converts from HTML to Excel. The free version allows users to scrape 10 pages per month. Paid subscriptions start at $1.99/month.
  • LightBox Collaborative's Evergreen Editorial Calendar is a must-bookmark and use. Better: Download and personalize for your organization. Can be used for many things including advocacy and fundraising.
  • There's a terrific discussion on Hacker News: Hacker News equivalent for other fields. I love Hacker News, techie or not. I'll definitely use this list to expand my information sources.

At work

The result is a vast pool of money that’s fundamentally shifting who is funding charitable work and how that work gets done. Viral campaigns may reach more potential donors but those givers often respond in an emotional as opposed to rational way: You’re paying to alleviate someone’s suffering, not the broader societal problem it represents. The result has left nonprofits scrambling for new ways to share their own community-minded messages within the medium.

Only 10 percent of projects raise 25 percent or more than their goal, Mollick said. "And the worst thing in the world for you is you've just raised $50,000, but you secretly knew you were going to raise a million dollars and your project cost $200,000 to make. That's a disaster," he said.

Learn something

Sandhya Kambhampati, a data reporter at ProPublica, explains what she learned from sending more than 1,000 open records requests to governments in Illinois. One helpful tip: Ask for other people's Freedom of Information Act requests. "If you know what records have already been granted, you can request the same records and not have to wait months for your data. So ask for the agency's FOIA logs," she writes.

Good reads

Follow Susie on Twitter

@susiecambria