Strategic Communications Audits

Nonprofit organizations are now continuously being challenged to be more strategic in their communications efforts. Communications activities must add up to more than a series of isolated events such as the dissemination of an occasional publication or press release. Being strategic requires that nonprofits be more deliberate, innovative, savvy, and less reactive in their communications practice. Nonprofits are encouraged to regard communications as essential to their overall success and integrate it throughout their organizations.1As a result of this movement, an array of new tools, resources, and trainings have been developed to help organizations better understand the concept of strategic communications, develop their own communications strategies, and evaluate them for both accountability and learning purposes. But while nonprofits are learning how to develop strategies and are gaining a better understanding of their importance, questions remain about their actual follow through in practice and nonprofits' overall capacity to implement their strategies given their relative inexperience in this field and the many priorities, including communications, that often compete for scarce organizational resources

LESSONS IN EVALUATING COMMUNICATIONS CAMPAIGNS

Builds on the findings of the first and second papers. It examines specifically how campaigns with different purposes (individual behavior change and policy change) have been evaluated, and how evaluators have tackled some of the associated evaluation challenges that the first three papers raised as important to address. It features fi ve brief case studies in which the main unit of analysis is not the campaign, but the campaign's evaluation. The case studies provide a brief snapshot of the real experiences of campaign evaluations. The paper also features cross-case lessons that highlight important findings and themes

Foundations and Public Policy Grantmaking

Foundations trying to better leverage their influence and improve their impact increasingly are being urged to embrace advocacy and public policy grantmaking as a way to substantially enhance their results and advance their missions. In fact, public policy grantmaking has been described as "one of the most powerful tools available to foundations for creating real change."1 The argument for public policy grantmaking is clear. Achieving large-scale and lasting results for individuals or communities -- a goal linked to many foundation missions -- typically cannot be accomplished with private resources alone. Often, it requires public investments and government directives. While a foundation might identify effective interventions, for example, and fund their implementation in several communities, larger and more sustainable funding sources are needed to scale up those interventions and broaden their impacts. Securing such commitments requires changes in public policies. This reasoning is persuasive. Yet to date, relatively few foundations have incorporated public policy into their grantmaking agendas. Although there is little doubt that the number of foundations moving in this direction has increased in recent years, foundations that make policy grants are still considered innovators among their peers. This paper is designed to inform how The James Irvine Foundation might frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve policy reforms in its primary program areas. It is organized around a framework developed to support the Foundation's thinking about its grantmaking options. The framework is used throughout the paper to help the Foundation consider its positioning vis-a-vis broader philanthropic trends and how other foundations have positioned their grantmaking in the policy arena. The paper has four main sections. The first section describes the framework and how foundations can use it to develop grantmaking strategies for achieving public policy goals. The second section uses the framework to discuss current grantmaking trends. The third section offers brief case studies of four foundations' public policy grantmaking approaches. And the final section presents several lessons foundations should keep in mind when developing their public policy grantmaking strategies

Feverish fictions: William T. Vollmann and American literary history after postmodernism

The rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the notion are necessary if it is to remain useful as a descriptor for important qualities of recent texts. Among issues in need of greater attention are the implications of the New Sincerity for historical awareness, a topic I pursue via consideration of William T. Vollmann’s grappling with literary history. I argue that Vollmann’s works offer more than the pastiche that allegedly defined historical consciousness in postmodernist fiction. His intertextual engagements with Edgar Allan Poe are especially valuable for modelling some of the ways recent fictions bypass postmodernist ahistoricism in favor of connections to a usable past, and, especially, a usable literary tradition. Readings of Vollmann’s ‘The Grave of Lost Stories’ (in several editions) and ‘The Cemetery of the World’ show how he employs research in the textual archive as a figuration of relations to the past that can serve the ends of renewal and recovery.Accepted manuscrip

Early Childhood Systems Building from a Community Perspective

Even when children and their families have access to support services from a variety of programs and organizations -- such as early learning centers, nutrition programs, and pediatric, nursing, dental and mental health care providers -- there are challenges in connecting families to these services. The result is that families often have a difficult time learning about, applying for and taking advantage of the services that could benefit their children. This Issue Brief, prepared for The Colorado Trust by Julia Coffman of the Center for Evaluation Innovation and Susan Parker of Clear Thinking Communications, explains systems building as an intentional, organized way to create or improve a system of early care and education services for children

Tools to Support Public Policy Grantmaking

· This article provides guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms. · Five essential steps for developing public policy strategy are described: choosing the public policy goal, understanding the challenges, identifying influential audiences, determining how far those audiences must move, and deciding how to move them. · Two tools developed specifically to support foundations during the strategy development process are presented

Removing Isolated Zeroes by Homotopy

Suppose that the inverse image of the zero vector by a continuous map $f:{\mathbb R}^n\to{\mathbb R}^q$ has an isolated point $P$. There is a local obstruction to removing this isolated zero by a small perturbation, generalizing the notion of index for vector fields, the $q=n$ case. The existence of a continuous map $g$ which approximates $f$ but is nonvanishing near $P$ is equivalent to a topological property we call "locally inessential," and for dimensions $n$, $q$ where $\pi_{n-1}(S^{q-1})$ is trivial, every isolated zero is locally inessential. We consider the problem of constructing such an approximation $g$, and show that there exists a continuous homotopy from $f$ to $g$ through locally nonvanishing maps. If $f$ is a semialgebraic map, then there exists such a homotopy which is also semialgebraic. For $q=2$ and $f$ real analytic with a locally inessential isolated zero, there exists a H\"older continuous homotopy $F(x,t)$ which, for $(x,t)\ne(P,0)$, is real analytic and nonvanishing. The existence of a smooth homotopy, given a smooth map $f$, is stated as an open question.Comment: to appear in Topological Methods in Nonlinear Analysi

Smooth counterexamples to strong unique continuation for a Beltrami system in C2\mathbb{C}^2

We construct an example of a smooth map $\mathbb{C}\to\mathbb{C}^2$ which vanishes to infinite order at the origin, and such that the ratio of the norm of the $\bar z$ derivative to the norm of the $z$ derivative also vanishes to infinite order. This gives a counterexample to strong unique continuation for a vector valued analogue of the Beltrami equation.Comment: 21 page