183 research outputs found
Measuring Success in Donor Development: Per Capita Giving Levels Highlight Successful Strategies
Every foundation wants to maximize its investment returns and achieve social impact with the leanest possible organization. Many standard metrics exist -- such as portfolio returns and operating cost ratios -- to help community foundations compare themselves to their peers and set appropriate performance targets. But community foundations also need to raise money from donors, and finding meaningful ways to measure this crucial aspect of their performance is much more complicated.It's easy enough to measure how much money comes in the door, but merely comparing the total contributions received by different community foundations doesn't take into account important variations in size and location. If community foundations are to learn from each other's success, they must find ways to cancel out these distortions and create truly comparable performance data. None of the measures community foundations currently use to gauge the success of their fundraising yet achieves this goal:Total ContributionsComparing total gifts received requires a rigorously-defined peer group to be meaningful. And given the substantial diversity in population and wealth within the areas served by community foundations, identifying a meaningful peer group is very difficult.Past PerformanceComparing this year's gifts with those received in prior years eliminates the challenge of peer group selection, but it doesn't permit foundations to learn from each other. Lower performing foundations will miss opportunities to improve and, of course, one or two large gifts in any year can make year-to-year comparisons meaningless.New funds establishedUsing the aggregate number of new funds established to serve as a proxy for the foundation's penetration of potential donors in its service area is also susceptible to the low expectations trap: It is difficult to measure performance or to set objectives effectively without a sense of the region's potential for giving.Our experience suggests that a new measure -- per capita giving within the foundation's service area -- combined with a new goal setting process can enable community foundations to better understand their own performance and highlight successful strategies
Brighter Futures: Tackling the College Completion Challenge
The United States' single greatest collective investment in human capital -- and in its future generations -- is public education. Yet today that investment is generating very poor returns for low-income students.Members of the lowest-income U.S. families are 10 times less likely to earn a bachelor's degree than members of the highest-income families. This situation would be troubling in any environment, but with income inequality only increasing and global job competitiveness intensifying every year, it is downright dangerous -- not just for low-income students but for society at large. While a field-level conversation about the college access, persistence, and completion challenges that face low-income students has been slow in coming, we believe that conversation is now imperative.Our new report Brighter Futures outlines the problem, the state of the field, and how to collectively intensify the ways we address these pressing challenges:Improve coordination between key actors: between high schools and colleges, within the college community, among nonprofit organizations, and between actors in the field and parents/communitiesCreate clarity around metrics -- and what drives successful outcomesLook beyond the traditional definition of "student"
Northward range expansion in spring-staging barnacle geese is a response to climate change and population growth, mediated by individual experience
The study was funded by the Norwegian Environment Agency, the Research Council of Norway (the projects ‘LANDRING 134716/720’, ‘AGRIGOOSE 165836’, ‘MIGRAPOP 204342’), the European Union (the project FRAGILE EVK2‐2001‐00235), the County Governor of Nordland, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the Fram Centre in Tromsø and a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research awarded to TO (ref 019.172EN.011).All long-distance migrants must cope with changing environments, but species differ greatly in how they do so. In some species, individuals might be able to adjust by learning from individual experiences and by copying others. This could greatly speed up the process of adjustment, but evidence from the wild is scarce. Here, we investigated the processes by which a rapidly growing population of barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) responded to strong environmental changes on spring-staging areas in Norway. One area, Helgeland, has been the traditional site. Since the mid-1990s, an increasing number of geese stage in another area 250 km further north, Vesterålen. We collected data on goose numbers and weather conditions from 1975 to 2017 to explore the extent to which the increase in population size and a warmer climate contributed to this change in staging area use. During the study period, the estimated onset of grass growth advanced on average by 0.54 days/year in each of the two areas. The total production of digestible biomass for barnacle geese during the staging period increased in Vesterålen but remained stable in Helgeland. The goose population has doubled in size during the past 25 years, with most of the growth being accommodated in Vesterålen. The observations suggest that this dramatic increase would not have happened without higher temperatures in Vesterålen. Records of individually marked geese indicate that from the initial years of colonization onwards, especially young geese tended to switch to Vesterålen, thereby predominating in the flocks at Vesterålen. Older birds had a lower probability of switching to Vesterålen, but over the years, the probability increased for all ages. Our findings suggest that barnacle geese integrate socially learned behaviour with adjustments to individual experiences, allowing the population to respond rapidly and accurately to global change.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Sex-Related Effects of an Immune Challenge on Growth and Begging Behavior of Barn Swallow Nestlings
Parent-offspring conflicts lead the offspring to evolve reliable signals of individual quality, including parasite burden, which may allow parents to adaptively modulate investment in the progeny. Sex-related variation in offspring reproductive value, however, may entail differential investment in sons and daughters. Here, we experimentally manipulated offspring condition in the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) by subjecting nestlings to an immune challenge (injection with bacterial lipopolysaccharide, LPS) that simulates a bacterial infection, and assessed the effects on growth, feather quality, expression of morphological (gape coloration) and behavioral (posture) begging displays involved in parent-offspring communication, as well as on food allocation by parents. Compared to sham-injected controls, LPS-treated chicks suffered a depression of body mass and a reduction of palate color saturation. In addition, LPS treatment resulted in lower feather quality, with an increase in the occurrence of fault bars on wing feathers. The color of beak flanges, feather growth and the intensity of postural begging were affected by LPS treatment only in females, suggesting that chicks of either sex are differently susceptible to the immune challenge. However, irrespective of the effects of LPS, parents equally allocated food among control and challenged offspring both under normal food provisioning and after a short period of food deprivation of the chicks. These results indicate that bacterial infection and the associated immune response entail different costs to offspring of either sex, but a decrease in nestling conditions does not affect parental care allocation, possibly because the barn swallow adopts a brood-survival strategy. Finally, we showed that physiological stress induced by pathogens impairs plumage quality, a previously neglected major negative impact of bacterial infection which could severely affect fitness, particularly among long-distance migratory birds
Health Expenditure Growth: Looking Beyond the Average Through Decomposition of the Full Distribution
Population differences in fever and sickness behaviors in a wild passerine: a role for cytokines
Seed Dispersal Anachronisms: Rethinking the Fruits Extinct Megafauna Ate
Background: Some neotropical, fleshy-fruited plants have fruits structurally similar to paleotropical fruits dispersed by megafauna (mammals.10 3 kg), yet these dispersers were extinct in South America 10–15 Kyr BP. Anachronic dispersal systems are best explained by interactions with extinct animals and show impaired dispersal resulting in altered seed dispersal dynamics. Methodology/Principal Findings: We introduce an operational definition of megafaunal fruits and perform a comparative analysis of 103 Neotropical fruit species fitting this dispersal mode. We define two megafaunal fruit types based on previous analyses of elephant fruits: fruits 4–10 cm in diameter with up to five large seeds, and fruits.10 cm diameter with numerous small seeds. Megafaunal fruits are well represented in unrelated families such as Sapotaceae, Fabaceae, Solanaceae, Apocynaceae, Malvaceae, Caryocaraceae, and Arecaceae and combine an overbuilt design (large fruit mass and size) with either a single or few (,3 seeds) extremely large seeds or many small seeds (usually.100 seeds). Within-family and within-genus contrasts between megafaunal and non-megafaunal groups of species indicate a marked difference in fruit diameter and fruit mass but less so for individual seed mass, with a significant trend for megafaunal fruits to have larger seeds and seediness. Conclusions/Significance: Megafaunal fruits allow plants to circumvent the trade-off between seed size and dispersal b
Diversity in warning coloration: selective paradox or the norm?
Aposematic theory has historically predicted that predators should select for warning signals to converge on a single form, as a result of frequency-dependent learning. However, widespread variation in warning signals is observed across closely related species, populations and, most problematically for evolutionary biologists, among individuals in the same population. Recent research has yielded an increased awareness of this diversity, challenging the paradigm of signal monomorphy in aposematic animals. Here we provide a comprehensive synthesis of these disparate lines of investigation, identifying within them three broad classes of explanation for variation in aposematic warning signals: genetic mechanisms, differences among predators and predator behaviour, and alternative selection pressures upon the signal. The mechanisms producing warning coloration are also important. Detailed studies of the genetic basis of warning signals in some species, most notably Heliconius butterflies, are beginning to shed light on the genetic architecture facilitating or limiting key processes such as the evolution and maintenance of polymorphisms, hybridisation, and speciation. Work on predator behaviour is changing our perception of the predator community as a single homogenous selective agent, emphasising the dynamic nature of predator-prey interactions. Predator variability in a range of factors (e.g. perceptual abilities, tolerance to chemical defences, and individual motivation), suggests that the role of predators is more complicated than previously appreciated. With complex selection regimes at work, polytypisms and polymorphisms may even occur in Mullerian mimicry systems. Meanwhile, phenotypes are often multifunctional, and thus subject to additional biotic and abiotic selection pressures. Some of these selective pressures, primarily sexual selection and thermoregulation, have received considerable attention, while others, such as disease risk and parental effects, offer promising avenues to explore. As well as reviewing the existing evidence from both empirical studies and theoretical modelling, we highlight hypotheses that could benefit from further investigation in aposematic species. Finally by collating known instances of variation in warning signals, we provide a valuable resource for understanding the taxonomic spread of diversity in aposematic signalling and with which to direct future research. A greater appreciation of the extent of variation in aposematic species, and of the selective pressures and constraints which contribute to this once-paradoxical phenomenon, yields a new perspective for the field of aposematic signalling.Peer reviewe
Data S4: Data on the location and distance between sites for species pairs with data from multiple locations
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