resources

Some resources, connections and good common sense for non-profits.

How to Implement a Social Marketing Effort
Contains a Community Tool Box that provides practical information to support work in promoting community health and development. Includes sections on leadership, strategic planning, community assessment, grant writing, and evaluation, and more.

Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes (and how to ensure they won't happen to yours) (PDF)
Andy Goodman
Seven easily learned techniques that increase the chances of your ad being noticed, read, and remembered.

Free Range Thinking
A monthly journal of communications best practices and resources for public interest groups, foundations, and progressive businesses that want to reach more people more effectively.

Tony Procsio
In Other Words: A Plea for Plain Speaking in Foundations (PDF)
Bad Words for Good - how foundations garble their message and lose their audience (PDF)
When Words Fail: How the Public Interest Becomes Neither Public Nor Interesting (PDF)

W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Communication Toolkit
Specific, detailed steps necessary to understand options, identify resources, plan, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of a strategic communications strategy.

Communications for Social Change Consortium
An international nonprofit building local capacity of people living in poor and marginalized communities to use communication in order to improve their own lives.

Communications for Social Change: An integrated model for measuring the process and its outcomes (PDF)
Figueroa, M.E., Kincaid, D.L., Rani, M., Lewis, G. Rockefeller Foundation and JHUCCP

Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for Social Change (PDF)
Alfonso Gumucio Dagron

D.K. Holland's Brand Blog
Helping socially progressive organizations understand how effective branding works and how to work together to strengthen a growing organization and its programs.

The Communication Initiative International Communication and Sustainable Development
An online space for connecting the people and organizations engaged in communication as a fundamental strategy for economic and social development and change.

Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Program: Publications
The center uses communication to save lives, improve health, and enhance well-being. Focuses on the central role communication plays in health behavior change.

Proving Your Worth: 10 Way to Measure the Impact of of Your Communications (PDF)

This Just In: 10 Lessons from Two Decades of Public Interest Communications (PDF)

Smart Chart 3.0: An Interactive Tool to Help Nonprofits Make Smart Communications Choices
An interactive tool to help nonprofits make smart communications choices.

Discovering the Activation Point:
A collection of best practices that can help social change organizations plan to persuade.

American Opportunity: A Communications Toolkit.
A Toolkit intended to help leaders and organizers working on a wide range of social justice issues begin to leverage the core American value of “Opportunity for All” in their communications work.

Communications Consortium Media Center
A public interest media center dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations use media and new technologies as tools for policy change.

Netcentric Campaigns Training Center
Powers progressive social change by serving as a hub connecting change makers with the innovation, tools, and strategy needed to be successful in the age of connectivity.

Berkeley Media Studies Group
Helps public health advocates raise their voices, break through the din and be heard at the time when its most important—when policy decisions are being made.

Designers without Borders
Designers Without Borders was founded in Kampala, Uganda in 2001 in response to the need for assistance at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts. DWB continues to deliver technology, instruction, and design consulting to schools and select non-profits in Africa.

www.idealist.org
Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.

Made to Stick
This book by brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath (both business and marketing experts) helps people make sure their ideas stick. It offers guidance as to what kind of intellectual knowledge is needed and helps people steer clear of “the curse of too much knowledge."

In Other Words
Here you will find three publications by language maven Tony Proscio that help organizations use words that will get their point across most effectively.

Presentation Zen
Communications specialist Garry Reynolds’ blog centers on issues related to professional presentation.

Polling resources:

Data Directory
The Washington Post publishes this guide to the public opinion data that are available online from nonpartisan organizations. It includes media and national polls, nonprofit and academic data, and opinion research by state.

FedStats.gov
This site provides statistics and studies compiled by the federal government. It is searchable by geography, subject and agency, with links to nonprofit agencies and their reports.

Gallup
Gallup is the most widely known polling and research organization. Its site is searchable by world region and topic.

PollingReport.com
This is an aggregate site of American polling data by issue or current news item

Public Agenda Online
Public Agenda Online is a nonpartisan, nonprofit opinion research organization with both research studies and guides that are searchable by issue or topic.

Roper Center Public Opinion Archives
Topics at a Glance gives a brief overview of major research on a range of issues, with links for further information. The site also has sections on polling and opinion research fundamentals.

World Public Opinion
This site provides international polling and opinion research searchable by topic or region.