nonprofits

• MTV is finally running its first paid political ad - and it's an attack on Senator Obama run by a third party organization. Classy. In a conversation I had with an MTV rep, they said that third party ads would be reviewed and accepted on a case by case basis. If newfangled swiftboaters can get their ads placed, I assume MoveOn or other progressives will have no trouble getting their own ads on TV, right?
• EJ Dione at The Washington Post pens the Best. Op-Ed. Ever. on the youth vote by a professional political pundit.
• McCain is getting ready to roll out new social networking features on his website to attract young voters. Because McCainspace was such a smashing success last year, right? I think Bondelli has the right take on building new social networks, but I've got no problem with McCain competing with the College Republicans to see whose social network can suck worse. Divide that tiny potential audience up and doom them both to failure.
• Jason at the Sentinel posted slides from his two excellent Netroots Nations panels on how to monetize, popularize, and all around make your blog more kickass.
• MSNBC has an interesting story about the role that nonprofits play in our elections. If you want to know about the differences between 501c 3, c4, and 527 organizations, it's not a bad place to start, even if there are some questionable assumptions about issue advocacy and ideology in the piece.
• Youth to Power made Micah Sifry and Andrew Raseij's "political beach-reading list."
• Facebook has plans to take over the rest of the interwebs . . .
• Over at his other blog, Kevin reports that Kanye West and MTV are teaming up to welcome home veterans and shed more light on the situation of our soldiers as they return home.

I continue to find Tactical Philanthropy to be an extremely interesting read, particularly posts about the Streamline Project - an attempt to make the grant application process much less onerous through standardization. As I said before, it's kinda like the "common application" for nonprofits.

In this post, they tackle a topic that should be of interest to any budget-conscious ED or Development Director - the inordinate amount of time we sometimes spend jumping through a series of very particular hoops for funders, and what that "lost" time and money means for the efficacy of the grantmaking process:

If you are buying the services of my firm Ensemble Capital, you don’t care what our company’s “client acquisition” costs are. But if you are investing in the company, you care very much about these costs. Another way to think about it is this; all of the money in a foundation has already been given to nonprofits, it is just being held for future delivery. This is factually the cases since the IRS only grants an income tax deduction for gifts to nonprofits because the gift is considered a “completed gift” to a nonprofit. That money literally belongs to the public. So whether a cost is paid for by a nonprofit or paid for by a foundation, the end result is the same. We know that foundations care very much about keeping their own administrative costs down, so the logical extension of this decision would be to minimize the cost to nonprofits of obtaining grants.

I think the concept of “net grants” is a powerful one and something foundations should understand when they think about their grant making. Realize too that the costs of the nonprofit that actually obtains the grant are not the only relevant costs. If 100 nonprofits spend $1,000 each to pursue a $100,000 grant, they the net grant would be $0. Nada. Nothing gained. In effect the foundation has just taken $1,000 away from the 99 nonprofits that failed to get the grant and delivered the money to the winning grantee.

It's a powerful argument for streamlining the process. There have been some attempts at this within the political realm - most notably the New Progressive Coalition. NPC tried to put many organizations on an even playing field where, once they completed an application process, they could be exposed to an open market place of donors for little to no additional costs. Conversely, the process was supposed to provide potential donors with enough information about each organization to invest with confidence. Unfortunately, many participants found the process to be even more cumbersome than the traditional grant making process, and the Return on Investment even smaller. So far NPC boasts barely more than $100,000 in monies raised for the accepted 35 participants.

Still, streamlining the process is definitely something for funders - non profit and partisan alike - to think about. I hope they're reading Tactical Philanthropy as closely as I am.