NPQ’s Week in Review

Good Morning! At NPQ, what moves you is what moves us. The Week in Review highlights what our readers nominate as their favorite content and what they share with us and the community in the form of tweets, comments, contributed articles, and newswires.

But first, take a look at what you might have missed last week in some of the major news stories covered in NPQ.

THE NLRB RELEASED FINDINGS ON 14 EMPLOYMENT ACTIONS REGARDING SOCIAL-MEDIA USE BY EMPLOYEES: We ran two newswires this week that are must-reads for any human-resources person. The law on social-media use in and around the workplace is still being written; the wise nonprofit keeps up. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a report on 14 instances where firings occurred due to inappropriate use of social media. Separately, a decision was reached in the Hispanics United case where five nonprofit workers were fired for discussing their employer online.

IT’S THE JOBS, STUPID: In the week leading up to President Obama’s address on his new jobs plan, elected officials at the state and municipal levels were also releasing their own plans, and many had implications for nonprofits. For example, Boston Mayor Tom Menino announced a citywide jobs program which will give incentives to nonprofits to hire the unemployed. (Stay tuned to NPQ this week for an analysis of Obama’s jobs proposal by our national correspondent, Rick Cohen.) In a related story, Guidestar reported that the CEO-pay gap for women in the nonprofit sector persists.

AMERICA’S OBSESSION WITH THE VERY RICH GRINDS ON: We were happy to see that Obama included an elimination of tax breaks for the very rich in his jobs proposal, citing Warren Buffet’s position on the matter. In our own version of such obsessions, the Gates Foundation got big readership on our Newswire for putting millions into Western Governors University, a college co-founded by presidential candidate Rick Perry and also because some of its highest-placed staff on educational policy are leaving the foundation, prompting speculation about a Gates brain drain. One does wonder why people committed to the success of education would leave an institution with such growing influence in that field.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11 REVEALS THE BEST, AND A LITTLE OF THE WORST, OF U.S. CHARACTER: During a week when many were commemorating the almost inconceivable heroism of so many on September 11, 2001 there were also the sadly unavoidable reports of exploitation of the tragedy by unscrupulous operators. Still, a couple weeks ago Rick Cohen looked at an Associated Press report on the topic and found that there was a lot of nuance, even in its reports of charitable failures.

 

 Readers’ Pick: THE Hottest article OF THE WEEK

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Your Promise Is Your Brand: How to Work It

This article from NPQ’s archives is more than an article on branding – it is really an article about how your reputation is an asset that is linked to your integrity and your relationship to your community. We think about this issue often in our own work and urge you to bookmark the article and keep it close at hand as a reminder of what is truly important in the work you do.

 

 inspiring moment of the week

Why People Give: Lessons from an Oregon Diner

This real-life O. Henry story began in a small diner in Oregon. After one patron generously offered to cover the tab for a pair of Oregon National Guard soldiers, the gesture turned into a “pay-it-forward” surge that didn’t stop until closing time. Kathi Jaworski, one of NPQ’s correspondents, saw the story and used it to beautifully explain why and when people engage in charitable giving. A timeless story with profound practical implications for any nonprofit—it is worth passing on.

 

 Conversation of the week

Rhetoric: Will Scaring People about the Mentally Ill Result in Better Treatment?

The Treatment Advocacy Center put out a statement drawing a connection between recent mass shootings in Arizona and Nevada and those states’ records in treating mental illness. NPQ questioned whether that rhetorical scare tactic was likely to lead to negative unintended consequences. Readers weighed in with their opinions. Meanwhile, offline, a reader took the writer and our editor-in-chief, Ruth McCambridge, to task for using the phrase “the mentally ill” in the headline. Ruth apologized online in a comment to the piece, saying, “Thank you to the reader who has redirected me about my language in the headline above. ‘The’ mentally ill? It just goes to show, as he says, how implicit our language is as distancing and objectifying mechanisms in reinforcing marginalization .” We welcome and depend on your honest feedback, so don’t hold back!

 

 Trending Tweets of the week

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Thanks to all you tweeters out there. Last week our stories on Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women featuring nonprofit sector leaders and NLRB reporting the outcomes of 14 employment-law cases involving social-media use really captivated our twitter followers’ attention.

#NPQ10K is nearing its final lap with less than 100 followers to go! We are so thankful for all your support and article shares throughout this campaign. We truly appreciate it. We will announce the lucky winners of one-year subscriptions on Twitter once we finally hit the “Big 10,000.” And if you don’t already, follow us on Twitter: @npquarterly.

 

shiaochongSep 9, 11:11am via Web

 

Great story & post! RT @npquarterly Why People Give: Lessons from an Oregon Diner owl.li/6pPbU

 

silverbellSep 7, 10:17am via TweetDeck

 

RT @npquarterly: Judge rules Hispanics United rehire employees fired for unprofessional comments on Facebook owl.li/6nITS

 

MTJusticeFDNSep 6, 11:22am via Web

 

Via @npquarterly Very interesting retrospective on the Economic Opportunity Act tinyurl.com/4yjcjaz

 

FundingXchangeSep 9, 3:47pm via Hootsuite

 

YES! RT @FCAtlanta: 100 Most Powerful Women Includes Leaders from #NonprofitSector via @npquarterlyhttp://ow.ly/6pReYHT @GuideStarUSA

 

  NPQ’s READER Contributor of the week

Carlo Cuesta

One thing that you can count on if you join the NPQ community as an active participant is that you will be among a galaxy of stars. This week, NPQ re-posted an article by Carlo Cuesta and Padraic Lillis, “Your Promise Is Your Brand: How to Work It” and we then saw that Carlo tweeted the re-post out to his network. That’s how NPQ works. We’re part of a network of readers and writers who gather and distribute the best in nonprofit-sector knowledge. Carlo epitomized that last week.

 

CmcuestaSep 8, 6:23am via Twitter for Mac

 

Thanks for the shout! @NAFund: A classic article about brand promise by one of our favorites @Cmcuesta at @npquarterly ow.ly/6nROQ

 

 NOW IT’S YOUR TURN! GIVE IT TO US.

Got a Tip for Us? We Need Your Voice Here

Did we miss something this week? What do you want to see us cover next week? Be our eyes and ears on the ground. Don’t hold back. Let us have it. And we’ll put it right here. Just let us know if you want it to be confidential.