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Leadership

Jul 25

Data tool for Marion County

By Feature, Leadership

In case you missed it, WFYI’s “No Limits” aired a program about the new IndyVitals tool created by SAVI at The Polis Center. The tool contains an untold wealth of information about the 99 distinct neighborhoods of Marion County. It measures the health and sustainability of neighborhoods in Marion County in the following goal areas:

  • built environment
  • economy and jobs
  • education, arts and community
  • equity and empowerment
  • health and safety
  • natural systems
  • general demographics

John Krall’s guests were Sharon Kandris, director of community informatics and SAVI director, The Polis Center at IUPUI; Brad Beaubien, AICP, administrator for long-range planning, Department of Metropolitan Development, City of Indianapolis-Marion County and Steven Meyer, executive director, King Park.

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Jul 25

Three things great data storytellers do differently

By Feature, Leadership

By Jake Porway, founder and executive director of DataKind, for Stanford Social Innovation Review

How can data be used to both humanize our work and demonstrate robust social impact?

How can we use data to tell a story without bogging down our audience with numbers and statistics?

How can people be inspired by data?

These are just a few of the nearly 200 questions that represent a mix asked in a survey before Porway’s talk at SSIR’s Data on Purpose conference.

At DataKind, Porway and his colleagues use data science and algorithms in the service of humanity, and believe that communicating about the work by using data for social impact is just as important as the work itself. There’s nothing worse than findings gathering dust in an unread report.

At DataKind, staff believes projects should always start with a question. It’s clear from the questions above and others that the art of data storytelling needs some demystifying. But rather than answering each question individually, Porway poses a broader question to help get at some of the essentials: What do great data storytellers do differently and what can we learn from them?

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Jul 25

The state of storytelling in the nonprofit sector

By Feature, Fundraising, Leadership

By Vanessa Chase, founder, Storytelling Non-Profit and Network for Good

Stories have been a huge trend in the nonprofit sector in the past five years, but our sector has been telling stories for much longer. Year after year, we are committed to telling people about our work, progress, and needs. Each time we communicate these things, we are communicating pieces of the larger narrative about our organization.

But things are changing, and storytelling is becoming a much more intentional act. Across the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, storytelling is a buzzword and communicators are consumed with telling stories that will engage their target audience. In the nonprofit sector, donors make up that audience. Our challenge is getting our current donors to give more and acquiring new donors who care about the cause. This is not a new or small task for our sector.

“The State of Storytelling” is a project that came to life out of an interest to know how the nonprofit sector is actually using stories and what results organizations are getting. Stories are constantly talked about as a tactic, but are they really helping nonprofits get better fundraising results?

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Jun 13

India’s new CSR law sparks debate among NGOs and businesses

By Feature, Leadership

By Oliver Balch, freelance writer, The Guardian | 

India is the first country in the world to enshrine corporate giving into law. Following a change in company law in April 2014, businesses with annual revenues of more than 10bn rupees (£105m) must give away 2 percent of their net profit to charity. Areas they can invest this money in include education, poverty, gender equality and hunger.

At the time India’s policy-makers said the law would release much-needed funds for social development, while critics warned of a tick-box mentality and efforts at evasion.

Two years on, the arguments remain unresolved. What’s unambiguous is that overall charitable spend by companies has increased. According to independent reports, the private sector’s combined charitable spend jumped from an estimated 33.67bn rupees (£357.5m) in 2013 to around 250bn rupees (£2.63bn) after the law’s enactment.

Some say the change in law is also waking up corporate India to its wider social responsibilities. “The so-called 2 percent law has brought CSR [corporate social responsibility] from the fringes to the boardroom,” argues Bimal Arora, chair of the Delhi-based Centre for Responsible Business. “Companies now have to think seriously about the resources, timelines and strategies needed to meet their legal obligations.”

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Jun 13

Corporate social responsibility: How it affects employee satisfaction

By Feature, Leadership

By Ivan Widjaya, Small Business Trends |

Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz is one of many CEOs around the world that have embraced the idea of corporate social responsibility when it comes to how they run their companies.

You don’t have to be running a Fortune 500 company to be an ethically responsible company that embraces corporate social responsibility and all that it stands for. In fact, if you refuse to embrace it and all that it entails, it’s quite possible a strong majority of the people that work for you are currently unhappy in their jobs.

The definition of corporate social responsibility and the values and practices it embraces is a vast one.  Each company that embraces it has their own mantra that’s used to describe it: community investment, social impact, corporate citizenship, sustainability and many others.

In a nutshell, corporate social responsibility is all about company ethics — how you treat the environment, the communities you serve and work in and your employees. Even your competitors.

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Jun 13

Corporate social responsibility can be good for business

By Feature, Leadership

By Vlad Moldavskiy for BusinessCollective |

Corporate social responsibility is more than a company’s marketing strategy — it’s quickly becoming a way to retain millennial employees as well.

Despite having a reputation for being arrogant and lazy, millennials are actually highly philanthropic. Many young workers want more than just a paycheck from their employer; they also want to feel that they’re making an impact on the community.

According to the recent Millennial Impact Report, which was led by Achieve in partnership with the Case Foundation, more than 30 million millennials are employed, and 84 percent of these employees made a charitable donation last year. That’s on top of the 78 percent of millennials who made a charitable donation on their own without going through an employer.

It’s hard to dispute the millennial passion for giving back: When compared to managers, millennials value meaningful work over fat paychecks. Business Insider reports that while half of surveyed managers believe money is important to millennials, only 27 percent of actual millennials agreed.

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Mar 28

Communicating data to drive change

By Feature, Leadership

By Patrick McCarthy, president and CEO, and Lisa Hamilton, vice president of external affairs, Annie E. Casey Foundation |

Kids can’t vote. They can’t buy ads on television. They can’t form a political action committee to get what they need. They can’t speak up for themselves, and as a result they often disappear from the crowded list of political priorities competing for attention. To combat this invisibility, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has been building a project known as KIDS COUNT for more than a quarter century.

KIDS COUNT began in 1990 as a single product: a national data book comparing 10 indicators on children (including infant mortality, education expenditures, and the teenage employment rate) across the United States. The theory behind the book was that if we created an accurate, comprehensive picture of what children need, change would follow. With its ranking of outcomes by state, the foundation hoped to draw attention from the media, as well as from local, state, and national policymakers, by capitalizing on the human impulse to compete.

Learn how the Annie E. Casey Foundation has leveraged the power of information and communication to drive public investment in children and their families.

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Mar 28

From project to platform: the evolution of KIDS COUNT

By Feature, Leadership

By the Annie E. Casey Foundation |

This report tells the story of how a single data book documenting child well-being measures turned into a mission-critical vehicle for the Foundation in building bipartisan support for proven practice solutions and policy change. The report includes data and research insights that the Foundation gained from decades of investing in a program that turned into a keystone for shaping and amplifying policy on a broad scale.

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Feb 23

The gap

By Feature, Leadership

By Christine H. O’Toole, freelance writer, Heinz Endowment |

When Patricia Arquette used her Oscar acceptance speech to demand fair pay for women, it wasn’t just Hollywood stars who gave her a rousing ovation.

Television viewers saw actresses Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez cheering as Ms. Arquette declared, “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” Some 2,400 miles away, women in Pittsburgh’s nonprofit sector applauded, too.

Recent analyses of the region’s nonprofits have revealed a significant pay gap between men and women executives. The studies include a report that Bob Orser and Rita Haronian of the Nonprofit Compensation Associates prepared for the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University. It shows that although 64 percent of executive directors at nonprofit agencies in the Pittsburgh region are women, their average pay was just 75 percent of the average salary for men — $101,475 compared to men’s $135,170. Overall, women’s nonprofit pay has stalled at 74 cents for every dollar earned by men, even as women comprise 74 percent of all employees in the sector.

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Feb 23

Gender pay gap hurts women in retirement

By Feature, Leadership

By Mark Miller, Reuters reporter, Minneapolis Star Tribune |

Women who work full-time, year-round, made just 79 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts in 2014, U.S. Census Bureau data show.

But the injustice of the gender pay gap also impacts retirement security.

A woman who works full-time over a 40-year period loses $435,480 in lifetime income (today’s dollars) due to the wage gap, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit legal and advocacy group.

The income gap translates directly to lower income from Social Security and pensions — since those benefits are determined by wage history — and it hampers the capacity of women to save for retirement.

And since women typically live longer than men, savings often must be stretched across more years of retirement.

Paying women less than men for the same work has been illegal since 1963. Seven years ago, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for workers to challenge pay inequality. He announced last month that employers with more than 100 workers will be required to start reporting compensation data by gender to the federal government.

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