Cozy up with a book this fall (Photo Credit: Madeline Tosh, Creative Commons/Flickr)

Didn’t get the chance to dive into your summer reading list? No problem; it’s already back-to-school season, making now the perfect time to get back into the habit of curling up with a good book. For those who may need a few simple suggestions or inspiration to get started, I’ve gathered a few non-fiction titles that sparked my interest as educational reads.

From tips on how to leverage social media to change the world, to a simple feel good tale mixed with important life lessons, here are a handful of books I plan on checking out:

GirlDrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism by Emma Bee Bernstein and Nona Willis Aronowitz

Two women, Emma Bee Bernstein and Nona Willis Aronowitz, hit the road in 2007 with an important question to ask young women: what matters to them the most. The authors describe the book as a focus on “how young women grapple with the concepts of freedom, equality, joy, ambition, sex, and love—whether they call it “feminism” or not.” GirlDrive shares the stories of 127 very diverse women through vivid photos, profiles, and diary entries, who all have more in common than expected.

You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets to Happiness by Julie Klam

Julie was thirty, single, and working part-time as an insurance clerk, wondering if she would ever meet the man of her dreams. Then she met Otto, her Boston Terrier. Even though she has made a few additions in her life — her husband and daughter –  she was surprised and delighted to find that her dogs had more wisdom to convey to her than she had ever dreamed. And caring for them has made her a better person-and completely opened her heart. You Had Me at Woof is a humorous account of how one woman discovered life’s most important lessons from her canine companions.

The Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms by Nicolette Niman

Accepting an offer to head an environmental organizations “hog campaign” took Nicolette on a odyssey into the inner workings of the factory farm industry and helped mold her transformation into a environmental lawyer who takes on the big business farming establishment. The book dives into the an industry gone awry and offers a bit of romance when she’s swept off her feet by a cattle rancher.

Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time by Claire Diaz-Ortiz

In this book, Twitter’s head of corporate innovation and philanthropy, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, shares the same strategies she offers to organizations launching cause-based campaigns through Twitter. Twitter for Good is filled with dynamic examples from initiatives around the world and practical guidelines for harnessing individual activism via Twitter as a force for social change.

Have you read any of these? What other books would you recommend?

Is your community's "happiness flag" showing signs of wear and tear? (Photo: Rachel Kramer, Flickr/Creative Commons)

How happy are we?

Most everyone would agree that being happy is a good thing—along with the coming of spring, a robust economy, and clean air to breathe. For most nations, there are detailed, current statistics about the weather, the state of the economy, and the atmosphere (not to mention many other things). Statistics about happiness are a little harder to come by.

The government of the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has made it a priority to measure “Gross National Happiness” as a summary of national wellbeing. Since 2005 a national effort has been underway to assess not just economic activity in the nation (“Gross National Product” in economist-speak), but to attend to data from eight other “domains” that impact people’s lives, such as health, education, community vitality, and cultural resilience. The website GrossNationalHappiness.com provides the official explanation of the project and reports on the results of the calculation of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index for 2010.

There is no such national index for the USA so far. In my hometown, Sustainable Seattle is using the concept to develop a happiness index for communities. The idea is to supplement its other initiatives and build a long-term future of health and well-being. The project has two components: a set of objective statistics that create a profile of a region’s progress toward meeting goals related to sustainability, and a personal happiness survey that anyone can take. At the end of the survey, each respondent’s answers are compared to the overall response from all survey-takers. Food for thought as a new year begins.

No such thing as personal happiness?

For his 2008 book The Geography of Bliss, reporter Eric Weiner visited nine varied countries, looking for the happiest place on earth. He found some very disappointing spots, including one place where people “derive more pleasure from their neighbor’s failure than their own success. I can’t imagine anything less happy.”

In contrast, when he talked with Bhutanese scholar Karma Ura, he heard “There is no such thing as personal happiness. Happiness is one hundred percent relational.” Weiner reflected: “At the time I didn’t take him literally. I thought he was exaggerating to make his point…But now I realize Karma meant exactly what he said. Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and…people you hardly notice. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.”

This general point is repeated over and over again in the literature. Arthur Brooks, President of the Heritage Foundation, concludes his book “Gross National Happiness” with a quick review of social scientists’ results demonstrating that all sorts of activities that benefit others—from the most direct sorts of help to family and friends to the abstractions of making donations to help people in far-away lands—are closely related to general feelings of happiness and well-being.

Five steps to happiness

In the UK, a study for the National Health Service called Five Ways to Well-Being concluded that these simple steps would improve people’s lives in measurable ways (and sharply reduce the risks of mental illness too!):

• Connect with the people around you
• Be active
• Take notice of what’s around you
• Keep learning
• Give

How will you do these things in the coming year?

Not to toot our own horn too loudly, it still bears saying that Idealist.org offers lots of opportunities for doing all five. Just a few minutes clicking through listings in your community, or in your area of interest, or for the sorts of things you want to do will turn up things to do and places to go.

With your personal profile from Sustainable Seattle’s survey in front of you, and some reflection about the Five Ways to Well-Being, Idealist’s listings are one way to make sure you have a happy Happy New Year.

Best wishes for 2012 from all of us!

How do we build our list of email subscribers? How do we get Facebook users to ‘like’ our page?

Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements asks you to stop tweeting at people for a moment, stop obsessing about the numbers, and pose a completely different question: What do our biggest fans care about most, and how do we give them more of it?

Though this is clearly a book by and for marketers, there’s a lot of good stuff in here for almost anyone who wants to get people excited and build long-lasting change.

The book makes its point through a number of case studies from both the nonprofit and corporate worlds. The authors, who run a marketing firm of the same name, learned quite a bit about movement-building from working with Rage Against the Haze, a youth-led anti-smoking movement in South Carolina.

Photo: RageAgainstTheHaze.com

They had been handed a tough job:

• combat one of the highest rates of teen tobacco use in the country
• …without publicly demonizing an industry that is a major contributor to the state’s economy
• …and do it with a very small budget.

So what did they do? More important is what they didn’t do: they didn’t start brainstorming hip commercials or slogans. They didn’t bombard teens with lots of scary statistics about the dangers of smoking – statistics that had fallen on deaf ears for years. They started by meeting teens face-to-face and asking them for ideas.

What really matters to teens? Autonomy. Owning your self. The ‘grown-ups’ just needed to get out of the way. So the firm had the teens choose the title of their own movement. They designed their own swag: numbered dog tags they could wear and t-shirts that put an ironic spin on the state motto, “While I breathe, I hope.” They went to high school football games and talked to other kids where they already were. They changed the conversation from one about mortality to one about empowerment – choosing not to be controlled by big tobacco. And it worked so well that, even when the money ran out, the movement kept right on going. In just four years, with no major media campaign or new taxes on cigarettes, they decreased teen smoking rates by 16.9% – one of the biggest decreases in the nation.

The authors offer other cases, too, from a customer-led community at Fiskars to Love146, a movement to end child sex trafficking.

The bottom line? Find the people who care the most and give them more power. You can make them feel special just by giving them a little face time, a little inside knowledge, and the authority to make some real decisions. Scary? Yes. But a risk worth taking? Absolutely.

Want to read Brains on Fire? If you purchase the book through this Amazon link, a percentage of the proceeds will help power our work.

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More book reviews: The Networked Nonprofit; Jobs That Matter; Brandraising

Amy Potthast served as Idealist’s Director of Service and Graduate Education Programs until 2011. Read more of her work at amypotthast.com.

With the advent of social media, we are all living through a tremendous technological revolution. Have we all been so busy using the new tools—or learning to use them—that we haven’t stopped to think how they are changing the way we work?

Alison Fine and Beth Kanter’s book The Networked Nonprofit offers insights into the way socially-networked organizations look and work differently – and better.

From Beth Kanter's Flickr page

The book is about social networking but it’s not an instructional book about how your organization can use a specific social media tool more effectively. On the one hand, it’s a philosophical treatise on the changing nature of nonprofit being — peppered with true, vivid stories that make a person proud to be a member of the nonprofit family.

On the other hand, the book is a friendly travel guide for traditional organizations and experienced professional communicators and managers who cut their teeth in an age that pre-dated Twitter and Facebook. A travel guide that says—in the nicest way possible—that organizations must change in order to survive in our socially networked age.

Their main points are that networked nonprofits are decentralized and draw strength from diverse and widespread support (rather than a small, pinpointed centralized leader); that networked nonprofits are less needlessly complex and sleeker in their transparent and simple functionality; and that networked nonprofits listen to the public conversation regarding their issues, themselves, their community.

The book goes out of its way to be accessible to all generations of readers.

• It offers a glossary in back — and bolds the first time a new glossary word appears in the text.
• It offers clear and specific tips for becoming a more networked nonprofit and what to do as a networked nonprofit.
• It busts the most common myths about engaging in social networking online.
• It illustrates new points with stories from the sector.
• Each chapter concludes with a fabulous, succinct summary of the main points and reflection questions.

Book cover image from Amazon.com

Let’s say you’re thinking about your work—maybe changing jobs, maybe finding one—and you’d like what you do for a living to be interesting, pay enough, and, at the end of the day, make a positive difference in the world. Sounds like you might be looking for some sort of a job in public service — working for federal, state or local government, a nonprofit organization, or a for-profit firm that’s involved in some way.

The problem? According to Heather Krasna’s new book Jobs that Matter, there are some 22 million jobs in government (with more than 30,000 federal jobs vacant at any time), 8.7 million nonprofit jobs, and countless tens of thousands of jobs with contractors who work alongside government agencies and nonprofits doing parallel work. Just thinking about where to start can give you a headache.

When you look a little closer, you discover that each agency, each local government, each potential employer, in a matter of fact, expects something different from applicants, provides information about vacancies (if at all) in different ways, and approaches the hiring process differently as well. “Headache” doesn’t sum up half of it.

Careful, comprehensive and informative, Jobs that Matter doesn’t make things any simpler. But it does offer practical help with the tough questions: Where to start? How to focus the search? How to deal with styles of recruiting from most to least formal?

Krasna starts and ends her book with general advice to a job seeker with the goal of finding a job that matters. She begins with how to define goals, match goals with qualifications, and grasp the complexities of this range of possibilities. She wraps up with how to prepare for a job search, apply, focus and negotiate when an offer is on the table. And the chapters in the center of the book explore seven broad ways a career that make a difference, in health care, the arts, education, etc., with examples and advice that span all levels of government and all sorts of nonprofits from large to tiny.

The book offers exercises to help with the planning, examples of good resumes and cover letters, interesting profiles of real people doing real jobs across the country, and useful explanations of jargon (Who knew that a “status candidate” is a federal employee looking to change jobs? Or that some vacancies can only be filled with people who already have jobs with the government?). It has lots of useful references as well, including Idealist’s own Career Guides.

Jobs that Matter will help any seeker Find a Stable, Fulfilling Career in Public Service (as the subtitle promises).

You can order Jobs that Matter from Amazon.com; a royalty will be paid that helps support this site.

[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]

“Brandraising” blends fundraising with marketing to outline a new way of thinking about a nonprofit’s communications with the public. Brandraising (a new book by Sarah Durham) is an easy to read, easy to use guide to bringing this new way of thinking to bear on the work of all types of public benefit organizations.

Brandraising (the concept) is building “a strong framework for communication” that rests securely on vision, mission and values — “the core elements that direct all aspects of the organization’s work.” The difference between brandraising and other guides to nonprofit communications is apparent from the start when Durham adds to the list of core elements four more concepts: objectives, audiences, positioning and personality.

Most planning sessions for nonprofits likely get as far as objectives, though considering that sort of detail when thinking about organizational communications may be rare. Rarer still, Durham thinks, is attention to the audiences to be reached, the position to be achieved, and the personality that best suits the organization’s goals. What adjectives describe the way the organization wants to be perceived? What is the big idea the organization wants to be known for? Who, exactly, needs to hear and understand the organization’s messages?

The book offers straightforward and practical exercises for working out the answers to questions like these. My personal favorite: Make a list on a whiteboard of all the other organizations that might be seen by the public as working with more or less the same goals as those that guide your work. Write your tagline or identity statement at the top just to the right of the list. And then make a check mark next to the name of any other organization that could comfortably use those same words to describe itself. Too many check marks? Your message is going to come across as blurred; key members of the public may all too easily confuse your work with that of other organizations that approach the goals differently.

Clarifying the key components of identity so they can be communicated accurately is half of the brandraising project. The other half—and maybe the harder half—is aligning communications efforts in every part of the work across all “the channels and tools through which audiences connect with the organization.” Too often, Durham suggests, organizations invest too little in developing a framework for communication that can be, and is, used by everyone consistently and comfortably.

Many people who work in nonprofits, Durham observes, are not engaged with the idea of marketing as an important contributor to organizational success. Brandraising serves well as an introduction, building on nonprofit examples and respecting the distinctiveness of nonprofits’ work.

You can order Brandraising from Amazon.com with this link; a small royalty will be paid that helps support this site.

For an advanced exploration of the idea, look at the 7th edition of Phillip Kotler’s classic (and expensive) Strategic Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations.

[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]

Now that it’s summer, have you found yourself with more time for pleasure reading? Want to throw some guides to organizational effectiveness and digital organizing into your beach bag amid the crime series and romance novels? Consider one of these three books by some sharp and talented pals-of-Idealist:

By Flickr user Wonderlane (Creative Commons)

• Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business, by Nancy Lublin, called “a must-have for anyone running a Fortune 500 company or small business who wants to learn how to grow their business while spending zilch.”
• Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, by Deanna Zandt, which “offers concrete strategies and advice for both individuals and organizations looking to engage” in social media.
• The Networked Nonprofit: Using Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change, by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter, which helps nonprofit organizations “overcome their fears of losing control and evolve to meet the informational and cultural needs of today’s donor and volunteer.”

Need more inspiration? See our recent reviews of Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose!; Marilyn Johnson’s This Book is Overdue!; Shirley Sagawa’s The American Way to Change; and more — and stay tuned for a review of Sarah Durham’s Brandraising next week.

[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]

Are you the type of person who joins a volunteer literacy program in March, starts learning Sanskrit in April, and begins building your own bamboo bicycle in May — only to feel ashamed when you’ve lost interest in all three projects by June? Or perhaps you have so many ideas for your future career that you’re afraid to go ahead with any of them?

Barbara Sher would call you a Scanner. In Refuse to Choose! Use All of Your Interests, Passions, and Hobbies to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams (or you might find the alternate subtitle, A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love), she argues that this type of person is not a failure for not being able to find and hold onto their goals. Instead, she portrays Scanners as curious, versatile, creative geniuses who should be proud of the fact that they might never settle down in the conventional sense.

Of course, it’s easy to like a book that lays such heavy praise on its readers. But Sher, a life coach and career workshop leader, has worked with enough Scanners throughout her lifetime to allow her to develop practical advice for adding structure to your life, getting past barriers to success, and choosing a catch-all career. The exercises she suggests aren’t going to solve everything or work for everyone, but they can give you a starting point for buckling down — while giving you permission to continue jumping from field to field.

Sher devotes a chapter each to seven categories of Scanners, including “serial specialists” and “Jacks of all trades.” You don’t have to choose just one identity: the author acknowledges that most people fit into multiple types. As with most classification systems, it does feel a little forced, but it’s just a way to organize all of the ideas that Sher is bursting with. Each specialized chapter offers possible models for living your life, whether you’ll be pursuing your multiple passions as part of your job or in your free time.

So if you (or your family) are bothered by your lack of direction, pick up this book and stop worrying so much. If you can’t commit long enough to read the whole book or go through all of the exercises, it’s worth just paging through to find bits of inspiration. (If you buy it here on Amazon, part of the proceeds will go towards Idealist.)

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More book reviews:

• The Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits
• This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
• The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers are Transforming America
• How to Be an Everyday Philanthropist
• The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing Nonprofit Organizations to to Create the Future of Our World

[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]

The Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits is a compact, 80-page introduction to the sometimes confusing world of software programs and web tools that nonprofits often leverage to maximize their impact. The Field Guide provides a basic overview of key terms and products, and would be most useful for novice or “accidental” techies who are hoping to familiarize themselves with the landscape. Anyone who is feeling a little lost after suddenly being charged with producing their organization’s new podcast series or developing a “search engine optimization” strategy will benefit from flipping through the pages of this small, accessible book. More experienced technology professionals will find the book is too basic, though they might learn about a few software programs they hadn’t been aware of.

The Guide is broken into three sections, and the structure allows the reader to quickly find what they’re looking for. The first section describes five functional areas of particular interest to nonprofits, and what categories of technology can be useful in each area: raising money, constituent outreach, event management, supporter engagement, and “listening and measuring,” along with a few pages on fundamental tools that are critical for all organizations. The second section is a set of fictional case studies, ranging from a small start-up with a $100,000 budget to an established $3.5 million organization with a sophisticated technology strategy. The final section provides a high level overview of specific software programs in each broad category, though it does not provide detailed analyses or reviews. For that, readers might want to visit the Idealware website which features in-depth research and product reviews. The website is an incredibly useful resource for both accidental techies and experienced IT professionals alike.

Individual copies of the Field Guide are available for $19.95 on Lulu. Additionally, organizations can purchase licenses to distribute larger quantities of the book to their networks. In this case, the Guide can be co-branded with your organization’s logo, a custom introduction page, information about your organization, and a customized set of resources for more information. For an additional fee, the Field Guide can be tailored specifically to your network. The content can be edited to speak directly to your organization’s typical processes and software needs, and can feature additional case studies and software ideas.

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More book reviews:

• This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
• The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers are Transforming America
• How to Be an Everyday Philanthropist
• The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing Nonprofit Organizations to to Create the Future of Our World

[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]

In This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, Marilyn Johnson guides us through a world that few library patrons have probably thought about: the progressive, activist, cutting-edge, modern, hip, and exciting side of libraries and librarians.

Johnson easily convinces us that librarians do much more than shelve books, and provide more than just a place for the public to access information for free (as if that weren’t a noble enough cause!). She shows the range of other roles that librarians play in society. Some library professionals double as “street librarians” who volunteer to supply information to activists during protests. Others have staunchly defended civil liberties, keeping their community members’ confidential information private, even in the face of government mandates. And there’s even a whole chapter about reference librarian avatars in Second Life, and how the virtual world became a safe space to connect people with information on sensitive topics such as transgender identity.

This Book Is Overdue! demonstrates that librarians not only have to keep up with technology and other trends, but are often active agents of change as well. Johnson introduces us to a fellowship program in which leaders from all around the world gather in Rome to learn techniques from librarians on how to access, organize, and share information—skills that they’ll bring home to empower the underserved communities that they work with. In another chapter, she highlights archivists as benevolent preservationists of things that might otherwise get lost forever, from ever-changing online material, to obscure zines, to finicky electronic documents, to artifacts that get tossed to the curb.

The book provides a fun overview of the unexpected roles librarians play, as well as the quirky culture that arises out of their profession. But it doesn’t quite serve as a cohesive or critical piece. Readers may be left wondering about the actual impact of all of this noble work, because Johnson stops short of examining it.

Johnson’s book comes at a crucial time. It’s a good reminder of the services we’re losing as libraries face dramatic budget cuts; maybe it will give readers that extra push they need to decide to donate to their local library system. It also demonstrates that library services are not becoming unnecessary with the rise of the web; in fact, they’re becoming even more useful and accessible.

If you want more juicy details, borrow the book from your local library, or buy it from Amazon using this link (a royalty will be paid that helps support Idealist.org). As you read through the fascinating anecdotes, don’t be surprised if you find yourself daydreaming about getting a graduate degree in information sciences. If you’re serious about it, you can even talk to admissions representatives from these programs at some of our Graduate Degree Fairs.

[This blog entry appeared on an older version of Idealist; any broken links are a result of having re-launched our site in Fall 2010.]