CNE Welcomes New Director

The Center for Nonprofit Excellence (CNE) welcomes Kerry Dodson, their new Executive Director. Membership in the CNE is open to Charlottesville area nonprofits; the dues range from $100 to $400 annually.

The current CNE calendar of upcoming events includes their Brown Bag seminar, How to Write a Survey, on Oct. 4, and the Oct. 19th FOCUS presentation by Bob Eliason of JMU College of Business Management on the basics of starting an online business from establishing a website to handling payment.

The January 2007 Virginia Network of Nonprofit Organizations (VANNO) report The Virginia Nonprofit Sector indicates that there were 8,537 reporting charitable nonprofits in Virginia in 2004, and that the 1,240 foundations in Virginia held $6.1 billion in assets and gave $388 million in grants.

Kiva Update

37Signals has a nice update on Kiva, the online microloan program for small entrepreneurs in developing countries. (See BGNonline last November for more related links)

Social Edge maintains the Kiva Chronicles, the story of how Kiva came into being, and how it is progressing through the ups and downs of social entrepreneurship. At this writing, they have funded every business request they received.

Notes from the Nonprofit Commons Launch

If you missed the opening of the Nonprofit Commons in SL, you can see a video of Anshe Chung's talk and avatar Rik Riel's notes on the event at The Click Heard Round the World. For links to pictures from the event on Flickr, see NetSquared. For print media coverage, see the Victoria Times Colonist.

The New World Notes piece on the event is entitled SL as a Nonprofit Incubator. They also have a recent post on Mixed Reality Headcount by avatar Tateru Nino, looking at how well the corporate world engages SL residents.

Nonprofit Commons Opens in SL

From Nonprofits in Second Life (NPSL), comes the news that the Nonprofit Commons SL sim will hold its grand opening hybrid world event on Tuesday, August 14, at 5:30 PM PC/SLT in SL and in San Francisco. According to New World Notes, the sim dedicated exclusively to providing free office space for non-profits was donated by Ms. Anshe Chung, and is managed by TechSoup.

Here is the wiki, and Rik's announcement in The Click Heard Round the World. NetSquared offers registration for the San Francisco event on Meetup. The SLURL goes to the SL event location.

Web Analytics for Nonprofits

Beth Kanter has just put together a great primer on web analytics for nonprofits. Additional information is available at her Wiki space.

Edutopia's Daring Dozen 2007

Edutopia announced the innovative Daring Dozen educators recently.
They are:
Richard G. Baraniuk, Edward Burns, Nìnive Clements Calegari, Mary Keller, Mark Leon, Claudette Morton, Luma Mufleh, John W. Rogers Jr., Arthur Rolnick, Derrell Simpson, David Sobel, Laurie M. Tisch.

Edutopia is one of the initiatives created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which publishes the stories of innovative teaching and learning through a variety of media -- a magazine, e-newsletters, DVDs, books, and the Edutopia web site.

Purposeful Fellows of Virginia

59 Americans over 60 have been named Purpose PrizeTM Fellows, leaders in a new age of social innovation. All are inventing new ways to solve society's toughest challenges.

Two Virginians are on the list, Dennis Bakke of Imagine Schools in Arlington, and Adele Douglass of Certified Humane in Herndon. Douglass is also a finalist for the $100,000 Prize for 2007.

Last year, three Virginians were similarly honored: Martha Rollins of Boaz and Ruth, Marguerite Kondracke of America's Promise, and Dene Peterson of Elder Spirit.

Social Entrepreneurs' Film Festival

Guy Kawasaki points to the new FRONTLINE/World Series videos. These stories about social entrepreneurs will be shown on Monday at the Heroes from a Small Planet film festival in San Francisco.

Maryland Cultural Data

The Maryland Cultural Data Project site was announced recently by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. Based on on the Cultural Data Project (CDP) in Pennsylvania which is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the MD group intends to provide benchmarking information about the sector and to individual organizations, and to improve cultural policy expertise by making data available to researchers.

Maryland cultural organizations are encouraged to participate in the project by completing the Data Profile online upon receiving their annual audit, financial review or have closed and balanced their books for the previous year.

Change in the Air

Change This describes itself as a new form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread. Since 2004, authors of their short manifestos include Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Tom Peters and Malcolm Gladwell.

Endeavor Knowledge Center provides a series of articles on high impact local/global entrepreneurship in the context of emerging markets and poverty.

On June 14, Guy Kawasaki will moderate a panel at the Silicon Valley Churchill Club entitled No Plan, No Capital, No Model ... No Problem: Companies that Defied what VCs Tell You. Panelists include the founders of FanPop [fan], PlentyofFish [dating], HotorNot [ranking], MayasMom [parenting], and CoreFino [accounting services].

Finally,the original social entrepreneur, Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, speaks on PBS; and Bill Gates speaks to Harvard graduates (from c|net news).