Your Nonprofit Summer Reading List

Does anyone really slow down in the summer any more? Well, I hope you get that chance and, just in case, here are some great books that you might want to tackle. They’re not novels, but they might help you get ahead with your marketing and fundraising, come fall.

The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause, Kivi Leroux Miller.

Miller’s experience with hundreds of small nonprofits with one-person-marketing shops led her to write this instructive basic guide to marketing for people who have to do it all. This book is so incredibly useful, from building a basic marketing plan to how to use social media effectively on a small budget, that I wish I could simply reprint it all here.

Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications, Sarah Durham.

This book is the clearest blueprint I’ve seen lately to rationally building your brand and implementing it. It is “branding in a box.” If you do one thing about your organization’s brand this year, make it reading this book. Once you do that, you’ll be so excited to have a step-by-step plan that you’re bound to start creating a better brand.

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting With Social Media to Drive Change, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

I haven’t written my own review of this book, but OnPhilanthropy said, “The Networked Nonprofit covers all the important structural bases - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, wikis, blogs, contests, map, widgets etc - but it’s not social networks for philanthropic dummies. What makes the book sing are stories and the voices: many terrific examples of how nonprofit organizations - big and small - have used these tools, and the ideas of the people who make it all go.”

The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems, Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin.

I found this book to be extraordinary. The positive deviancy idea is a fresh solution for the aid community and maybe even for business. I found the case studies in the book riveting, from the Vietnam experience to alleviating the terrible infant mortality rate in Pakistan to changing the belief systems that allow female circumcision in Egypt.


Source: About.com