Today, social media offers an alternative broadcast and communication medium for nonprofit advocacy organizations. At the same time, social media ushers in a "noisy" information era that renders it more difficult for nonprofits to make their voices heard. This book seeks to unpack the prevalence, mechanisms, and ramifications of a new model for nonprofit advocacy in a social media age. The keyword for this new model is attention. Advocacy always starts with attention: when an organization speaks out on a cause, it must ensure that it has an audience and that its voice is heard by that audience; it must ensure that current and potential supporters are paying attention to what it has to say before expecting more tangible outcomes. Yet the organization must also ensure that advocacy does not end with attention: attention should serve as a springboard to something greater. The authors elaborate how attention fits into contemporary organizations' advocacy work and explain the key features of social media that are driving the quest for attention. Developing conceptual models, they explain why some organizations and messages gain attention while others do not. Lastly, the book explores how organizations are weaving together online and offline efforts to deliver strategic advocacy outcomes.

Provides a multi-disciplinary survey of nonprofit organizations and their role and function in society. This book also examines the nature of philanthropic behaviours and an array of organizations, international issues, social science theories, and insight.

At a time when more and more people are becoming activists, this thoroughly revised and updated edition of Making the News explains how to generate news coverage of any important issue or nonprofit cause - and to do so within a reasonable budget. Based on interviews with professional journalists and media-savvy activists, this easy-to-use handbook describes how to stage media events, write distinctive news releases, contact reporters, deliver soundbites, and much more. Now including the latest information about online media coverage - including news Web sites, viral e-mail, and more - this new edition will also insure a media edge in the Internet age. The handbook's expanded sections on aggressive tactics, including extensive tips on how to create newsworthy visual imagery, provides everything needed to transform standard media events into spectacles that reporters won't ignore.

With a foreword from Michael Schudson, The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States examines the rapid growth, impact and sustainability of not-for-profit investigative reporting and its impact on US democracy and mainstream journalism. The book addresses key questions about the sustainability of foundation funding, the agendas of foundations, and the ethical issues that arise from philanthropically funded journalism. It provides a theoretical framework that enables readers to recognize connections and relationships that the nonprofit accountability journalism sector has with the economic, political and mainstream media fields in the United States. As battered news media struggled to survive the financial crisis of 2007-2009, dozens of investigative and public service reporting startups funded by foundations, billionaires and everyday citizens were launched to scrutinize local, state and national issues. Foundations, donors and many journalists believed there was a crisis for investigative journalism and democracy in the United States. This book challenges this and argues that legacy editors acted to quarantine their investigative teams from newsroom cuts. It also demonstrates how nonprofit journalism transformed aspects of journalistic practice. Through detailed research and practical discussion, it provides a comprehensive study of this increasingly important genre of journalism. The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States is an important text for academics and students of journalism, communications theory, media and democracy-related units, as well as journalists worldwide.

The past several decades have seen unprecedented growth in the scope and complexity of relationships between government and nonprofit organizations. These relationships have been more fruitful than many critics had feared and more problematic than many advocates had hoped. Nonprofits and Government is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary exploration of nonprofit-government relations. The second edition of this important book is fully updated and includes two new chapters. The authors address a host of important issues, including nonprofit advocacy, direct regulatory and tax policy, the conversion of nonprofits to for-profits, clashes in government interaction with religion and the arts, and international nonprofit-government relationships. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers alike will benefit from the authors' wide-ranging discussion.

As a kid, Noam Chomsky handed out the Daily Mirror at his uncle's newsstand on 72nd Street, inadvertently finding himself in a buzzing intellectual and political hub for European immigrants in New York. Iranian human rights Nobelist Shirin Ebadi and her husband signed their own legal contract, attempting to restore equality to their marriage after the Iranian Revolution effectively erased the legal rights of women. Elizabeth Warren set out to expose those frauds declaring bankruptcy and taking advantage of the system-only to discover, in her research, a very different story of hard-working middle-class families facing economic collapse in the absence of a social safety net. While studying at Oxford, a young Tariq Ali made a bet with a friend that he could work the Vietnam War into every single answer on his final exams. In this rousing, thoughtful, often funny, and always inspiring volume, a diverse and impressive group of thinkers reflect on those formative experiences that shaped their own political commitments. A fascinating new window into the revealing links between the personal and the political, Political Awakenings will engage readers across generations.

Making Nonprofit News examines the essence of nonprofit journalism on multiple levels of analysis, explaining how individuals, routines, organizational makeup and outside institutions all affect news production at nonprofit news organizations. The book argues that the market model itself - not simply the journalism industry - impacts news workers, news content and outside influence on the organization. Essentially, nonprofit journalism organizations are influenced by forces consistently impacting the industry as well as those previously not involved in journalism. Drawing on three years of in-depth interviews with more than 30 journalists at nonprofits, site visits and more broad research on nonprofit journalism, this book is a sociological study of how nonprofit status affects journalistic work. The book further conceptualizes the forces impacting newswork and examines the social institutions now on the boundaries of journalism due to their connection to nonprofit journalism. Exploring how nonprofit news is disrupting the industry's very idea of news, news values and news processes, this is a helpful text for academics and researchers with an interest in journalism, media industries, media sociology and not-for-profits.