For nonprofits and the people who love them...
3 for Thursday, brought to you by K. Weill Consulting Group, LLC
August 18, 2016 Edition

1.  Foundation Center's IssueLab
2. Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development  
3.  Hemingway 
Desktop Editor

Plus:

Learn How to Build a Strong Donor (and Funder) Cultivation Program!

3-Part Online Training Series with national expert Linda Lysakowski, ACFRE kicks of September 20th!

 
1.   Key Resource: 
IssueLab 
Foundation Center's Knowledge Sharing Platform
With the premise that great social sector knowledge should be shared fr eely, Foundation Center created IssueLab. Within roughly 50 issue areas, from Housing and Homelessness to Prison and Judicial Reform, you can drill down to browse or download - for free - hundreds of reports, case studies, presentations, policy briefs and more. You can also search by author to see what else they've published and for which publishing organization. And you can drill down by publishing organization to check out other reports it has generated.

In an effort to increase access to cutting edge research and best practices from the sector, IssueLab provides useful information about open knowledge practices, and helps organizations openly publish their reports to the site.

IssueLab also offers useful services - not free - like working with your organization to create a customized, searchable Knowledge Center embedded in your website.


2.  
Best Practices: 
Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development

Promising and Model Programs
If you work in the field of youth development, we highly recommend you peruse this website. Run by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at University of Colorado Boulder - and funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation - Blueprints uses rigorous methodology to evaluate evidence-based youth development program models. So rigorous that, of the 1,400 they reviewed, they gave only 5% the "promising" or "model" program moniker.

As the programs are diverse, Blueprints provides a handy Program Selector tool so you can search by type (after-school, drug prevention, etc.), outcome (behavior change, academic achievement, etc.), target population, and risk and protective factors within individual, school, peer, family or community domains.

Know of a formally evaluated youth development program - maybe yours! - that you think could pass muster with the Blueprints review board? You can nominate it for inclusion as a promising or model program.

3. Cool Tool:  
Hemingway
Desktop Editor to Help You Write Like the Master
So many of our clients struggle to convey their organization's story clearly and concisely. Hemingway serves as your own personal editor. It highlights words, phrases and sentences which are wordy, awkward, passive, even confusing - then helps you fix them. It also checks for overall readability (5th grade level is about right!). Did you write a needlessly complex word? Hemingway provides suggestions for alternatives. You can import your document easily from Word to Hemingway. Then, once finished editing, you can export your new work of art back into Word.

For ten bucks, you can download Hemingway Editor 2 to your Mac or PC.*

*K. Weill Consulting Group, LLC has no financial or other relationship with this company or product. We just like it!
 
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K. Weill Consulting Group, LLC

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