The LinkedIn for Nonprofits Weekly Digest

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another edition of the LinkedIn for Nonprofits Weekly Digest! 

To give you some good reading to go into the weekend with, we’ve compiled five fascinating articles covering everything from measuring impact to responding to unforeseen change. You’ll also find tips and advice you can implement to improve your grant applications, create reports your donors will love, and more. 

Here are five must-read articles for nonprofits this week:

1. Measuring Transformational Impact in Human Rights Advocacy (Stanford Social Innovation Review)

How do you measure transformation? This can be a particularly challenging question in the case of human rights advocacy, where change can be incremental and concrete progress difficult to track. Zehra Mirza, an internal evaluator at Amnesty International USA, shares some practices that can help organizations measure how well their strategies are working. 

2. The Backburner List: A Major Gift Fundraiser’s Top Secret Strategy (Fired-Up Fundraising)

Some prospects are harder to pin down than others—but that doesn’t mean they won’t make a major gift one day. To help you avoid overlooking great yet elusive prospects, Fired-Up Fundraising details why a Backburner List could be your secret weapon, and a few steps for developing yours. 

3. Having A Conversation Before Application Submission (The NonProfit Times)

Are you missing one crucial step before submitting grant proposals to foundations? The NonProfit Times explores why a pre-submission conversation with the foundation’s program officer could be beneficial, and some steps you can take to best prepare for these discussions.

4. The Sensemaking Mindset: Improvisation over Strategy (The Nonprofit Quarterly)

In a rapidly changing environment, even the best-laid plans can become outdated fast. The Nonprofit Quarterly outlines how fostering an improvisational approach among their teams can help nonprofit organizations respond to unforeseen circumstances by balancing past experience with flexibility. 

5. Why One Size Doesn’t Fit All (Ann Green’s Nonprofit Blog)

What type of reports do your donors want to receive—and perhaps more importantly, what don’t they want? Nonprofit communications consultant Ann Green makes a case for developing different versions of your annual report with different donor segments in mind. 

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