Nonprofit Speech Rights

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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Voter Turnout Among Persons with Disabilities and Youth Online

On 10/15/01, the U.S. General Accounting Office released "Elections: Perspectives on Activities and Challenges Across the Nation", which addresses reform measures regarding the voting administration, voter registration, voting technologies, and vote counts and certification in federal elections. It is one of a series of reports to Congress in response to the issues and perceptions raised during the contested November 2000 Presidential election, in which some 57% of voting jurisdictions faced some problem conducting a fair and/or accurate vote.

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E-Mail Advocacy In the Blink of an Eye

Previously, we talked about the potential downside of conducting advocacy campaigns via e-mail. If you look beyond the spam, however, you might also see an increased opportunity for advocacy campaigns to be conducted by both traditional established organizations and individuals concerned and motivated enough to become an engaged around an issue.

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Data Mining of Voter Information

Marcia Stepanek, writes in the October 26, 2000, edition of "BusinessWeek" about some of the software tools being deployed during this campaign season that are opening up the voting process -- not to increase voter turnout, but to find out more information about voters. Internet marketers and candidates, through the use of data-mining tools, are combining individual voter records and personal commercial data to target candidates, issues, and products to specific segments of the population, potentially crossing the boundaries of individual privacy in the process.

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Congress, Constitutents, Content Online

There appears to be considerable variance between what constituents want and what Congress needs, according to two reports on congressional websites released this year. The Congress Online Project's November 2001 report and the Advocacy Group's February 2001 report provide a useful balance of perspectives around public attitudes and expectations towards individual member websites, and ways these potentially valuable resources can be improved.

The Advocacy Group

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E-mail Advocacy: Online Petitions, Spamming the Globe

While electronic mail is still recognized by US nonprofits as a primary means of communicating with elected officials at the national level, e-mail campaigns and online petitions, however, are generally regarded with a high degree of suspicion, skepticism, or indifference by elected officials. Even the general public expresses hesitancy with this form of advocacy.

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Nonprofit Peer-to-Peer Technology

Leslie Walker's 1/3/02 Washington Post technology column describes how an international law firm is utilizing a custom online collaboration system to enable interaction among its lawyers and clients around legal transactions, regardless of location or time of day.

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E-Mail Advocacy: Will It Get Heard on the Hill?

Electronic advocacy today carries some great benefits. In particular, we can now witness the breaking down of geographic boundaries as a factor in delivering messages to elected officials and policymakers. This in turn reduces the time and cost involved in sending correspondence. Newer tools now make it possible to efficiently generate a high volume of personalized, customizable, and targeted communications with relative ease.

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Technology Funding and Fundraising Resources

The following information is drawn in part from archived content on the NPTalk discussion list. It is also available online, courtesy of The Foundation Center's Philanthropy News Digest December 21, 1999 edition. In addition to the resources below, interested organizations should also examine the online resources available at Helping.org. Online Fundraising Resources for Fundraising Online Compiled by Putnam Barber, of the Internet Nonprofit Center, this comprehensive list includes annotated links to a wide range of online fundraising sites.

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Sharing Bookmarked Websites Online

Admit it: you probably have accumulated an impressive collection of websites and pages that you have collected in your browser—yet have no idea when you added them or possibly even why. You would like to eventually share them with others, but they are not organized in a manner that makes their distribution easy.

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Open Source Software (OSS) and Application Service Providing (ASP)

What is Open Source? Open source software (OSS) generally refers to software whose source code can be read, modified, and shared, such that it can ultimately evolve into a more stable product that can be customized to meet specialized needs, at a quicker pace than conventional software development, and does not operate under licensing terms that are restrictive to any persons or groups, fields of endeavor, or other software. What are ASPs?

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