Weekend Reading: Best Links for Nonprofits and Philanthropists

• Scott Stadium, in The Changing Face of Volunteerism at idealist.org, provides a roundup of tech tools that allow micro-volunteering, micro-fundraising, and community organizing. Volunteer managers listen up!

• I love a good controversy and we have one, beginning with Nicholas D. Kristof's column in the NYTimes, in which Kristof says, "...humanitarians are abjectly ineffective at selling their causes. Any brand of toothpaste is peddled with far more sophistication than the life-saving work of aid groups."

  Allison Fine, of A. Fine Blog, came back with Why Humanitarian Aid is NOT Crest Toothpaste, saying, "The problem isn’t that we don’t sell causes like toothpaste, the problem is that we too often DO sell them like toothpaste."

• Rod Schwartz, who holds forth at the SocialEdge blog, examines the good and the bad of charismatic leaders in The Charismatic Entrepreneur -- a Blessing or a Curse? Schwartz points out that in some organizations, "So impassioned is the leader by the mission, so violently consumed by this personal passion, they stifle innovation, debate, staff development and, inevitably, the enterprise’s future."

Related:

• Micro-Volunteering via Mobile Phones
• Characteristics of Social Entrepreneurs