Nonprofit Nation: A New Look at the Third America by Michael O'Neill

Author:Michael O'Neill [Michael O'Neill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-10-05T22:37:00+00:00

Strategies

Just as nonprofit advocacy groups learn from and respond to corporate lobbyists, nonprofits also build on each other's work. Women's suffrage leaders had worked in the abolition movement, and a century later veterans of the civil rights movement became leaders in the women's movement. Civil rights and women's movement workers moved on to welfare rights organizations and peace organizations. Advocacy staff and volunteers circulate in an extensive network of social action.

New technology, especially communication and transportation technology, has played a critical role in the success of protest movements. The archetypal example is the Protestant Reformation, which made highly effective use of the newly invented technology of printing. Changes in transportation, especially the railroad, played an important role in the abolition movement. Television, whose presence in American homes leapt from 10 to 90 percent during the decade of the 1950s, helped create public support for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Federal civil rights legislation was partly the result of television pictures showing peaceful marchers in the South being doused with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs. In the 1990s the Internet added a powerful communication weapon to advocacy arsenals. Suddenly it became possible to have instant communication with an unlimited number of actual and potential advocates, through e-mail messages to constituents, opinion makers, and legislators, Web site information on legislative issues, and Internet-based fundraising.

Just as major nonprofit arts, health, and educational organizations are able to attract the financial and corporate elite, advocacy organizations often attract the entertainment elite. Figures such as Joan Baez, Paul Newman, Martin Sheen, and Barbra Streisand have given their time, money, and, probably most important, their presence to a wide variety of advocacy causes. Nor is this phenomenon limited to liberal causes: while Elizabeth Taylor is working on AIDS and Sting on protecting rain forests, Charlton Heston champions the National Rifle Association's opposition to gun control. Los Angeles, New York, and other entertainment capitals have become almost as important to nonprofit advocacy as the nation's political capitals.

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