Light Reading

I'm very happy to have regular professional development, am okay with the realities of nonprofit life, and embrace the value in getting spare-time things done before NaNoWriMo starts... but y'all, this is a ridiculous stack of reading I'm working my way through this week.

When I say "light reading," I really
just mean I can carry these around
without hurting myself.

First: I highly recommend the top two, Social Media for Social Good and Mobile for Good, to anyone who works for a nonprofit, whether you're in the communications department or not. As the author, Heather Mansfield, often says, nonprofits can no longer afford to ignore the impact social media and the mobile web are having on our work. Get thee to a library!

Further down the stack is The Nonprofit Marketing Guide, which is slightly more outdated but still contains solid principles, and I also recommend just about anything Kivi Leroux Miller writes down. If you work in nonprofits at all, you need to be paying attention to both of these ladies. They know their stuff.

We have a work event on Saturday, our year-end appeal was supposed to have been written two weeks ago (that's my own deadline, not the office deadline... but since I'm in charge of the year-end appeal, I suppose my own deadline is the office deadline), and then we hit the ground running for our next big event in March. Oh, and I still have no ideas for NaNoWriMo.

I'm frantically reading all of these (or re-reading, in the case of a few of them) in the hopes of learning something in a hurry. The stack of magazines at the bottom are from the meeting and convention industry and are quick reads, thank goodness! The rest--well, I'm pretty good at speed-reading, thanks to grad school. Whaddya know, I learned something I can use in real life!

What are you reading this week?