This week we’re excited to offer another guest post from one of our brilliant colleagues in the world-changing business: Karen Uffelman at Groundwire recently wrote about finding your “engagement superpower.”  We were inspired and think you will be, too:

Nonprofit organizations all have missions, expertise, and a dependence on other people who care about our missions to get the work done. In a perfect world we would not have to compete for the time, attention and pocketbooks of those people upon which our success depends. We’d have all the support we required and we’d achieve our missions in no time. Comic book villains defeated. Climate change fixed.  Toxics outlawed. Urban sprawl, deforestation, disappearing biodiversity – all of that stuff would be a thing of the past.  Unfortunately, the world’s not perfect yet, and all of those good folks whose help we need have loads of other things on their minds, schedules and budgets.

To make the most difference in this imperfect world, your organization needs an engagement superpower. Here are three bits of guidance as you identify your organization’s superpower and use it for good:

1. How Are You Special?
So how do you build relationships with the good people who care about your cause, make them prioritize your cause, better engage them in your work? One excellent way is to use your unique expertise, access, skills – whatever you’re super at – to provide a product, service or experience that really matters to your target audience.   A value proposition.  And not just some vague value proposition, like, “we protect the environment,” but more along the lines of what can you do for me today? Wonder Woman, for example, fights crime, but her superpowers? Invisible plane, “lasso of truth” and, hello, magic bracelets.

Your engagement superpower shouldn’t distract from your mission-related work. In fact, your superpower should advance your mission, even be integral to it. However, an engagement superpower may be an expansion of or a departure from your historical strategies and tactics. Or something you’re already doing, but not doing much of because you didn’t realize it was a superpower.

2. Learn from Good Examples: Engagement Superpowers in Action
•    Conservation Minnesota – These guys have developed a bunch of engagement superpowers, but the one that I really love is the weather service they offer on their website. Weather is something that people want to know about everyday – and really, it’s probably the most common way that people relate to the natural environment. It’s also the starting point for any conversation about climate change. Offering a weather information service on their website has doubled Conservation Minnesota’s web traffic over the last year, and has served as a gateway for really important policy conversations about climate. Awesome engagement superpower.
•    Washington Trails Association – WTA is working to preserve, enhance, and promote hiking opportunities in Washington State. Cool, right? They lobby the legislature, they organize volunteers to repair trails, they have hiker education programs.  But their engagement superpower is a hiking trails database that is not only a great resource for hikers looking for trail information with recent updates, it’s also a place for those same hikers to post trail reports – giving back in a way that is both fun and useful. The easier it is find a hike and the more you hike, the more invested you are in the Washington Trails Association. In the last year, over 700,000 unique visitors visited WTA’s website to find or post a hike.
•    Ecology Center – The folks at Ecology Center have developed an incredible superpower and you can check it out at their HealthyStuff.org website. Once there, you can research over 5,000 consumer products, including toys and other children’s items, and find out exactly what’s toxic and what’s not. It’s a great service, behavior changer and action motivator all rolled into one. Nothing will get you more fired up about the sad state of consumer product protections than discovering that the Dora the Explorer activity tote you just bought your niece is chock full of lead, chlorine, arsenic and bromine. Yuck! This is a site that I started visiting all of the time once I found out about it.  I’ve told all of my friends with kids about it, and it has seriously engaged me in the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families campaign.

3. Important Superpower Questions
How do you know if an experience, service or product you offer is actually an engagement superpower? Or if it has the potential to become one, if you just invested a little more?
•    Is there a market for your superpower? Is it something people actually want? Really? Would people pay for it? We’re not saying that you should charge for your superpower, but if you’re doing something that people would be willing to pay for, that’s a pretty good clue that it has superpower appeal. If you have to organize, cajole or guilt people into using or taking advantage of your superpower, well….it’s probably not a superpower.
•    Does your superpower attract people with whom you’d not otherwise be in contact?
•    Does your superpower cause people to identify themselves to you and enter into the beginning of relationship that you can further develop?
•    Is your superpower uniquely excellent? Is it something that your target audience can’t readily get from anyone else?
•    Does your superpower make your mission personally relevant to the lives of the people with whom you’re seeking to connect? This is really the key. For the true believers in your mission, they already take your issue personally. But for all of the rest of us who might be volunteering, taking action, contributing or otherwise supporting you, providing value around what’s personally relevant to us related to your issue is the best way to engage and expand your base.

Today’s Three Things is the second of a two-part series by Rebecca Epstein, the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Client Services at The Management Center (TMC). The Management Center (TMC) works with talented nonprofit leaders who are experts in their fields, have thrived as individual performers, and now must learn how to get things done through other people – in other words, how to manage. Learn more about TMC at www.managementcenter.org.

As we noted last week, much has been written about the importance of giving people a sense of ownership over their work, but significantly less attention has been paid to what it means to be a good owner. The two practices of handing over ownership and being a good owner are inextricably linked: without trusting that a staff member will really drive a piece of work forward and take responsibility for its success, it’s much harder for managers to delegate full ownership (or, as is often the case, to delegate work at all beyond the simplest of tasks!).

Last week we offered up three tips to get a handle on “owning” a piece of work. This week, we’re following up with three more tips to make you an effective owner, and thereby a more effective manager.

Here’s the headline: Do it all with a spirit of ownership! Even in the context of the best-planned work, issues will inevitably arise: people won’t respond to your repeated calls and emails, timelines will shift due to circumstances outside your direct control, unexpected costs will outweigh limited resources. One way or another, you can pretty much bank on things not going according to plan all the time. In our experience, there are generally two types of owners: the helpless victim who thinks her hands are tied when problems arise and often makes things harder (e.g., “there’s no way we can meet deadline now”) and the can-do driver who takes things in stride, adjusts to new circumstances, and finds ways to keep moving forward (e.g., “if we move our internal deadline back by one week we’ll be able to focus on Convention and still get the book in on time”).

Can-do drivers come in many shapes and sizes but they all have one thing that makes them successful owners. We’ll call it the “Spirit of the O” and it looks like this:

1. Creative problem-solving: You actively re-strategize when issues come up, surface options, get input/approval as needed, and continue driving work forward, even if it means finding and then navigating another road. You’re not wedded to one way of doing things and because you’re focused on your outcomes (see ownership Part I), you’re flexible in how you get there.

2. Proactive approach: You realize that because success or failure lies with you, it’s unlikely that your co-workers are lying awake at night thinking about the project you own. You also recognize that sending out a brilliant action plan or polished email with clear next steps does not mean that your Helpers are automatically on it. As a result, you don’t wait for deadlines to pass or problems to arise – you take active steps to meet or prevent them, checking-in along the way, sending friendly reminder emails before deadlines come around, and nudging/cajoling as needed to keep things on track.

3. Good attitude and a focus on results: You approach your work with a can-do attitude, staying focused on where you’re trying to get and pushing past the bumps to reach the finish line. Because you enjoy your work and bring a spirit of optimism, others want to work with you and help you succeed. Sounds trite, but it’s true.

Again, being an effective owner is not easy. It takes knowing what you need to own, bringing others into the process at the right times in the right ways, and approaching it all with a true spirit of ownership. While the benefits of ownership are many – empowerment, responsibility, even happiness – the pitfall is that you’re on the hook for great work (with power comes responsibility). We think the tradeoff is well worth it and leads to happier staff, happier managers, and better outcomes for the world.

One line in particular struck me:

“In general, post-disaster studies ten to measure “throughput indicators” like how much food was distributed, or how much shelter got provided, instead of “output or outcome metrics” like lives saved or suffering alleviated.”

It’s another situation where measuring the wrong things has led very good people doing incredibly good work down wrong paths… paths that ultimately veer off from their goals.

In the communications space, the equivalent is measuring email messages sent (instead of actions inspired by those email messages), Facebook “likes,” or even classic clip books that measure the number of mentions.

Are you measuring what you mean to?  Are your metrics helping you make decisions that take you closer to your goals?

Working in the silo of politics, especially at a time when the national debate is so uber-focused on a few big issues (healthcare, anyone?), one might assume that articles about politics, Congress, issue debates, and the like would predominate among the shared links.

Or, setting politics aside, misery loves company, right?  We assumed negative articles, or articles discussing negative topics (the Iraq War, the millions of Americans without healthcare, the appalling state of our public schools) might get passed around to friends, family or those whose opinions one might be trying to change.

Turns out, neither is the case.  The study showed that “awe-inspiring” articles, especially about science, predominated the most emailed list.

We wonder if this finding doesn’t have broader implications for how causes communicate with the people on our email list, and whether we might do well to rethink how we mobilize our communities – or at least test some modifications.

The general “formula” for email messaging, at least specifically for “ask” messages, goes something like this:

A.  Brief Introduction to the issue
B.  Stark description of the problem (or what the opposition is up to)
C.  The Ask – do this to help solve the problem!
D.  Reminder of the problem
E.  Ask Again
F.  Inspiring closing line about how goodness and justice will prevail over evil because of their action

This is such an ubiquitous formula, that we had difficulty finding an email that didn’t utilize it, at least for the most part.  And why not use it?

The NYT findings got us thinking: maybe, instead of focusing on the negative aspects of our issues, we should instead talk more about the amazing positive things that have happened lately, either because of the efforts of our organization or due to the act of secondary (or even unrelated) partners.

Backing into this theory is the old “peer pressure” adage that we also take advantage of when motivating action.  “Join the thousands just like you who are emailing the President right now…”

What if we simply rethought how we utilize peer pressure and combined it more with the positive, awe-inspiring messages?

Instead of sending messages that regale readers with the vastness of the problem, and telling them that their email to the White House is the solution, why not share inspiring stories of success achieved through collective action that leads to an ask that calls on the individual reading your message to follow in the footsteps of those other ordinary citizens?

Have you tested this different approach in your communications? We’d love to hear your findings.

The thrust of the proclamations is this: it’s time to move past counting clicks and obsessing about list size.  The number of fans you have or Twitter followers you’ve amassed isn’t the important thing.  The important thing is whether the work you’re doing is making the change in the world your organization exists to make.   The manifesto urges some shifts in thinking that are bound to be controversial.

We’ve endorsed the Web Thinking Manifesto, and hope you’ll read the whole thing: http://bit.ly/d5Nxxc.  It’s caused a bit of a stir in our sector.  We’ve been pondering on it quite a bit and have landed on our favorite proclamations, those we’re a bit skeptical of, and humbly offer up an 11th proclamation:

We love these proclamations:

Proclamation 2: We Will Engage Web Thinkers in Leadership
We will make it mandatory for the people in charge of Internet and digital strategies to be in senior staff meetings – and be sure they serve at the highest level of the organization. Planning a new campaign or initiative without “new media” at the table is as foolish as holding that same meeting without Communications or Membership Directors.

Yes yes yes! Even better…Communications and Membership should include online thinkers as leaders, since online tactics are carrying ever more of the water in those departments.

Proclamation 3: We Will Engage Everyone in Web Thinking
We will understand the difference between IT and the Internet and ensure all staff share responsibility for leveraging the web in their daily work. Not everyone will understand the latest tools and tricks, but collectively, we will appreciate the web’s value and the critical role it plays in the lives of our audiences.

We’re well past the era where anyone should ever confuse the roles of the people who make sure our computers work (bless you, IT team!) and the people who communicate, recruit, fundraise and more using computers to connect to the world.

Proclamation 10: We Will Be Nimble
We will move at the speed of the Internet – and the instantaneous news cycle. We will set up structures that eschew bureaucracy and allow us to move both quickly and strategically. Organizations that are positioned to respond rapidly are rewarded. We will redefine what it means to be proactive on issues. We will create and distribute news directly and we will hijack, adapt, and redirect the traditional news cycle to fit our campaigns and issues.

Again, yes yes yes. The behemoths who need 2 hour senior staff meetings and three weeks to make small adjustments to message and audience will be left in the dust. Nimble and quick are the quintessential keys to success these days, for better and for worse.

We’re unconvinced about these:

Proclamation 1: We Will Position Ourselves as Movement Leaders
We will be more concerned with our cause, our broader mission in the world than with building a brand or institution. And we will reflect this reality in all of our work. We seek to work across traditional boundaries of race, class, gender identification and religion to build alliances that truly represent the people impacted by our issues. We can’t be afraid to talk about other efforts in our space, to link generously and be genuinely proud of the successes of our friends and allies. Their success drives our success and drives the change that makes our existence worthwhile.

We’re skeptical because we think brands and institutions do matter in this increasingly fragmented world. It’s harder than ever to tell real grassroots from astroturf, advocacy from advertising, and genuine voices from those generated by “social media experts.”  We love the emphasis on coordination, cooperation, and sharing credit and successes… we’re just not sure developing well-respected brands and institutions don’t play an important role in all that generosity.

Proclamation 4: We Will Hire Digital Natives
We will embrace millennials because we understand the difference between learning about technology and growing up digital – between speaking Internet as a foreign language and speaking web natively. Internet culture is radically changing the way people engage not only with one other but also with organizations. Transparency, collaboration, and open dialog – millennials can show us how to develop these cultural norms and values. We will listen and learn with them.

Pluralities if not majorities of the people who do the most work for many organizations and causes, particularly those that have been around for more than a decade or two, are older than millenials and approach online tools for engaging causes and making a difference in the world much differently than digital natives.  Yes, we need millenials.  But we also need people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and even older (gasp!) to help bridge digital divides and gaps in how people of different generations, access, and comfort levels with technology want to connect and plug in.

We hope Michael and Tim add this:

We Will Remember That It’s Not About The Campaign
We will not obsess solely about clickthrough and sizes of lists (in house and dispersed) and will not celebrate just tactical victories. We will obsess about power maps and strategic intelligence, not just application of the newest-best-most-visible-everyone’s-dong-it-latest apps. We will keep our eye on the ball and evaluate openly and honestly whether our tactics are connected to real life change.

What do you think?  Weigh in on the conversation here http://bit.ly/d5Nxxc or in the comments.

Michael was on the ground for the climate movement’s efforts in Copenhagen a couple of months ago, and came away with an impression of a policy making process largely immune to the outputs of the movement’s work.  He proposes a refocusing, noting, “it is incumbent upon all of us to avoid getting so caught up in the art and craft of our online engagement and online campaigning work that we’re blinded to the reality of the people we’re trying to influence — or the landscape in which we’re operating.”  It’s a brave and insightful post and I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

In support of refocusing, we’re offering up a trio of ideas that we think can guide the way toward more effective more world-changing work, online and offline.

1. Measure for outcomes, not just inputs and outputs. It sounds obvious, but as a sector we focus relentlessly on inputs (how many emails did we send, how often did we tweet, and what’s on our campaign website?) and outputs (how many calls to legislative offices did we generate, how many people visited our website,  and how many of them signed up for our email list?), but very little on outcomes.  As we noted in a December Three Things on measuring outcomes, we tend to focus on inputs and outputs because it’s incredibly difficult to figure out how to measure outcomes in a complex environment with many moving parts and murky causality.  Difficult as it is, it’s a vital next step.

2. Remember that organizations don’t have friends. The buzzwords in online organizing are “community” and “engagement.”  Communities are great and cultivating and engaging them is a time-tested touchpoint of grassroots organizing, but mission-driven organizations need donors, activists, volunteers, grasstops leaders and sound connections within well-thought power maps.  Engagement for engagement’s sake can lead us to generate a ton of outputs (ie. Facebook fans and Twitter followers) unconnected to meaningful outcomes. We wrote about this before, too, here and here.

3. Become a power mapping pro. Most, if not all, of the policy change work we do depends ultimately on the decisions of a very few people, be they members of Congress on key committees, policy makers in the US administration, business leaders, high profile members of the media or a city council member or two.  Online campaign strategists should bring to the table a commitment to understanding what really influences those people, and endeavor always to keep investments and activities narrowly focused on those pathways of influence.  Sometimes mass grassroots actions are the right way to go, other times they’re not.  For a terrific example of power mapping in practice, check out this write up of the successful campaign to get Lou Dobbs off of CNN, in part using Facebook ads mictrotargeted to CNN/Time-Warner employees.

Clearly I’m missing some things in this list – and it might be the wrong list altogether, I’d love to know what you think! – but if we can get more focused on outcomes, on relationships that move our mission, and on focusing our efforts only where they can have an impact on decision-makers, I think we’ll see more of the change we’re working for.

Elections are won and lost based on a wide variety of factors, many if not most of them impervious to the efforts of individual organizations trying to influence elections. Major social problems – hunger, illiteracy, unaffordable health care, joblessness, etc. – are complex, long term, and decidedly not the responsibility of a single organization’s or coalition’s efforts. Legislating takes a long time and is a messy undertaking under the best of circumstances – advocacy and lobbying can’t change that reality.

So, what should organizations, coalitions, and the sector at large measure in the context of unrelenting complexity, widely dispersed responsibility, and, often, a virtual blackout when it comes to timely, reliable data? We’re working on some larger pieces on this for the coming weeks, but in the meantime, three things to get the ball rolling:

1) Measure progress against an articulated strategy.
If your issue depends on key legislators taking a leadership role and you’ve heard from their staffs that they fear retribution from their constituents, then it makes sense to generate support – and grassroots actions demonstrating that support – in those legislators’ districts. That’s your strategy.

The ultimate measurement is whether you successfully swayed the legislators to take the action you wanted them to take, but that might be a larger ballgame than your at-bats can reasonably deliver. You can measure how well you delivered on your strategy. How many new advocates in the district did you move to action, how many in-district alliances did you build, how many and which grasstops influencers did you bring on board, how many of the legislators’ donors did you bring on board, etc.?

“Was your strategy the right one?” is an important question that’s hard to measure. Knowing with certainty how well you delivered against that strategy is vital, and you can and should be measuring it.

2) Measure capacity building.
Changing the world is a long term endeavor. After you win the current battle, the next one’s probably coming up right behind it and you’re more likely to win that battle if you’re expanding on capacity you’ve already built and tested. Identify the two or three critical capacities you’d like to see extended, and measure how well your efforts build on them. Examples of important capacity questions: how many partners did you coordinate with and what types of coordination happened, how many advocates did you move up the engagement ladder, how many new relationships did you build, how did your structures for communications or accountability work?

3) Measure learning.
Particularly when an organization is taking on something new – new partnerships, new tactics, new tools, new messages – lessons learned are a critical and measurable outcome. When you tested message A versus message B to your email list, which one worked better for which segments? Are there any larger lessons learned from that? Maybe the lesson is just that it’s important to test, because the results were counter to your expectations. Did you bring on new staff to manage elements of a campaign, or assign existing staff new roles? What worked and what didn’t about the arrangement?

It’s easiest to measure inputs: how many emails did we send, how many people signed the petition, etc. We’d never argue that organizations should stop measuring those inputs, but that outputs and outcomes are important, too. In our view, changing the world demands it.

Officially, “Web of Change connects the foremost thinkers and do-ers in social media, technology, and social change. Together we are growing a community of leaders working for transformation of our organizations and our world.”  It is a conference of progressive tech geeks – people working for social change by leveraging opportunities presented by technology.  The people there were brilliant, committed, and breaking new ground.   They included some of the impressive folks at ONE Northwest, a nonprofit dedicated to helping environmental organizations in the pacific northwest have a bigger impact on policy, and Jason Barnett, an activist forging a new model for citizen journalism at The Uptake in Minnesota.  Representatives from organizations like Conservation International and 350.org intermingled with hard core political types like the incomparable Joaquin Guerra of SEIU and Adam Morecai of Advomatic, a firm figuring out innovative ways for organizations to connect activists with their elected officials (among other things).  Of the ninety-plus people there, I didn’t meet any I didn’t learn from.

As someone a little bit out of the tech geek circle – I’m a political strategist, organizer and communications specialist first, and an online aficionado only insofar as online moves my (and my clients’) offline agendas -  I found myself returning to several themes over the course of the four day gathering:

1. Those of us working online need to up our game to make sure the work we’re doing connects with real world change. The people at Web of Change were nearly universally focusing on taking this next big step from tactics that work to strategies that work, but we’ve got a ways to go.  Better targeting – of both potential activists and decision-makers – and better measurement are important capabilities to tackle next.  At this point, the tactics and tools are mature enough to ensure we can build big lists, mobilize some percentage of those lists to sign online petitions, send emails to their representatives, and maybe even take action offline.  It’s time to ensure we’re building lists that include the people we’ll need to move policy or change behavior, and we need to get better at measuring the effect on levers of power of all of the mobilization.

2. An ongoing challenge is making sure we’re not just talking to each other, but rather expanding the community to include people who don’t live online day and night, who aren’t activists by profession or hobby, and who maybe aren’t even entirely convinced that we’re right.  Cara Pike gave an excellent presentation of data gathered and analyzed by Earth Justice, including the factoid that the average Earth Justice donor also gave to more than a dozen other environmental organizations.  The data also revealed that the environmental movement was delivering all of the wrong messages – and telling all of the wrong stories – if it hoped to move new people to become advocates for environmental protection.  While the thrust of her presentation was about message, I came away with another key point: the environmental movement is largely talking to itself, which is not a winning strategy in the short or long term.  I wondered how many other organizations and movements are investing heavily in communicating to the “in crowd” – existing donors, advocates, and other converts to the cause – through email, twitter, Facebook, and whatever the next big thing is at the expense of finding and cultivating new supporters who may not be ready to engage with them online.  We need to make sure we’re not falling in love with the tools and the technology while letting those people we need with us fall out of love with us.

3. There was an interesting division between people who were campaigners first and are embracing online tools to help them do that better, and people who were online activists first and are growing into campaigning writ large. How well we can bridge the gaps will have a lot to do with how successful the sector is at resolving the challenge of getting more strategic  (number 1, above).

4. A remaining big question for me: are online tactics useful for more than building big lists at the grassroots level, and facilitating coordination at the campaign leadership level? Can online be productive for grasstops, for example, or for persuasion?  What do we do (online) when mass mobilization isn’t the best way to make a difference?  I fear we risk always seeing a nail (a requirement for lots of grassroots action) because we have a hammer (great online tools to deliver that action).  Some challenges doubtless require a different set of tools to conquer, and this is another critical question to resolve if we hope to make the practice of online politics more strategic.

I hope I get to make my way back to Web of Change in coming years to continue the work on these and the myriad other important issues we’re tackling every day in advocacy, fundraising, and world changing.  Thanks, fellow Web of Changers, for the opportunity!

The New York Times succinctly explained the context:

Following the direction of recent Supreme Court decisions, the appeals court held that independent groups have a First Amendment right to raise and spend freely to influence elections so long as they do not coordinate their activities with a candidate or a party.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government’s only legitimate interest in restricting political donations is combating the appearance or reality of corruption that could arise from allowing unlimited contributions directly to a candidate or political party.

The court has held that, on the other hand, a desire to level the playing field or limit the power of moneyed interests is not a permissible reason for the government to limit the amount a rich person might spend on independent efforts to elect or defeat a candidate. In this case, the appeals court held that nonprofit groups are essentially like rich individuals, so the government cannot restrict their independent spending either.

As the NYT blurb hints at, the underpinnings of decades of strict limits on campaign financing are tumbling.  In addition to the federal appeals court ruling on nonprofit money in politics, the Supreme Court appears poised to erase some of the limits on corporate and union money in elections, there’s some speculation that the next step would be removing or significantly raising limits on candidates and parties to keep parity with the corporations, unions, and non-profits, and just last month a federal court ruled that a Connecticut law providing public financing for elections is unconstitutional.

Without delving into the arguments for and against limits on campaign finance – though those arguments are myriad and interesting, addressing both the theoretical and the practical sides of how we go about selecting those who will govern our nation – the context of deregulation provides an excuse to do some thinking about the role of nonprofits in politics.

Some of questions at the top of my mind today:

1) Pending a SCOTUS appeal, non-profits now have much more leeway when it comes to influencing elections; does that also mean they have more responsibility? From housing to education to veterans benefits to the environment, nearly every issue non-profits work on are heavily influenced by federal policy, and therefore by federal policy makers.  With fewer legal limitations against electioneering, do non-profits have a responsibility to expand their policy work to advocating for those candidates who would make the best policy?

2) We know from years of data that political donors and “joiners” – those people who take a up a cause and give blood, sweat, and tears, or at least a few mouse clicks – are different than “charity” donors and joiners.  Is engaging directly with politics an opportunity for non-profits to bridge the gap, finding political donors to plug into more traditional nonprofit work and giving nonprofit folks a bigger voice in electoral politics? Or is that a trap – are two communities different enough that should remain separate but equal-ish, so to speak, to the nonprofit leader?

3) The locus of the conversation on this has been around fundamentally political non-profits.  EMILY’s list originated the most recent case, and EMILY’s list is first and foremost a political beast, regardless of which section of the IRS code it’s operating under.  As the lines get blurrier legally, does it make sense for the lines between ’service’ and political non-profits to get more solid, or should they blur, as well?

What the IRS allows is just one factor.  What’s best for the nonprofit sector, the people and causes non-profits serve, and the ways that politics should and shouldn’t intertwine are some of the factors that make up the big picture.  I hope we’ll all take this opportunity to be deliberate and about the path forward: there are opportunities to make a huge difference in the world if we get this right.