Dear Malcolm Gladwell: The nonprofit technology world is not very happy with you.

Mr. Gladwell's article in this week's New Yorker magazine, criticizing the hype about social media's ability to stir social movements, is drawing fire from nonprofit technology experts, among others.

The primary gripe against Mr. Gladwell, left, an author of several best-selling books, centers on his argument that Facebook, Twitter, and other online tools foster "weak" ties among people, which he says are not the types of relationships upon which social activism depends. For example, he writes, the lunch-counter sit-ins that helped foster the civil-rights movement of the 1960s were built on "strong" ties, true friendships, which are necessary if one is to engage in high-risk activism of the sort required of civil-rights leaders.

Allison Fine, a social-media expert and Chronicle contributor, disagrees...

For as long as nonprofit groups have used social-media tools, they have faced the perplexing problem of Internet money math: How do all of those supporters and friends add up to real dollars in the door?

But Zachary Sniderman, an assistant features editor for Mashable.com, suggests that money shouldn't necessarily be the object of nonprofit groups' social-media efforts. Social good, after all, is also about the process of bringing people together.

Take the Livestrong campaign. The group behind the ubiquitous golden wristband, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, recently started a Facebook campaign that encouraged fans to share their personal cancer stories on the social-networking Web site. The foundation wasn't trying to raise money through this effort. It was trying to bring people together behind its cause.

In this case, Mr. Sniderman writes, "the community is the end goal." The...

Donors crave more and better information about charities, information that will help them make smarter decisions about which groups they support.

That assumption has driven a lot of the discussion about philanthropy in recent years, writes Cynthia Gibson, a senior vice president at the Philanthropic Initiative, on the organization's blog and in the Nonprofit Quarterly. And she says that idea seems to be behind recent grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to two philanthropy consulting groups, to help them develop tools that will enable donors to give more intelligently.

But do donors really want more information?, Ms. Gibson asks. And even if good data existed on nonprofits' impact, would donors really use it to decide how to channel their charity?

Ms. Gibson and her co-author, William Dietel, former president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, suggest that data may not have the...

Nonprofit groups should join hands with an unusual ally—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to fight a "burdensome and costly" provision in the new health-care law, argues lawyer Jack Siegel in his Charity Governance blog. The provision has nothing to do with health care but was inserted as a way to raise money to pay for the new law.

It would require employers, including charities, to file Internal Revenue Service 1099 tax forms to report all purchases from any vendor that sold them at least $600 in goods during the year. It is designed to ensure that those vendors are reporting all of their taxable income.

"It's not the filing that is so problematic," writes Mr. Siegel. "The significant costs will be associated with collecting information."

The Chamber of Commerce is trying to get the measure repealed.

While that organization "may disgust many nonprofit leaders, health care reform has...

A charity leader in Seattle has assembled a short video laying out the impact of the nonprofit world, a film that he believes can help other nonprofit executives spread the word about philanthropy’s economic value.

The three-minute, 40-second video, “Know Your Sector,” has been posted on YouTube. Among the nuggets of information it contains: the fact that about one in 10 American workers is a nonprofit employee (compared with the one in 57 workers who waits tables).

“My hope is that it will be a free resource, for donors, for board members, for nonprofit employees, and volunteers to understand the power of our sector,” says Ben Klasky, executive director of IslandWood, a nonprofit outdoor learning center on Bainbridge Island, Wash., who created the video for a class he teaches on nonprofit management “My hope is that it’ll go viral and that people will realize that,...

This Sunday's New York Times magazine has an article about Plumpy'nut, a paste made of peanuts that has been credited with significantly reducing death rates during famines in Africa.

Anderson Cooper, in a "60 Minutes" segment, has compared the paste to penicillin, saying it "may just be the most important advance ever" in fighting childhood malnutrition. Plumpy'nut has gotten lots of raves from aid workers, too, who are using it in their programs. 

But the Times article draws attention to a debate about a patent for Plumpy'nut held by the French company Nutriset, which first produced and sold the paste. Plumpy'nut is relatively expensive ($60 per child for a two-month supply), and critics contend that, as a lifesaving product that some describe as essentially fortified peanut butter, it shouldn't face the same restrictions about who can make it.

The debate resembles arguments over...