Some news from the political front – a popular economic theory that has been much discussed in regards to efforts for austerity in the Federal budget process, has recently been debunked. A college student looked at the data set for a school assignment and noticed that a formula was missing several key countries in its results.
We’ve discussed before the idea of the fallacy of facts – that data can be used and purposed to make any and all arguments, sometimes by manipulating the numbers. But data is still incredibly important in helping to guide major decisions, both in the political and nonprofit arenas. This story is just a good reminder to us all – don’t just pick data that matches your hypothesis. Also, it might be a good idea to double check your work.
Here are the rest of this week’s links:
- A great read from NPQ about how some nonprofit organizations classify their advertising to protect their “overhead.”
- Similar to the story we featured last week – Idealist takes a look at what change makers could learn from software developers.
- LinkedIn provides an interesting infographic about how millennials use the Volunteer & Causes section in their profile.
- A nice piece from Armchair Advocates highlighting five ways you can make an impact as a volunteer.
- Many nonprofit organizations use Eventbrite for events. News came out this week that they raised an additional $60M in funding.