LPP year in review

It's been a busy and exciting year for the Listening Post Project.  Thanks to our dedicated partners and Listening Post organizations, we were able to achieve the following:

• The finding of our Health Benefits Sounding that three out of every four nonprofits offering health benefits have experienced an increase in their total direct health insurance costs during the past year helped convince the Senate to include provisions to assist nonprofits in its healthcare reform bill;
• Our Pensions Benefits Sounding was used by staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (the HELP Committee) to help kick off a set of hearings on pensions;
• Our Sounding on nonprofit policy priorities led to the Forward Together Declaration endorsed by hundreds of nonprofit leaders across the country and used to help convince Congress to include a new nonprofit capacity-building  program in the Serve America Act;
• Our shovel-ready nonprofit infrastructure Sounding, which documented $166 billion worth of "shovel-ready" nonprofit projects, has been used by state nonprofit assocations across the country to help nonprofits get access to state decisions on Economic Recovery funding.

The project also:

• Created a customized report function that enables us to provide each Sounding participant with a quick snapshot of how their organization's responses to key questions compare to the national average and to similar organizations;
• Added a new intermediary group to our project, the Corporation for National and Community Service; 
• Redesigned our website and project logo, and started use of social networking technologies such as blogging and Twitter.  Hits on our website are now averaging 50-60,000 per month;
• Convened a second successful Roundtable on nonprofit advocacy and lobbying.  

We plan on building on this success with an important Sounding on nonprofit innovations and performance measurement in early January.  This survey responds to a request we received from the White House Office of Social Innovation to document innovations being pursued by nonprofits across the country and the metrics being used to assess them.

Without the support of our intermediaries and member organizations, none of our accomplishments this year would have been possible.  We look forward to working with you in 2010 and the years ahead.