Ever since the yellowcake uranium incident a few years back, the CIA has been trying to redeem its image: less bumbling lapdog of the President, more efficient, hands-on spy service. In the spirit of inspiring the agency toward its ideal of James Bondish competence, Foreign Policy brainstormed five critical missions that the CIA should undertake to re-establish its bona fides.

In true Bond movie style, the proposed missions range across the globe and include a commendably shady cast of characters: gauge the spread of the H-bomb (India? N. Korea? Pakistan?); scope out the extent of Chinese naval power; figure out the dynamics at play within Russia's state-owned energy conglomerate, Gazprom (turns out all those conspiracy theories about oil and politics were almost right; this mission's about natural gas); figure out which Afghan tribes have Taliban connections, then how to bribe them; and finally, who's in line to succeed Kim Jong Il?

Who needs fictional criminal cartels like Quantum (see new Bond flick, "Quantum of Solace")? These missions would be plenty interesting.

What might happen if the non-profit world was free from funding constraints? Though a distant dream for most, many non-profits are in fact examining minimal-cost outreach tactics in preparation for when funds run dry.

As women's organizations across the country are pushing for equal gender representation in the new administration, their struggle to find adequate funding has pushed them to think creatively. Allison Stevens, Washington Bureau Chief for Women's eNews, introduces a few options for mobilizing that are cost-free given the struggle for financing that many non-profits are facing in the current economic crisis.

"Money is not going to get in our way," said Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a women's rights lobby in Arlington, Va.

Smeal said women's rights groups are more organized than ever and have new communications tools at their disposal. One possibility would be an online site that would collect recommendations from grassroots women's activists around the country.

Smeal's website is jam-packed with grassroots initiatives to engage women across the country. Their "take action" webpage provides viewers with 6 step-by-step options on how they can engage. Additionally, their student activism page provides students with means to meet other engaged students, start their own campus movements, become informed on campus-related issues, etc.

By mobilizing community members and volunteers, non-profits successfully tap into one of their greatest (and free) resources. Instead of cutting back in the midst of a financial crisis, non-profits can look towards making progress at the grassroots level. President Elect Barak Obama is not the only grassroots community organizer around; going back to the basics; mobilizing the people, is an advocacy tool that we will most likely see in increasing popularity.

Effective advocacy is deeply entwined with effective communication. Once you have established an advocacy goal, most often the next step is to figure out who your organization needs to reach -- the most specific audience you can identify -- in order to achieve that goal. Then you're faced with the question of how -- how to communicate meaningfully with an audience who will not, in most cases, instinctively grasp why your issue or proposal is of special import.

In many cases, the media can act as an amplifier, helping you raise the visibilty of your issue with a key audience. The Communicaitons Consortium Media Center has a long track record helping nonprofits figure out how to communicate their ideas effectively in a media context. CCMC recently packaged much of this knowledge in its second edition of Strategic Communications for Nonprofits: A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the Media "New and updated features include: new case studies; new trends in media and branding; ethnic media issues; and trends in technology."

Speaking of the power that clever advocates -- specifically, efforts like the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization -- can exert by leveraging their spending to incentivize others to deliver services, The Economist reports that the big pharmaceutical companies are shifting their focus to serve the needs of developing countries. GAVI and similar commitments to buy useful drugs that have yet to be developed for markets in the global South are not the only reason for this shift in sales strategy, but they helped to point Pharma toward shifts in the marketplace. Increasingly, drugs to treat diseases that afflict primarily those in the developing world are becoming the R&D priority (instead of another heartburn med, for example):

For its part Pfizer, the world's biggest pharmaceuticals firm, recently announced a restructuring that makes emerging markets a priority. Jean-Michel Halfon, who is in charge of that effort, says serving customers in developing countries is now "a business, not a charity."

This is nothing less than a huge success story for global health advocates.

"Leverage" has a bad name these days. The word evokes investment banks' habit of borrowing $30, $50, $100 for every dollar invested. That sort of leverage did not create efficiencies. Instead, it created illusions of capital where there was none, and it hurt public confidence.

It's a shame that capital markets are so prone to boom and bust. Among other downsides to this cycle: concepts -- like leverage -- that underlie market behavior are very useful, yet their abuse makes them appear fundamentally flawed. Despite all that economists and policymakers have learned since the stock market went bust in 1929, leading the country into a decade of Depression, we still have a hard time steering an even course between irrational exuberance and fear.

Matthew Bishop, the New York bureau chief of The Economist and co-author of Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, reminds those focused on social and environmental impact that leverage, used in a healthy way, is indeed a powerful, legitimate asset. And leverage needn't involve borrowing money at all. Leverage, for nonprofits and civil society organizations, should be fundamental to their theory of change.

Within a few short hours of Obama's victory, this slide show flew through cyberspace (much faster, I might add, than any in-depth analysis or political commentary).

Over the past few years, we've begun to see the new online phenomena of news stories being told through slide shows in addition to conventional articles with one or two photos thrown in here and there. BBC's "day in photos" was one of the first to venture into this realm. It quickly became attractive for readers who didn't have the time to read a few articles yet still wanted a lively highlight of the day's most interesting events.

The paradox of the internet is that news sources have unlimited space- no more word limits, yet viewers seem to yearn for the quickest and most catchy means to digest a story. Soon enough, other news sources adopted the exciting idea of condensing stories of an entire day, month, year, event, person's life...etc into a photo slide show. Most online news sources now have an entire section of their website dedicated to Photos and Videos alone.

Many advocates struggle to maintain the integrity of a complex issue; a slide show would seemingly oversimplify it. However, it would be foolish to neglect the fact that the slide show is popular due to its simple nature: it is an easily digestible series of short yet poignant bullet points that remain imprinted in a viewer's memory. If these bullet points happen to be photographs, is it so bad?

As the economy worsens, the relationship between grant makers and grant seekers is liable to get even more testy than it already tends to be (though the well will not necessarily run dry, say the experts). I found this piece, by Eugene R. Wilson, who has a long history on both sides of the equation, to be a helpful "empathy primer," so to speak, for grant seekers trying to understand what's so hard about giving money away. One excerpt:

The critic Dwight Macdonald once explained why many grant makers avoid seeing grant seekers in person. A foundation is "just a big pile of money, surrounded by people who want it," he said.

All of whom believe they deserve it, he might have added. At the ARCO Foundation, we received a new request every 16 minutes of the workday. We learned that you turn down 20 requests for each one you approve.

Barry D. Karl, the University of Chicago historian, told a gathering of grant makers that I attended in 1979 that when you awarded a grant, you created an ingrate and a lot of enemies.

More importantly, if we chose badly, the grant money was wasted. But with new requests quickly piling up, there was no time to spend wondering which of those organizations we rejected might have done more with a grant.

In such a deluge, grant seekers are often treated badly. Grant makers must change that.

The quote helps explain why both sides get frustrated with the grant seeking process -- and why evaluation and lessons learned often fall through the cracks. But, notes Wilson, both grant makers and grant seekers participate in creating the social impact sought (if indeed it was created, which brings us back to evaluation). Grant makers' don't deserve to be proud of their power of the purse unless the purse is opened wisely and deployed in a flexible, transparent way. Meanwhile, grant seekers might have a lot to say about causing social change, but they should realize that others' do too: ergo, keep it short and tie the work into the grant maker's larger vision for change.

I posted a few weeks ago on Nicholas Kristof's column exploring the way Barack Obama's (at that time still undecided) presidency would change the face of the United States -- not because of what Obama does but because of his name, background and heritage. That can be a foreign idea to people who work hard day-in and day-out for substantive policy change.

But symbols are incredibly powerful, though Americans may not realize why or how, exactly, symbolic shifts in the U.S. presidency will challenge or change perceptions of their country. Jim Sleeper, a professor at the Yale School of Divinity, writing for TPM Cafe, offers his perspective in a post titled "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear..."

...During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, you'd have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington...

Charitable giving is too strange a bird for anyone -- economists, nonprofit experts and corporate managers included -- to predict very accurately. One might expect philanthropy to be among the first casualties of economic difficulty, since it is, in economic terms at least, clearly non-essential. But as yesterday's New York Times story "Bracing for Lean Times Ahead" shows with the Depression-era study to the right, giving is counter-intuitive; it can increase in the midst of great financial difficulty.

According to the Times, nonprofits will probably face lower giving levels soon, but "few fund-raising experts or nonprofit leaders are predicting an implosion in giving, a long fall from the more than $300 billion that was donated last year in the United States." Historical data show "that swings in giving are not nearly as severe as broader economic ups and downs, and that during some of the worst times philanthropy remained strong," as was the case during the Depression.

Patrick M. Rooney, interim executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, said the most reliable indicator of individual giving was Standard & Poor's 500 stock index, with a 100-point jump translating into an additional $1.5 billion of philanthropy from people who report donations on tax forms. "It works just the same way on the downside," he said.

Using that rule of thumb and the price of the index on Nov. 6, such individual giving would drop this year by about $8.7 billion from an estimated $187 billion, according to Mr. Rooney. That's far less than financial markets have fallen.

Helpfully, the Times also ran some advice for nonprofit managers in the midst of funding trouble. "The Nonprofit's Guide to Surviving a Downturn" discusses Reynold Levy (who directs New York's Lincoln Center) and other nonprofit leaders' accumulated wisdom about fundraising and management in difficult times.

Those without the resources or influence to access the mainstream media often talk about the web's power to fashion grassroots coalitions that upend the establishment. I'm not sure the establishment, once it's established, has ever devoted much thought to cultivating the grassroots. But the Washington Post reports that Barack Obama is planning to leverage his campaign's enormous online operation to translate grassroots campaigning to direct governance.

Armed with millions of e-mail addresses and a political operation that harnessed the Internet like no campaign before it, Barack Obama will enter the White House with the opportunity to create the first truly "wired" presidency.

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.

Just as John F. Kennedy mastered television as a medium for taking his message to the public, Obama is poised to transform the art of political communication once again, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who first helped integrate the Internet into campaigning four years ago.

It's unclear how Obama will maintain his special connection to these ten or so million Americans while governing on behalf of the rest; in his acceptance speech, Obama explicity promised to be the President of those who did not vote for him, too. But it's a fascinating prospect, particularly as advocates think about how to manage the transition following their own campaigns targeted at candidates during election season.

The GII Exchange is back up and running after a brief hiatus due to technical difficulties. We apologize for last week's radio silence.

Many groups argued for a more sensible approch to U.S. foreign policy during the 2008 presidential campaign. It's impossible to determine the net effect each of these efforts produced in the race. But I appreciate how one of them -- Impact 08, an attempt to help candidates strike the right balance among defense, diplomacy and development assistance proposals -- recapped its contributions and offered ideas about how the efforts of those involved before the election carry forward.

Impact 08's focus on overall outcomes (rather than their own outputs) and next steps for the new administration is helpful to all advocates on these issues; everyone working on these issues needs to figure out how to stay relevant after the election as the business of governing gets underway.

Speaking of windows of opportunity, Americans for Informed Democracy is helping to publicize an inventive idea that advocates for fair trade cocoa are using across Canada and the United States tonight. People are already thinking about chocolate on Halloween; why not make the case in person?

A pleasant surprise will greet nearly a quarter million people distributing candy at their door, when youth reverse the Halloween tradition to hand adults a sample of Fair Trade chocolate.

The chocolate will be accompanied by a card informing recipients of poverty and child labor problems in the cocoa industry, affecting mainstream candy enjoyed at Halloween and around the year, and how Fair Trade certified chocolate provides a solution. The chocolate and cards are FREE thanks to generous donations of Fair Trade chocolate companies listed below.

Thanks to you we may reach a quarter million households this year with our important message about Fair Trade and the cocoa industry.

This campaign is compelling because it allows advocates for fair trade cocoa to take a frame with which people are familiar and comfortable --- trick-or-treating -- and turn it around. That is much "stickier" than simply standing on a street corner, handing out fair trade chocolate and fliers. Those who were reverse trick-or-treated this year will remember "the fair trade chocolate people" the next time they do Halloween.

Soon we'll no longer have presidential candidates. We'll have a president-elect. News outlets will (grudgingly) switch from contest mode to covering actual policies and decisions. The president-elect will be deluged with calls to hurry up and get a jump on governing. And Americans will be tempted to sit back and "see what this guy is going to do for me," so to speak.

All of this is natural but not necessarily beneficial -- or inevitable. Gary Mitchell directs readers to Stephen Hess, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution and "veteran of almost every presidential transition since Eisenhower-to-Kennedy." Hess recently collected his accumulated wisdom on the subject by writing What Do We Do Now: A Workbook For The President-Elect.

The Boston Globe reports that despite foundations' willingness to spend up to $60 million to make education a high priority for presidential candidates, even that sum could not move the issue up the priority ladder into front page debate.

Last year, foundations started by Eli Broad and Bill Gates pledged up to $60 million on a campaign called "Ed in '08" to press the candidates to make education an issue in the 2008 election.

The campaign set up field offices in the early primary states, pushed education questions at town-hall candidate meetings and bought ads on TV, radio and the Internet. Organizers insist the campaign was a success. But the funders ultimately capped the campaign at around $25 million. Education never rose to anywhere near the top of the national agenda -- and another $35 million wasn't going to change that.

This is a perfect case study in the value of capacity building. Experienced advocates know that one can have a solid advocacy strategy, deep resources and and extensive network, yet factors beyond the one's control can still make it impossible to achieve the goal. At such times, success is measured in increased capacity: hurry up and wait for a window of opportunity to present itself again. At which point a win might come cheap -- if the groundwork is well-laid.

We've often discussed on this blog the power of images to confirm or challenge frames that audiences bring when they're presented with new information. Visuals stick, but not always the way we imagine.

I read with interest a Q&A feature with New York Times "visual Op-Ed columnist" Charles M. Blow (that's an example of one of his column's visuals to the right). Blow says this when asked if he would prefer to communicate his ideas in visual or word form:

Information graphics visually reveal relationships among data with unparalleled power, while words allow for more nuanced expression, synthesis and context. Both forms require their own level of craftsmanship, and, when done well, both are very effective communications vehicles. Together, they complement each other.