RHE 328: Writing for Nonprofits SP16
Instructor: Dr. Aaron Zacks
Office/Hours: PAR 19/T 3:30-5, W 11-12:30
Resources:
Required Texts:
Easy Writer (EW). 5th Ed. Lunsford. Longman, 2014. ISBN 978-1457687747
Strategic Communications for Nonprofits (SCNP). Second Ed. Bonk, Tynes, Griggs, Sparks, 2008. ISBN 978-0470181546
Winning Grants Step by Step (WGSS). Fourth Ed. O’Neal-McElrath, 2013. ISBN 978-1118378342
All other course content will be made available via Canvas and UT Libraries.
Writing for Nonprofits Course Description:
Can you see yourself working for an organization whose main purpose is to raise awareness about an important issue and make a difference in people’s lives? Bring your passion to the classroom in this service-learning writing course, in which you’ll practice supporting a nonprofit by harnessing your language and digital media skills.
Nonprofits do a lot of good in their communities, but their survival depends on how well they do two things:
1) promote their mission; and
2) create opportunities for people to support it.
Writing plays a crucial role in achieving these goals. In this class, you will learn to:
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Understand the rhetorical situation inherent to nonprofit work;
-
Assess an organization’s needs;
-
Think critically about an organization’s precepts and opportunities for engagement;
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Prioritizing the use of an organization’s resources;
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Construct innovative messages in support of cause;
-
Use the internet and print sources to research and assess potential donors;
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Develop the knowledge and skills necessary to write a compelling grant proposal;
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Collaborate with like-minded, busy, students and professionals.
This course provides you the opportunity to work directly with local non-profit agencies and create materials their directors can use for publicity and fundraising. The materials you’ll create for class will be the kind that employees of nonprofits create on a daily basis. Students will work in groups to research and write a grant proposal directed at a particular foundation. Independently, students will write a feature article and design a project that meets the needs of one of our partner organizations or another local nonprofit.
We will have several guest speakers from local nonprofits. Some will invite your help fulfilling specific writing needs; others will share some of their hard-won experience in the nonprofit realm and field your questions about nonprofit careers.
Writing for Nonprofits is one of the DRW’s “Production Courses.”
This semester has two distinct parts. In the first, we’ll hone research and documentation skills and practice writing skills by emulating a range of genres relevant to the founding, publicizing, and success of nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Part I has a discrete, though loose topic: NPOs and nonprofit causes related to the wide range of controversies related to the implementation of Texas State Bill 11. In compiling a collective bibliography, we will survey the wide range of NPOs and nonprofit causes. This “wide range” includes homegrown initiatives like Students against Campus Carry (https://www.facebook.com/UTStudentsAgainstCC/) but it may contain whatever related NPOs and causes interest you each, personally (well, in small groups).
The second part of the semester has no discrete theme; it will be driven by your initiative and take shape through your work in the first part. We’ll spend the weeks leading up to Spring Break strategizing and workshopping student Portfolios, which will constitute the focus of all formal writing submitted for the rest of the semester.
Digital Literacy:
The DRW is committed to developing digital literacy throughout its curriculum. My classes require students to develop skillsets required to leverage tools like Google Drive, Evernote, Flipboard, and Skitch.
Many assignments will require you to work in more than one application or computer program. For example, you might compose some text in Drive or Word and revise it with a partner before pasting the final text into a graphics editor like pixlr or Skitch. In this sense, such assignments are multi-layered and, therefore, will lead inevitably to file format conversion problems. To avoid such annoyances, you’ll submit all of your work in this course — with the possible exceptions of audio-visual projects — as PDFs.
Unless otherwise indicated in the prompt, EXs will be evaluated on a 10-point scale divided equally between two criteria: Depth of Intellectual Engagement and Thoroughness of Completion. FWs will be scored out of 100 points according to the rubrics attached to their prompts.
This class uses Plus/Minus grading according to the following scheme:
|
Letter
|
%
|
GPA
|
|
A
|
94-100
|
4.00
|
|
A-
|
90-93
|
3.67
|
|
B+
|
87-89
|
3.33
|
|
B
|
84-86
|
3.00
|
|
B-
|
80-83
|
2.67
|
|
C+
|
77-79
|
2.33
|
|
C
|
74-76
|
2.00
|
|
D+
|
67-69
|
1.33
|
|
D
|
64-66
|
1.00
|
|
D-
|
60-63
|
0.67
|
|
F
|
0-60
|
0.00
|
Grade Breakdown:
| Exercises (EX) |
30% |
| Adaptations (AD) |
30% |
| Portfolio |
40% |