Despite the importance of these developments, however, we know very little about them in a systematic or comprehensive way. As a consequence, nonprofit managers and those who would support their activities are flying blind in a world of extraordinarily rapid change.

The Listening Post Project was designed to fill this critical gap by creating a solid base of useable knowledge about how nonprofit organizations are responding to the range of critical challenges they are facing at the present time. The project has three primary purposes:

1. to assess the health of key components of the American nonprofit sector;
2. to determine the challenges these organizations are confronting; and
3. to help organizations identify how best to respond.

The project relies on organizational "listening posts" — i.e., organizations across the country representing diverse fields of nonprofit action — that participate in regular "Soundings" through which they report on key trends and developments affecting them, and express their opinions on an array of topics deemed most important to the sector. The project summarizes the resulting insights in a series of quick-turn-around Communiqués, commissions case studies on promising approaches, and organizes Innovators' Roundtables for practitioners and educators in the field.