The Creative Activist

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy.  The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT.  Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts.  SWOT - A Quick Review This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps: Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social media?  Weakne

Whenever a problem like gun violence or illegal immigration gains traction in the media, you'll find people misrepresenting the problem. The world is full of uninformed people, but the world is also full of dishonest actors trying to "sell" an idea. This post is the first of several where I will try to help the curious reader defend themselves from the fools and con artists and understand social problems, for real.  Confirmation bias is just the tendency to look for information that confirms what we already know or think. Everyone wants to be right, and the more important the subject is, the more the person wants to continue being right. Information that shows we're right gets more weight than information showing we are wrong. So, with that psychological note in mind, let's look at the outline of a formula for thinking about social problems.  Abusing Statistics - Raw Numbers A real thinker always gives numbers a context and always uses the right kind of numbers. A

Climate change is back on the front burner thanks to the latest, rather alarming, IPCC report . This blog is about how nonprofits can respond to the latest climate news, to raise money for relevant programs, to design and test new programs, or to promote sustainable behaviors.  Whether you want to raise money, recruit volunteers, or convince people to recycle more of their stuff, it helps to know how to think about how best to sell your ideas. That much is common sense, to some extent. This post is meant not so much to restate what plenty of people know but to begin to organize that knowledge. With that in mind, consider the basics of effective marketing and how they apply to your project. I'll then have a few things to say about market research, a topic that fewer people are familiar with. Digital Marketing Basics for Climate Activists I can't offer a real introduction to marketing in one post. That kind of thing might even be insulting to experienced communications or develop

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co-op

This short article outlines a technique you can use to focus your efforts to solve social problems through advocacy, public education, program design, or social marketing. What follows is a framework for thinking about how best to attack a given social problem This process should be helpful whether you know what your options are or not. You'll answer a series of questions about the issue starting with the most obvious question of all.  What is the problem? What is the challenge or problem you want to tackle? This is a broad social problem, like domestic violence or climate change, or something a bit narrower. Avoid stating that the lack of a specific thing is a problem - no playground in the neighborhood, no soup kitchen in the neighborhood, and so on.  There are a few reasons for not including a solution in your problem statement. First, you were probably assuming too much about the social problem in question. You will never look at other, better ways to address hunger or bullying

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb