The Creative Activist

How do you establish a distinct identity in the minds of potential supporters? I’m glad you asked.   The Fundraising Fundamentals blog at http://www.andrewolsen.net/mark-cubans-advice-for-your-nonprofit/blog )   offered branding tips from entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Here are the tips(My comments are in parentheses): 1. Don’t make educating your donors the focus of your communications. Meet them where they are – not where you want them to be. (Don’t tell them what you want or what your mission is or what you need. Concentrate on explaining how donations or volunteering will benefit them in some way. The most obvious way to do that is to show people how their support will reduce domestic violence or clean up the river.)   2. Forget the witty, brainy, philosophical branding campaigns that are designed to “make donors think.” They don’t want to think. They want to help. Show them in simple terms how they can help. (Take the direct approach. If you are the only nonpr...

A post to one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to sparked a thought about marketing. The poster was recruiting nonprofit execs and social entrepreneurs to be on a UK television show. That makes me wonder if nonprofits could make better use of video, television, and radio. YouTube and Facebook videos are common enough. Some nonprofits post videos on their own sites and on other specialized sites. If you search online you'll find plenty of places to share videos for free. Of course you still need a plan - What is the objective? How do the video posts feed into the nonprofit's broader strategy. Tip #1: Use video sharing sites, but only if you have a good reason to use videos as part of an overall communication strategy. What about television? Think that's out of reach? Network television will be tough for all but the most famous charities and most newsworthy programs. Local stations would be better targets. Send press releases to them whenever your organization has anythi...

Crowdsourcing is the practice of submitting challenges or problems to an online group for their input. Have you ever used crowdsourcing for anything? If not, you might be missing out on a powerful tool. Nonprofits could do lots of things with crowdsourcing: 1. Fundraising - This should be obvious. Your organization could use a crowdsourcing site like Kickstarter.com to raise money for general operations, or for a specific purpose. 2. Marketing - You can also crowdsource advertising, branding, and marketing challenges. There are sites for those things, including Crowspring, Kluster, 99Designs, and PopTent. 3. Naming Things - Stumped trying to come up with a name for a campaign, program, or project? I guess this can happen. Why not use crowdsourcing to solicit ideas? 4. Program Design - Designing a program that will do a great job of meeting a certain need, say mental health assistance for homeless people, might not be tough all of the time. Sometimes you might want a whole cro...

You need a new idea for an education program. mentoring, recycling, prevention of bullying, and so forth. You can find an existing program and duplicate it, or maybe duplicate a variation of the idea. That's what usually happens and it usually works pretty well. This post is for times when no suitable programs exist. When you don't have anything you can copy, whether because of local laws, lack of resources or what have you, then it is time to get creative. How does that work? I'm glad you asked. In many previous posts I've covered lots of ways to generate new ideas, some creative and some more logical. Let's continue in that vein and look at how various brainstorming tools can work in creating new programs. First, the "creative" approach to brainstorming. Refer to Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono to read more about provocation and movement. For now, just keep these things in mind: Movement is about getting away from established ways of thinking. ...

How do you know if your program idea is a good one? Admittedly, experience and some data collection (interviews in particular) could be all it takes to answer those questions. This post is for the times when experience and a bit of research won't do the job. Consider the case of a part-time social activist, we'll call him Chet, who wants to start a nonprofit to educate people about how new renewable energy technologies can help them save money. The right questions can lead to better ideas, or a new approach to a challenge, or a newer challenge that might be more important, or at least more tractable. After all, your first thoughts about the challenge (or problem) might not reflect the best way to address whatever problem you've been inspired to tackle.  There is the "5 Why" technique for example. You start by asking why you want to address a specific challenge: How do I get people in my city to adapt innovative renewable energy technologies (never mind which...

The core of most nonprofit work is the program of some sort. Conservation, education, and emergency assistance seem to be the most popular program goals. When a program exists there may be room for improvement. Heck, there is almost certainly room for some improvement. If you have an idea for a nonprofit you will want to develop your core program, or refine your program idea. You already know how to brainstorm ideas, or research them. The next twenty or so posts will help you do a better job of finding program ideas. I'll help by describing a bunch of brainstorming tools you can use. The tools I cover here will be the same ones you may have read about in my long and rambling posts on better fundraising. If you are tuning in late, that's fine. The techniques I want to show you are simple to learn and will come with actual program design examples. I'll get into a few techniques that did not come up in the fundraising section. When I was skimming through Michael Michalk...

This post is about another creative thinking tool, this time applied to designing programs for nonprofits. I want to walk you through a few ways that NGOs can design or improve programs with a bit of applied creativity. Edward De Bono (yes, him again) developed the use of “provocations” or “provocative operations” to help people break away from normal patterns of thinking. De Bono also invented the word “po” to introduce provocations. I’ll use po here as if it were a word people use every day so bear with me a moment. De Bono created several types of provocations, the “stepping stone” being the one I want to focus on today. A stepping stone provocation helps us move from our current thinking to a radically different way of thinking, by way of an interim step. The interim step is a provocation is a forced switch to a different way of thinking. The end point is, we hope, a creative new way of doing whatever the program does. The first stepping stone provocation is called a reversal b...

I’ll return to the subject of strategic planning for nonprofits later. For now, I want to introduce another technique for generating ideas, for fundraising, planning, program design, advocacy, and other things. The Filament Technique was created by Edward De Bono, guru of creative thinking, and described in Serious Creativity . The technique is pretty easy to understand so I will just jump into demonstrating it with a nonprofit example. We start by defining a creative focus. In this case I want to focus to securing donations. You could also focus on fundraising generally or on another aspect of fundraising. The process is exactly the same. Having decided on the creative focus of “securing donations” I next need to list some of the normal requirements of securing donations. Here is my list: Potential donors Compelling case for donations Printed materials Objectives Note that those requirements are kept pretty broad. That was done on purpose. The list above is meant to be an illustrati...

This post introduces another tool you can use to generate ideas for your nonprofit. I know you have many problems/issues and challenges and opportunities related nonprofit management, marketing, and strategy, so this post offers a little bit of help. So, the tool of the day is called a “stratal” for no specific reason. The first step in using a stratal is to write down a topic to think about. This could be something broad, like fundraising, or something specific like getting in-kind contributions from area businesses. I’ll go with the latter topic for the sake of discussion. I start my session by just writing down the subject. Below the subject I write down exactly five thoughts on the subject. There is no need to be comprehensive or rational about this list. But, the list must contain complete statements and not just single words. Here’s what I come up with: SOLICITING IN-KIND CONTRIBUTIONS FROM AREA BUSINESSES 1. Go around and talk to managers 2. Send letters to owners 3. Use a maili...

The North Branch Land Trust, a small northeast Pennsylvania, has the sort of problem many charities might like to wrestle with. The Trust owns a wildlife sanctuary that sits on a natural gas deposit, a deposit that could be quite valuable. What to do? Allow access to the land for drilling and make money to expand? Do they stick strictly to their environmental stewardship mission in every way and hope things work out in the end? Is there another option? I don’t know what North Branch Land Trust needs to do in this case. I DO know about some tools that could lead to a better decision. There are huge stakes in a decision like this one. An intuitive approach to making the right choice might not give the best results. There are techniques for evaluating decisions. I’d like to mention three of those methods and show how they can apply to decisions like the one North Branch Land Trust faces. First, consider all of the factors involved in a decision to allow natural gas drilling. There are po...