The Creative Activist

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...

Development, mostly in the guise of fundraising, ends up consuming lots of staff time and money. Fundraisers often come up short on donations, grants, and in-kind contributions. Often the shortfall is minor, but sometimes the deficits are serious enough to reduce the organization's effectiveness. Some lateral thinking might be the key to avoiding those chronic funding challenges. What can be done? Plenty of options exist. Hiring fundraising consultants or recruiting more volunteer fundraisers constitute two popular options. This post is simply a call for more flexibility in thinking about what your organization needs and how to get it. When it comes to ending fundraising worries forever, there are three basic approaches: 1. Develop a reliable system for generating more donations. 2. Cut costs. 3. Find new ways to secure resources. Option #3 offers the most room for innovation, so that will be the focus here. (I'll come back to 1 and 2 in future posts, as lateral think...

This post is just an opportunity to propose a new way to create programs, policies, and social marketing campaigns that (we hope) work better and cost less in terms of both time and money. Scientific activism is just a process for formally organizing our thinking about social change efforts. That's about all. It can help to have a system or a framework for organizing the work needed to start a new program, a new nonprofit, or a new advocacy effort. I think this scientific activism framework should be based on specific principles: 1. Data orientation - Use of numbers, rates, proportions, and percentages to inform decisions and guide our evaluations, of what to do and what works once we get things going. 2. Leverage - Related to above, we should look for ways to intervene that will produce the most change for a given level of effort (or spending). 3. Targeted innovation - Related to #2, we should champion social and technological innovations that get at the root of social pro...

Branding is something that seems to stress nonprofit execs year after year after year. Branding? Isn't that more of a product thing? Well, if you want to stand out from the other nonprofits out there and somehow rise above the other "noise" in the world, you have to work on branding your organization. That branding thing could, and actually does, provide enough content for several peoples' blogs. This post merely serves to introduce the concept of branding and point at a cool marketing book. The marketing book is Pop! Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything by Sam Horn. Horn's book contains a bunch of lessons and techniques you could use to market your organization or a specific project or program. "Pop" is an acronym for Purposeful, Original, Pithy. The book is organized around lessons on how to be each of those things. The book wraps up with seven chapters on how to keep peoples' attention once you've got it. Fundr...

A plan for reaching supporters, and staying in touch with them, has to be part of any nonprofit's strategic plan. That fact shouldn't be news to anyone in the nonprofit world. You probably know of plenty of ways that you could reach people. But, do you know how well your efforts are working? that is, do you know how much you are getting out of your efforts? If you do know, or can find out, then you can also figure out which communication tactics to keep, drop, or start using. That's what this post is about... How much are your current marketing efforts costing in time and money? Take a minute to write down everything you do to communicate with people. Make one line for each thing. Now record how much time and money has been invested in each. You can just use a monthly estimate, or estimate the investment for a one-time event. Next, try to estimate the benefits. How much money was raised? How many names did you add to your mailing list? How much equipment, food, et ...

Using the holidays to promote your cause and communicate. Could be used for fundraising too! Christmas and New Years Eve are obvious targets, with Thanksgfiving being popular too. Other holidays in the USA and of course in other countries where you may operate make good reasons to reconnect with people on your email list, or promote in other ways. Is there an event where tabling would be appropriate? Could you just put some 8X11 posters in the area? Is there any possible tie in with an upcoming holiday and your cause or mission. Why aren't you using that? We are all, in the USA at least, familiar with ads for food donations, ads that talk about how many people are at risk of going hungry this Thanksgiving or Christmas. Look for a holiday that offers an excuse to do one of the following: 1. Remind people what you've accomplished. 2. Tell people what you want to do in the near term. 3. Report on what you are doing now. 4. Talk about a related issue. 5. Ask people to do ...

Getting attention for your organization of for a cause. You can use the usual methods - Facebook, events, Web site updates, blogging, radio and magazine ads, et cetera. But, what do you say exactly? How can you afford magazine and radio advertising? This time I want to just share a simple way to come up with new marketing ideas, and illustrate how it works. I've written before about using a technique called random input to generate new marketing ideas. To review, random imput requires you to state a creative thinking challenge, select an object or activity at random, then compare the two things. Hopefully, reflecting on the random object will give you a new and (potentially) useful idea. This is a post about nonprofit marketing so it should be easy to guess what's coming next. Say you have a small charity that exists primarily to help other anti-poverty organizations raise money and get attention for their specific causes. The challenge you set yourself is this: "H...