The Creative Activist

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...

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...

Actually, this post is about cheap and creative ways to use social media to get your message out. Some of the advice related to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube might seem like old news but bear with me. I think things will hang together pretty well. Your organization is using social media I hope? A Facebook page, Twitter Feed, and YouTube channel aren't substitutes for real-world engagement with people. As long as you realize that social media is part of an overall marketing strategy and may, in some cases, be a sensible backbone then you are fine. So, assuming you are working hard in the real world and trying to make good use of social media too, here are some ideas you might like to try out. Facebook - Do have a fan page. Like other pages and comment on their posts. Focus on allied organizations, and potential strategic partners. LinkedIn - Create a group related to a cause or issue or challenge if there isn't one. Do join and make connections here. Look for people who...

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...

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...

The blog fell into disuse while I was involved in other writing projects: starting a freelance Web writing business, studying screen writing, and job hunting. In addition, I found time to study grant writing and work on a couple of small grant proposals. Now is the time to get a useful, daily blog running for nonprofit staff and social entrepreneurs who want to make their organizations more effective and efficient. I hope you will want to follow along, or at least review some old posts. The older posts dealt mainly with using various brainstorming and problem solving techniques to make nonprofit programs and projects more effective. More of the same is coming up, but with more attention to marketing, fund raising, and earned income. The new focus reflects what I think are bigger issues, or bigger opportunities, for nonprofits. Building partnerships with businesses, other nonprofit, colleges and universities, and trade/professional associations seems like a good strategy in man...