The Creative Activist

Selling sustainable behavior during the holidays may not be a good idea, but there might be lessons to be learned by using the holidays. Valentine's Day is today, so it will make a good illustration of what I am getting at. Assume you want to convince people to stop eating meat, as a sustainability thing, not just as a question of promoting animal rights. How could the holidays be used to help achieve that goal? A holiday-themed ad campaign might work. Indeed, such campaigns are run in November in the run up to Thanksgiving Day. I would not recommend using Valentine's Day to convince people to go vegan. What possible connection is there between the two? Well, why not force a connection or two. You might get a new idea for promoting veganism. Here is how it works: 1. Ask yourself how celebrating Valentine's Day is like selling a lifestyle change (or just use veganism instead). 2. Spend a few minutes writing down everything you associate with Valentine's Day. Rec...

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 is just a quick sort of public-service announcement dedicated to some books activists, working in nonprofits or not, might want to read. These titles are not always easy to follow, but contain powerful lessons for activists. Do you want to know how to raise more money, set up a new program, or start a social marketing campaign? Well, first of all you need two things: (1) A clear goal, (2) some relevant technical knowledge or training, such as training in the basics of social marketing. Assuming those two things are in place, reading one of these books, and applying the lessons therein, will give better results. DeBono's Thinking Course (Edward DeBono) - A summary of many tools and techniques for thinking about problems, evaluating information, and generating new ideas. The Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox (Richard Fobes) - A detailed methodology for defining (yes, you need to do that) and solving problems, with notes on how to evaluate ideas for potential effectiv...

The Super Bowl is on peoples' minds today, for some reason that escapes me. End of social commentary. There was a power outage that lasted 34 or 35 minutes. A few minutes into the blackout up when an Oreo ad reminding us that we eat Oreos in the dark. The details are at this Getting Attention blog post. http://gettingattention.org/2013/02/agile-nonprofit-marketing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gettingattention+%28Nonprofit+Marketing%3A+Getting+Attention+Blog%29 My post is about some observations sparked by the post. The point is that the Oreo add exploited a situation in minutes because they were ready for these sorts of opportunities. The same philosophy could be applied to nonprofits. Take any event, big or small, that is relevant to your cause. What can you tweet or post or email out that takes advantage of this event? Any happening associated with the event, or the buildup to it, or the immediate aftermath is fair game for some comme...

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...

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts. Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity. I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy. To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time: CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM CULTURE ECOLOGY ? ECONOMIC ? DEMOGRAPHIC LEGAL POLITICAL ? TECHNOLOGICAL ? Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements. From the polit...