Thriving on Failure
Engineers Without Borders’ new website, Admitting Failure, gives new life to “good failures.” It aims to help organizations learn from others’ mistakes.
Cause Marketing
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Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Deserves Top-Level Focus and Resources
Peer-to-peer communication leverages the personal networks of members to disseminate messages.
Invite Your Listener to Share the Story
Sharing a story will likely to trigger a story in the mind of your listener. Be intentional about the stories you choose to share.
How Does Celebrity Impact Fundraising?
Celebrities are out; trust is in. So just how do organizations earn the trust of Millennials?
The Benefits of Building a Narrative Organization
The value of narrative in your organization extends well beyond telling stories in your annual report and newsletters.
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Catalytic Philanthropy
Despite spending vast amounts of money and helping to create the world’s largest nonprofit sector, philanthropists have fallen far short of solving America’s most pressing problems. What the nation needs is “catalytic philanthropy”—a new approach that is already being practiced by some of the most innovative donors.
The Dragonfly Effect
Two veterans of consumer psychology, marketing, and entrepreneurship provide a guide to using social media for social change.
The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing
From pink ribbons to Product Red, cause marketing adroitly serves two masters, earning profits for corporations while raising funds for charities. Yet the short-term benefits of cause marketing—also known as consumption philanthropy—belie its long-term costs. These hidden costs include individualizing solutions to collective problems; replacing virtuous action with mindless buying; and hiding how markets create many social problems in the first place. Consumption philanthropy is therefore unsuited to create real social change.
Cultivating the Green Consumer
Consumers say they want to buy ecologically friendly products and reduce their impact on the environment. But when they get to the cash register, their Earth-minded sentiments die on the vine. Although individual quirks underlie some of this hypocrisy, businesses can do a lot more to help would-be green consumers turn their talk into walk.
Antipoverty Apps
mPowering has created an app that awards goods and services to individuals facing extreme poverty when they make beneficial choices.