By Tom Peterson This morning’s headline: Solar-powered plane completes round-the-world journey Do you have an ambitious goal for your life? Does your cause have one? If you do and you faithfully pursue it, it will change your life, or that of your organization. Most do-good organizations don’t have an audacious goal. Instead, they do […]
Click HERE or on the image for a free pdf E-Chapter, Brand Your Cause. Each year thousands, if not millions, will come into contact with your group. They may catch 60 seconds on the local news, see a magazine article or a friend’s Face- book like. They may glimpse it on […]
Click HERE for Tom Peterson’s New Book! By Tom Peterson From his Los Angeles podcasting garage Marc Maron recently interviewed President Barack Obama. “When I ran in 2008 there were those posters out there: ‘Hope’ and ‘Change,’” Obama said. “Those are capturing aspirations about where we should be going—a society that’s more just, […]
By Tom Peterson Inspired in 2002 by frequent electricity blackouts, Brazilian mechanic Alfredo Moser thought up a simple technology that’s literally a brilliant idea. Just fill a clear plastic soda bottle with water (add bleach to prevent algae clouding), cut a hole in the roof of the house and snugly place the […]
By Tom Peterson “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” we’re told. Don’t waste time re-creating something already created. Someone else has gone through the trouble to invent almost anything we use. We didn’t invent soap, the dog leash or the smart phone or the custom of saying “You’re welcome” when someone thanks us. But […]
Be a hero! Save your nonprofit a big chunk of change. Year after year. Okay, this is going to sound like an ad. But there’s no down side. Only winners, including the cause you’re working on! Here’s the easiest way to save funds your nonprofit won’t have to raise. And it’s […]
By Tom Peterson In 1988, Katherine Freund was set on a new path. That’s when an 84-year-old driver, who should not have been behind the wheel, hit her 3-year old son. The son survived the life-threatening brain injury, is healthy and now in his thirties. But the event led Freund, then working on graduate studies […]
Every so often some nonprofit hits the news because of a breakthrough supporter-driven campaign. With the Kony 2012 campaign-turned-phenomenon the organization Invisible Children asked its supporters to bring attention to war criminal Joseph Kony and thus aid in his capture. In 2014 the ALS ice bucket challenge became a viral social media […]
By Tom Peterson Not too often, but occasionally a nonprofit should re-think its brand. Brands are so much more than logos and words. Here’s my best recollection about one such endeavor: the rebranding of Heifer. The challenge Heifers for Relief started out sending ships full of dairy cows and other farm animals to the countries […]
Nancy Duarte has worked on thousands of presentations, most notably Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. In her book Resonate she draws on the speeches of Joseph Campbell, Martin Luther King, Martha Graham, Abraham Lincoln and Steve Jobs to show what makes a presentation powerful and compelling. Duarte tells us to drive home our big idea with a STAR (Something They’ll […]
