By Tom Peterson What I really need… or want! One day driving on a busy street in my neighborhood I noticed little girl and boy in their yard holding up signs, flagging down cars. A few adults sat in lawn chairs watching and laughing. I was about to keep going when I realized what was […]
The Yin and Yang of Growing Your Cause: Incremental Improvement and Breakthrough The best way to grow your nonprofit or cause is to do two seemingly opposite things at once. First, incrementally improve the things— the programs, revenue streams, branding, public relations—that are already working well. Or at least seem to have […]
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 […]
The German relief agency MISEROR‘s new campaign asks people to swipe their credit card for a 2 Euro donation. They then get an instant sense of how their gift can help. Make donating an interesting experience.
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 “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”— Charles Darwin Save the Crabs. Then Eat ‘Em! A recent news item gave me reason to cheer: a study found that the Chesapeake Bay dead zones are coming […]
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 […]
What could be more boring, less likely to move us to action than a fact? There’s no such thing as an inspiring statistic. Right? Well, not always. In her book Resonate, the best book out there on presentations, Nancy Duarte tells us to create S.T.A.R. moments. That is Something They’ll Always Remember. One STAR […]
By Tom Peterson A friend of mine recently needed some blinds for his window, so we stopped into the local Habitat for Humanity “ReStore.” There he found a brand new set of wooden blinds for only $15. A real win! But winning didn’t stop there. The giant warehouse-sized store in North Carolina with […]
