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 […]
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 […]
Through the explosion of crowdfunding nonprofits and others have found a new way to ask for help. An alternative to traditional financing, it allows you to raise money for a new venture or project from many people in a short time. Some crowdfunding takes place at an event but most is through […]
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 In the acknowledgements section of her best-selling book Quiet, Susan Cain thanks more than 200 people by name. Along the way, she had asked those people to help her: share contacts, read some pages, be a sounding board, do an interview. That’s a lot of reaching out for a […]
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 […]
By Tom Peterson How do you bring your cause to light when it’s invisible? When no one seems to care? These question is asked hundreds of time each day. How is it that these refugees are suffering, that these children are hungry, that this forest is disappearing, that people are dying from […]
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 […]
In Made to Stick brothers Chip and Dan Heath tell the story of Art Silverman with the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a group that educates the public about nutrition issues. CSPI had discovered through lab testing that because of coconut oil the average bag of popcorn at a […]
