Remember when summer used to mean time for play? Have you lost that playful feeling? Before fall rolls around, let’s see if we can get a bit of it back. Hugh McLeod of Gaping Void recently reminded me that there is no purpose without play. As anyone familiar with nursery rhymes knows, all work and…
DetailsJust because you’ve always done it one way doesn’t mean you should continue to do so. This week Seth Godin exhorts us to adopt a new paradigm in Strategy Matters More Than Ever. It’s not what you do (the potentially bren thing) but how you do it (the potentially bren process/attitude) that separates winners from…
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Does this box need anything else to fill it? Or is it good to go? A recent post by the inimitable Seth Godin poses the question What’s in the box? The point of the post is to make us question our quest for perfection and all the needless worrying we put into imagining every thing…
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Go down the road of ‘good enough’ Do you suffer from ‘term paper syndrome’? Do you mean to revise your website copy or write a funding proposal, but don’t because you feel you don’t have enough well-researched, referenced content? Do you mean to post to your blog regularly, but don’t because the several half-finished articles…
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Philanthropy should not just be about big checks. We live in times of scarcity. How are you mobilizing your community in fresh and different ways? How are you building long-term capacity to sustain your organization? How are you creating stronger, deeper relationships with constituents? 1. Identify where your communities hang out.How? Lo for what groups…
DetailsI just returned from a two-week vacation in which I unplugged. Guess what? This crazy planet filled with crazy people kept somersaulting all around the sky. It didn’t stop. There’s no way to stop it. And guess what else? I relaxed. I even got a little bit bored. And that was a good thing.…
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In Becoming a Futurist Leader, Jill Schumann speaks directly to the reasons I SWOT analyses. They’re all about loing at the present to divine the future. And leaders need their crystal balls to identify trends, anticipate change, and be open to possibilities that will enable them to work effectively and have greater impact. …
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Shall we join forces? Fundraising is not basketball, but it’s madness not to play as a team. I’ve spen with three nonprofits in the past several months that, rather than joining forces, have decoupled their marketing and development departments. I surmise they do this because marketing doesn’t understand development. Or development doesn’t understand marketing. Or…
DetailsWe’re six weeks into 2012, and our new year’s resolutions may be beginning to fade. For those on a June-July fiscal year, it’s planning time. What should we be thinking about when it comes to allocation of our energies and resources this year? First, let’s clear out some space. I’ve participated in many a planning…
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The current zeitgeist is one of information overload, as highlighted in a recent article, Content Rivers and Information Gluttony. The availability of information is not the problem, however. We’ve been in overload at least since 1970, as described by futurist Alvin Toffler . Our inability to limit our choices is what gets us into trouble. …
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