Two Baton Rouge Residents Help Create Disaster Nonprofit. Be relevant | ifundraiser. Relevance is now so key. Especially in our ‘busy’ lives with so much information coming at us. I’m learning to do this well needs a small but significant mind shift when I want to communicate to anyone I want to engage. It’s no longer a case of “Look at us“, me me me, but “This is something I think you will find interesting and here’s why ...” Its not about you – it’s about them I find by trying to be relevant it makes me think of the person or audience I am communicating to. And by thinking of them you start to find the words to connect. It’s like saying “I saw this and thought of you“. And if its relevant to them they are much more likely to read what you send or listen to what you have to say. So when you want to engage anyone or an audience ask yourself questions like: Who are they! Do the thinking for them And when to comes to action make it easy.
It’s probably just a few choice words added to a sentence – but it will make all the difference. Try it out. Like this: Like Loading... Call for projects and ideas to be showcased at the World Water Week in Stockholm | CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food. Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) is calling for ideas or projects to be showcased at Ideas’ Market that will be organised at the World Water Week. The Ideas Marketplace is an open platform dedicated to ideas and projects seeking funding and/or partnerships. The Ideas’ Marketplace will provide you with an opportunity to discuss your ideas and projects and future ventures with the wide range of delegates attending the World Water Week in Stockholm.
For each of the projects selected, the World Water Week will offer: Two day-passes to attend the Ideas’ MarketOne table in where to display project informationPossibility of displaying a pull-up banner (80cm width) If your project/idea is selected to be part of the Ideas’ Marketplace, you will be expected to attend the World Water Week in Stockholm on September 4, 2013 and be present at the Ideas’ Marketplace during the exhibition hours – 09:00 to 19:00. GuideStar nonprofit reports and Forms 990 for donors, grantmakers and businesses. Lusonje Primary School Rainwater Catchment Project – Tanzania | Appropriate Projects. Location Mfuto, Masasi district, Mtwara region, Tanzania Community Description Mfuto consists of two sub-villages: Lusonje and Chinolo. There are 1,654 people living in Mfuto, 889 women and 765 men. Almost all members are farmers, with their economic livelihoods relying on their cashew harvests.
Other main crops farmed are corn, cassava, and cow peas. Community members rely on their harvests to feed their families. There are a couple of small shops in both sub-villages, but they sell minimal food items. Water availability is extremely low. Often, village members dig approximately 8-10 feet deep and allow for minimal water to seep up from groundwater or captures water runoff during rain seasons. Shule ya Msingi, Lusonje or Lusonje Primary School serves children of grade levels 1 through 7. Project Description This project is to build a rainwater catchment system for the school. Water will be stored in a sealed underground water catchment tank. Dollar Amount of Project $500.00. Blog.firstgiving. Part 4: Use video to your online fundraising advantage The 4th post in our weeklong “Sharing your fundraising page” series discusses how using a simple, webcam video can communicate your cause to your network in a fun and different way.
Experiment with your computer’s webcam Most computers these days come with their own built-in webcams. This is a powerful tool that you may already have experience with. Shoot a quick video of yourself explaining the story behind your fundraising campaign. Why are you fundraising? How do you plan to do it? Upload your video online Once you are happy with your video message, it’s time to post it online. Here are a couple great examples of fundraising pages with videos: Ben Kaminow's Page The Rachel Carrick Tornado Relief Fund Speak from the heart Webcam video is nothing too fancy.
Strategically share the video. How to get hired as a head of fundraising. It can be very difficult to find the right mix of skills and personal qualities in a head of fundraising. Photograph: Dave Caulkin/AP The need for precision leadership has become increasingly stark in a world of diminishing funds. As technology races onwards, trampling job seekers underfoot, fundraising roles are shifting. Even senior managerial roles are not immune to the vagaries of a harsh and competitive job market. Andrew Hyland, recruitment and resourcing manager at Macmillan Cancer Support, says fundraising has changed greatly in recent years, and with it necessary management skills have changed too.
“There are so many different channels,” he says. Macmillan has just experienced this intense competition in its search for a new head of fundraising. “Macmillan was looking for someone who would bring fresh ideas, solid thought leadership and enthusiasm to the role,” says Hyland, “and Lynda [Thomas] continually stood out as the outstanding candidate.” Like this: Like Loading... Charity: Water Shows You Where Your Money is Going. One of the difficult things for non-profit organizations to do is showing donators where their money is going exactly.
It’s a difficult proposition, especially when most organizations spend so much time on the actual programs as well as campaigns to raise money. Basically, there’s little to be said for the “middle”, which is explaining what’s going on with the funds. Charity: water has been a groundbreaking organization for some time now, and has taken some further steps to show us in great detail what our funds are doing in places outside of the United States. Today, the organization has launched a website for its “Yellow Thunder” drilling rigs in Ethiopia which shows you, in real time, the activity going on as it seeks out water for residents. Last September, charity: water raised an impressive $1.2M for these rigs, and are already at work. The Yellow Thunder site is also tracking the rigs via GPS, tweeting updates about its whereabouts: Don’t Indulge. Be Happy. Many of us aren’t satisfied with how much we have now. That’s why we’re constantly angling for a raise at work, befriending aged relatives and springing, despite long odds, for lottery scratch tickets.
Is it crazy to question how much money you need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time — even before yoga came into vogue. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty. The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy?
Don’t Just Thank Them. I’ve said some irreverent things about thanking donors in the past few weeks. So I had mixed feelings about this recent post by Katya Andresen. I agree with her main point 1000%: “The single most powerful thing you can do as a fundraiser is to take great care of the donors you have.” Amen … Amen … Amen! However Katya then focused almost exclusively on the ‘thank you’ process, providing an excellent checklist on what makes for effective thank you’s. But to me, ‘caring’ for donors involves a whole lot more than thanking them after the fact. Katya does touch upon some of the other ingredients of “caring” for donors when she talks about ongoing communications. I’d add one more, respecting what your donors have already told you — from correct spellings and addresses to contact preferences and programmatic interests.
True donor appreciation begins well before the thank you. Tom. No Silver Bullet for CSI Success, But a Plan Helps. In my keynote address to the 2012 Serious Social Investing workshop, I noted that no singular national corporate social investment (CSI) plan or body can replace the need for well-defined strategies and the nuance of multi-faceted development. Social investment long ago moved away from the ‘heart of giving’ to the science of strategic social investment.
How we go about this on a daily basis may seem challenging at times, especially in a country with such vast needs and opportunities. Our unemployment level is among the highest in the world, our education system is in crisis, the inequality gap is increasing and our health care system requires strengthening. This means that our most vulnerable people – those with disabilities, the aged, the orphaned, and the destitute – risk having organisations assisting them neglected by funders in favour of education and job creation. Given these challenges, how are we to most effectively work in social investment to greatest societal benefit? The Giving Pledge. 7 Tips For Getting More Donors. Guest post by Rob Wu Would you like to know how to attract more donors? Do you want to learn professional fundraisers’ secrets? Of course you do! Fundraising is your nonprofit’s lifeblood; funds fuel the impact you make. But thinking of effective ways to raise funds occupies valuable time and energy you could be spending on your programs.
Most of us aren’t professionally trained fundraisers, so it doesn’t come naturally to us. Image: oneiroi via Flickr, CC 2.0 But we’ve got great news! We at CauseVox have launched a free 7-part video series to coach you on fundraising fundamentals. Consider these seven tips for getting more donors for your nonprofit a preview of the series: 1. Your prospective donors are asking why they should support your nonprofit. People don’t give to charity anymore; they invest in results. 2. The most effective fundraising appeals are real, personal, and urgent. 3.
The amount doesn’t matter; full team participation matters more. 4. 5. 6. 7. Grameen Foundation, KfW and CARE's Access Africa Fund Invest in World's First 100% Mobile Microfinance Institution. Getting up to speed on social entrepreneurship. Elaine Smith Not just the Olympics, but all of the fun we’ve had with sports over the vacation makes me think that if we are not prepared for challenges, hurdles and extremes, it is hard to cope with growth, development and progress.
You cannot just wish to occupy a strategy position for future success. You need to work your way to it. Looking at my schedule in the next quarter, I see one subject coming up again and again: social business and social entrepreneurship. In October alone, two very important events will take place. Firstly, SOCAP12 will be held in San Francisco (USA) from 1 to 4 October. It’s followed by the Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF2012) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) from 16 to 18 October. The discussion about social finance and social business in Brazil is relatively new. An impact investor is defined as one wanting mix of financial return along with positive social and environmental impact. This movement will bring interesting things and impact lives. Why Helping Women Climb the Ladder Isn’t a Gender Issue—It’s Good Business | Business on GOOD. Lean in. Speak up. Don’t opt out. Everyone’s talking about what women should be doing to get ahead at work. Why the sudden interest? There’s no disputing that in business, nothing trumps the bottom line.
I work in advertising, one of the chief offenders when it comes to gender inequality. As a creative director and writer who has brought glory on my employers and rung up sales for my clients, being marginalized really pisses me off. If I were a client right now and saw that all of my agency’s creative directors were men, I’d be taking my business elsewhere to an agency that demands more women in its higher ranks and can give me a better creative product. So it’s no wonder that Lean In and related conversations are getting so much play. The event—the only conference for women creative directors—sold out the very first time it was held in 2012. Who’ll be listening? Research Grant Programs & Fundraising | Foundation Center.
Charitable Celebrities, Celebrity Giving Directory | Foundation Center. Tips for Creating a 'Give Back’ Day—and Sharing in the Donations - Events Fundraising. Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) - Working Paper 299. Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock argue that many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. In addition, the flow of development resources and legitimacy without demonstrated improvements in performance undermines the impetus for effective action to build state capability or improve performance.
This dynamic facilitates “capability traps” in which state capability stagnates, or even deteriorates, over long periods of time even though governments remain engaged in developmental rhetoric and continue to receive development resources. How can countries escape capability traps? The authors propose an approach, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), based on four core principles, designed to contrast with standard approaches. No Time to Volunteer? Stop Kidding Yourself – Giving Time Gives You Time | Volunteering Is CSR. One of the biggest barriers to getting employees engaged in your CSR efforts is that they simply “don’t have the time” to participate. Hogwash. According to new research published in Psychological Science and conducted by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Business School and the Yale School of Management, when people volunteer, it actually makes them feel like they have more time in their days.
Feeling Like We Have 24+ Hours What is it about volunteering our time that makes us feel we have more hours in the day? According the research article, titled “Giving Time Gives You Time,” helping others increases our feelings of time affluence. So even though we can’t expand the 24 hours we have each day, using our time to help others makes us feel highly effective and capable, translating to a more “full” and accomplished feeling in our day. And the more we feel accomplished and that we’ve done a lot with our time, the more time we feel we have. Philanthropy: Spreading gospels of wealth. Alliance Magazine offering FREE electronic subscriptions.
Alliance magazine, the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment worldwide, is now offering FREE electronic subscriptions to those in countries not designated as high-income countries by the World Bank. Alliance aims to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas among people working for social change in order to maximize the impact of funding for social development. Their new interactive map, developed with the support of the Foundation Center, highlights which countries are eligible– visit www.alliancemagazine.org/freesubs for full details.
What’s included: Four issues of Alliance magazine to read online or in pdf formatThe Alliance Bulletin, providing regular updates on developments in the sectorUnlimited access to the Alliance website, including the entire Alliance archiveAdditional articles and interviews published exclusively for the websiteEmail updates whenever new content is published Visit www.alliancemagazine.org to find out more. Like this: Like Loading... Preventing and Responding to Gender-based Violence Globally. 57 Ways to Spread Kindness and Brighten a Day « Charity Ideas Blog. 52 reasons why you should date an aid worker. Be a nonprofit bee – craft sweet n’ sticky content honey. If You’re Going To Instagram Your Food, At Least Help End Hunger In The Process | Food Security. Harnessing the Power of Youth for Your Nonprofit. How Small Nonprofits Can Use Big Data - 2013-04-24 - Live Chat. 10 Dumbest Words Used By Fundraising Consultants.
How Camfed is Helping Create Change in Girls – Through Film. Joseph Jimenez: Improving Healthcare in Africa. Business: Good business? Want to Feel Healthier and Happier? Cut Back on Lying - Lifestyle. The James Irvine Foundation: News & Insights. 2013 East Africa Philanthropy Awards. Three steps to curb youth unemployment.