Wired Causes

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Network for Good, where I work, is hiring.  Among the positions is a business development position for those interested in cultivating corporate cause partnerships.  Next week, we’ll be posting an additional position in marketing.

Check out our job listings here.

When Warren Buffett challenged Mitch McConnell to help him pay down the deficit, McConnell paid him no never-mind—but a teenage girl in Northbrook, IL heard and responded, sending $300 to the Feds and asking Buffett to do the same.  This is an adorable story, and the video makes it more adorable still. But let’s not [...]

Heroes with A Heart Grant Recognizes Unsung Nonprofit Heros – Guest Post by John Haydon If you’re like most people, you get most of your inspiration from people who are quietly changing the world each and every day. They’re not on the front page of the newspaper, and they’re not mingling with the Gates and [...]

Today, I finished reading John Kotter’s book, A Sense of Urgency*.  It’s full of good advice on how to spark a burning desire for your agenda.  If you are frustrated, you should buy this book and read it right away.

What I learned was complacency and “false urgency” are the biggest barriers to getting things done.  Complacency is comfort with the status quo, generated by past success or perceived success.  False urgency by contrast comes from failure.  It’s essentially unproductive panic and activity.

True urgency, on the other hand, is a very good thing.  It is the visceral, highly motivated urge to do something important, day in and day out.

So how do you create that?

The single most important thing you can do is to appeal to the heart not just the head of your colleagues.  (This reminds me of the elephant in Switch.)  As Kotter says, “Excellent information, by itself, with the best data and logic, can win over minds and thoughts but rarely increases needed urgency… A logical case that is part of a heart-engaging experience can win over hearts and minds and increase needed urgency.”

He then told the story of a corporation spending months on strategy and consultants and committees to make his point in terms both vivid and scary.

He offers four key tactics.  Here they are with my commentary:

1. Bring the outside in: Don’t just navel gaze!  Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and risks.  Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, videos, sites and sounds.  Put front and center stories of your customers, competitors, donors and beneficiaries.  Send out scouts to experience front-line, real world circumstances.

2. Behave with urgency every day: Don’t be content - or anxious.  Show the real sense of urgency - fire in the belly for a worthy and clear aim.  Free up time in your day to think straight - because clutter and fatigue undermine urgency.

3. Find opportunity in crisis: Handled right and with caution, a crisis can destroy complacency and inspire sound action.  But remember: Crises alone don’t create urgency - in fact, they can create paralysis.  And manufactured crises create resentment.  If you have a crisis, use it as a rallying point.  If you don’t have one, don’t stand around waiting for one!  Create urgency through other means.

4. Deal with the Nonos: Remove or neutralize those who are complacent or creating destructive, false urgency.  The NoNo is ready with ten reasons why the current situation is fine, why your problems don’t exist or why you need more data before you do anything.  A skeptic is fine - even good.  But NoNos aren’t about healthy questioning.  They’re about automatically shooting down change.  Kotter says not to bother co-opting a NoNo - it won’t work.  Nor will ignoring them, because they are good at creating mischief, not to mention organizational civil war.  So what do you do?  He offers three options:

NoNo Option A: Distraction.  Send the NoNo on a special assignment suited to her skills or give them lots of other work.  Or get them riled up about something else.
NoNo Option B: Removal.  Fire the NoNo.
NoNo Option C: Immobilization.  Kotter says “lightweight” NoNos can be exposed in public and social pressures can be used to neutralize their behavior.  But calling out someone only works if they aren’t powerful or hard core.

Of course, if you do all of this, you will be successful - and generate a new round of complacency, Kotter points out.  So you have to keep working the tactics, again and again.  Urgency is needed all along the way.  Sigh.  The work of a change agent is never done, my friends!

*Hat tip to birthday girl Jocelyn Harmon for giving me a copy of this excellent book!

as they seem to have lost their own.  Komen’s decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood at the behest of an anti-choice Board member reminds us how ready the right wing is to sacrifice women’s health for political gain. There’s a petition to sign if you want to want to make your voice heard.  If you’ve been [...]

I get a lot of email from people who are trying to better connect with their supporters, but they encounter resistance to new approaches from within themselves or, more often, from within their own organizations.  If you’re hitting a brick wall, this post is for you.

It’s not easy to turn the focus from your own perspective to that of your audiences, but turn it, you must.

When you hit a brick wall before you even leave your own building, don’t give up.  Don’t stop pressing for taking the perspective of those you must reach.  Don’t abandon the quest to do things differently and better.  Because it’s the only way forward.

No one ever built a great organization by navel-gazing and never changing.  Ever. 

Advocate for meeting the needs of your donors and your beneficiaries and your customers above all else.  It will lead to success, I swear.  As a wise CSO recently put it to me: “Meeting the needs of the customer is always the winning hand.  Always.”  The best companies in the world get that.  And their stock prices show there is positive payback.

If you do right by your donors, the money will come.

If you do right by those you serve, the mission will come.

If you do right by the status quo, nothing will come.  And that has to be more scary than trying to make things happen.

Don’t turn back at the brick wall.  Find a way around it, over it or under it.  There’s usually a secret passageway - in the form of a different messenger, a different message, or different positioning.  And if you can’t find that, there’s always the fallback: Do it right and then seek forgiveness, not permission.  More likely, you’ll get more than forgiveness.  Perhaps even applause - because the results will be something to celebrate. 

Source: thefastertimes.com via Noland on Pinterest   On Tuesday, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a leading breast cancer charity,  pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars in breast cancer screening funds from Planned Parenthood.  Each year millions of women are screened for breast cancer at Planned Parenthood, and Susan G. Komen’s funding pays for about 170,000 of those [...]

Alex Abelin: Google + for Nonprofits View more presentations from Social Media for Nonprofits Does Google + have the potential to be a valuable platform for nonprofits or is it just another shiny object to distract nonprofits?  Should your nonprofit do more than simply set up a presence on Google + and not invest any more [...]