3 Keys to Successful Fundraising in the 21st Century
October 11, 2011
3 Keys to Successful Fundraising in the 21st Century
As organizations wrestle with how to integrate digital, social and mobile platforms into their development efforts, many are looking for guidance as to how to get started. Successful fundraising in the 21st century required a coordinated, strategic effort. This presentation covers 3 key elements every organization must consider in planning for success.
1. Know your brand. It’s key to cultivating the right audience.
2. Communicate. It’s the cornerstone of healthy, prosperous relationships.
3. Set goals & measure results. Know what the path to success looks like.
Why Ning’s Shut Down of Services is Like a High School Break-Up
April 16, 2010
Me and Ning in good times
Ning is changing their business model starting with firing 40% of staff and pulling the plug on millions of free networks to focus on “Premium” ones. They need to make changes to make money. Fair enough. But to not reach out to their customers about it? Did I really have to find out about it on twitter? Come on!
No notice was sent to network creators. I know because as a Ning customer and Network Creator of BrandTampa.com, I receive a monthly bill from them in my inbox. Where’s the love? It’s out the window along with any sense of trust or loyalty that Ning customers might have felt for the company.
Me and Gina before the break-up
Let me back up a moment and say for the record, Ning has been good to me. Their platform allowed me to pursue a vision and create a network that has over 1500 people who are share similar interests in my local community. Heck, last summer I even went to NY to attend a Network Creators party because I felt such a connection with the brand. But now things have changed.
I should have seen it coming last month when CEO Gina Bianchini left and was replaced by Jason Rosenthal. Now he’s ending Ning’s relationship with about a million networks. It’s like a high school break-up. One morning you wake up and decide you don’t like your boyfriend or girlfriend any more. So you get a friend to pass them a note from you saying, “it’s not you, it’s me” and then proceed to ignore one another in the hallways. Except in this case it’s a leaked email which is now all over the internet which makes it harder to ignore than an old-fashioned note.
If Ning wants to salvage the relationship with their paying customers (outside of the 4 networks Rosenthal mentions in his leaked email) it’s time to call PR and start cleaning up the mess. Or not. Maybe Ning is just moving on. And a million Ning Network Creators will have to do the same.
Is your Business Model Killing your Competitive Advantage?
April 5, 2010
Are you at risk of becoming extinct?
If you were at risk of losing your business, would you be willing to do whatever it took to save it? Would you be able to step away from “the way things have always been done” and stand in a new space to test and innovate, try something different, uncertain of knowing the outcome?
Clay Shirky’s post about “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” has me thinking about the distinction between businesses too beaurocratic to change, and those lithe enough to adapt.
Digital Darwinism.
It’s become common to hear commentary about how print media is dying. Shirky comments on how “Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full.” Shirky goes on to paraphrase the media moguls as basically stating, “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
Lots of business leaders like Diller, Brill and Murdoch are standing in the space of “we don’t know how to do that” with their heads in the sand and/or their feet feeling like cement shoes.
The world we are living in is changing more rapidly than any other time in the history of mankind. How and how fast is the internet altering your industry? Your business?
As entire industries and individual business owners struggle with how to adapt communications, delivery, customer service, marketing, sales etc. to meet the demands and expectations of consumers on the social web, their future success lies in their ability to move beyond “the way we’ve always done things” and begin exploration and testing of “the way we are going to be doing things now and in the future.”
Shirky summarizes his thesis on the collapse of complex business models by stating, “When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
Position yourself to be the one who gets to say what happens in the future.
To survive and thrive you need a digital strategy to adapt your business model and communications to work in today’s world. The internet continues to influence and impact consumer expectations. How fast is your business responding?