What’s Happening In Miami’s Nonprofit Scene? A Lot!

By: Christian Williams, Social Enterprise and Visibility Specialist

Your favorite cause lover is here to let you know about who’s been making waves in South Florida’s nonprofit scene recently!

The University of Miami’s School of Communication earned some brownie points with me when they announced their PhilAdthropy marathon. Advertising and public relations students are preparing to pull a 25-hour all-night marathon to help charities with advertising campaigns. The endeavor provides the students with invaluable experience, and helps nonprofits grow by providing them with promotional materials that they possibly could not afford otherwise. The event is this weekend, February 8-9^th and I’m excited to see the work that the students produce.

I’m also excited to see the organization, Girls Who Code, expand into Miami! The national nonprofit works to close the gender gap in technology and engineering. The year-old organization pairs younger girls with top female engineers and entrepreneurs from the technology industry for 300 hours of mentorship and intensive instruction in robotics, web design and mobile development.

So how about a huge round of applause for UM’s School of Communication and Girls Who Code - thanks for your support and hard work for causes in our local community!

Image Source: Marlena Skrobe/Sun Sentinel

Image Source: The Next Web

Giving Thanks for the Chance to Give Unused Rewards to Causes

This blog post was originally posted on KULA Causes' blog The Currency of Giving on 11/29/12. 

Thanksgiving may be over for another year but the feeling of gratitude, the desire to help others and to give back lives on at KULA and with our partner companies and their customers.

This is evident not in the Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday or Cyber Monday shop-a-thons, but in the millions of unused reward points and miles that are being converted by travelers into donations that benefit nonprofits all over the world.

When media has become so fixated on how much North Americans have shelled out during the four-day Thanksgiving period at brick-and-mortar outlets or online, it feels great to be contrarian and focus on how these consumers are using their points or miles to help others. It also feels great to know that we have a developed a very powerful giving engine that creates meaningful brand loyalty by connecting those consumers with the companies and causes they truly care about – all year round.

So while North Americans gave thanks then dashed out to shop last week, we continue to be grateful every day for the travelers who donate their miles and for our partners, like JetBlue and Milepoint that support the more than 2.5 millions causes available through the our CLM™ platform.

And instead of pictures of stampeding shoppers, we’ll close out with images that inspire us to be grateful.

The Nonprofit Post-Election Connection - An Open Letter to President Obama

By: Christian Williams, Social Enterprise Coordinator

Dear President Obama,

In your victory speech on Wednesday morning, you made a poignant statement about American unity. “… While each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family, and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.” 

Nonprofits are unique in their ability as an organization to unite a politically divided public. Nonprofits influence an American culture of giving, geared to helping our nation’s citizens and companies work toward the greater good - regardless of political affiliation. We’ve already seen evidence of this in our recovery efforts for Hurricane Sandy victims.

Now that you’ve been re-elected, what will you do for nonprofit organizations?  Can you:

Influence companies to grow their corporate giving? Companies traditionally represent a huge chunk of the donations made to charities. How can you encourage companies to grow their giving programs? Can you offer tax breaks or other incentives to promote the use of employee philanthropy and volunteer programs?

Stand by nonprofit employers? Continue your support of nonprofit organizations that hire new employees by supporting them through measures like your monumental health care reform, allowing payroll tax credits to offset the cost of providing healthcare to their employees?

Continue being an example?  President Obama, you are known for being one of the most giving presidents in American history. You and Michelle contributed $172, 130 to charity in 2011, a whopping 22 percent of your adjusted income. You have even linked up with the likes of Republican talk show host Bill O’Reilly to raise money for a nonprofit organization, showing a willingness to reach across the aisle to work toward doing good.

Please continue being an example to the rest of us and encourage your fellow Americans to be as giving as you have been.

Do these things and we’ll be looking forward to another four years under your leadership.

Sincerely,

Christian Williams

The ThinkTank, Helping Nonprofits Grow

The State of Democratized Giving: How Cause Marketing Can Be Up For a Vote

This post originally appeared on the KULA Causes blog on 09/13/12.

“Do well while doing good.”

This inspiring quote is commonly attributed to American founding father and Renaissance man Benjamin Franklin, a wealthy entrepreneur whose penchant for frugality, industry and civic responsibility would leave him out of place in many of today’s corporate glass-and-steel fortresses.

Many, but not all. 

Why? Over the last few years, thanks in part to burgeoning technology, Ben Franklin-style democracy is no longer relegated just to political parties and four-year election cycles. To a very real extent, the term “democracy” can now be applied to cause marketing itself.

Especially when it comes to the “civic responsibility” mentioned above, today’s corporations, along with the consumers who patronize their businesses, appreciate the need to give back—and they’re giving back in very new and innovative ways.

The democratization of cause-related marketing means that, rather than the heads of corporations controlling the type of causes that their customers donate to, those customers now have a real, unmatched, and democratic say in the types of causes that they can to donate to within a company’s corporate philanthropy program.

Consumers Have Choice

Today, consumers select the causes. And they advocate not only for causes, but for brands, too. Like the thousands who tweeted their approval or disapproval of recent RNC and DNC political speeches, cause-related marketing has become a real-time, interactive experience. And that experience benefits both consumers (through heightened engagement and the feeling of doing good by giving back to their favorite cause) and corporations (via insight into customer behavior and values)—not to mention the nonprofits they both support.

Just in the last few years, campaigns like Kohl’s Cares and the Pepsi Refresh Project—an initiative to award $20 million in grants to whomever came up with inspiring solutions to help advance ones’ community, state and nation, and the ability to channel those funds directly to the organizations that could implement those ideas—are just the beginning of this new, two-way giving conversation. The National Philanthropic Trust reported that in 2011, there was a 20% increase in contributions to consumer-advised fund programs, illustrating that this type of “democratized giving” is really catching on.

Doing Well by Doing Good

Consider Bruce Burtch, the architect of one of the first known “cause marketing” campaigns—a 1976 partnership between the Marriott hotel chain and the March of Dimes nonprofit—that yielded over 2 million visitors for Marriott’s then-new Great America hotel and $2.5 million for March of Dimes’ mission of improved health for mothers and babies. As a historical footnote, Burtch has also been credited with coining the “do well while doing good” phrase. 

No matter who strung those five words together, the concept of reaping rewards by contributing in ways that have a positive social impact—be it through nonprofit partnerships, investment in microfinance institutions, or maintaining a portfolio of stock in companies that practice good corporate governance—is alive and well and stronger than ever—whether we’re talking about corporate giving, or today’s newer, technology-dependent and more democratized approach.

The ROI of Corporate Philanthropy

But when you consider that close to $16 billion in loyalty points and rewards go unredeemed—and basically wasted—every year, you wonder why more companies aren’t offering their consumers the choice to do some good in the world by channeling those unused rewards to charity. After all, by doing good, companies can generate greater brand awareness and increase ROI from their corporate philanthropy.

Speaking of democratized giving, we’re also creating a new way for companies to do well while doing goodthrough our Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing platform (CLM) that helps brands engage with consumers through their cause-related affinities.

CLM links a brand’s customers to over 2.5 million causes in more than 50 countries around the world, allowing them to redeem their rewards, points and miles and convert them into donations to their favorite causes. Our SaaS loyalty technology powers this online giving platform, which enables companies to engage with customers in a more meaningful way. By enabling “democratized giving,” we’re able to help companies calculate the ROI of their corporate philanthropy—showing them that doing good can be profitable—all while turning customers into brand advocates.

The State of the (Giving) Union

The bottom line is that democratized giving is putting the power of choice in the hands of consumers. Consumer-advised donations democratize philanthropy, aid the corporate-nonprofit relationship and make giving a whole lot more rewarding. They also simplify what can be an onerous donation process, both for consumers, who can help multiple non-profits through a single process, and for non-profits, which don’t have to worry about converting non-cash donations (such as unredeemed rewards and miles) into contributions.

Taken in whole (and in keeping with the democratic political spirit of this piece) the state of democratized giving in our Union is strong—and getting stronger. And best of all, unlike the upcoming presidential election, no one has to wait until November to show their support! 

This post originally appeared on the KULA Causes blog on 09/13/12.

For Nonprofits, the Future is Multicultural – and Digital

By: Laura Morales, Hispanic Media Relations and Business Writer

During the latter part of my years as a Miami Herald reporter, I had to drive by the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts every weekday.

Arsht, 70, a philanthropist and business leader, helped save the venue by donating $30 million in 2008. Its opera house is named after another pair of philanthropists, Sanford and Dolores Ziff, whose names are on buildings all over South Florida. Even in Miami, where Latinos outnumber every other ethnic group, most philanthropists’ names you see on buildings are of Anglo or Jewish descent. I’m sure there must be some buildings here named after Hispanic donors, but I can’t think of any.

I’d never given this much thought until I read this Media Post article about the eroding traditional donor base for nonprofits: aging white Baby Boomers. According to its author, ad exec Jose Villa, nonprofits and foundations, whose incomes have already been battered by the recession, are dreading what Villa calls “the coming demographic donor cliff.”

That’s understandable – at least from the 35,000 ft. view. Despite America’s exploding Hispanic population, accounting for half of all population growth between 2000 and 2011 and a Nielsen prediction that between 2011 and 2016, 60% of population growth will be Latino, donation dollars continue to come from a highly stratified subset.

But that too, is poised to change.

Villa, pointing out that non-Millennial Hispanics’ giving is generally limited to church, remittances to Latin America and support for extended families, recommends that nonprofits focus on reaching – and hiring – Hispanic Millennials. He also prescribes an increased mobile digital presence, as 42% of Latinos do most of their online browsing and networking on mobile phones – and that’s a donor resource that must be tapped.

Great idea. We all know mobile is the future. But why stop with Latinos? As I pointed out in a previous post, half of African-Americans do most of their browsing on mobile phones. Nielsen also reports that Asian-Americans outpace all other groups in smartphone adoption. And, moving into the future, these groups’ digital engagement – particularly through smartphones and tablets – is only going to balloon.

As the country charges on toward ethnic plurality nonprofits would also do well to remember that, even individually, these groups wield considerable purchasing power. In the same post I referenced earlier, I noted that combined Hispanic and African-American buying power stands at $2 trillion. That’s more than enough money to balance the US budget for a year. Add to that Asian-Americans’ economic clout – just over $500 billion now and expected to grow to over $700 billion by 2015 – and we’re looking at a strong potential new funding base that can help non-profits achieve their missions. Demographic donor cliff? I don’t think so.

Who knows? Maybe in a decade we’ll start seeing American buildings adorned with names such as Ramírez or Sengupta or Takahashi. I, for one, would find that refreshing. Multicultural funding is the answer and it’s literally a mobile phone call or text away.

Kony 2012: Social Media ‘Slacktivism’ at its finest

By Christian Williams, Social Media and Visibility Specialist 

slacktivism  /’slaktiviz(ǝ)m / noun, informal: actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement, e.g. signing an online petition or joining a campaign group on a social networking website

Alright, I’ll admit it. I’ve been a slacktivist. I think many of us are guilty of that.

In early March 2012, after watching a 30-minute Kony 2012 documentary produced by non-profit organization Invisible Children Inc., I posted the video on my Facebook page with the following statement: “Two words: I’m in.”

The following day, I hopped into the campaign to stop Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. I made plans to attend a screening of the documentary on my college campus. I joined Facebook groups dedicated to the cause. I debated and argued with skeptics who thought the campaign was a sham. I even offered to organize a Cover the Night event in the Coral Gables area with huge Kony 2012 posters.

April 20^th came, and I was not in Coral Gables. I was in my residence hall at FIU, finishing a paper. From what I could see on Facebook, barely any of my friends that had previously ‘dedicated themselves to the cause’ were putting posters up at neighborhoods around Miami-Dade County. They were at work, at home, dancing it up in nightclubs.

In other words, they weren’t engaged in the Kony 2012 cause.

The viral video garnered over 86 million views of the video on YouTube, and the Twitter hashtag #StopKony was a trending topic for weeks. The video especially hit a chord with college students like me. Yet Kony 2012 soon became known as the internet sensation that took the social media landscape by storm, but then failed to deliver the action it was supposed to create.

So what happened?

Life happened.

A quick poll of my friends on Twitter gave me some insight as to why they –personally - dropped the campaign.

“It was fake. A set-up, I believe.” (@__Mo)

“[The] publicity for it died? There was no constant flow of information on what they were doing.” (@MsJanisV)

“[Jason Russell’s] public display of affection if you know what I mean.” (@katinreallife)

A couple of different reasons played a factor in ultimate demise of the campaign, and the lessons learned can be valuable to any non-profit.

We couldn’t see the issue. According to Invisible Children’s Wikipedia page, “the group seeks to put an end to the practices of the [Lord’s Resistance Army], which include abductions and abuse of children, and forcing them to serve as soldiers.” But because the conflict is happening in Uganda, many people outside of Africa – especially in Europe and the Americas - don’t see the conflict going on. People are willing to work for causes that they know affect the community around them. They can donate to the organization (the Kony campaign generated millions of dollars in donations), but there is little they can really do to contribute to the cause in other tangible ways.

The planned ‘action’ was too far away from the call. The Kony 2012 video debuted in early March, and the date set for the Cover the Night events worldwide was April 20^th. That is a full month-and-a-half gap in between the call to action and the actual event; it is very easy to lose interest in a cause when the planned date for action is so far away. The events would have been dramatically more successful if they would have taken place before the hype died down.

The video’s creator went off the deep end. In the media industry, anything you do is open for the public’s viewing pleasure… or displeasure. So when the Kony 2012 documentary’s director, Jason Russell, had a very PUBLIC meltdown on a San Diego street just two weeks after the video was released, it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. While the reasons behind the meltdown were unknown at the time, the meltdown was publicized and everyone that had seen the Kony video heard about it.

So what lessons can nonprofits learn from Kony 2012? It’s very clear that social media can help causes – but it can also hinder them.

Make your mark locally, nationally, globally. Take great care to ensure that the people you are recruiting to assist in your campaign are educated and invested in your cause. A 30-minute video won’t cut it. Get them to come to a workshop, or send them more information by email or snail mail. Get them to solidify their support.

Make your mark fast. If you are planning an event for your cause, make sure it takes place soon after your social media campaign. There’s no point in your campaign if it doesn’t get them to the event.

And, whatever you do, make sure your figureheads don’t have a public meltdown.

2012 Global Philanthropy Forum: Live Stream

The 2012 Global Philanthropy Forum is ending it's three-day run today. Be sure to tune into the live stream to catch the final topics of the forum discussed live. Today's topics include global health delivery and climate change. Let us know what you think about the live sessions in the comments.

Hooray for Mark Zuckerberg (and his millions)

By Katie Norwood

Proof that youth is not wasted on the young, not only is Mark Zuckerberg TIME’s Person of the Year at only 26, and worth an estimated $6.9 billion, but he’s also coughed up a princely $100 million to the struggling public school system in Newark, New Jersey. Following the donation, Zuckerberg received his fair share of criticism from those who thought his motivation was less than philanthropic, and more of a strategically planned exercise in image rehabilitation in response to the negative publicity he received following the release of the motion picture The Social Network.

Whatever Zuckerberg’s true motivation may be, his multi-million dollar donation is certainly generous by any standards – and at the end of the day, in practical terms his donation will have a great impact in the lives of many. He is a figure who, by creating Facebook, has helped shape Gen Y and Gen Z tremendously – so will he be the inspiration of the next generation of philanthropists?

More and more, it is important for nonprofit organizations to reach out to young donors and cultivate relationships with them, building the foundation for life-long giving. Too often, nonprofits ignore this important demographic and fail to target young people in marketing and fundraising campaigns and outreach. One great way to reach young people? Social media. Nonprofits might try starting a blog, becoming more active on Twitter or even – you guessed it – on Facebook.

Watch the video of TIME’s Person of the Year below. http://video.ap.org/?f=AP&pid=GUNLRPM5VNIOECLhtBJNOWk5P6kuraxl

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg will inspire a new generation of young philanthropists? We'd love to hear your thoughts!

What is Social Entrepreneurship, Anyway?

Wikipedia defines a social entrepreneur as someone who “recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.”

The PBS New Heroes series, which highlights the stories of twelve social entrepreneurs from various parts of the globe, also makes an important distinction regarding social entrepreneurship: unlike traditional business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs “primarily seek to generate ‘social value’ rather than profits.” And, unlike many non-profit organizations, their work is targeted “not only towards immediate, small-scale effects, but sweeping, long-term change.”

A recent article from the ever-pioneering Stanford Social Innovation Review also offers an interesting introduction to social entrepreneurship. Along with highlighting real world examples of ‘social businesses,’ the article also offers up substantive food for thought regarding the role business ought to play in addressing societal issues and the distinction between social entrepreneurship, nonprofit management, and philanthropy.

Innovating for the Common Good

Some examples of social entrepreneurship ventures include:

• KickStart International – Revitalizes impoverished communities by promoting sustainable economic growth and employment creation.

• Barefoot College - Provides basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, in the areas of solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development.

• Grameen Foundation - Uses microfinance and innovative technology to fight global poverty and bring opportunities to the world's poorest people.

Interested in learning more about social entrepreneurship, or perhaps starting up your own social venture? Here are a few resources to get you started:

• Ashoka.org – A global organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs, engages communities of entrepreneur and creates the infrastructure needed to develop social partnerships with lasting social and financial value.

• Social Edge - A program of the Skoll Foundation, this global online community helps social entrepreneurs connect to network, learn, inspire, and share resources.

• Social Venture Network – Ideas, resources, conferences and events geared toward nurturing social entrepreneurship around the world.
  

And please feel free to contact us at The ThinkTank if you have any social entrepreneurship ideas or challenges you would like to discuss.