Your Nonprofit: Ready for Take-Off or About to Crash & Burn?

Photo Courtesy of NASA.gov

Fiscal Sponsorship for

Wannabe & Transitioning Nonprofits

Are you the founder or idea person behind a wannabe nonprofit organisation?  Is your fledgling nonprofit poised and ready to raise funds, but lacking legal nonprofit status?  Are you the designated hitter for the turnaround of an existing nonproft that's drowning in a quicksand of legal, financial, and operational troubles?  Fiscal Sponsorship may be the solution you need.

Mercenary vs. Missionary....

Don Quixote's Windmill Adventure, by Dominica Alcantara
Find it at Fine Art America

On a Quest or For Sale?


A recent New York Times article recaps the failings of Netflix and CEO Hastings during the hasty and ill-considered move -- now aborted -- to divide the company and its customers into two camps with the creation of Qwikster.  How Netflix Lost 800,000 Customers and Goodwill, does more though, perhaps unintentionally:  it brings to light an interesting phrase delineating two principal entrepreneurial styles, the Missionary versus the Mercenary.

Forgotten Heroes, Abandoned Children, Devalued Seniors

1 of 5 prototypes for Stony Mountain Ranch logo & bizcards.
See them all at http://tiny.cc/STONY

The Challenge

What do the following people have in common?

• Aged-out foster children
• Military veterans returning to civilian life
• Devalued seniors

Simplicity, Simplify: A Marketing Lesson from the Toybox

 Simplicity, Simplify

A few years into my brilliant marketing career, I learned an important lesson, albeit from an unexpected source.  A six year-old boy taught me how too many choices and too little opportunity to filter one's options can overwhelm and even disable the buying decision.

Can You Hear Me Now? Intentional Listening.

Vístanme despacio que estoy de afán.

Dress me slowly, I'm in a hurry.

(Loose interpretation - Do your best and carefully, even more so
when you're down to the wire and running out of time.)

The Miraculous Melrosas High Wire Bicycles

Have you ever seen the circus act with the unicyclist crossing a tightrope hundreds of feet in the air?  Silly hat on his head, balance pole in his hands, and rising precariously from his shoulders and stretching upward beyond the spotlight's reach, a human lattice-work of more acrobats in more silly hats.  One missed cue, one miscalculation and spangles splattered across sand and sawdust.  Thankfully, long before donning his silly hat and climbing to the high wire, the unicyclist rehearsed, exercised, sketched, studied, imagined, trained, prayed, and prepared, prepared, prepared.

  

Few of us who work in the arts and entertainment arena are privileged to work in a proper circus, yet we face long years of preparation and our own peculiar dangers.  One of those dangers is when we're on a high wire and don't realise it.  In my case, I fell off my high horse, landed a black-and-blue bruise to my conscience, and barely kept my silly hat.  I learned something important about myself and about doing business though.  It all began innocently enough...

Marketing Al Fresco

And now, a few words from our sponsor about chilling out on the Starbucks patio to improve your marketing research...

I can circumnavigate the globe with the best GPS ever created, Global Positioning via Starbucks.  Drop me anywhere on the planet, and I will find my way to the nearest Starbucks or patio-con-cafe.  Want to know the coffee house with the best patio, best espresso shot, best crew, worst bathrooms, most corporate lockstep, most responsive and responsible management?  Call me.

My point?  An alert participant in life, his community, and in mundane, everyday conversations can gather an abundance of useful information, voluntarily offered and unobtrusively gathered.  A diligent marketer needn't invade people's privacy or manipulate them to get pertinent data for creating persuasive, appropriate strategies.  Chill out on the nearest java joint terrace and listen ' til it hurts -- and trust me, it will hurt occasionally.  Pay attention, do deep, intense people-watching, interpret a little of what you see and hear, talk a little, question.  PARTICIPATE.

As a friend in the U.K. says,

"Only Americans need a million-dollar survey to tell them the bleeding obvious."

W. Edwards Deming noted the proclivity of American big business to dismiss "unknown and unknowable factors" and business anomalies when he was a consultant to post-war Japan, helping the the shattered country re-invent their economy.  Although he was a reknowned statistician, Deming stated "one of the seven deadly diseases of management is running a company on visible figures alone" -- banking every decision on "statistics in a vacuum."

While American executives remote-controlled their decisions by commissioning study after study of consumer behaviour, Japanese companies sent executives and employes into the marketplace, to observe consumer behaviour first-hand -- at sales counters, in appliance stores, in automobile dealerships.  As Americans lagged behind in the technology and manufacturing race, insistently making big, gas-guzzling cars with fins, the Japanese passed them by with micro-circuitry, compact cars, and attention to detail.  "Made in Japan" ceased being a label to ridicule and became something to emulate.

Decades later, here goes American business again, this time with algorithms and "reality mining" overruling common sense.  To entrepreneurs, micropreneurs, solo-preneurs and marketing people everywhere:  Get out of your cubicles, java-chat your patio mates, and download real life.

After you've done your reality check, then you can supplement what you've heard, observed, and learned with surveys and statistical studies.  With an open mind and open heart, reassess your strategy, rewrite your business plan.  Yes, it may mean pulling a 180 and going an entirely new direction with your cherished, long-harboured idea.  It could mean ditching your scheme completely and starting from scratch.

Scary?  Oh, yeah.  Gut-wrenching, disappointing, and bewildering.  But, profound knowledge (remember, no more "data in a vacuum") is a "[l]ong-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy [and] is required of any management that seeks transformation.  The timid and the fainthearted, and people who expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment." (Deming)

You want BUZZ?  Go for a coffee at the scene of the crime.

See you on the patio! ;-)