Branding

It's lurking. It's close. And it's deadly. It forces hundreds of nonprofit organizations out of business every year. It robs even more organizations of their resources and leaves them foundering, unable to fully accomplish their missions. It destroys the careers of 
hundreds of hardworking and idealistic people.

If you love thinking about how social media and technology can be used to raise money, increase visibility and create social change (is there an app for that?), there's no better place to be than the annual NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference, which took place this year in April in Atlanta. Once I got done ogling all of the new iPads and finished searching for places to plug in my laptop, I actually had real conversations with a few breathing humans. Look, ma! No plugs!

In a seventh-floor conference room festooned with framed articles and journalism awards, Managing Editor Gordon Witkin leads the morning discussion of stories his staff is pursuing.

Their latest scoop -- on members of Congress dumping their BP stock -- "was a big success," he says. "It was in an AP story that sent it everywhere, including Yahoo and Google News."

On the front burner, a dozen staffers around the table explain, is a joint series just approved by the New York Times. A piece underway with The Washington Post is being edited. There was a "tough conference call," says international director David Kaplan, with eight London producers on a 10-segment project with the BBC.

Investigative reporting is increasingly being outsourced, and these offices off K Street serve as a boiler room for research that the big boys are less able to afford. The Center for Public Integrity is hardly a traditional news operation, but it is taking on a more prominent media role, fueled by a recent hiring spree that has added more than half a dozen journalists to its 45-person staff.

Winston Wallin's college scholarship program isn't just about writing checks -- although he has poured about $20 million into it. Wallin has personally met the students, recruited business supporters, and set up a system to track students' grades and overall performance going back more than a decade.

This brand of hands-on philanthropy is creating a buzz in the world of giving. Dubbed "engaged philanthropy,'' it calls upon donors to give their time and talent to organizations, and to stick with them longer than a funding cycle.

During their presentation, “30 Ideas in 60 Minutes: Your Hour of Creative Power," at the Association of Fundraising Professionals Fund Raising Day in New York held last Friday, Jeff Brooks, creative director at TrueSense Marketing; Moira Kavanagh Crosby, president of MKDM; and Dennis Lonergan, president of Eidolon Communications, provided direct-response and online fundraising strategies to make your fundraising solicitations stand out from the crowd. Here, Crosby outlines her 10 strategies from the session.

Branding is a vital, yet often difficult to grasp, component to any nonprofit organization. Donors must know who you are and what you do in order to give. In a roundtable eChat, “Bring the Brand!” during the first-ever FundRaising Success Virtual Conference and Expo held on May 20 (and available on-demand until Aug. 24), Sarah Durham, founder and principal of Big Duck and author of “Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications,” answered attendees’ questions about branding.

A recent report by the Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project, Nonprofits, Innovation, and Performance Measurement: Separating Fact From Fiction, reveals that there are widespread efforts in U.S. nonprofits to innovate. Driving that point home is the recent phenomenon of nonprofit restaurants.

I'm sure you've all seen the KFC commercials promoting the fast-food chain's pink buckets. (If you haven't, click here.) For every pink bucket KFC sells, 50 cents goes to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the Dallas-based breast cancer nonprofit. My first reaction to the commercial? "Help fight breast cancer, all while increasing heart disease!"

In her presentation at the 47th AFP International Conference on Fundraising in Baltimore earlier this month titled How You Can Create Experiences That Foster True Loyalty, Bridget Brandt, senior marketing manager at Sage Nonprofit Solutions, discussed some keys to creating loyal donors through their experiences with your organization. Here are some key takeaways.

Remember Goofus and Gallant? They're two boys, brothers maybe, whose morality tales in children's magazine Highlights (that mainstay of doctors' waiting rooms) had a profound impact on the moral and behavioral development of many a boomer-aged kid — though not always the way the authors intended. (They are also, I'm compelled to mention, 
registered trademarks of Highlights for Children Inc.)