The Seven (or Nine) Things Everyone Wants

On her Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Katya Andresen shares a recap of and highlights from the session “The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach,” which she and Sea Change Strategies President Mark Rovner presented at the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month.

The NTC in New Orleans was full of fantastic, sparkly, shiny new technology tools. And then there was our session. No winsome widgets, no witty Twittering, no Dopplr-found Doppelgangers.

And that was the point.

Which is this: What makes technology tools great is not the technology. It’s the people behind them. Successful technology is about bonds, not wires. It’s human connections that matter. “Social media” is about “social” more than it’s about “media.”

If you missed our session, we summed it up in the title: “The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach.”

Some very human principles make or break the success of absolutely everything you do online. These are the kind of truths Buddha or Freud — explorers of the deepest recesses of the human mind — talked about. To achieve true marketing “enlightenment,” you need to tap into fundamental human needs with your technology — rather than hoping technology can inspire alone. You may think this sounds a bit like [psychologist Abraham] Maslow — and it is — but with a twist: Maslow was uncovering human needs; we are showing how his and other deep needs can be employed to foster a more humane world.

There are at least seven of these fundamental needs, and that’s what we covered in our session. We threw out a need, and the folks in the session talked about how they’d met it through online communications. … There are other human needs — we’d like to add simplicity and humor to the list of seven — but this was a start.