One of my favorite lines of poetry comes from TS Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." It comes in a spot in the poem where he talking about the passage of time and mundane events. I can't resist quoting, bear with me: In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2011
That Was A Spectacular Failure!
On Monday, I attended Compasspoint's Nonprofit Day 2011. The theme was "Inspired Resilience: How we sustain People, Organizations, and Causes." I attended a fantastic workshop facilitated by Michelle Gislason, Senior Project Director, CompassPoint, called "How to Fail Spectacularly (and What You Can Learn from It)" Here's a few key takeaways and resources. There are two different views about failure that people in the room who work for nonprofits have - one positive and one negative. … [Read more...]
When Culture Eats Your Foundation's Social Media Strategy for Breakfast
Council on Foundations View more presentations from Beth Kanter Yesterday, I had the honor of facilitating a workshop on culture change and social media at the Council on Foundations Conference for Community Foundations in San Francisco. John Kobara, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, California Community Foundation, was the session designer and introduced the session with a famous quote from Peter Drucker, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Instituting a new … [Read more...]
Measuring Your Crowdsourcing Efforts by Aliza Sherman
Note from Beth: My colleague, Aliza Sherman, has written a book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crowdsourcing and you drop everything and buy it now. We've been chatting about how to measure the impact of the crowd and she offered to write this guest post on the topic. Measuring Your Crowdsourcing Efforts by Aliza Sherman If you are considering incorporating crowdsourcing principles or processes into your workflow, you should also thinking about how you’ll measure the results of your … [Read more...]
What's the Secret to Social Media Success? Cute Animal Theory
What will it take to get the climate some attention? Cute Dog Photos! That's Sam, grist.org's office puppy. We know that people would much rather look at pictures of cute dogs than think about downers like climate change. So, grist-.org is using Sam to call attention to the environment and harness puppy power on behalf of the climate. They're inviting folks to submit their own cute dog photos grist.org has discovered what social media folks who work for zoos, aquariums, and animal welfare … [Read more...]
