Cool - and sobering - visual on homicide data.

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The always fantastic, highly recommended Data Blog at the Guardian just published this engrossing Tableau-based interactive visualization on worldwide homicide rates. Not the cheeriest of weekend topics, but worth a quick look. (I tried to embed the code here but Squarespace wasn't having it, and trouble-shooting javascript doesn't seem like a good Saturday morning activity!)

For example, there has been a lot of talk in Chicago this year about the alarming increase in homicides -- but Chicago doesn't even make this list! New York is the only U.S. city in the top 60 or so in the visualization. Makes one count one's blessings...

In any case, I thought it was worth sharing. One of the many things I like about Tableau is that shared visualizations like this come with the data embedded -- in other words, you can download the data yourself to inspect it. 

Click to interact.

Click to interact.

Friday contemplation: Stargazing with BT.

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Thanks to Peter Kirn at the always amazing Create Digital Music-Motion-Noise blogs for this: A really wonderful, relaxing, inspiring way to spend 15 minutes on a Friday morning. 

I'm a huge fan of all music, and electronic, ambient, and chillout specifically, so this blend of music by BT with photography by Randy Halverson is right up my alley. As Kirn writes:

Over 13 minutes. BT’s “13 Angels On My Broken Windowsill” playing. And nothing but timelapse footage of starscapes above fields and farms on Planet Earth. All of this could be corny, and yet…Nope. It’s a breathtaking virtual-stargazing love song to the Milky Way.

A bit off my usual blogging path, but well worth watching. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and breathe deeply... 

Is Giving Tuesday a bad idea? No.

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As you probably heard if you spend any time online, which is everyone reading this, yesterday was Giving Tuesday, a day created by a consortium of nonprofits to emphasize charity during the busiest shopping period of the year.

Interestingly, in addition to garnering a great deal of attention (and from what I've heard from our clients, creating an actual spike in giving), Giving Tuesday has inspired criticism from some circles as being the exact kind of commercialized, homogenized pseudo-caring it has been designed to counteract. Notably, both Tim Odgen in SSIR and Jeff Brooks in Future Fundraising Now -- neither a slouch in the space -- have written with some cynicism about the effort. 

I agree with the point that Giving Tuesday has the potential to be hollow and trite, and obviously also with Jeff's point that December 31 is already the biggest giving day of the year. Further, there's no denying that Giving Tuesday was a dreamt-up idea, although to be fair it was created by marketers hired by nonprofits, not by marketers.

What I'd offer, though, is that there's really nothing good about the biggest giving day of the year being the LAST day of the year. I applaud any effort to try to shift that giving earlier in the year. I'm not sure I understand the downside.

Further, with the incessant drone of BUY-BUY-BUY that now starts weeks before Thanksgiving and floods every single media channel, I like the idea of trying to mesh in some other message -- if only for balance.

I get the cynicism, I really do. But isn't combatting that cynicism the whole point?

What I've learned about business after ten years in business.

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Somehow, unbelievably, Event 360 – the company that I founded with two of my most loyal friends – turned ten years old today. It is amazing to me, and for one of the few times in my life I find myself at a loss for words. 

I woke up this morning early so I could head downtown for a meeting. It took me a few minutes to remember what day it was, but it hit me while I was fumbling around the coffee maker. When I remembered, my first thought was to call a few people to say "thanks" and "happy birthday." My second thought was about my long to-do list. And maybe that's the sum total of my advice: Recognize the people you work with, and keep plugging away. 

Frankly, I feel like I should write a long, thoughtful post about all the hard lessons I've learned. But as I sit down to type, I realize I don't have that list. My list is pretty short. 

Here's what I've learned about business after ten years in business:

  • Love what you do.
  • Love the people you do it with.

That's it.

Wait! I know it sounds trite, so before you move on let me offer a bit more exposition. When I write "love," I don't mean it as the kind of passive, reactive, "I hope I fall into it" love that we often think will come and seek us out in our lives. I mean LOVE in the sense of a powerful, active choice we each can decide to make every day. 

To all would-be business owners, entrepreneurs, leaders, and change agents, let me tell you this straight up: What you're trying to do is going to be hard. If it weren't, you wouldn't need to do it; someone would have already solved the problem you're trying to solve, or created the product you're trying to create. Nope, let's be honest and say, wow – it's going to be hard.

And so I've learned to make an ongoing, passionate, persistent, proactive choice to fully engage with what I do. You have to choose to love your work, particularly during the challenging times. Otherwise you're going to be employed at best and miserable at worst. You're too good to just be busy. Decide to be passionate.

More importantly, you have to choose to love the people you do it with, because without them you're sunk. I know they have their faults, but let's be honest, you have plenty too. Nothing, zero, zilch gets done alone. If you can set yourself up to be the least important person in the organization, then you've achieved one of the great accomplishments of leadership. 

I'm grateful for what I do and who I do it with. I wish you the same. It's onwards and upwards from here.

Just another seashell?

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Shells.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend our family took a short trip to the beach. The kids were getting restless, Jeanie and I were running out of amusements, and we all needed some fresh air.

We parked the car and walked 200 feet or so over the dunes to the ocean. After a few feet, one of our kids spotted a shell sitting on the path. "Look! A shell! Cool!" Everyone gathered around to see this unique and wonderful ornament of the beach. It was a bit dirty and cracked in half, but it was the first shell of the trip. The kids ran down the path, excited to see what else they would find.

As we approached the shore, they began to realize that the sand they were walking on was entirely covered in shells. Shells were literally everywhere.

As this realization dawned on them, guess what happened? The kids lost all interest in most of the shells. Oh, they spent 30 minutes or so combing the shore, but they passed over hundreds if not thousands of shells far prettier than the one they had discovered on the path. The only shells that attracted their attention were the ones that looked markedly different than the rest.  

The episode stuck with me. Does it speak to our inability to see the precious right in front of us? Or how easily the novel becomes boring? Or how quickly we can take beauty for granted?

It probably speaks to all of those things. But I can't help but think that it is a quick lesson in strategy, too. Our organizations spend a great deal of time trying to keep up with everyone else, when most of the time imitation is the quickest way to blend into the beach. If you want to get picked up, you have to be willing to be different.

Thanksgiving.

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Grateful for family most of all.

Grateful for health and the perspective to appreciate it.

Grateful for friends and for laughter.

Grateful for love and hope.

Grateful for work that matters to me, and grateful to matter to my work.

Grateful for the chance to make a difference and the chance to see that difference being made.

Grateful for all of you.

Onwards and upwards. 

Your next four years.

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Whether you're waking up happy or sad, satisfied or dissatisfied, it's a good morning to keep things in perspective. No matter if you supported Obama, Romney, or someone else, I can 100% guarantee you that the person who will have the most influence on your next four years is YOURSELF.

Give yourself a vote of support today by setting aside your usual worries, insecurities, and doubts. Instead, spend a bit of time thinking about what you hope to contribute to the world around you. What's your four-year platform?

Cause marketing standards: Guidelines, guardrails, or governor?

On my "State of Event Fundraising" webinar last week, one of the system dynamics I discussed was the progressive merger of the for-profit and nonprofit spaces. I wondered aloud if the fusion is entirely a good thing. 

While the nonprofit space can learn a lot from business, we might also observe that, again and again, business will serve its own interests first. It is fantastic that Starbucks donates a small portion of water sales to the developing world (a very small portion, actually: five cents on $1.80 per bottle, or a little less than 3%). It is fantastic that Wal-Mart wants us to “Live Better." It is fantastic that BP is cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico (after helping to pollute it, but who's counting?). All nice things.

But I worry that the desire for social change has been co-opted in order to shift product. What becomes of real charity when my kids think they are creating a better world by buying Pepsi instead of Coke? The social change space needs to offer an authentic alternative.

So I was interested to see this article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy regarding New York state's new truth-in-cause-marketing guidelines. The rules are presumably going to be adopted in other states as well, so that in the next few years we'll have a de facto national cause marketing regulatory standard. 

I wonder what the impact of the guidelines will be. Will they really "guide" actions? Will they serve as guardrails to excise out some of the more questionable programs? Or will they serve to slow down the cause marketing space and catalyze a resurgence in traditional fundraising? My hope is the last. But I have a feeling that this genie isn't going back in the bottle, and that somehow all that the guidelines will do is channel everything to move faster down a narrower track.  

 

The State of Event Fundraising

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Thanks to David Hessekiel and the wonderful folks at the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council, I had a chance yesterday to riff for an hour on "The State of Event Fundraising." An overblown title, to be sure, but when David approached me several months ago about speaking I told him I wanted to steer away from my usual mix of strategy and analytics. Instead, I wanted to speak at a broader level about what I'm observing and thinking about.

In a nutshell, I think the dynamics in the nonprofit space are changing, and I'm not sure that we're reacting fast enough. I don't have many of the answers, and I haven't even articulated all of the right questions. But I know enough to know that I should starting talking it through with other thought leaders in the industry.

My fears of appearing overblown turned to performance anxiety when I learned that over 500 people had registered for the presentation -- a new record for Run Walk Ride. As it turned out, over half of those actually showed up and stayed to listen to my ramblings, which can be found on Slideshare here or at the bottom of this post. The entire hour-long presentation, with audio, can be found at Cause Marketing Forum.

I'm not sure what to take from all of that -- y'all don't have enough to do on Thursday afternoons, apparently . But I think what it means is that many others share my anxiety that the dynamics are changing, and many others share my hope that we can benefit from those changes. 

I look forward to sharing some of the observations, thoughts, cautions, and ideas over the coming weeks.