After about 2 months of not posting a Tip Jar roundup (less blogging=more sleep, which I’ve decided is healthier than less sleep), I’ve saved up enough links to fill a barrel. I’ll try not to overwhelm you with them, and have selected only the finest of the lot. Before I let them sit around long enough to age in the barrel, I’m going to get this first batch out and try to post more very soon (it’s already been a week since I started writing this post).
- If you have a great idea for spurring positive social change, consider applying for the Echoing Green fellowship, which provides up to $90,000 of seed money and technical support to make the vision a reality. But don’t wait too long to act — the applications for the 2008 program are due December 3rd.
- Though cause marketing is not my focus, I saw three different studies in the span of a day reporting results of surveys that a significant number of people prefer to buy products that are part of a cause marketing campaign (pdf) or that are perceived as being environmentally responsible, and the same goes internationally.
- Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson at U Mass Dartmouth surveyed the 200 largest nonprofits and found that they are adopting social media at a much faster pace than the business world, with 75 percent using some form of social media like blogs, social networking sites, podcasts, wikis or other formats. Makes a lot of sense, given that these tools are mostly free or low-cost, and yet so effective.
- Via Beth, I found out about the Advocacy Progress Planner, a click-and-go tool to create a logic model to plan policy-focused advocacy campaigns. I would love to see something like this for social marketing programs, but our issues and strategies are not that simple and straightforward. At least, a well-designed social marketing program based on research with the target audience could not just click a few choices and be ready to go. The model is quite appealing though — perhaps it could be used for preliminary planning.
- It’s always nice to hear or read stories about how a social marketing campaign saved someone’s life. And this British Heart Foundation ad is credited with saving at least nine or ten other people as well. Of course, every life saved is worth more than the cost of the campaign, but just remember that anecdotes are not necessarily proof of effectiveness.
- I guess this is one way to make sure that your country is full of only fit people. Not a very nice or intelligent way, but a way nonetheless.
- Download an interesting ChangeThis Manifesto called Change the Way You Change the World, which talks about what nonprofits can do to achieve wide-scale social change. It’s written by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather Grant McLeod, authors of Forces for Good.
More soon, I hope…
Photo Credit: ltflux
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
Hi Nedra,
Comment on the rate of nonprofits buying into social media like FaceBook.
There are serious privacy concerns that I wasn’t aware of until coming across this link on the Marketing Profs website. Indeed, as they said, it makes you think twice before putting your information into social networking (or any) site.
Terre
http://tinyurl.com/2d4ldg
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2007/11/think_you_have_any_online_priv.html/?adref=gmi14b7
I didn’t realize how much I missed your link roundups.