Green Marketing 2.0| SEO SEM Social Media Consulting - Lorna Li» Nonprofits

The Story of Stuff – Great Social Marketing Through Social Media

lorna li — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:29:10 +0000

My buddies at Free Range Studios created this fantastic viral video that was featured at Bioneers last October. While lambasted in the mainstream media, the Story of Stuff has been a fave of left-leaning environmental activists and educators.

Why? Because it makes you think about where our stuff comes from and where it is going, and the part we all play in this consumption oriented system.

What makes the Story of Stuff successful?

In a similar style to CommonCraft’s In Plain English video series, the Story of Stuff uses simple animations to illustrate complex concepts. Video animation is a great medium to tell a complex story in a simple, yet compelling way. The message is easily digestible by kids as well as adults.

Imagine trying to explain the Story of Stuff in text, with, maybe a few diagrams. The message would probably be lost. The relationships between consumers, government, and corporations a little too complex to grok in words. The text version of the Story of Stuff would never go viral.

The Story of Stuff is a must see for anyone wanting to create an education campaign using social media, in order to raise awareness of sustainability issues.

Saving The Orangutans Of Borneo

lorna li — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:11:56 +0000

Borneo, located in Southeast Asia, is the world’s third largest island. Borneo is also divided into three different nations, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. The island of Borneo is rich in biodiversity; Borneo’s rainforests are the home to world’s largest flower, the world’s largest carnivorous plants, the world’s largest orchid, and the world’s last orangutans. Not long ago, Borneo had an extensive rainforest that covered the majority of the island. However, the ever increasing demand for timber in the international markets, coupled with government corruption, has turned the green lungs of Asia into the world’s biggest exporter of tropical timber. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the rate of environmental destruction in Borneo is now faster than in the Amazon Basin.

In the early 1990s, a surge in the demand for palm oil as an ingredient in processed foods, as well as for biofuel production, was seen as an economic opportunity in the region. Oil palm became much more lucrative traditional crops, like bananas, and resulted in the decimation of 86% of Malaysia’s rainforests for the development of oil palm plantations. In fact, environmentalists have been alarmed at the rate in which oil palm plantations have been replacing tropical rainforests. But the numbers are hard to beat. Compared to soybeans and corn, which yield only 446 and 172 liters of crude oil per hectare, a hectare of oil palm may yield nearly 6,000 liters of crude oil.

While the palm oil devastation is far reaching, reforestation efforts by the Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) Foundation are promising. Their Samboja Lestari Reforestation project demonstrated that it was indeed possible to transform a 2000 hectare wasteland into a thriving forest with 1800 native species of plants in only a few short years. The end result was the return of hundreds of species of wildlife, from butterflies and beetles to hornbills and gibbons. Furthermore, with its high concentration of fruiting trees, Samboja Lestari is a sanctuary for the rehabilitation of rescued orangutans.

BOS is currently looking after more than 1000 displaced young and adult orangutans, and are looking for ways to release them into safe forests.
The EcoPreservation Society is partnerring with BOS on land acquisition, for the purposes of reforestation and orangutan rehabilitation. Check out their Borneo Reforestation Project for more information.

Saving the Jaguars of Belize

lorna li — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:35:42 +0000

Image Source: Prospero973

When one thinks of Belize, images of coral reefs, white sand beaches, and lush green jungles teeming with wildlife come to mind. Unfortunately, Belize’s tropical rainforests are under siege, as logging companies from China, Indonesia and Japan continue to clear cut vast swaths of forested land in order to supply valuable timber to international markets.

Even more rainforest territory is being destroyed to make way for cattle ranches and plantations. Many of these properties are then sold off to unsuspecting American and European retirees with the promise of huge returns. While ranch owners might initially reap rewards in the first couple years of ownership, eventually, many of these ranches and plantations fail, due to the poor soil quality upon which they were founded, thereby resulting in bankruptcies or huge losses for the owners.

Rainforest soil is ill suited to agriculture. The soil underneath the dense rainforest canopy is fragile and thin; without the protective cover of trees and the wide network of roots, the thin layer of soil erodes quickly with the rain and wind, which wash away what little nutrients there are. Because the soil is low in nutrition, it cannot support healthy pasture for cattle or intense agriculture for much more than two years. In the southwestern parts of Belize, especially in the mountainous Cayo district, which was once covered by dense rainforests and home to jaguars, most of these ranches are now up for sale. Owners that have experienced the sudden economic collapse of their ranches are now looking to sell of their properties for whatever price that they can get.

The desperation of ranch owners to sell to sell off their properties has resulted in plummeting real estate prices, making it an opportune time to purchase land for reforestation and jaguar conservation. Jaguars are the largest wild cats that currently roam in the jungles of Belize. Uncontrolled logging has severely reduced the size of the jaguars’ natural habitat and decreased their food supply. Due to increased scarcity of their natural prey, jaguars come into conflict with humans and prey on the cattle that now occupy their former habitat. In a bid to protect their property and cattle, ranchers attack and kill the jaguars. While nobody knows how many jaguars have been killed, some conservative estimates claim that more than 15000 jaguars have died due to their conflict with humans.

The Rainforest Trust and the Eco-Preservation Society are currently raising funds for to buy out bankrupt ranches for the purposes of reforestation. Cattle ranches are great locations to begin reforestation, as they already possess the basic infrastructure necessary for these kinds of projects. The houses provide good quality shelter for the volunteers, as well as for the local Mayan people participating in the conservation program. Furthermore, by acquiring these ranches, conservation dollars would be spent primarily on jaguar conservation and not on constructing houses for the volunteers.

You can help support jaguar conservation through your donation to Eco-Preservation Society’s Belize Reforestation Project.

YouTube for Nonprofits: How to Use YouTube to Save the World…And Raise Money

lorna li — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:41:35 +0000

Last week’s Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Maryrose Dunton, the Head of User Experience at YouTube,, who spoke about YouTube’s Nonprofit Program.The YouTube Nonprofit Program, is an in-kind donation by YouTube to the nonprofit sector that’s worth about $20 million. Currently available to established 501(c)(3)s, YouTube offers participating nonprofits:

A premium branded channel – some environmental nonprofits that have done a good job with this include Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. The ability to upload videos of any length. Currently the limit on video length is 10 minutes.

Rotation into the “Promoted Videos” section on YouTube’s homepage.
Listing in the Nonprofit Channels and Nonprofit Video areas
The ability to collect donations using Google Checkout (with no processing fee).
The option to participate in the user partner program, which allows you to show partner ads on video – and share the ad revenue. However, there is currently no way to filter ads, which may not work for some organizations.

YouTube has 30 million visitors daily and over 100 million videos are viewed each day. By connecting nonprofits to the world’s largest online video community, the YouTube Nonprofit program will allow these organizations tap into a significant pool of potential small donors. While large nonprofits are able to receive 10-15% of donations from online fundraising, smaller organizations have the most difficulty establishing a web presence. By offering a dedicated channel on YouTube, YouTube’s Nonprofit Program hopes to empower smaller organizations to significantly expand their reach. Now its just the matter of these, often, short-staffed nonprofits finding the manpower to manage their YouTube presence.

YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofits

Maryrose recommended these tips to help nonprofits engage successfully with the YouTube community:

1. Keep it fresh, keep it short. Best not longer than 10 minutes

2. Be genuine, no public service announcements (PSAs)

3. Engage and interact with the community – have a dialogue, allow people to post video comments, be sure to respond to comments
4. Create a call to action

5. Invest in your channel – update content, make sure links and videos work

7. Do not fear comments, ratings, related videos – while you can moderate user engagement, do not disable the commenting or rating features as this tends to upset the community

New Plans for Nonprofits on YouTube

New developments coming down the pipeline include:

1. Extending the program to include international nonprofits.

2. Incorporating more calls to action that are important to nonprofits, petitions, signup forms.

3. Improving nonprofit discovery on YouTube’s website.

[tags]maryrose dunton, net tuesday, net2, youtube nonprofit program, youtube nonprofit channel, lorna li[/tags]

Google Earth Outreach – Best Practices on Mapping Social and Environmental Issues Accross the Globe

lorna li — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:31:28 +0000

On October 9th, Steve Miller, Product Manager Google Earth, gave a presentation for Net Tuesday on Google Earth Outreach – a program that enables nonprofits and NGOs to use Google Earth and other geo-spatial applications to tell their stories.

Steve highlighted a number of organizations that leveraged Google Earth to tell their stories in effective, compelling ways, starting with the organization that inspired the creation of the Google Earth Outreach program.

Google Earth Outreach got started because Steve’s friend Rebecca Moore, a passionate environmentalist, was involved with Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, a community group that was fighting to protect the from the San Jose Water Company’s proposed logging operations with Big Creek Lumber.

Residents were mailed a legal notice and vague black and white map of the area affected by the “proposed timber harvest.” Rebecca decided to create an alternative map on Google Earth to outline areas that the logging concession would affect and school districts that would be impacted by logging.

Google Earth Outreach is particular useful to NGOs and nonprofits that have multiple program locations as it enables them to organize information about each program and keep track of them geographically.

For example, the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum created Crisis in Darfur an interactive map of the genocide conflict in Western Sudan.

Damaged and destroyed villages are indicated with clickable orange and red flame icons that pop up a description of the village, and additional information like photos and testimonials. Top-line presentation is simple, but additional resources are available for those who want to learn more. Each window links back to the US Holocaust Memorial Museaum website.

Appalachian Voices, partnered with Google Earth to raise awareness about about mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian mountains. By creating compelling presence and providing valuable information, Appalachian Voices succeeded in driving a large volume of traffic to their site and generating public awareness about their projects.

Some Google Earth best practices they employed included:

A User’s Guide, which they placed front and center, which gives a site content overview and explains the meaning of different colors and icons

Historical overlays of the region, combined with imagery – which presents a very compelling picture of the environmental damage caused by mountaintop removal coal mining

Consistently placed icons to show where you can download additional data

A Call to Action – which was to sign a petition

The results?

Within the first 10 days Appalachian voices received 10,000 signatures from all 50 states

Other product features that Steve highlighted were:

Customization of placemark descriptions

Photo uploads and video embedding

Time span documentation, such as this graphical representation of world population growth.

Google provides extensive tutorials on how to use Google Earth’s powerful features. In addition, they offer a grant program which provides qualifying organization access to use Google Earth Pro, valued at $400 a license, which includes:

Higher resolution printing

Video-making capability – record videos

The ability to import more data

For more information about Google Earth, visit, the Google Earth Blog. For more information about Net2 and Web 2.0 technologies that empower social change, visit the Net2 blog.

[google, google earth, google earth outreach, u.s. memorial holocaust museum, crisis in darfur, nail, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, Appalachian Voices environmental activism, social activism, Rebecca Moore, Steve Miller, net tuesday, netsquared, net2, lorna li[/tags]

Understanding Google PageRank

lorna li — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:08:15 +0000

Simplified for Small Business, Green Enterprise, and Nonprofits

Google PageRank (PR) is a link analysis algorithm developed by Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the late 1990s. Google PageRank contributes to your search engine ranking on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google PageRank is one benchmark for understanding the popularity of your web site based on the number and quality of sites that link to you. A high PR page that links to your web page will confer more PageRank to your page than an inbound link from low PR page.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson on SEO, PageRank values are published approximately once every 3 months. Therefore, Google PR is not an accurate metric for site popularity, as it is a cached value that is usually out of date.

What’s my Google PageRank?

If you want to view your Google PageRank, you can download the Google Toolbar or try the nifty SearchStatus plugin for FireFox.

The Google Toolbar’s PageRank feature displays as a green bar on the bottom right of your browser window. Scroll over and you will see a visited page’s PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10, with PR 10 web site being the most popular.

If you don’t want to download the Google Toolbar, you can submit your site url to a number of free Google PageRank tools on the Web, such as the Google PageRank Lookup Report which will check the PR of up to 10 web sites.

PageRank Values for Popular Green & Environmental Web Sites

National Geographic – 8
An Inconvenient Truth – 7
The Discovery Channel – 7
The Nature Conservancy – 7
World Wildlife Fund – 7
TreeHugger – 6
Change.org – 5

Top PR sites include:

Google (of course) – 10
Yahoo – 10
Wikipedia – 9
MySpace – 8

How important is Google PageRank?

Don’t obsess over your Google PageRank – it is just one factor in the collective algorithm that Google uses to build SERPs. While having lots of relevant, inbound high PageRank links is a good thing, high PR does not guarantee high placement in SERPs.

Bear in mind that Google calculates your PR based on the page criteria and title tag of the linking page. Google can penalize a site if it detects a large number of irrelevant links. How effective Google is at determining link relevance is a subject of debate among SEOs. However, building relevant links is a good rule of thumb in order to follow if you want to increase your site’s PR.

How do I build PageRank for my site?

Andrew Gerhart’s Understanding and Building Google PageRank gives a detailed overview on how PR works and what to do to improve it. Here’s a summary:

In order to understand how to improve PageRank, you must understand how a site’s linking structure absorbs PageRank from other sites. Suppose you are TreeHugger, with a PR of 6 for your homepage.

This means a number of web sites with PR 5 and above are linking to your homepage. Your second level pages, will then have a PR of 5, and your tertiary pages have a page rank of 3, and so forth.

How Internal Linking Affects PageRank

Your internal linking structure does not have an effect in increasing PR, but sharing PR within the overall site, with decreasing powers as you go deeper into the structure of your web site.

* Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to your secondary pages or secondary levels.
* Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other
* Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their sub-directory, sub-domain, or level
* Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or sub-domain to each other.
* Link the third level pages back to the secondary page that it was linked from
* Make sure that the there is not heavy linking between third level pages
* Link to pages, regardless of level, that are relevant
* Link to pages, regardless of level, where the text on the page being linked from is keyword specific to the page that you are linking to
* If there are fourth level pages, follow the same linking structure that has been laid out in this checklist
* Only link pages within your site that are relevant to each other
* Use keyword specific link text when linking between pages
* Use standard HREFs in links that are easy for the search engine robots.

How External Linking Affects PageRank

External linking plays the strongest role in determining a site’s PR, but it is the factor over which you have the least control. Understand that link building campaigns can be a slow, tedious process. You can request, beg, and cajole a site owner to link to you, but they may not respond in a timely way, if at all, and will likely request a reciprocal link, which confers less link juice to you than a one-way inbound link would.

It’s not within the scope of this article to discuss link-building strategies, but to understand how external links pass PageRank to your site.

The exact algorithmic calculation that Google employs will likely never be divulged, but simply speaking, Google confers PR to you based on its evaluation of the linking sites PRs and their relevance to your page. Spammy, irrelevant links can negatively impact your PR.

If the sites linking to you all mention “Organic, fair-trade chocolate” and have above 6 PRs, and your page talks about “Organic, fair-trade chocolate”, your PR will likely be close to 6 as well.

Don’t make the mistake of randomly sending all inbound links to your homepage or the top level page of a section – the max PR you will reflect the cumulative PRs of the sites pointing to you, adjusted based on their relevance to your homepage.

Let’s say you have an e-commerce site specializing in fair trade products from around the world. The theme of your homepage is “fair trade products”, but one of your categories is “fair trade crafts”, and your subcategories are “houseware”, “jewelry”, and “stationery”. Identify high PR sites and pages for “fair trade products” and solicit links from them to your homepage. Then do the same for your “houseware” page, and then for each sub-category below that.

Tips on Boosting Google PageRank Through External Linking

* Understand the way PageRank trickles down through a site’s internal linking structure.

* To improve the PR of your site, identify the theme and market segment of each page, find relevant web pages with higher PR and ask the site owners to link to you.

* Work on the external linking for every page from the homepage to sub-pages based on each page’s topic – prioritize top level down.

Where should I seek links from to boost my Google PageRank?

Identify the keywords relevant to each page’s theme, and then Google-search these terms. The sites that show up in the top positions are the sites you want to solicit links from.

Google Directory – Science > Environment > Forests and Rainforests

Another good place to begin is the Google Directory, which lists sites by category in order of PageRank. However, a site’s willingness to link to you is directly proportional to the content of the page. If your content is not that exciting, you will have a harder time getting links.

PPC Primer for Small, Sustainable Business

lorna li — Sun, 20 May 2007 05:45:47 +0000

According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). North American advertisers spent $9.4 billion on search engine marketing (SEM) in 2006, a 62 % increase over 2005. SEMPO researchers also estimate SEM spending to double by 2011, at an aggregate spending total of $18.6 billion.

However, while only a tiny percentage of small and medium size businesses currently contribute to this huge volume of advertising spend, many analysts predict that the number of small businesses will grow significantly over the next few years.

If you are a small, environmentally sustainable business with a limited advertising budget or a nonprofit seeking other avenues of funding, PPC ads can be an inexpensive, cost-effective way to reach a targeted segment of customers. And now is a great time to get in on it, before the green industry gets uber-competitive.

PPC – More Bang for the Buck

Pay-Per-Click Ads are small Internet text ads with a short description that link to a Web site that usually appear on the right hand side of your search engine results pages (SERPs) and in designated sections on many content-driven Web sites and blogs. Advertisers bid to have their ads show up when users search for certain keywords, or when Web site features those specific keywords in the content of that web page. Advertisers only pay when a user clicks on their ad and visits their Web site.

Depending on how competitive your market is, the cost-per-click on certain keywords can be as cheap as a few cents a click to $5, $10 or even more. However, anyone can start a PPC advertising program on as little as a few dollars per week.

The first great thing about PPC advertising is that it is treeless. With print direct mail, at a 2% response rate – which is considered to be good – 98% of your mailing gets trashed. In my opinion, no matter how “successful” the campaign metrics, print direct mail is an incredible waste of time, energy, and resources.

The second great thing about PPC advertising is that your campaign results are available within days of the launch of your campaign. By contrast, direct mail advertising campaigns often take at least 3 months to close, and the first responses typically roll in 6 weeks after the mail date. Other forms of traditional marketing – print ads, TV and radio commercials – can be extremely expensive, yet, entirely unmeasurable. It is nearly impossible how many people viewed your glossy magazine ad, and how many of those people actually went out and bought your product.

With PPC, you can track all metrics from number of clicks to conversions in less than a week. Furthermore, based on your campaign statistics, you can tweak and adjust your bids, edit your text ads, and perform A/B split tests on ad creative and multivariate tests on your landing pages as often as you want, when you want – and see the results the following day. This is impossible with other forms of traditional media – not only will it prove to be very expensive, it will drive your designers and media vendors utterly crazy. And you won’t receive your results, if you are lucky, until the following quarter.

Understand PPC before you begin, or you will waste your money

Implementing a successful PPC campaign requires a certain level of skill and understanding, so read up about it before you begin. You will need to:

set up your account correctly
know how to select and price keywords
know how to write compelling ad copy
have at at least one landing page
know how to perform ad testing and landing page tests
be willing to monitor and tweak your campaign frequently

While PPC professionals will employ a number of arcane techniques and strategies, there are 4 main factors to PPC success that everyone should know. I will start with what I believe to be the most important:

1) Get Creative With Your PPC keywords, then Narrow it Down

Come up with a large, robust initial list of keywords and key phrases, and then narrow it down to the ones worth bidding on. To further fine-tune your targeting and avoid paying for clicks from people unlikely to buy your product, create a list of negative keywords – search terms where you don’t want your ad to appear. For example, if you are selling gourmet, organic, hand-crafted and fair-trade chocolate truffles, you will probably want to include the negative keywords “free”, “cheap”, and “discount” in your campaigns.

Also, if you have a limited budget, you may want to choose to display your ads only on the search network and turn the content network off. In general, content network ads tend to have a lower click through rate (CTR) than search ads. By showing your ads only to people actively searching for those keywords, you will get more bang for your PPC buck.

2) Put Your Keywords In Your PPC Ad Text

If your ad text is not relevant to the search term, chances are, no one will click on it. A low click through rate (CTR) can cause Google to render your ad inactive for that keyword, which will require you to increase your initial bid in order to enter the market.

Make sure your keyword is in the headline, and if not, at least in the description. The user’s search query will show up bolded on the SERP, so if your ad creative has matching keywords, these will appear more prominently as bolded text, and your ad will stand out more on the page.

3) Send PPC Traffic to a Relevant Landing Page

One of the most important factors to PPC success is driving targeted traffic to a landing page, NOT your homepage. Your landing page should be directly relevant to the ad that links to it. For example, if you have listed a text ad for “Sustainable Bamboo Cutting Boards”, be sure to send visitors to a landing page about eco-friendly bamboo cutting boards, and not bamboo products in general, or you will lose them.

Design your landing page to quickly take your visitors to product selection, purchase and check-out with a little clicks as possible. If you want them to sign up for something, make the form as simple and hassle-free as possible. Think of your landing page as funnel. Create no distractions, leave no option for escape.

If you are running a nonprofit, link your text ad a donation page, and not a general info page about your organization’s mission and vision. If you are raising money for your rainforest Adopt-An-Acre campaign, make sure your Adopt-a-Rainforest text ad takes the visitor to a landing page about this specific program, and not a page about a different conservation initiative, nor your general donation or membership page.

4) Test, Test and Test Some More

Finally, running a successful PPC program depends on your ability to track results and tweak your campaigns on a frequent basis. As the bidding landscape changes daily, you will need to monitor and adjust your strategies accordingly.

You will want to test ad creative and improve your ad creative. Google and Yahoo are set up so that split testing is easy. You will also want to test your landing pages and determine which variables – such as headline, main image, ad copy – attract more conversions. Google Optimizer allows you to easily perform multivariate testing on your landing pages.

The fun part about developing your PPC strategies is testing “out of the box” ideas. For example, most of us who care about environmental conservation are keenly aware of how active the Bush Administration has been in dismantling existing environmental laws and undermining the nation’s overall environmental policy. The Bush Administration’s environmental track record is, for most conservation-minded individuals, a miserable failure.

Some of you might be familiar also with the Google bomb for the keywords “miserable failure” that linked to the biography of George W. Bush.

The last time I Googled “miserable failure” a text ad pop up that said, “Yes, We Think So, too”. Who was that ad from? The Natural Resources Defense Council.

[tags]Pay-Per-Click, PPC, SEM, search marketing, paid search, green marketing, PPC primer, lorna li[/tags]

3 Limiting Activist Habits to Avoid

lorna li — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 05:38:38 +0000

I’ve been learning a lot about professional and personal relationships these days, and continually trying to reassess my approach to others. A relationship is much like a dance between 2 individuals, which involves grace, balance and counterbalance, exploring boundaries, occassionally stepping on toes, trying to guess the other person’s next step. Ideally, it’s an experience that 2 or more indivuduals co-create, ideally in a mutually enriching, enjoyable, safe, and positive manner.

I’ve certainly stumbled in relationships, and regrettably, a few are beyond repair. It’s these blunders that have caused me to reflect upon what works, what should be avoided, and from what place should one approach dealing with others. I’ve noticed some distinct differences in the way relationships are conducted in the business world as opposed to the nonprofit world. While it would be simplistic for me to state that relationships are more genuine in one world over the other, I’ve certainly noticed some recurring themes in the nonprofit world that I would like comment on.

I recently had an embarrassing encounter when trying to introduce a new friend, a fantastic wildlife photographer, to a long time friend and collaborator who is an environmental activist and sustainability consultant. They both have a passion for rainforests, sustainability projects, and Latin America. My new friend expressed interest in buying land in Ecuador and developing sustainability workshops. My old friend organizes sustainability workshops in Latin America. As I am an avid, and constant networker, I immediately thought they should meet each other, as I believe in the benefits of creating new friendships and strenthening community. I made an email introduction stating that they should connect on the basis of their mutual interests and shared love for Latin America and the rainforest.

To my embarrassment, my old friend responded to the intro with a long pitch email about her expertise, article attachment and a price quote for her time. My new friend, who had actually lived and travelled extensively in South America, found this approach rather off-putting and premature. I ended having to send several more emails in damage control.

My old friend expressed to me her frustration about the difficulty of earning a living as an environmental consultant where she is overwhelmed with “leads” that take up her time, extract all kinds of information from her, and who never lead to any consulting gigs. She also appreciated my feedback to her approach, and recognized her need to re-evaluate her relationship to others, as well as how to manage her time as a consultant.

She mentioned that her work as a fundraiser caused her to consider every person she met as a potential “donor” and subsequently the relationships became “hollow”, based more on the end goal of getting money rather than enjoying the person for his or her true merits.

I understood her frustration around the difficulty of earning a living as a highly specialized environmental consultant with a niche target market of NGOs, conservation professionals, and wealthy, educated, socially-aware green investors that would value and pay for her expertise. Sadly, I’ve noticed in the nonprofit sector, the constant need to chase after funding for vital programs and administrative overhead tends to manifest itself in 3 negative behavioral traits (all of which I’ve been guilty of myself).

1) Poverty Mentality

There never seems to be enough money to keep all the vital and valuable social services running in the world. Charitable programs are necessary. Many are chronically underfunded; few are revenue-generating. Most grasssroots organizations are entirely sustained on a shoestring budget by a dedicated team of staff and volunteers who can barely eek out a living.

Unfortunately this chronic lack of programmatic funding exacerbates “poverty mentality” which is more a state of mind that creeps out of the program and pervades into one’s personal and professional life.

Of course it’s always preferable to have a well-funded program, and having more money means you can do more wonderful things to save the world with it. However, when life is experienced from a place of lack, it then becomes difficult to see and appreciate those valuable things that are there in front of you.

2) Gimme Gimme Gimme (or everyone should fund my project).

Because it’s easy to get caught up in your project (after all, everyone loves rainforests, right?) this can often translate into the belief that everyone in your sphere of influence should donate to your project, cause, organization or at least work on it.

What’s worse is when this translates into a sense of entitlement that everyone MUST donate to your project, cause, organization or at least work on it, and if they don’t, you’re secretly pissed at them, because you work 24/7 on it.

This mentality skews relationships from a place of equality, mutual respect, and open inquiry towards a “what can I get from this person” mentality – will it be money? value-added services?

Granted, this dynamic can be as prevalent in the business community, except in the private sector there is a tacit understanding of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, whereas in the nonprofit sector, what you can “get out of the other person” will be mentally written off as a “donation.”

Sadly, I noticed that in my nonprofit and social activist community, favors seem to be a one-way street, recieved as some kind of entitlement. By contrast, in my community of friends and colleagues who are business professionals, there is more awareness that no one truly has to do anything for you. I have found that if I step out of my way to do a favor for business colleague, I tend to see timely reciprocation and appreciation, more so than among my do-gooder nonprofit activist friends.

3) Taking the moral high ground and failing to listen

Nonprofit fundraisers and activists are often highly educated people who have taken below market salaries to work on worthy, interesting, heroic causes and cool projects. This scenario can often illicit a sense of self-sacrificing superiority and judgemental behavior towards mainstreamers who are not actively trying to save the world.

Interestingly, one would think that the social sector would be endowed with a higher level of social consiousness, and therefore more positive, ethical behavior. However, I’ve found just as much power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and unethical behavior in the nonprofit sector as in the private sector, except it’s a little more annoying when everyone claims to be doing good.

Because activists are often at the pulpit educating the masses of the evils of multinational corporations, GMOs, and greenhouse gasses, we often fail to listen. And because we don’t listen, we don’t realize we are shoving an unpalatable message down other people’s throats and fail to understand why more people won’t wear hemp and drive veggie fuel cars.

We tend to assume we have the answers and then proceed to tell others what they should do. In the case of my well-meaning friend, it would have been better if she had gotten to know my new friend a little better, heard about his experiences in Latin America, asked questions, ascertained where her insights and experience might me appropriate to his needs before trying to upsell him on anything.

Unfortunately her approach put him off and shut down what could have been a rewarding dialogue and future collaboration had the relationship been cultivated more naturally.

Which brings me to 3 antidotes to these negative behavioral traits.

1) Have gratitude, believe in abundance

It’s easy to believe that all social ills can be solved with money and that there is never enough money to solve all the problems in the world, like starvation, disease, war, etc. And indeed some regions of the world are wealthy while other regions suffer from a chronic lack of basic necessities.

My point is not to argue whether there enough physical resources exist – more to encourage a shift in attitude around the question of abundance. Sure, it would be great to have more resources, more funding, bigger and better programs. But sometimes you just have what you have.

Your whole quality of experience as an activist, fundraiser, program manager will be remarkably different if you begin with an appreciation of what you’ve already raised and what you can do with it creatively. By coming from a place of gratitude, rather than entitlement, disappointment, or frantic urgency to raise more and more cash, you will likely affect more positive change due to the attitude you bring to the project and the people around you.

Just as much as a huge allocation of cash can be mismanaged and wasted, a small amount can be made to go a long way. If you come from the perspective that there is always enough to affect some postive change, chances are, you will succeed and inspire more people around you to help and to give.

In addition, gratitude is an excellent reminder that not only did someone find it important to help your project, they found it important to do it through you. They could have just easily contributed to another project or a similar cause but NOT through you.

I notice that when I am in a place of gratitude, I tend to recognize and act upon opportunities to reciprocate favors or help out others than if I am in a mindframe of scarcity and feeling entitlement.

2) Start from a place of friendship and shared interests

Any time you perceive another individual to be a potential “donor”, “contact” or “client”, you’ve already placed limitations and agendas on that relationship. Chasing high net worth individuals and establishing a relationship based their money and not on their inherent value as a human being quickly becomes transparent. Besides, most high net-worth people who are used to being courted for their money can smell this tactic a mile away.

The truth is, both you as an activist fundraiser, and your potential donor, client, professional contact have shared interests, and those interests are real. By beginning with your shared interest – be it the rainforest, indigenous issues, wild cat conservation – you can at least begin a dialogue, cultivate a relationship, then grow a friendship. A money transaction be most likely to occur when sufficient goodwill and trust have been cultivated.

This dialogue doesn’t even have to begin as a face to face interaction. That’s what annual reports, websites, blogs, newsletters, public events and other communication channels are for. In many cases, that’s all the dialogue that’s needed for a person to decide to give to your cause.

At least get a website

If you are a really small shop and don’t even have a website, then you will need to invest the time in developing a solid referral network and personal one to one relationships so that the other party can get a good sense of who you are and what you can offer. As this can be a lot of work, and duplicated work as you will have to repeat your story to each new individual, it may behoove you to get your credentials up on a website and let your website do the talking.

3) Listen with honesty, humility and a genuine sense of inquiry

Activists love to tell people what to do. Most people don’t like to be told what to do. Most people, when they get involved with an organization or social cause, want to derive a sense of participation, personal enrichment, and learning.

As an activist, organizer, fundraiser, or consultant your best recourse is to listen, question and understand how you can create an experience that is rewarding to your constituents.

I learned this lesson best from the business community. In the private sector, I noticed that the most successful sales people are those who have a relationship approach to sales, rather than a selling approach to sales. The best account reps are those who ask a lot of questions, and then start to hone in on the right questions. Then, they’ve figured out what it is you really needed help with, and then before you know it, they’ve advised you, answered your questions, solved your problem and upsold you on a product you are more than happy to pay for. The fact that they will invest a certain amount of time in educating the customer is a given.

Fundraising and social activism is not too different from sales. You are selling a vision of a better world to your constituents, and cultivating their trust that you can solve those problems. Your competitors are other compelling organizations in your space. Your value-add is that you can do a better job, or provide a unique solution. Expect that you will have to invest time into educating your constituents before they support you.

It’s a given.

[tags]social activism, nonprofit, rainforest, conservation, fundraising[/tags]