On-Line Videos Should Also Leverage Social Media
- Image via CrunchBase
After yesterday’s announcement about the National Aphasia Association’s evening gala with Second Stage Theater in New York, we return to our week’s topic of social media and outreach. Streaming video (Think: YouTube or Vimeo) has really come-of-age in the last few years, and many not-for-profit organizations take advantage of it. We have discussed YouTube’s not-for-profit channel in the recent past, which is a great way to get your organization’s video and information out to the world. Today we discuss some ways to ensure your videos draw viewers back into your organization.
| Category Marketing, Media Review, Nonprofit, Technology, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Fundraising: National Aphasia Association – A Night At The Theater To See “Wings”
Image via Wikipedia
A few weeks ago in our Perspectives series we interviewed the Program Director of the Snyder Center for Aphasia Life Enhancement (SCALE) in Baltimore, Denise McCall, and the Technology Coordinator, Jes Porro. That story grew so rich that we set up an interview with Ellayne Ganzfried, Executive Director of the National Aphasia Association, which will appear in our next installment of Perspectives. In that interview, Ellayne was especially proud of her association’s work with Second Stage Theater in New York City, which has reprised the 1978 play “Wings,” written by Arthur Kopit. On Tuesday, November 2nd, Second Stage Theater and the NAA have teamed up for an evening of outreach and fundraising through the play.
| Category Community, Healthcare, Interview | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Twitter Twice Singled Out As Prognosticator
Twice in the past week Jared Keller of TheAtlantic.com has posted stories of how scholars have found correlations between trends on Twitter and changes in the human condition (for better or worse). Academics have developed algorithms that can survey the ‘mood’ in the Twittersphere by seeking out specific terms or expressions of sentiment, then applying further ‘fuzzy logic’ algorithms to correlate the trends expressed in Twitter with such exchanges as stock markets and communicable diseases. What makes Twitter the sample base of choice for developing prediction models for such disparate experiences?
| Category Community, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Unemployment: Can Social Media Help Improve The Situation?
There is a new group of people who define themselves based on the economic crisis. We’ve had ‘the unemployed,’ ‘the underemployed,’ ‘the seasonal unemployed,’ etc… And for those who are now coming to the end of their extended unemployment support (extended to ninety-nine weeks in the face of the Great Recession): the “Ninety-Niners.” They are people who are about to reach or have just passed that threshold of social support and are still looking for work. What could improve the situation?
| Category News and Current Affairs, Politics, Sustainability, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Social Media Series: How SM Savvy Is Your City?
This week we want to present a brief series catching up with the world of communications and social media, a world that we have often explored though not recently. We begin with a look at a report put out by NetProspex concerning the use of social media among America’s urban centers. The report focuses on the uses of social media among the larger businesses and corporations. Not surprisingly, businesses are well-embedded in the social network. But what patterns lie beneath the surface?
| Category Media Review, News and Current Affairs, Press Release, Technology, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
The Foreclosure Crisis: The Same, But Different
The economic news relayed via our blog this week has not been much for confidence building, and we close the week with reports of a bleak twist in the ongoing foreclosure crisis. The news of the past couple of weeks has been that reporters and most of the fifty states’ attorneys general have been pursuing the ‘robo-signing’ services‘ that have churned out foreclosure proceedings on people who might even have been in good standing. Now third-party investors are demanding that the banks they support clarify who owns which properties and who owes what amounts to whom. Turns out that the banks can not readily provide that information, as the paperwork and loans on the properties were sliced-and-diced in a process called ‘securitization.’ Some pundits see in this latest twist the undermining of some of the first principles of capitalism: private property and the legal right to register, retain, and/or resell it.
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, News and Current Affairs | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Tech: Microsoft Will Join The Cloud With Office 365
Microsoft recently released Office 2011 for the Mac, built on the materials added to Office 2010 for the PC. Two notable changes were that the old Entourage program that acted as the calendar/email/address book feature has been replaced by a more robust and truer-to-the-original Outlook, and the opportunity to record macros has been returned. Mac users might be pleased if they want Microsoft products, but the real news from Redmond is the release of the beta version of the Office 365 service, which melds the office suite with Microsoft Enterprise server technologies, allowing Mac, PC, and smartphone users access not only to their company’s Office software but to shared documents and secure collaborative communications tools. Leaving aside the threatened expectation of working on Christmas, Eid, Rosh Hashana, what might the service mean for the work place?
| Category Marketing, Press Release, Technology, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Smarter Cities: Opportunity For Corporate And Community Cooperation?
I had a late night out last night (No, nothing particularly entertaining to report; just a late night) and had to drive home along much of the length of a major urban road in northern Baltimore city. Twice I sat at red lights for over a minute while the non-existent traffic on the small cross street got its turn. While cursing my luck and tempting my inner demons simply to pass through the lights, I also wondered what the cost to the city would be to have either traffic-monitoring cameras retrofitted to the lights or at least to have a timer that moved the lights to flashing yellow for the main street at, say midnight. Why couldn’t we have a light/traffic system ‘smart’ enough to keep the cars moving wherever possible or necessary? My thoughts were mimicking IBM’s periodic commercials for ‘building a smarter planet,’ of course. Could my impatience and my desire to respond to my better angels both benefit? Am I allowing myself to be fitted into a corporate grid of inflexibility and power?
| Category Community, Opinion, Revitalization, Sustainability, Technology | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Interview: Andrew Vincent & Allison Pendell-Jones of Greater Baltimore AHC
If you’ve ever watched Extreme Home Makeover, you’ve seen the kind of satisfaction one group of people can bring to another by providing them with a home that suits their needs. While the Greater Baltimore AHC (GBAHC) hasn’t caught this kind of ‘extreme’ media attention, they’ve certainly caught the attention of the Baltimore area. GBAHC is part of AHC Inc., a private, nonprofit developer of affordable housing that’s been providing quality homes for low- and moderate-income families since 1975. A subsidiary of AHC Inc., an affordable housing developer in Arlington, VA, Greater Baltimore AHC opened in 2004 to address the need for more affordable housing in the Baltimore region. Today GBAHC has six properties with more than 1,100 affordable apartments.
| Category Affordable Housing, Community, Interview, Revitalization, Special Series, Sustainability | | Comments Off
Written by: Cate Neilson
Foreclosures Slowly Start Moving Again, Though Distrust Remains
A week or so ago, Bank of America announced it would put a hold on its foreclosure proceedings while it reviewed the processes that moved the foreclosure claims past lawyers, whose signatures were required. Other financial institutes followed suit. The decision came in the midst of growing fears that the foreclosures on tens of thousands of homes had taken place without real human oversight of the paper trail legally required for the process. Today Bank of America announced it would return to the process in at least 23 states, confident that their materials in those states were being properly vetted. How have politicians and neighborhood associations responded to the hold and release?
| Category Affordable Housing, Banking & Finance, Local/Maryland, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
A Compendium Of Recent News About (The Effects Of) Unemployment
Perhaps rainy days and Mondays can get us down, but so can recent economic news. And we have had a fair amount of that in the last few days. For example, the last jobs report before the midterm elections shows a notable reduction in public-sector jobs (mostly caused by the ending of the last of the Census 2010 jobs and the firings/redundancies made by state and local governments) with a slight uptick (ca.64,000) of private-sector jobs. An uptick is an uptick, but the drain of long term unemployment has made most Americans somewhere between hankering and obsessed with changing the political makeup of Congress in a few weeks time. Long term unemployment – after the credit and banking meltdown, after the housing bubble popping – has also sorely curtailed our abilities to support our charities and not-for-profits, as recent reports demonstrate.
| Category Banking & Finance, Grants and Funding, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Nonprofit, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
The Gaps In The New Logo From The Gap (Design By Proxy)
Yesterday we discussed the rise and fall of the new logo for The Gap (rising and falling in about three days). The Gap Company is not the first to take on a logo redesign only to have the effort eviscerated by customers and critics (See, for examples, Tropicana and Pepsi. If the fact of the fallout over The Gap is not especially new, why might it nevertheless portend a new way for corporations to deal with their public faces?
Or I'll Just Give Myself Away
The open contest to redesign the logo for The Gap was posted earlier this fall at 99Designs.com. The results, at least the top 4660, are available for public viewing, and many of them deserve consideration. Indeed, the who collection is an excellent study of how we might respond to combinations of fonts and color (mostly the traditional navy blue). The response to the winner was uniformly negative, except, apparently by those at The Gap delegated to made such decisions. But what we wanted to talk about today was the fallout over the contest itself. (more…)
| Category Marketing, Media Review, Opinion, Sustainability, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Branding: The Gaps In The New Logo From The Gap (Attacks From The Vox Populi)
The Once-And-Future Logo
The people (er, ‘lots of people’) have spoken. And they are miffed. The social-media universe (expanding, yet sometimes surprisingly small) was all atwitter with comments about the new logo accepted (momentarily) by The Gap after it opened up the opportunity to anyone who wanted to participate in a design contest. The entries ran into the many hundreds as individuals and small firms sought to score a designing coup by having their logo picked.
As things turned out, The Gap released the new logo and immediately became the target of a barrage of complaints both against the unnecessary efforts to redesign a respected logo and against the qualities of the chosen new logo. What does the brouhaha have to say about design and social-media marketing?
| Category Marketing, Media Review, Opinion, Web and Print | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Fundraising: What Is Next For Philanthropy? Acting Bigger And Adapting Better
Earlier this summer The Monitor Institute released a significant white paper penned by Katherine Fulton, Gabriel Kasper, and Barbara Kibbe that wants to challenge philanthropic organizations to see beyond the present fundraising doldrums toward the structural changes that requires such organizations to behave differently, whatever the economic environment. Their answers challenge some of the standard presuppositions they believe that nonprofit and fundraising organizations have been using since the turn of the twentieth century. (more…)
| Category Banking & Finance, Grants and Funding, Nonprofit | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Columbus Day: Hotly Contested and Coldly Ignored
Perhaps no other holiday on the American calendar raises such contentious debate and such comfortable indifference. Christopher Columbus’s expedition of three ships from Spain landed on 12 October, 1492 in what are now called the Bahamas. That landing was followed by three other expeditions led by Columbus, the last of which included his son, Diego Colombo, who documented the journey and helped his father write up narratives of the first three.
The landing is marked in various ways throughout the Spanish and English-speaking Americas (not, therefore, in Brazil). In the US, banks and government agencies are closed, and parades are occasionally held, at least on the east coast. But no meal, no pic-nic tradition, no fireworks or gift-exchange, marks this particular holiday.
| Category Community, News and Current Affairs, Opinion, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Foreclosure Assistance To Banks Almost Slips Past Obama Administration
President Obama enacted a ‘pocket veto’ earlier today, blocking a bill coming from Congress (HR3808) that would have sped up the status of numerous foreclosure proceedings. The pitch for the bill was that it would ease interstate commerce by allowing states to expedite each others’ foreclosure confirmations, and thus help clear out the backlog of foreclosures that many blame for the ongoing malaise in the housing market. According to CNNMoney.com, “The bill would have required federal and state courts to recognize documents that were notarized in other states. Both congressional chambers approved the legislation by voice votes, a move used for noncontroversial bills. However, housing advocates and attorneys warned that the bill might have made it more difficult to challenge the quality of foreclosure records at a time when reports of improperly foreclosed homes are increasing.”
Not only are such reports increasing, one can not help but also smell the presence of big-bank lobbyists getting their way. Or are we being paranoid?
| Category Affordable Housing, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Opinion, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Is Your Organization’s Status With The IRS Up-To-Date?
http://www.irs.gov/charities/index.html
In our final follow-up/ announcement concerning a subject we (and many others) have periodically discussed over the last year, the IRS has established 15 October (in but one week!) as the deadline for all tax-exempt nonprofits and charitiable organizations to re-assert their status via the Form 990. Tax-exempt organizations are likely to keep their status once the form is submitted, but if they do not submit the form, they will find their organizations retroactively taxed back to May 2010.
| Category Banking & Finance, Grants and Funding, National/International, News and Current Affairs | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Maryland Schools Strive To Green Their Lunches
Last week on the blog “Audacious Ideas” (sponsored by the Soros-funded Open Society Institute of Baltimore that the MKCREATIVE blog featured earlier this month) Jill Wrigley wrote about establishing “a garden in every school.” Her ambition is to establish gardens that become fields of learning such cognitive skills as science (chemistry, biology), math (areas, fractions, scales of measurement), art (design, colors), and of course, nutrition.
| Category Community, Greening, Local/Maryland, News and Current Affairs, Urban Farming | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Interview: The Snyder Center for Aphasia Life Enhancement
Most of us like to talk. We like to talk a lot. But have you ever stopped for a moment and considered how different life might be if you couldn’t seem to find the words you wanted to use in a sentence—not just one sentence, but every sentence, every day? People with a condition called aphasia may even have trouble reading this article, but once they comprehend it’s discussing their disorder, they’ll know exactly how it feels to deal with this problem every moment of their lives.
Promotional Video from SCALE
| Category Community, Healthcare, Interview, Nonprofit, Special Series | | 3 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
TARP: Unpopularity Of Program Belies Its Success
In the interests of full disclosure and blogospheric transparency, I should admit I was against the TARP program when proposed by the flailing George W. Bush administration in 2008. It seemed a rush job and a chance for the administration’s friends to get painlessly out of an operation they had botched themselves with absurdly risky loans divvied into absurdly anonymous proportions to resell back to their colleagues. Yet the ledgers of surviving banks (albeit too-much-bigger-to-fail) and the money moving back toward the Treasury suggest that TARP might have been the best bad way to keep the economy at least alive on the table. But as TARP passed with overwhelming support through a Democratically controlled Congress to a Republican White House, who gets political credit?
| Category Banking & Finance, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Politics | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
Social Media And The Upcoming Elections
New Media/Social Media have had some stunning influences on recent elections all over the world. In Britain’s election this past May, when the long-standing Labor Party was forced to give way to a Conservative/Liberal-Democrat coalition, the Guardian newspaper and blog crowned it “The First Social Media Election.” Australia had a similar outcome of a hung parliament in August after an election rich in SM outreach. Most dramatically (nay, “dangerously”), last year’s disputed Iranian elections were themselves especially driven by social media, but the protests were and continue to be (For an interview with the Iranian-American who returned to her homeland for the elections, click here.). What will SM and the US midterm elections look like?
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Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD