Blog
What Is Mission Driven Volunteering?
From the new Spark whitepaper, The Mission Driven Volunteer, written with Peggy Hoffman: A number of research studies and innovative volunteer-supported projects…provide us with a new working definition for volunteerism: giving one’s time and talent…
Read More →Problems with the Current Model
From the new Spark whitepaper, The Mission Driven Volunteer, written with Peggy Hoffman: The current model of volunteering in associations, based on standing committees, is broken, leading to: Difficulty recruiting volunteers Do-nothing committees Poorly attended…
Read More →Announcing: The Mission Driven Volunteer
I’m excited to announce the third Spark white paper – The Mission Driven Volunteer – co-authored with Peggy Hoffman, CAE, President of Mariner Management. This week, I’ll be blogging about the contents of the whitepaper….
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In Order to Advance, Sometimes You Have to Retreat
Next week will mark one year in business for Spark Consulting. Thanks to the advice of several wise friends who’ve been down this road before me, I scheduled my first “get outta Dodge” corporate retreat,…
Read More →10 Tips for Creating an Effective Marketing Piece
I’m headed to Providence to speak at CESSE this week, and one of the sessions I’ll be participating in will be an idea swap where we’ll be sharing marketing materials. I’ll be facilitating the discussion,…
Read More →Getting Lean
Is it just me, or is lean process trending? I recently read a great Harvard Business Review article on the lean startup. According to HBR, lean: …favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition,…
Read More →Association Alumni Networks
I was recently reading an article in Harvard Business Review on the changing employer-employee relationship. The main point of the article, to quote, is: The time has come, we [authors Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and…
Read More →The Looming Retirement Crisis
No, I don’t mean the typical “Boomers haven’t saved enough!” wailing, although that’s certainly likely to be a problem. I mean the hourglass problem. As in, there are somewhere between 72-79 million Baby Boomers, and…
Read More →Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
The presentation Peggy Hoffman, Eric Lanke, and I recently gave at ASAE’s Marketing, Membership and Communications Conference on volunteer engagement was about learning to manage volunteers by being a volunteer, aka “Walking a Mile in…
Read More →Do You SAVE?
First, marketing had the 4 Ps: Product, aka what you’re selling Price, aka what it costs Placement, aka how do you get your product to your customers Promotion, aka how are you selling your product…
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