Guest Blogger's blog

By Marc W. Halpert and Colleen McKenna

Editor’s note: “Company Pages” may sound like something only for-profit businesses should care about. But those pages provide valuable visibility to nonprofits as well. On Wednesdays, we’ll be running a five-part guest series on how nonprofits can reap significant benefits from LinkedIn’s Company Pages.

LinkedIn’s Press Center reported that as of August 2011, more than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages. How does a nonprofit stand out in the crowd? By continually updating, of course, but also by adding its logo, value proposition, key causes and services, hiring information, employees, and other social media activity.

By Marc W. Halpert and Colleen McKenna

Editor’s note: “Company Pages” may sound like something only for-profit businesses should care about. But those pages provide valuable visibility to nonprofits as well. On Wednesdays, we’ll be running a five-part guest series on how nonprofits can reap significant benefits from LinkedIn’s Company Pages.

 A complete LinkedIn profile is essential if you are to reap the benefits of LinkedIn’s connections and every individual profile adds value to the company profile.

By Marc W. Halpert and Colleen McKenna

Editor’s note: “Company Pages” may sound like something only for-profit businesses should care about. But those pages provide valuable visibility to nonprofits as well. On Wednesdays, we’ll be running a five-part guest series on how nonprofits can reap significant benefits from LinkedIn’s Company Pages.

Nonprofits overlook or ignore the easy and obvious marketing opportunity that LinkedIn provides. With LinkedIn your nonprofit can be seen by a potential audience of 135 million+. Do you want to look less than your best to that audience? If not, why is your   organization’s company page incomplete or absent? 

You can probably think of several reasons: 

Nonprofits wrestle with continuous turnover in the development sector and with changes in staffing at lower echelons. Layer on top of those problems the little-to-no time you have to do anything other than mission-critical tasks. Thus, the mere thought of something else to maintain isn’t appealing, BUT that is actually why LinkedIn will be beneficial to you and your organization.

Whether the organization’s pages are used for branding, business development, recruiting, or potential funding/alliances and partnerships, LinkedIn provides a stage on which to show how vital your nonprofit is to its cause, especially when in competition with other nonprofits.

by Farra Trompeter

As a nonprofit fundraiser, this is my favorite time of year. While others make vacation plans, I work with my colleagues to devise exciting integrated fundraising campaigns for nonprofit organizations. 

Study after study shows how most nonprofits see their biggest influx of donations—especially those that come in via email/web/social media—during the last few months, if not days, of the year.

Fellow Big Duck strategist, Rachel Hope Allison, and I have focused on developing online fundraising strategies and campaigns for more than 10 years. With that experience in hand, along with previous training in direct mail and telemarketing programs for nonprofits, we’ve developed a handy list of 12 ingredients for successful multi-channel or integrated fundraising campaigns.

by Farra Trompeter

This summer, I had the pleasure of learning, teaching, sharing, and absorbing lots of great ideas at Social Media for Nonprofits, a conference series curated by Darian Rodriguez Heyman and Ritu Sharma and sponsored by NTEN. The conference made its New York debut, after passing through San Francisco and Washington, DC, where it similarly drew large crowds of eager nonprofit staffers, enthusiastic consultants, and yes, even a few services.

by Marc Halpert

Recently at a networking luncheon in New York City, when it was my turn in the introductions portion of the agenda, I dubbed myself a “schizo-preneur.” Some eyebrows rose and there were a few chuckles, but the point I was making is that I have two seemingly divergent businesses that I manage to bring together to help my clients.

As the others introduced themselves, there appeared to be other “schizos” like me -- more than a dozen in a room of 45 networking colleagues! I submit that this economy has forced entrepreneurs to open multiple businesses to keep the cash flow pipeline full(er).

So how can you portray yourself best, given your different business interests? How do you show that you can be a valuable business partner?

by Lauren Abele

For entrepreneurs looking to positively impact people, planet, and profit by launching a triple bottom line enterprise, financing opportunities are scarce.  Why? Traditional investors—like banks, angels, and VCs—tend to look exclusively at financial return on investment and ignore social impact when making an investment decision. On the other hand, most foundations and other nonprofit funders, which traditionally have funded projects with high social and environmental impact, are either unable to or not interested in funding for-profit companies. With this funding dichotomy, where is there room to do well and do good?

by Randy Epstein

What type of umbrella do you use?  

1.   The one your company or bank gave you?  
2.   The one you chose and bought because it was super big or punk?
3.   Or the one you quickly grabbed from the shelf on your way to the office?

By Robin Mockenhaupt, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Last month Robin Mockenhaupt, Chief of Staff at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, attended the Social Impact Exchange conference. Here she shares her perspective on the value of strategic collaborations in scaling for social impact.

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons features a group of wolves on a mountaintop howling at the moon. One of them says, “Do you think we’re having an impact?” That’s what it often feels like in philanthropy; we’re all up there howling at the moon.

This year’s Social Impact Exchange conference was a great opportunity to bring people together from traditional philanthropy and donor advised funds, as well as high net worth individuals, to engage in a dialogue about the complex issues that are inherent in trying to drive innovation and impact. We’ve walked away better able to understand how we scale promising innovation. We recognize the solutions that we’re all trying to work toward require us to enter into strategic collaborations with many different kinds of partners. We cannot scale something on our own.