Let’s face it; every day we use our smartphones and mobile technology to get through daily and simple tasks, from finding information, to exercise, to learning new languages, even finding the nearest grocery store. The majority of mobile application software we use today has been “gamified,” and the same ideas are starting to enter the social sector.

Global 2000 businesses have recognized gamification as a powerful tool to engage consumers and motivate them to purchase more products. Yet not all organizations in the social sector have gained this knowledge, and some continue to fail when integrating gamification into their operations.

In some cases, fundraisers become casino nights or raffles drive donors to purchase family vacations for two to three times more than their standard price, all just to support a charity. Fundraising is a way that gamification can be utilized, but it’s not the bottom line for the social sector.  When thinking about gamification, nonprofits have to start thinking outside of the box if they truly want to engage the masses into more positive social behaviors.

Simple tasks that would normally cost a nonprofit time and money can be delegated through one mobile application and can create a friendly environment for the user. Pop-up messages as reminders, rewarding users for their engagement, badges, progress bars, and even weekly challenges drive a little competition to keep users on their toes. When a…

Every marketer understands the challenge of competing for attention among a sea of content with limited resources. The problem is even more acute for nonprofits, which typically experience stricter budgets and more mission-related limits on what they can do when they market.

Nevertheless, great marketing is possible for nonprofits. These are techniques even smaller organizations can implement every day to improve their marketing efforts, see more impressive results, and gain even more loyalty from their communities.

Partner with your community

Influencer marketing is the latest craze in marketing, for good reason. It means getting organic, word-of-mouth buzz about products from people who others listen to. It's also shockingly economical and far more effective than traditional marketing techniques. In the nonprofit context, this means reaching out to members of your community.

Create, maintain, and remind about your nonprofit's value

Every nonprofit needs to sign new people up for the email list, and entice new people to join the community. Each organization also needs to keep community members loyal and active. The way we can do this is the same way traditional marketers do it: by creating value that attracts people, making sure we maintain it, and reminding community members about how much value we're offering.

If you want people to sign up for…

The Great Recession and its aftermath have forced nonprofits to seek out new and different ways to address their challenges. In order to make change that is sustainable and scalable, additional funding sources need to be considered to help nonprofits achieve their core missions. Charity and government support remain crucial but are insufficient to address the magnitude of the task at hand. Solving basic social problems requires a level of sustainable investment that donors and government cannot provide alone. Social enterprise models may well offer an answer.

Nonprofit organizations are vital to the nation’s economic well-being and have nearly doubled in the last 30 years (National Center for Charitable Statistics, 2015). More than a million tax-exempt organizations exist in the United States, including public charities, private foundations, and civic organizations—not counting the 220,000 religious congregations that are also registered. However, the traditional reliance of nonprofits on governmental and charitable funding is increasingly unsustainable. Shrinking government budgets and greater competition for ever-fewer dollars are reducing the scale and effectiveness of nonprofits in meeting the nation’s growing challenges and intractable problems. It may be time to rethink how these important social organizations are funded.

Should nonprofits become more aggressive in adopting new business models that can add needed revenue? Could this ease…

“Proposition 22: The normal expectation ought to be that success will be very difficult to achieve in cross-sector collaborations.” - John Bryson, et al., "The Design and Implementation of Cross-Sector Collaborations"

Collaboration is emerging as a popular vehicle to solve complicated problems that our communities face. So much, in fact, that organizations are boarding the train without a map, a travel bag, and even a destination. Worse yet, they have not considered the repercussions of boarding the collaboration train. Collaborations require a high level of understanding and resource investment. There are resources, frameworks, and institutes dedicated to study of cross-sector collaboration, but all collaborators heed the proposition above, “success will be very difficult.”

You may ask, “Why worry?”

It is as likely that a “wrong” collaboration can lead to detrimental reverberations through all sectors, as that the “right” collaboration can lead to positive system-wide change.

Regardless of the player considering cross-sector collaboration - CEO, government official, or nonprofit CEO/board executive - the goal is that each sector understands that there are strengths, weaknesses, and skills that should be collectively leveraged to engineer an integrative solution aimed at their community target. So what are the problems?

The Problems:

• Sector institutional logics: Each sector has a…

Today’s world is an IT world, and nonprofits that do not recognize and accept the inevitability of this fact may find themselves fading into the background of the public’s consciousness. IT provides nonprofits with a host of tools for building capacity, thereby exponentially increasing the potential for mission fulfillment. However, Gordon (1998) notes the existence of a wide gap between available IT capabilities and nonprofits’ current usage, and he suggests that bridging that gap will improve capacity building. For example, of 165 nonprofits examined in October 2015, only 58% provided links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts from their websites and vice versa (Koenig). Even when nonprofits have websites and social media site (SMS) accounts, they demonstrate a disturbing propensity for failing to respond to direct questions from the public. The life-blood of nonprofits flows through the veins of an interested community, which makes monitoring SMS and responding to posts an essential element of nonprofits’ effective capacity building.

The causal relationship between IT usage and capacity building correlates to the definition of capacity building – “the ability of nonprofit organizations to fulfill their missions in an effective manner” DeVita and Fleming (2001). This requirement for efficacy demands that nonprofits begin thinking of the adoption of IT as a strategic investment rather than an operational expense. Only when the strategic planning…