How to use your talents for greater purpose, positive impact & lasting satisfaction

Guest post by Lorna Li
Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Green Marketing TV & Entrepreneurs for a Change

I recently received a review copy of the book Work on Purpose by Lara Galinsky and Kelly Nuxoll of Echoing Green, an organization that provides seed funding to social entrepreneurs. “Work on Purpose” profiles the lives of five social entrepreneurs and how each one of them arrived at founding organizations that leverage their unique skills and experience for a greater good.

I also just received a review copy of Nonprofit Management 101 from Darian Heyman, former executive director of Craigslist Foundation.  At 672 pages, it’s a veritable tome of wisdom and advice from such change-making luminaries as Paul Hawkin, Van Jones, Beth Kanter, Craig Newmark, and Lynn Twist, to name a few. But Kimberly Hendler’s section “Taking Charge of Your Nonprofit Sector Career” really spoke to the brazen careerist in me.

All this juicy reading has gotten me thinking a lot about what it takes to develop an exciting career in the social change sector — not just a job but a career that leverages your unique genius for a greater purpose, with excitement, adventure, positive impact and lasting satisfaction.

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you are committed to having work that has meaning. If you’re a careerist like me, every job is a steppingstone toward “awesome career,” every project completed is a new feather in your cap, and you are always on the lookout for the next best opportunity.

Tips on how to align your career with your passions

So here are some tips on taking charge of your career, so that the next best job, project, and person you meet contributes to the development of your exhilarating career as a high-impact change maker.

1Know thyself. This is the most important part of designing your optimal change-making career path. Knowing yourself involves self knowledge on several fronts:

• Skills. You need to take an inventory of your skills, projects and expertise. What is your unique genius? What marketable skills do you have? Will the job let you make a unique, valuable, contribution? Will it allow you to build upon your existing skills? What successful projects have you worked on that would compel future employers? What expertise do you have? What software programs do you know? If you are angling for a fundraising job, your previous experience with a company like Vertical Response may come handy.
• Personality. Are you outgoing and social? Or quiet and analytical? Do you crave freedom and flexibility? Or do you prefer a 9-5 cube environment? Understanding your personality traits is the key to knowing if you will thrive in certain work environment or job position, or if you will feel constrained.
• Lifestyle. What do you require to live and save for the future? Is time more important to you or money? Will the job be a step up in pay and position? Or will it be a lateral move with compelling perks? Or is it about the adventure factor and once in a lifetime opportunity to do something totally out of the box?

• Goals. Where do you see yourself next year? A few years from now? At the end of your years? Are your professional choices taking you closer to those goals? If not, why, not? Is it time to make a change?
• Passion. What makes your heart sing? What kinds of projects do you love? What issues do you care the most about? Do you feel alignment with your organization’s mission and vision?

2Know thy neighbor. This is biblical speak for network like a pro. Networking involves knowing both people and organizations. If you have in mind to shift your career from a more lucrative position in the solar financing industry, to a more altruistic position with a solar social enterprise, you will need to familiarize yourself with the people and players in that space.

3Never stop learning. Self discovery and self development are a lifelong process. Here are four ways to develop yourself personally and professionally:

• New projects and responsibilities. Take on new projects and responsibilities in your current role. This could involve asking your boss to let you assist other projects, shadowing someone in your organization who has a role you are interested in.
• Volunteer and freelance. If you can handle it, take on side projects and freelance opportunities. They can be personal projects or consulting gigs. Learning while working is the best way to pick up new skills and knowledge fast, especially when the pressure is on to deliver.
• Find a mentor. As you network like a pro, you will meet many people who are happy to share what they know with you. Some of those people can become your mentors, even if it is only for a short period of time. Mentorship is a key component of success. In fact, a study of Northwestern MBAs found that mentorship had a positive impact on the careers of both men and women, resulting in average compensation of over $23K more than those without.
• Invest in professional development. This might mean investing in that $2,000 conference pass so you can listen to industry pundits talk about the latest trends in your sector and network with thought leaders. Or paying for the weekend Excel power user workshop. Or hiring a business coach. It’s worth it.

4Tell a compelling story. I am always shocked when I meet an amazingly brilliant person doing incredibly positive things in the world and discover they haven’t dominated the first page of Google results for their name. As a change maker, you owe it to the world to share your knowledge and make your presence known. That way, you can attract more exciting, challenging opportunities to be of greater service.

Here are seven easy channels you can use to tell your story:

• On your personal blog
• By guest blogging
• Through video via YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
• By audio podcasting
• Through photos shared on Picasa or Flickr
• On LinkedIn
• On Facebook

With your personal website or blog serving as the hub, and the other social media sites as the spokes, together you create an integrated online presence that tells the story of who you are, what you are about, what you know, and how you help. If your blog evolves into an engaging community with a life of its own, you now have an audience. All these channels and activities help showcase your unique genius and build your personal brand. And that’s something no one can take away from you.

It’s important to leverage every job as an opportunity to grow and develop more skills. Every once in a while, take a step back, reassess, and ask yourself, what do you hope to accomplish next, and what will it take to get there? As you leap from opportunity to opportunity, pretty soon you’ll find yourself looking back at a pretty remarkable track record.

What do you think?

The post Tips to take charge of your change-making career appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Lorna Li
Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Green Marketing TV & Entrepreneurs for a Change

Ispent 10 years in the nonprofit sector before crossing over to the corporate world, in a sense, out of frustration. Don’t get me wrong. I love the work of many nonprofit organizations, and we need them to provide valuable services that governments fail to provide. However, having seen big, well-funded nonprofits reach levels of bureaucratic inefficiency deserving of communist governments, and having seen too many small, poorly funded nonprofits with big goals crash and burn, I decided to cross over and learn what business was doing right. In particular, one segment of the business community caught my eye, businesses whose goals not only included profit, but included people and the planet. Yep, that’s right – social entrepreneurs.

What is a social entrepreneur?

Like nonprofit activists, social entrepreneurs are visionary individuals with creative solutions for solving some of the world’s most perplexing social problems. Different from nonprofit activists, social entrepreneurs apply the rules of business to find these solutions. A social entrepreneur takes on a complex challenge: how to increase profits and lower the company’s ecological footprint and provide a living wage for its employees and improve the community in which it operates and serves.

That’s a tall measure. How do they do it?

I think it boils down to the relationship with money. Most nonprofit organizations rely on donations and sponsorship. This relationship is valuable but somewhat dysfunctional as it makes nonprofit funding extremely vulnerable to economic downturns, when individual and institutional donors start tightening their purse strings. Often, for smaller nonprofits, program officers find themselves spending more time seeking donations to pay their administrative overhead rather than executing on their program services.

“Free money” also creates other distortions as well: the tendency to spend the money in the absence of powerful feedback mechanisms that businesses typically use such as market response, return on investment and the cost of capital over time. Ongoing “free handouts” in the way of services and goods have been well documented in many cases to exacerbate issues of poverty in developing countries, creating a cycle of victimhood that stymies local enterprise and fails to promote sustainable economic growth.

What nonprofits can learn from social enterprises

Here are four tips from the business world that can help nonprofits:

1. Treat your charitable contributions as if they were investments. In a for-profit enterprise, money typically shows up in three ways: as bank loans, as investments and as earned revenue. When you are dealing with bank financing, you are dealing with interest. When you are dealing with investors, you are dealing with owing them convertible debt or equity. When looking at earned revenue, you are looking at achieving profitability and growth. Therefore, it is in your interest to leverage the capital in ways that generate a higher return. For nonprofits, this may involve adopting strategies that maximize social impact & social amplification for the charitable dollars spent. Programs that leverage charitable funding to empower its constituents to eventually become independent of the services they receive. For example, Samasource provides micro-work opportunities for marginalized people around the world.
2. Design programs that scale. Businesses are always seeking profit maximization and economies of scale. As a nonprofit, your business is the social good, therefore if others copy and improve upon the work you do, the social benefit only spreads, and this good for everyone, especially if it doesn’t cost more to your organization. Design programs that can spread on their own with minimal added cost to the organization. For example, Amazon Conservation Team teaches indigenous peoples to use geo-mapping technologies like GPS and Google Maps to protect their ancestral territories from illegal exploitation. By training and empowering indigenous leaders, they in turn can train and empower other villages and tribes.
3. Leverage the power of new technologies. Businesses are constantly investing in new technologies that improve business efficiency and communications, which improves their competitive edge. Nonprofits should do the same, as this frees up valuable time that can be used toward the execution of important programs. The great news is, a lot of these innovative technologies are low cost or even free. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled mass collaboration to achieve business goals, but they are incredibly powerful when being leveraged to achieve social goals. For example, Ushahidi develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. The mapping software allows users to crowdsource crisis information and plot it on a map, via email, the web, or SMS. When disaster strikes, it’s often difficult to know which areas are the hardest hit, especially since aid agencies and international journalists tend to report from areas that are the least impacted or compromised. Ushahidi’s crisis map of the 2010 Haiti earthquake allowed aid organizations to see which areas that were the worst hit by the disaster, as reported by local Haitian residents.
4. Create earned income streams. Earned revenue streams can provide some relief donor dependency and also has a magical way of making the organization even more attractive to institutional funding. While arts organizations have more easily identifiable earned income streams from admission fees, membership dues, building rentals and sales of souvenirs, opportunities exist for other nonprofits. The Sierra Club has successfully tapped into product licensing, selling a range of products from backpacks, T-shirts and mugs to organic coffee and teas. A partnership with Clorox allows the Sierra Club to earn a percentage of sales from its Green Works natural cleaning product line in exchange for the Sierra Club stamp of approval. Given the tough philanthropic environment, many nonprofits are hitting the market to survive.

By adopting a more capitalistic approach to the business of social change, nonprofits can find new organizational efficiencies and better weather economic downturns. These four tips can help any nonprofit put their donation dollars to work for them rather than the other way around.

The post 4 ways nonprofits can learn from social entrepreneurs appeared first on Socialbrite.

People who manage nonprofit organizations understand just how difficult it can be to make ends meet – especially in a tough economy where fewer people are donating. When every dime goes to spreading your green message, it can be difficult to find a spare $2,000 to $5,000 for a website.

The good news is, with WordPress, you can now create and manage your website without spending thousands of dollars for a web developer.  In fact, your new website may only cost your time!

How to choose your nonprofit’s WordPress theme

The most important thing to consider when selecting a WordPress theme for a nonprofit is layout. You want your visitor to understand what your nonprofit does in one glance. You will need dedicated real estate to showcase your mission statement, key programs & services, and most importantly have a donation box front and center.

Finding a WordPress theme with this layout takes some research, looking through curated lists, like this list of awesome green WordPress themes, or surfing through numerous WordPress theme directories. Finding the right theme for your nonprofit might seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. The good news is, we’ve identified some great WordPress CMS themes that work well with nonprofit organizations, as well as some great WordPress blog themes, for project specific blogging.

Green Stimulus

1Green Stimulus is a free WordPress theme with an animated content slider, customizable social media icons and the ability to embed videos. Green Stimulus is a great option for a sustainability nonprofit, or any nonprofit organization, especially since it was the only free WordPress CMS template we could find.

The nice thing about Green Stimulus is its versatility. You can use the theme as standalone nonprofit website CMS (content management system), with or without a blog. You can also choose to have blog entries published to your website home page – a steady stream of fresh content is good for search engine optimization. You can also completely customize the CSS so that the theme reflects the look and feel of your brand.

To see how easy this theme is to install, watch this video demo of a San Francisco cause marketing agency using Green Stimulus.

Demo | Download

Charity Organization Theme

2Charity Organization template is a gorgeous WordPress CMS theme that includes six call-to-action areas where you can highlight campaigns and solicit involvement, all on the home page. Blog posts appear below the main campaign focus areas. At $55, this beautiful theme is a great value.

Demo | Download

Organic’s Nonprofit Theme

3Organic’s Nonprofit Theme is an attractive $69 theme that includes custom tables and a lot of space for information on your home page. This design will make an impression on volunteers and donors alike. The well thought out layout allows you to feature the most important information about your organization, such as your mission statement, contact information, programs, newsletter sign-up and donation widget.

Demo | Download

Agency Theme

4Agency Theme is a nonprofit WordPress theme by Organized Themes. Designed with nonprofits in mind, Agency Theme is also a great template for religious charitable organizations. It comes with a featured content slider and prominent donation button on the home page, which can be easily removed.

Demo | Download

Organic Theme

5You have a choice between Earth and Ocean with the Organic’s Nonprofit Theme. From the earthy colors to the customizable portfolio, you will find this website theme has everything your nonprofit needs. Your $65 fee even includes a separate blog!

Demo | Download

Down to Earth

6Down to Earth is another theme that showcases earthy colors. You can use the content slider and two-level navigation to present a clean website to your volunteers and donors. The Down to Earth theme costs just $27.

Demo | Download

Coffee Break

7Coffee Break offers you the chance to customize your home page and posts. These posts can include a slideshow from a recent volunteer event or mini features about important donors. Your $70 fee includes 17 styles and various customizable widgets.

Demo | Download

EcoPro

8Your visitors will be impressed with this theme because 10% of your $79 fee goes straight to supporting the environment. This clean theme includes five color options, a content slider and customizable widgets to make your nonprofit organization really stand out.

Demo | Download

Over Easy

9The Over Easy theme features a content slider page that gives you more room to tell the world about your organization. You can choose from seven color schemes, a variety of different home page templates and five customizable widgets – all for just $70!

Demo | Download

Charity Blog Theme

10The Charity WordPress theme is a professional clean cut blog theme in warm colors. There is a dedication section on the home page for your mission statement or project overview, below which your blog posts will appear. At $55 it’s an attractive, easy WordPress blog template to document specific projects and campaigns.

Demo | Download

If you are a nonprofit using WordPress and also have received free Salesforce CRM licenses for donor management, another useful thing to know is that you can use the WordPress-to-Lead plug-in to capture donor leads from your WordPress site.

WordPress is a terrific web publishing solution for frugal nonprofits. If I’ve missed any great nonprofit WordPress themes, feel free to add them in your comments.

The post 10 beautiful nonprofit WordPress themes appeared first on Socialbrite.