Hey St. Louis, if you want to have a rockin’ good time AND help raise relief aid for Haiti, come on over to Highlands Brewing in Kirkwood next Thursday night, February 4th at 7:30.

Roger Ash, Brad Carr, AJ Chivetta, Evan Gatch, Kevin Grossnicklaus, Tim Hanser, Jim Krekeler, Ken Niemann, Randy Parham, Dave Schmid, aka Spontaneous Nugent, everyone’s favorite band, will be rocking the night away for a $5 admissions charge that will all be donated to Hopital Sacre Coeur CRUDEM Foundation in Haiti.

And that’s not all….the night will also feature Reggie of PEC Studios and the PEC Studios Hip Hop Mamas.

Event on Facebook.

Hope to see you there….this is going to be a really great event and I know I don’t have to say how much the people of Haiti are hurting right now.

With the presidential election just a few weeks away and the candidates continuing to make their cases that the other guy is bad (or worse) versus telling us why we should feel good about voting for them, it is good to know that there is something on the ballot in St. Louis County that one can feel good about voting for: Proposition 1.

Proposition 1 calls for a 1/4 cent sales tax to be used for providing necessary mental health services and substance abuse prevention to children in St. Louis County, Mo. It is on the ballot this November due to  a bi-partisan collaborative campaign initiated by non-profits serving children and families in St. Louis County.

An assessment done in Spring 2007 ( 2007-st-louis-county-needs-assessment-1) revealed the extent of the unmet needs resulting from the decline in services resulting from continuing budget cuts for mental health and prevention services such as:

• More than 12,000 St. Louis County children and youth in need of services were going without help!
• Over 151,000 children and youth were not receiving beneficial school-based prevention programs.
• Nearly half a million lives are negatively impacted by the unmet mental health and substance abuse needs in the St Louis County area.

It will appear on the ballot as: “St. Louis County shall, solely for the purpose of establishing a community children’s services fund for the purpose of providing services to protect the well-being and safety of children and youth nineteen years of age or less and to strengthen families, be authorized to levy a sales tax of one-quarter of a cent in the County of St. Louis.”

When you see it on your ballot, St. Louis County, vote YES!

Thanks to Kathleen Buescher, President and CEO of Provident, Inc for making me aware of this.

WOM pal Michael Rubin asked me to pass along a really cool thing that he and Andy Sernovitz are doing in support of their upcoming conference BlogWell, How Big Companies Use Social Media. They are auctioning off tickets to BlogWell on Ebay and 100% of the proceeds go to charity, a different charity each week.

This week the National MS Society will be the beneficiary of the auction proceeds. And if you win, you will be the beneficiary of wisdom from a 4 star line up of corporations such as Home Depot, Wells Fargo, Intel, Cisco, Graco, UPS, Kaiser Permanente, and WalMart. Check out the first auction now.

So learn to blog well and do good all at the same time.

Here is the auction schedule:

Have a vision of social change? Using a new or existing technology tool to turn your vision into reality? Nominate your project for the NetSquared Innovation Award.

The Net Squared Conference is being held on May 29th-30th in San Jose. The conference is focused on 20 social change projects that use technologies, tools and communities of the social web to create sustainable societal change. Net Squared has created a Technology Innovation Fund to financially support projects selected by the NetSquared Community.

If you or someone that you are aware of is working on a social impact project using technology you should consider nominating the project for a NetSquared Innovation Award.

Britt Bravo, Community Builder for NetSquared and Non-Profit and NGO Contributing Editor for Blogher explains that they are looking for projects that:

• Use the power of community and social networks to create change
• Use existing/newly developed technology tools for social impact
• Have a plausible financial model
• Have a clear way to measure success
• Exhibit extraordinary leadership, passion and resourcefulness
• Exhibit a passion for social change

The project guidelines are here and online submissions are being accepted until April 6th 2007, noon PST. On April 9-14 all the projects that have been nominated will be voted on by the public on the NetSquared web site.

On April 16th the top 20 projects will be announced and those 20 NetSquared Featured projects will receive an all expense paid trip to San Jose for the NetSquared Conference.

You can see the most recent projects that have been submitted here.

Tags: NetSquared, NetSquared Conference, NetSquared Innovation Fund Award, Media 2.0, Non-profit, Non-profit tech, innovation, Britt Bravo

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The Net2 conference begins on May 30th in Santa Clara and if like me you are not one of the lucky 350 participants, Marshall Kirkpatrick informed me that there is a remote conference, live online at http://netsquared.org/remote. How cool is that going to be?

There is chat which features "special Q&A sessions with NetSquared speakers and other guests." The agenda is here and a speakers list is here….there is even a frappr map. Net2′s mission is to help non-profits understand and use the tools of the social web, or as they put it remixing the web for social change. Relationships are, of course what non-profit capacity building is all about and the tools of web 2.0, blogs, wikis, online social networks, RSS, podcasting, vlogs are transformational tools to enable non-profits to achieve their missions faster and further than ever before.

So, if you haven’t been to Net2, you need to; and sign up for the remote conference. I’ll see you there!

Tags: Net2, Net Squared, non-profits, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Web 2.0

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Google appointed Dr. Larry Brilliant to head its corporate philantrophic program, Google.org.

Google has pledged 1% of its annual profits and 1% of its stock with a current value of 1$ billion to Google.org. Dr. Brilliant according to the WSJ has had extensive non-profit public health and private-sector tecnology experience. His background includes working to eradicate small pox in India and serving as a physician to members of the Grateful Dead.

Google.org has defined several initial directions: The Acumen Fund which invests in market-based solutions to global poverty, TechnoServe which supports entrepreneurship,  Water Research in Western Kenya, Planet Read an organization that works to improve literacy in India, and the Google Grants program that provides free advertising to non-profits.

Dr. Brilliant says he is going to provide a focus on conquering public health issues as a necessary part of conquering poverty. The WSJ quotes Dr. Brilliant as saying that the Google motto, "Don’t be evil" is what brought him to the Google job, "Its very hard to find another company that starts out on a conscious path to do good and not do evil," he said.

I guess his favorite Grateful Dead song was probably not, Friend of the Devil.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google.org, non-profits, public health, Grateful Dead,

Sean Glass and Chris LaConte of Higher One talk about how they have used Word-of-Mouth to build their on campus financial services business on a podcast at the Wombat Blog .It is fascinating!

Sean and Chris talk about how when they started the business their first encounter with the influence of word-of-mouth was through negative word-of-mouth generated through misinformation about their on-line bill pay product. They astutely realized the importance of getting the right message to the right people by joining the conversation.

They began working with students to identify the physical locations, the venues, on campus where the conversations were happening and began providing students with the tools to facilitate the spread of information about their products. They gave students copy and content that they could then personalize and pass along to their friends and classmates. They identified students who believed in their products and were willing to talk about them and made them Agents.

The Agents were required to provide written reports of their activities and to encourage students to submit  high quality reports, they were given points based upon the quality of their reports. The reports provided Higher One with immediate feedback, both negative and positive, that was then used to make changes, improvements, or otherwise build their business. The Agents functioned as the marketing department as well as the market research department. Impressive!

Sean and Chris say that word-of -mouth can be an entrepreneurs best friend….it is important to give early adopters the tools to amplify word of mouth…this includes finding the venue, providing information to share, and motivating the evangelists. Advertising they said can build awareness and create demand…word-of-mouth drives the decision to buy.

I mentioned Sean in a post in  November about Word-of-Mouth Marketing on college campuses and he emailed to thank me and to tell me that he had started blogging. I am sure he will have a lot to say!

Besides Higher One, which is projecting sales of over $18 million in 2006, the 26 year old has among many other accomplishments, co founded the Yale Entrepreneurial Society a non-profit that promotes entrepreneurship in the greater Yale community and ThreadKill.com which I suggest you read his explanation for, and is an investor in Axon Labs, a sleep research labortory that is developing products to enable peak performance based upon research in neuroscience. The Axon web site links to an American Medical Association study that officially declares waking up the worst part of the day. Just visit our house any school day morning to confirm that.
Technorati Tags: WOMMA, advertising, blogging, WOMBAT Blog. word-of-mouth, buzz marketing, college marketing

USA Today ran a story today about Google Grants, the in-kind advertising program for non-profits utilizing Google Ad-Words. According to USA Today, Google has given away $33 million dollars to 850 non-profits over the last two years.To participate, an organization must have 501(c)(3)
status, and share Google’s "philosophy of community service and have a strong mission to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts."

Religious and political groups are not eligible to participate. Google staffers volunteer to make the decisions about who receives a grant based upon a review of the organization’s application and their determination of the "fit" between the organization’s mission and Google’s stated philosophy. Google states that over 8O% of the organizations that apply for the grants are accepted.

An application can be found on-line. New recipients are selected each quarter.

Technorati Tags Google Grants, Non-profits, Search Engine Marketing

A great deal is being written about the aging baby boomers, that attention grabbing, developmental stage defining, amorphous yet distinct,  demographic group that I count myself as a member of…..I think sometimes that one of our most distinctive characteristics is our lack of acceptance of aging but perhaps that, along with the feeling of distinctiveness itself, is just part of the developmental stage process. So, the addition of aging  to baby boomer, aging baby boomer, as in, I am an aging baby boomer, is a bit disconcerting.

There are several recent blog posts asnd articles specifically addressing the aging baby boomer paradox. David Wolfe at Ageless Marketing frequently writes great posts about aging and baby boomers in the context of marketing. His perspective is shaped by developmental stage theory and in his view the second half of life is very different than the first in regard to internal versus external focus. In our later years, we focus outward and seek to understand the meaning of life, specifically the meaning of our lifes.

James Hillman, a psychologist and the author of 20 amazing books, wrote one book, The Force of Character and the Lasting Life that says that the purpose pf aging is the fulfillment and confirmation of our character. His thesis is that even the ravages of old age have a purpose: changes in sleep patterns allow us to experience elements of nighttime that we missed when asleep or the decline in short term memory allows us the opportunity for longer term reflection. He writes, "Aging makes metaphors of biology." He speaks of life being cyclical and that if we want our lives not to stray too far from our character, we need to make tiny adjustments like a sailor with a hand on the tiller, constantly correcting course though never exactly on-course.

It is in the second half of life that we feel the pull to stay close to our families and to work toward the social good. The benefit to society was termed, "return on experience(ROE)" by Civic Ventures, a San Fransisco non-profit that develops outreach programs for baby boomers and seniors to serve the public good. They are launching a program in June called the "Purpose Prize" that will award $100,000 each to five social entrepreneurs who according to the Wall Street Journal are "individuals age 60 or older who are trying to improve their communities through their work." Applications will be taken at www.leadwithexperience.org beginning on Tuesday, December 6th.

Civic Ventures says according to the Wall Street Journal, that in addition to helping the five social entrepreneurs they also wish to highlight the results of a survey they conducted that indicated that three fifths of adults in their fifties said they wanted to use the next stage of their lives to serve their communities. Civic Ventures notes that the oldest of the baby boomers will turn sixty in January, the healthiest, best educated population of Americans to reach the stage that Civic Ventures calls "pioneers"…a stage of life between middle and later life, neither young nor old. Essentially, baby boomers will become senior boomers….as we turn sixty we will be, now let’s not choke when we say it, seniors.

The Senior Lawyers Project is another non-profit that uses over 60 talent for the prublic good. With a budget of $175,000 and three employees, they have sent 200 US attorneys to developing counties over the past four years.

Technorati Tags:
social entrepreneurship, non-profits, baby boomers, aging

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Leo Burnett, a Publicis Group agency, has just launched a kind of non-profit American Idol called Packaged Good. Burnett is requesting proposals from non-profits that are in need of a marketing campaign. They are looking for an unknown entrepreneurial nonprofit with potential to become known, ala Habitat for Humanity.

"Our goal, as always, is to invest ourselves and our expertise in a worthycause. What differentiates this new effort from our pro bono assignments are three key elements," said Leo Burnett USA Chief  MarketingOfficer Ben Kline."We want to build a brand from scratch. We want the relationship to belong-term. And we want to fully leverage our strengths to help a worthy cause receive the awareness and recognition it deserves."

The deadline for submission is December 20th. Political and religious groups need not apply according to the Wall Street Journal. A decision will be made in early January. Complete details are available at the Packaged Good web site.

Technorati Tags: Leo_Burnett, Packaged_Good, nonprofit

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