The Pivotal Political Decisions On The Young American...

The pivotal political decisions in the young American republic of the late 18th century were made by a select few leaders. These forerunners knew each other at a personal level, and their gregariousness had a remarkable impact on the choices they made in the future. In the words of an accomplished historian and a biographer, Joseph Ellis, these crucial decisions with an astounding aftermath came about â€Å"in a sudden spasm of enforced inspiration and makeshift construction† (3). In addition, in his new non-fiction erudite study, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, published in the year 2000, Ellis strives to illustrate how these decisions came about â€Å"in a sudden spasm of enforced inspiration and makeshift construction during the final decades of the eighteenth century.† (3). Thus, in order to distinguish between categorical truth and romantic fiction, Ellis focuses primarily on the forerunners themselves, wishing to examine how their relationships r esonated through political changes. As an ardent historian, Joseph Ellis has written numerous books on the topic of American history. Some of his most famous include: Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the 1997 National Book Award. After graduating from Yale University and the College of William and Mary, Ellis currently lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and three sons. Joseph Ellis eloquently conveys theShow MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 PagesDavid M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography Allida M. Black, ed., Modern American Queer History Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past Sharon Hartman Strom, Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform Michael Adas, ed., Agricultural and Pastoral SocietiesRead MoreExploring Corporate Strategy - Case164366 Words   |  658 Pagesstrategy development in the ï ¬â€šavours and fragrances industry. Key: ââ€" Ã¢â€"  = major focus ââ€"  = important subsidiary focus ECS8C_C01.qxd 22/10/2007 11:54 Page 603 A GUIDE TO THE CLASSIC CASES ON THE COMPANION WEBSITE 603 CASE Coors – an American brewer moves into the UK market. Barclaycard – a market leader’s strategic options for maintaining market dominance. GSK – the wisdom of mergers for a global pharmaceutical giant. Brewery Group Denmark – how a small player survives in a globalisingRead MoreContemporary Issues in Management Accounting211377 Words   |  846 Pagesscholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the UnitedRead MoreProject Mgmt296381 Words   |  1186 Pagesto Text Topics Chapter 1 Modern Project Management Chapter 8 Scheduling resources and cost 1.2 Project defined 1.3 Project management defined 1.4 Projects and programs (.2) 2.1 The project life cycle (.2.3) App. G.1 The project manager App. G.7 Political and social environments F.1 Integration of project management processes [3.1] 6.5.2 Setting a schedule baseline [8.1.4] 6.5.3.1 Setting a resource schedule 6.5.2.4 Resource leveling 7.2 Setting a cost and time baseline schedule (1.3.5) [8.1.3] 6

Factory Farming Essay - 1141 Words

Industrialization has revolutionized America’s economy. Mass production allows products in demand to be easily available for purchase. But at what point does this system cross the line? It is one thing to mass produce electronics and clothing, for example, but applying mass production to the meat industry is entirely different. In order to generate the most profit, livestock are killed systematically at a massive scale on an assembly line. These animals are treated as nothing more than objects that can be processed, packaged, and sold to a consumer. For this business to take place with both time and cost efficiency, the welfare of the livestock is placed as one of the last priorities. Factory farming has gotten out of hand, and America is†¦show more content†¦A problem that arises from this is that animal abuse can take place without any consequences, simply because it goes unseen. Therefore, the installation of video cameras to monitor behavior inside of farms will h elp in the process of finding those who are guilty. Undercover videos of the animals being killed in such a brutal fashion only gives the farm a poor reputation, not to mention the ethical issue of animals suffering unnecessarily when euthanasia is available. Incidents similar to the aforementioned will only continue to happen if the government does not step in. Security cameras, proper training of new employees and regular examinations to ensure all FDA regulations as well as animal welfare laws are being practiced should be implemented in farms. Meat-producing companies try to hide the conditions in which their livestock are kept before being slaughtered. In Iowa, a bill called H.F.589 attempted to make it illegal to record videos and pictures at a farm without the facility owners consent, and illegal to agree to work there to get a hold of undercover photos and videos of animal cruelty (Lin). 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Potential of Renewable Energy Systems

Question: Discuss about the Potential of Renewable Energy Systems. Answer: Introduction: Engineering could be the only profession which greatly contributes to development of other professions. Engineers are found virtually across all industries; especially where systems are created to impact positively to the society. Notably, engineers greatly affect the society. But how and where do they apply the much-needed engineering principles? The role of engineers can never be underestimated. Actually; they develop complex systems and technologies. Engineers are at the center of most complex systems and technologies (Princeton, 2017). They actively play a role of overseeing the development of such systems. Unlike politicians who do little but want more praises, engineers often positively shape the society through their great works but hardly get appreciated. A good example is the creation of the epic titanic ship. It was a wonderful piece of great engineering. Everyone was convinced that the ship could not sink easily. A part from the unfortunate fatal accident (perhaps the worst marine accident ever recorded in history), beforehand, however, the engineers who created this marine vehicle were hardly feted. Today, engineers continue to revolutionize virtually all industries. Nowadays, people are able to share and disseminate information almost instantly anywhere across the globe (iWE, 2017). No wonder, the world has become a global village. Information technology, a product of software engineers, has not only boosted information sharing but greatly improved the wellbeing of the world system. Furthermore, engineers are known to be great at delivering innovative ideas. Most of the world problems have partly been solved by engineers. From medicine, agriculture, entertainment, military industry among others: engineers have not disappointed. For instance, in the military industry, mechanical engineers have designed and developed powerful missiles to help boost the world's defense system. Reportedly, Russians have developed a powerful war ship which has anti-aircraft and anti-submarine capabilities (Majumdar, 2016). Engineers are also committed to developing sustainable societies. Climate change is an area in which a lot of engineering projects are being undertaken. There was a time when global warming was the biggest threat to the existence of humanity; the amount of carbon emissions to the atmosphere was increasing at an alarming rate. This pushed engineers to rethink about other sources of power. Thereafter, a new concept: the green economy was birthed. The development of sustainable energy technologies has therefore seen a significant drop in the use of fossil fuel powered systems. Admittedly, the future now looks more interesting with the adoption of these strategies for green economy. The United States reportedly invested about 329 billion US dollars in renewable technology implementation in 2015 alone (Mooney, 2016). China has announced to increase its renewed energy share index to cater for sustainable development of renewable energy systems (Wen et al, 2009). Importantly, therefore, eng ineers are more excited than ever before to realize these planned projects. Currently, the United Kingdom is at an advanced stage of erecting the wind and tidal turbines, an investment worth billions. Therefore, clearly, engineers roles go beyond the imagination of people. They feel and think and develop sustainable systems which positively impact on the society at large. They must therefore be solely responsible to further develop conducive, productive and safe society for the betterment of humanity. But what specific responsibilities should Engineer bear? Engineers are supposed to take the lead role in ensuring principles of safety; quality and productivity are integrated in the projects they undertake. Consequently, they must be ready to bear the responsibilities of failure in the systems they develop. For instance, the unfortunate titanic accident helped engineers to rethink and develop sophisticated safety systems. Additionally, there is need to employ more principles of sustainable development. EME 807 (2014) opines that the three main corner stones of sustainable development are environmental, social, and economic values. Therefore, for engineering to be in line with the principles of sustainable development, all three mentioned issues must be adhered to. The project would be described as lopsided should it ignore any of the pillars (EME 807, 2014). But how will the understanding of these roles affect us? Now, as mentioned earlier, Engineers participate in building complex systems. The understanding of this enables us to rewire our brains in readiness to take part in the great work. Personally, it has developed my mental stamina since the real-time exposure has strengthened my resolve to engage more in the complex systems development. Admittedly, one may wish to begin working on a specific area of interest since they have the prior knowledge to design and develop the systems. It also makes us more aware of the realities of engineering in the field hence psyching us up for the challenging work ahead. Additionally, we can develop greater interest in taking part to improve the safety aspect of these systems. As a student Engineer, through my projects, have designed systems to handle various safety concerns in the existing systems. LO-4: Manage Information and Documentation The engineering projects are often accompanied by very large and complex information. Therefore, improper management of engineering information and documentation may lead to catastrophic failure of the project. However, importantly, engineers have established systems and networks to assist them manage the project information. One of the important documents in engineering is the technical drawing. Firstly, engineers often spend quite some time in drafting the drawings. Normally, they are designed to effectively communicate all the technical details about the project-at-hand. Secondly, there are tools that have been designed to assist them properly manage the complex engineering information and document the same. For example, software tools like PDXpert can help the engineers have better control of various documents (PDXpert, 2017). Besides, they can help minimize costs of designing and maintaining the systems. Furthermore, these tools can be used to effectively manage the projects activities especially if they are on a critical path in projects management. Furthermore, the management tools also allow archiving of these technical documents in a systematic fashion. This allows faster retrieval of the required document for update or reference purpose. Hence engineers can reportedly become more productive. Another tool that engineers use is the Open text engineering document management which stores and controls engineering documents in a centralized fashion (OTC, 2017). This superior software control tool allows the engineer to integrate maintenance with day to day process and operations of the systems. Besides, the drafting tools such as AutoCAD can easily be used in conjunction with this system. It readily provides templates onto which the engineer can develop the desired project work. Hence, ultimately, it provides real-time platform where effective control of complex projects can happen. Additionally, the platform supports concurrent engineering where various professionals can easily share information across a range of project issues. However, another key issue in managing engineering projects is planning (McClung, 2017). Admittedly, this is the initial stage of the project life cycle and therefore a chunk of project information would be developed from this stage. Therefore, there is need to inculcate sound design principles to ensure launch of project would be a success. At this juncture, various technical documents such as feasibility reports are developed and documented. Cross departmental collaboration is often the norm at this stage, as the team starts to align itself and prepare for the real work. Engineers, especially project engineers, need to identify effective tools and derive frameworks to assist them properly manage the team and information. It is also common, at the project initiation, for the team to slightly experience interpersonal friction; this should be seen as normal as the team members are discovering each others personality however, managers need to have control of the team and solve any issu e that would be threatening the success of the projects. Hence, it is important for the project managers to device appropriate communication channels through which information can be shared among the team members. Therefore, technology plays a pivotal role in managing and documenting technical and professional information, critical for the success of the project team. Notably, project engineers normally categorize information into: public and confidential information. In the process of sharing information, confidential information is kept in safe custody of the engineers in charge. Consequently, engineers are often required to sign the non-disclosure forms to prevent them from sharing some classified information about the project. Importantly, therefore, engineers often consult with the client first before going public with the information. It is among the best practices that must be adhered to by all professional engineers in the industry. Besides, engineers must always be capable of producing the right information, at the right time, and to the right audience to ensure security of the classified and confidential information. Managing information should begin early in the student engineers career life on a day-to-day basis. Personally, I have always remained committed and organized and keeping up-to-date records. For example, in my classwork projects, I have been able to implement the mentioned systems and tools like AutoCAD, inventor, Ms Project so that I can be in control of the project. Besides, some projects required teamwork. I have been an active team player where various elements of the group assignment would be planned by the team under my leadership and establish techniques to have each individual member take part. Most of the time I would find out that I have to manage the information in a way that ultimately meets group objectives. However, I still need to clearly define the relevant techniques that I should use to handle the complex team dynamics which often times may hamper the groups progress. LO-5: communicate effectively across a range of contexts. As mentioned earlier, engineers handle complex projects virtually across all industries. It is imperative, therefore, for them to adopt effective ways and means to communicate with different people in different scenarios at different times during roll out of projects. Effective communication can make a big difference between successful and unsuccessful engineering projects. Admittedly, according to Taylor April (2013), the information technology has revolutionized the way information is being shared; how professionals collaborate, and the status of the workplaces. For instance, information is almost instantly available to everyone including the non-technical people hence presenting a greater challenge to engineers to not only deliver quality projects but also accurate and up-to-date information to the designated people, for example, clients. Gone are the days when engineers would be spared from communicating their technical s tuff. Nowadays, professional success in engineering requires one to adopt state-of-the-art communication strategies. Engineers, for example, are taking the lead role in negotiating funds for their projects since they actually know where and how the funds would be utilized. Furthermore, they have developed systems of reporting their project work as it rolls out. There are software tools like Pro Engineer, Inventor and solid works which assist the engineers to illustrate their ideas hence providing a platform to communicate to potential clients about the same. Additionally, engineers are also equipped with professional writing skills. They need to draft proposals, technical reports, and memoranda among others. In fact, engineers are being encouraged to write more books so as to share their valuable experiences to the public. There is a lot of information that engineers can share. Besides, engineers continue to collaborate more with other professionals like scientists especially in research work. For instance, the iconic Burj Khalifa building in Dubai was a product of extensive research and collaborative work between engineers and the research scientists (Burj Khalifa, 2017). Taylor April (2013) argue that communication skills should be inculcated earlier during pursuit of engineering courses in colleges. Admittedly, afterwards, engineers would have to interact globally hence a wide spectrum of communication issues need to be elucidated during the course of acquiring engineering education. Gaining competence in engineering takes a lot of time and effort hence similarly, effective communication is being regarded as a critical component of engineering competency. Furthermore, engineers bear the responsibility of communicating accurate, verifiable and competent technical issues to the clients and general public. Normally they are expected to abide by the professional code of conduct during engagement with the clients and government. Notably, therefore, engineers are expected to be honest and truthful to the clients. For instance, an engineer may conduct feasibility study on a proposed project and unfortunately, from her findings, she realizes the project would cause greater damage to the environment and endanger the communitys well-being; it is imperative for her to remain true to the objects and purpose of the code such that she would advise the client not to pursue the project any further; although, such a decision would likely be unpopular. However, engineers must safeguard the health, welfare and safety of communities (BoPE, 2008). Now, the mentioned skills need to be inculcated early in the student engineers career. As a student engineer, I have been able to gain drafting skills such as the use of AutoCAD, inventor, solid works among others. This is certainly preparing me for the future design work. Besides, in my classwork projects, I always strive to competently apply them so that I develop the much-needed experience which I will later need to participate in the real-world designs. Furthermore, in communicating with my time members, it has become easier as I progress with my coursework. This certainly continues to equip me with the right skills of going about the assigned roles. Besides, through the leadership forum, organized by our campus engineering society, I have been able to polish my communication and leadership skills that I believe will ultimately serve as an impetus to my professional engineering growth. References EME 807. (2014). Technologies for Sustainability Systems: Principles of Sustainable Engineering. Available at: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/688 Taylor, J.L April, A.K. (2013). Engineering Communication and The Global Workplace: Preparing professionals and global citizens. Available at: https://connexionsj.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/kedrowicz_taylor.pdf Burji Khalifa.(2017). Building A Global Icon. https://www.burjkhalifa.ae/en/thetower/design.aspx BoPE.(2008).Code of Practice for Registered Professional Engineers. Queensland. Available at: https://www.ausimm.com.au/content/docs/7029009_code_of_practice_v9_15_jan_08_final_imple mented_from_1_july_2008.pdf PDXpert. (2017). Engineering design and document control systems. Available at: https://www.buyplm.com/document-control/engineering-drawings-data-document-control.aspx Eniac. (2017). Project Integration Management. Available at: https://wwwkiv.zcu.cz/~pergl/SAI/PMIBOK/project4.htm OTC. (2017). OpenText Engineering Document Management. Available at: https://www.opentext.com/what-we-do/products/enterprise-content-management/content-centricapplications/opentext-engineering-document-management McClung, D. (2017). Engineering Information Management. Available at: ftp://ftp.ni.com/pub/techsym/minneapolis/eng_info_management.pdf Princeton. (2017). Interdisciplinary Centers. Available at: https://www.princeton.edu/engineering/centers/ iWE. (2017).What value has information in a fully connected world? Available at: https://iwecloud.com/en/value-information-fully-connected-world/ Majumdar, D. (2016). Russia Is Set to Build 12 New Monster Warships Armed with 200 Missiles Each. Available at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russia-set-build-12-newmonster-warships-armed-200-missiles-16427 Mooney, C. (2016). Why clean energy is now expanding even when fossil fuels are cheap. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/14/whyclean-energy-is-now-expanding-even-when-fossil-fuels-are-cheap/?utm_term=.a241a8b5f2f1 Wen, L et al. (2009). The Potential of Renewable Energy Systems in China . Available at: https://vbn.aau.dk/files/39186853/Potential_of_Renewable_Energy_Systems_in_China.pdf

Taoism Essay Research Paper Taoism is a free essay sample

Taoism Essay, Research Paper Taoism is a faith that originated in Ching, likely during the 300 # 8217 ; s B.C. Taoism is besides the name of a faith that began in the 100 # 8217 ; s B.C. Through the many old ages this faith has influenced creative persons and authors in the East and West. The word Tao ( besides spelled Dao ) originally meant route or manner. The Taoist studied their faith and they believed that everything in the universe was explained by the manner. The word ( the manner ) is besides meant every bit world as a whole or single # 8220 ; ways # 8221 ; The beliefs of Taoism appear in two books, the # 8220 ; Lao-tzu # 8221 ; ( subsequently renamed the # 8220 ; Tao Te Ching # 8221 ; The Authoritative Way and Virtue ) and the Chuan-tzu are all the different books that they frequently read. The # 8220 ; Lao-tzu # 8221 ; is a book that was brought together by many unknown writers. At first Confucianism was really popular among the Chinese but they believed they had to many regulations. We will write a custom essay sample on Taoism Essay Research Paper Taoism is a or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page In Confucianism people can populate a good life merely in a well-disciplined society that stresses attending to ceremonial, responsibility, mortality, and public service. Although in Taoism it was non as rigorous. In the Taoist faith they believed to populate a simple life yet still mediated and was near to nature. The Taoist faith had an influence on many of the creative person involved. Tao Qian was extremely against any type of force and wanted a life in harmoniousness with nature. Xia Gui painted pictures and landscapes that reflected the Taoist sensitiveness to nature. Taoism was influenced by Chinese common people faith. In common people religion their Gods are represented as human being who displayed exceeding powers during their life-time. One of many they believed was a God that was a human being in there past lives was Guan Di, who is the defender of concern people, lived as a general during the A.D. 200 # 8217 ; s. The priests would expose public rites in which they submit the people # 8217 ; s supplications to the Gods of common people faith. The main priest, who is in a enchantment, prays to other deities for the worshippers. These deities are non former human existences but represent facets of Tao. # 8220 ; The members o f some Taoist groups have sought to attending immortality through thaumaturgy, speculation and particular diets, breath control, or the recitation of Bibles. Tao is the first-cause of the existence. It is a force that flows through all life. The end of everyone is one with the Tao. The construct of a personified divinity is foreign to Taoism, as is the construct of the creative activity of the existence. Therefore, they do non pray as Christians do ; there is no God to hear the supplications or move upon them. They seek replies to life # 8217 ; s jobs through interior speculation and other observation. Time cyclical, non additive as in western thought. Yin ( dark side ) is a breath that formed the Earth. Yang ( light side ) is the breath that formed the celestial spheres. They symbolize braces of antonyms that are seen through the existence, such as good and evil, light and dark, male and female. Intervention by human civilisation upsets the balances of Yin and Yang. # 8220 ; The Tao surrounds everyone hence everyone must listen to happen enlightenment. # 8221 ; Five chief variety meats and the organic structure that complement Taoism are the five parts of the sky: H2O, fire, wood, metal and Earth. Each individual must foster the Ch # 8217 ; I ( air, breath ) that has been given to him or her. Development of virtuousness is 1s major undertaking. The three gems that identify Taoism are compassion, moderateness, and humbleness. Taoists follow the art of # 8220 ; wu wei # 8221 ; , which is to accomplish action through minimum action. # 8220 ; It is the pattern of traveling against the watercourse non by fighting against it and junking approximately, but by standing still and allowing the watercourse do all the work. Thus the sage knows that comparative to the river, he still moves against the current. To the outside universe the sage appears to take no action-but in fact he takes action long before others of all time foresee the demand for action. # 8221 ; Taoists believe that # 8221 ; people are compassionate by nature # 8230 ; left to their ain devices [ they ] will demo this compassion without anticipating an award. # 8221 ; Sivin, N. # 8220 ; Taoism # 8221 ; The World Book Encyclopedia. 1997, Volume19 page 36 www.taoism.com

All About Russias Exclave of Kaliningrad

All About Russia's Exclave of Kaliningrad Russias smallest oblast (region) of Kaliningrad is an exclave located 200 miles away from the border of Russia proper. Kaliningrad was a spoil of World War II, allocated from Germany to the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference that divided Europe between the allied powers in 1945. The oblast is a wedge-shaped piece of land along the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania, approximately one-half the size of Belgium, 5,830 mi2 (15,100 km2). The oblasts primary and port city is also known as Kaliningrad. Founding Known as Konigsberg prior to Soviet occupation, the city was founded in 1255 near the mouth of the Pregolya River. The philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg in 1724. The capital of German East Prussia, Konigsberg was the home to a grand Prussian Royal Castle, destroyed along with much of the city in World War II. Konigsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 after Mikhail Kalinin, formal leader of the Soviet Union from 1919 until 1946. At the time, Germans living in the oblast were forced out, to be replaced with Soviet citizens. While there were early proposals to change the name of Kaliningrad back to Konigsberg, none were successful. Key History The ice-free port of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea was home to the Soviet Baltic fleet; during the Cold War 200,000 to 500,000 soldiers were stationed in the region. Today only 25,000 soldiers occupy Kaliningrad, an indicator of the reduction of the perceived threat from NATO countries. The USSR attempted to build a 22-story House of Soviets, the ugliest building on Russian soil, in Kaliningrad but the structure had been built on the property of the castle. Unfortunately, the castle contained many underground tunnels and the building began to slowly collapse though it still stands, unoccupied. After the fall of the USSR, neighboring Lithuania and former Soviet republics gained their independence, cutting Kaliningrad off from Russia. Kaliningrad was supposed to develop in the post-Soviet era into a Hong Kong of the Baltic but corruption keeps most investment away. South Korean-based Kia Motors has a factory in Kaliningrad. Railroads connect Kaliningrad to Russia through Lithuania and Belarus but importing food from Russia is not cost-effective. However, Kaliningrad is surrounded by European Union member-states, so trade on the wider market is indeed possible. Approximately 400,000 people live in metropolitan Kaliningrad and a total of nearly one million are in the oblast, which is approximately one-fifth forested.

Womens Role England 1558- 1667 essays

Womens Role England 1558- 1667 essays Lawrence Stone in 1979 claimed that during 1558-1667 change in the family structure (impacting women) was the most important social change in 1,000 years. Further historical research has now discredited this theory. The years 1558- 1667 are largely characterised by continuity rather than change and the lifestyle of women did not change markedly. Alan Macfarlanes research suggests that structures and roles had not changed since 1300. There was a social continuity through the whole pre-industrial era in England, where women had an inferior status to men. In 1617 William Whately in a wedding sermon pronounced, The whole duty of a wife is referred to by two heads. The first is to acknowledge her inferiority; the next was to carry herself as inferior. He was not being provocative, but simply stating common knowledge and practice. Throughout the period this difference between the two sexes was a fundamental principle upon which society was constructed. This is the main historical context in terms of analysing the role of women. However, there were occasions of major upheaval that saw disruptions and some changes, albeit not lasting ones. One can also view the issue in context of social class which influenced particular womens lives. A predominant feature of England 1558-1667 saw social continuity and a patriarchal society from the middle ages, where women had a subordinate status to men and who encountered many restrictions. Women originated from Adam, a man. Therefore they were inferior to men. People of this time were very religious and believed that women were weaker physically, intellectually and morally. This view started when Eve persuaded Adam to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Women could not hold office in the protestant church, which was made stronger by removing nunneries. Under common law, married women (feme covert) had no rights. Women moved from the contr...

Advertising analysis Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Advertising analysis - Assignment Example Obviously, the message of the advertisement is to attract customers to go to Disneyland for fun and entertainment. The aforementioned advertisement in particular uses an adventurous Disney character named â€Å"Buzz†, to show all the places the whole family can enjoy. Buzz goes from place to place and makes wonderful statements about everything he sees. His closing speech, â€Å"There’s no end in sight†, says it all. The message clearly shows that Disneyland is a place where there is so much to do and the fun stops depending on the customer’s time and budget. Children may be the primary target audience of the ad but it also includes adults as well. With the budget needed for the vacation at Disneyland, the company did not fail to consider the finance managers of the family. Therefore, they included what adults can also enjoy in the place. The ad also implies that adults need to have as much fun as kids do and that they need to unwind in a place such as Disneyland. The creator of the ad is Disneyland evidently because the materials used are all owned by the company. Moreover, who else would be interested to make an advertisement for a company’s product but the company itself. The creator highlights the fun and adventure which families enjoy at Disneyland and speaks to the customers through a fun-loving cartoon character who is loved both by kids and parents. Making a filmed ad is perhaps more effective than still images especially when it is intended for children and the busy parents. This makes the production of the ad quite successful. It does not just attract the viewers’ attention but it also entices them through the sights and sounds. The messages are delivered more easily and accurately through the images and the words of â€Å"Buzz†. The makers of the ad seemed to have considered all the different points of view. From the

Bipolar Disorder Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

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BHS 400 STRESS MANAGEMENT (Module 5 CBT) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

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Shakespeares Othello

Shakespeares Othello Language plays a very important role in all of Shakespeares plays. When Shakespeare performed his plays, no scenery and very few props were used. This meant that the language had to set an atmosphere, whether it is high in tension or a light hearted conversation. Use of language was also very important, as the vast majority of the audience was made up of common people. This meant that he had to make the language compelling and accessible. He does this by including jokes and curses, even in his tragedies. This comic relief is also used to create contrast and highlight the tragic sections, for example the Clown in Othello directly after act 3 scene 3, a very serious emotional part of the play. Language is also used to distinguish between the important characters and the lesser roles. The main characters like Othello tend to speak mostly in verse; this gives them a sense of superiority and elegance, while the less important speak in short, un-poetic sentences highlighting the difference . In this essay, I will look at how power and control influences the play and how the different characters use it, in particularly Iago. I will also look at how power and control shifts between the characters.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Power plays a very important role in the plot and overall outcome of this play. Power is used to create control and vice versa. This is very important as it allows Iago, who is lower ranking than Othello, to generate power through controlling Cassio and ultimately Othello. The fact that the play is set within the higher ranks of the Venetian army allows clear divisions in power to be highlighted immediately, and Othello being the General automatically puts him at the top of the triangle of power. However, as the play unfolds, the power seems to shift to Iago, the villain of the play. Right at the very beginning, Iagos manipulative nature is revealed when he convinces Roderigo to give Iago all of his money in return for helping Roderigo win Desdemonas hand, which is obviously a false promise. This allows Shakespeare to show that although Iago lacks power socially and within the army, he is adept at controlling others.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Controlling others is something which Iago repeatedly does throughout the play. In act 2 scene 3, he displays his control over Cassio, when he tries to make him drink. Like the beginning, even though Cassio is a higher rank that Iago, he still lets Iago bully him into drinking. At first, Iago suggests that he should drink for Othello and Desdemona and when Cassio refuses he implies that he is therefore a bad friend O, they are our friends. When Cassio still refuses Iago becomes more aggressive in his speech What, man! Tis a night of revels; the gallants desire it. When Cassio leaves to fetch the men at the door Iago has his first soliloquy, in which he reveals his intentions. If I fasten but one cup upon him, with that which he hath drunk tonight already, Hell be as full of quarrel and offence (II, iii, 41-43). In this soliloquy, Iago moves into verse, this could be to show the real Iago to the audience, not just the manipulative acting which h e puts on. Another reason for Iago going into verse is to make him appear more important in the play. Othello also controls others of a higher rank, albeit not in the manipulative nature of Iago, in Act 1 Scene 3 when Brabantio accuses him of stealing Desdemona and corrupting her using spells and medicines. Othello stays calm, also demonstrating his self control and talks his way out of it using long speeches in blank verse. In this speech, Othello repeatedly refers to the fact that he has a common tongue, Rude am I in my speech and little blessd with the soft phrase of peace, little grace I shall cause by speaking for myself. The reason for this self-criticism may be to emphasise that that what he is saying comes from the heart not the brain, demonstrating his love for Desdemona. This also reduces the sense of power and it makes Othello appear as just a man in love. Othello states that he is rude in speech, but he actually speaks very well, this could also be Othello showing his false modesty and trying to show off to Brabantio, questioning Othellos honesty. In stark contrast, Othel lo ends his speech with a contrasting last line, I won his daughter. This powerful last line restores his authority in the eyes of the Duke and the Senators.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  This scene shows the power that accompanies self control, Iago also utilises this by showing a great deal of restraint when trying to convince Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful in act 3 scene 3. Did Michael Cassio, when you wood my lady, know of your Love? (III, iii 95-96) this question does not have any real meaning. However it gets Othello impatient and curious. He did from first to last. Why dost thou ask? to which Iago replies But for the satisfaction of m thought; No further harm. Iagos could have easily told Othello about Desdemona, but instead he resisted, this meant that Othello wanted to know even more. By putting Othello in this situation Iago used Othellos persistence to gain control and power over the situation. In unwillingly giving the information, Iago is laying down a false sense of trust. Throughout the scene Iago repeatedly reminds him of this, with constant remarks about how much he loves the moor. To show the love and dut y that I bear you, I humbly do beseech you of your pardon for too much loving you. During this scene, Othellos language is always changing. Sometimes he speaks in short broken up sentences, but then he composes himself and speaks in verse again. This shows the way that Othello is fighting jealousy. However when he finally gets proof that Desdemona is cheating in him, he loses all control and allows jealousy to take control of him, O monstrous! Monstrous!, Ill tear her all to pieces. Look here, Iago, all my fond love thus do I blow in heaven: Tis gone. Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell! Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne to tyrannous hate!. (III, iii, 447-450) In this speech, Shakespeare shows that Othello has lost his self control by using punctuation to break up his once flowing sentences. The punctuation however would have only been visible to the actors. This means that they are more like stage directions than literary devices. Shakespeare used other stage directions to create a sense of power and superiority in this scene, like when Othello kneels at the end of his speech, (443-451). This shows visually Othello breaking down, and the fact that Iago is still standing symbolizes that Iago is the most powerful in this scene. In kneeling down, Othello also loses his stature and authority, as he is now below Iago. Do not rise yet. Here Iago shows his influence over Othello, Iago did not want Othello to rise by himself, it would make Othello feel more in control and powerful. Instead Iago joined him; this meant that Iago would conform to his position of sharing Othellos pain.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  One very prominent statement made by Iago, in which he compares jealousy to a green eyed monster (III,iii, L. 166) can be seen as an attempt to further his control over Othello by warning him of Jealousy. He goes on to say that the monster Mocks the meat it feeds on, in this he is suggesting that if Othello gives in to jealousy it will mock him. The word mock in this context may mean destroy and the meat could symbolize Othellos love for Desdemona. Friendship and trust is what holds the story together, and Iago knows this. By constantly reminding the characters of this and by showing his devotion to them, he gets into a position of having more influence over what they do and how they behave to a certain situation that they do. When Iago is trying to force Cassio to drink, he reminds him that O, they are our friends (II, iii, 32). They fact that he refers to them as our friends gives the impression that they share something in common, bringing them closer and also increasing the amount of trust that Cassio has for Iago. Trust is a major fact of that scene, as well as trying to gain trust with Cassio, he is also trying to break up the trust between him and Othello. At the beginning of the scene, you get a strong sense of friendship between Othello and Cassio. Good Michael, look you to the guard tonight. (II, iii, 1) by using Cassios first name it shows that they are close friends.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In this play, Iago is a bit of an outsider, and has no relationships other than with his wife Emilia. When Iago is with Emilia, it shows his real persona attitude. Unlike with all the other characters, he shows no effort to show his devotion and love for her even though he is her wife. This is prominent in act 3 scene 3 when Emilia gives Iago Desdemonas handkerchief. When asked what will you do witht, Iago snatches it defensively and says Why, whats that to you? In this part of the scene, it shows Iagos lack of control and patience, something which is not evident in the rest of the play. This is very important, as this section of the play is very high paced and full of big events and big powerful scenes. This part of the scene also shows the real nasty side of Iago which you only previously saw in his quite frequent soliloquies outlining his plans.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In this play, power and control is a very important and ever changing factor, ultimately influencing the outcome of the play. Iago stays quite constantly emotionless showing his self control and Othello is the complete opposite, staying emotionally attached to almost every aspect. This in due course led to his death. This plays shows the power of the rumour, love and jealousy, not only in the play but in Elizabethan and modern day society. This is why; much like a lot of Shakespeares plays it shall always stay relevant.

Strategic Marketing Planning for Non Profit Organization

Georgetown University Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership Marketing & Communications in Nonprofit Organizations David Williamson Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program  © 2009 Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership Georgetown University Georgetown Public Policy Institute Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 2Marketing & Communications in Nonprofit Organizations: It Matters More Than You Think David Williamson Marketing gets no respect in the nonprofit world. Program people tend to hold the most senior positions in nonprofits and accordingly have the most status. Fundraisers are often viewed as necessary evils, as are operations staff, including those who labor in the communications and marketing departments. Several factors account for the suspicion or disdain with which many nonprofit managers view the marketing functi on.Mostly, it’s a matter of ignorance. Usually trained in other disciplines, nonprofit leaders often fail to understand what marketing can and can’t do for their organizations. Consequently, they hold some strange assumptions (e. g. â€Å"Our good work will sell itself †), unrealistic expectations (e. g. , demanding to be in The New York Times once a week) and arbitrary funding theories (i. e. , when fundraising is down, cut the communications budget). Compounding the challenge, few nonprofit managers recognize their lack of expertise in these areas.The same people who would never contradict a financial expert or ignore a scientist don’t think twice about overruling marketing professionals on audiences, messages, tactics — the very essence of marketing strategy. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, primarily advocacy or social marketing enterprises where the core program involves communications, outreach and marketing. But in the main, the basic lack of respect accorded marketing comes as no surprise to anyone who tried to apply marketing to mission or build a nonprofit brand — we’re used to it.After all, why is this chapter near the end of this book? Forward-looking nonprofit leaders, however, will recognize what their counterparts in the for-profit sector understood long ago: marketing is essential. And although the marketing function masquerades under many names within nonprofit organizations — Communications, Advancement, External Affairs, Public Relations, or Brand Management — the primary objectives are pretty much the same: to define and then defend an organization’s position, and move it closer to success in its mission. Marketing answers the questions: How is our program distinctive?What do we want to be known for? Why is our work relevant? With the competition for philanthropic resources and public attention fierce, these are absolutely critical considerations for every no nprofit. While the benefits of investing in marketing may not be obvious to nonprofit leaders, the costs of failing to do so are becoming increasingly clear. With nonprofits coming under increasing public and regulatory scrutiny, organizations no longer can afford to relegate communications and marketing to second-class status. It’s a matter of survival.When the investigative reporters are circling your organization (think of the recent unpleasantness that befell the American Red Cross, United Way, and Smithsonian Institution, among others) you will wish that you had a robust, professional communications department to handle the incoming slings and arrows. An expensive outside public relations firm is a poor substitute for people who know your organization and command the trust of the staff. moral: Show marketing some respect. It is essential for mission success, but if you wait around until the need is obvious, it will already be too late.The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Douglas Meyer in preparing this manuscript. Note: The anecdotes herein are intended to illustrate larger themes, and not as critiques of individual organizations. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 3 The Elevator Test Through the years, marketers have invented ever-more sophisticated ways to develop organizational position statements. Lots of these methodologies work, and you can spend big money with consultants on finely crafted and focus-group-tested positioning statements.At the same time, for nonprofits, the simpler approach advocated by the marketing savant Harry Beckwith may achieve much the same result at considerably lower cost and effort. I think of Beckwith whenever I find myself confronted with a classic â€Å"elevator test† moment. You strike up a conversation in an elevator, on the subway, in the line at Starbucks and the question soon arises: What do y ou do? The challenge is how to answer that question in an interesting, compelling manner that invites further questions about your organization, but that does not bog down in jargon or too much detail.You don’t have much time — maybe two sentences at most. So what do you include? What do you leave out? What’s your answer to the elevator test? Lest you think this exercise trivial, recall that everyone on the staff of your nonprofit gets asked the â€Å"what do you do? † question, in various forms, every day. In that sense, everyone on staff is a marketer, albeit rarely trained as such. Do you know how your staff is responding? Do you have any confidence that everyone on the team — program staff, receptionists, board members — shares a common sense of the organization’s brand position?Are they communicating a consistent message? Many nonprofit organizations fail this test. Happily, Beckwith prescribes a very simple formula that nonprofi ts can adapt readily to their needs in developing an elevator test that can double as a position statement. (Note that the elevator test is not a mission statement, nor should it read like one, but instead tries to distill the essence of the organization into relevant, accessible language for the particular person with whom you are speaking. ) The Beckwith formula starts with six basic questions: ho? What’s your name? what? What kind of organization are you (scale and sector)? for whom? Whom do your programs serve? what need? What pressing social problem does your program address? what’s different? What is distinctive about your program? so what? Why should they care? String the answers to these questions together for a nonprofit like Population Services International, a $350 million organization working to improve health in the developing world, and you get something that looks like this: PSI (Who? ) is a global nonprofit (What? that works to improve the health (What need? ) of the poor and vulnerable in 60 developing nations around the world (For whom? ). Combating diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria that kill millions around the world (So what? ), PSI saves lives by using the power of the private sector to distribute and market health products to the neediest people. (What’s different? ) Three red flags about elevator tests. First, ruthlessly eliminate jargon. Every sector has a specialized language, but don’t use it in your elevator/positioning speech. Second, avoid laundry lists of activities.Nonprofits are wonderfully inclusive organizations, with a great sense of fairness and equity between their constituent parts, but this makes for disastrous marketing. The entire point of an elevator speech is to boil your enterprise into a message that is simple, consistent, and most of all distinctive, so make hard choices and focus on the things you do particularly well. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Manageme nt Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 4 Second, and perhaps most important, put some real thought into answering the question: So what?It’s the payoff piece of the speech, the call to action that makes the programmatic work of a nonprofit relevant. And to change policy and behavior, to raise money and build a strong institution, most organizations simply must find a way to make their mission relevant to a broader constituency. Figuring out a compelling â€Å"so what? † response is a good place to start. Third, try to make it â€Å"sticky. † Is what you have said memorable? In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath identify the common currency of memorable ideas, a good story.And, specifically, they note the importance of simple, true stories with concrete details, unexpected twists and emotion. Does your elevator speech tell a story in a way that helps the listener remember it? For the leaders of nonprofits, the elevator test al so can serve as a shrewd diagnostic tool for determining differences within the management team. Have everyone sit down and simultaneously craft an elevator speech — give them no more than five minutes — and then have people share the results. You will learn a lot about the attitudes of your senior managers and how they are portraying the organization to the outside world. he audience; not coincidentally, that’s why lots of marketing pieces tend to start with the word â€Å"you. † Looked at another way, marketing is a â€Å"pull† strategy that meets the audience where it is, and then tries to steer the audience to the desired action or behavior through incentives or other inducements. Marketing, it has been said, appeals to the heart. Communications, on the other hand, typically appeals to the head. Representing the institutional perspective, sentences in communications materials usually start with the word â€Å"we† or else the organization ’s name; ook at any nonprofit annual report for a case in point. Communications also tend to be declarative, laying out a statement of opinion, a detailed factual case, or an institutional position, and then try to connect those to the audience’s interests. These are classic push strategies in action, with the organization pushing out information (and misinformation! ) about its activities or agenda. Best-practices nonprofits combine the best aspects of both these approaches, and appeal to both the heart and the head.Mothers Against Drunk Driving, one of the most effective advocacy groups of modern times, is famous for the powerful emotional appeal of its advertising campaigns and legislative testimony, which prominently feature the victims of drunk drivers. But supplementing these classic marketing techniques, MADD also deploys equally classic communications strategies — position papers, voter’s guides, legislative briefing books, and on-line advocacy, f or example. Together, this combination of disciplined marketing and focused, issue-oriented communications has made MADD a political force in every statehouse and on Capitol Hill.And it’s not just MADD. Effective organizations of all stripes are taking advantage of both sides of the coin to get the message out about their issue, cultivate donors, and impress policymakers. Take a look next time you go to the web site or get direct mail from the National Rifle Association, the American Heart Association, or CARE. You’ll see a blend of marketing and communications, things to pull you in and also to push out. It’s not by accident. moral: Marketing is the only job shared by everyone in the organization. An elevator speech makes sure your people have a compelling story, they stick to it and it sticks with their audience.Marketing Isn’t Communications, and Vice Versa Nonprofits tend to use the terms marketing and communications interchangeably — another i ndication of the overall lack of sophistication about these issues inside the sector. But there are substantive differences between the two, none more significant than their very different points of departure. Effective marketing generally starts from the point of the view of the audience, or customer, and seeks to anticipate and address their needs. It’s all about you, moral: Don’t just communicate. Market. Essays on ExcellenceLessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 5 Marketing and Communications for Fundraising Fundraising can be the fire alarm that awakens the leader of a nonprofit to the need for marketing and communications, though, chances are, the initial interest will be less focused on strategy, and more focused on stuff: glossy brochures, pretty pamphlets and verbose newsletters that they can use to â€Å"sell† the organization to major donors. Mike Coda, the best fundraising strate gist I have ever known, was famously contemptuous of this type of marketing material. All that collateral is just a crutch for a poor fundraiser,† Mike would say. â€Å"It’s no substitute for developing relationships and listening to donors. † Of course, he was right — but only to a point. The marketing and communications functions can play an important role in helping execute a comprehensive fundraising plan, and the truth is, the marketing/ communications shop can produce stuff to help raise money. But a word of caution here about a lot of the â€Å"stuff† that currently comes out. More than anything, pressures from development account for the proliferation of publications across the nonprofit sector.Our organizations are clogged with annual reports, magazines, newsletters, case statements, working papers and brochures targeted at planned givers, annual givers, alumni givers, givers of every sort. The arrival of the electronic age has not reduced, but instead added to the volume of potential fundraising collateral. Now prospective donors are besieged with slickly produced DVDs as well as blogs, virtual communities, interactive websites, and more. I have always been surprised how few organizations conduct honest assessments of the costs and benefits of producing all this fundraising collateral.It’s not just that it costs a lot to design, print and create it; the real issue for nonprofits is the investment of time. The true cost of a piece of fundraising collateral must reflect the amount of energy and agony that went into its development and often more painful, approval by management and the board. Everybody has a favorite story about absurd bureaucratic hurdles they have encountered to get something approved. One CEO, for example, used to require the signatures of 17 different managers to approve text for use in direct mail solicitations.Needless to say, the impact of the language was much attenuated by the time it we nt through so many editors, reducing the return on investment as well as diverting senior managers from their real jobs. Globally distributed organizations, like the World Wildlife Fund or Save the Children, face particularly tough challenges in getting their colleagues overseas to sign off on collateral materials or joint announcements. It is the job of the marketing and communications function to bring discipline and reason to this process.Smart marketing managers will resist the steady drumbeat from the fundraising staff to deliver new and different materials. Instead, they will put the ball back in the court of the fundraisers by asking some tough questions: Who is your audience and what do you know about them? Why do you believe this is the best way to reach that person? What is the shelf life of this piece? What else could you spend this money on? We will come back to these important questions later in this chapter. An honest recognition of the need for fundraising is required , but so, too, is a healthy skepticism about the demands for fundraising collateral.Certainly, it makes life easier for fundraisers if they have attractive, compelling materials that reinforce the institution’s key messages. But then remember the boxes and boxes of attractive, compelling fundraising materials from previous campaigns gathering dust in your organization’s basement. Once you decide to move forward with a piece of fundraising collateral, however, don’t try to save money by cutting corners. Good marketing materials can be expensive, and you should be prepared to pay to get the kind of products that will send the right message to Essays on ExcellenceLessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 6 your donors. At the same time, you can often mitigate the budgetary impact by substituting quality for quantity. As so often is the case in nonprofits, the key is to focus on the few things that you can do that will have the greatest impact. moral: Fundraising is often a core component of marketing and communications, but not all fundraising collateral translates into more money raised. The success of this campaign can be measured first in lives saved. Drunk-driving deaths are down about 50 percent from all time highs.Perhaps even more enduring, the key concepts of this campaign have permeated the public lexicon. Designated drivers. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Drink responsibly. When the beer companies spread your message for free in their massive TV advertising campaigns, you know that you have succeeded. Lots of fine organizations run social marketing campaigns aimed at changing public behavior on a large scale: the American Legacy Fund and its anti-smoking efforts; the American Cancer Society, which emphasizes early screening in all its marketing initiatives; and the American Heart Association and diet.Choose to Save seeks to promote personal savings; the Presidential Fitness Challenge to promote personal fitness. The unifying element is the focus on changing behavior, on getting people to stop doing something they presumably like and start doing something else. Nonprofit marketing often aims at behavior change, and social marketing was made to do just this. Marketing and Communications for Mission Impact After a discussion of the way in which marketing and communications can help with fundraising, the opportunity often arises to bring up the potential for it to have a direct impact on mission. Remember the movie Arthur?Dudley Moore plays an affable drunk who spends his time getting in hilarious fixes, many involving driving his convertible while three sheets to the wind. The movie was one of the big hits of the early 1980s — coincidentally about the same time that two housewives in California were forming a new nonprofit called Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Fast forward a quarter century. Do you think that a movie like A rthur, with its tacit endorsement of drunk driving, could possibly be made today? I think not. The prevailing moral winds have swung hard against drinking and driving, making anathema what was once socially acceptable.And the reason for that is MADD. MADD is not only an exceptionally effective advocacy organization that seeks and often secures legislative victories. It also excels at social marketing — using the full grab bag of tricks and techniques from the marketer’s playbook to achieve changes in individual behaviors and social norms that also were directly in line with its mission of ending drunk driving. In the case of MADD, that means orchestrating a sustained, national marketing campaign designed to change the behavior of Americans when it comes to alcohol and automobiles. ase in point: the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which was founded in the early ‘90s to tackle the surging levels of teen pregnancies. A small organization — only $ 5 million — but with powerful friends, the National Campaign thought hard about best way to change the behavior of teenage girls, the target audience. Research showed that teenagers tended to romanticize parenthood, and did not understand the impact that caring for an infant would have on their lifestyle. But how to communicate this lesson to an elusive audience that is already deeply suspicious of adults?The National Campaign cleverly threaded this needle by reaching out to the producers of the afternoon TV shows targeted at teen girls. With a little persuading, the producers agreed to write into the scripts of these shows storylines that made it clear what a drag it was to have a baby: it ruined your figure, ruined your social life, cost a lot of money, and so forth. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 7If the same messages had been delivered to the same audience but in the form of a public service announcement, the impact would have been marginal. But by merging the message with the content of these shows, the National Campaign managed to get the attention of these kids in a far more effective way. A lot of factors go into the sharp drop in teen pregnancies over the last decade, but certainly some of the credit needs to go to the National Campaign for a textbook case of social marketing in action. Social marketing can’t advance every mission, and is not for every organization.It can be expensive and requires significant expertise, both in-house and out. But it works, and must be part of your marketing and communications strategy if changing the world for your organization involves changing the behavior of people: health habits, purchasing choices, social norms, voting patterns. This is one of those inescapable, brutal facts about the nonprofit world, and thus bears repeating: most people have never heard of your organization, and they probably donâ €™t care much about what you do. And this is even when the work being done is undeniably â€Å"good. This is a hard pill for many nonprofit people to swallow, because we all do care, passionately, about our causes and we want others to feel the same way we do. But you can’t let that passion blind you to the objective realities of trying to carve out a position for your nonprofit organization with your most important audiences amid the clutter of so many competing priorities and so much background noise in multiple media. Strengthening that position — defending your organization’s reputation, the one irreplaceable asset of any nonprofit — is the essence of branding.The key is being disciplined in articulating the distinctive set of attributes that collectively define an organization’s position in the marketplace for funding, ideas, and influence. Komen for the Cure — formerly, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation — provides a great example of the power of nonprofit branding. It’s remarkable enough that this organization has grown in less than 25 years into the largest support group for breast cancer survivors, raising almost $1 billion for breast cancer programs.Even more impressive, however, Komen (and other initiatives, like Avon’s pioneering breast cancer walks) have helped bring this once-taboo disease into mainstream and make it a top public health priority — even though there are other diseases, less well-funded, that kill more people every year. In the process, Komen has turned pink ribbons into instantly recognized symbols of support for breast cancer victims and even managed to co-opt the word â€Å"cure. † No one asks any more, â€Å"Cure what? † In today’s context, pink plus â€Å"cure† has become shorthand for â€Å"cure breast cancer. Little wonder, then, that when Komen revised its name and logo in 2006, the word â€Å"cure† took c enter stage. And what an upgrade! Komen ditched its foundation moniker, which was always a bit confusing to donors and supporters because it did not speak to the organization’s programmatic efforts to support grassroots networks of survivors, promote early screening, and moral: Your mission should drive your marketing. If you are trying to change individual behaviors or social norms it’s time to invest in social marketing.Marketing and Communications to Build the Brand The best of the best are thinking not only of marketing for fundraising and mission impact, but also for brand building. Brands are powerful stuff. Apple, for instance, evokes immediate associations of hip, cool, innovative products with excellent design. Coke and Pepsi have spent decades (and billions in advertising) staking out their relative brand positions: real thing or next generation? Nike has even managed to transcend its name, evolving into a universally recognizable logo.If you work for Apple, Coke, or Nike, you don’t have to explain to anyone what your company does. Everyone knows, both in substance and style. But not so the typical nonprofit employee. Maybe you’re lucky and work someplace like the National Geographic Society, which has name recognition numbers to rival IBM and Starbucks, but the chances are that few people have ever heard of your organization or care particularly about your mission or approach. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate ProgramAdvocacy in the Public Interest 8 improve patient care. The words â€Å"breast cancer,† with all their negative baggage, also disappeared from the name. Instead, Komen has adroitly repositioned itself as the leading force focused on a finding a cure — a positive, future-oriented message that appeals to donors, the public, and breast cancer victims alike. Komen’s rebranding has been successful because its new brand positioning rings true with the organization’s core values, mission, and programs.This illustrates an important point about authenticity for any nonprofit trying to strengthen its brand. In the eyes of your stakeholders, it’s fine to change the various attributes of your brand — your name, logo, messages, and programmatic emphasis — as long as what you’re changing to passes the authenticity test. (Imagine Komen moving into an issue such as prostate cancer — they simply would not enjoy the same credibility and clout that they have earned in the breast cancer arena. The lack of authenticity also helps explain the failure of so many high-profile corporate rebranding efforts; call it Phillip Morris or the Altria Group, in the public mind both are merchants of death, and no new logo can change that. As marketing guru Seth Godin might say, Komen is an example of the tremendous power to be found in telling an authentic story in a low-trust world. So be careful abou t undermining the existing equity in your nonprofit brand.The National Audubon Society learned this lesson in the early 1990s, when the organization’s new leadership decided that Audubon needed to take a much more aggressive political posture. They ditched the revered whooping crane logo (â€Å"the bird image hurts us,† the CEO said at the time), fired the veteran editor of their signature magazine, and launched the kind of political activists campaigns usually associated with the Sierra Club. But that wasn’t what Audubon members wanted. They were birders. They liked the crane. They wanted the magazine full of handsome photographs of warblers, not partisan screeds on toxic waste.The defections were swift, and Audubon’s membership and fundraising dropped sharply. Finally the board had to act and the CEO was ousted in 1996, only three years after launching the revolution. The new CEO wisely returned to the focus on birds, but even so, Audubon has never reco vered its peak membership of the late 1980s. Despite the importance of branding and reputation, nonprofits are notoriously poor brand managers. Building a brand can be difficult and very expensive, and the results are typically hard to measure or not immediately apparent.As a result, nonprofits rarely invest the necessary resources to secure top-flight marketing talent, to produce outstanding marketing materials, to engage the media, to implement a consistent and appropriate visual identity system, and to do all the other supporting activities that fall under the heading of â€Å"branding. † To be sure, branding is no longer a dirty word in nonprofit circles, as it was in the 1990s, but this type of advanced marketing is still the first thing that gets cut when the funding is tight and the last item in the budget to be restored. Such foolishness wouldn’t last long in the private sector.When sales are down, do Ford and General Motors reduce the advertising budget or sla sh the marketing department? Regrettably, about the only thing that compels nonprofit leaders to pay attention to branding is when something goes spectacularly wrong at a high-profile peer organization. And some of the marquee brands in the nonprofit world have taken a real battering in recent years: the American Red Cross, United Way, or the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Ask any of these nonprofits how much their brand is worth to them — and what kind of damage they have suffered and how it could have been even worse.Then you might think twice before taking a red pencil to the marketing budget. moral: Your brand defines your organization to the outside world. Take the initiative and define yourself, before one of your enemies tries to define you. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 9 Developing Successful Marketing and Communications Strategies With the desire for fundrai sing, mission impact and brand building understood, the key question becomes one of strategy, taking you from where you are to where you want to be.And strategy is fundamentally about making choices. This scares the hell out of the typical nonprofit employee. After all, making choices means that you might not choose me! As in Lake Woebegone, we in the nonprofit sector believe ourselves to be all above average, somehow special and immune from the laws of supply and demand that govern the rest of the world. The nonprofit culture — often conflict-averse, participatory, and given to consensus decision-making — further complicates the task of making real strategic choices. No wonder so many decisions inside nonprofit institutions end up as compromises.But making tough choices is not optional when it comes to developing communications or marketing strategy. The reason is simple. No matter who you are, it costs too much for nonprofits to compete in this realm. Even Coca-Cola has to make hard choices about whom it targets with its marketing dollars. For nonprofits, operating with only a fraction of the resources of corporations, discipline and focus become all the more important in developing effective communications strategies. Your chances of success depend both on well-conceived strategy and on the quality of your implementation plan.Brilliantly conceived marketing concepts have failed because of disconnects between planning and doing. A good marketing or communications strategy should flow in a tight logical sequence, starting with a very explicitly articulated objective or goal, all the way through the tactics and accountability. The more measurable the goal, the better — get the state legislature to fund this or that program, reduce teen smoking rates, raise attendance at the museum. You may not be able to avoid such amorphous goals as â€Å"raise awareness,† but you can ensure that your communications plan is driving toward a specifi c outcome.The real guts of a high-quality marketing and communications plan follow directly from the goal. As long as it’s aimed at a measurable result, the time-honored â€Å"audience, message, vehicle† formula has lost none of its relevance: audience: Which individuals or institutions do you need to reach and/or influence to achieve your programmatic objective? Can they be identified according to demographic or geographic, personality or lifestyle characteristics? Are they already aware of your issue and organization? message: What message will motivate each of your vehicle: What is the best means of delivering the arget audiences to take the required actions? After all, awareness matters not if nothing changes. message to the target audience? What combination of tools and vehicles work best? What individuals can serve as effective messengers? Not very complicated, right? And if it’s as simple as that, then how come marketing consultants continue to earn hands ome fees from nonprofits? First of all, it’s not that simple. Crafting a communications plan for a nonprofit that will cut through the background noise requires skill and ingenuity. But compounding the problem, nonprofits infrequently take the time to do this right.Impatient executive directors tend to focus on tactics, obsessing on such things as their column in the organization’s newsletter or signing off on all direct mail copy. Audience research and message testing can be expensive, so often nonprofits will try shortcuts or simply close their eyes and do something even more dangerous: assume. And belaboring the whole process can be the immense self-absorption of so many nonprofits. Mission-driven organizations, with their singular focus on a cause such as human rights or the environment, can come across as cults of the self-righteous, demanding that supporters drink their proverbial purple Kool-Aid.Their communications and marketing materials will ask for buy-in to a full set of beliefs, rather than support for a single solution to an identifiable problem that matters to their audience. This can lead to big problems. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 10 Developing tightly integrated marketing and communications plans with a focus on a measurable goal, and a clearly identified target audience thus can serve as the perfect antidote for the congenital lack of discipline and self-referentialism of so many nonprofits.It will ensure that you spend what you need to spend — and not any more. It will ensure that whatever you do spend will be aimed toward a pre-determined result (and evaluated accordingly). moral: You can’t go far wrong in communications if you stick to the Holy Trinity: Audience. Message. Vehicle. In addition to the general public, a few other hardy perennials seem to pop up onto most nonprofit lists of priority audiences. T here are â€Å"policymakers† — as if county, city, state, federal, and international institutions were all the same.This phrase lumps together elected officials, appointed officials, and legislative staff; the executive, judicial, and legislative branches; and often the media elites, academics, and other key influencers as well. Then there are â€Å"major donors† and â€Å"foundations. † These too are highly idiosyncratic audiences, requiring discrete messages and careful handling. Specificity matters when identifying and prioritizing audiences. The more general and broad the audience, the more difficult it is to tailor and deliver a powerful, compelling message that will resonate with that audience.Political campaigns see this dynamic all the time whenever a candidate has to reach out beyond his or her base. The red meat issues that so inspired the faithful don’t always translate well when packaged for a wider audience. The same logic applies to t he nonprofit sector. The narrower the audience you choose, and the more audience appropriate your approach, the higher the probability that you can move that audience to action. Selecting and ranking your audiences is a bit like solving a puzzle. Start with your objective. Who do you need to make progress?In other words, what group of people (or institutions) will have the necessary clout to make a difference — either to block what you want or else to make it happen? The answers to these questions cannot be based on wishful thinking or guesswork; rather, it requires a clear-eyed and sometimes coldblooded analysis of the world of the possible. I learned about the importance of figuring out the right audience years ago, when I was involved in a campaign to protect the desert tortoise, whose listing as an endangered species threatened to shut down realestate development in Las Vegas.The key to the whole deal was getting the local Board of Supervisors to put up a bunch of money t o acquire habitat for the tortoise way out in the desert. It didn’t take us long to focus like a laser on the target audience of our campaign — the nine members of the board of supervisors. About Audiences I still get splenetic when my nonprofit clients list the â€Å"general public† as one of their target audiences. I remind them that there is no such animal in today’s sophisticated marketing universe, no one — not Proctor & Gamble, not General Motors, not Unilever — tries to sell to the â€Å"general public. And certainly no nonprofit can be in the business of trying to appeal to such an amorphous and diverse audience. Yet all too many nonprofits persist in the fantasy that they can reach and then mobilize a broad audience. If you are the AARP, to be sure, you can easily roust your membership of 35 million to action whenever there is a political attack on Social Security or Medicare. But even if they were to get all 35 million, thatâ€⠄¢s still barely a tenth of the country, and hardly representative of the â€Å"general public. An exceptionally savvy and politically astute institution, AARP instead makes careful, informed judgments about what political coalition they need to achieve their legislative goals, and then methodically reaches out to those audiences. That’s a far cry, and far more strategic, than trying to spread the word about your cause through every possible channel to every possible audience. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 11 But we really didn’t even bother with all nine.Three of them were on our side already, and three opposed. To get a majority, we needed to target the two undecided supervisors — an audience of exactly two. I am happy to report that both of these fine elected officials were deeply impressed by our poll of voters that showed strong public support for protecti ng the tortoises. They agreed to support the appropriation we were seeking. Today a healthy population of tortoises thrives at a wildlife refuge created for them in Searchlight, Nevada. The poll that broke the political logjam cost around $10,000.If we had been less careful in choosing our audience — if, say, we had targeted the voters of — I have no doubt that we would have spent a lot more money and accomplished less in terms of conservation. The alternative would have been expensive and timeconsuming grassroots campaign, with no guarantee of success. With inherently limited means, nonprofits, therefore, should be ruthless in narrowing their target audiences to the greatest degree possible. What’s the irreducible minimum, the smallest audience I can reach and still achieve my objective? It could be two people, as in the Las Vegas case, or it could be thousands.The numbers matter less than going through the exercise of drawing an explicit link between the audie nce and the desired outcome. At the very least, this keeps you from spending time and money trying to engage people who aren’t interested in what you do, and never will be. I’m all for being on the same page. That’s why highimpact nonprofits have a position statement and elevator speech, an organization-wide mission and unifying goals. But don’t confuse or conflate these framing elements of your organization’s positioning with the messages that you are trying to deliver to your target audiences.Certainly, there will be considerable overlap, and messages must be consistent with the overall brand. If you fall in the trap of starting with your message first, you will never really succeed at marketing or communicating about your organization. Instead, the needs of the audience dictate the message. Nonprofits often miss this point and believe that the message should be about them. But it most emphatically is not. More than just slogans, messages should be designed to motivate the target audience to go beyond awareness and take action — to vote one way or another, make a donation or sign a petition, to stop smoking or exercise more.What’s more, messages have to speak directly to the needs, desires, and aspirations of the audience. What’s in it for them? Why should they care? And how might your messages lessen the perceived costs or highlight the perceived benefits of taking action? Messages can evoke emotion (fear or hope, for example) or appeal to reason (using statistics or anecdotes) but in either case, the message needs to address a top-of-mind concern not for you, but for your target audience, and do so in a simple, compelling way.Obviously, the more you know about your audience, the better you can devise messages that will scratch their particular itch. Market research, consequently, plays a critical role in communications and marketing campaigns. Research helps you understand your audience’s attit udes and concerns, their priorities and where your issue stands relative to others for them. Meanwhile, research into language — testing specific words and phrases — can ensure that messages will resonate with the target audience. And market research also plays a role in figuring out how to deliver your message.What are the common characteristics of those in your target audience? How does your target audience get information? Who do they trust for accurate data? What do they read? Do they all watch the same TV shows? moral: There is no such thing as the general public. Find the audience that matters most to your mission, and focus on them like a laser beam. About Messages About 45 minutes into the first meeting on developing a new communications strategy, someone — usually an long-time employee from the program side of the organization — will express frustration with all the attention being pent on audiences. â€Å"Let’s just get our message strai ght and go from there,† this person will say. â€Å"We all need to be on the same page. † Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 12 Brevity is the second success factor in developing effective messages. The more clear and compelling the message, the greater the likelihood of moving your audience to act. In the desert tortoise case, for example, the message couldn’t have been clearer — your constituents overwhelmingly support this. In short, it is a votewinner.By contrast, once you branch out into a more complex message, especially one that requires context, it’s easy to lose the thread and hence the audience. The environmental community had this problem for years with the issue of global warming, which until very recently was a hard sell to policymakers because the story wasn’t being told well. Finally, let me reiterate that effective messages incorpo rate an explicit call to action. A message without an explicit â€Å"ask† may help build awareness of a particular issue or cause, but awareness by itself rarely results in positive social change.The Lance Armstrong Foundation discovered the importance of this lesson when to their astonishment the yellow rubber â€Å"LiveSTRONG† bracelets exploded in popularity by the tens of millions. Within months, the market was awash in different colored bracelets: white, pink, red and so forth. Armstrong’s cause — promoting cancer survivorship — was lost in this technicolor jumble, and not least because they were unprepared to channel the immense initial interest in their work into a simple ask. The â€Å"ask† also has to align with the problem or product.The famous â€Å"Got Milk? † campaign, for example, also got a ton of attention for its innovative approach — hip advertising with milk mustaches on celebrities — and the ask was o bviously there, but it initially and famously failed in its goal of increasing milk sales. It turns out people loved the ads because they were fun and clever, not because they presented a compelling argument to go out and drink more of the same old boring milk. It took better alignment with the actual product — new bottles, different flavors — before milk sales were affected.Back in the nonprofit world, the Lance Armstrong Foundation is now aimed at turning the â€Å"LiveSTRONG† awareness (wear a yellow bracelet) into an ask for united political action (vote for cancer funding), and achieving far more tangible results, such as the recent passage of a $3 billion bond initiative for cancer research in Texas. When the message aligns with the interests of the audience, by contrast, possibilities abound. To rejuvenate membership and participation, in 2000 the Girl Scouts ditched their stodgy Brownie image and adopted a message hierarchy organized around the theme â⠂¬Å"where girls grow strong. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reached its teen audience by stressing how having a baby resulted in the loss of social status and the addition of many new responsibilities. But the gold standard for effective messaging in the nonprofit world revolves around the â€Å"Truth† campaign, an initiative designed by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids to reduce teen smoking in Florida. Conventional anti-smoking messages aimed at teens asserted that smoking wasn’t cool and stressed the health risks, the smell, and the cost.They preached responsibility and just saying â€Å"no. † And as anyone with teenage children could tell you, those messages were doomed from the start. When you are immortal, like all 17 year olds, you don’t care about developing lung cancer at 65. You also deeply resent insults to your intelligence, so being lectured that smoking isn’t cool just doesn’t fly. Rebels smoke, and always ha ve: Bogart, Bacall, Dean, Che. The â€Å"Truth† campaign started from a whole different place. The ads, funded with tobacco settlement money, were written and produced by teens.Instead of telling kids that smoking was bad for them or somehow uncool, the teenagers in the Truth ads openly acknowledged the right of their peers to make their own decisions about smoking. (Independence being a key motivator for teens. ) Instead, the ads zeroed in on the tobacco companies, and, in particular, charges about tobacco advertising intended to lure children and teenagers into smoking. In essence, therefore, the message in the â€Å"Truth† ads was all about manipulation: did you know that the adults at big Tobacco are trying o manipulate you into smoking? Again, parents will recognize immediately the huge leverage in this message: the only thing kids hate more than sanctimonious adults are manipulative adults. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Exe cutive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 13 And â€Å"Truth† worked. Florida was one of the few states that actually experienced a drop in teenage smoking rates. Most telling, the tobacco industry absolutely loathed the Truth campaign and did everything in its power to stop it.When you have attracted the ire of the master marketers at Phillip Morris and RJR, you can be sure that you have honed a pretty effective message. moral: Figure out what motivates your audience. That’s the basis for your message, not what the board, management, and staff want. About Messengers and Vehicles When SeaWeb and other ocean advocacy organizations became concerned about the rapid decline of the swordfish and other species known as much for their popularity on our plates as their populations in the oceans, they decided to enlist top chefs, rather than movie stars, as their main messengers.Why? Their research showed that the public looked to chefs for advice on seafood. A nd Paul Prudhomme already had exemplified the way that a top chef, with a catch phrase and heavy seasoning, could take the relatively bland redfish, and create a dining sensation while unintentionally driving a species closer to the point of extinction. The hope was that those who set the nation’s menus would take a step in the opposite direction, and stop promoting a popular fish that was now in trouble. The organizations enlisted hundreds of leading chefs from across the nation in a campaign to â€Å"give swordfish a reak. † The media liked the messenger, picked up the message, and policymakers listened, taking action to protect swordfish back in the sea. The messenger alone is not enough, but the right messenger carrying the right message can do wonders to motivate an audience. Of course, that message also needs to reach the audience in a way they trust. For SeaWeb and the swordfish, the focus was not only on the media outlets that reached the policymakers who contr olled fishing regulations, but also on arranging one-on-one meetings directly with those policymakers.With the advent of the Internet, the number and variety of arrows in the marketing and communications quiver has increased exponentially. Once an audience is identified, there are now more paths than ever to their proverbial doorstep. While personal meetings, printed materials, earned media and advertising remain important in many cases, increasingly the centerpiece of an effective marketing strategy is no longer offline, but online. The best web sites have evolved from being simple online brochures to nodes on larger networks.Blogs offer an opportunity to send and receive more sophisticated and nuanced messages, especially to those who follow your issues with rapt attention. And email systems are becoming so cost effective that savvy organizations can now do the sort of differentiated marketing and information exchanges with large groups in a way that they once had to reserve only for use with VIPs. The catch, of course, is that for organizations to make the most of these new tools, they need to relinquish some control and allow the public to participate.The networked nature of the Internet is at the core of a small â€Å"d† democratic revolution in the creation of distribution of information. In keeping with the title of Jed Miller and Rob Stuart’s influential article, network-centric thinking certainly is a challenge to ego-centric organizations. If a nonprofit leader still wants to employ a 17-step approval process for every bit of information going out the door, that organization will simply not thrive in the Internet age. moral: Put the right messenger in the right vehicle and let it fly.Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 14 Managing a Communications Crisis The recurring nightmare of every communications manager starts with a phone call. â€Å" I’m calling from 60 Minutes,† the nightmare begins. â€Å"I’d like to come over and ask you a few questions about your organization. † These words typically trigger a series of immediate reactions on the part of recipient: panic, a sinking feeling in the gut, the sweats. And with good reason.When you hear from investigative journalists, it’s generally not because they are interested in all the good work you do. To the contrary: their job is to expose what you aren’t doing well. To paraphrase a reporter who covers the nonprofit sector for a leading newspaper, â€Å"‘Foundation gives grant’ is not news. ‘Nonprofit helps people’ is not news. ‘Nonprofit misuses foundation money’ — that’s news. † This attitude infuriates the boards and staff of nonprofit organizations. It’s so unfair, they wail. Journalists don’t understand all the great work we do on behalf of our mission.W hy don’t they go get a â€Å"bad guy†? Rather than indulge in self-pity and anti-media resentment after the fact, nonprofits would be wise to prepare themselves in advance for communications crises that may never come. Planning and forethought represent your best, perhaps only hope for mitigating the institutional damage that comes from a full-blown reputational crisis. When it hits the fan, you won’t have time to do anything but react, and by that time, you will have already lost. At the same time, how can you prepare for something that hasn’t happened yet or that you don’t know about?Nonprofit staff, just like their peers in the private sector and government, are loath to acknowledge error and in many cases do their best to bury mistakes far from the light of day. How can the poor communications director possibly know which of these little disasters is going to burrow out of the bureaucratic morass and land on the front page of The New York Times ? Two kinds of stories in particular seem to agitate the media when it comes to nonprofits. The first has to do with the compensation and behavior of nonprofit managers.Much of the mainstream media has unfortunately bought into the idea that those working in the charitable sector deserve to be paid much less, and should act much better than their private-sector counterparts, and thus the spate of stories in the press about lavishly compensated nonprofit CEOs or a personal indiscretion that would go unnoticed in the for-profit world. Whether these criticisms are valid or not is irrelevant. The fact, the appearance of nonprofit â€Å"profiteering† or inappropriate behavior remains a huge red flag for the press.Hypocrisy is the second big trigger. If the media finds out, for example, that your anti-smoking coalition has been accepting money from tobacco companies, your reputation is basically toast. No explaining that decision away. The same holds true for children’s prog rams that actually benefit adults or when a high-profile televangelist is discovered with his pants down. The press holds nonprofits and others working in the charitable sector to a higher ethical standard, and when organizations violate that trust, the journalistic response is usually swift and merciless.So what can the nonprofit marketing professional do? Is the only choice to take the punches? Actually, that’s not such a bad strategy, depending on the severity of the media attack and the depths of your organizational culpability. If you don’t argue — if you just admit that you made mistakes and assure your stakeholders that the problem is being fixed, oftentimes the press will get bored and move on to a new story. It’s no fun picking a fight with someone who refuses to fight back.This kind of institutional jujitsu works best for dealing with cases of employee fraud or theft, accidents, or other isolated incidents. Higher-stakes assaults on your reputat ion — ones that suggest a pattern of inappropriate behavior — merit a more aggressive response. No one has thought more deeply about this than Lanny Davis, who helped Bill Clinton fend off media inquiries into White House Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate ProgramAdvocacy in the Public Interest 15 fundraising practices. Frustrated both by the lawyers inside the White House, who fought releasing any information to the public, and the press, who were convinced of a massive cover-up, Davis conceived a set of three simple rules for handling crisis communications: Tell it all. Tell it early. And tell it yourself. tell it all: Since Watergate, generations of media relations professionals have cleaved to the mantra that the cover-up is always worse than the original sin.The reason is simple: nothing keeps a story in the news more than having information dribble out slowly, with each new revelation allowing the press to rehash everything that has gone before. What’s worse, each new revelation only confirms the suspicions of the press that you aren’t being straight with them. So why do so many organizations violate this basic tenet of crisis communications? First, as noted earlier, no one likes to admit error. For nonprofits, which depend on voluntary contributions, there is also real fear that owning up to mistakes will damage their reputation and thus hurt their fundraising.Even more fundamental, though, it’s often very difficult to gather and get straight all the facts about a tricky situation in time to meet the deadlines of the press. This leads to incomplete or evasive answers that often have to be â€Å"corrected† later — with predictable results. Who can ever forget Richard Nixon’s press secretary saying â€Å"that information is no longer operative†? The only possible defense against accusations of a cover-up is to get to the bottom of the is sue internally and then make a complete and frank accounting externally.Even the most embarrassing details are better told up front than leaking out later. Or as Davis says: tell it all. But the most important reason to tell it early is so that you can control — or attempt to control — how the issue gets framed. If something has gone terribly wrong inside your organization, you want to be the person announcing it to the press, rather than the other way around. It gives you a chance to play a little offense, not only to reveal the transgression but also to announce what you’re going to do about it.In such circumstances, your best hope of avoiding a media feeding frenzy is to acknowledge the full extent of the error (tell it all), take full responsibility for what happened (passing the buck infuriates the press), and lay out a series of action steps to prevent recurrences. tell it yourself: There’s no guarantee, of course, that telling it all and telling it early will suffice to call off the media. Some will always question whether you’ve taken strong enough action, or whether the responsible people have been appropriately disciplined.But the alternative — waiting for your dirty laundry to be aired in the press — is invariably worse. And make no mistake: your unsavory organizational secrets will eventually come to light. Bad news is too juicy and has too many avenues for escape. I learned this lesson the hard way when I was running communications for The Nature Conservancy. Disgruntled with the new directions of the Conservancy’s president, at least three different people from inside management were leaking documents to The Washington Post.This is every reporter’s dream: multiple sources with access to inside information — and a grudge. As a result, the Post spent months asking questions to which they already knew the answer, hoping to catch the organization in a contradiction. You can’ t just worry about an errant employee, though. Even if you believe down to the depths of your soul that your organization is beyond reproach, both in its mission and its actions, there is, without doubt, someone out there who would like to see you stopped in your tracks.Identify those potential enemies in the same way you would identify your potential allies, and be prepared for when they come knocking. tell it early: In the public mind, stonewalling equals guilt (just as most people instantly interpret the classic â€Å"no comment† as an admission of error). The longer you wait to respond to charges, the more validity those charges assume. These factors alone provide a powerful incentive for nonprofits to get their side of the story out fast. moral: Don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. Instead, learn to take your medicine and follow the Davis Rules.Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program A dvocacy in the Public Interest 16 About the Author David Williamson is Managing Director of the consulting firm of Bernuth & Williamson, serving nonprofit clients in the areas of strategy, marketing, and communications. He previously served for 13 years in senior management positions at The Nature Conservancy, the nation’s 10th largest nonprofit, including six years as Director of Communications (1997–2002) and terms as Vice President for Marketing and Director of Conservation Marketing.He is an adjunct professor of business administration at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and has lectured on nonprofit management at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, among others. Williamson, a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, serves in leadership positions on three nonprofit boards in addition to his work with clients. David Williamson