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The Fine Art of Fundraising

By on February 27, 2013 in Design, Fundraising, Non-Profits, Sector, Social Entrepreneurship, Starting the Journey

World-changing social impact idea – check! Recruited an amazing team of passionate individuals – check! Funding to get the ball rolling … well … maybe!! Fundraising is a skill set critical to any start-up, as it’s needed to get things going and keep them rolling once you have started up.  Unfortunately for any nonprofit focused [...]

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Communication Design + Social Innovation

By on February 20, 2013 in Community Building, Design, Education, Sector, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Intrapreneurship

Communication is the most important determinant of whether or not you will succeed in achieving your vision (see my previous post on the use of language in Intrapreneurship). Great leaders have it, and there’s a way to get it. I speak at many conferences, including the recent Social Enterprise Boot Camp, and receive many requests [...]

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The Secret Power of Crowdsourcing

By on February 18, 2013 in Building a Social Venture, Design, Education, Social Entrepreneurship, Water

One of the most powerful but little talked about movements that has arisen in the last few years is that of crowdsourcing.  According to Wikipedia crowdsourcing “is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people.”  With the explosion of the Internet, crowdsourcing is at last realizing its true potential as an [...]

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The Problem with Solving Problems

By on February 10, 2013 in Building a Social Venture, Design, Featured, Social Entrepreneurship

The formula is simple; identify an everyday life “problem” that impacts a large number of people.  Next step, create a product or service that solves the problem and deliver the solution (your product or service) to the people who have the problem.  This is entrepreneurship.  This is the formula that I was taught while starting [...]

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You’re So Sleek, But I’m Not Interested

By on December 14, 2012 in Design, Energy / Enviornment, Poverty, Stories of Impact, Water, Women's Empowerment

In college, I was enamored by all the savvy products that were being created by first world designers for pressing world issues. Buzz words like humanitarian design and design for bottom of the pyramid began forming. Interdisciplinary design was becoming more experimental and addressing bigger problems. Incredibly imaginative solutions were being produced for basic needs [...]

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Unlocking Intrapreneurship with Language

By on December 5, 2012 in Design, Featured, Social Intrapreneurship

If it is true, as has been said, that all change begins with language, then it is equally true that the inability to change begins with language as well. The wealth of jargon used to describe intrapreneurship (itself a bit of jargon), innovation and corporate social responsibility is more exhausting than enriching, and as their [...]

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