Race and Ethnicity Paper Essay

I was born and raised in China. I would come to self – identify with the Chinese people. My roots allow me to be classified as Asian. Mandarin and Cantonese are languages I have learned to speak and read. These languages also help to identify me as Chinese. What is race? Race defines who we are. We look at people and experiences through race and culture. Both of my parents are introverted in personalities. They are soft spoken because they once lived under the fears of Communism. They taught me not to speak inappropriate things to other people. This prevented much trouble from occurring. I have been taught by the spoken and unspoken ways of my parents and teachers to utilize my race as the social lens through which I can value people and experiences. My parents shaped me early on life to not speak out about Chinese Politics. They taught me that Chinese plays a role in my cultural identification. Through generations of racial modeling, my parents passed on these oppressive limitations. What make me Chinese? What are the characteristic of a Chinese person? I really don’t know. Other identifying me as a Chinese by my skin color, hair, eyes, height, other appearance features, and the language I speak, and where I come from. I’m a quiet person in school, and when I have questions or I need help on my subjects, I hesitate to raise my hand. Since my freshman year I have been like this. I’m represented as a workaholic Chinese. I turn in every assignment and on time, for this reason, they identified me as an Asian, because of the stereotypes placed on Asians my behavior and attitude contributed to people’s reasoning. My ethnic identification exposed me to a cultural clash. For example, we had a critical thinking class last year, for summer camp. We read an article in our class, part of the paragraph described a Chinese person taking a sample food. He liked it because it was free. Therefore, the rest of the class considered Chinese people to be greedy. People always judge us by our conversations, actions and jokes. We do not need such a race consciousness in order to know who we are. It is hard to identify one’s self. It shouldn’t be based on where you were born, where you come from or the color of your skin. I don’t want to be a Chinese nor any other ethnic background. If an American gave birth to her offspring in China, and her baby was raised there they may face the same cultural biases as I have. The baby would probably speak Chinese, use chopsticks, and dress like a Chinese person, but that does not make them Chinese. Racism will never end unless the word race is not used any more. We must stop separating Chinese, American, and Mexican groups.

Student of the Year

WEDDINGS IN THE UAE Every nation has its own way of celebrating their festivals or personal occasions. These anniversaries are indeed very essential and important in the culture of every country in the world. Some people have different ways of celebrating their rituals and their dear parties. In the UAE, for example weddings have another different story. Have you ever asked your grandparents about their wedding? Weddings were different in the UAE in the past.In the days before the discovery of oil, the majority of people didn't have much money and they lived in smaller towns and villages where everyone knew every other. Unlike today when a wedding is a very expensive party for one day, weddings in the past often lasted for many days and the whole community took part in them. One day I asked my curved back and toothless grandmother about how she got married from my grandfather. Her cracked face smiled and produced a laughing sound . She didn't hesitate to answer me with pleasure as I amSome people who are 80 years old now remember when a dowry cost Dh 60 and Dh 40 would pay for a whole wedding. The family of the bride and her women neighbors made the wedding dress in a tent near her house , In the past , these dresses were very colorful and were sewn with a hand . It took several days to sew the bride's clothes, so women had a chance to visit. They often sang while they worked. When they the clothes were ready, they perfumed the clothes with incense and then stored the clothes in a wooden trunk.Then as now, henna decorations were very important for a beautiful bride. The groom's family prepared the place for the couple to live . The mother of the groom even made a cradle so that when the couple had their first child , the baby's bed would be all ready. A tailor made the groom's colored kandoora. Even the man wore henna sometimes in the past. Food was as important in the past as it is now. However, in the past, the families got together to make large amounts of r ice and meat that were served at the wedding.Since houses were smaller in the past, weddings were often held outdoors in small tents and both men and women attended them. The men danced and the women sang old songs about love and happiness. Wedding traditions change with time. Recently, more people have chosen to have their wedding parties in traditional tents set up near the houses instead of having them at luxury hotels . Some young Emiratis prefer to have their weddings in tents because it makes them feel more committed to heritage and traditions and it helps them save money and feel more private.Tent dealers are very happy with the increase in their business. On tent dealers once said more than 50% of their clients have been UAE nationals who have hire tents for their weddings . Another company said that they charge 25,000 Dhs for tents with full service for 1000 guests. It is a recent habit to have wedding parties in a 5-star hotel. A lot of neighbors and relatives could not at tend the wedding if it was in a hotel.

Gender relationships in one of the two course plays Essay

Show how gender relationships in one of the two course plays is used by the playwright to throw light on our understanding of the main character, and the overall themes of the play. A view from the bridge is based in Brooklyn, an Italian community set in the 1950s. This particular part of the 20th century was seen as a rather sexist era. Men were a lot more dominant, women were known to stay at home cooking and cleaning-like every wife seems to do today! However aside from that, men felt like they had to be ‘men’ all the time. They felt like if they expressed their feelings, talked about their troubles or cried, these men would be laughed at and ridiculed. Eddie Carbone is a hard working longshoreman who works on the docks in his local area. Eddie is a typical bloke; he is a proud and stubborn man but is a loving husband to his wife Beatrice and a caring father figure to his niece Catherine. To the audience in the first part of the play Eddies comes across as the typical over protective father, however as the play progresses his feelings for Catherine become obvious that they are a lot heavier than what we are led to believe. Throughout the play we discover Eddie has fallen in love with his niece but his feelings are not sexual, in my opinion it is an obsessive need that cant be controlled as realized by Alfieri, â€Å"Something perversely pure calls to me from his memory – not purely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly known. † Alfieri realizes his feelings for Catherine are exceptionally powerful and that their would be nothing that Eddie could do to control them or dissolve them. Eddie tries to open up to Alfieri but can’t quite get the words out of what he wants to say. There is also one other particular part of the play when Eddie goes to see Alfieri in his office. Eddie goes to seek advice in order to prevent Catherine from marrying Rodolpho. Alfieri subtly mentions Eddie’s feelings but doesn’t quite mention them in so many words. Alfieri says, â€Å"When the law is wrong it’s because it is unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now. Let her go. † Alfieri is saying that it is illegal for Eddie to get involved with Catherine sexually. It goes against the natural order. However the only advice Alfieri can give is to turn Rodolpho and Marco in to immigration, but with them being family it wouldn’t be a wise move. Eddies love for Catherine is so strong that he is willing to go to any means necessary to stop her marrying Rodolpho, making the call to immigration the only way out of the predicament. Eddie calls immigration, aware of his betrayal to Beatrice but he is doing it out of love for Catherine. Beatrice also realizes Eddie’s feelings for Catherine, in one [particular scene Eddie ad Beatrice have a slight disagreement over Catherine which later leads to an argument over lack of sex. Beatrice wants to know, â€Å"When am I gonna be a wife again, Eddie? † Beatrice says it in this context rather than come straight out and says when are we going to have sex again. This way avoids embarrassment but still gets the point across without having to actually say it. Beatrice wants to talk about what is happening but she can’t get Eddie to open up to her. Eddies feelings are putting a strain on the marriage, sexually, physically and emotionally. But Eddie,

Analyze Why I went to the woods of Henry David Thoreau Essay

Analyze Why I went to the woods of Henry David Thoreau - Essay Example Since the present times are driven by digital innovations, facilities and other leverage and benefits being provided through the overall progress, therefore jungle life as is related to the historic people and stone age cannot be lived by the contemporary man based on the facilities and the environment that has been enjoyed by them. His experience is based upon the fact that he had undertaken tests and tribulation towards deciding a place prior to settling at a place. The decision came up after massive investigation and assessment of the places and subsequently deciding upon a place which he could relate to. He was in search of the place that would allow him the feel of nature and keep his soul at comfort and peace. Other purposes behind his expedition and adventure was to realize and assess for the benefits that are being provided by the nature, and the artificial environment that has been overtaken by the mankind which has led to an alienation from the real structure of society and earth and this in turn makes it difficult for the mankind to live in a natural way that comes in form of the woods and jungle life. Hence it can be safely said that these conditions do not apply to the 21st century and a person living in sophisticated urban environment may find it nearly impossible to live in the woods as he does not have any of the facilities that he is used to otherwise. Although the author has taken up the case for the purpose of bring himself closer to the nature and natural existence, yet for any other ordinary citizen it would be difficult to adjust and relate to the woods as there are hardly as facilities that may be available to them in the woods (Thoreau). The purpose of the author was to provide the readers with an insight into the differences and the possible shift over which is often questioned and desired by the person who get distasted from the civilized modern day society and

Credit risk management in banking sector Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Credit risk management in banking sector - Essay Example Credit risk management appears to have improved during the past decades due to greater reliance on market determined prices. Credit risk today is managed through the creation of an in-house risk management unit. In addition, efficient credit risk valuation methods are being employed today by banks. Banks have also resorted into more advanced methods of credit risk management and quantification such as value at risk, stress testing, credit scoring. According to BIS paper No.33, financial markets are subject to various sources of risk: credit, market, liquidity, operational and legal risks. These risks tend to be more pronounced in the developing world than in developed countries due to a lower level of economic, financial and institutional development. Credit risk tends to be more acute as a result of a lack of highly rated counterparties. Market and liquidity risks are higher due to thinly traded markets (IMF BIS Paper No. 33). Operational risks may also be exacerbated because of inadequate human resources or the failure of manual, mechanical or electronic systems to process payments. Finally, legal risk may also be part of the environment (for instance, due to the inability to foreclose on collateral). The next section discusses credit risk and some of its components and how it can be managed. 1.2 Credit Risk According to the International Monetary Fund Business Paper No. 33, credit risk is the risk that a debt issuer will default is known as credit risk; this is typically the most important form of risk for commercial banks (Shapiro, 2003; Buckley, 1996; Muller and Verschoor, 2005; Solt and Wayne, 2001).Solt & Wayne (2001) argues that, in assessing credit risk, an institution needs to consider three issues: default probabilities over the horizon of the obligation, credit exposure (ie how large the obligation is when the default occurs) and the recovery rate (ie what part of the exposure may be recovered through bankruptcy proceedings or some other form of settlement) (Solt and Wayne, 2001). Credit risk is often difficult to assess due to the lack of information on the credit history and financial position of borrowers, inadequate accounting practices and standards that make it difficult to evaluate credit exposures, macroeconomic volatility and deficiencies in the institutional environment (e.g., political instability) (BIS Paper No.33, 2005). Weak enforcement of creditor rights may also contribute to uncertainty regarding recovery rates. Although many of these factors have been improving in recent years, progress in some cases is slow (Mohanty et al., 2006). Moreno (2006) highlights two key issues related to credit risk that are relevant for emerging market economies (EMEs). First, the distinct increase in the share of credit to the household sector that has been observed in a number of countries could lower credit risk if the concentration of bank assets fell, if consumer credit diversifies risk among a larger number of borrowers. Moreno (2006), further states that, credit risk could rise if banks are lending in new market segments. Second, there is significant credit risk associated with the effects of asset price fluctuations on banking books. One concern in this case is the volatility

From the perspective of Native Americans, would you say that the Essay

From the perspective of Native Americans, would you say that the Spanish and English Empires in America had more similarities than differences - Essay Example Both empires took the lead in developing a new empire in the new world and subdivided their territories into subsections. The Spanish empire consisted of three viceroyalties including New Spain, New Castile, and New Granada. Its empire extended across most of Americans and into Asia in the sixteenth Century. The English empire had four subdivisions including Indian empire, four self-governing countries, colonies, and territories. Secondly, the Spanish and the English empires in America were similar in their economic endeavours. The leadership in both empires quite well understood the importance of a stable economy. The Spanish empire, which happens to be the largest in the world, depended mainly on silver and gold produced form Peru and Mexico. According to Scott, â€Å"the gold and silver of the conquered Aztec and Incan civilizations supplied the Spanish monarchy with centuries of mineral wealth† (Scott web). This wealth could sustain its economy. Indigenous people formed the workforce because they worked as slaves (Hansen et al 530). To maintain its empire, English empire endeavoured to industrialise using slaves from the colonised nations as cheap labour. The fact that English society contained a more developed and flourishing sector than its neighbourhood did attract settlement to its territories building a platform for commerce. Thirdly, both empires carry a history of poor administration. The management of the conquered colonies was inefficient and poor. For instance, Spanish monarchs had a problem in administering large territories conquered during their raid. There existed poor means of communication, which led the monarchs to formulate rigid rules, within layers of bureaucracy. Both empires endeavoured to civilize and colonise the natives, at times dehumanizing them by making them slaves or getting rid of them and replacing them with the whites. Although both empires had poor administration, they influenced globalisation of the current

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman Essay - 2

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman - Essay Example or about the value, limitations, and ethical implications of ethnography as a way of making sense of social conduct, for instance – in your personal and professional roles? The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is one of the modern classics in the medical anthropology genre. Tracing the immigration and the challenges of assimilation of a Hmong family into the USA, the book is admirable on many counts. Firstly, for medical professionals, it offers valuable insights into the symptoms, treatment options and overall management of epilepsy in children. Second, it presents the unique challenges faced by health care professionals in a multi-cultural environment. Third, the book documents the broader details of Hmong ethnography, adopting classical anthropological approaches. The rest of the essay will elaborate these features, as well as noting the personal and professional impact the book has had upon the writer. The central dialectic in the book is how the shaman istic animism followed by the Hmong conflicts with the rationality of Occidental medicine. While the cultural heritage of the Hmong is rich and colourful, it betrays its superstitious underpinnings when juxtaposed with modern scientific knowledge and advancement. In other words, in light of our overall increase in the knowledge of the world, much of the Hmong beliefs appear mythical. In the classic case of conflict illustrated in The Spirit Catches You, we see how Hmong culture is markedly at odds with modern science.

Pediatric Issues Paper (Health Brief) #1 Research

Pediatric Issues (Health Brief) #1 - Research Paper Example The Issue- The number of adolescents aged 10-19 years who underwent bariatric surgery tripled from 2000-2003 (Tsai, 218). The number of obese adolescents is increasing due unhealthy eating habits. The high consumption of junk food among adolescents increases cholesterol deposits in the body. According to Pollan, most American meals contain meat and products made from high fructose corn syrup (8). The number of adolescents involved in physical activities has also reduced drastically. Lack of exercise and unhealthy eating habits increase the chances of becoming obese. Between 1999 and 2003, adolescents consumed an average of two 12-ounce cans of carbonated drinks. The consumption of soda and other carbonated drinks increases the amount of calories in the body. Bariatric surgery provides a medical procedure of losing excess body fat. The surgery involves gastric bypass that helps the patient lose several pounds in a healthy way (Encinosa, 710). The number of deaths reported during this period was 0.2 percent, which indicates that the surgery is a safe method of losing body fat. Programmatic Bottom Line/Policy Implications- The following recommendations can reduce obesity cases among adolescents. School systems and other organizations catering for adolescents should stop the sale of soft drinks in hallways, shops, and cafeterias (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 770). Adolescents should replace sodas and fruit juices with club sodas, tap water, or mineral water. Including adequate levels of fiber in the diet reduces cases of obesity. Spending less time in sedentary pursuits and engaging in physical activities helps burn excess calories in the body. Organic food products contain less cholesterol compared to junk food and industrial food products. The consumption of organic foodstuff lessens the level of cholesterol deposits in the body (Maziak, 38).

Arbitration and Litigation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Arbitration and Litigation - Essay Example First, the law that recognises and enforces the agreement of arbitration. Then law that regulates actual arbitration procedure, next the specific law or rules that arbitral tribunal has to use in the matter and finally law for recognition and enforcement of the decision of arbitral tribunal, known as arbitration award. The laws governing arbitration proceedings may be same but it is not necessarily so always. Since most of the international arbitration take place in a neutral country to which neither the arbitrating parties belong. So the law of the proceedings, as applied to the matter of the case and known as substantive or applied law, may be different from the law of enforcement of the award. For example, an arbitral tribunal sitting in England will have English law for place of arbitration but may need to apply New York law as substantive law1. Compared to the courts of law, arbitration is a "primitive' way to resolve the issues which is simple because of less formality and expense. The person deciding the dispute has the qualification that he is accepted for arbitration by two parties.2 For example two merchants disputing over damage to their goods would turn to and accept the judgement of a third, fellow merchant. Actually such had been a community practice to maintain peace and harmony among members of business community3. Why International Arbitration The answer may come from the fact that sometimes national law is not sufficient to resolve disputes between warring parties. For e.g. A corporation based in USA contracts another in Germany. The contract is for setting up a power plant in Egypt with any disputes to be arbitrated in London. Now, if a dispute arises and one of the party refuses to arbitrate or the losing party refuses to carry out the award. No national law can resolve the dispute in such case and is an International treaty was necessary to link the national laws and respecting the award (see footnote 1 p. 4). The international treaty to resolve international disputes is a result of Geneva protocols 1923 & 1927 and New York Convention 1958. The aim for such treaty was to remove all the short comings of law of courts, viz. It is to be fast while law is slow, it is to be inexpensive while law is costly, to be simple in contrast to law which is technical and is peace maker in contrast to str ife creator4. The present arbitral process no longer has the simplicity of its beginning, it has incorporated somewhat more technical complexity which was needed to strengthen it to remove any loopholes leading to non acceptance of the award, particularly by the losing party. In the modern arbitral process the award is binding on both the parties and if it is not carried out voluntary by the losing party it would be enforced by the court at the expense of that party (See footnote. 1). The Arbitration Process: The first step is selection of an arbitrator, which should be done carefully. Ideally the help of an arbitral institution is a good option for

The impact of the British system of government around the world Essay

The impact of the British system of government around the world - Essay Example This is now renamed as Australia. The British Americans forming part of the thirteen colonies of the United States disliked the British Parliament's attempts to tax American colonists without the colonists' consent. In addition, the American war for independence was due to the disagreement over the American colonists' guaranteed rights as Englishmen. The American Revolutionary War for independence started 1775. This is the setting for the following paragraphs1. One good impact of the British system of government around the world is the colonization of the many parts of the world. The British Empire is the largest Empire. Hong Kong was one of the last colonies returned by England to China. Portugal had ceded India to Charles II of England in 1661. England had an expansionist war against Spain Portugal. And, England acted as the world's policeman after the defeat of French leader Napoleon Bonaparte. At the height of Britain's glorious empire, it is often stated that the sun never sets on England because Britain's political and military power had reached many corners of the world2. The English empire during the period 1815 to 1914 covered an estimated ten million square miles of territory and about four hundred people around the globe. During this time, England belligerently exerted its dominating position in world trade thereby controlling the economies of independent countries like Latin American, China and Siam and Asia's India. Some of th e current senators United States are descendants of British persons that arrived from Great Britain. Some of the Australian Caucasians today arrived from England because the thirteen colonies in the Americas won their independence under the leadership of George Washington. Clearly, one good impact of the British system of government around the world is the colonization of the many parts of the world3. Another good impact of the British system of government around the world is the replacement of the Muslim government over India. The British ruled India from 1803 to 1947. The British political system took over the reigns of the Indian government when they defeated the Muslims at the start of the 18th century. The Muslims ruled this small Asian country after its invasion of Indian in the 12th century. Many of the Indians reacted religiously. The Hindus tried their best to hold on to their religion. This was also the reaction of many of the Muslim Indians. This reactionary stand of the people meant that they engendered a strong demand for self government. Evidently, another good impact of the British system of government around the world is the replacement of the Muslim government over India4. Further, this Indian revivalism was also a good impact on the Indian population. This revivalism was characterized by the Indians undying stance to keep their Hindu religion alive. The Muslims were not completely successful in trying to eradicate the Indian native religion Hinduism. The Muslims forcefully installed the Muslim faith on India. The Muslim faith expects each Muslim convert to obey every law mentioned in their bible named Koran. The Muslim government is based on the teachings of their prophet Muhammad written down in their bible. The failure of the Muslims to install their Islamic form of

Examine the ways Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Essay Example for Free

Examine the ways Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Essay Examine the ways Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adds a sense of mystery and suspense to the typical detective story in the sign of four. (Write about the mysterious nature of the plot. The exotic nature of the settings, the variety of personalities involved in the story on both major and minor level. The personalities of Holmes and Watson. The way late Victorian society and its attitudes are depicted. Your own response to the book. ) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle starts the mystery off in the book straight away by just naming the book The Sign of Four, this encourages the reader to open and start reading the book. He creates suspense in the book by not including us in the crime in the first chapter, which differs from the normal detective story; he chooses to settle you in to the story by introducing you to the characters in the story. We find out that many people respect Holmes. Mr. Sherlock Holmes- he began; but the words seem to have a magical effect, for the window instantly slammed shut, and within a minute the door was open. And A friend of Sherlock Holmes is always welcome, When the author does enter Holmes and Watson in to the crime; he creates suspense by constantly solving bits of the puzzle, and introducing new problems. This also keeps the reader interested in the novel. Doyle indulges us in the novel by letting us see the story unfold from Watsons view; this doesnt let us know what Holmes is thinking, and keeps us guessing, Have u read your Jean-Paul. This again differs from the typical detective novel, thus increasing the suspense. Another way Doyle adds mystery to the book is the way he leaves the end of chapters at cliffhangers The little man obeyed in a half-stupefied fashion, and we heard him stumbling down the stairs in the dark. The typical Who done it? Is not present in the Sign of four adding mystery around the crime. The reader finds out who committed the crime half way through the novel, differing from the normal rounding up of suspects in to one room and explaining the motive, chain of events and finally the guilty party. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle differs from the norm with a very relaxed detective, Sherlock Holmes and I blankly looked at each other and then burst simultaneously into an uncontrollably fit of laughter. When they do find the right trail, they find that the criminals are intelligent. We are out of luck, said Holmes. They have taken a boat here. Suspense is increased at this point, as the women knew that a man with a wooden leg came and hired a boat late at night. I dont like that wooden legged man, In the first chapter the author establishes a social hierarchy; this differs from the social hierarchy of today. In the 19th Century the rich gentleman (non-working) were considered higher in status and intelligence than doctors or teachers which today would be considered higher in society than the gentleman. This attitude is reflected in Sherlock Holmes. He is a gentleman that is egotistical, misogynist and vain, yet he is always right. His knowledge is referred to at the start of the book when he is casually taking drugs. Again differing from the typical detective novel as usually you would not associate the hero, with being a drug taker showing differences in 19th century society to nowadays. He smiled at my vehemence. Perhaps you are right, Watson, As u can see Holmes is condescending Watson in the previous quote, showing the difference in society, as we would probably listen to a doctor if he told us something was bad. His intelligence shows again when he produces a likely (correct) storyline. The most obvious difference in society from the 19th century is that the language has changed, sentences are said in different orders and words have evolved (e. g. from thus to that). Watson is put in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries so the reader can relate to someone in the book. The reader relates to Watson because he finds out clues or puzzles the same time we do, he also finds out what Holmes is thinking when we do because Doyle chose to have a narrator involved in the story. This allows us to relate well. Watson is a very clever person making the reader relate even better as many people would not think of themselves as stupid. Watson has a personality which is a very calm, respectful, caring and modest. He never questions Holmes but is always mindful of what he is doing and obviously shows great respect for him: He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his fingers together, leaned forward on his chair like one who relishes conversation. Miss Morstan is the typical 19th Century Woman. Very frail, angelic woman needed to be protected by a strong man (Watson). Nowadays we would not see women as frail or angelic they are presumed competent to look after them selves. Doyle having lived in the 19th Century does not hold that opinion of women although unusually places a women at the center of the story. She, having lived in a boarding school since she was seventeen sees Watson as a Father figure and her feelings towards him grow stronger, and they eventually marry at the end of the book. The other characters of this story include Thaddeus Sholto, Athenly Jones and Jonathon Small. Thaddeus Sholto is a bizarre looking, bald man. He is often nervous as he has bodyguards who surprisingly are Indian. When he is first introduced in to the story he is wearing Indian clothing and smokes from a Hookah, his house is decorated in a typically Indian manner, he is a stereotypical hypochondriac and trusts no-one. Many 19th Century people thought that it was the best gift to be English, and people who chose to be or act a different way were considered to be mad. We nowadays would not think of foreigners as crazy unless we had met them, and got to know them well, this is associated with physiognomy, as people in the 19th Century firmly believed that they could tell if someone was bad by their facial features. He also has a great sense of moral value and respect. Athenly Jones is normally one of the people who deals with the more trivial cases in the world and only crosses paths with Holmes when he is perplexed. When Gregson, Lestrade or Jones are out of their depths, the matter is laid before me. When they first encounter each other Jones has a hint of envy in his voice. You lectured us on the Bishopgate Jewell case. He is obviously a man who does not like to be bettered and does not appear to have the same amount of respect and awe around Sherlock Holmes. We are told that Jonathon Small is, A poorly educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and he wears a wooden stump. And He is middle aged, sunburnt, and an ex-convict. This quote in the 19th Century due to there attitudes on Physiognomy would make the readers think that he was a man to be wary of, and not trust. In the book Small is represented in a resentful, unkind manner; and is portrayed as a man who has led a hard and tiring life only wanting justification for his life, receiving what is rightfully his. Going back to the Physiognomy theory a controversial book was published in 1869 called The Origin of the Species. It followed the widely accepted theory of physiognomy. It made people believe that black people or savages were less evolutionally developed than they were. So Smalls accomplice from the Andaman Islands was viewed as a savage as well as being part of the smallest (height-wise) race on the earth. Being that they were fierce, morose intractable people, with distorted features. However this view was wrong and when you became loyal friends, they were loyal back. In the 19th Century many children did not attend school, either through poverty or theyre parents did not want them to go. They were left wandering the streets earning cheap money by doing errands. Sherlock Holmes refers to them as, His dirty little Lieutenants. He refers to them when he and Watson are hot on the trail of the Small and his accomplish. I enjoyed this book as it differs greatly from the normal detective novels creating suspense, mystery and anxiety. The way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle structured this book was very well done and deserves great praise, it kept me interested all the way through and surprised me one or two times as well. This after all did not conform to my original preconceptions of the book.

The Pros And Cons Of Theory In Family Nursing Nursing Essay

The Pros And Cons Of Theory In Family Nursing Nursing Essay Humanistic nursing embraces more than a benevolent technically competent subject- object one-way relationship guided by a nurse in behalf of another. Rather it dictates that nursing is a responsible searching, transactional relationship whose meaningfulness demands conceptualization founded on a nurses existential awareness of self and of the other (Paterson Zderad, 2008) dduncan2011-02-24T17:28:00 Great quote, you need to include a page numberIn Patersons and Zderads Humanistic Nursing, they believe that nursing is more than having a technical approach to patients, but also to have a self-awareness of themselves and inquire into their experiences with patients. Paterson and Zderad suggest that nurses have a personal knowing that they can apply to there everyday practice experience. The Humanistic Nursing Theory is one of the many theories that can help shape a nurses actions and guide their practice. The Humanist Theory was developed by Dr. Josephine Paterson and Dr. Loretta Zderad. Dr. Patersons education background included a doctor of nursing science degree and a major in public health. Dr. Zderad education background included a doctorate in philosophy while majoring in psychiatric nursing. Similarly, their dissertation papers focused on comfort and empathy. During the 1950s they had met while working at a University. Together, they developed a new program that integrated psychiatric and community health components. This experience was the beginning of there friendship that lasted more than 35 years (Paterson Zderad, 2008). Having similar education backgrounds, they shared their experiences and insights. Together they gained a new perspective and approach to nursing that led them into created the Humanistic Nursing theory. In 1976, they published their book called Humanistic Nursing. The philosophic ideas that formed the two theorists view was nurses have an intuitive knowing and by reflecting on their experiences and gaining more awareness of themselves, they are then able to inquire more into their practice. dduncan2011-02-24T17:29:00 Grammar issues The Humanistic Theory defines the focus of family nursing by creating an interconnection between the nurse and patient or family. As the nurse gains awareness of their own perspective of the patients situation, the nurse is then able to withhold his/her viewpoint so that they dont interfere in the patient describing their experience. Through identifying and withholding personal viewpoints, the nurse is more open to new and different concepts. In turn, the nurse gains more understanding of the individuals perspective and is better able to understand the patient more intuitively.dduncan2011-02-24T17:31:00 Stephanie, you need to reference these ideas as they are clearly not yours Using intuition allows the nurse to communicate from an authentic perspective where the patient is empathetically heard. The nurse is better able to present himself/herself as a real and genuine individual. Furthermore, the humanistic theory suggests that openness, sharing and caring leads to (the) expansion of (an) individual or (a) groups angular views (where) each (are) becoming more than before (Paterson Zderad, 2008). As patients feel accepted and cared for, a bond is established. Through effective communication the patient is better able to understand themselves, thus allowing an opportunity for them to grow. When patients feel empathetically heard, it becomes more possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of inner experiences (Rogers, p.116, 1995). Through intuitive understanding and back and forth communication, patients and nurses are better able to connect with each other. While establishing relationships with families is an important prospect in nursing, nurses also have to keep up with the rapid changing health care system. An underlying truth in nursing today is that nursing has become more technical. Due to a fast paced health care environment and rapid technical advances, nurses are pressured to keep up with the rapid changing health care system. As a result, the nurses relationship with the patient is sometimes overlooked (Kleiman, 2008). Not only are nurses impacted by constant changing technology, they are also influenced by the governments decrease in funding of the health care system. Due to cut backs, hospitals have limited resources and support for services which can result in increased nursing workloads. Nurses who work in environments with limited resources may find their experiences emotionally challenging (McCloskey, 2010, p.234). Nurses create a barrier with themselves and patients when they feel stress and anxiety. Due to stress and technical advances, nurses may find difficulty in establishing genuine therapeutic relationships with patients; thus preventing them from practicing the Humanistic Theory. While there are underlining truths in nuring that may limit connection with others, the Humanistic Theory enables me to become more aware of my true self. Through reflection, I am able to go inwards and gain understanding of my attitudes and belief systems. Individuals have within themselves vast resources for self-understanding and for altering their self-concepts, basic attitudes, and self-directed behaviours (Rogers, 1995, p115). Understanding that some of my behaviours may be hindering my progress in establishing a therapeutic relationship with patients, I can take action and change these behaviours. The Humanistic Theory helps me understand that my perspective of the patients experience may be different from the patients perspective; thus hindering my authentic presence with the patient. Having self-awareness and taking action, enables me to feel more empowered. Through gaining more awareness and making changes, the Humanistic Theory provides individuals an opportunity for personal growth. In relation to personal growth, the Humanistic Theory enables me to reflect more on my nursing practice and to have a broader perspective on situations. Through reflection of my experiences, I am able to identify my strengths and weakness that may be holding me back in developing therapeutic relationships with patients. The Humanistic Theory enable me to become more aware of my habits of thinking. Furthermore, the Humanistic Theory influences me to reflect and change my beliefs; thus allowing me to have a more positive and accepting attitude towards patients. In turn, my genuine attitude influences patients to feel genuinely accepted and truly heard; thus providing an opportunity for them to grow. Humanism requires nurses to develop relationships with patients that are grounded on empathic understanding. This process necessitates an acceptance of the individuality of each person and each encounter (Scalon, p.760, 2006). Through understanding the patient more effectively, I am better able to provide nursing care that is more congruent with where the patient is at in life. When I am presently in the moment with a patient, I am able to communicate authentically to them and feel genuinely empathetic towards them. The experience not only benefits them, but also offers personal fulfillment and growth for myself. Without resistance, I am able to communicate more effectively and have more understanding toward others; therefore, I feel more compassionate and am able to project unconditional love towards others. I can make a difference in ones life. Not only does the humanistic theory allow me to be more compassionate with patients, but also with staff members. Being authentic and genuine with coworkers, I am able to establish a respectful relationships and create a more interconnected work environment. Through creating connections with individuals within the hospital, a community can be establish. Creating an integrated community will help promote an environment with compassionate communication. In relation to compassionate communication, my personal beliefs are very much similar to the Humanistic Theory approach. I believe that each individual has their own limitations and barriers that prevent them from establishing an authentic connection with others. By identifying those barriers, they can heal themselves and undergo personal growth to become more present in the moment. Many individuals may not be aware that they themselves are hindering their own relationships with others and even themselves. Similarly to the humanistic theory, by reflecting daily on our behaviours, especially the ones that cause discomfort in us, we can gain a better understanding of why we act that certain way. For myself, I enjoy reflecting daily in my journal. I reflect about situations that occur in my life and identify certain patterns in my behaviour. Through reflection, I am able to describe how I felt in the experience and what it reminded me of in the past. I realize that how I felt and how I reacted in the experience, was a trigger from a past hurt that I had not completely healed from. Having awareness of my experience is similar to the Humanistic theory perspective. Furthermore, as long as I remain unhealed, I will continue to project my past issues into the present moment; thus creating a barrier in establishing an authentic relationship with others. Similarly to the humanistic theory, I also believe that I can make changes in myself and grow as an individual. As I reflect and become more aware of myself, I can choose to make changes. As a result, I become more evolved and in tune with my inner being where I feel more enlightened and empowered in life. Some of my experiences that are congruent with the Humanistic Theory include my relationships with friends. For instance, when a friend calls me to talk about a difficult time that they are going through, it is only when I am fully present in the moment, I am able to empathize and support them through their experience. In relation to the humanistic theory, the theory suggests that when one is intuitively aware and present, then they can be genuinely empathetic. At times, when I am not present in the moment, my mind is elsewhere and I miss the opportunity to be truly authentic and to hear my friends feelings. I miss the opportunity to be truly there for them and to see them go through there ups and downs in life. Similarly to the humanistic theory, one may have barriers that are withholding them from being able to experience another individuals perspective. Through my awareness, I can prevent this situation from happening and create full filling and memorable experiences with friends. I feel that the actions this theory directs me to take are in the best interests of families in a clinical setting. Through my past clinical experiences, I have had the opportunity to experience an application of the humanistic nursing theory. The theory is in the best interest of the family because it encourages professionals to reflect on their practice and learn from their experiences with families. By become more aware of themselves in situations with families, nurses are then better able to identify their own barriers in the relationships. Through awareness and intuitive knowing, nurses are then able to inquire more about the family; thus the family will feel more understood and better able to communicate there needs. Effective communication between the nurse and family encourages trust and openness leading to a therapeutic relationship.

Overview of Health Behaviour Theories

Overview of Health Behaviour Theories APPENDIX HEALTH BEHAVIOUR THEORIES The biomedical perspective The biomedical perspective incorporates the biomedical theory in which patients are assumed to be passive recipients of doctors instructions. Behavioural (learning) perspective This perspective incorporates behavioural learning theory (BLT) which is focused on the environment and the teaching of skills to manage adherence. Communication perspective Communication is said to be the cornerstone of every patient-practitioner relationship [p. 56]. This perspective suggests that improved provider-client communication will enhance adherence and implies that this can be achieved through patient education and good health care worker communication skills an approach based on the notion that communication needs to be clear and comprehensible to be effective. It also places emphasis on the timing of treatment, instruction and comprehension. Cognitive perspective The cognitive perspective includes theories such as the health belief model (HBM), social-cognitive theory (SCT), the theories of reasoned action (TRA) and planned behaviour (TPB) and the protection motivation theory (PMT). These theories focus on cognitive variables as part of behaviour change, and share the assumption that attitudes and beliefs, as well as expectations of future events and outcomes, are major determinants of health related behaviour. In the face of various alternatives, these theories propose, individuals will choose the action that will lead most likely to positive outcomes. Health Belief Model The HBM views health behaviour change as based on a rational appraisal of the balance between the barriers to and benefits of action. According to this model, the perceived seriousness of, and susceptibility to, a disease influence individuals perceived threat of disease. Similarly, perceived benefits and perceived barriers influence perceptions of the effectiveness of health behaviour. In turn, demographic and socio-psychological variables influence both perceived susceptibility and perceived seriousness, and the perceived benefits and perceived barriers to action. Perceived threat is influenced by cues to action, which can be internal (e.g. symptom perception) or external (e.g. health communication). The protection-motivation theory According to this theory, behaviour change may be achieved by appealing to an individuals fears. Three components of fear arousal are postulated: the magnitude of harm of a depicted event; the probability of that events occurrence; and the efficacy of the protective response. These, it is contended, combine multiplicatively to determine the intensity of protection motivation, resulting in activity occurring as a result of a desire to protect oneself from danger. This is the only theory within the broader cognitive perspective that explicitly uses the costs and benefits of existing and recommended behaviour to predict the likelihood of change. Social-cognitive theory This theory evolved from social learning theory and may be the most comprehensive theory of behaviour change developed thus far. It posits a multifaceted causal structure in the regulation of human motivation, action and well-being and offers both predictors of adherence and guidelines for its promotion. The basic organising principle of behaviour change proposed by this theory is reciprocal determinism in which there is a continuous, dynamic interaction between the individual, the environment and behaviour. Theory of planned behaviour and the theory of reasoned action (TRA) The first work in this area was on the TRA. The TRA assumes that most socially relevant behaviours are under volitional control, and that a persons intention to perform a particular behaviour is both the immediate determinant and the single best predictor of that behaviour]. An intention to perform a behaviour is influenced by attitudes towards the action, including the individuals positive or negative beliefs and evaluations of the outcome of the behaviour. It is also influenced by subjective norms, including the perceived expectations of important others (e.g. family or work colleagues) with regard to a persons behaviour; and the motivation for a person to comply with others wishes. Behavioural intention, it is contended, then results in action. Information-motivation-behavioural skills (IMB) theory This theory was developed to promote contraceptive use and prevent HIV transmission. IMB was constructed to be conceptually based, generalisable and simple. It has since been tailored specifically to designing interventions to promote adherence to ART. Self-regulation perspectives Self-regulatory theory is the main theory in this domain. Developed to conceptualise the adherence process in a way that re-focuses on the patient, the theory proposes that it is necessary to examine individuals subjective experience of health threats to understand the way in which they adapt to these threats. According to this theory, individuals form cognitive representations of health threats (and related emotional responses) that combine new information with past experiences. Stage perspectives The transtheoretical model (TTM) This theory is most prominent among the stage perspectives. It hypothesizes a number of qualitatively different, discrete stages and processes of change, and reasons that people move through these stages, typically relapsing and revisiting earlier stages before success. This theory is said to offer an integrative perspective on the structure of intentional change [p. 1102] the perceived advantages and disadvantages of behaviour are crucial to behaviour change. Lakhan, 2006

Solar Energy Essay -- Essays Papers

Solar Energy Since the beginning of humanity, people have relied on the sun for their daily needs. Whether it is to grow the crops that they eat, dry clothes or warm their family, people have relied on the resource of the sun for sustainability. It was not until people started to get the idea of managing this energy source, that people were able to fully take advantage of the sun. In 1767, a Swiss scientist discovered a practical way to harness the energy of the sun. Horace de Saussure invented the â€Å"solar hot box,† the first devise to attract and capture the energy capabilities of the sun. The main uses of this primitive solar box consisted of cooking food, distilling water and pumping water for irrigation. It was not until the 1880’s that America caught on to this new source of energy. Introduced by John Ericcson, this engineer created solar power engines, used for power steam generators onboard ships. The most famous person credited with exposing solar capabilities to the west, however, was Clarence Kemp, the first man to patent solar water heaters in 1897. His invention caught on so well, that within seven years, thirty-percent of houses in California were using his invention. This was just the beginning of solar energy’s popularity within the US. In 1908, Carnegie Steel Company’s William J. Bailey produced the solar panels we are most familiar with today. The popularity of the solar power boom peaked around the end of World War I, when â€Å"more than 4,000 rooftop solar water heaters had been sold, and more than 60,000 were in place† (EIA). Shortly after this, scientists discovered the possibilities of solar energy in space. Even to date, many satellites and space projects take advantage of this renewable... ...olar energy has undergone many stages throughout its existence, especially within the United States. At the beginning of its discovery, carried out through its peak in popularity around the 40’s and 50’s, solar energy enjoyed its time in the spot light. Due to limits on where solar plants can be built, inefficiency, unreliability and high prices, the use of this fairly environmentally friendly, renewable energy source has dwindled. While some hope for advances in the methods of collecting solar energy, currently it does not have the ability to meet our world’s ever-growing consumption of energy. Works Cited - â€Å"Current Uses and Future Prospects.† . - Energy Information Administration (EIA). The U.S. Government.. - â€Å"Solar Power.† Energy Matters. .

History Of Haiku :: essays research papers fc

In Japan, short poems have a long history. The earliest Japanese poetry such as that of the Manyoshu, written in 759 A.D., includes stirring narrative, dramatic and short lyrical poems which scholars believe were originally written as part of the pre-Buddhist or early Shinto ceremonial rituals (Haiku). This anthology includes anonymous songs and prayers designed to celebrate and pacify the gods, prayers for safe voyages, formal eulogies on the death of an Emperor or Empress and courting, marriage, planting and harvesting rituals. The 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable haiku has evolved and been reinvented many times over the centuries. One such form is the 31 syllable waka composed of five 5-7-5-7-7 syllable phrases. Developed as the early imperial court of the late eighth century consolidated cultural, social and political forms, the waka took its place as one of the important regularized poetic forms of the period. Within imperial circles, minor officials and scribes gained recognition as poem-providers and word specialists due to their ability to compose waka (Haiku). Nevertheless, early Japanese poetry went beyond official usage. In the 14th century, an intellectual game developed where one person would write the first half of a waka-like poem, and another would complete it, adding the two 7-syllable stanzas.As many as four people took part in composing such poetry in what developed as a serious poetic form, with many complicated rules to ensure that the elegant court-poetry diction and aesthetic ideals were maintained. However, in large social gatherings where Japanese rice wine, or sake, was often served, participants became inebriated and started writing haikai, comic linked verse, which ignored many of the rules and allowed any subject matter at all, from the truly crude and erotic to pure slapstick, daffy comedy. According to Dr. Kerkham, it was this lower-level poetic form which Matsuna ga Teitoku, haikai master, tried to clean up and popularize and teach to his student Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). Basho's haiku, written while travelling around Japan, made him one of Japan's most celebrated poets.

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