land of non – Jeremy Gregg

Things aren’t always what they seem…

Tomorrow, I am giving a presentation at the Nonprofit Summit hosted by the Nonprofit Center of North Central Florida. I am giving a wide-ranging talk that I am calling “The Land of Non: More than Charity.”

(Thanks to my friend Stacy Caldwell for introducing me to this very appropriate term for the ol’ nonprofit sector. See my first blog about it here.)

My talk will cover three basic topics:

YOUR ORG (“your organization”): How and why nonprofits should stop using the language of “begging” when it comes to fundraising, and focus instead on giving a solid investment pitch (i.e. more like what you see on Shark Tank than on the street corner). I’ll also talk about the difference between thinking of donors simply as sources of money rather than ambassadors in your mission.
1. To illustrate this, I am going to use a version of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program’s “ambassador enrollment presentation” as a case study.
DOT ORG (“the nonprofit sector”): How to reframe our understanding of the nonprofit sector’s role in society by discussing the size, breadth and impact of the nation’s 1.4 million charitable organizations.
OUR ORG (“our sector-wide organizing efforts”): How we can all get involved in changing the dialogue used when discussing the nonprofit sector.
1. To illustrate this, I am going to highlight the work of Robert Egger and his new lobbying organization, CForward

I have about 45 minutes to cover 45 slides. Some will take 5 seconds, some will take 5 minutes. We’ll see how this works out!

For those who attended the conference and are now finding this blog, you can download the presentation here:
Land of Non – More than Charity – by Jeremy Gregg

Finally, here are the links included in this presentation for “Suggested Reading”:

My dear friend Stacy Caldwell, Executive Director of Dallas Social Venture Partners (whose 10th annniversary is being celebrated with a BigBang!), has launched a rather ambitious exercise to create a children’s fantasy documenting the way that the nonprofit sector is changing.

I have been in the sun all day, so here is the best I can come up with — an “imitation piece” based very largely (in fact, 90% of the words come directly) from Lewis Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland”:

——

Jeremy was beginning to get very tired of sitting in a cubicle in a bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice he had peeped over the cubicle wall onto the computer screen his coworker was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a screen,’ thought Jeremy `without pictures or conversation?’

So he was considering, in his own mind (as well as he could, for the long day made him feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of photo-copying a picture of his backside would be worth the trouble of getting up and going to the copy room, when suddenly a White Rabbit with rose-colored glasses ran close by him.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; after all, the company held large investments in various chemical and food companies, and Jeremy was always wading through large crowds of malnourished protesters on his way into the office. Nor did Jeremy think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when he though it over afterwards, it occurred to him that he ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it seemed all quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a grant proposal out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Jeremy started to his feet, for it flashed across his mind that he had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a grant proposal to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, he ran down the aisle after in, and was just in time to see it pop down a large mail chute behind the water cooler.

In another moment down went Jeremy after it, never once considering how in the world he was to get out again.

Thus began my foray into the Land of “Non,” where nonprofits thrived despite the most ludicrous of circumstances.

To be continued.

Tag: land of non

Land of Non — More than Charity

Photo Credit:

Land of Non — More than Charity

The Land of “Non” — an imitation piece

Photo Credit: