Nonprofit Marketing Quotes

Your uniqueness is your greatest strength, not how well you emulate others.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).

The more highly competitive the market for labor and for the employer’s products, the higher the cost paid for discrimination and consequently the less leeway the employer has for indulging his prejudices without risking his own profits and ultimately the financial survival of the business. On the other hand, enterprises not subject to the full stress of a competitive market—monopolies, non-profit enterprises, government agencies—have greater leeway.

The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government. This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.

landscape that makes political fodder of this liberationist legacy. With increasing frequency, we are party (or participant) to a white liberal and “multicultural”/“people of color” liberal imagination that venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries.

This is the real estate state, a government by developers, for developers. It is not monolithic; there are plenty of disputes within it. Builders' desires are not always the same as owners', as reflected in the presence of separate developer and landlord lobbies in New York. Nonprofit developers follow a somewhat different model than for-profit builders. And of course government is still accountable to voters, who are by and large either renters or mortgage holders and continue to organize collectively against real estate's rule. But the parameters for planning are painfully narrow: land is a commodity and also is everything atop it; property rights are sacred and should never be impinged; a healthy real estate market is the measure of a healthy city; growth is good-- in fact, growth is god.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

(6) Doubt about new schools. Is this not all a pipe dream? Private schools now are almost all either parochial schools or elite academies. Will the effect of the voucher plan simply be to subsidize these, while leaving the bulk of the slum dwellers in inferior public schools? What reason is there to suppose that alternatives will really arise? The reason is that a market would develop where it does not exist today. Cities, states, and the federal government today spend close to $100 billion a year on elementary and secondary schools. That sum is a third larger than the total amount spent annually in restaurants and bars for food and liquor. The smaller sum surely provides an ample variety of restaurants and bars for people in every class and place. The larger sum, or even a fraction of it, would provide an ample variety of schools. It would open a vast market that could attract many entrants, both from public schools and from other occupations. In the course of talking to various groups about vouchers, we have been impressed by the number of persons who said something like, "I have always wanted to teach [or run a school] but I couldn't stand the educational bureaucracy, red tape, and general ossification of the public schools. Under your plan, I'd like to try my hand at starting a school." Many of the new schools would be established by nonprofit groups. Others would be established for profit. There is no way of predicting the ultimate composition of the school industry. That would be determined by competition. The one prediction that can be made is that only those schools that satisfy their customers will survive—just as only those restaurants and bars that satisfy their customers survive. Competition would see to that.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

the Soil Carbon Challenge measures carbon levels over ten years. Someone at a university, completing a PhD or seeking publication, has incentives to do research projects of no more than a few years. In government agencies and nonprofits, soil carbon work is geared to the “so-called carbon market.” And all organizations—this is a pet peeve of his—tend toward fragmentation, so that soil conservation and climate mitigation are seen as separate, even competing, campaigns. All this means that stories that don’t fit into a short time frame, aren’t linked to profitable ventures, and/or can’t be neatly tucked into departmental divisions may not get told.

If you put these five things together - you can't use money to attract talent, you can't advertise, you can't take risks, you can't invest in long-term results, and you don't have a stock market - then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole system charity, as if there is something incredibly sweet about it.

Lights. Camera. Help. is an Austin-based nonprofit cofounded by David J. Neff, coauthor of The Future of Nonprofits

Austin-based nonprofit Lights. Camera. Help, which worked with Groupon in late 2010, raised only $150.

Another important question is to ask why the problem your new organization is addressing has not been solved already, or won’t be solved in the future. Ask yourself: Why hasn’t this problem been solved by markets? Why hasn’t this problem been solved by the state? Why hasn’t this problem already been solved by philanthropy? In many cases, the answers to these questions will suggest that the problem is very difficult to solve, in which case it may not be the most effective problem to focus on. In other cases, the answers might suggest that you really can make good progress on the problem. If the beneficiaries of your action don’t participate fully in markets and aren’t governed by a well-functioning state, then there is a clear need for philanthropy. For example, we should expect the interests of future people to be systematically underrepresented because they don’t participate in present-day markets or elections. For-profit entrepreneurship can be even more compelling as an option than nonprofit entrepreneurship. Though it generally will be more difficult to focus your activities on the most important social problem within for-profit entrepreneurship, there is a much greater potential to grow quickly, and there is the additional benefit of larger earnings that can be used for good purposes later on in life. Economists also suggest that innovative entrepreneurship is undersupplied by the market.

      •   Show your commitment to community by Liking nonprofits in your city or county and demonstrating how the nonprofit addresses local needs. If you do this, you will find new bonds with your fans.

had few other choices. And it was her “build everything” position, and SF BARF’s comfort with for-profit development generally, that put Sonja and her group in conflict with the city’s nonprofit establishment, which tended to look skeptically on any building that wasn’t 100 percent subsidized and tarred privately built apartments as “market-rate luxury housing.

As an ideology, neoliberalism is predicated upon the belief that the maximization of social good requires locating all human action in the domain of the market.

While the PIC overtly represses dissent the NPIC manages and controls dissent by incorporating it into the state apparatus, functioning as a “shadow state” constituted by a network of institutions that do much of what government agencies are supposed to do with tax money in the areas of education and social services. The NPIC functions as an alibi that allows government to make war, expand punishment, and proliferate market economies under the veil of partnership between the public and private sectors.

I have observed a peculiar dynamic in the current political landscape that makes political fodder of this liberationist legacy. With increasing frequency, we are party (or participant) to a white liberal and “multicultural”/“people of color” liberal imagination that venerates and even fetishizes the iconography and rhetoric of contemporary Black and Third World liberation movements, and then proceeds to incorporate these images and vernaculars into the public presentation of foundation-funded liberal or progressive organizations. I have also observed and experienced how these organizations, in order to protect their nonprofit status and marketability to liberal foundations, actively self-police against members’ deviations from their essentially reformist agendas, while continuing to appropriate the language and imagery of historical revolutionaries.

There are some seismic cultural shifts that are underway online, and they are adding new vital layers to our digital landscape.

You don’t have to master every new tool right away, but an understanding of what it does, who it’s for, and how it works goes a long way in helping you understand how it might fit alongside what is already working for you. Going all-in on the latest social media platform won’t be a wise use of time, effort or money for the majority of charities.

I believe it [a year end appeal] is often so successful because it is one of the few—if not only—times that many charities deliver a clear and “hard” ask for a gift, along with a deadline. Specific, urgent, and time-bound. These are qualities that we shouldn’t hide in storage ten months a year like pumpkin spice and Michael Bublé.

Charities or Non-Profit Organisations should have the interest of their target market at heart and not to enrich themselves

BOTH PEARSON EDUCATION AND THE NONPROFIT Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) have promoted SIOP as an all-purpose educational product: a tool for evaluating teachers, a template for lesson planning and “delivery,” and a course of professional development. They advertise their model as ideal not only for English learners (pre-K–12 and adult), but also for mainstream and special education students in the United States, as well as language students worldwide. Clearly, they believe the market potential is vast.

The stunning thing about a zero-marginal-cost digital distribution system is that we forget that it could allow artists to run a nonprofit distribution cooperative and keep a far higher percentage of their revenues than they do now. YouTube takes 45 percent of the ad revenue on its site simply for running the infrastructure, without putting up production or marketing money. At worst the cost to run the infrastructure is around 5 percent, at current revenue levels, so the rest of the revenue is pure profit. What if artists ran a video and audio streaming site as a nonprofit cooperative (perhaps employing the technology in some of those free Google patents)?

The Fed’s fingerprints were all over this boom, and not just because of Greenspan’s low interest rates. In 1993, in response to initiatives by the Clinton administration to make housing more affordable for minorities and the poor, the Boston Fed produced a widely circulated paper called “Closing the Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending.” “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor” in obtaining a mortgage, the Boston Fed guide noted. As an effort to counter “unintentional” racism in lending markets, the guide sanctioned lowering traditional mortgage-lending standards. Not enough saved for a down payment? No problem. The Boston Fed’s PhDs encouraged banks to allow loans from nonprofits or government assistance agencies to go toward a borrower’s down payment, though such borrowers are more likely to default on their mortgages. The Boston Fed distributed more than ninety thousand copies of this remarkably naïve guide. The mortgage industry, anxious to extend its reach and generate fees, embraced its suggestions.

Giving while shopping seems to reduce overall giving. Most of the research on these relationships focus on the benefits to the companies that sell the product, not on how these partnerships affect either you—the consumer/giver—or the cause itself. There are a few academic studies of cause marketing that focus on the end result for the nonprofit partner or on how people’s behavior changes after they’ve purchased one of these branded products. The most generous read of the research on cause marketing is that it is good for the marketer, not so much for the cause.

Uber had to get creative to unlock the hard side of their network, the drivers. Initially, Uber’s focus was on black car and limo services, which were licensed and relatively uncontroversial. However, a seismic shift occurred when rival app Sidecar innovated in recruiting unlicensed, normal people as drivers on their platform. This was the “peer-to-peer” model that created millions of new rideshare drivers, and was quickly copied and popularized by Lyft and then Uber. Jahan Khanna, cofounder/chief technology officer of Sidecar, spoke of its origin: It was obvious that letting anyone sign up to be a driver would be a big deal. With more drivers, rides would get cheaper and the wait times would get shorter. This came up in many brainstorms at Sidecar, but the question was always, what was the regulatory framework that allows this to operate? What were the prior examples that weren’t immediately shut down? After doing a ton of research, we came onto a model that had been active for years in San Francisco run by someone named Lynn Breedlove called Homobiles that answered our question.22 It’s a surprising fact, but the earliest version of the rideshare idea came not from an investor-backed startup, but rather from a nonprofit called Homobiles, run by a prominent member of the LGBTQ community in the Bay Area named Lynn Breedlove. The service was aimed at protecting and serving the LGBTQ community while providing them transportation—to conferences, bars and entertainment, and also to get health care—while emphasizing safety and community. Homobiles had built its own niche, and had figured out the basics: Breedlove had recruited, over time, 100 volunteer drivers, who would respond to text messages. Money would be exchanged, but in the form of donations, so that drivers could be compensated for their time. The company had operated for several years, starting in 2010—several years before Uber X—and provided the template for what would become a $100 billion+ gross revenue industry. Sidecar learned from Homobiles, implementing their offering nearly verbatim, albeit in digital form: donations based, where the rider and driver would sit together in the front, like a friend giving you a ride. With that, the rideshare market was kicked off.

What we gave mostly was wine. Especially after we made this legal(!) by acquiring that Master Wine Grower’s license in 1973. Most requests were made by women (not men) who had been drafted by their respective organizations to somehow get wine for an event. We made a specialty of giving them a warm welcome from the first call. All we wanted was the organization’s 501c3 number, and from which store they wanted to pick it up. We wanted to make that woman, and her friends, our customers. But we didn’t want credit in the program, as we knew the word would get out from that oh-so-grateful woman who had probably been turned down by six markets before she called us. Everybody wanted champagne. We firmly refused to donate it, because the federal excise tax on sparkling wine is so great compared with the tax on still wine. To relieve pressure on our managers, we finally centralized giving into the office. When I left Trader Joe’s, Pat St. John had set up a special Macintosh file just to handle the three hundred organizations to which we would donate in the course of a year. I charged all this to advertising. That’s what it was, and it was advertising of the most productive sort. Giving Space on Shopping Bags One of the most productive ways into the hearts of nonprofits was to print their programs on our shopping bags. Thus, each year, we printed the upcoming season for the Los Angeles Opera Co., or an upcoming exhibition at the Huntington Library, or the season for the San Diego Symphony, etc. Just printing this advertising material won us the support of all the members of the organization, and often made the season or the event a success. Our biggest problem was rationing the space on the shopping bags. All we wanted was camera-ready copy from the opera, symphony, museum, etc. This was a very effective way to build the core customers of Trader Joe’s. We even localized the bags, customizing them for the San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco market areas. Several years after I left, Trader Joe’s abandoned the practice because it was just too complicated to administer after they expanded into Arizona, Washington, etc., and they no longer had my wife, Alice, running interference with the music and arts groups. This left an opportunity for small retailers in local areas, and I strongly recommended it to them. In 1994, while running the troubled Petrini’s Markets in San Francisco, I tried the same thing, again with success, for the San Francisco Ballet and a couple of museums.

I wanted to help rescue this species from endangerment by learning about the elephants’ intricate social structure, increasing worldwide attention to this species through my research and scientific advancements in knowledge. However, when the scientific papers that I had spent years writing finally came out, there was little reaction. I felt proud of my scientific accomplishments but was sad that I wasn’t doing more for the species that I cared about so much. The following year after I graduated, a new paper by one of my colleagues in Gabon found that between 2002-2011, the duration of my Ph.D. plus a few years, over 60% of the entire forest elephant population declined due to poaching[5]. The poaching was almost exclusively driven by the consumption of their tusks as sources for carving statues, jewelry, and other decorative objects. The true conservation issue had nothing to do with studying the elephants themselves. What was the point of studying a species if it might not exist in a few decades?  If I really wanted to help forest elephants, I should have been studying the people, the consumers who were purchasing ivory to determine if there were ways to change attitudes towards ivory and purchasing behavior. Yes, having rangers on the ground to protect parks and elephants is important, but if there is no decrease in demand, it will constantly be an uphill battle. All of the solutions to the conservation problems of forest elephants are social, political, and economic first.  If you are interested in pursuing wildlife biology as a career for conservation purposes (like I was) or because you love animals (also me), you might be better suited in another career if research is not your thing but can still work for a conservation organization. Nonprofits need lawyers, financial planners, fundraising experts, and marketing executives to name a few. When I perused the job boards of nonprofit organizations, I was surprised by how few research positions there were. There were far more in fundraising, marketing, and development. Even if you don’t work directly for conservation, honestly, you can still make a difference and help conservation efforts in other ways outside of your career. A lot of conservation is really about investing in programs and habitat, so species stay protected. For example, if you can purchase and/or donate money to organizations that buy large areas of land, this land can be set aside for wildlife conservation. The biggest threat to wildlife is habitat loss and simply buying more land, keeping it undeveloped, and/or restoring it for species to live on, is one of the major means to solve the biodiversity crisis.

Many leaders still regard the private sector with skepticism—an attitude inherited from the old “New Left.” They fear that they might lose focus or be co-opted if they partner with corporations. Some nonprofits play a corporate watchdog role and protest the excesses of capitalism and globalization—often for good reason. And a recent spate of corporate scandals hasn’t helped improve the image of business. “Among many nonprofits, there is a view that business is the enemy,” says Mike McCurry, who is on the board of Share Our Strength. On the other side of this debate, more pragmatic members of the social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility movements have long touted the benefits of cross-sector partnerships and of harnessing market forces for social change. They argue that companies’ bottom lines can benefit from social responsibility, while nonprofits

Everyone, whether an educator, a health care worker, or a domestic violence advocate is working in pseudo-corporate environments where the culture and organization of the market is increasingly encroaching on our lives. Instead of organizers, we have managers and bureaucrats, receptionists and clients. Instead of social change, we have service deliverables, and the vision that once drove our deep commitment to fighting violence against women has be replaced by outcomes.

YOU MUST DETACH FROM THE WHEN. You send things into the universe and they come back to you, but they don’t always come when you expect or want them to. You have to know WHAT you want. If you are too attached to the WHEN, you will be fighting the natural flow of the universe. You may think you need a new job within the next three months, or that you need to launch your nonprofit by the end of the year, or that your greatest desire must be fulfilled now, but the universe already has the best plan. It knows the exact right moment everything needs to happen. That is not something you can control. Maybe you aren’t as prepared as you think. Maybe the universe—which is a more informed version of yourself—wants you to develop your foundation before it gives you what you want. Maybe being delayed will mean that the market is more open or the economics will have shifted in your favor. Don’t get caught up in the WHEN. Just know the WHAT.

On this score, for-profit managers have it easier. Market prices give them a clear yardstick against which to measure the value they create. Nonprofit managers face the same task, creating value, but without the clarity of that yardstick.

Nonprofits compete to show that they are the best organization to win a grant. To win, nonprofits want to make their work look legitimate to the funder, which means working according to the funder’s beliefs about the causes of and solutions for a particular problem rather than challenging those beliefs. For example, the funder may favor nonprofits that make sobriety a condition of receiving a spot in a homeless shelter, because rich people would rather believe that homelessness is caused by poor people’s drug use than that it is caused by a capitalist housing market.

You’ll know that your company’s mission, vision, and values are being communicated effectively when you observe that your employees’ job satisfaction is high, that they have a customer service focus, and that they feel committed, loyal, and empowered. What that really means is that you need to think of everything in your business as marketing—from your business model to how you treat your employees to how you engage your investors.

In addition, the Non-Profit Industrial Complex promotes a social movement culture that is non-collaborative, narrowly focused, and competitive. To retain the support of benefactors, groups must compete with each other for funding by promoting only their own work, whether or not their organizing strategies are successful. This culture prevents activists from having collaborative dialogues where we can honestly share our failures as well as our successes. In addition, after being forced to frame everything we do as a "success", we become stuck in having to repeat the same strategies because we insisted to funders they were successful, even if they were not. Consequently, we become inflexible rather than fluid and everchanging our strategies, which is what a movement for social transformation really requires. And as we become more concerned with attracting funders than with organizing mass-based movements, we start niche marketing the work of our organizations. Framing our organizations as working on a particular issue or a particular strategy, we lose perspective on the larger goals of our work. Thus, niche marketing encourages us to build a fractured movement rather than mass-based movements for social change.

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

It would be one hell of a coincidence if private and public universities responded to entirely different sets of cost pressures in the same way over the course of three decades. The most obvious explanation is that nonprofit higher education has become a single industry with premium and generic brands. If you don’t believe me, then at least believe the financial services agency Moody’s, whose 2013 report describes the distinction in the clear and unashamed language of unaccountable finance professionals: “Public universities are now as market driven as private universities, but remain a lower cost option with stronger pricing power.” 19

Populist fundraisers argue that fundraising is evolving from big donors to big networks, and they believe that marketing to the top of the pyramid hurts their nonprofit’s future. They want to deliver the same communications to everyone, because they believe the small piece of their donor base that’s made up of older, richer supporters is a high-risk and high-reward constituency. This notion sounds good in theory, but it just isn’t true.

One of the most fundamental strategic concepts is focusing marketing efforts and resources on the 20 percent of your donors who have the capacity and ability to make large or legacy gifts. Master this, and you will endow your nonprofit’s mission with the greatest degree of efficiency at the lowest cost—period.

When process owners like Roos read Introduction to Market-Based Management, they were warned against using the nonprofit support services too much. Because services like accounting and environmental engineering were essentially “free” to people like Roos, there was a danger that those services would be overused. The pamphlet likened the nonprofit groups to government agencies that handed out free services: there was a danger that the nonprofit groups might become bloated and overly expensive. The nonprofits might therefore drag down the performance of the very profit centers that they were supposed to serve. As they grew in size and cost, the nonprofit service centers would suck resources away from the parts of the company that actually made money. “The predictable result was often a corporate overhead cost spiral,” the pamphlet said. To counter this cost spiral, Charles Koch created an internal market system: divisions such as Roos’s had to essentially pay to use the nonprofit groups.

Ron Howell founded an obscure nonprofit group called Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence. It did something unheard of: it started grading local judges based on their fealty to free-market economic theory. The group created scorecards for state judges, measuring how well their verdicts conformed with the teachings of Hayek and von Mises. The group publicized these rankings with public opinion articles published in places like the Daily Oklahoman.

When I was a certified small business and startup mentor for several Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs), after several months I came to realize that most business owners saw websites as "one and done" items rather than as company portals through which valuable and important processes could go through -while concurrently promoting their business online 24/7 through multiple online channels. Set your goals higher and ask yourself "how can we automate what takes up so much of our time and energy" and "how can we learn from and mirror the strategies of larger, more profitable competitors?