Author and Marketing Designer
Bringing the magic of marketing to bottom-up social change
“The philanthropic landscape is shifting towards grassroots investing, recognizing its effectiveness in generating meaningful returns through real partnerships. This site is for bottom-up innovators with philanthropists willing to share the risk, emphasizing the importance of evaluating social-change initiatives as serious investments.”
“Marketing is a verb. Your story is the vessel.”
Your biggest marketing asset is your unfolding story. Start with quantitative and qualitative research. Prepare a balance sheet: what are your strengths, your weaknesses, both real and perceived. Collect facts to use in proving your strengths and countering weaknesses or — nirvana — find one piece of evidence that does both at the same time. Explore: What are you good at? What do you love to do? In marketing parlance, this is called “positioning your product.” This all melds into your essential core story that can evolve over time.
“There is no such thing as no momentum.”
Let no message lie on the page, have a purpose for all you say. Figure out where you are and what you’re up against relative to the marketplace. Then adapt your message to your constituency of followers. In my work with some of the greats in institutional investing, I developed a system to help them know when to shift their messaging; understand why to shift; and identify the strategy to drive momentum rather than chase it. This same system can work for you.
“Know the language to play the game.”
The world of going bottom-up is highly entrepreneurial. Expect it to evolve quickly, with new models and ideas emerging to propel and measure success. Prepare to collect an inflow of new words and concepts, often adopted from other fields, as the push grows for more resilience and impact working on the ground. This new language, if shared, will guide us to new rules of thumb, more creativity and greater market transparency.
