Our weekly blog, Social TrendSpotter provides you with the latest trends and ideas within the social sector. It merges current thinking with the edge of innovation to inspire, to encourage, to educate and – ultimately – to create a better sector. Social TrendSpotter includes original analysis, but also highlights the latest sector-wide thinking into a user-friendly resource where social sector professionals and students alike can draw inspiration, share ideas and develop new thinking on best practices.
Haven’t Got a Clue How to Start Your Market Research? Try Secondary Research First
Detective stories, legal thrillers, murder mysteries – have you ever thought about why people love these so much? I love them for two reasons. First, I love puzzles, and these stories allow me to solve the crime along with the detectives. Second, people...
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3 Smart Tactics to Start Your Journey into Market Research
Travel is one of my passions. I love everything about it – planning the trip, immersing myself in a different culture, and sharing my adventures with friends and readers. But, these days preparing for a trip seems harder rather than easier. For example, I...
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What is the Difference between Social Innovation, Social Enterprise & Social Entrepreneurship?
I am often asked how I come up with blog topics. The answer is some come from collective client work, some are sparked by life experience and others are inspired by colleagues. Today’s topic comes out of Dallas’ Startup Week, where I recently had the pleasure of...
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Q&A: 3 Tips for Knocking Your Next Retreat Out of the Ballpark
Spring has officially started and with it comes vacations, cookouts and baseball games – and your nonprofit’s retreat. Retreats have become commonplace in the sector, but many CEOs and board chairs find orchestrating a productive retreat for their...
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Social Alchemy: Transforming Problems into Ideas that Change the World
My favorite graduation gift is the bestselling book, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. I share it with anyone I can, because it speaks to all of us who want to find our own destiny. As one of the mentors tells the protagonist, Santiago, “When you really want something...
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Do You Have an Impact Culture? An Organizational Checklist to Up Your Game
I just love the ancient parable about the elephant. Six blind men were asked to describe an elephant by touching its body parts. The first man felt its side and described the elephant as a wall, the second man touched its tusk and thought it was a spear, the third man...
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Why Social Sector Teamwork Fails
In the social sector, we often come together as individuals for important work, but are we really working together as one team? To really make a difference, we need to maximize our team efforts in our department and executive team meetings as well as in our community...
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How We Can Change the World: The Social Ripple Effect
Last week in the social entrepreneurship class I teach, we started our current events discussion like any other, but the events in Parkland, Fla., and the resulting outrage around gun reform overshadowed every other headline. My students discussed it as I...
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Playing the Long Game: Best Practices for Fighting Poverty
Like many Americans, my eyes were glued last week to the Olympic women’s halfpipe snowboarding event, watching 17-year-old American Chloe Kim defy physics with back-to-back 1080s (three full rotations) and a nearly perfect score of 98.25. Even more...
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