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For-profit executives use business models—such as “low-cost provider” or “the razor and the razor blade"—as a shorthand way to describe and understand the way companies are built and sustained. Nonprofit executives, to their detriment, are not as explicit about their funding models and have not had an equivalent lexicon—until now. 

When a person says that a company is a “low-cost provider” or a “fast follower,” the main outlines of how that company operates are pretty clear. Similarly, stating that a company is using “the razor and the razor blade” model describes a type of ongoing customer relationship that applies far beyond shaving products.

The value of such shorthand is that it allows business leaders to articulate quickly and clearly how they will succeed in the marketplace, and it allows investors to quiz executives more easily about how they intend to make money. This back-and-forth increases the odds that businesses will succeed, investors will make money, and everyone will learn more from their experiences.

Whitepaper: Sustainable Social Media Infrastructure

A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.

The foundation world, largely absent from these success stories, should seize the opportunity to create new funding models for the next generation of long-term, public interest technology projects.

What is the Youth Offer? The Mayor of London and the Government are working together to deliver a £79m ‘London Youth Offer’. The package will run over two years from 2008 to 2010, with £20m coming from the Mayor’s London Development Agency (LDA) and £59m from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).

Facebook Won The Conversation Battle Published in March 14th, 2009 Posted by robdiana in Social Media Well, it took several days, but I finally got the new Facebook homepage. With this redesign, Facebook realized the battle is for conversation. Conversation makes a site more of a destination for people, and the new redesign is completely targeted towards this. As much as sites like Twitter and FriendFeed have been battling for the conversation destination title, I warned that Facebook could just decide that they need to own something. Facebook has just won the conversation battle. Why? The reasons are fairly simple. First, they have almost 200 million users staring at the “What’s on your mind?” prompt. All of the other social sites combined do not have anywhere near this number of unique users. You will probably not hear this from many bloggers, because they tend to be early adopters. Those people, myself included, will stick with Twitter. This is about the mainstream. Facebook is most definitely a mainstream site. One killer feature they have that Twitter does not is lists. I quickly created lists for groups of my Facebook friends and was able to view their updates without the noise of the “news feed”. There are even predefined filters for photos, links and videos. Search capabilities are a glaring omission, but that is not as important to the mainstream user. That is only important for people building third party applications.

The other big reason that Facebook may be crowned king is that all of the social sites in the conversation battle have either written a Facebook application or have their feed being pulled in as status updates. It is fairly simple to import your Google Reader shared items, your Twitter status updates, your FriendFeed and SocialMedian activity. The lure of a potential audience of 200 million users is too great to not create some hook into Facebook.

New website aims to raise millions for charity

The site, See the Difference, will feature a collection of short films through which charities will be able to explain to the public how their projects are run.

Risk Toolkit - How to take care of risk in volunteering: A guide for organisations

On the safe side - Risk, risk management and volunteering

Microsoft Word - cautionarytales.doc

Stories, Storytelling, Story-Selling in Business

"Good stories fascinate us all. They always have. They always will. At this moment in our nation’s history, we are seeing two epic stories evolving—in terms of our new President, and in the state of our economy. The story of Obama many believe is epic, and certainly the story of our nation’s recession and economic downfall is also a burgeoning epic tale. Stories move societies forward. They inspire, engage and initiate change through their telling and re-telling. Basically, there are two types of stories: Truth Stories and True Stories."