Group items tagged

Flash forward to 2011, and philanthropy is the new black. Everywhere you turn, people are spending a few months abroad to build a school

volunteering at the blood bank in the evenings after they finish their 9-to-5 job. Everyone has a cause

This nouveau philanthropic righteousness is definitely making the world a better place and is empowering a generation to believe that they, as concerned citizens of the world, can make a difference to global issues

owing that non-profit supporters around the world have been adopting the use of social networking in their daily lives we set out to figure out if the use of social networks had any impact on personal or peer-to-peer fundraising. The results we’re pretty amazing

e found that participants who use social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube communicate with their networks more regularly and send more messages. This resulted in increased fundraising results by up to 40%.

Twitter as a Multiplier Twitter users set higher fundraising goals and raised more money. In fact, Twitter users increased their personal fundraising goals by at least three times more and raised nearly 10 times more online than their peers who did not use Twitter.

Striving to make everyday business tasks more engaging, a growing number of firms, including International Business Machines Corp. and consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., are incorporating elements of videogames into the workplace. They're deploying reward and competitive tactics commonly found in the gaming world to make tasks such as management training, data entry and brainstorming seem less like work. Employees receive points or badges for completing jobs or meeting time limits for assignments, for example. Companies also may use leaderboards, which let players view one another's scores, to encourage friendly competition and motivate performance, experts say. This "gamification" of the workplace, or "enterprise gamification" in tech-industry parlance, is a fast-growing business. Companies have used digital games for a number of years to help market products to consumers and build brand loyalty. What's emerging is using games to motivate their own employees.

Tech-industry research firm Gartner estimates that by 2014, some 70% of large companies will use the techniques for at least one business process. Market researcher M2 Research estimates revenue from gamification software, consulting and marketing will reach $938 million by 2014 from less than $100 million this year.

SAP even turned its gamification efforts into a game, holding a series of "Gamification Cups" to generate ideas for turning various business processes into games.

new business certification as an innovative way to put the province at the forefront of the work-life balance movement

uebec

d is a seal of excellence that sends th

aking the checkin and making it philanthropic

lets users post their actions via SMS, web, email, Foursquare or Google Talk.

ach act earns the user points that can be redeemed for actual rewards and discounts

For decades, the decision to be an environmentally and socially responsible company has been based on the bottom line: Would it be profitable?

In terms of traditional accounting and the legal requirements of corporations, costs always outweighed benefits.But it now seems that this equation is starting to lean the other way as brands recognize the potential financial and reputational advantages they can gain by engaging with consumers around the shared ambition of building a better world.

We can see this already happening among some leading brands such as Pepsi, Google, Nike, Patagonia and Starbucks, who have all earned consumer respect for their involvement