Nonprofit Competition & Concept Map

Ben Sheldon — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:57:54 +0000

At this summer's CTCnet Conference the thing I most took away--or rather, repeated to the most number of people--was something said by the keynote speaker, Ami Dar, the creator of Idealist.org.

He was asked by someone in the crowd something along the lines of "In what areas do you want to see nonprofits develop into the future?"

Ami Dar responded that an area that he saw as important was acknowledgement of nonprofit competition. His brilliant reasoning was this:

In for-profit companies, everyone accepts that competition takes place; it's a given. Businesses identify the areas in which they compete, and from this, also gain an understanding of the areas in which they don't compete. In the areas in which they don't compete, businesses can cooperate. Nonprofits, in general, are not aware of, or acknowledge that they compete (and they do), and because of this, they cannot collabrate as efficiently or as effectively as possible.

My own example of this is the Detroit automakers. Ford and GM are incredibly competitive in car production, features, pricing, dealerships, etc. But at the same time, they have an incredibly strong combined lobby for setting safety and emission standards, things that affect the entire industry. They know where they compete and therefore know where they can work together.

So this has been rattling around in my head until I read two things:

This first was "Learning How to Learn" by Joseph D. Novak, D. Bob Gowin, and Jane Butler Kahle, which lays out some very interesting models and heuristics for visualizing information.

The second was A Typology of Nonprofit Competition: Insights for Social Marketers by Robin J. Ritchie and Charles B. Weinberg.

Putting them together, I made this using OmniGraffle:

Download the PDF

So whats happening in BGCEV now days?

Tony ORourke — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 01:11:46 +0000

Last weekend I took 3 members from the club to a different club in the East Valley conglomerate. The program that they were running was called St.R.U.T. or Students Recycling Used Technology. The members had a chance to learn about the internal workings of a computer. How they go together and how they work. Then they had the opportunity to take an operating computer apart and examine all the parts and then to put it back together. Once together they were given a monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. The kids then had to see if the computer would start up and if not then with the help of the Tech Team leaders they trouble shoot the problems. The best part of all is when they were done they got to take the computers home with them when they were done. I was also allows to take apart a computer and take it with me. I am going to give it away to one of the members who could really use the computer.

I have been working on getting some donations to get some more equipment for our lab. We have 14 computers but we need to update the RAM on the computers so that they do not crash every time we try to load a program. I really would like to get a set up to allow for us to play movies, music, presentation in the room as well. Something like a multimedia center. Some of the things in the room need to be moved around. I have a lot of work to do.

Digital Arts Service Corps - Nonprofit

Nonprofit Competition & Concept Map

So whats happening in BGCEV now days?