Michael Lichtenstein to Pamela Anderson, Fareed Zakaria To Ami Mesika: Immigrant Success Stories

From real-estate moguls to entertainers, America is lined with amazing success stories. As the New Year of 2014 approaches, wanted to share some of my favorite quotes as it comes to entrepreneur success stories:

·                     “Immigrant families generally come to America with many strengths, including healthy, intact families, strong work ethic and aspirations, and for many, a cohesive community of fellow immigrants from the same country of origin.” Princeton.edu

·                     “As in the past, so it may be in the future – Americans will always look to a fresh wave of immigrants who are leaner, tougher, younger and more willing to sacrifice their bodies to do the work that we can’t or won’t do.” NYTimes.com

·                     “There is simply no substitute for hard work.” Michael Lichtenstein

·                     "Here in the United States, we do a lot of talking. Foreign people talk less. They just do. Results is what pays the bills." Ola Ayeni

·                     "America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs but because of the vigor of its society. It has thrived because it has kept itself open to the world – to goods and services, to ideas and inventions, and, above all to peoples and cultures." Fareed Zakaria

·                     “Immigrants don’t come to this country to do what they love; they come here to make money.” QuickSprout.com

·                     “Hard work never harmed anyone – working hard is good for the soul.” Ami Mesika

·                     “Grit and determination to get ahead are often what drive [immigrants] as they strive to take advantage of better economic opportunities in America.” Nancy Foner

·                     "I'm an immigrant myself. It was a tough road to come to America and work." Pamela Anderson

·                     “I'm very inspired by him-it was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.” Zinedine Zidane

·                     “Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.” Mark Helprin

Effective Communication with Donors

The Internet is a very busy place. So how does a nonprofit stand out from the Internet crowd and make a splash?  By effectively communicating with donors and potential donors 24/7.

Let’s take an example. Car donation. There are a gazillion car donation programs out there. How do you get the potential car donor to donate specifically to YOUR car donation program, let’s say Kars For Kids. The answer is to use every means possible to reach and engage individuals that share the aims of this nonprofit which is all about educating and mentoring children.

The vehicles used by a nonprofit for communication with potential donors is important but probably not as important as the message conveyed. By all means, make use of snail mail, email, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, but make sure you say what it is that grabs attention in this crowded competitive public sphere.  A simple way to grab attention is to put yourself inside the donor’s head, and then read or view your materials from that perspective. You want to make sure you answer the following donor-specific questions:

1.       Why me?

2.       What for?

3.       Why now?

4.       Who says?

Review all materials with these four questions in mind before you send them out into the world. Watch for shortcomings. Address them.

And do it for all materials you send out, using the same reviews process. Getting into the donor’s head is easy if you know the demographic who share your goals and you ask all the right questions.  Knowing the demographic, of course, is a crucial element in crafting your message.

People with the potential to become donors or volunteers in your nonprofit:

·         Share your mission

·         Believe that your nonprofit is a stable one

·         Feel included, and have a sense they are valued by your organization

·         Respect the leaders and founders of your nonprofit

 It’s important to note that donors don’t give out of a sense of guilt or obligation or because they’ve received from you some glossy promotional materials. They also do not give solely to get a tax deduction. None of these factors favor your nonprofit over the competition. It’s the extra bit of oomph you put into communicating and engaging with your public that woos them to give to you instead of to the other guy.

It’s about making them feel a part of what you do: making them feel important. And let’s face it—you couldn’t do it without them. Now go forth and make them feel it. 

Woodie Cars

Most of us just love cars. Shiny new cars and old vintage cars are just some of the cars that tug at our hearts and keep people looking at the Kars for Kids garage page in hopes of seeing some rare find. Perhaps one of the most pleasurable and exotic cars we can still occasionally see on the road is the woodie, a beloved American car with wood incorporated into its body.

The very earliest cars were made of wood. So it was not exactly a surprise when a car incorporating wood into its design became a runaway hit. That would be the Ford Mercury woodie station wagon.

Bragging Rights

Produced during the 1930’s and 1940’s, the woodie came with prestige and bragging rights. It was one of the most, if not the most expensive model in the Ford line from year to year. The funny thing was, the car was high maintenance and had all sorts of foibles but everyone still wanted one, still coveted that woodie above all other cars.

Ford was the industry leader for sales of cars with wooden bodies. But the manufacturer kept production of these beauties to a very limited number, owing to the smaller demand for this gorgeous but impractical vehicle. The demand was mostly among the higher echelons of society: movie studio moguls, resorts, country squires. Of course, in those days, no one called these cars “woodies.”

Woodies being made of wood swell and shrink with the weather. As a result, the cars make a lot of noise as the glue and screws holding the body together shift during contraction and expansion of the wood. Also, think of the wooden hull of a boat and how much maintenance it needs and you begin to get an idea of how much effort a woodie owner must put into cosseting his moving acquisition. The owner’s manuals always included a recommendation for annual stripping and refinishing.

The Woodie Narrative

Of course, that makes no difference to a country squire or a movie mogul. They can afford to hire people to do that sort of thing for them. The annual refinishing was all a part of what made the woodie and the narrative that went with it, something special.

Henry Ford had a thing about making his enterprises totally self-sufficient. To that end he purchased rubber plantations and ore mines to produce materials for his cars. In deciding to create the woodie, he bought huge tracts of forest reserves in 1920, on Iron Mountain in the Upper Michigan Peninsula, located around 500 miles northwest of Detroit. There he grew stands of maple, gum, birch, and basswood, all for the purpose of building Model T floorboards and body frames. In addition to growing the trees, he had his own people cutting timber, ran his own sawmill, and cut and created wooden body parts on location.

Ford didn’t like waste and could always find a purpose for everything. The leftover wood pieces and even the sawdust from the mill were not disposed of but were used to create Ford Charcoal Briquettes. There’s a lot you could say about Ford, who was a known anti-Semite, for instance, but one thing for sure: he had the green ethos down pat, way before anyone else was concerned with recycling and making good use of all resources. He might not have cared much about the environment, but he appreciated that everything had a purpose.

6 Tips on Blogging For Your Nonprofit

Blogging is a great marketing tool and should definitely be a part of your online nonprofit marketing strategy. Blogs are appealing because the type of content offered is informal and generally trendy and fresh. For nonprofits, blogging comes with several benefits: a nonprofit blog will drive traffic to the nonprofit website, offer a new venue for engaging potential donors, and allow a nonprofit to position itself as a player in its particular sector.

Here are 6 tips on effective nonprofit blogging:

1. Brevity is the soul of discretion. Readers have short attention spans. A blog could be a few lines to preface an appealing image or video, or it could be an informal article. In generating an outside word limit, it’s best not to go beyond 800 words. If it must be longer, make it into a two-part series and link the two parts to each other for the readers’ convenience. Break up texts with subheadings, pull quotes, images, and videos. In general, you should break up the text with one of these devices every 3-4 paragraphs. 
2.  A picture’s worth a thousand words. It cannot be said too often for those marketing ANYTHING online: people are visual. Images are essential to the well-crafted blog. They keep the reader engaged and draw him to the next section of the text. Take your own photos or use royalty-free images. Some sources are free to use as long as you include a photo credit, for instance, the photo gallery at the White House website. 
3. It’s the name of the game. Don’t stint when it comes to creating a catchy title. No matter how much effort you put into the body of your blog, if it’s got a boring title, no one will read it. Consider the difference between: How I taught my dog to beg and Begging will get you everywhere. The first is ho-hum, the second piques the interest. You can’t help but want to read the rest. Car donation program Kars4Kids showed it was title savvy with this blog entry from March: Do our customer service reps rock? Or do they really really rock?! You just know you want to read that. 
4.  Don’t be listless. Lists are good because they tell readers that they don’t have to read every word of your blog but can scan the contents for effective tips. The numbering or bullets also help to break up the text in much the same way as images, videos, or subheadings. 
5.  Do your share. More than anything, you want people to share your content. Don’t make it hard for them to do so. Add share buttons and situate them in a section of the page where they will be seen. You can put them in more than one place, for instance at the top and bottom of blog posts. Include lots of choices for sharing venues but definitely include the main players: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. 
6.  Keep an eye on things. From behind the scenes (back end of the blog), you can monitor traffic to your blog and from your blog to your nonprofit’s website. You can check these stats according to the day, week, and month and often, you can see the referring website. Other things you can see: the keywords that brought people to the blog, and what type of content drove the most traffic. There are free tools you can sign up for to help you generate and interpret your blog traffic, such as Google Analytics. Use the data to help you plan future content that will be appealing to your target audience. The data will also tell you the ideal time to post new content.

5 Beneficial Side Effects of Good Deeds

We knew it all along: doing nice things for people makes us feel happy. It can be as simple and fast as helping that old lady across the street. Or it can be huge, like donating your car to the Kars for Kids car donation program, knowing that some child, somewhere, will benefit from this act. But isn’t it ironic that doing nice things for others makes us happy, too?

According to David R. Hamilton, PhD, that’s because doing loving acts of kindness has side effects. Not the bad kind of side effects you get from taking a new medicine that might leave you drowsy, itchy, or worse, but the good kind, the kind of side effects that are desirable. Here are five of those side effects:

1. Doing good generates happiness for the doer. For some people, this is about fulfilling a spiritual need, about digging deep within and finding the meaning and affirming who we are. But there’s also the biochemical side of being nice. When we do good deeds, levels of feel-good brain chemicals increase. These chemicals are called endogenous opioids and lead to an increase in dopamine levels. The result is a natural high that psychologists refer to as “Helper’s High.
2. ”Doing good is good for your cardiac health. That warm feeling you get when you do something nice? That feeling of warmth spurs production of the hormone oxytocin both in the brain and throughout your body. Oxytocin plays an important role in regulating the cardiovascular system by inducing the release of nitric oxide in the blood vessels. Nitric oxide helps to dilate the blood vessels and in so doing, lowers blood pressure. In spurring a mechanism to lower blood pressure, oxytocin protects the heart. That’s why some call this hormone “cardioprotective.”
3. Doing good staves off aging. In addition to its “cardioprotective” properties, oxytocin lowers heart levels of free radicals and inflammation, two major culprits involved in the cardiac aging process. Additionally, engaging in acts of kindness activates the vagus nerve, responsible in part for controlling heart rate and levels of inflammation.
4. Doing good decreases emotional distance. Nice people tend to bond with other nice people. The more we engage in acts of kindness, the closer we feel to our partners. There may very well be a genetic component to being the kind of person who does kindnesses. Long ago, a kindness extended to another could increase that person’s chances of survival. The adaptation process meant that for some people, kindness became part of the genome.
5. Doing good is contagious. When we’re nice to others, we serve as an inspiration for others to do likewise. The more kind acts we do, the more we generate. It’s the ripple-effect played out in real-time. A study performed in 2011 illustrated this concept to perfection. A 28 year-old man donated a kidney. His friends and family heard about it and many of them followed suit. The New England Journal of Medicine reported on this apparent domino effect in which 10 people became kidney recipients as a result of this one man’s act of kindness.