Strategic Solutions and Support
for Community Benefit Organizations
Brooke Frost
& Associates
Keep up-to-date on real life solutions in the community
Whether activities in which we are directly involved or information pertinent to the world of community benefit organizations, check here for community related items of interest. You may find ideas for your own solution!
SOLUTION - Open Source CrowdFunding
If you attended the recent Association of Fundraising Professionals lunch topic on crowd-funding, you learned the buzzword "crowdfunding" is really just an electronic way to provide peer to peer fundraising. Using your customer relations management system, providing an opportunity for people - especially millennials - to support your cause their own way is proving to be a growing interest in the field. Think "Ice Bucket Challenge" for ALS. But there are costs associated. And how do you develop a platform if you can't afford some of the more expensive fund developoment database management systems that provide the platforms.
Fresno actually has a local company that can provide open source tools at a fraction of the cost. Marcel Bourdase at Professional Exchange Services Corp (www.pesc.com) can give you more information.
SOLUTION - Fresno Community Scorecard
Have you checked out the new site at www.fresnocommunityscorecard.org? If your organization serves those in the Fresno area, you can get data on 150 different indicators for your grant proposals. Developed by the Fresno Business Council and Valley PBS, there are 11 different categories with data. These include people, agriculture, education, culture & quality of life, economic vitality, equity, housing, safe community, health, strong families, and sustainable infrastructure. An ongoing process with updates regularly and open to your suggestions, this could be a valuable tool to focus community attention or measure progress.
SOLUTION - Design Cycle & Contextual Intelligence
The Children's Movement Action Forums are utilizing a model for business innovation called Human Centered Design developed by David M. Kelley and introduced to the group by Keith Bergthold of Metro Ministries. After a smaller group went through a three hour training on the model, we realized that all our groups needed more "contextual intelligence" directly from parents and youth. Brooke led a training at the June 25 Action Forum that focused on the Empathy phase of the Design Cycle process, developing open-ended questions to elicit a broader understanding of the parent and child needs and their environment. The TCM Forums focus on the end goal of children reading at grade level by third grade and groups are divided into clusters of attendance, summer learning and school readiness. There is a planning team investigating the option of developing a Design Center here in Fresno, led by Keith Bergthold.
