In depth conversation with the founders of ChangeBetter.org about their journey starting and how they approach the sector. Sometimes you need to merge with larger organizations to achieve the true mission of your organization. Founder Amanda Ashton and Ellie Zietlin discuss their approach to helping nonprofits discover their impact model and talk through tough questions.

Episode 35

Speaker 1: This is Using the Whole Whale, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world.

My name is George Weiner, your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

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Speaker 1: We’ve got a fun short interview today with co-founders of changebetter.org, an organization that works with more smaller start up type of nonprofits thinking about how they have structured their impact and business objectives. The co-founders Ellie Zeitland and Amanda Ashton are former coworkers of mine and we have a fun dialog, because they themselves are also a startup. You kind of hear that as they are talking about the day to day and newly getting into it.  I think it’s fun having these kinds of conversations with newer organizations, because frequently I think I at least run into more established, longer running organizations just have different problems. However, there’s a lot of us out there that are starting things up and thinking about how do we manage day to day keep the lights on with incredible oversized impact goals.

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Speaker 1: I’m here with Ellie and Amanda from changebetter.org. So a little backstory. We spent some time together while I worked as the CTO of dosomething.org. How are you guys doing? Tell us. W

How should we be setting goals and measuring success in the nonprofit sector? We discuss this with Brian Reich, Author of Shift & Reset and founder of little m media. In his book he asks us to ‘imagine that there is a meteor headed toward earth/your cause’, given this urgency how can we test solutions that actually work, solutions that have a chance to knock this meteor off course. How should we think about our mission if we ACTUALLY want to change how the world works?

This is part 1 of 2 of our in-depth conversation with Brian.

Shift & Reset on Amazon. Follow Brian on twitter!

Episode 33

Speaker 1: This is Using The Whole Whale. A podcast that brings you stories of data & technology in the non-profit world. My name is George Weiner, your host, and the chief whaler of WholeWhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

speaker 1: I had the chance to catch up and interview a friend of mine, Brian Rich, the author of Shift & Reset, a great social impact and change book, and he’s also the founder of little M media. We talk a bit about the book and his experience with that, and some work he’s currently doing with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and really fascinating thinking big-picture about how do we reach the right people, who are the right people, and ultimately what are we going t

Matt Addler, founder of MAS strategies, a marketing firm that helps nonprofits reach and speak to the right Latino market discusses why we need to think differently about this growing audience. Currently there are 53m Latinos in the U.S. according the last census numbers.

Matt explains that Google translate doesn’t cut it and that for a real outreach strategy you need to consider the nuances of the audience, language, and culture. Identify who you are or want to be talking to by region, age, culture and then design your communication plan.

Episode 30

Speaker 1: This is using the whole Whale, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the non- profit world.  This is  George Weiner, your host, the chief whaler at wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.  

speaker 1: hola bienvenidos, mi nombre es jorge. And that’s about all the Spanish that i have for  this episode. But i do believe that this is important. Currently there are  53 million Latinos in the United States, estados unidos.. Alright now i am done with the Spanish. There is so much to understand about the audience language and culture and how to approach them on social media. Today, we are talking with Matt Adler from a company called “Mass”. and his specialty is in understanding in reaching this market for organizations and i think there is a lot to learn here and i can’t  wait to jump into this conversation. [00:57 – 01:05- music] .

speaker 1:And I am thrilled to be here with Matt Adler, who is going to  take some time and explain to us a bit more about how we can think about the strategies that we employ to engage Latinos in the U.S and the Spanish speaking market in general . Matt, tell us who you are and what do you do?

Speaker 2: Sure. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast today. I am very excited. I am based out of the DC area. I do social media and communications in Spani

Games are fun and social change is serious. Right? We talk with Asi Burak, the president of GamesForChange.org an organization that leads the sector in thinking about the intersection of games and social change. Their annual Games For Change conference brings together the leaders in the gaming and social sector fields to learn about cutting edge advances in the field.

Our conversation covers some examples of successful games and how nonprofits can start exploring gaming for social impact. Creating games can be very expensive, though there can be great upside when it comes to engagement with a target audience and potential growth to a new one.

Never Alone Trailer

Full disclosure – Games For Change is a former client of Whole Whale and they are awesome.

Episode 29 – What is the role of games in making social change?

Speaker 1: This is Using the Whole Whale -a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the non-profit world. This is George Weiner, your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: Games are tremendously powerful and I think most of our interactions with them come in the form of tiny little candies that we slide around and help companies make, you know, billions of dollars crushing those candies. Today I am excited because we are talking with an organization called Games For Change and Asi the president there has lot of insight on how the field has develop