The Realist Idealist

…for anyone who stops by the site tomorrow.
Can’t wait to resume blogging after the madness of the election ends.  For those that I haven’t talked to, or can’t tell from my Twitter feed to the right, I’m in North Carolina for the final days of the campaign trying to turn out a victory for Kay [...]

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To be perfectly honest, as much as I love the products that come out, I get a little tired of writing and talking about Google and Salesforce. I really wish some other companies would develop and innovate on the same level and provide some new tools to the folks out there trying to [...]

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In early October YouTube announced the YouTube for Nonprofits Program and a special site for them that would allow them to have full branding of a page and free processing of donations for Google Checkout.
Since then, hundreds of nonprofits from the ONE Campaign to the Clinton Foundation to PlayPumps International have launched pages and raised [...]

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http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html
As we all know Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So in true realist-idealist fashion Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first [...]

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I’ve often felt strongly that the requirement of businesspersons, nonprofit and NGO staff, and others in the field to write an email or produce other work on time is one of the larger problems our society faces. There is simply not enough time in the day. There aren’t enough neurological connections upstairs to [...]

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I spent all of yesterday afternoon at Google’s DC offices for a meeting of Leadership 18 - a coalition of the country’s largest and most well respected nonprofit organizations - at which we talked about large nonprofits use of new technology in their work (particularly Google’s technology). As the United Way was the [...]

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Sitting here in Red Rock coffee shop in downtown Mountain View, CA - the fabled home to tech giants like Google and innumerable startups - you can almost feel the innovation pulsing through your veins. It permeates the air. You suck it in with every breath.  Like politics in DC.
I’m in a chair [...]

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At the end of the day, fundraising is the engine that drives the nonprofit sector. In general, if you’re running any organization - for-profit or non - and you’re not thinking about money, you’re wrong. With the overwhelmingly vast majority of nonprofits, if you’re not thinking about fundraising, you’re wrong.

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I like the idea of taking ideas or terms that people are familiar with and tweaking them for use in the social sector. In the case of this post’s title, I had enough backlash from two friends when I said “pimp” that I almost refrained from writing it. Almost. Maybe there’s something [...]

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They’ve been talking about it behind the scenes for a few weeks now, but unlike those companies who just talk (and trust me, a lot of companies do), Chad, Steve and all the folks at YouTube have actually delivered.
The YouTube Nonprofit Program - announced in a commitment the company made at the Clinton Global Initiative [...]

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