Posts tagged research
Four ideas for starting the GIVE on spring break
Mar 24th
It’s spring break time! When I was younger this meant something different than it means to me now. These days, I’m excited to see the crocuses blooming, pining to get my garden planted, and enjoying pretending that 57 degree weather makes me happy.
I have three kids. They are five, three, and 6 months old. Next year, my wife and I will have to schedule our vacation around SCHOOL. This blows my mind of course. But many of you already have kids in school and are used to waiting until spring break to vacation with your family. So we thought we would think about how you can spend your precious spring break time with your family but not lose track of the give while you’re out and about. More >
The Giving Consumer: Some thoughts on Compassionate Capitalism
Mar 22nd
Recently, we have been thinking about the notion of “compassionate capitalism”- that is, the idea that a business can or ought to seek profits responsibly or that people can decide to choose to do business with companies that meet some standard of philanthropy before they make a purchase from them.
This idea is not new, but is gaining mindshare. More >
foyble is developing a service curriculum aligned to national standards for teachers and students
Jan 14th
Note: Special thanks to Chad Sansing and Dr. Jack King for helping us get this post together. Check Chad out here and Jack out here.
Imagine your students on the Act Map!
foyble is working with Dr. Jack King, creator of Leadership Upside Down and Chad Sansing of the Community Public Charter School in Charlottesville, VA, to create a service project-based curriculum that educators and administrators can use to provide an educational opportunity in an inspirational package to meet the needs of educators and administrators, students, and communities.
The philosophy: foyble will help schools and children help build new relationships in their communities. Administrators, teachers, and students will use social media to help students, teachers, and administrators learn together through instuctional technology, with content standards that deliver academic rigor. The curriculum will be developed in a way that will support administrators efforts to draw funding from multiple sources so that service projects have an opportunity to be fully funded. Educators should be able to meet professional development goals while working on the service projects with students. More >
Five Winter giving ideas
Jan 12th
Never mind. I'll use the valet.
It’s been pretty brutal here in Chicago and all over the midwest, weather-wise, for the last few weeks. We’ve had a few snow storms and temperatures in the teens or twenties for a few weeks straight. But we think it would be shame to waste a whole season just because the weather is terrible. Below are a few ideas we have for making the cold winter months productive giving months.
1) Use the time to research some new organizations to get involved with once the weather breaks. So you’re stuck inside because it’s 10 below and the driveway is unpassable? Go with it. Stay inside and let your internet do the walking. Use our resources page to find a new organization. Or search for them on your own- using your fave search engine use search terms for things that you’re interested in like “soccer” or “little league” or “gardening” and pair them with good giving ‘action’ words like “giving”, “volunteerism”, or “helping”. Throw in your city or a nearby larger city for good measure. Check this ‘gardening volunteerism’ search result on google.
The internet depends on random acts of kindness to function
Oct 20th
I am always looking for new ways of describing to people what foyble is. Of course I have my trusty talking points. I deploy my elevator speech whenever possible (but rarely on actual elevators). I refer people to the what is foyble tab on the website. And we love bragging about the what is foyble video. We frequently like to use metaphor and analogy in our description of what we think foyble is and what it means to us.
During my research for what was going to be a post about some random act of kindness in the news I came across the below imbedded video. It is a talk by Jonathan Zittrain from this year’s TED conference. Jonathan is a Law Professor who teaches at Harvard. Read more about him on his bio page on the TED website.
It turns out the internet itself is the perfect metaphor for foyble. There is a lot of content that is produced, police-ed, and proliferated on the internet by people and organizations that have no obvious benefit for contributing to the content. Wikipedia is the most obvious example of this. The video contains some nice examples of how Wikipedia works. It drives home the notion of user generated content and demonstrates just how deeply involved the people who contribute to Wikipedia are.
Jonathan’s premise that the internet depends on one random act of kindness after another to function fits in nicely with what we believe the internet is. We believe that the internet is people. That despite all the popular criticisms of the internet- that it is filled with spam, and pornography, and viruses, and opinions disguised as news- that it really is just a fantastic interactive content generation mechanism that everyone owns. And since we all own it we all get to decide what content gets posted. And if we can’t decide what gets posted we at least get to help decide what is popular.
So that’s why we created foyble, because you should be able to use the internet to tell the world about your story, about your organization, and what you’re doing so that people can be inspired by the good that you’re trying to start.
Zittrain ends with a quote that I’ll take some license with and mash together just a little for effect: “the internet isn’t just a pile of information. it’s not a noun, its a verb. …that information is saying something to you…it’s saying: let’s march.” I like that. Help us help you use the internet to do your marching.
posted by Brian
Starting the GIVE keeps employees engaged and grows business, Harvard research says.
Sep 24th
Harvard Business Publishing posted this great article about how, on many levels, employees want to “do good” (we call it Start the GIVE) and its makes their employers more successful. That’s all win-win, foyble style. Here’s what they had to say:
“New research shows that high-potential employees are motivated by a desire to give back to their communities, and increasingly seek out employers that allow them to do so on the job. Companies like GE and Pfizer are launching programs that expand their revenue and attract and retain these employees by integrating “doing good” into their business strategies. Don’t limit your company’s socially responsible efforts to donation and volunteering. Explore ways that your company can combine social responsibility and commercial viability by offering lower cost products to emerging markets or developing a new profitable solution to a social problem.”
-This tip was adapted from an article by Sylvia Ann Hewlett that you can read below. Whether you are an employee or an employer, on behalf of yourself or a company, make sure you use foyble and tell us how we can make your experience better not only to Start the GIVE but to continue the GIVE and watch it grow!
