Ian Joyce showed up at Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation after a robust and distinguished career in corporate marketing and communications. He brought that mindset to his new work in social good. But he found there was a missing piece—a pipeline.  

An authoritarian mindset is most often the reason volunteer systems fail. Here we examine the impact of the authoritarian mindset on leaders and followers.

First, authoritarians have good intent. It is true, however, that they operate using a method that often impacts others both significantly and negatively. It’s who they are, and because authoritarianism is held by many in poor regard, most don’t want to see themselves this way.

History is unfolding before us; it’s on C-SPAN and most cable news outlets. How can we use what we’re witnessing to help us in social good? Repeat to yourself... people respond to situations. Great marketing and program design create situations that trigger the types of attitudes and behaviors that we’re seeing as a result of the January 6th hearings.

We recently wrote about the unfortunate results of “siloing” events and event participants. By doing so we prevent the participant from connecting to the mission, to make the mission a part of their identity.

We have defined “our community” as “the people on our email list” for a long time, but that’s not what community is all about. To our credit, we knew that they (people on our email list) cared about one thing—our mission.

It was addictive. I wanted to continue that feeling. It was such an incredible feeling. I wanted more and more. It became something that I loved.

In the past months, we’ve read a lot of “takeaways from the pandemic” articles. So many, in fact, that we thought adding one more to the conversation might be redundant. At the same time, we are still reading them, and it looks like you are too. So here is our take on what we learned.

I am the mother of a thirty-year-old with Down syndrome, autism, and type 1 diabetes. Like me, I'm sure you've been asked to help fundraise for an organization dedicated to helping your loved one. And you thought, “We have a really rare situation. Will anyone donate if this isn’t part of their life?”