Competition in Energy Drinks Essay

Porter’s five-forces model reveals that the overall alternative beverage industry attractiveness is high. Some beverage companies, such as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, have mastered the art of brand building in the alternative beverage market and have been rewarded with rapid growth rates. The rising population of health conscious consumers is increasingly leaning towards alternative beverages that are believed to offer greater health benefits. The strongest competitive force, or most important to strategy formulation, is the threat of entry of new competitors. Competitive pressure from rival sellers is high in the alternative beverage industry. The number of brands competing in sports drinks, energy drinks, and vitamin-enhanced beverage segments of the alternative beverage industry continue to grow each year. Both large and small vendors are launching new products and fighting for minimal retail shelf space. More and more consumers are moving away from traditional soft drinks to healthier alternative drinks. Demand is expected to grow worldwide as consumer purchasing power increases. Another strong competitive force is buyer bargaining power. Convenience stores and grocery stores have substantial leverage in negotiating pricing and slotting fees with alternative beverage producers due to the large quantity of their purchase. Newer brands are very vulnerable to buyer power because of limited space on store shelves. Top brands like Red Bull are almost always guaranteed space. This competitive force does not affect Coca-Cola or PepsiCo as much due to the variety of beverages the stores want to offer to the customer. As a result of this certain appeal, the two companies’ alternative beverage brands can almost always be found shelf space in grocery/convenience stores. Distributors, like restaurants, have less ability to negotiate for deep pricing discounts because of quantity limitations. The weakest competitive force is the bargaining power and leverage of suppliers. Most of the raw materials desirable to manufacture alternative beverages are basic merchandise such as flavor, color, packaging, etc. The suppliers of these commodities have no bargaining power over the pricing due to which the suppliers in the industry are relatively weak. Raw materials for these drinks are basic commodities which are easily available to every producer and have low cost which makes no difference for any supplier. Low switching costs limit supplier bargaining power by enabling industry members to change suppliers if any one supplier attempts to raise prices by more than the cost of switching.

Project Management and Community Members Essay

TopCoder has a very unique and different model with respect to the traditional companies. As a senior manager, I would need to build following capabilities: Firstly, build manpower to oversee a community of over 200,000 members and direct the process of competition based software development. The emphasis would be on not managing individuals but managing the process of participation, fostering community participation and community growth. Secondly, focus on building a critical mass of talent and coding capacity to run many competitions and produce solutions for clients at the same time. This would require attracting new members into the community through more challenges and contents, doing online advertising and member development days. Thirdly, build norms by maintaining the highest standards of contest integrity, transparency and quality. Strictly monitor competitions and maintain consistency of procedures. Fourthly, provide the right governance. Involve the views of the community members as well in the decision making process and treat them as driver along with establishing a fair peer review scoring system. Fifthly, do the right resource allocation. Allocate community resources and control contest participation across the number of contests. This is because unlike traditional firms, Topcoder cannot assign specific people to a task or project. Focus would be on to set the prize amount, duration and timing of contest and the number of competitors. Sixthly, work towards retaining community members and encourage future contest participation. Supply community members with consistent work stream and prize money. Dedicate significant resources to facilitate forum discussions and encourage members to engage in the community. On the demand side, as a manager, I would need to guide clients through the contest-based software development process, provide suggestions for contest prize amounts, gather feedback between contests and provide project status updates to clients. In case of technical problem, get the problem fixed through the appropriate community members. Manage client expectations and serve as a board for client concerns. Additionally, educate the clients on how to use the TopCoder platform to manage the contest-based software development process themselves.

BSBOHS503B Assist in the design and devlopment of OHS participative Essay

BSBOHS503B Assist in the design and devlopment of OHS participative arrangements - Essay Example In this paper the conduct of a health committee is evaluated in terms of building a committee that is functional and effective. A constitution to govern the working of the committee is proposed, and dispute resolution in the committee in terms of the work, health and safety (WHS) management model is discussed. In the case study given, a health and safety committee has been operational for six months but has been ineffective due to a clash of personalities. As the workplace safety officer, there are various steps I can take to improve the efficiency of the committee. The first step will be reviewing the committee’s constitution to ensure that it is aligned with the organization’s vision. The committee members will be educated on the purpose of the committee. The junior workers in the committee will be taught that the health and safety committee is not another avenue for them to voice their wishes to the management. Rather, it is a forum to generate solutions for the health and safety problems at the workplace. The second step will be improving the cohesiveness of the committee through team building exercises. Team building and workplace cohesiveness reduces workplace bullying incidences which are impact negatively on workplace health and safety (Chan-Mok, Janet, Carlo and Chr is 3; Keashly and Branda 423). The agenda of the committee meetings will be clearly communicated to the members. This will avoid deviation from the relevant issues during the meetings and preempt the witnessed personality crash. Finally, the committee will be setting practical goals and steps to achieve these goals. An evaluation procedure will be available in order to determine if the goals are being met in a timely manner. The health and safety committee is tasked with coordination of health and safety related activities in an organization. The committee should be representative of all stake holders who are affected by the health and safety systems implemented by

Affirmative Action v. Quotas, disparate treatment and disparate Coursework

Affirmative Action v. Quotas, disparate treatment and disparate impact, employment at will - Coursework Example Quotas, on the other hand, refer to a set number or percentage for the representation of people of a given group. The main difference between affirmative action and quotas is that while affirmative action has no set minimum percentages for the representation of a protected group, quotas provide this. This makes quotas easier to monitor considered that the criteria for determining whether or not an institution has complied is predetermined. Disparate impact is easier to prove compared to disparate treatment. While disparate impact involves focuses on discriminatory consequences, disparate treatment looks at discriminatory intent. One would, therefore, suppose that it is easier to establish the consequences of discrimination than to establish the intention of discrimination. Proof of discriminatory motive does not, therefore, is not part of the disparate-impact theory. This implies that establishing the consequences of discrimination within an institution does not involve the contributions of an institution’s management as it is the case with establishing the motive behind discrimination. The employment-at-will doctrine refers to the common rule that an employment contract with no defined duration can be terminated by either the employer or the employee at any time without the party terminating the contract having to provide good reasons for doing so. This doctrine goes against the â€Å"good will† requirement advocated by employee unions. Unlike the at-will doctrine, the good will requirement supposes that employers need to demonstrate that it is for a good cause that they intend to terminate an employee’s

Analysis of Airbus and Boeing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 5000 words

Analysis of Airbus and Boeing - Essay Example The reactions from the airline industry for previously launched planes by Airbus and Boeing have also been discussed and then the opportunities that 787 has, have been the main point of the study. This report basically has been divided into four sections. In the first part of the report, important variables that could influence the decision of Airbus and Boeing have been discussed in detail. In the second part of the report, the risks faced by both these firms have been discussed and how the risks faced by Airbus and Boeing are identified and analysed and then model has been used to know how firms should manage risk (McLaney, 2009). In the third part of the report, stakeholders of both Airbus and Boeing have been discussed and how these stakeholders could influence the firm have been described in detail. However, in the fourth section of the report, critical financial analysis about Boeing has been discussed as it introduces the Dreamliner in the market. In the end, conclusion of the report along with recommendations has been discussed. Contents Management attitude and perception 6 Market analysis 7 Traffic of passengers 8 Change in Idea to Point to Point 8 Market Deregulation 8 Product Portfolio 9 Cost and the return 9 Technological ability 10 Risks faced by boeing and airbus 12 Technological Risk 12 Market Risk 12 Economic Risk 12 Environmental Risk 12 Financial Risks 13 Political Risks 13 Economic Risk 14 Social Risks 14 Technological Risk 14 Legal Risk 15 Environmental Risk 15 Managing Risk 15 TARA Model: 15 Predict 15 Prevent 16 Detect 16 Response 16 List of Stakeholders 18 Impact of each Stakeholder 18 Government: 18 Airlines 19 Society 19 Shareholders 19 Employees 19 STAKEHOLDER MAPPING 20 Group A 21 Group B 21 Group C 21 Group D 21 Tallman GmbH Model: 22 How has each stakeholder been affected 23 Government 23 Competitors 24 Airlines 24 Society 24 Shareholders 24 Employees 25 Recommendations 28 Conclusion 28 Reference List 30 Introduction The report is a bout Airbus and Boeing and it is primarily based on a case when Boeing introduced its Dreamliner. The case discusses the background and how things shaped up that lead towards a fuel efficient aircraft, 787 Dreamliner. The report discusses how the management feels and what variables they considered when they were preparing the feasibility of introducing a new fuel efficient plane as well as variables that influenced their decision to not go for a jumbo sized aircraft, 747. The second section of the report discusses about the risks that the company faces and how Airbus and Boeing need to manage their risk properly in order to have consistent profits in the long run. The importance of managing and identifying risks has been described in this section. The third section of the report discusses important stakeholders of both the aircraft manufacturing firms; Boeing and Airbus and analyses how they could impact the firm’s operations. Also stakeholders have been prioritised using a t heoretical framework to identify the level of their impact and their power to influence the firm’s operation. The fourth section of the report discusses the critical financial analysis of Boeing as it introduces a new fuel efficient plane and what impact the plane would make in the long run profitability of the firm. The report then gives recommendations for Airbus and Boeing

Steve Jobs, a Modern Hero Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Steve Jobs, a Modern Hero - Essay Example He was among the most influential persons in the globe for the last four decades. So influential he was, but not without authority. He assembled a team that was accordingly competent and conformed to his commands with total fealty. Not just his death, his resignation as Apple’s Chief Executive Officer was a total anguish to the world. The public response to the tremendous death was that only seen in cases involving tales about epic heroes. Like a modern hero, he accepted assistance from his fellows as well as subordinates. In addition, he inspired those he worked with to be better. Fearless to dream, he invented technologies that extremely fulfilled the lives of countless people. This paper focuses on the life of Steve Jobs as a modern hero, triumphing via initiative, technology, and will power, who looks at things from a global perspective. Born on February 24, 1955 to an unmarried Joanne Simpson and Abdufattah Jandari in San Francisco , Steven was given up to adoption and adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs of California who brought him up . His adoptive parents cherished and nurtured his curiosity in electronics. He dropped out of college in 1972 when he felt his parents were struggling too much to educate him and he was still not sure of what he wanted. He foremost saw a computer terminal at NASA’s Ames Research Center. ... His engineers at Apple tailored the idea to come up with two great computers, the pricier Lisa and Macintosh (Iwatani & Fowler Web). After this, one invention came after another, from the ‘graphical’ PC of 1984 to Pixer, Apple completely changed the world of computers. It kept building new and better innovations under the guidance of the competent Jobs. He was once pushed out of Apple for eleven years due to discrepancy with Sculley. Even when out of Apple his dream remained sentient, and he opened another company ‘NEXT’. He later rejoined Apples, to find it struggling to remain in the picture but he invigorated the company (Robertson Web). Most fancied of his inventions is the launch of iPod in 2001, a pocket garget that could lug up to 1000 songs. Next came the touch screen iPhone in 2007 coupled by Apple’s App Store in the subsequent year. In 2010, arrived the iPad. These and other innovations ranked Apples as the second biggest company by 2011 in United States. Though most felt that creation of iPad was unimportant, Steve wizardly convinced the world to accept and buy the tablet sized all touch computer. Jobs ideas resulted not only in Apple’s success but also fashioned everything, from Hollywood to music industry. They changed PC as well as digital media industries (Robertson Web). Jobs unreservedly transformed the field of technology, completely revolutionizing the word. He had an entirely diverse way of envisaging things, always believed in himself and brilliant enough to implement what he contemplated. No hero lacks rivals, and Steve did have some, Bill Gates a computer intellect like Jobs was one of them. The difficult path full of the setbacks and disappointments he had to follow to be triumphant as well as the challenges he came across but

Interview Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

Interview - Article Example However, over the years, he had managed to shift from literature research into institution management for the last seven years. The policy maker was also quick to justify and defend stringent policies on use of smart phones by students in class rooms, punitive measures on plagiarism claims and his inclination towards the American degree system. On his defense of the policies on mobile phone usage in classroom, the academician noted that new technologies had transformed the minor sources of distractions into profound cause of alarm for tutors. The prevalence of mobile phone usage in classrooms furthermore amounted to disrespect of tutors in addition to negatively impacting on their teaching morale while every students is busy on their smart phones and tablets. Alternatively, Dr. Lawrence added that the new policy against phone usage was to be guided by disciplinary action. According to this interview, Dr. Lawrence stated that the disciplinary action on mobile phone usage would take two stages, the informal stage and the formal stage. The informal stage entailed warning of student caught using their gadgets in school. Failure to restrain form these offences, the students would be asked to meet the directors of Regent and Webster University for further questioning. These two steps were termed informal since no record of the i ncidences would be registered on students account. On the other hand, the formal stage entailed official disciplinary action by the disciplinary committee of the institution for students who failed to heed their subsequent warnings. Another key issue raised by Dr. Lawrence was the new policies on plagiarism offences. He noted that despite the harshness of the newly formulated policies on plagiarism, it was imperative that students appreciate that the policy aimed at promoting behavior change of students concerning their attitude towards research projects and individual efforts. The newly formulated policies provided the Regent’s students

LoE Project Rules Against Hersay Research Paper

LoE Project Rules Against Hersay - Research Paper Example It draws conclusions on the basis of observation made by others. This rule is completely against the direct evidence made by the persons in the case involved in the court. The rule negates the importance of the verdict of the person who is directly involved in the incident reported for claiming the rights in court. Instead, another person presents the facts from his own point of view that cannot be considered as authentic in most of the cases (Graham, 1982). The definition made by researchers for Hearsay is that an out-of-court statement that is used to prove the verdict inside the court. The word ‘out-of-court’ needs some explanation. It contains all the necessary explanations that are not directly part of the court proceedings. These are either the observations of verdicts of others. The rule of hearsay might be used by persons to provide evidence to save or enforce punishment against the real evidence. It may be used to manipulate the truth in the favor of the motives of the witness. He may tell the observation of some other person in a sugar-coated way that serves his own purpose or aim. It may be used in those cases in which the Declarant is either unavailable for presenting himself to the court or he is not confident enough to record his statements in front of the jury. In normal cases, the purpose of the witness is to provide his statements to help in solving the case under the oath. His statements are based on the direct evidence concluded from his experience, study, or observation. The witness is directly involved in the case. In case of Hearsay, the Declarant lies outside the court. His oath doesn’t have any role in the proceedings of the court. He just feeds his information to another person who plays the role of witness. The witness will present the information based on the feedback from Declarant. This feedback is based on the indirect observation on the part of the

CBRN Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear weapons Essay

CBRN Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear weapons - Essay Example In the modern context, political instability is a serious problem because one cannot expect an unstable state to be responsible towards humanity. Comparing with nuclear weapons, radiological weapons are with less capacity to create severe damage. To be specific, this sort of weapons is generally used to create chaos among the mass. Within this scenario, world nations suspect that notorious terrorist organizations may make use of this weapon to intimidate humanity. For instance, the Padilla case (2002) proves that terrorist groups have worldwide network and are strong enough to use radiological weapons. To be specific, the government suspected that Padilla may involve in jihad because he is trained to handle radiological weapons. Besides, this person is closely related to the leadership within Al-Qaeda. So, the Padilla case proves that terrorist groups may make use of civilians to handle radioactive weapons. In my opinion, Al-Qaeda possesses economic capability to plot and conduct a severe attack using radiological weapon. Shane (2010) states that, â€Å"Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you† (p. A1). To be specific, the revenue from oil trade in the Middle East supports Al-Qaeda. So, one can see that economic capability is not a serious problem for the terrorist organizations. On the other side, the former satellite nations related to Russia (USSR) may have weapons (say, nuclear) and the terrorist organizations can easily influence these nations. Besides, the terrorist organizations make use of religious ideology to attract individuals who live in U.S. and other western nations. Mendelsohn (2009) states that, â€Å"Al Qaeda has never disguised its desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear capabilities† (p.77). So, I rate the threat of radiological weapons as high risk because

The Dramatic Significance of Act 3.4 of Richard III Essay Example for Free

The Dramatic Significance of Act 3.4 of Richard III Essay Dramatic significance is used in several instances in the given extract from Act 3 Scene 4, for various purposes such as to reveal to us the true nature of Richard, foreshadow deaths and ill-fortunes in the upcoming scenes as well as develop themes that have appeared in previous scenes such as the theme of curses and prophesies. The use of diction in the first few lines contributes to the creation of dramatic significance to develop the theme of evil and the role of the supernatural in the play. Words which connote supernatural and evil powers such as devilish, damned and witchcraft are used by Richard as he accuses people of having cursed him and hence caused harm to his body, such as his arm which he describes as a blasted sapling withered up. Dramatic significance is also used to show irony here as Richard is portraying himself as a victim of their evil forces. However, in actual fact, Richard is the one who is evil and conspires against everyone, attempting to deceive and overthrow them. He is also the one who has most often been associated with hell and the devil by many characters in the previous acts of the play. For example, in Act 1 Scene 3 Margaret refers to Richard as The slave of nature and the son of hell!. The hard alliteration of the d sounds in damned, death and devilish also make him sound evil and cruel. As such, we are able to see through his false front and also realise how absurd his argument is as he is born with the deformities that he is accusing others inflicting upon him. In Act 1, he himself used the phrase rudely stamped to describe himself, which shows that he was born with deformities. Punctuation and diction in Hastings responses to Richard also has dramatic significance as it reveals to us his true feelings towards Richard and establishes the hidden conflict present between them. For example, when Hastings says The tender love I bear your grace, my lord, he exaggerates by the using of the word tender to describe his love and the fact that he places my lord at the end of the sentence, causing a pause in the line, suggests the lack of sincerity in his words. Also, the use of If in his next response to Richard gives us a clear hint of the split between them as it is evident that he doubts Richards words. Dramatic significance is also used to foreshadow the evil that is to come. For example, when Hastings says that whoever offends Richard deserved death, he is digging his own grave as he is unknowingly granting permission for Richard to have him executed. He is unaware that Richard would soon throw accusations on him and have him killed. Hence, Hastingss death is foreshadowed. Another instance where death is foreshadowed is at the end of the extract when Hastings says that England will experience fearfulst time to thee/That ever wretched age hath looked upon and that his executioners Lovell and Ratcliffe shortly shall be dead. This also highlights the theme of curses and prophesies as these curses and prophesies actually come to pass towards the end of the play when Richard and his allies get defeated. In many other cases, curses have been fulfilled but the receivers of the curses or bad omens are ignorant of them and hence are not cautious of the danger that they will face and are unable to avoid them. For example, when Hastings was ordered to be executed, he was angry with himself for having brushed away all the warnings that he got, and not having taken Margarets curses seriously. This is shown through the repetition of Margarets name when Hastings says O Margaret, Margaret and the despaired tone that is conveyed through the use of exclamation marks, commas and diction such as scorn, loathe and wretched. We see Hastings regretfully state the several warnings that he had received, such as the stumbling of his horse upon approaching the tower where traitors were taken to for execution, Stanleys dream of a boar attacking them, in Act 3 Scene 2, which he disregarded, as well as Margarets curse in Act 1 Scene 3 saying That none of you may live your natural age, /But by some unlookd accident cut off!. This is also dramatically significant as well as it creates a sense of pathos for Hastings and his unfortunate predicament. We feel sorry for him and understand his pain and anger as he could have avoided this misfortune from happening as he says, For I, too fond, might have prevented this!. Lastly the stage directions in the extract are relevant in creating dramatic significance to show Richards forceful nature and power to control the behaviour of the noblemen and rope in their support. Firstly, he shows how easily he can call for an execution of someone by saying Off with his head. Now by Saint Paul I/Swearlook that it be done, making it sound all religious and official. After which, he says, The rest that love me, rise and follow me almost as if he were threatening those who stay behind with the same ending as what he had just caused for Hastings. As a result, the stage directions in response to Richards ending line is Exeunt [all but] LOVELLE and RATCLIFFE, with the LORD HASTINGS, showing us that the rest do fear Richard, his power, and that they understand the danger of losing their lives. This is also felt by Hastings as he describes him as O bloody Richard!. Hence, dramatic significance has been used effectively in the given extract to help us readers better understand the play and the message and ideas that Shakespeare is trying to convey.

A Review on the Role of Expert System in Nephrology

A Review on the Role of Expert System in Nephrology Mr. Sagar S. Mali, Dr. R. V. Kulkarni Abstract Expert system refers to ability of the machine to collect data, performing operations on that data, and provide the correct and accurate results. The Expert system brings the intelligence like the human intelligence which is embedded into them by the computer programs. The use of Expert system in Nephrology concerns itself with the study of normal kidney function, kidney problems, and the treatment of kidney problems by the use of IT. There is need to transformation of the human expert knowledge to the machine. So that users of the system get the quick information about the particular disease in the field of Nephrology. The many researchers want to develop the system by using the fuzzy sets and neural computing. Author wants to present the exhaustive review on the role of expert system in Nephrology with special reference to kidney functions, kidney problems and kidney problem solutions through expert system. Keywords – Expert System, Nephrology INTRODUCTION The human body is the made up of the various parts. To take care of it the medical science exists from thousands of years and growth of its growing tremendously. It includes the various branches like biochemistry, molecular biology, medicinal chemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, physiology, nutrition, vision science and biomedical technology etc. In the recent era the use of IT for the medical science gives the precious contribution for the systematic development. The Medical Expert helps for diagnosing the medical disease that suggest to patients for about their health problems. But due to new amendments use of expert system is must. The Medical experts / doctors give treatment to patients with their experience and judgment. But sometimes he/she fails to treat the patient if the correct diagnosis is not made on patient disease or due to lacunas of expert Knowledge in the respective field. So it is the major problem for the junior doctors to learn new things and to patients also to know about their health problems because they can’t make experiment in reality because life is the very important. Another major problem is that the experienced Doctors/ Experts cannot always teach to junior or cannot tell to individual patients about their disease due to geographical location problems. It may require lot of cost and time for doctors and patients also. EXPERT SYSTEM Expert system refers to the mechanism which has the capability of collecting core data, process on it, analyze, make synthesis, perform operations, and provide the correct and accurate results which help to any individual or to any organization to take their best decisions. It is the specialized branch of Artificial Intelligence. Now days in various areas the expert system is working just like the medical, space research, security department, in banks and so on. The major use of the expert system to reduce the technical error related to business processing, logic processing and data processing. Expert systems are widely used in the field of medical to diagnose the patient disease. OBJECTIVE To take the review on the role of expert system in Nephrology with special reference to kidney functions, kidney problems and kidney problem solutions through expert system. REVIEW OF LITERATURE Laith R. Fleaih, in his paper â€Å"Expert system for Diagnosing kidney diseases† stated that the neural computing system designed to support the medical decision process using medical imaging databases and creating the optimal systems for ministry of the health to help the physician to making the correct decision with high certainty also give suitable medical device and can use for training the medical stuff easily. Main aim of the proposed system is the ability to diagnose of the kidney disease by in hospital or in the clinical center. Pornpimol Meemasuk and Chantana Chantrapornchai, presented paper â€Å"On the Development of Nutrition Information Systems for Kidney Disease Patients† focuses on the use of information system to aid kidney disease patients. There are various kinds of kidney diseases. Each of them requires the certain limitation of food nutrition, especially, sodium, potassium, protein, etc. In some situation, the protein may need to increase while in some case the protein needs to be decreased. Sandeep Soman, Gerard Zasuwa, Jerry Yee in the paper â€Å"Automation, Decision support and expert system in Nephrology † presented that increasing data suggest that errors in medicine occur frequently and result in substantial harm to the patient. Clinical decision support systems (cdsss) are active knowledge systems that use 2 or more items of patient data to generate case specific recommendations. This article describes how automation, templating, and cdss improve efficiency, patient care, and safety by reducing the frequency and consequences of medical errors in nephrology. M.Surendra Prasad Babu, L. Sreedhar, Dr. K. Rammurthy, in the paper â€Å"Hematology Expert System Using Rule Based Mechanism† stated The Hematology information system helps the people to know about the information about the different aspects of Hematology. The Hematology Advisory system helps the patients to get the required advices about the different diseases attacked to them due to their blood disorders. System is developed using JSP and MySQL. Wim Van Biesen, Guido Sieben, Norbert Lameire and Raymond Vanholder In their paper stated that the patients as having glomerular or tubular disease with a high sensitivity and predictive value. The rule-based system performs worse than the neural networks. The most adequate results were obtained with the hybrid system. They used Kohonen map is cap able of classifying the patients. Miroslave ivandic, walter hofmann and walter g guder, in his paper â€Å"Development and evaluation of a urine protein expert system† developed expert system that describes use of DSS for medical assessment of urine protein differentiation provides a standard of high and constant quality. A graduated and transparent decision process is implemented in the hybrid knowledge base that uses both production rule and geometric distance classification as complementary method of knowledge representation. Leonardo F. Duarte said in his research paper â€Å"Expert System for diagnosis and treatment of diabetes† that intelligent system gives diagnosis and steps to follow in order to achieve optimum health status for the patient. FINDINGS There is Expert system for Nephrology but all the aspects are not covered related to the nephrology. No fully implemented expert system is available which open source. The system is not used by the patients only doctors or experts are using it for diagnosis purpose in their clinic or hospitals. No web based full-fledged implementation. SUGGESTIONS Expert System in Nephrology which includes collection of disease data in well from and then it will make diagnosis. Also system should provide the suggestion for food nutrition to the kidney patients according to their age group. System will be open source which will be used by anybody across the world. System will provide the drugs information and exercise information to the patients also depending on their type and stage of kidney disease. CONCLUDING REMARK Although the literature presents that researches are made in the field of Nephrology but whole areas of it is not taken into consideration for developing the expert system. So author want to propose new research in all areas of Nephrology which includes diagnosis, suggestions, and food nutrition for the patients and system is developed by using open source platform. REFERENCES [1] Laith R. Fleaih, Expert system for diagnosing kidney diseases, international journal of computers technology, Vol.14, No. 3, Page 5517,Dec. 2014. [2] Pornpimol Meemasuk and Chantana Chantrapornchai, â€Å"On the Development of Nutrition Information Systems for Kidney Disease Patients†, International Journal of Database Theory and Application, Vol. 6, No. 3, June 2013. [3] Sandeep Soman, Gerard Zasuwa, Jerry Yee, â€Å"Automation, Decision support and expert system in Nephrology† US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health , 15(1):42-55, Jan 2008. [4] M.Surendra Prasad Babu, L. Sreedhar, Dr. K. Rammurthy, in the paper â€Å"Hematology Expert System Using Rule Based Mechanism†, ISSN: 2231-071 IJCSET | April 2011 | Vol 1, Issue 3,103-106. [5] Miroslave ivandic, walter hofmann and walter g guder, â€Å"Development and evaluation of a urine protein expert system†, Clinical chemistry 42, No. 8, 1996. [6] Leonardo F. Duarte said in his research paper â€Å"Expert System for diagnosis and treatment of diabetes†, spring 2003. [7] http://www.kidney.nyc/kidney-disease/ [8] http://www.webmd.com/drugs/index-drugs.aspx [9] http/en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephrology

Dying at a Young Age :: Death Youth Accidents Essays

Dying at a Young Age Death can occur at any age or period in a person’s life. Death is a natural part of life that everyone will one day have to face. So why does it seem so different when a young adult or adolescent dies in comparison to an older adult? Is it so different? My brother lost two of his best friends in the last three years. One in a car accident and one to a terminal illness. I also lost my best friend in a car accident. In this paper we will look at why people consider it so different when a younger person dies, as well as what is appropriate behavior in dealing with death. MT was a fourteen year old boy that was entering his freshman year of high school. MT was very athletic and active young man. One day MT, used to the usual severe headaches that he sometime got, blacked out. His parents rushed him to the emergency room. The doctors believed it was just a seizure. After a couple weeks in the hospital MT was released from the hospital just before Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving day MT blacked out again. He was again rushed to the hospital. This time doctors believed it was a tumor, but had to wait for the swelling in the brain to go down to do surgery. MT went into a coma, which he never came out of. The doctors finally figured out MT had a rare disease called Moa-Moa. The disease caused the blood vessels in the brain to burst. MT died five days before his fifteenth birthday. CO, a typical high school senior, thought he was invincible. CO decided to drag race one of his friends. As they went around a forty-five mile per hour curve at eighty miles per hour CO left the road. CO was instantly killed as two passengers walked away with a few cuts and bruises. MW, a twenty year old college student, was on her way home for the summer break. MW looked up to see another car in her lane trying to pass a semi.

Performance Enhancing Supplements Essay -- Steroids Illegal Drugs Heal

Performance Enhancing Supplements Northeastern junior Colin Magee is like other athletic students around campus. He played sports in high school and now lifts weights at the Marino Center, Northeastern’s multi-million dollar workout center, several times a week. Also like many other weight-lifting students, Magee takes performance-enhancing supplements. Performance-enhancing supplements are nutrients that, unlike anabolic steroids, are available over the counter at countless supermarkets and nutrition stores nationwide. Supplements such as androstenedione (andro), creatine, tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), and NO2 are the most popular in today’s market, and are used to improve muscle gain. They are taken to coincide with a weight-lifting program. The supplements, though all similar, differ in the way each works once inside the body. "Creatine is the most moderate of the supplements out there," says Magee, an amateur expert on supplement and steroid use. Magee's sister is a professional bodybuilder. "Creatine creates water retention in muscles, basically bloating the muscles to increase strength...NO2, nitric oxide, is what they call a hemo-dialator, which is a blood widener. NO2 creates more blood flow in the body, makes the blood pump harder, which creates increased strength... Andro tricks the body into thinking it is not producing enough testosterone, so it causes the body to overproduce the testosterone hormone." While supplements are sold over the counter, anabolic steroids, which are illegal in the United States, are not. Despite this, anabolic steroid use has been rising in recent years. A 1989 study by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) showed that roughly one in every 20 collegiate student-athlet... ...ds, and more and more teenagers are seeing their idols admit to taking supplements and steroids and think it’s okay if they did too. In today’s world, where skinny girls are prettier and bulky guys are more handsome, teenagers and college students are under more pressure to conform to these social norms, and if someone is under pressure, they are more apt to turn to other unnatural methods to better their results and appearance. The answer to this problem is an increase of awareness. If people were aware of the real risks of these supplements or the long term effects of taking steroids, then maybe, just maybe, today’s youth will turn away from these supplements and steroids. Maybe, just maybe, today’s youth will realize that maybe taking those supplements isn’t really worth it after all. Maybe, just maybe, they will choose their health over their appearance.

Strategic Marketing Planning for Non Profit Organization

Georgetown University Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership Marketing & Communications in Nonprofit Organizations David Williamson Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program  © 2009 Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership Georgetown University Georgetown Public Policy Institute Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 2Marketing & Communications in Nonprofit Organizations: It Matters More Than You Think David Williamson Marketing gets no respect in the nonprofit world. Program people tend to hold the most senior positions in nonprofits and accordingly have the most status. Fundraisers are often viewed as necessary evils, as are operations staff, including those who labor in the communications and marketing departments. Several factors account for the suspicion or disdain with which many nonprofit managers view the marketing functi on.Mostly, it’s a matter of ignorance. Usually trained in other disciplines, nonprofit leaders often fail to understand what marketing can and can’t do for their organizations. Consequently, they hold some strange assumptions (e. g. â€Å"Our good work will sell itself †), unrealistic expectations (e. g. , demanding to be in The New York Times once a week) and arbitrary funding theories (i. e. , when fundraising is down, cut the communications budget). Compounding the challenge, few nonprofit managers recognize their lack of expertise in these areas.The same people who would never contradict a financial expert or ignore a scientist don’t think twice about overruling marketing professionals on audiences, messages, tactics — the very essence of marketing strategy. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, primarily advocacy or social marketing enterprises where the core program involves communications, outreach and marketing. But in the main, the basic lack of respect accorded marketing comes as no surprise to anyone who tried to apply marketing to mission or build a nonprofit brand — we’re used to it.After all, why is this chapter near the end of this book? Forward-looking nonprofit leaders, however, will recognize what their counterparts in the for-profit sector understood long ago: marketing is essential. And although the marketing function masquerades under many names within nonprofit organizations — Communications, Advancement, External Affairs, Public Relations, or Brand Management — the primary objectives are pretty much the same: to define and then defend an organization’s position, and move it closer to success in its mission. Marketing answers the questions: How is our program distinctive?What do we want to be known for? Why is our work relevant? With the competition for philanthropic resources and public attention fierce, these are absolutely critical considerations for every no nprofit. While the benefits of investing in marketing may not be obvious to nonprofit leaders, the costs of failing to do so are becoming increasingly clear. With nonprofits coming under increasing public and regulatory scrutiny, organizations no longer can afford to relegate communications and marketing to second-class status. It’s a matter of survival.When the investigative reporters are circling your organization (think of the recent unpleasantness that befell the American Red Cross, United Way, and Smithsonian Institution, among others) you will wish that you had a robust, professional communications department to handle the incoming slings and arrows. An expensive outside public relations firm is a poor substitute for people who know your organization and command the trust of the staff. moral: Show marketing some respect. It is essential for mission success, but if you wait around until the need is obvious, it will already be too late.The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Douglas Meyer in preparing this manuscript. Note: The anecdotes herein are intended to illustrate larger themes, and not as critiques of individual organizations. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 3 The Elevator Test Through the years, marketers have invented ever-more sophisticated ways to develop organizational position statements. Lots of these methodologies work, and you can spend big money with consultants on finely crafted and focus-group-tested positioning statements.At the same time, for nonprofits, the simpler approach advocated by the marketing savant Harry Beckwith may achieve much the same result at considerably lower cost and effort. I think of Beckwith whenever I find myself confronted with a classic â€Å"elevator test† moment. You strike up a conversation in an elevator, on the subway, in the line at Starbucks and the question soon arises: What do y ou do? The challenge is how to answer that question in an interesting, compelling manner that invites further questions about your organization, but that does not bog down in jargon or too much detail.You don’t have much time — maybe two sentences at most. So what do you include? What do you leave out? What’s your answer to the elevator test? Lest you think this exercise trivial, recall that everyone on the staff of your nonprofit gets asked the â€Å"what do you do? † question, in various forms, every day. In that sense, everyone on staff is a marketer, albeit rarely trained as such. Do you know how your staff is responding? Do you have any confidence that everyone on the team — program staff, receptionists, board members — shares a common sense of the organization’s brand position?Are they communicating a consistent message? Many nonprofit organizations fail this test. Happily, Beckwith prescribes a very simple formula that nonprofi ts can adapt readily to their needs in developing an elevator test that can double as a position statement. (Note that the elevator test is not a mission statement, nor should it read like one, but instead tries to distill the essence of the organization into relevant, accessible language for the particular person with whom you are speaking. ) The Beckwith formula starts with six basic questions: ho? What’s your name? what? What kind of organization are you (scale and sector)? for whom? Whom do your programs serve? what need? What pressing social problem does your program address? what’s different? What is distinctive about your program? so what? Why should they care? String the answers to these questions together for a nonprofit like Population Services International, a $350 million organization working to improve health in the developing world, and you get something that looks like this: PSI (Who? ) is a global nonprofit (What? that works to improve the health (What need? ) of the poor and vulnerable in 60 developing nations around the world (For whom? ). Combating diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria that kill millions around the world (So what? ), PSI saves lives by using the power of the private sector to distribute and market health products to the neediest people. (What’s different? ) Three red flags about elevator tests. First, ruthlessly eliminate jargon. Every sector has a specialized language, but don’t use it in your elevator/positioning speech. Second, avoid laundry lists of activities.Nonprofits are wonderfully inclusive organizations, with a great sense of fairness and equity between their constituent parts, but this makes for disastrous marketing. The entire point of an elevator speech is to boil your enterprise into a message that is simple, consistent, and most of all distinctive, so make hard choices and focus on the things you do particularly well. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Manageme nt Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 4 Second, and perhaps most important, put some real thought into answering the question: So what?It’s the payoff piece of the speech, the call to action that makes the programmatic work of a nonprofit relevant. And to change policy and behavior, to raise money and build a strong institution, most organizations simply must find a way to make their mission relevant to a broader constituency. Figuring out a compelling â€Å"so what? † response is a good place to start. Third, try to make it â€Å"sticky. † Is what you have said memorable? In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath identify the common currency of memorable ideas, a good story.And, specifically, they note the importance of simple, true stories with concrete details, unexpected twists and emotion. Does your elevator speech tell a story in a way that helps the listener remember it? For the leaders of nonprofits, the elevator test al so can serve as a shrewd diagnostic tool for determining differences within the management team. Have everyone sit down and simultaneously craft an elevator speech — give them no more than five minutes — and then have people share the results. You will learn a lot about the attitudes of your senior managers and how they are portraying the organization to the outside world. he audience; not coincidentally, that’s why lots of marketing pieces tend to start with the word â€Å"you. † Looked at another way, marketing is a â€Å"pull† strategy that meets the audience where it is, and then tries to steer the audience to the desired action or behavior through incentives or other inducements. Marketing, it has been said, appeals to the heart. Communications, on the other hand, typically appeals to the head. Representing the institutional perspective, sentences in communications materials usually start with the word â€Å"we† or else the organization ’s name; ook at any nonprofit annual report for a case in point. Communications also tend to be declarative, laying out a statement of opinion, a detailed factual case, or an institutional position, and then try to connect those to the audience’s interests. These are classic push strategies in action, with the organization pushing out information (and misinformation! ) about its activities or agenda. Best-practices nonprofits combine the best aspects of both these approaches, and appeal to both the heart and the head.Mothers Against Drunk Driving, one of the most effective advocacy groups of modern times, is famous for the powerful emotional appeal of its advertising campaigns and legislative testimony, which prominently feature the victims of drunk drivers. But supplementing these classic marketing techniques, MADD also deploys equally classic communications strategies — position papers, voter’s guides, legislative briefing books, and on-line advocacy, f or example. Together, this combination of disciplined marketing and focused, issue-oriented communications has made MADD a political force in every statehouse and on Capitol Hill.And it’s not just MADD. Effective organizations of all stripes are taking advantage of both sides of the coin to get the message out about their issue, cultivate donors, and impress policymakers. Take a look next time you go to the web site or get direct mail from the National Rifle Association, the American Heart Association, or CARE. You’ll see a blend of marketing and communications, things to pull you in and also to push out. It’s not by accident. moral: Marketing is the only job shared by everyone in the organization. An elevator speech makes sure your people have a compelling story, they stick to it and it sticks with their audience.Marketing Isn’t Communications, and Vice Versa Nonprofits tend to use the terms marketing and communications interchangeably — another i ndication of the overall lack of sophistication about these issues inside the sector. But there are substantive differences between the two, none more significant than their very different points of departure. Effective marketing generally starts from the point of the view of the audience, or customer, and seeks to anticipate and address their needs. It’s all about you, moral: Don’t just communicate. Market. Essays on ExcellenceLessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 5 Marketing and Communications for Fundraising Fundraising can be the fire alarm that awakens the leader of a nonprofit to the need for marketing and communications, though, chances are, the initial interest will be less focused on strategy, and more focused on stuff: glossy brochures, pretty pamphlets and verbose newsletters that they can use to â€Å"sell† the organization to major donors. Mike Coda, the best fundraising strate gist I have ever known, was famously contemptuous of this type of marketing material. All that collateral is just a crutch for a poor fundraiser,† Mike would say. â€Å"It’s no substitute for developing relationships and listening to donors. † Of course, he was right — but only to a point. The marketing and communications functions can play an important role in helping execute a comprehensive fundraising plan, and the truth is, the marketing/ communications shop can produce stuff to help raise money. But a word of caution here about a lot of the â€Å"stuff† that currently comes out. More than anything, pressures from development account for the proliferation of publications across the nonprofit sector.Our organizations are clogged with annual reports, magazines, newsletters, case statements, working papers and brochures targeted at planned givers, annual givers, alumni givers, givers of every sort. The arrival of the electronic age has not reduced, but instead added to the volume of potential fundraising collateral. Now prospective donors are besieged with slickly produced DVDs as well as blogs, virtual communities, interactive websites, and more. I have always been surprised how few organizations conduct honest assessments of the costs and benefits of producing all this fundraising collateral.It’s not just that it costs a lot to design, print and create it; the real issue for nonprofits is the investment of time. The true cost of a piece of fundraising collateral must reflect the amount of energy and agony that went into its development and often more painful, approval by management and the board. Everybody has a favorite story about absurd bureaucratic hurdles they have encountered to get something approved. One CEO, for example, used to require the signatures of 17 different managers to approve text for use in direct mail solicitations.Needless to say, the impact of the language was much attenuated by the time it we nt through so many editors, reducing the return on investment as well as diverting senior managers from their real jobs. Globally distributed organizations, like the World Wildlife Fund or Save the Children, face particularly tough challenges in getting their colleagues overseas to sign off on collateral materials or joint announcements. It is the job of the marketing and communications function to bring discipline and reason to this process.Smart marketing managers will resist the steady drumbeat from the fundraising staff to deliver new and different materials. Instead, they will put the ball back in the court of the fundraisers by asking some tough questions: Who is your audience and what do you know about them? Why do you believe this is the best way to reach that person? What is the shelf life of this piece? What else could you spend this money on? We will come back to these important questions later in this chapter. An honest recognition of the need for fundraising is required , but so, too, is a healthy skepticism about the demands for fundraising collateral.Certainly, it makes life easier for fundraisers if they have attractive, compelling materials that reinforce the institution’s key messages. But then remember the boxes and boxes of attractive, compelling fundraising materials from previous campaigns gathering dust in your organization’s basement. Once you decide to move forward with a piece of fundraising collateral, however, don’t try to save money by cutting corners. Good marketing materials can be expensive, and you should be prepared to pay to get the kind of products that will send the right message to Essays on ExcellenceLessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 6 your donors. At the same time, you can often mitigate the budgetary impact by substituting quality for quantity. As so often is the case in nonprofits, the key is to focus on the few things that you can do that will have the greatest impact. moral: Fundraising is often a core component of marketing and communications, but not all fundraising collateral translates into more money raised. The success of this campaign can be measured first in lives saved. Drunk-driving deaths are down about 50 percent from all time highs.Perhaps even more enduring, the key concepts of this campaign have permeated the public lexicon. Designated drivers. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Drink responsibly. When the beer companies spread your message for free in their massive TV advertising campaigns, you know that you have succeeded. Lots of fine organizations run social marketing campaigns aimed at changing public behavior on a large scale: the American Legacy Fund and its anti-smoking efforts; the American Cancer Society, which emphasizes early screening in all its marketing initiatives; and the American Heart Association and diet.Choose to Save seeks to promote personal savings; the Presidential Fitness Challenge to promote personal fitness. The unifying element is the focus on changing behavior, on getting people to stop doing something they presumably like and start doing something else. Nonprofit marketing often aims at behavior change, and social marketing was made to do just this. Marketing and Communications for Mission Impact After a discussion of the way in which marketing and communications can help with fundraising, the opportunity often arises to bring up the potential for it to have a direct impact on mission. Remember the movie Arthur?Dudley Moore plays an affable drunk who spends his time getting in hilarious fixes, many involving driving his convertible while three sheets to the wind. The movie was one of the big hits of the early 1980s — coincidentally about the same time that two housewives in California were forming a new nonprofit called Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Fast forward a quarter century. Do you think that a movie like A rthur, with its tacit endorsement of drunk driving, could possibly be made today? I think not. The prevailing moral winds have swung hard against drinking and driving, making anathema what was once socially acceptable.And the reason for that is MADD. MADD is not only an exceptionally effective advocacy organization that seeks and often secures legislative victories. It also excels at social marketing — using the full grab bag of tricks and techniques from the marketer’s playbook to achieve changes in individual behaviors and social norms that also were directly in line with its mission of ending drunk driving. In the case of MADD, that means orchestrating a sustained, national marketing campaign designed to change the behavior of Americans when it comes to alcohol and automobiles. ase in point: the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which was founded in the early ‘90s to tackle the surging levels of teen pregnancies. A small organization — only $ 5 million — but with powerful friends, the National Campaign thought hard about best way to change the behavior of teenage girls, the target audience. Research showed that teenagers tended to romanticize parenthood, and did not understand the impact that caring for an infant would have on their lifestyle. But how to communicate this lesson to an elusive audience that is already deeply suspicious of adults?The National Campaign cleverly threaded this needle by reaching out to the producers of the afternoon TV shows targeted at teen girls. With a little persuading, the producers agreed to write into the scripts of these shows storylines that made it clear what a drag it was to have a baby: it ruined your figure, ruined your social life, cost a lot of money, and so forth. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 7If the same messages had been delivered to the same audience but in the form of a public service announcement, the impact would have been marginal. But by merging the message with the content of these shows, the National Campaign managed to get the attention of these kids in a far more effective way. A lot of factors go into the sharp drop in teen pregnancies over the last decade, but certainly some of the credit needs to go to the National Campaign for a textbook case of social marketing in action. Social marketing can’t advance every mission, and is not for every organization.It can be expensive and requires significant expertise, both in-house and out. But it works, and must be part of your marketing and communications strategy if changing the world for your organization involves changing the behavior of people: health habits, purchasing choices, social norms, voting patterns. This is one of those inescapable, brutal facts about the nonprofit world, and thus bears repeating: most people have never heard of your organization, and they probably donâ €™t care much about what you do. And this is even when the work being done is undeniably â€Å"good. This is a hard pill for many nonprofit people to swallow, because we all do care, passionately, about our causes and we want others to feel the same way we do. But you can’t let that passion blind you to the objective realities of trying to carve out a position for your nonprofit organization with your most important audiences amid the clutter of so many competing priorities and so much background noise in multiple media. Strengthening that position — defending your organization’s reputation, the one irreplaceable asset of any nonprofit — is the essence of branding.The key is being disciplined in articulating the distinctive set of attributes that collectively define an organization’s position in the marketplace for funding, ideas, and influence. Komen for the Cure — formerly, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation — provides a great example of the power of nonprofit branding. It’s remarkable enough that this organization has grown in less than 25 years into the largest support group for breast cancer survivors, raising almost $1 billion for breast cancer programs.Even more impressive, however, Komen (and other initiatives, like Avon’s pioneering breast cancer walks) have helped bring this once-taboo disease into mainstream and make it a top public health priority — even though there are other diseases, less well-funded, that kill more people every year. In the process, Komen has turned pink ribbons into instantly recognized symbols of support for breast cancer victims and even managed to co-opt the word â€Å"cure. † No one asks any more, â€Å"Cure what? † In today’s context, pink plus â€Å"cure† has become shorthand for â€Å"cure breast cancer. Little wonder, then, that when Komen revised its name and logo in 2006, the word â€Å"cure† took c enter stage. And what an upgrade! Komen ditched its foundation moniker, which was always a bit confusing to donors and supporters because it did not speak to the organization’s programmatic efforts to support grassroots networks of survivors, promote early screening, and moral: Your mission should drive your marketing. If you are trying to change individual behaviors or social norms it’s time to invest in social marketing.Marketing and Communications to Build the Brand The best of the best are thinking not only of marketing for fundraising and mission impact, but also for brand building. Brands are powerful stuff. Apple, for instance, evokes immediate associations of hip, cool, innovative products with excellent design. Coke and Pepsi have spent decades (and billions in advertising) staking out their relative brand positions: real thing or next generation? Nike has even managed to transcend its name, evolving into a universally recognizable logo.If you work for Apple, Coke, or Nike, you don’t have to explain to anyone what your company does. Everyone knows, both in substance and style. But not so the typical nonprofit employee. Maybe you’re lucky and work someplace like the National Geographic Society, which has name recognition numbers to rival IBM and Starbucks, but the chances are that few people have ever heard of your organization or care particularly about your mission or approach. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate ProgramAdvocacy in the Public Interest 8 improve patient care. The words â€Å"breast cancer,† with all their negative baggage, also disappeared from the name. Instead, Komen has adroitly repositioned itself as the leading force focused on a finding a cure — a positive, future-oriented message that appeals to donors, the public, and breast cancer victims alike. Komen’s rebranding has been successful because its new brand positioning rings true with the organization’s core values, mission, and programs.This illustrates an important point about authenticity for any nonprofit trying to strengthen its brand. In the eyes of your stakeholders, it’s fine to change the various attributes of your brand — your name, logo, messages, and programmatic emphasis — as long as what you’re changing to passes the authenticity test. (Imagine Komen moving into an issue such as prostate cancer — they simply would not enjoy the same credibility and clout that they have earned in the breast cancer arena. The lack of authenticity also helps explain the failure of so many high-profile corporate rebranding efforts; call it Phillip Morris or the Altria Group, in the public mind both are merchants of death, and no new logo can change that. As marketing guru Seth Godin might say, Komen is an example of the tremendous power to be found in telling an authentic story in a low-trust world. So be careful abou t undermining the existing equity in your nonprofit brand.The National Audubon Society learned this lesson in the early 1990s, when the organization’s new leadership decided that Audubon needed to take a much more aggressive political posture. They ditched the revered whooping crane logo (â€Å"the bird image hurts us,† the CEO said at the time), fired the veteran editor of their signature magazine, and launched the kind of political activists campaigns usually associated with the Sierra Club. But that wasn’t what Audubon members wanted. They were birders. They liked the crane. They wanted the magazine full of handsome photographs of warblers, not partisan screeds on toxic waste.The defections were swift, and Audubon’s membership and fundraising dropped sharply. Finally the board had to act and the CEO was ousted in 1996, only three years after launching the revolution. The new CEO wisely returned to the focus on birds, but even so, Audubon has never reco vered its peak membership of the late 1980s. Despite the importance of branding and reputation, nonprofits are notoriously poor brand managers. Building a brand can be difficult and very expensive, and the results are typically hard to measure or not immediately apparent.As a result, nonprofits rarely invest the necessary resources to secure top-flight marketing talent, to produce outstanding marketing materials, to engage the media, to implement a consistent and appropriate visual identity system, and to do all the other supporting activities that fall under the heading of â€Å"branding. † To be sure, branding is no longer a dirty word in nonprofit circles, as it was in the 1990s, but this type of advanced marketing is still the first thing that gets cut when the funding is tight and the last item in the budget to be restored. Such foolishness wouldn’t last long in the private sector.When sales are down, do Ford and General Motors reduce the advertising budget or sla sh the marketing department? Regrettably, about the only thing that compels nonprofit leaders to pay attention to branding is when something goes spectacularly wrong at a high-profile peer organization. And some of the marquee brands in the nonprofit world have taken a real battering in recent years: the American Red Cross, United Way, or the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Ask any of these nonprofits how much their brand is worth to them — and what kind of damage they have suffered and how it could have been even worse.Then you might think twice before taking a red pencil to the marketing budget. moral: Your brand defines your organization to the outside world. Take the initiative and define yourself, before one of your enemies tries to define you. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 9 Developing Successful Marketing and Communications Strategies With the desire for fundrai sing, mission impact and brand building understood, the key question becomes one of strategy, taking you from where you are to where you want to be.And strategy is fundamentally about making choices. This scares the hell out of the typical nonprofit employee. After all, making choices means that you might not choose me! As in Lake Woebegone, we in the nonprofit sector believe ourselves to be all above average, somehow special and immune from the laws of supply and demand that govern the rest of the world. The nonprofit culture — often conflict-averse, participatory, and given to consensus decision-making — further complicates the task of making real strategic choices. No wonder so many decisions inside nonprofit institutions end up as compromises.But making tough choices is not optional when it comes to developing communications or marketing strategy. The reason is simple. No matter who you are, it costs too much for nonprofits to compete in this realm. Even Coca-Cola has to make hard choices about whom it targets with its marketing dollars. For nonprofits, operating with only a fraction of the resources of corporations, discipline and focus become all the more important in developing effective communications strategies. Your chances of success depend both on well-conceived strategy and on the quality of your implementation plan.Brilliantly conceived marketing concepts have failed because of disconnects between planning and doing. A good marketing or communications strategy should flow in a tight logical sequence, starting with a very explicitly articulated objective or goal, all the way through the tactics and accountability. The more measurable the goal, the better — get the state legislature to fund this or that program, reduce teen smoking rates, raise attendance at the museum. You may not be able to avoid such amorphous goals as â€Å"raise awareness,† but you can ensure that your communications plan is driving toward a specifi c outcome.The real guts of a high-quality marketing and communications plan follow directly from the goal. As long as it’s aimed at a measurable result, the time-honored â€Å"audience, message, vehicle† formula has lost none of its relevance: audience: Which individuals or institutions do you need to reach and/or influence to achieve your programmatic objective? Can they be identified according to demographic or geographic, personality or lifestyle characteristics? Are they already aware of your issue and organization? message: What message will motivate each of your vehicle: What is the best means of delivering the arget audiences to take the required actions? After all, awareness matters not if nothing changes. message to the target audience? What combination of tools and vehicles work best? What individuals can serve as effective messengers? Not very complicated, right? And if it’s as simple as that, then how come marketing consultants continue to earn hands ome fees from nonprofits? First of all, it’s not that simple. Crafting a communications plan for a nonprofit that will cut through the background noise requires skill and ingenuity. But compounding the problem, nonprofits infrequently take the time to do this right.Impatient executive directors tend to focus on tactics, obsessing on such things as their column in the organization’s newsletter or signing off on all direct mail copy. Audience research and message testing can be expensive, so often nonprofits will try shortcuts or simply close their eyes and do something even more dangerous: assume. And belaboring the whole process can be the immense self-absorption of so many nonprofits. Mission-driven organizations, with their singular focus on a cause such as human rights or the environment, can come across as cults of the self-righteous, demanding that supporters drink their proverbial purple Kool-Aid.Their communications and marketing materials will ask for buy-in to a full set of beliefs, rather than support for a single solution to an identifiable problem that matters to their audience. This can lead to big problems. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 10 Developing tightly integrated marketing and communications plans with a focus on a measurable goal, and a clearly identified target audience thus can serve as the perfect antidote for the congenital lack of discipline and self-referentialism of so many nonprofits.It will ensure that you spend what you need to spend — and not any more. It will ensure that whatever you do spend will be aimed toward a pre-determined result (and evaluated accordingly). moral: You can’t go far wrong in communications if you stick to the Holy Trinity: Audience. Message. Vehicle. In addition to the general public, a few other hardy perennials seem to pop up onto most nonprofit lists of priority audiences. T here are â€Å"policymakers† — as if county, city, state, federal, and international institutions were all the same.This phrase lumps together elected officials, appointed officials, and legislative staff; the executive, judicial, and legislative branches; and often the media elites, academics, and other key influencers as well. Then there are â€Å"major donors† and â€Å"foundations. † These too are highly idiosyncratic audiences, requiring discrete messages and careful handling. Specificity matters when identifying and prioritizing audiences. The more general and broad the audience, the more difficult it is to tailor and deliver a powerful, compelling message that will resonate with that audience.Political campaigns see this dynamic all the time whenever a candidate has to reach out beyond his or her base. The red meat issues that so inspired the faithful don’t always translate well when packaged for a wider audience. The same logic applies to t he nonprofit sector. The narrower the audience you choose, and the more audience appropriate your approach, the higher the probability that you can move that audience to action. Selecting and ranking your audiences is a bit like solving a puzzle. Start with your objective. Who do you need to make progress?In other words, what group of people (or institutions) will have the necessary clout to make a difference — either to block what you want or else to make it happen? The answers to these questions cannot be based on wishful thinking or guesswork; rather, it requires a clear-eyed and sometimes coldblooded analysis of the world of the possible. I learned about the importance of figuring out the right audience years ago, when I was involved in a campaign to protect the desert tortoise, whose listing as an endangered species threatened to shut down realestate development in Las Vegas.The key to the whole deal was getting the local Board of Supervisors to put up a bunch of money t o acquire habitat for the tortoise way out in the desert. It didn’t take us long to focus like a laser on the target audience of our campaign — the nine members of the board of supervisors. About Audiences I still get splenetic when my nonprofit clients list the â€Å"general public† as one of their target audiences. I remind them that there is no such animal in today’s sophisticated marketing universe, no one — not Proctor & Gamble, not General Motors, not Unilever — tries to sell to the â€Å"general public. And certainly no nonprofit can be in the business of trying to appeal to such an amorphous and diverse audience. Yet all too many nonprofits persist in the fantasy that they can reach and then mobilize a broad audience. If you are the AARP, to be sure, you can easily roust your membership of 35 million to action whenever there is a political attack on Social Security or Medicare. But even if they were to get all 35 million, thatâ€⠄¢s still barely a tenth of the country, and hardly representative of the â€Å"general public. An exceptionally savvy and politically astute institution, AARP instead makes careful, informed judgments about what political coalition they need to achieve their legislative goals, and then methodically reaches out to those audiences. That’s a far cry, and far more strategic, than trying to spread the word about your cause through every possible channel to every possible audience. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 11 But we really didn’t even bother with all nine.Three of them were on our side already, and three opposed. To get a majority, we needed to target the two undecided supervisors — an audience of exactly two. I am happy to report that both of these fine elected officials were deeply impressed by our poll of voters that showed strong public support for protecti ng the tortoises. They agreed to support the appropriation we were seeking. Today a healthy population of tortoises thrives at a wildlife refuge created for them in Searchlight, Nevada. The poll that broke the political logjam cost around $10,000.If we had been less careful in choosing our audience — if, say, we had targeted the voters of — I have no doubt that we would have spent a lot more money and accomplished less in terms of conservation. The alternative would have been expensive and timeconsuming grassroots campaign, with no guarantee of success. With inherently limited means, nonprofits, therefore, should be ruthless in narrowing their target audiences to the greatest degree possible. What’s the irreducible minimum, the smallest audience I can reach and still achieve my objective? It could be two people, as in the Las Vegas case, or it could be thousands.The numbers matter less than going through the exercise of drawing an explicit link between the audie nce and the desired outcome. At the very least, this keeps you from spending time and money trying to engage people who aren’t interested in what you do, and never will be. I’m all for being on the same page. That’s why highimpact nonprofits have a position statement and elevator speech, an organization-wide mission and unifying goals. But don’t confuse or conflate these framing elements of your organization’s positioning with the messages that you are trying to deliver to your target audiences.Certainly, there will be considerable overlap, and messages must be consistent with the overall brand. If you fall in the trap of starting with your message first, you will never really succeed at marketing or communicating about your organization. Instead, the needs of the audience dictate the message. Nonprofits often miss this point and believe that the message should be about them. But it most emphatically is not. More than just slogans, messages should be designed to motivate the target audience to go beyond awareness and take action — to vote one way or another, make a donation or sign a petition, to stop smoking or exercise more.What’s more, messages have to speak directly to the needs, desires, and aspirations of the audience. What’s in it for them? Why should they care? And how might your messages lessen the perceived costs or highlight the perceived benefits of taking action? Messages can evoke emotion (fear or hope, for example) or appeal to reason (using statistics or anecdotes) but in either case, the message needs to address a top-of-mind concern not for you, but for your target audience, and do so in a simple, compelling way.Obviously, the more you know about your audience, the better you can devise messages that will scratch their particular itch. Market research, consequently, plays a critical role in communications and marketing campaigns. Research helps you understand your audience’s attit udes and concerns, their priorities and where your issue stands relative to others for them. Meanwhile, research into language — testing specific words and phrases — can ensure that messages will resonate with the target audience. And market research also plays a role in figuring out how to deliver your message.What are the common characteristics of those in your target audience? How does your target audience get information? Who do they trust for accurate data? What do they read? Do they all watch the same TV shows? moral: There is no such thing as the general public. Find the audience that matters most to your mission, and focus on them like a laser beam. About Messages About 45 minutes into the first meeting on developing a new communications strategy, someone — usually an long-time employee from the program side of the organization — will express frustration with all the attention being pent on audiences. â€Å"Let’s just get our message strai ght and go from there,† this person will say. â€Å"We all need to be on the same page. † Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 12 Brevity is the second success factor in developing effective messages. The more clear and compelling the message, the greater the likelihood of moving your audience to act. In the desert tortoise case, for example, the message couldn’t have been clearer — your constituents overwhelmingly support this. In short, it is a votewinner.By contrast, once you branch out into a more complex message, especially one that requires context, it’s easy to lose the thread and hence the audience. The environmental community had this problem for years with the issue of global warming, which until very recently was a hard sell to policymakers because the story wasn’t being told well. Finally, let me reiterate that effective messages incorpo rate an explicit call to action. A message without an explicit â€Å"ask† may help build awareness of a particular issue or cause, but awareness by itself rarely results in positive social change.The Lance Armstrong Foundation discovered the importance of this lesson when to their astonishment the yellow rubber â€Å"LiveSTRONG† bracelets exploded in popularity by the tens of millions. Within months, the market was awash in different colored bracelets: white, pink, red and so forth. Armstrong’s cause — promoting cancer survivorship — was lost in this technicolor jumble, and not least because they were unprepared to channel the immense initial interest in their work into a simple ask. The â€Å"ask† also has to align with the problem or product.The famous â€Å"Got Milk? † campaign, for example, also got a ton of attention for its innovative approach — hip advertising with milk mustaches on celebrities — and the ask was o bviously there, but it initially and famously failed in its goal of increasing milk sales. It turns out people loved the ads because they were fun and clever, not because they presented a compelling argument to go out and drink more of the same old boring milk. It took better alignment with the actual product — new bottles, different flavors — before milk sales were affected.Back in the nonprofit world, the Lance Armstrong Foundation is now aimed at turning the â€Å"LiveSTRONG† awareness (wear a yellow bracelet) into an ask for united political action (vote for cancer funding), and achieving far more tangible results, such as the recent passage of a $3 billion bond initiative for cancer research in Texas. When the message aligns with the interests of the audience, by contrast, possibilities abound. To rejuvenate membership and participation, in 2000 the Girl Scouts ditched their stodgy Brownie image and adopted a message hierarchy organized around the theme â⠂¬Å"where girls grow strong. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reached its teen audience by stressing how having a baby resulted in the loss of social status and the addition of many new responsibilities. But the gold standard for effective messaging in the nonprofit world revolves around the â€Å"Truth† campaign, an initiative designed by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids to reduce teen smoking in Florida. Conventional anti-smoking messages aimed at teens asserted that smoking wasn’t cool and stressed the health risks, the smell, and the cost.They preached responsibility and just saying â€Å"no. † And as anyone with teenage children could tell you, those messages were doomed from the start. When you are immortal, like all 17 year olds, you don’t care about developing lung cancer at 65. You also deeply resent insults to your intelligence, so being lectured that smoking isn’t cool just doesn’t fly. Rebels smoke, and always ha ve: Bogart, Bacall, Dean, Che. The â€Å"Truth† campaign started from a whole different place. The ads, funded with tobacco settlement money, were written and produced by teens.Instead of telling kids that smoking was bad for them or somehow uncool, the teenagers in the Truth ads openly acknowledged the right of their peers to make their own decisions about smoking. (Independence being a key motivator for teens. ) Instead, the ads zeroed in on the tobacco companies, and, in particular, charges about tobacco advertising intended to lure children and teenagers into smoking. In essence, therefore, the message in the â€Å"Truth† ads was all about manipulation: did you know that the adults at big Tobacco are trying o manipulate you into smoking? Again, parents will recognize immediately the huge leverage in this message: the only thing kids hate more than sanctimonious adults are manipulative adults. Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Exe cutive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 13 And â€Å"Truth† worked. Florida was one of the few states that actually experienced a drop in teenage smoking rates. Most telling, the tobacco industry absolutely loathed the Truth campaign and did everything in its power to stop it.When you have attracted the ire of the master marketers at Phillip Morris and RJR, you can be sure that you have honed a pretty effective message. moral: Figure out what motivates your audience. That’s the basis for your message, not what the board, management, and staff want. About Messengers and Vehicles When SeaWeb and other ocean advocacy organizations became concerned about the rapid decline of the swordfish and other species known as much for their popularity on our plates as their populations in the oceans, they decided to enlist top chefs, rather than movie stars, as their main messengers.Why? Their research showed that the public looked to chefs for advice on seafood. A nd Paul Prudhomme already had exemplified the way that a top chef, with a catch phrase and heavy seasoning, could take the relatively bland redfish, and create a dining sensation while unintentionally driving a species closer to the point of extinction. The hope was that those who set the nation’s menus would take a step in the opposite direction, and stop promoting a popular fish that was now in trouble. The organizations enlisted hundreds of leading chefs from across the nation in a campaign to â€Å"give swordfish a reak. † The media liked the messenger, picked up the message, and policymakers listened, taking action to protect swordfish back in the sea. The messenger alone is not enough, but the right messenger carrying the right message can do wonders to motivate an audience. Of course, that message also needs to reach the audience in a way they trust. For SeaWeb and the swordfish, the focus was not only on the media outlets that reached the policymakers who contr olled fishing regulations, but also on arranging one-on-one meetings directly with those policymakers.With the advent of the Internet, the number and variety of arrows in the marketing and communications quiver has increased exponentially. Once an audience is identified, there are now more paths than ever to their proverbial doorstep. While personal meetings, printed materials, earned media and advertising remain important in many cases, increasingly the centerpiece of an effective marketing strategy is no longer offline, but online. The best web sites have evolved from being simple online brochures to nodes on larger networks.Blogs offer an opportunity to send and receive more sophisticated and nuanced messages, especially to those who follow your issues with rapt attention. And email systems are becoming so cost effective that savvy organizations can now do the sort of differentiated marketing and information exchanges with large groups in a way that they once had to reserve only for use with VIPs. The catch, of course, is that for organizations to make the most of these new tools, they need to relinquish some control and allow the public to participate.The networked nature of the Internet is at the core of a small â€Å"d† democratic revolution in the creation of distribution of information. In keeping with the title of Jed Miller and Rob Stuart’s influential article, network-centric thinking certainly is a challenge to ego-centric organizations. If a nonprofit leader still wants to employ a 17-step approval process for every bit of information going out the door, that organization will simply not thrive in the Internet age. moral: Put the right messenger in the right vehicle and let it fly.Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program Advocacy in the Public Interest 14 Managing a Communications Crisis The recurring nightmare of every communications manager starts with a phone call. â€Å" I’m calling from 60 Minutes,† the nightmare begins. â€Å"I’d like to come over and ask you a few questions about your organization. † These words typically trigger a series of immediate reactions on the part of recipient: panic, a sinking feeling in the gut, the sweats. And with good reason.When you hear from investigative journalists, it’s generally not because they are interested in all the good work you do. To the contrary: their job is to expose what you aren’t doing well. To paraphrase a reporter who covers the nonprofit sector for a leading newspaper, â€Å"‘Foundation gives grant’ is not news. ‘Nonprofit helps people’ is not news. ‘Nonprofit misuses foundation money’ — that’s news. † This attitude infuriates the boards and staff of nonprofit organizations. It’s so unfair, they wail. Journalists don’t understand all the great work we do on behalf of our mission.W hy don’t they go get a â€Å"bad guy†? Rather than indulge in self-pity and anti-media resentment after the fact, nonprofits would be wise to prepare themselves in advance for communications crises that may never come. Planning and forethought represent your best, perhaps only hope for mitigating the institutional damage that comes from a full-blown reputational crisis. When it hits the fan, you won’t have time to do anything but react, and by that time, you will have already lost. At the same time, how can you prepare for something that hasn’t happened yet or that you don’t know about?Nonprofit staff, just like their peers in the private sector and government, are loath to acknowledge error and in many cases do their best to bury mistakes far from the light of day. How can the poor communications director possibly know which of these little disasters is going to burrow out of the bureaucratic morass and land on the front page of The New York Times ? Two kinds of stories in particular seem to agitate the media when it comes to nonprofits. The first has to do with the compensation and behavior of nonprofit managers.Much of the mainstream media has unfortunately bought into the idea that those working in the charitable sector deserve to be paid much less, and should act much better than their private-sector counterparts, and thus the spate of stories in the press about lavishly compensated nonprofit CEOs or a personal indiscretion that would go unnoticed in the for-profit world. Whether these criticisms are valid or not is irrelevant. The fact, the appearance of nonprofit â€Å"profiteering† or inappropriate behavior remains a huge red flag for the press.Hypocrisy is the second big trigger. If the media finds out, for example, that your anti-smoking coalition has been accepting money from tobacco companies, your reputation is basically toast. No explaining that decision away. The same holds true for children’s prog rams that actually benefit adults or when a high-profile televangelist is discovered with his pants down. The press holds nonprofits and others working in the charitable sector to a higher ethical standard, and when organizations violate that trust, the journalistic response is usually swift and merciless.So what can the nonprofit marketing professional do? Is the only choice to take the punches? Actually, that’s not such a bad strategy, depending on the severity of the media attack and the depths of your organizational culpability. If you don’t argue — if you just admit that you made mistakes and assure your stakeholders that the problem is being fixed, oftentimes the press will get bored and move on to a new story. It’s no fun picking a fight with someone who refuses to fight back.This kind of institutional jujitsu works best for dealing with cases of employee fraud or theft, accidents, or other isolated incidents. Higher-stakes assaults on your reputat ion — ones that suggest a pattern of inappropriate behavior — merit a more aggressive response. No one has thought more deeply about this than Lanny Davis, who helped Bill Clinton fend off media inquiries into White House Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate ProgramAdvocacy in the Public Interest 15 fundraising practices. Frustrated both by the lawyers inside the White House, who fought releasing any information to the public, and the press, who were convinced of a massive cover-up, Davis conceived a set of three simple rules for handling crisis communications: Tell it all. Tell it early. And tell it yourself. tell it all: Since Watergate, generations of media relations professionals have cleaved to the mantra that the cover-up is always worse than the original sin.The reason is simple: nothing keeps a story in the news more than having information dribble out slowly, with each new revelation allowing the press to rehash everything that has gone before. What’s worse, each new revelation only confirms the suspicions of the press that you aren’t being straight with them. So why do so many organizations violate this basic tenet of crisis communications? First, as noted earlier, no one likes to admit error. For nonprofits, which depend on voluntary contributions, there is also real fear that owning up to mistakes will damage their reputation and thus hurt their fundraising.Even more fundamental, though, it’s often very difficult to gather and get straight all the facts about a tricky situation in time to meet the deadlines of the press. This leads to incomplete or evasive answers that often have to be â€Å"corrected† later — with predictable results. Who can ever forget Richard Nixon’s press secretary saying â€Å"that information is no longer operative†? The only possible defense against accusations of a cover-up is to get to the bottom of the is sue internally and then make a complete and frank accounting externally.Even the most embarrassing details are better told up front than leaking out later. Or as Davis says: tell it all. But the most important reason to tell it early is so that you can control — or attempt to control — how the issue gets framed. If something has gone terribly wrong inside your organization, you want to be the person announcing it to the press, rather than the other way around. It gives you a chance to play a little offense, not only to reveal the transgression but also to announce what you’re going to do about it.In such circumstances, your best hope of avoiding a media feeding frenzy is to acknowledge the full extent of the error (tell it all), take full responsibility for what happened (passing the buck infuriates the press), and lay out a series of action steps to prevent recurrences. tell it yourself: There’s no guarantee, of course, that telling it all and telling it early will suffice to call off the media. Some will always question whether you’ve taken strong enough action, or whether the responsible people have been appropriately disciplined.But the alternative — waiting for your dirty laundry to be aired in the press — is invariably worse. And make no mistake: your unsavory organizational secrets will eventually come to light. Bad news is too juicy and has too many avenues for escape. I learned this lesson the hard way when I was running communications for The Nature Conservancy. Disgruntled with the new directions of the Conservancy’s president, at least three different people from inside management were leaking documents to The Washington Post.This is every reporter’s dream: multiple sources with access to inside information — and a grudge. As a result, the Post spent months asking questions to which they already knew the answer, hoping to catch the organization in a contradiction. You can’ t just worry about an errant employee, though. Even if you believe down to the depths of your soul that your organization is beyond reproach, both in its mission and its actions, there is, without doubt, someone out there who would like to see you stopped in your tracks.Identify those potential enemies in the same way you would identify your potential allies, and be prepared for when they come knocking. tell it early: In the public mind, stonewalling equals guilt (just as most people instantly interpret the classic â€Å"no comment† as an admission of error). The longer you wait to respond to charges, the more validity those charges assume. These factors alone provide a powerful incentive for nonprofits to get their side of the story out fast. moral: Don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. Instead, learn to take your medicine and follow the Davis Rules.Essays on Excellence Lessons from the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program A dvocacy in the Public Interest 16 About the Author David Williamson is Managing Director of the consulting firm of Bernuth & Williamson, serving nonprofit clients in the areas of strategy, marketing, and communications. He previously served for 13 years in senior management positions at The Nature Conservancy, the nation’s 10th largest nonprofit, including six years as Director of Communications (1997–2002) and terms as Vice President for Marketing and Director of Conservation Marketing.He is an adjunct professor of business administration at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and has lectured on nonprofit management at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, among others. Williamson, a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, serves in leadership positions on three nonprofit boards in addition to his work with clients. David Williamson