Archive by Author

Inspiration, Guidance & Connections for Your BIG Journey

You can be BIG. We’re here to help with inspiration, guidance, and connections to power you ahead on your BIG journey. It could be the most fun, exciting, and prosperous journey of your life. WE WILL INSPIRE, GUIDE AND CONNECT YOU TO BE BOLD, INNOVATIVE AND GENEROUS Inspiration At GenerationBIG, we want to introduce you [...]

Continue Reading

Katie Spotz – Rowing for Water

Now that she’s caught her breath after rowing her boat across the ocean, it’s time for Katie Spotz to give back. In March, Spotz completed her 70-day, 2,817-mile solo journey across the Atlantic from Senegal on the west coast of Africa to Guyana on the east coast of South America. Age 22 at the time, [...]

Continue Reading

BIG Ideas: The Giving Pledge

Earlier this week. Warren Buffett announced that 40 of the wealthiest families or individuals in America have made “The Giving Pledge” to donate at least half their wealth to charitable causes. Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates launched The Giving Pledge program earlier this year to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in America to [...]

Continue Reading

“Board Engagement” – A BIG Perspective

As we’ve often discussed, fund raising is far easier and more effective if you can tap into donors’ hearts so, for them, giving is an act of fulfillment, an act of feeding their passion. If you can connect their hearts and nurture their passion for your institution, they’ll be thinking, “How can I help?” rather [...]

Continue Reading

Who are the bigger heroes: Baseball all-stars or no-names who do BIG Things?

A lot of big businesses have launched initiatives to encourage and celebrate BIG (bold, innovative, and generous) people or organizations. Pepsi has it’s Refresh Project. Chase has the Community Giving program. American Express has the Members Project®. My favorite is People Magazine’s All-Star’s Among Us. I tuned in to tonight’s all-star game to see Albert [...]

Continue Reading

Frank McKinney’s “Tap Moment” and BIG Journey

Frank McKinney’s BIG journey began with a newspaper picture of a needy man. A successful real estate “artist” and creator of some of the most magnificent oceanfront homes on speculation (he just finished Acqua Liana the world’s largest and most expensive certified green home at $24.3 million!), McKinney was reading a profile about himself in [...]

Continue Reading

A Must-See Video: Entrepreneurs Can Change the World

I met and connected with a great, BIG person today — entrepreneur Ileana Kane — who turned us on to this video. Turn on your computer’s audio, turn up the volume, and check it out. Wondering what it means to be BIG? Looking for inspiration to look at life through a new lens and make [...]

Continue Reading

What’s in a Name? Bad News for “Nonprofits”

A few weeks ago, I spoke before a group of nonprofit administrators about how to raise money and market their organizations more effectively. I had recently given a similar presentation to for-profit marketing directors and was using those slides as the foundation for my speech to charities. The “for-profit” presentation discussed how to move people [...]

Continue Reading

Christine Shively – Knots of Love

It started with a hand-knit cap that Christine Shively made for her son. One of Shively’s friends, a cancer survivor, said she wished she had a cap like that to cover her bald held when going through chemotherapy. Shively decided to donate that one cap to a charity that distributes caps to people who need them, [...]

Continue Reading

Connect with the Heart to Raise Money

How many fund-raising appeals have you read that cite countless statistics to prove the effectiveness of the charity? I could wallpaper my house with them. No offense to the statisticians and numbers-crunchers, but charities that build their campaigns on such logical appeals may be undermining their efforts. In an important and provocative article published this [...]

Continue Reading