Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Designing Tomorrow explores a new playbook for modern social impact leaders and brands to reach their true impact potential.
Why do some social impact brands thrive, while so many others fail to get traction, build support for their cause, and make meaningful progress? Imagine your impact with truly sustainable revenue and resources. With deeper community engagement and relationships. With more influence in your social impact category.
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, each episode dives into the strategies, mindsets, and behaviors top social impact brands use to play and win in the attention economy. Go beyond high-level concepts to specific tools and tactics you can use today.
Watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes each Tuesday.
Let’s design a better tomorrow, together.
Designing Tomorrow is a Cosmic Production. Learn more at https://designbycosmic.com/
Designing Tomorrow is a registered trademark of Design By Cosmic, Inc.
Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Money in Motion, Not Money Warehoused
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There's a number treated like gospel in philanthropy: the 5% annual payout private foundations are required to hit. It was written into law as a floor.
Kristin Todd has watched it become a ceiling instead. After nearly two decades at the Daniels Fund, a $1.5 billion private foundation, she now leads the NoCo Foundation in Northern Colorado, where she's more than doubled annual grant-making by refusing to let donor dollars sit still.
Episode Highlights:
[00:01:00] Running a $1.5 billion legacy fund vs. a nimble community foundation
[00:07:00] Why mergers stopped being a taboo word for nonprofits
[00:11:30] How NoCo doubled its grant-making by keeping money in motion
[00:12:30] The 5% floor that became a ceiling
[00:20:30] Stop calling them charities. They're businesses with social impact.
[00:34:00] Punching above your weight locally instead of waiting on Washington
Notable Quotes:
Kristin Todd [00:12:30]: "In the private foundation world, that 5% has become a ceiling, not a floor."
Kristin Todd [00:11:30]: "We do not want to be a sponsor of DAFs that are warehousing dollars, and in fact we are not."
Eric Ressler [00:21:30]: "These are the hardest problems in the world that no one else has solved, and yet they're not getting the same attention as the latest AI startup."
Resources & Links:
- NoCo Foundation — nocofoundation.org
- Daniels Fund — danielsfund.org
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. New episodes every Tuesday.
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