remarkable communication

Are You a Wimp or a Warrior?

The actor Vince Pastore, whose character name on The Sopranos has taken on an unfortunate irony, bowed out of this season's Celebrity Apprentice because he didn't like the pettiness, the ugliness and the relentless bickering. Trump was apparently rather nonplussed at this. "Every morning I wake up and go to war," Trump said with visible pride.

Do you need to be a warrior to be successful? Is the world of business (and especially small business and entrepreneurship) really just an unending war, with victory possible only for the ruthless?

Should the rest of us respectful, kind people who don't think much of war just go home and hide?

One of my favorite Buddhist stories describes a monk and a samurai who meet. The samurai draws his sword and demands that the monk step aside. "Don't you know who I am?" growled the samurai. "I could strike off your head with this sword and never blink an eye."

The monk smiled and said, "Do you know who I am? You could strike off my head with your sword, and I'd never blink an eye."

There are different kinds of strength
There is a model, heavily promoted by certain marketing "gurus," that holds that there is only one possible kind of temperament that can support success. If you do not possess this temperament, you can subscribe to the gurus' expensive product suites and they will beat it into you.

You must be highly aggressive, pathologically stubborn, with an ego the size of Mount Rushmore and a complete intolerance for points of view that contradict your immense vision. Any other personality type is weak. The salesmen for this "business is war" model tend to use language like "sickening" or "disgusting" to describe people who operate differently than they do.

Tell that to the millions of successful entrepreneurs, business owners and heads of nonprofits who don't fit the Ego Warrior model and have no interest in deforming themselves to try.

Of course you need to set boundaries and hold to them. Yes, you need some audacity. You can't build what you don't dare to dream. You will have times when you need to hold yourself and others to a high standard. You will need to show strength. You will need to be tough. That doesn't mean you need to go to war.

There are a lot of kinds of strength. Slaughtering your enemies and scorching the earth is just one possible path to success, and not necessarily a very effective one.

Don't let anyone tell you that your kind of strength is less worthy than another. The earth is a pretty big place. There are enough people on it to supply an abundance of customers who treasure what you have to offer.

(Bonus: here's another monk and samurai story.)

Creative Commons Flickr image by mshades

Make Compassion a Competitive Advantage

Image by mape_s

CSR is the hot new acronym in corporate PR, standing for Corporate Social Responsibility. Essentially, the idea translates into companies taking care of issues other than their own immediate financial interests--the environment, worker safety, the health of surrounding communities, etc. It's certainly not a new idea, but it's gaining a lot more attention lately.

Like most corporate fads, CSR is typically about 90% spin, but there are companies that are doing important work to make the world better (while making themselves plenty of money). The same techniques that work for giant companies will work even better for small, lean organizations with a commitment to ethical business practices.

What kind of programs can you run?
The simplest way to get started is to donate a stated portion of your income to an organization that resonates with your customers' values. (For example, I donate 10% of my copywriting, consulting and editing income to Smiletrain.) You can donate a portion of your gross, a portion of your profits, a percentage of the proceeds for a particular product, whatever works for you.

You can come up with a little more talk value if you physically engage in something that tells a good story. Build a house with Habitat. Cook a meal for a soup kitchen. Pay your employees for their volunteer time working at charity marathons (hopefully while they're wearing your company hat or t-shirt). If you can imagine photographs of your participation appearing in your local paper, it's a good story. (Speaking of photographs, make sure you capture some!)

You can also pledge your company's commitment to some worthwhile large project--maybe building a library for Room to Read. Or you could sponsor a child or children through one of the many great charities (World Vision is one I like) that do that. Be sure to let your customers know how the project (or child!) is coming along.

Design your program for talk value
Whether you're a large organization or a small one, you want your efforts to be a good world citizen to get talked about. This is a lousy time for modesty. The nice thing is, updates on your charitable work make a great excuse to get in touch with your customers (and the press). And you should feel free to add additional information such as a sale or other offer that brings customers to your door.

Your communication will work best if the effects of your program are concrete and measurable. Look for either a number or a human story. ("Our hybrid delivery vehicles save 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions every year.") If they're not concrete and measurable, why are you doing them exactly? It's find to have some "fuzzy" components about respect and values, but make sure you can back that up with results and numbers.

Try to focus your company's efforts on a theme or an individual charity that resonates with what you do. If you're in the construction industry, helping the homeless makes a great theme. (There might even be some good donations in kind that you can make.) If you have a beauty salon, you might consider a charity like Smiletrain that helps the disfigured.

Here's a test of your program's talk value: imagine one of your customers talking with a friend about it. The "My dry cleaner uses silicone-based solvents instead of perchloroethylene" conversation probably isn't going to happen. But "I have a great dry cleaner, and they only use environmentally-friendly stuff" might work pretty well.

Remember to give your customers the language and story points to get out there and talk you up to other people. You'll never say anything about yourself that will be as powerful as what other people can say about you.

It should go without saying, but make sure you're not "greenwashing." It's perfectly ok if your contribution or project is small, but make sure it's authentic and that you feel good about all of the details.

Don't be a nag
Like all communication with your customers, you're here to serve their needs, not yours. It's usually a terrible idea to hit your customers up for donations to your favorite charity. (You can make an exception if that contribution can be used as a payment in full for one of your products.) Contributions are an intensely personal thing. Just do what you do, talk about it in a compelling way, and let the customers who resonate with it respond in their own way. Think of your CSR program as a way to help your customers feel even better about doing business with you, and leave it at that.

Focus on what matters to your customers
Different customers will respond to different kinds of stories. If your customers are women with small kids, find a project that helps poor mothers--and tell your story in a way that brings out your customers' empathy for those women, that puts your customers in the shoes of the people you're helping.

On the other hand, if your clients are CEOs, most of them probably won't put themselves in the place of the homeless--but they may be very receptive to messages about helping the less fortunate. Different story approaches will resonate with different people.

You will, by the way, have at least one customer who will ask "If I don't want to make a donation, can I get a discount?" Smile very nicely and say, "Sorry, that's not how we do business."

Unless you know your customers are very passionate about the environment, you'll usually come up with a more powerful message if your CSR efforts benefit people. Like every animal species, we're biased in favor of our own kind. There's a reason we've reached a tipping point about environmental awareness--it's because so many people can see that global warming doesn't just affect spotted owls. Try to find a human story of individual people who benefit from what you do, and don't be shy about telling that story in vivid detail. (There are a lot of environmental projects that also benefit people--if you want some ideas, visit the WILD Foundation's site.)

Failing that, loveable animal species actually work pretty well too--dolphins, great apes, abandoned pets, etc. Someone should benefit in a way that makes your customers feel good. If your project primarily benefits an endangered centipede, you won't get a lot of customers thanking you for doing such important work.

And of course, consider the political implications of your particular project. Understand who your customer is, what they value, and how they will react to the work you're doing. You should go ahead and do anything you feel strongly about, but don't do it without at least thinking through your customers' reactions.

Feeling guilty about "benefiting" from charitable work?
Get over it. Think of it this way: the more of us who can "do well by doing good," the more attractive it is for others to start pitching in. Leave your hair shirt at home and just get on with it.

Understand that you will almost certainly face some criticism on those grounds. The same argument holds. Doing business without giving back is not morally superior to blending the needs of your business with the needs of the greater society. Not everyone can be Mother Teresa. (Even Mother Teresa found it pretty tough going.)

(This post was inspired by another headline challenge issued by Brian over at Copyblogger. This is a great exercise for sharpening up your own headlines, and whatever you're writing, your headline carries 80% of the impact. As you can see from this post, what you come up with might be pretty far from the original headline source.)

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream"

Today is the official U.S. celebration of Martin Luther King day. Every child in the States older than four can hear Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech ring in their ears when his name comes up, so this might be a good day to look at Dr. King's message--not only its content, which virtually every civilized person today agrees with, but how it was delivered.

"I have a dream" was a tipping point. King and thousands of others in the civil rights movement had been working tirelessly for years to fight for a federal civil rights act, and for legal equality and social dignity for all people, without regard to the color of their skin. But as a Kennedy administration official mentioned in a radio interview today, this August, 1963 speech was the moment when Martin Luther King took his place not as a black leader but as a world leader.

It's very hard to remember now that they didn't know they were going to win. For years, civil rights and the defeat of Jim Crow looked like impossible dreams. To say that changing entrenched thinking, replacing an ugly false story with the true one, was an uphill battle is like saying that Everest is a damn steep hill.

Breaking down the dream
"I have a dream" is the work of one of the most powerful and effective communicators of his generation. Read the speech yourself and see if it doesn't give you chills. (Copyblogger posted a long exerpt today without comment, a classy move that I should have had the sense to emulate.)

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

The speech is, of course, the work of a dedicated, talented and inspired writer, and there's no simple technique that can be copied. But for a communicator, it's still worth studying. As a writer, you can't replicate the beautiful cadence (although you can try to be aware of the rhythms of your own writing, and make them more lovely), but there are things that you can learn from.

The word that makes that sentence remarkable is probably "red." That concrete, simple descriptor puts the scene in the mind of the audience. Those who have been to Georgia will say, "yes, the hills are red." The picture becomes real. And even for people from Singapore or Paris or Australia who have never been to Georgia, there is a second echo--the sense of a red, bloody battleground today contrasted with the simple, peaceful table of brotherhood tomorrow.

There is a nice sense, too, of ordinariness about the "table of brotherhood." Most of us sit down every day at tables with intimates and friends. It is not extraordinary. We give little thought to the grandparents or great-grandparents of who sits at that table. This simple sentence takes something that was at the time difficult to picture and makes it easy, normal and natural.

A few sentences later, Dr. King says:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . . one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

After he has introduced this quiet, simple idea to you--black and white sitting down in brotherhood--he raises the stakes by bringing children into the equation. The most rigid stereotypes usually soften a little when we think about small children. However tightly we define our own tribe, however fiercely we hate the other side, there's usually a tiny bit of room in our thinking to adopt a child from the other. Dr. King sends his own small children as emissaries to the hearts of his audience.

Having built this strong foundation on the personal, King takes the argument to the divine:

. . . one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

Just a few moments later the speech climbs to its climax, one of the best uses of repetition in the history of public discourse, the "freedom ring" sequence.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

If this doesn't make all the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you might be dead. Supported by Dr. King's tremendous speaking voice, the repetition and clarity of this message transported the audience of 250,000--including the presidential administration--to readiness for the final, triumphant conclusion:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The dream today
We seem very far from Dr. King's dream today, but that is because we forget how impossible that dream looked when he spoke those words. Even Martin Luther King, with his vast optimism and clarity of purpose, could not have imagined how quickly we would make important strides.

Like the old carpenter's joke about building a house, the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. Today is a good day to celebrate how far we have come, and to give some serious reflection to how we can complete the work. We all know this is not just an American problem or an American dream. You can work for justice from anywhere.

And pencil in some time tomorrow to think about your own dream. Maybe you're ignited by a great and noble dream like Dr. King's, or maybe yours is a little smaller. Either way is ok. Think about what you can create to share that dream, to make it real for someone else, to give the dream a life of its own that can survive you.

If you happen to use his construction of comfortable abstraction to personalization to a stirring global vision, you'll be honoring his memory in a small way. Not a bad thing at all.

Recommended reading

• I Have a Dream (full text).
• Dr. King's biography on www.nobelprize.org. Dr. King was, at 35, the youngest man to have won a Nobel Peace Prize.
• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, which includes a selection of audio clips in MP3 format.
• The birth home of Martin Luther King, Jr. (now managed by the national park system).

10 Resolutions for the Remarkable

(Photo: Luo Shaoyang)

I wouldn't ask you to do anything I won't commit to myself. Here are my resolutions for 2008.

(Incidentally, here as always, "customers" just means "people you want to persuade to take action." When you read these, think of the folks you want to convince to pay for your service, donate to your nonprofit, volunteer for your project, attend your church, whatever.

1. Quit spending so much energy trying to bullshit yourself and everyone else. Be what you are--glorious, dorky, embarrassed, proud, miraculous. The world's wisest people agree on one thing: you are fundamentally good. Quit hiding and start celebrating.
   
2. Put your customers ahead of yourself. Ask yourself every day what they need from you, how they benefit from you, what you can do for them that no one else can. Take a minute right now to calendar a regular appointment: on the 7th of every month, come up with a new way to create surprising value for your customers. Don't just think about it, do it.
   
3. Don’t be boring.
   
4. Speak clearly. Write clearly. Think clearly.
   
5. Ask for what you need.
   
6. Decide what promise your brand makes. Then bring everything you do into alignment with that. How you answer the phone. (In fact, whether you answer the phone.) Your email address. Your Web site. Your haircut. Your reading habits. Your television habits. Live the promise that you make. Get rid of all the false distinctions between who you are and what you do.
   
7. Commit to joy.
   
8. You have a tremendous amount to be grateful for. Think about and express gratitude daily.
9. Help someone much worse off than you are. I'm terribly grateful that in 2007, I was able to make donations that repaired cleft palates for 5 children. I also started sponsoring a five-year-old boy in Lesotho through World Vision. Next year, I commit to do the same again at least. You truly don't have to give a lot. A little bit of latte money can turn a desperate, helpless life into a productive one--and it will bring you more pleasure than anything else you're spending your dough on now, honest.
   
10. Live by my friend Krissie's motto: Fuck Doubt. Press On. Copy it out in your favorite pen and put it somewhere you can see it every day.

Made any resolutions this year? Have some ideas about how to become more remarkable, or how to communicate with other people in a more remarkable way? Leave a comment and let us know!

Be Happy, Make Money, Help Others

Maureen reminded me that it's really hard for many nonprofit organizations to get over their unhelpful mindset around money. Nonprofit workers often have limited (or hostile) ideas about wealth that get in the way of their goals to mobilize a lot of resources and help a lot of people.

I've been working on some materials to try and help people get over what I'm calling "financial anorexia," or a damaging and unhealthy fear of financial success. (It's not limited to nonprofits--plenty of small-business owners and hopeful entrepreneurs have the same problem.)

I'll let you know how that project is coming along, but in the mean time, Boing Boing has pointed us to a terrific post about working for success in a nonprofit setting.

Here's my favorite quote (because this is out of context, I added some italics for clarity or emphasis):

You have to get as passionate about talking to the people with as you are talking to the people without. Because we need each other, and you're the bridge person. If you were just desperate and needing of services and help, you wouldn't be working at a not-for-profit. If you were a gazillionaire, you probably also wouldn't be working at a non-profit. So you are the person whose job it is to bring the haves and the have-nots together. And you have to be passionate about that. Yeah, somebody will say "You self promote! You're self-promoting!" Fine, and proudly so! Get that out of your mind as a barrier, and look at the service you can provide . . .

If you can overlook the really unfortunate term "she-roes" (feminine of heroes, oh dear), this is a kickass post about how to get over yourself and help more people.

The art of happiness
While I'm at it, in honor of Boxing Day and the other solstice-ish holidays we're celebrating, I give you this link on happiness. I debated posting it, but the more I work with small businesses (and large ones, for that matter), the more I realize that getting smart about how to be happy makes everything else work better. The article is written from a Buddhist point of view, but the concept of Little Me is unbelievably useful no matter what your belief system.

And thanks also to Senia for pointing me in the direction of a terrific book, Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar. It's all about the serious research that's been done on chasing the unicorn of happiness. I've been reading and re-reading it all month and I have a lot of new ideas for integrating the science of happiness with the art of business. Very cool stuff.

It's Time to Get off our Ass and Save the World

Seth Godin directed our attention this morning to an organization called Room to Read, a nonprofit group that builds schools and libraries for children in some of the world's poorest rural communities.

Here are some stats from their site. In the past seven years, they've built 287 schools, established more than 3,700 libraries, published 146 new local-language children's book titles (with a more than 1.3 million total print run), provided 1.4 million English-language titles, funded 3,448 long-term scholarships for girls, and established 136 computer and learning labs.

Total number of children provided with access to books so far? 1.3 million. And they're not even thinking about slowing down.

Their founder is a guy named John Wood, who learned how to move fast and aggressively (and to think huge) as a senior marketing and biz dev exec for Microsoft.

He's shown an impressive immunity to being overwhelmed. His response to the challenge of lifting 10 million children out of illiteracy, in a 2002 interview with Fast Company, was "Why is that not possible? Microsoft doubled every year in its early days. Cisco more than doubled every year. I worked in a lot of different organizations at Microsoft that doubled year to year, and none of us thought it was incredible."

Welcome to the new philanthropy
Organizations like The Acumen Fund, Kiva, and of course The Gates Foundation are taking their tactics from the big-picture, big-action dotcom culture--and it's working.

There are a lot of reasons Room to Read has been successful. One that interested me is that Wood and the organization he runs aren't at all shy about asking for large sums of money. One aspect of their model essentially "sells" a school to a donor for $5,000. Woods has the experience to know that for his audience, $5,000 is a puny amount of money balanced against the satisfaction of seeing a school built and hundreds of children's lives changed forever. He knows his market, he knows what drives them, and he knows that price is pretty elastic.

In simple marketing terms, Wood has the right message and the right offer. He has a strong, benefits-oriented tag line ("World change starts with educated children.") He has a good hook (impoverished local communities co-fund the schools, providing exceptional local accountability and buy-in) that speaks to the language and concerns of his customers. His value proposition--a package that presents the problem, the solution, the price tag, and the tracking that guarantees accountability--is sound.

His campaign has all the ingredients of any intelligently-run marketing campaign. His product just happens to be saving the world.

Traditional nonprofits are often run by folks who think "ethical marketing" is a contradiction in terms. They're extremely smart about real life stuff like helping people in need, but often not so smart about the business and marketing that could help them accomplish that. Their staff and volunteers have a strong tendency to hate and fear the rich, and it's never a good idea to communicate with anyone you hate and fear. And career nonprofit types are sufficiently accustomed to living on ramen and good luck that they have a hard time saying, "The best part is, it only costs $5,000."

Those organizations are still doing incredible things and alleviating suffering, and I mean them no ill will or disrespect. But sooner rather than later, their work will be overshadowed by this new model. And since the new model has the potential to work incredibly well, I celebrate that.

It's time to quit making excuses and save the world, already
It's easy to lose sight of it in the depressing information clutter after 9/11, but we actually have a shot at ending extreme poverty on this abused little planet. Not just in my two-year-old's lifetime, but in my lifetime.

The technology of making stuff has gotten so good that we can make enough stuff for everyone (if we figure out the energy thing, which we will). New tools and new business models let us think on a global scale and act accordingly. A fractured status quo provides a lot of air and light for revolutionary ideas. Massive action is tricky to take in any context, and a lot of excuses have always been made about third-world inefficiencies, but the new players are looking at factors--cheap labor, social cohesion, powerful aspirations--that can make third-world projects workable on surprising scale.

My challenge to the bright, wired oddballs who read this blog is to get out there and find a way to help out. Together we and our bright, wired oddball kin are smart and obsessed enough to do this thing.

In the words of John Wood back in 2002,"We've helped 100,000 kids gain access to books so far. That is one one-hundredth of 1% of the illiterate people on this earth. So congratulations. Get your ass back to work."

Related reading:
An End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs
Fast Company's 2002 interview with John Wood
How evil is Bill Gates?
Room to Read's Web site
We are not powerless
The WILD Foundation and the Umzi Wethu project

Blog Action Day

You might have noticed that you're seeing a lot of environmentally-related posts around the blogosphere today. Today is Blog Action Day, coordinating tens of thousands of bloggers to create posts on one broad topic: the environment.

Why I support The WILD Foundation
My favorite environmental group is The WILD Foundation up in Boulder. They have an interesting focus--both on the importance of preserving wilderness that is essentially untouched by humanity, and by humanity's need for that wilderness. They take the need for unspoiled wilderness as a human right and human necessity, and they always look for the human connection.

I recently made a donation to a project they're supporting--Umzi Wethu, a pilot project that benefits South African wilderness, AIDS orphans, and South Africa's ecotourism economy. Wilderness Foundation South Africa (which WILD supports & fundraises for) took a smart idea and grew it into a powerful little project that, with some funding and support, can be grown to create tremendous real benefit to both people and wilderness.

Here's the pair of problems that led to this solution. South Africa has a growing population of children orphaned by AIDS.  AIDS has taxed--and in fact, often broken--the traditional African extended family system, as families bankrupt themselves trying to care for the sick. Children living on the street, severely traumatized by losing both parents and abandoned by society, fall prey to  prostitution, street crime, and disease. Over a million children in South Africa live in this desperate circumstance, and the number is expected to climb to almost five million in the next 10 years.

At the same time, perhaps rather bizarrely, ecotourism is booming in South Africa. According to WILD's figures, tourism has grown 10% a year since 1994 and is the country's third largest industry. Ecotourism is a growing source of good skilled employment. But many of the industry's trained employees have also fallen to AIDS, and training is hard to come by.

A remarkable solution
The Umzi Wethu project married these two problems to create a rather beautiful solution. They train orphaned children for good jobs in game reserves and parks, paying more than virtually any other work these young people could hope to attain.

The crux of what makes the program work is that the training includes five days every two months in wilderness. (I was surprised to learn that black city children in Africa typically never go to the wilderness. "Camping" is not the norm, and black South Africans rarely visit the country's reserves or parks. In fact, a child living in the U.S. is far more likely to have ever seen a zebra or lion than a child living in Africa is.)

The children's education is supported by training in long-term health, self esteem, and personal growth. These things make life more enjoyable for those of us living comfortable, materially rich lives in the West. They're a stark matter of survival for a child struggling to create a healthy adult identity without family or support. When WILD founder Vance Martin spoke to a small group here in Denver about the program, he stressed the way that this experience in wilderness heals psychic wounds that I might not have thought could be healed at all.

There probably aren't 4.7 million jobs in ecotourism, no matter how quickly the industry grows. But the goal is to develop the Umzi Wethu approach of practical employment training combined with nurturing and a profound healing experience in wilderness. The approach could, conceivably, create real change in South Africa for any number of organizations and business sectors. South Africa must solve this problem--they have tremendous resources, but this is a monumental challenge to their still-new democracy.

Incidentally, WILD is a four-star charity, which means they've attained the highest rating for organizational efficiency. (That means they're putting the greatest possible percentage of your donations into programs, rather than overhead.)

Donate a little, save the world
If you feel called to celebrate Blog Action Day with a donation to support the environment, and supporting human populations is also important to you, I invite you to head on over to the WILD site, look over the list of projects, and make a donation. Umzi Wethu is, amazingly, just one of the many powerful projects this tiny nonprofit supports. WILD and its partners are the kind of organization that can make a real difference in the health of this planet and its humans in the decades to come.

(You might easily miss the notice that Andrew Muir, WILD director and executive director of the Wilderness Foundation South Africa, was given an award in South Africa for environmentalist of the year. Here's a PDF from WILD's site that explains more.

(p.s., I liked this Blog Action Day post over at my beloved copyblogger on how to be a better butterfly. It's easy to forget that small actions can have great consequences.)

Do something amazing

I ran across this Squidoo lens and was deeply touched.  Their project is amazing. Volunteers knit cute, easy-to-make dolls that are used as packing materials for medical supplies sent to HIV clinics in Africa.  The dolls are then given to children in the community, including clinic patients with AIDS, who love and cherish them.  Children with AIDS are often buried with their "comfort dolls."

The project builds on this by using the dolls in promotional fundraising activities with famous musicians.  So you get to help raise money for a wonderful cause, give some love and comfort to a child who needs it, and feel absolutely excellent about your few hours of time spent.

I’m planning on knitting a few of the dolls--the pattern is right here and looks very easy.  There’s an address on the same page to mail the dolls. I’m also planning on slipping a check in when I send them.  Never hurts, right? If you knit, I encourage you to join me. If you don’t, email a link to someone you know who does.

I’m knocked out by the expressions on these children’s faces.  Little children, especially when they’re facing hardship, get so much from having a doll to love and take care of.  This project is easy enough for beginners, and there’s nothing else you can work on this weekend that will make you feel as wonderful.

I really liked this quote from the woman who organizes the project:

No matter how caught up I get in writing letters to bands and their managers for photo ops, no matter how frustrated I get when I don't hear back, or I get a 'no' answer, no matter how many dolls I knit that look goofy to me--I always keep in mind who my partner and I, who these bands, who my friends who knit furiously after dinner each night--who we are doing this for in the end.

Why Squidoo is a great communication vehicle
Check out the difference between the Squidoo lens and this MySpace page (turn down your speakers) created by the same person. The Squidoo template brings unity and visual harmony to the message, and provides the right number of tools to add information like images, links, Wikipedia references, whatever.

If you have a project that you want to get the word out about and you’re not a communications pro, I can recommend Squidoo as an easy and smart way to do that. You might even make a few dollars from your pages, which you can put in your pocket or donate to charity directly from the lens. I’ve been putting lenses together for a few months now, and so far I’m impressed.

We are not powerless

I was Squidooing around over the weekend and came across a not-very-good lens promoting some kind of affiliate marketing product. The lens made essentially no impact at all, since it was just a series of pleas to click through to something I believe will offer little value for too much money.

At the end of the lens was one of those photo-and-caption montages that gets emailed around, this one in support of the U.S. armed forces.

One of the photos was of a man in civilian clothes, my guess would be in the streets of Baghdad, carrying an unconscious child whose feet had been blown off.

Two things.

One, you may not, ever, use a photo of a maimed child to sell anything other than a remedy to help that child or children like her. The fact that it won't work is completely beside the point.

It's wrong. There's not really any other way to put it.

The other thing is, as usual when I run across something like this, I couldn't sleep after seeing her picture. I don't have the first idea how to stop children from being maimed and murdered in Baghdad or Sierra Leone or Darfur.

But I do know one way to help alleviate the suffering of some children who need help. www.smiletrain.org trains doctors in poor countries to perform cleft palate surgery on children whose families cannot afford it. Without the surgery, these children face hunger (many cannot eat well, and babies can die because they are unable to suck) and, maybe worse, extreme social isolation. Many are abandoned by their parents. They form few or no human bonds. There is no more horrible fate for a child.

Smiletrain will solve that problem for one human being for $250. If $250 is a lot of money (of course it is), any contribution at all will help pay for things like equipment, training, and anesthesia.

I donate 10% of my windfall (tax returns, bonuses, etc.) and second income to Smiletrain, and I can recommend this practice highly. On days when you see no point at all to what you do, you can look back and count the number of children's lives you have saved. Words rarely fail me, but I have none to describe this emotion to you.

We are not powerless, even when it feels like we are. There is something you can do today to alleviate someone's suffering. It doesn't have to be this suggestion, but something. A contribution, an action, some words that need to be said. Please go do it now.

(For another option, here's a link to make a contribution to Unicef's efforts to help children in Darfur: www.unicefusa.org.)