The Influential Nonprofit: Episode 128: Eric Ressler: Thriving In The Attention Economy
Eric Ressler is the Founder and Creative Director at Cosmic, a Social Impact Creative Agency. Cosmic empowers social impact organizations to catalyze real-world change by helping them nail their impact story, build brand awareness, and inspire action.
It shouldn’t be an issue if either a “nonprofit” organization is making a profit, or if it’s failing. Most for-profit businesses take a lot of years before they take off and it’s only right that we give nonprofit businesses the same kind of consideration.
Our current digital era has allowed for information to be free and flowing to the point that it can be overwhelming to most people. Information is no longer at a premium, attention is. Since attention is finite, that is the thing that we compete for in this new “attention economy”.
Building your brand is foundational to your organization’s success - it can either boost your growth or hinder it. Embrace boldness, but not just for boldness’s sake. Your messaging, actions, and decisions have to reflect the brand and core values of the organization.
If the branding foundation is strong, then everything else that you do is going to have a bigger impact. However, if you don't have that luxury, you can still make a lot of progress just by getting the right messages out to the right people in a way that's informative and inspiring.
I think we need to embrace failure and learn from failure as a sector and not like sweep those things under the rug when they don't work, but publish them and say, ‘We tried this, here's why we tried it. Here's why we thought it had potential. Turns out it didn't work. For these reasons, let's like all learn from this experience together.’
Information is no longer at a premium, what's now at a premium is attention. If you understand that, you are playing in the attention economy where our attention is being bought and sold by large corporations.
You have a brand, whether or not you think you do, and the more that you can dial in that brand - your visual identity, your impact story, your niche - that foundational kind of brand-building work is either going to supercharge everything else that you do or hold back everything else that you do.
Manifesto for Today’s Social Impact Leader: https://designbycosmic.com/manifesto/
Free Insights and Resources: https://designbycosmic.com/insights/
Reach out to Eric Ressler at:
Website: https://designbycosmic.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cosmiceric/
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