The way we think about charities is dead wrong

This is a must-see for anyone / any organisation involved in fundraising.

Dan Pallotta walks us through the five areas of discrimination:

1. Pay – The two rule books for compensation, one for the for-profit sector, one for the not-for-profit sector.

2. Advertising and marketing dollars – Why it's fine to spend lots of money on advertising and marketing if you're in the for-profit sector but not if you're in the non-for-profit sector.

3. Taking risk on new revenue ideas – Again, fine for the profit-driven enterprises, but frowned upon for charities.

4. Time – Commercial ventures aren't always expected to turn money over immediately and that's fine, not so with not-for-profits.

5. Profit – The very idea of making profit is taboo if you run a charity whilst widely applauded in the for-profit sector.

Pallotta wraps up his talk with this line: "Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, "We kept charity overhead low." We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things."

Breaking the "one size fits all" education model

In this fascinating talk, Daphne Koller from Stamford talks about the future of on-line learning.