Why an ad person should care

It’s a story to make even the most hard-bitten ad-guy weep: a nonprofit organization struggling to save the lives of Rwandan orphans, or to reach kids in your own community who have been sexually molested, or researching Chagas Disease, which kills more people than AIDS.

Never heard of them? That’s the part that could make you cry. With all their passion, these organizations will never accomplish all they should – simply because they lack the basic communications skills you and I learned as ad cubs.

But here’s the happy ending:

The Cyrano Project, a nonprofit founded by communications professionals, has a plan to change all that. Our mission is to help nonprofits tell their stories eloquently and effectively. We started helping them one by one – but we’ll never reach them all. Pro bono work is not the answer. Consulting is not the answer.

The answer is a radical new way to deliver the expertise of communications professionals to the fingertips of thousands of nonprofits across the country - over the Internet. Cyrano’s SolutionBuilder on the web is being designed to incorporate tools, worksheets, how-tos and templates that have best practices built in, augmented by user forums and Ask an Expert features.

For example, just in the course of making a brochure from a template, the user has to answer the questions that tighten his brief and reduce the probability that he’s wasting his time and money: Who’s it for? What do you want them to do? What’s the most persuasive way to get them to do that? – questions any ad guy would ask in his sleep but a nonprofit user has most likely never considered.

Here’s where you come in: we need a forward-thinking partner to support building this radical solution. We recently received a grant from the New York Times Foundation – but there is much more to do to get this up and running.

This is an unusual and exciting opportunity to demonstrate how the skills you have perfected for your corporate clients can be applied to extend and amplify positive change – on a broad scale. Or perhaps you have clients who would see the virtue of extending their corporate responsibility in this very visible direction.

I look forward to hearing from you.