YouTube ‘Brings Sexy Back’ To Charity Work

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank needed a way to tell the world about its work. Shawn Ahmed wanted to continue the video storytelling he’d begun on behalf of the poor in Bangladesh.

YouTube wanted to bring them together.

The result, YouTube’s Video Volunteers page, pairs deserving but underfunded charities with creative video producers willing to help them. The page has brought hundreds of sometimes-offbeat fundraising and promotional videos to the same site that launched such Web celebrities as singer Susan Boyle and the “Leave Britney Alone” guy.

“There are all these really big, sexy parts of YouTube, but we need people to know about this [project] because it actually matters,” said YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost, invoking pop star Justin Timberlake.

“The nonprofits aren’t that sexy — but we’re trying to bring sexy back a little bit to the nonprofits.”

The Video Volunteers page lets nonprofits post descriptions of projects for which they need videos produced. Video artists, in turn, can scroll the offerings and pick a cause they’d like to help.

Since October, the site has featured a particular issue each month. February’s issue is health. The best videos get featured on YouTube’s main page, giving massive exposure to both the charity and the video artist.

“We would love to think users just do it out of the kindness of their own hearts,” said Ramya Raghavan, the nonprofits and activism manager at YouTube, who said she thinks that’s usually the case. “But I think the incentive piece does help a lot.”

On average, about 75 new volunteer videos appear on the page each month. During “animal welfare month” in October, 120 new videos were created, Raghavan said.

Last year, Ahmed, who had already visited Bangladesh to video blog and raise funds for poverty relief there through his personal project, Uncultured, was looking for a way to address the issue closer to home.

He found out about the Los Angeles, California, food bank through YouTube and the charity’s parent organization, Feeding America.

“It was just really serendipity,” said Ahmed, who lives in Toronto, Canada. “I wanted to do something charitable at home and YouTube had made a relationship with Feeding America. This actually made things really, really easy for me.”

The food bank is one of the nation’s largest and distributes about 1 million pounds of food a week. Its staffers were thrilled at the prospect.

Spokeswoman Julie Flynn said the staff recognized the value of an online video presence, but never had the time or money to seriously pursue it.

“We’re just trying to maintain our own Web site,” she said. “It was really nice to have someone volunteer, and a cool way for [Ahmed] to get involved. It was a perfect blend of his passion, his skills and our need.”

The resulting video shows Ahmed touring the bank’s distribution center on a forklift, interviewing clients and, ultimately, showing the 10,000 pounds of food he was able to provide with a $2,000 donation he’d raised online.

It appeared on YouTube’s main page on Thanksgiving Day, and had gotten more than 400,000 page views as of this week.

The key to success on YouTube, Ahmed said, is realizing that the site’s viewers are different than a television audience and that traditional public-service announcements aren’t going to cut it.

“When people watch videos on YouTube, they don’t approach it the same way as when they watch CNN or ‘Heroes,’ ” he said. “It’s very personal interaction for them. I just wanted to take a personal approach … I thought if I do it this way, people would get more involved.”

Many of the clips are quirky, unconventional and self-referencing — taking their cues from some of the most viral videos on the site.

One video titled “The World Sucks: Make It Suck Less” promotes the launch of Video Volunteers while name-dropping some of the most viral Web videos ever.

“How about we put a squirrel on water skis and we tie a banner to its neck with all the stuff that you want to say about charity?” says a guy having a video chat about the page. “Or, we take a 7-year-old kid to the dentist, we get him all hopped up on pain medications and then we have him talk about charity.”

In the end, Raghavan said, the project is about giving charities — which often struggle to make ends meet in tough economic times — a chance to make their case to the masses.

“If you’re a pet shelter in Kansas, you don’t have the money, you don’t have the staff and, frankly, you don’t have Bono,” she said, referring to the U2 singer’s worldwide One campaign. “It’s very hard to get your message out.”

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10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Measure

While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.

According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Quantity of commentary about brand or product

These are easily understandable common social metrics. However, with some C-level executives saying that they want to measure ROI from social media but don’t yet know the value of certain types of social media, there has to be more measurement and analysis. Monitoring data is only valuable if metrics relevant to a company are being tracked, analyzed, then applied to improving a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)
3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.
4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.
7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.
8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?
9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?
10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

You can see from the above list that there are both key metrics and variations that you’ll probably want to monitor and analyze, depending on your business objectives. Not all of them are simple metrics to track, and as such do require either or both custom tools and custom reports. Supplement your metrics reports by noting any milestones in your SMM plan. Also, if you run any sort of social campaigns, measure the ROI on specific goals. Social campaigns could use applications (E.g., Facebook applications like Mob the Rainbow) to encourage social participation. Measure application usage and resulting conversions. Finally, the use of complex measurements such as Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) can show both short- and long-term trends, thus providing you with an overall view of the health of your sites and social networks.

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Alumni Participation Reaches All-Time Low

Last week, the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) released its annual Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) survey results. In addition to a steep decline in overall giving to colleges and universities last year, the report also revealed that alumni participation rates had hit their lowest level (10%) in the history of the survey.

According to CAE, alumni participation has been declining slowly since 2002, when it was 13.4%. Contributing factors might include:

• Increased student loan debt, likely reducing the sentiment that alumni “owe something back” to their alma mater.

• The proliferation of nonprofits over the past decade, creating greater competition for philanthropy.

• Large (often misunderstood) endowments, fostering skepticism about the true “need” of many colleges and universities.

Declining alumni participation represents a real problem for institutions, and extra annual fund mailings, more e-mail blasts, and additional phonathon shifts don’t address the fundamental issues. Donors are motivated either out of loyalty to an institution or support for a cause. For many years, annual giving managers at educational organizations have built their strategies around the former. Going forward, we need to focus more on the latter.

Loyalty is an asset, but useless when it doesn’t exist in the first place. However, when we talk more about the causes that our educational institutions support (research, shaping future leaders, etc.), we will have begun to address the real issues behind declining alumni participation.

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British Financial Firm Typecasts Wealthy Donors

Wealthy donors typically fall into one of six categories according to new research from Barclays Wealth. The resulting report, Philanthropology: The Evolution of Giving, contains profiles drawn from the responses of 500 high net worth investors in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Though there are significant differences among the six types, they share a common entrepreneurial approach to giving and aim to make as big an impact as possible.

Privileged youth

Typically younger, these donors have inherited their wealth. Giving time and energy to charitable causes offsets some of their guilt about their comfortable lifestyles. They are very generous with their time, and use their social networks to support social welfare causes across the globe.

Eco givers

Eco givers are most likely to be young females who have worked hard for their wealth. They expect a high degree of accountability from the charities they support. This group primarily supports environmental charities.

Altruistic entrepreneurs

This group comprises middle-aged business owners with strong ties to their roots. They have earned their own wealth and strongly believe that sharing it is a duty. Their philanthropic behaviour is often driven by their desire to support the communities in which they grew up.

Reactive donors

High-earning male executives dominate this group. They usually give to charity because they believe their peers expect it, rather than through a social or moral conviction. They also tend to give indirectly through purchases from brands that support charities.

Cultured inheritors

In their late 50’s and 60’s, these donors generally have created their own wealth, although some have also inherited it. They plan both to leave their wealth to their families and continue the legacies of parents who may have been heavily involved in charitable work. Their social and moral beliefs drive their motivation to give.

Professional philanthropists

Consisting of high-level executives and successful business owners, this is the oldest group. Nearly all of them have created their wealth rather than inheriting it. They donate, but also support charities by offering their business expertise. That leads them to be more demanding of charities as they expect to see the impact of their donations.

Emma Turner, head of client philanthropy at Barclays, advises, “Alongside traditional giving, charities should increasingly be welcoming the non-financial support and entrepreneurial skills that a lot of today’s wealthy can bring.”

An earlier Barclays report published in July 2009 found that respondents were still highly committed to giving, despite their assets and businesses being under strain in challenging economic conditions. The research revealed that 75 per cent of respondents had not decreased their charitable contributions, while 26 per cent had increased their giving in the last 18 months.

Download the report at
http://www.barclayswealth.com/Images/Philanthropy-The-Evolution-Of-Giving.pdf

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Study Finds Public Discontent With Colleges

Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007.

At the same time, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said that colleges should use federal stimulus money to hold down tuition, even if it means less money for operations and programs.

The study, a joint project of Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, also found that most Americans believe that colleges could admit a lot more students without lowering quality or raising prices, and that colleges could spend less and maintain a high quality of education.

“One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education,” said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, “is the vote of no confidence we’re getting from the public. They think college is important, but they’re really losing trust in the management and leadership.”

According to the study, “Squeeze Play 2010: Continued Public Anxiety on Cost, Harsher Judgments on How Colleges are Run,” a growing share of Americans believes that college is essential to success — 55 percent, compared with 31 percent in 2000. But at the same time, a dwindling share — 28 percent, compared with 45 percent a decade earlier — thinks college is available to the vast majority of qualified, motivated students.

“People are increasingly seeing themselves caught between these two trends,” said John Immerwahr, a senior research fellow at Public Agenda and an author of the report. “It’s a new kind of misery index. This is really important, and it’s really inaccessible.”

The report is based on a December telephone survey of more than 1,000 Americans. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.05 percentage points.

The report found some areas of optimism. Nine in 10 Americans say it is somewhat or very likely that their own high-school-age child will attend college, and the majority believe that almost anyone who needs financial help to go to college can get loans or financial aid.

But 83 percent said that students had to borrow too much money to pay for college.

In “Iron Triangle,” a 2008 study of 25 college presidents, Public Agenda and the center found that most saw an unbreakable link between the cost of running their operations, the number of students they can educate and maintaining educational quality.

To serve more students or offer higher quality education, the college presidents said, would require more money — and conversely, cuts in their budgets would inevitably translate into either a smaller number of students or diminished educational quality.

According to the new report, the public disagrees.

“It’s nice to think that we can have guns and butter, but it’s not that easy,” said Terry Hartle, the senior vice president of government and public affairs for the American Council on Education. “The public is not always right.”

While it is true that colleges and universities could provide higher education for less money, Mr. Hartle said, it would require cuts in areas that most people see as fundamental to quality.

“We probably wouldn’t have libraries open as much, we wouldn’t update I.T. regularly, we wouldn’t have small classes,” he said. “Running a first-class college or university costs money. It’s a very labor-intensive enterprise, in which it’s common to spend 70 to 76 percent of the budget on faculty and staff.”

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University of Toronto Experiences $1.5-Billion Loss

The University of Toronto’s foray into aggressive U.S.-style investing is coming to an end following a decade of disappointing returns and a $1.5-billion loss that wiped out nearly 30 per cent of the school’s pension and endowment funds in a single year.

The move was announced quietly over the weekend in a letter to faculty and staff from university president David Naylor and follows the recommendations of a blue-ribbon panel led by Hal Jackman, a former chancellor and major donor to the school.

That report, also made public on the weekend, finds that University of Toronto Asset Management, a corporation set up in 2000 to boost returns by applying the investment style pioneered at big U.S. schools, “has not achieved its mission.”

It recommends that the university bring the asset manager back under its direct control and that its exposure to risky investments such as hedge funds and private equity “be scaled back significantly.”

Dr. Naylor in his letter said he intends to act on the report’s recommendations and will make “fundamental changes” to the oversight of endowment and pension funds, which will include a new board of directors comprising senior university staff. UTAM’s leader will become the university’s chief investment officer and will report directly to the president.

“The university administration for its part needs to take careful stock of its current return targets and the risks associated with those targets,” he said.

The decision to bring the oversight of UTAM in house marks the end of an ambitious attempt by the University of Toronto to mimic the investing approach developed at Yale and Harvard universities, with a heavy reliance on risky “alternative investments,” rather than stocks and bonds, in an effort to increase returns.

The opposite happened.

The Jackman report finds that even in strong markets, performance was “disappointing,” lagging other funds. Since its inception, the manager has had an annualized rate of return of just 2.7 per cent. In 2008, a bad year for all investors, the fund got hammered with a loss far greater than its peers, thanks largely to a bad bet on the strength of the Canadian dollar and exposure to expensive hedge funds.

In reaction, the university was forced to stop payments from its endowment – a loss of $62-million or about 5 per cent of its operating budget. Those payments will resume next year.

Even now that markets have rallied, the report finds UTAM’s investment in alternative assets, which are difficult to sell, has dragged down results. Returns were just 3.8 per cent to September, compared with an industry average of more than 12 per cent.

George Luste, head of the university’s faculty association who has long been critical of UTAM, said the changes do not go far enough and do not hold anyone responsible for the botched strategy.

“All they are doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said. “This acknowledges the problems, but it does not say why the mistakes happened.”

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Twitter Creator Reveals Square Mobile-Pay Device

Paris, France (CNN) — Twitter creator Jack Dorsey Wednesday gave the first public demonstration of his hotly-anticipated latest venture — a device to allow credit card payments by cell phone — and revealed it would be given away for free.

Details of “Square” — a card reader which plugs into the headphone socket of most mobile devices — have been circulating on the Internet since it was announced earlier this month, but little has been known about how it works or who it was aimed at.

However, Dorsey — whose microblogging Web site has proved hugely popular but not hugely profitable since launching in March 2006 — gave no explanation on how he would make money from his new creation, beyond revealing there would be a per-transaction charity donation.

Square, a tiny cube about an inch in length, contains a magnetic strip reader that allows users to swipe and read credit cards, then deduct payment on or offline through a downloaded application that communicates with card issuers in the same way as retailer devices.

Customers then use their finger on the phone’s touch-recognition screen to sign their name to the transaction.

Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and chairman, says the device, scheduled for launch on iPhones and iPods in March 2010, was inspired partly by the “immediacy, approachability and transparency” of Twitter and by the global economic crisis which has exposed a need for a radical rethink of the financial sector.

“The financial world is amazing right now because there’s a clean slate. A lot of these industries are looking for something very small and innovative,” he said during the gremlin-hit demonstration of his device at LeWeb, a major Internet forum in Paris.

“My co-founder is a glass artist. He sells things that people don’t need — $2,000 glass faucets. They’re beautiful. If he could not take credit cards, he wouldn’t make the sale because no one carries around $2,000 in the cash.

“So we looked at it. Ninety percent of the U.S. has moved to credit cards, but it’s still very difficult to accept them.”

Dorsey said he considered a number of options in developing Square, including using cell phone cameras and character recognition software to read images of the credit card.

“The other thing we looked at is the audio jack — and it’s on Macbooks, desktop PCs, BlackBerries and Androids. We built this hardware. It’s a self-powered swiper. Powered by the magnetic power of the swipe itself, converts it to an audio signal, which the software interprets.”

Dorsey, who joked he had pocketed $650 by allowing potential business partners to road test the device with their own credit cards, said Square was currently being beta tested in a handful of major U.S. cities by a cross-section of small business users.

“We’re trying with a bunch of different profiles of folks in New York, San Francisco, LA and St. Louis, Missouri. There are piano teachers, flight instructors, and coffee shops. It can be used in a retail store like Apple, all the way down to Craigslist or paying me back for that dinner you owe me.”

Dorsey said his developers were still working to ensure the device was fraud proof.

By Barry Neild, CNN
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Crossover Learnings Between Email And Social Media

by Chad White

What Email Can Learn from Social Networks

Expressing personality. Most brands can no longer afford to be faceless entities. The interactivity and transparency of the Internet has elevated the need for personality. Luckily, there are several ways to do this: You can use an executive as TigerDirect does, staff members like Crutchfield, or your customers like REI. The most poignant expression of personality I’ve seen recently is Backcountry’s memorial message for skier Shane McConkey.

Expressing a sense of community. People want discounts and helpful information, but many also want to be part of a community. Including product testimonials from product reviews on your site is one way to do this. Backcountry goes a step further and highlights its top contributors in its monthly newsletter.

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently suggested another way to build a community feel: adding social proof to your email sign-up process, such as a running count of how many subscribers you have. Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, subscriber counts are a well-established and highly promoted measurement of legitimacy and influence. I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but the idea is intriguing.

What Social Networks Can Learn from Email

Providing exclusivity. Email subscribers appreciate it when they get exclusive deals and information not available to your Web site visitors. It helps justify them sharing their email address with you. With social networks, there’s a similar dynamic. Some people will ask themselves, “Why should I bother to be a fan if the announcements and other content are available on your Web site or to email subscribers?”

There’s value to making information available via different channels — being channel-agnostic is great m– but if you want to get people to engage with you via multiple channels, then the experience has to be different. Indeed, people expect to have a different experience with your brand via Facebook vs. Twitter vs. email, for instance.

Explaining the benefits of joining. Just as email sign-ups suffer when you don’t explain the benefits of receiving your emails, your “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” call-to-action put the burden on your customers to explore the benefits themselves. Quickly listing the key benefits can be effective in getting people motivated to take action. In a recent email, Fingerhut did a good job of selling the benefits for engaging with the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Driving subscribers to other channels. Providing customers with many avenues to take advantage of offers and exposing them to different channels has well-established benefits. Just as email programs aren’t maximizing their opportunity when they drive traffic solely to the Web, self-contained social networks are destined to underperform. Look for occasions to expose customers to multiple channels. Sephora did that recently by asking email subscribers to share a digital gift (a tote bag) with their Facebook friends; if they did that, they could get a real Sephora tote from their local store. But the most impressive utilization of a brand’s channels that I’ve seen recently was Buy.com and its Tweet n Seek contest, which had participants following them on Twitter, searching Buy.com, visiting their Facebook page, and reading products pages.

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Email Open Rates in Q4 2009

Email open rates increased 5.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 versus the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Q4 2009 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks report published by marketing services firm Epsilon.

The quarterly analysis is compiled from more than 7 billion emails sent by Epsilon in October, November and December 2009, across multiple industries and approximately 170 participating clients. The analysis combines data from Epsilon’s proprietary platforms, DREAM and DREAMmail. Additional highlights from the study include the following:

• average click rate was 5.9 percent, up slightly from the same time last year (5.8 percent);

• during the high-volume holiday season, the average volume per client increased 25.8 percent from last quarter and 9.8 percent from last year;

• Epsilon’s client base had a 94.1 percent inbox deliverability rate for Q4 across a sample of U.S. and Canada commercial email; and

• nine of the 13 industries tracked saw increases in open rates over Q4 2008, and two of the 13, consumer products goods and consumer services telecommunications, reported increases in all three metrics — opens, clicks and nonbounce rate — compared to last year.

Leaders: Give Thanks for Your People

Mike Prokopeak

Between the travel tie-ups and the rush to begin the holiday shopping season, it’s easy to forget the Thanksgiving holiday is intended as a time to give thanks. That message is important for leaders to remember at all times, but especially now when many in the workforce continue to reel from the aftereffects of the Great Recession.

“It is more important now,” said management consultant Ken Blanchard, author of business best-sellers such as The One Minute Manager and the recently revised and updated Leading at a Higher Level. “We’ve lost the trust of our public; we’ve lost the trust of our people.”

Blanchard, who holds the position of chief spiritual officer for The Ken Blanchard Companies, a provider of workplace learning, employee productivity and leadership training, said restoring trust within the workforce begins with developing a leadership point of view.

“What are their beliefs about leading and motivating people, where did they come from, what can people expect of them and what do they expect of people?” Blanchard said. “It’s such a powerful thing, especially when they start to share it with their people.”

This personal leadership mission statement defines a leader’s values and, when used properly, guides his or her future behavior. “Based on that, what are your beliefs about motivating and leading people, then what are you going to do on a daily basis to recalibrate that you’re going to be that kind of leader?” Blanchard said.

But perhaps the most significant part of developing a leadership point of view is the personal and organizational change it can create.

“Leadership is a transformational journey starting with yourself,” Blanchard said. “A lot of times there will be a problem with an organization, and you’ve got a leader who has really never had a chance to look at themselves. Their ego drives their behavior. They think life is all about them.”

Pushing those kinds of leaders to probe and develop a point of view makes them realize the importance of the people around them.

“In quiet moments of reflection, they get that they are here to serve rather than be served,” Blanchard said. “But if they’ve never sat and thought about it, then they get caught up by lousy role models and the pressures of Wall Street and they start to think that leadership is all about them and their concerns.”

Blanchard pointed to fast food company Chick-fil-A as an organization that understands the importance of leadership point of view. The Atlanta-based company even developed a leadership model, SERVE, that is taught to managers of the company’s 1,400 restaurants. SERVE stands for:

• See and shape the future.
• Engage and develop people.
• Reinvent continually, personally and structurally.
• Value both people and results.
• Embody the values.

That focus on a leadership point of view and the resulting servant model of leadership is good for Chick-fil-A’s business, Blanchard said. He reports that the company has less than 2 percent turnover, significantly less than similar businesses with a large hourly workforce.

“They’re not even open on Sunday and they kill everybody in the fast food industry in six days,” he said.

Blanchard said Chick-fil-A’s servant leadership model delivers business results and human satisfaction because it brings together the strategic vision — where the company is headed — and its operations — making sure the organization works for its people.

“Having a clear leadership point of view and sharing it with your people shows them that you respect them, you want to be clear with them,” Blanchard said. “They can hold you accountable for that. If you face them and respect them and share with them, then you’re going to have a chance to rebuild trust.”

CLOs can help leaders develop a leadership point of view and implement the models and behaviors that go along with it. The biggest problem, Blanchard said, is that learning leaders too often look for the next great idea.

“We’ve spent too much time looking for the next new management concept, and we don’t follow up [on] what we just taught our people,” he said. “How many diets does it take to lose weight? Only one you stick to. They need to find something that really makes sense, that is consistent with the leadership point of view of their top managers, and drive that through the organization.”

Despite the challenges, now is the time to work on implementing a leadership model and training people to carry it out.

“This is a time not to turn your back on training, but to prepare the people who are still going to be with you in the future to be the best that they can and to have the skills that they need,” Blanchard said.

That result would indeed be something to give thanks for.