“Stop knocking lightly on the door of change. We’ve got to knock it down! People are counting on you.”
By day, Jeff Shuck runs Event 360. By night (or perhaps in the wee hours of the morning as he has 4 kids!), he blogs at Your Part Matters.
At the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference, Jeff gave a session on using data to effectively segment your audiences. There was talk of regression and p-values and pivot tables. Not what many would consider “inspiring”, although highly useful.
That’s why his closing was so unexpected…and awesome.
After geeking out for 87 minutes, Jeff took the last 3 minutes to implore the audience to get serious about doing good. To do more. To do it louder. To get more people involved. To really give this making the world a better place stuff everything we’ve got.
I said a really loud “Amen!” and whooped a lot at the end. If it’d been remotely appropriate, I would’ve stood on my chair and cheered.
We’d spent the morning listening to Dan Roam, author of Blah, Blah, Blah, so we all had visual representation on our minds. But Jeff’s words gave us all a mental picture that we can use every day to gauge our effort, if not our impact:
Did we knock the door down today or simply lightly knock, hoping not to disturb anyone with our do-gooder ways?
Perhaps it’s not realistic that every day we’ll knock the door off its hinges. But just by asking the question, we’re way more likely to way more often, right?
Even if you’re not an Excel whiz or a data-head, check out his session for that last bit. It’s worth it.
For more inspiration, check out the Do Gooder Video award winners, which were announced at the conference. (Get out the hankies!)