No One Ever Said It Would Be So Hard

When I was a boy, I was always jealous of my friends who had fathers with a career. Whether it was a tobacco salesman at one of the many warehouses in our small rural town at the time, or whether it was the local attorney or Lance Truck delivery guy… there was something I felt prestigious about having a career with a “real job” attached to your identity. My dad was on track to be an architect before he went to work for himself. I just recently stole a notebook of his drawings from that time before I was born (sorry, Dad). He would mention buildings or features that he designed in his earlier career path as we drove past them on the way to yet another car dealership in the area. We’ve never discussed it, but I always wondered what it would be like to have a dad with a formal career.

Dad has always been the entrepreneurial type and I can’t count the number of other side ventures he’s been involved with to go along with his main profession as a car wholesaler. He’s carried a leather briefcase for most of his life, and I used to sneak extra copies of his evolving business cards to put in my briefcase (which I, unfortunately, didn’t realize was not considered a cool fashion accessory during the first few days of Middle School).

But yet, he created his own job. As did his father. As did my Great Grand Father. Probably further back on down the line if I go check our family history file. There’s something about growing up in a small rural town of just a couple thousand people that makes you create your own path, whether that’s politically or theologically… or career-wise. Our town was full of women and men who were self-starters and “worked for themselves.”

God Helps Those Who Help Themselves could be on the official seal of Mullins, SC.

Perhaps that’s why I coveted a dad with a career in a fancy office building that he’d go off to in a white shirt and tie every morning after we ate corn flakes and he asked me how I liked my teacher and how the homework was going as he read the folded up paper at the breakfast table. Instead, I would see my dad often during the day in his mobile office. That’s what I called his truck. It was always full of papers and industry figures on cars and random tools or car parts. He’d drive up at 11 am or 2 pm or 4 pm while I was outside playing basketball in our yard. We’d exchange quick hello’s then go about our day. He’d drive off again after and I’d see him a few hours later. Dad would also travel to cities with exotic sounding names like Charleston or Savannah or Lumberton or Atlanta. I’d find the cities in our copy of The World Book and try to guess how far they were from Mullins. While he was on these trips, I would often stay up late drawing the logo for the business I was going to create in a big office building in a big town somewhere (hopefully Chicago so that I could go see the Cubs play when things weren’t too busy). I still have a notebook from childhood with a few of those drawings and designs for the invisible company. It was going to be called Harrelson Agency and the logo was a fancy “H” that I lifted from a crystal glass that was in the China cabinet that I wasn’t supposed to ever dare touch (I did).

After I left Mullins for college (where I got to fly on planes and travel overseas) and then graduate school (in another part of the country, even), I moved to Columbia. I had the option to go back home and teach there (in an alternate universe, there’s a very happy and inspired 40 years old AP US History Teacher Sam doing his thing), but we chose Columbia. I ended up in the classroom for a while but was tempted away by what I had always sought… a job in an office.

I stumbled into the marketing agency building here in Columbia on my first day not knowing much of anything about the real profession of marketing. I was good with computers and had a pretty quick wit, so I guess that was good enough to land the job in 2002. I loved the job and the connections I was making with people all around the world even if I was just writing email copy or begging advertisers for money. I bought a home. I had a steady paycheck with a beautiful girlfriend and a dog and I wore a white shirt and tie to work every day. Living the dream, I thought.

Then as the months went by, I started realizing I should be getting more money. I was “Sam Harrelson” after all. I was important to the company. I should get at least a commission on these big deals I was landing, right? I was 25 and knew everything.

I even considered becoming a registered Republican. As those thoughts entered my mind, I quickly realized it was time for my next career step. That’s what a career is, right? It’s a series of vertical movements until you hit a “Chief” position where there’s no one to tell you what to do. So I made vertical moves over the next few years until I realized enough was … well … enough. And I walked away from the office job with the white shirt and tie. I walked away from that career. I ended up back in a classroom.

Teaching wasn’t just a job for me. It was and is my true passion. I don’t know why. Some people love jumping out of airplanes. Some people love selling makeup. I love teaching. I’ll teach anything (just give me an hour to brush up beforehand). My partner has become accustomed to my dinner table mini-lessons on the newest star formation in the Orion constellation or how Egyptian mummification techniques changed rapidly in the late Ptolemaic period, or why 2 Samuel’s depiction of Uriah is so damning today. She handles me with grace.

Over the course of 8 years as a professional teacher, I taught 11th grade American literature, 8th-grade science, 8th-grade robotics, 8th-grade algebra, 7th-grade pre-algebra, 7th-grade science, 7th grade US History, 7th grade English, and 6th-grade Design Tech along with many summer camp courses. I worked with students to launch a balloon into space (well, upper atmosphere… close enough) and we made the TV news and front page of the local paper. The students had a copy framed for me, and it still hangs on my “office” wall (more on that in a second). I just knew I was going to be a teacher forever.

Then as the years went by, I started realizing that I should be getting more money. I was “Sam Harrelson” after all (Well, “Mr. H”). I was important to the school. I should be getting at least a moderate pay bump for all the exposure and social media likes and parent involvement I was generating, right? I was 32 and knew everything.

So I walked away from the classroom with the coffee mugs and bow ties. I walked away from that career. I ended up back in my bedroom.

For the last 8 years, I’ve been carving this Harrelson Agency thing out of marble. Michelangelo might have seen the David in a block of marble that had laid neglected for 26 years in the yard of a Cathedral, but I certainly didn’t have the same privilege with the 26-year-old career block that has been sitting in the corner of my mind. Sculpting this company and this life from that block of hard stone has caused me much psychological and physical and emotional and relationship strife. It’s only now, 8 years after I started chipping, that I realize what I’ve done to myself and what Harrelson Agency has done to me. You could call it the male impetus for chasing “The Great White Whale” or the Concord Fallacy, but I’m not giving it up just yet even though it remains a difficult beast to direct and has fits of starts and stops and continuous bucking. We’re conjoined now. I’ve engendered it with life and meaning and kicking it out of the Garden is not a practical resolution to this creation.

I realize, as a Pirate Looks at 40, that I have become very much like my dad. I don’t have a typical office. My truck is my mobile office. I carry a leather briefcase. I’m consistently changing my business card designs. I’m at home during random times of the day, and I get to spend a good deal of time with my children and partner. It’s a good job if you can get it.

Yet, I’ll still put on a white shirt and pair of slacks just to go work at the dining room table or my makeshift office here in our bedroom, which makes no sense. I’m always pulled back to that childhood fear of being a man without a career and when I look at my 10-year-old daughter I wonder now if she has the same thoughts I do. “My mom is a doctor, but what in the hell do I tell people my dad does? Play on the internet all day?” I hope I’m not causing her that anxiety as I work on this marble block. My tools have gotten better, and I have a better sense of how to chip and strike and know when to walk away and leave the block for a day to give us both rest as I work on it and it works on me. I hope she understands that I’m doing this intentionally for her and her sister and her brother and our family.

There’s a Coldplay song (I’m not a Coldplay fan if you’re wondering) titled “The Scientist” that has always pulled my heartstrings. Willie Nelson did an excellent cover of it a few years back and I prefer his version but that’s irrelevant. Having gone through a divorce and having lost people close to me in death, the song of loss and hurt resonates deeply. One of the lines that will pop up in the ever playing jukebox that is my head is:

No one said it was easy. No one said it would be so hard.

It was a constant partner to me during the divorce and during hard times with Harrelson Agency. I wish my dad would have warned me. Maybe he did, and I’m just now hearing him.

Harrelson Agency has grown every year in client base and income. Now it’s growing in offerings and direction (more on that in a second). Despite that, I’ve tried to walk away from this career a few times. I’ve flirted with a big job in an office high rise downtown with a parking garage and a hierarchical ladder for climbing. I’ve flirted with going back into the classroom. None of those dalliances amounted to me leaving this block behind though. I realize now that what I’ve always been looking for has been right there in the notebook that I created while wondering what my dad was doing. Living in Columbia now and having many friends and acquaintances in the “professional class” here has only ratcheted up that anxiety of not “having a career.” I get asked “So what do you do?” weekly as I’m introduced to parents at our son’s school or meetups or church. “Oh, Communications and PR. Who are you with?” To which I answer “Myself.” I need to start answering “Harrelson Agency… up and coming PR agency here in town. Heard of them?” Imposter syndrome is real, y’all.

What I’ve realized is that Harrelson Agency continues to shift from being a pure “marketing agency” into more of a public relations and communications firm. Marketing is a part of that to be sure, but most of our newer clients don’t need a website or a social media plan and are looking for real strategy and real communications help. We all thought Public Relations as a “career” (more on that in a second) was dead as a doornail in 2005 as the social web was just beginning to flourish and everyone could be their own PR rep.

What we realized is that effective communication, especially online, is a job and a career in and of itself no matter the medium. In our current age, we’re able to use artificial intelligence to create audio and video of anyone saying anything we’d like. Our human brains are still tied to our pre-Paleolithic environment and we’re just now beginning to understand how the brain “sees” and “hears” scientifically. But good luck explaining that to an angry Facebook user who saw the video of you saying something you didn’t say, or the angry Twitter person calling you out for a snippet of audio in your voice but not from your mouth. We’re entering dangerous, but exciting, times. I want to be more a part of that conversation as it relates to what I love doing with nonprofits and religious organizations marketing-wise, but also in the political realm. Not a full-on change, but a slight pivot to keep up with the times and my passion and the tools I have on hand to work on this block.

What I’ve realized is that my dad has had a great career that he sculpted himself. I’m proud of him. He is, for all intent and purposes, my role model. I’m still working on this damned marble block, but I’m not letting the cherubim and seraphim have at it just yet with their flaming swords. I’m not condemning it to a life of thistles and thorns. We’re going to make this work, Harrelson Agency, and we’re going to continue to build this career as we hammer it out in the sunshine and in the rain of that cathedral yard.

Running in circles, chasing our tails Coming back as we are

Keyword Research Tips

Good overview of keyword research here. Too many people neglect the usefulness of thinking through important terms and keywords in their web site’s content or blog posts. If you ask a Googler how to rank better in their search engine, they’ll tell you to “write great content.” That’s true but deliberately thinking about your “main ideas” and including those terms in your content also helps that aspect of discovery marketing.

The one pushback I have is the need for landing pages focused on particular keywords… that was certainly true a few years ago, but recent Google algorithm changes have made that pretty much a waste of time and resources if the landing pages are being created with the direct purpose of keyword rankings…

Keyword research is the first step in the SEO copywriting process and an essential part of any SEO strategy. Before you write your website content you need to think about which search terms you want to be found for and this means getting inside people’s heads to find out which words they use when searching. Then you can use these exact terms in your content so that you start ranking for them. This is keyword research and this ultimate guide will take you through the many steps involved.

Source: Keyword research for SEO: the ultimate guide • Yoast

Stitching together reality

The reason why we experience reality as a movie when it’s only a collection of pictures can be at least partially explained by our rhythms of attention. About four times every second, the brain stops taking snapshots of individual points of focus — like your friend on the corner in Times Square — and collects background information about the environment. Without you knowing it, the brain absorbs the sound of the crowd, the feeling of the freezing December air — which it later uses to stitch together a narrative of the complete Times Square Experience.

— Read on www.inverse.com/article/48300-why-is-it-hard-to-focus-research-humans

Moving beyond passwords

I was just working with a client for the better part of the morning to regain access to a few of their social media accounts and personal email because they had used the same password for those accounts. So I have very similar thoughts to Doc Searls right now.

Amen:

Please, please, please, tech world: move getting rid of logins and passwords to the top of your punch list, ahead of AI, ML, IoT, 5G, smart dust, driverless cars and going to Mars.

Doc Searls Weblog · Please let’s finally kill logins and passwords – Read on blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/08/24/pw/

Batman doesn’t believe in God anymore

In the story, Catwoman leaves Batman, whose secret identity is billionaire Bruce Wayne, at the altar. This leaves Wayne in a questioning state, where he explores his life and reflects on his theological background — he had been raised as a Christian by his father, Thomas.In one exchange with another character, Wayne is asked, “Do you believe in God?” to which he replies, “I used to.”

Source: Batman No Longer Believes in God: DC Comics Turns Him From Christian to Atheist

I always identified more with Batman than Superman as a kid and a teen exploring my own faith and thoughts because of the ongoing tensions between his faith and practicality, his morality and his violence, his sense of duty and his wanting to retreat to a cave full of computers…

Personal Branding (Not Selling Out)

I’m not a huge fan of the “personal brand” phrase, but I do appreciate how David Bowie (a constructed name and a series of constructed personas) was a “personal brand” of sorts and never in a band (besides those three Tin Machine albums in the early ’90s that we won’t talk about here). Same with Prince. Madonna. Elvis.

It’s a big leap, but creating your space and persona online is more possible than ever:

Your personal brand statement consists of 3 key elements:

• Your target audience: The specific market or people that you serve.

• The value you offer: How you help your target market.

• What makes you unique: Why people choose you over the competition.

— Read on www.shopify.com/blog/116266245-personal-branding-how-to-market-yourself-without-selling-out

Episode 148: Faith Is a Boomerang

The Rev. Lauren Larkin joins Sam to discuss birthing pangs in Genesis, the merits of demythologizing, and Dialectical Theology in the 21st Century.

Special Guest: Lauren R.E. Larkin.

Support Thinking Religion

Links:

An observation on “Church ‘Marketing’”

Hyperbole aside, this is ridiculous. It’s called the gospel. Marketing is not a negative phrase or concept that churches or religious orgs should shy away from. “Navel-gazing” and “not spreading the word,” however, are according to the Gospels.

The marketing of the church is an invention of the Antichrist. If you have to ‘sell’ your Church, it isn’t a Church that you’re selling and you are a pagan pretending to be a Christian.

— Read on zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/church-marketing-an-observation/

Contracts in the Age of Connections

It’s possible to negotiate a substantial contract in a few minutes by email—if both sides care more about forward motion than they care about the last decimal point. Or, to be more honest about it, if they care more about the benefits of the future than they care about the narrative of treating their partner like an opponent.

— Read on seths.blog/2018/08/transactions-without-conflict/

“We won’t let that happen.”

Who would have thought the annoying little service that lit up my text messages in 2006 with updates from other text nerds posting to 40404 would go on to become the political and media juggernaut it is today…

President Donald Trump on Saturday took to Twitter to allege social media companies are discriminating against prominent conservatives, saying “we won’t let that happen.”

— Read on www.politico.com/story/2018/08/18/trump-social-media-censorship-conservatives-twitter-facebook-787899

Let’s just all blog again #BreakingMyTwitter

Let’s just all go back to our blogs…

“Or maybe it’s time to admit the open forum for everything that Twitter – and social media, really – has promised is failing? Maybe it’s time to close the apps – third-party and otherwise. Maybe it’s time to go dark. Get off the feeds. Take a break. Move on.”

Twitter company email addresses why it’s #BreakingMyTwitter | TechCrunch — Read on techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/twitter-company-email-addresses-why-its-breakingmytwitter/

Response to “America’s Empty-Church Problem”

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

Source: America’s Empty-Church Problem – The Atlantic

This piece does a good job in summarizing the overall tilt towards secularism in America and its effects across the political spectrum. I agree with the above sentiment that the decline in church membership is helping to steer our country towards an atmosphere of conflict and zero-sum games.

However, there’s a good deal to unpack here. For one, there are all sorts of overlooked privileges incorporated with projecting that “things were better when we all went to church.” Second, conflating complicated movements like Trumpism, Bernieism, and Black Lives Matter into causations based on church attendance is problematic at best. Third, we can’t overlook the very real damage that many churches and associated hierarchies have done to children and adults over the last century, from misogyny to blatant racism and sexism to sexual abuse of children and young people.

My main pushback, however, would be the first sentence in the snippet above. Hierarchy, authority, and tradition are certainly values that some churches instill in their congregants. But, as someone from the Baptist tradition, I bristle at such overarching statements about what values churches instill. Our tradition emphasizes religious freedom over hierarchy, soul competency of each believer over authority, and congregational determinism over tradition. Of course, that has led to a whole host of problems for us in Baptist life, but it’s a reality that doesn’t get expressed when all of American Christendom is pitched into one descriptive bucket.

I would have ended this piece in a way that framed church as an opportunity to experience a different reality (I’m coming at this from someone who is ordained in a faith tradition, of course) and how it’s good for each of us to hear that we aren’t the center of the universe, we should be kind to each other no matter what, we should consider the lilies more often, and the ability to love others as themselves is the ultimate measure of a person. Those are things we Americans need to hear more often.

Oh, and wear a good suit at least once a week.

 

Grammarly finally coming to Google Docs!

I can’t tell you how reliant I am on Grammarly for writing everything from memos to strategic reports to blog posts to emails. It’s a fantastic platform that works well with GMail, Outlook, Microsoft Office, MailChimp etc. The one place it didn’t work was Google Docs… that’s changed now and I’m very glad I won’t be doing any more copy/pasting to double check my words and grammar:

We’re thrilled to tell you that we’ve begun beta testing one of our top-requested features: Grammarly in Google Docs! And it’s now available for all Grammarly Premium users.

Just make sure you have Grammarly for Chrome installed. Then, open up a Google Doc and take it for a spin. Enjoy!

Source: Grammarly for Chrome – Chrome Web Store

The reason Twitter will ultimately fail

I still firmly believe we’ll see a reckoning of sorts for social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter (and even Instagram and its lovely filters) where the network effect takes a backseat to quality interactions and we move away from hegemonic one-size-fits-all walled gardens towards decentralized and specified communities based on our preferences. Reddit is already pointing the way on this (partly):

The internet of old — composed largely of thousands of scattered communities populated by people who shared interests, identities, causes or hatreds — has been mostly paved over by the social-media giants. In this new landscape, basic intelligible concepts of community become alien: The member becomes the user; the peer becomes the follower; and the ban becomes not exile, but death. It is not surprising that the angriest spirits of the old web occasionally manifest in the new one. But what’s striking is how effectively they can haunt it, and how ill-equipped it is to deal with them.

Source: Twitter’s Misguided Quest to Become a Forum for Everything – The New York Times

Go Start Your Blog and Find a Newsreader

I’ve been using RSS as my primary way to read news, blogs, thoughts, and ideas since 2005 or so (I currently use a mix of Feedly and NewsBlur as my RSS readers, and both are excellent in their own ways).

There’s a growing rumbling going on in the tech-thinkers space I follow (mostly through my RSS readers). Twitter is great for quick fleeting thoughts that you write on the back of a leaf and watch float away down the river. Facebook is great for sharing pictures and updates with those who you are close with in real life. RSS and feed readers serve a much different purpose and I have no doubt they’ll be back in the mainstream soon enough given the current tensions around walled gardens, security, and advertising…

Now fight against the machine and go start your blog. You’ll be glad you did.

The tension between walled gardens (or lock-in, or whatever you want to call it) and a decentralized web will likely never end. But, it feels like we are in for another significant turn of the crank on how all of this works, and that means lots of innovation is coming.

— Read on www.feld.com/archives/2018/08/rss-the-persistent-protocol.html

Should social media be regulated?

Interesting numbers From the Knight Foundation and Gallup that, if enacted, would have huge ramifications for the advertising and marketing industries (especially for nonprofits)…

A new survey says yes — almost eight in 10 Americans agree that these companies should be subject to the same rules and regulations as newspapers and television networks that are responsible for the content they publish. The survey is part of a series of reports released by Knight Foundation and Gallup over the course of the year exploring American perceptions of trust, media and democracy.

— Read on medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/should-platforms-be-regulated-a-new-survey-says-yes-2f3f4d0d1f00

Twitter Changes Dramatically For Me on August 16

I use Twitter heavily for work and personal reasons. It’s been a service I turn to for news, socializing, brainstorming, and promoting services (including mine). That all will change on Thursday.

One of the changes being pushed through is the removal of the “streaming API.” Most Twitter users don’t use 3rd party apps and stick to the default apps. One of the greatest features of 3rd party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific is streaming timeline.

It’s been in place for years and allowed Tweetbot etc to cater to “power users” like me who use something like an iPad to watch Twitter stream by in real time. There is no streaming in the default app, so you have to constantly refresh your timeline. That’s fine if you’re just dipping in or looking for something specific (or the Moments feature that Twitter is always pushing on me), but I think of Twitter as a river that is constantly flowing.

I enjoy seeing the nonstop flow over on the side of the screen on my iPad and it’s something I’ve done for years. As I’ve said before, Twitter has paid our mortgage a number of times over the years because I caught a tweet out of the corner of my eye and made a quick action on it. Don’t @ me about being a distracted ADHD-riddled Gen Xer. I know. But it works for me.

There is still Tweetdeck that will offer streaming tweets (for now) but that doesn’t work on iPads or iPhones or Android devices. Before I became so iPad centric, I used Tweetdeck for years on its own monitor. Yes, I’m that guy. But again, it worked for me.

I’ve been following the developer discussions closely over the last few months, and I’m incredibly sad that it’s come to this point and not quite sure why Twitter continues to tighten the noose around developers and its most devoted users that it could easily tap into if it cared about things like, oh… say, monetizing beyond advertising.

So starting on Thursday I guess I’ll be using the default Twitter app on my iPad a great deal more. That means I’ll definitely be using the service less. Thanks, Twitter.

Core functionality like access to your timeline and the ability to post tweets will remain, but several basic features will be limited or removed. Alerts for mentions and direct messages in third-party apps are expected to be delayed, and timeline streaming which populates your timeline with new tweets in real time is expected to go away.

Source: Twitter API change strikes next week, Tweetbot and Twitterrific affected | 9to5Mac

Church Marketing and Political Issues

Six-in-ten religiously unaffiliated Americans – adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – say the questioning of religious teachings is a very important reason for their lack of affiliation. The second-most-common reason is opposition to the positions taken by churches on social and political issues, cited by 49% of respondents (the survey asked about each of the six options separately). Smaller, but still substantial, shares say they dislike religious organizations (41%), don’t believe in God (37%), consider religion irrelevant to them (36%) or dislike religious leaders (34%).

Source: Why America’s ‘nones’ don’t identify with a religion | Pew Research Center

One word: Marketing.

Churches and nonprofits shouldn’t focus on attribution as a social media goal

For years, marketers have tried to attribute social directly to sales, but industry standards and consumer data reveal that their true focus should be expanding awareness and consideration.Think long-term, not quick fix. Think relationships, not attribution.

Source: The 2018 Sprout Social Index | Sprout Social

The biggest mistake I see churches and nonprofits make when engaging in an intentional “social media campaign” is counting the likes and hearts on Facebook, Twitter, or Twitter rather than measuring the engagement factor of relationships.

Only 14% of marketers polled say that they can attribute any revenue from social media. The same is true when a church or nonprofit creates a social campaign… focus on long-term relational signals, not short-term likes and favs.

Is your website mobile friendly?

It would surprise you to know how often I have new clients who have never done the simple test of checking their website on their own iPhone or Android device. However, it’s definitely something that everyone should do. If your site doesn’t look and operate well on a mobile device, you’re losing visitors and need to make some changes…

A great way to test if your site is at least mobile friendly is to use Google’s mobile-friendly test. This gives you an indication if Google thinks your site is fit for displaying on mobile devices. But don’t stop after checking this. The best advice I can give you is to visit your site on your mobile phone. Browse your own site for a while and try to click on every button, image and link to see what happens. Is everything working as expected? Can you actually purchase something on your site while using your mobile phone? Are all pages displayed correctly? You will see that most sites have some work to do this fall.

Source: How to avoid common SEO mistakes • Yoast

Facebook and the Humanities

I strongly think this aspect of Facebook’s leadership, and leadership in Silicon Valley in general, is an important piece of the current trend in tech and politics. There’s a reason the “Titans of Industry” in the 20th century placed such an emphasis on the liberal arts and libraries…

“That’s because it was based in the idea that Facebook was essentially benign. Worse: Mr. Zuckerberg stuck with this mix of extreme earnestness and willful naïveté for far too long.

Because what he never managed to grok then was that the company he created was destined to become a template for all of humanity, the digital reflection of masses of people across the globe. Including — and especially — the bad ones.

Was it because he was a computer major who left college early and did not attend enough humanities courses that might have alerted him to the uglier aspects of human nature? Maybe.”

via Kara Swisher in the New York Times

Philanthropy and Underserved Communities

The average person thinks, “Of course philanthropy is about helping the poor.” In fact, just one out of every three dollars is intended to benefit underserved or marginalized communities. Even with a very broad definition—low-income communities, communities of color, women and girls, LGBT communities, people with disabilities, the elderly—it’s a small percentage of philanthropic dollars.

In our last analysis, 90% of the 1,000 biggest foundations in the country direct less than half of their dollars to benefit underserved communities. It’s shocking.

via Yale Insights – How Can Philanthropy Do More Good

Why People Do or Don’t Go To Church

Interesting stats about the reasons Americans attend or do not attend church regularly…

“For instance, two-thirds of people who cite logistical reasons or that they “practice their faith in other ways” as very important factors in keeping them away from religious services identify with a religion (primarily Christianity), as do 56% of those who dislike features of particular congregations or religious services. Roughly half of those who say they practice their faith in other ways also report praying every day, as do 44% of those who name logistical reasons as key factors in keeping them away from church and 36% of those who dislike elements of services and congregations. By contrast, just 15% of those who do not attend religious services due to a lack of belief say they pray daily.”

via Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life