Taxes go up, taxes go down (sometimes). Does it ever seems to make a real difference on the ground in your neighborhood? The typical temptation is to strive to cut costs and then reduce spending. What if instead of cutting spending we changed spending to create virtuous circles of savings and improvements?
In 2020, the US has the rare occurrence of income taxes coming due just 111 days before a presidential election during a recession. This combination will surely push economic topics to the top of the news feed. Voters will likely be flooded during the summer and fall with many top-down proposals to reform government spending....
Recent protests against racism and police brutality have included calls for “defunding” police departments. I think few people, if any, want to completely abolish a critical social good such as public safety. So, calls for defunding are likely not literal and absolute. If that’s the case, then what are protesters demanding? How We Fund Public...Continue reading
Heavy rains and flood waters flow across the impervious surfaces of roads and parking lots. That flow pushes pollution on those surfaces–plastic bottles, cigarette butts, motor oil–into stormwater management systems. That pollution then dumps into lakes and streams. This system is how so much plastic ends up in our oceans.
It’s a different way to pay with plastic — bottles instead of credit cards. Cities like Beijing, Istanbul, Sydney, and Surabaya let you pay public transit fares with recyclable plastic. Innovative transit pricing is one way that public and social sector marketers achieve multiple goals at once.
We’re social animals. That means there’s always someone else around, and that means it’s easy for people to shirk responsibilities.
We have elections all over the place: within companies, nonprofits, homeowner’s associations, kid’s sports league. Civic elections are a social good. As with all social goods, marketing principles apply to elections.
For social goods like health care, the buyer and the end consumer are often two different parties. In much of health care, an insurance company or a government agency is the buyer, while the individual patient is the end consumer. At least in the United States, for-profit medicine companies exploit this split. They charge large...Continue reading
How do you deliver help to homeless people with no fixed address and little to no money?
Government, along with public and social sector marketers, should serve citizens not customers.