August 04, 2008
Nonprofit Buzzword Bingo: Take It to Your Next Meeting Today
Calling all best-practice stakeholders: Are you moving forward with a paradigm shift and taking the initiative with consensus building because wearing different hats is part of your core competency?
If that made you laugh, then Nonprofit Buzzword Bingo may be just the relief you need when you go into your next meeting.
Kivi Leroux Miller, president of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, an online resource for charities run by the EcoScribe communications, a marketing firm in Lexington, North Carolina, developed the game as a way to poke fun at “nonprofit-speak.”
Ms. Miller made it easy to print cards from her site that have charity jargon words and expressions, such as “consensus building” and “key players” and “facilitate” in place of the usual numbers on a bingo card. Players take the cards into a meeting and mark off a square for each buzzword uttered. Mark off five in a row and you can yell “bingo!”
Ms. Miller cautions you to keep “public humiliation of speakers to a minimum — unless they are saying nothing but buzzwords, and then they deserve it.”
You can even enter your own buzzwords into the card generator allowing you to get “on board” with the “perfect storm” of “empowerment.”
Beyond this game, you may also want to learn about the ways some dedicated nonprofit leaders are fighting jargon in a new article, Putting Clarity in Charity, from The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
We’re encouraging readers to share their favorite (or least favorite) jargon words by clicking on the comment link below. Later today we’ll post some of the buzzwords our readers on Twitter have shared with us.
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Jargon? How about “planned giving,” as if everything but life income gifts and bequests were “unplanned.”
— Jeff Steele Aug 4, 02:14 PM #
“Drill down” and “round back” started in corporate, now NPO employees use the terms to make themselves seem corporate.No one is fooled or impressed!!
— Juliette Aug 4, 02:48 PM #
“On-boarding”: noun used as verb meaning training, orienting, etc. new employees – ridiculous!!
— Ronda McKinnis Aug 4, 05:52 PM #
How about “convening?” Since no one ever has meetings anymore they’ll have to play buzzword bingo at the next convening.
— Lucy Bernholz Aug 4, 06:01 PM #
How about “mission-based sustainability” (huh?) or “nexus to ____” (fill in the blank, such as “strategic plan”)
— Donna Craig Aug 4, 06:15 PM #
We used to be fund raisers, but now we are “resource generators.”
— Kathleen Kilgore Aug 5, 09:39 AM #
“Silos”!
— Flaneusein DC Aug 13, 09:42 AM #