Businesses in every sector use Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning software to run their business.

Online retailers use augmented reality combined with AI to create virtual showrooms with 360-degree views to provide buyers enhanced shopping experiences for everything from cars to clothes to furniture. Hiring? Human Resources departments use AI-assisted filters to detect keywords in resumes. Want to improve your online customer support? There’s a chatbot for that. Shipping and supply chain management is often managed by AI software. The email newsletter you’ve been doing every month? That’s AI too. …

Happy 2021!

This winter, I became part of an arts nonprofit leadership team, and I‘m loving every single second of it.

Creative people are my jam.

When I think back to my corporate VP Marketing days, the best part of those jobs was collaborating with creative teams. Sometimes in ad agencies or with in-house talent, I used to find excuses to hang out with them.

“You could have emailed the changes, you know. You don’t have to walk them over all the time.”

Hehehe.

Now, I get to be part of a team that is doing good for artists, creatives…

The market for Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions has grown 54% year over year in 2020 to a $22.6 Billion market size in the United States alone. No longer considered futuristic, AI is here to stay.

AI is applicable to almost every business function.

Online retailers are using augmented reality combined with AI to create virtual showrooms with 360-degree views to provide buyers enhanced shopping experiences for everything from cars to clothes, to furniture. Hiring? Human Resources departments use AI-assisted filters to detect keywords in resumes. Want to improve your online customer support? There’s a chatbot for that. Shipping and supply…

When I wrote the first of my series profiling female philanthropists and venture capital investors, it was just before this article appeared in the New York Times.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I was onto something.

Female philanthropists and venture capitalists are making the news. They are a hot topic on social media recently given Whitney Wolfe Herd's enormous success, Bumble’s founder and CEO, who is now the youngest self-made billionaire founder, at 31, after taking her company public just one week ago.

For this second article, I’ve chosen to profile MacKenzie Scott.

Many may know her…

Last week I was a webinar guest invited to talk about the marketing and communication challenges impacting nonprofits.

As the Membership and Marketing Board Chair for Arts Alliance of Stratford, I see first-hand the challenges that nonprofits face. Combine tight budgets with skills gaps and time constraints, and the marketing function often falls into the ‘too hard’ category.

Nonprofits always mean well. I wrote about this in a previous article, but they’re often not marketing-driven.

These 7 tips for nonprofits can help turn the passion that fuels the mission into actionable marketing steps:

1. Show your website some love — This is your public face and must pass muster with all of your stakeholders. If your social media or…

I challenge the stereotypical image of philanthropists and venture capital, angel, and other investors as being solely male, by profiling 14 uber-successful women and how they’re using their money and influence to change the world.

Here are 4 surprising facts I unearthed in my research:

1. 64% of donations are made by women, Huffington Post
2. NPR dubbed 2020 the Year of the Woman Donor as a force for backing political candidates
3. Funding focused on women and girls represents a measly 1.6% of all charitable giving, PhilanthropyWomen.Org
4. Just 11% of Venture Capitalists are women and only 12% of investments go to startups with a female founder, Inc Magazine

The good news is…

After a year like no other, now is the perfect time for a deep dive into the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats your small business will face in 2021.

Using the 4 Steps of a SWOT Analysis makes strategic planning easy, even if you’ve never done it before. I often conduct a SWOT with my clients and the results always yield actionable results.

Like millions of other people I’ve been contemplating the state of the world, its people, politics, cultures, and lifestyles.

The pandemic has been, I’ll say…challenging.

Even before COVID-19, I’d been fantasizing about making a geographic change in my life and move somewhere far away. But where? Across the country? Across the world?

To satisfy my curious nature, I started researching various exotic locations focusing mostly on countries where I have friends and colleagues. Countries such as The Netherlands, Thailand, India, England, Norway, Canada, Scotland, and Australia as well as other places I’ve learned about from watching travel shows that seem…