Urban Legends for Fun and Nonprofit

Stanford business professor Chip Heath knows what makes urban legends tick and says nonprofit organizations can learn a thing or two by studying how apocryphal tales about vanishing hitchhikers, sewer gators, exploding Pop Rocks and kidney thieves "stick and catch fire" in the marketplace of ideas. There are six keys to the success of urban legends, Heath explains, and these principles can just as well be applied to marketing the truth: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credentialed, Emotional, Stories. "Used effectively, these principles can help nonprofit leaders get their points across and make them stick," Heath concludes in an article in the latest edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Summary here.