TED Talk By Melinda Gates on Nonprofits

Melinda French Gates’ Work With Nonprofits

Melinda French Gates has done much work with nonprofits throughout her life. In 2005, she and her husband Bill Gates, along with musician Bono, were named by Time magazine as Persons of the Year.

The Gates also received the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 2006 in recognition of their world impact through charitable giving. Melinda Gates ranks highly in the Forbes magazine list of the 100 Most Powerful Women, and in 2006 she and her husband were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, especially in the Mexican program Un Pais de Lectores.

In 2009 the Gates received honorary degerees from the University of Cambridge, where their gift of $210 million helped to establish the Gates Cambridge Trust.

TED Talk By Melinda Gates on Nonprofits

A TED Talk by Melinda French Gates focused on what nonprofits can learn from corporate giants like Coca-Cola. She said that in her many travels to the developing world, she sees a lot of abject poverty and lack of basic services like running water and electricity.

Yet even the poorest people have Coca-Cola, which is advertised and sold in even the poorest neighborhoods. She said that Coke’s success in these far-flung places represents a model that governments and NGO’s should study and imitate. She believes that in order to speed up the progress on the set of Millennium Development Goals, we need to learn from the innovators like Coca-Cola.

She has taken some time to study Coke, and has found three takeaways that are relevant to nonprofits. Coke takes real-time data and immediately feeds it back into the product, they tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing.

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