A plan for regional cooperation: public information and education for highway safety including communication plans and strategies. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Washington, D.C.

A plan for obtaining a more speedy postage communication between London and the more distant parts of the kingdom.

Mode of access: Internet.

Individuals in a mass market environment: Australian bequest donors seek better communication from charities

Swelling social need and competing calls on government funds have heightened the philanthropic dollar’s value. Yet, Australia is not regarded as having a robust giving culture: while 86% of adults give, a mere 16% plan their giving with those who do donating four times as much as spontaneous givers (Giving Australia, 2005). Traditionally, the prime planned giving example is a charitable bequest, a revenue stream not prevalent here (Baker, 2007). In fact, Baker’s Victorian probate data shows under 5% of estates provide a charitable bequest and just over 1% of estate assets is bequeathed. The UK, in contrast, sources 30% and the US 10% of charitable income through bequests (NCVO, 2004; Sargeant, Wymer and Hilton,2006). Australian charities could boost bequest giving. Understanding the donor market, which has or may remember them in their will is critical. This paper reports donor perceptions of Australian charities’ bequest communication/ marketing. The data forms part of a wider study of Australian donors’ bequest attitudes and behaviour. Charities spend heavily on bequest promotion, from advertising to personal selling to public relations and promotion. Infrastructure funds are scarce so guidance on what works for donors is important. Guy and Patton (1988) made their classic call for a nonprofit marketing perspective and identify the need for charities to better understand the motivations and behaviour of their supporters. In similar vein, this study aims to improve the way nonprofits and givers interact; and ultimately, enhance the giving experience and thus multiply planned giving participation. Academically, it offers insights to Australian bequest motivations and attitudes not studied empirically before.

Virtual worlds as a model-view approach to the communication of business processes models

The improvement and optimization of business processes is one of the top priorities in an organization. Although process analysis methods are mature today, business analysts and stakeholders are still hampered by communication issues. That is, analysts cannot effectively obtain accurate business requirements from stakeholders, and stakeholders are often confused about analytic results offered by analysts. We argue that using a virtual world to model a business process can benefit communication activities. We believe that virtual worlds can be used as an efficient model-view approach, increasing the cognition of business requirements and analytic results, as well as the possibility of business plan validation. A healthcare case study is provided as an approach instance, illustrating how intuitive such an approach can be. As an exploration paper, we believe that this promising research can encourage people to investigate more research topics in the interdisciplinary area of information system, visualization and multi-user virtual worlds.