A place to capture and share ideas, experiment with and exchange links and resources about the adoption challenges, strategy, and ROI of nonprofits and social media.
My friend, Manny Hernandez, founder of Tuiabetes Community and author of Ning for Dummies, let me know that today, November 14 is World Diabetes Day. Today, at 14:00 hours (local
time), thousands of people with diabetes will test their blood sugar,
do 14 minutes of exercise, test again and share their results on
TuDiabetes or on Twitter.
He is using a tool called "Twibbon" that makes it easy for people to change their avatar to incorporate a visual for a particular cause.
Exactly two years ago, the idea of changing the visual of your Twitter avatar to support a cause spontaneously happened as part of the Pea Fund Fridays, a Twitter fundraising campaign created by Connie Reece to support breast cancer research to honor Susan Reynolds. If I remember correctly, it was Robert Scoble who did it first and others took his cue. See the range of creative expression in the flickr group.
Two years later, changing your Twitter icon in support of a cause (even though some call this "slacktivism"), is a techniques being used. Remember the sea of green avatars last summer in support of the Iran? There are tools now to make it easy for supporters to change their avatars, although you don't get the range of self-expression.
What do you think? Is changing your Twitter profile in support of a cause a silly click action or the first rung on ladder of engagement to get people to do something offline?
You can win a this set of books, signed and personalized by the authors that will teach you how to be human through your computer, generate tons of social capital, and be a social media virtuoso - plus have some great books to curl up with during the holidays.
Here’s how you win:
1. Leave a comment below telling me your
social media plans for 2010, and why you think these 7 books will help
you achieve what you want to accomplish. Best comment in within the
next week wins the set.
2. Visit one of the following blogs who
have the same set of books to give away. If you really want to
increase your chances of winning, you’ll probably want to visit each of
them and leave a comment there as well. Here’s where to go (if the
blog post is not up yet, check back later in the day):
www.kaushik.net/avinash:
this is the amazing blog of Web 2.0 Analytics author Avinash Kaushik.
He’s simply the smartest guy in the world when it comes to analytics
and what it means for your business.
www.briansolis.com:
this is the blog of Brian Solis, the smartest man at the intersection
of PR and social media. He’s one of the true pioneers in the social
space, and constantly produces thought-provoking content.
www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog:
this is the blog of John Jantsch, THE expert on small business
marketing. He’s also writes probably the most practical, hands-on
marketing blog on the planet. It’s a must-read.
Yesterday, NTEN;s Holly Ross hosted an online conversation with Seth Godin and me, along with Roxy Allen and 100 plus NTEN members. These "Ask the Expert" chats take place on the phone with a online chat back channel.
This conversation came about after Seth's provoking post "The Problem with Non" took a swing at nonprofits for lack of adoption of social media, saying it was all due to fear. This caused an angry uproar on nonprofit blogs and Twitter from nonprofits saying there were plenty examples of nonprofits using social media effectively!
Seth quickly reached out to me via Roxy Allen suggested that I do an interview. In turn, I suggested that we have a conversation with the nonprofit technology community with Holly Ross at NTEN as host. This conversation took place yesterday.
Holly started with a great question, "What's in the DNA of each of these orgs that allows them to embrace this change and experiment?"
Seth told a story about men's shavers that illustrated his key point about innovation:
Innovation isn't always about the product, it's about the marketing and communications around the product.
Some organizations looks at landscape changes as opportunities, and others look at them as threats
Our patience with the lack of innovation that is the problem
Participants in the chat shared their impatience with the pace of organizational change, acknowledging that "All NPO's grow from experimenting, they just get freaked out by the tools."
It made think of one of his recent posts about "Asking Why," but while he was talking about shavers, it made me think of hair, and naturally that made me think of hair shirts and quote from Rob Stein about transparency as a hair shirt.
My answer to Holly's question was that organization's that are innovative have leadership that is open to public learning and models that in the organization. There's no better example than the public dashboards of the Indiana Art Museum - Innovation is about opening up and letting the outside in.
Roxy Allen mentioned in the chat that one of the biggest changes will be branding "from the inside out" -
employees have a mouth piece - which is hard to control and a culture
change. She recommended a book from the HR perspective called Brand Inside Essentials. Rekha, shared this essay about the generational differences in public media organizations when it comes to innovation.
The back-channel had a poll feature and one of the questions about change agents inside of nonprofits. One point that Seth made that really stuck with me was about leadership. That it doesn't matter what role the change agent has - but they put on a good show, model passion, and inspire people to change.
We covered a lot of topics - for culture change within nonprofits, nonprofit innovation, transparency, leadership, and the importance of storytelling. We discussed the findings of some recent studies about nonprofits and social media adoption.
Holly Ross has a blog post about some of her key takeaways and Darren from the Groupery also shared his notes here.
If you participated and wrote up a post or have some takeaways, leave them in the comments.
The results of two new research studies about nonprofits and adoption of social media were released this week. One focuses on telling nonprofits not to bother with social media, the other provides some strategic ways to move forward.
Weber Shandwick released the results of a survey of 200 nonprofit and foundation executives to explore how
their organizations (range of budgets) are using social media and the value they derive
from these efforts. Here's the topline results:
There is extensive experimentation with social media in the nonprofit sector, but only half (51%) surveyed are active users
Most nonprofits (67%) say social media is changing how they communicate with broad external audiences, but not narrower categories of stakeholders
Most nonprofits (52%) do not currently have the infrastructure, staff and expertise necessary to take full advantage of social media’s potential
Nonprofit executives (83%) understand that social media makes it easier for supporters to organize independently – underscoring how critical it is for nonprofits to demonstrate their value and relevance to advocates
Ultimately, for most nonprofit executives (79%), the true value of social media has yet to be determined for their organizations
The findings of this research offer insights into how nonprofits and foundations can optimize their use of social media in the future.
Successful nonprofit organizations will:
Move from experimentation to implementation of strategic programs that drive digital engagement
Focus on two-way conversations that build meaningful and sustainable connections with a range of priority audiences
Invest in social media capacity as a means of achieving brand building, advocacy and fundraising goals
Demonstrate their unique impact to underscore relevance to advocates
Measure social media with key metrics for visibility, engagement and advocacy
The survey looked at results and numbers and concludes that social media is not very effective and that midsize organizations should not waste time or effort. The survey was implemented between July 2008 and March 2009 - and the results presented here are focused on impact metrics
In terms of fundraising and attracting volunteers, metrics that most
nonprofit boards and executive directors highly value, the available
evidence suggests that social media is not very effective. To be fair,
that evidence is limited. To date, there are only two surveys that we
know of, one which we conducted, that have sought to quantify the
impact of social technologies in terms familiar to executive directors
and boards. In both cases, the results show that social technologies
are not delivering much in terms of fundraising or attracting
volunteers. While advocates of social technologies rightly point out
that these are not the only metrics by which social technologies should
be judged, they are the metrics that the majority of respondents to our
survey cited as driving their participation. Nonetheless, the
overwhelming majority of respondents to our survey say they are going
to increase their investment in the use of social networking.
Certainly there are different motivations of the sponsors of these surveys, different methodologies, and different conclusions.
My opinion is that nonprofits should not ditch their efforts in social media. It takes time to get results, like anything else. You need to listen, engagement, develop relationships, scale within your organization, and have the capacity to implement strategically. This takes time and social media for nonprofits is still in its infancy. There are no silver bullets. The results are in developing listeners and participants
who may later become supporters.
It’s time to set realistic outcomes, look for strategic efficiencies, and define and share best practices. I don't think it is a good idea to simply dismiss social media. I think it is important to have the conversation, but don't look at ROI in such a narrow - dollars only. Look at the missed opportunity costs of not participating - as well as take it as an opportunity to look at everything you're doing and figure out what isn't working and try social media in its place. It also important to keep measuring and improving.
What does your nonprofit think? Social media forget about it or move forward but implement strategically? Do you think social media is a waste of time for your organization or a technique in the early stages that needs more time to mature?
Update: The researchers responded that their conclusion was that midsize nonprofits should not use social media for fundraising. Sure didn't get that from the title. Further clarification point:
I think
the most interesting "alternative" view of the data we collected is how
many orgs reported no success on the metrics that they initially cared
about but that they were planning on investing more. There are two
possibilities to explain that: 1) they are caught up in shiny object
syndrome and thinking "the reason it's not working is we haven't
invested enough", or 2) they are finding value other than what they
expected and that value is enough to justify increased investment.
This is a point I make over and over again - use the right metrics. Social media metrics - particularly in the early stages of use - are softer ones - like learning and adapting, and engagement. Once you've engagement full measure, then start counting conversions.
With the big holiday charitable giving season just around the corner, there's a host of cause-related giving campaigns waiting in software launch and nonprofits gearing up for their end-of-the-year efforts. Some campaigns will launch soon, while others have already swung into action.
After last week's social media workshop, a gentleman from a local nonprofit came up to me and said, "Well this social media stuff is all fine and good for large national advocacy organizations, but it is not very relevant for small or regional organizations with really tight resources."
Whenever I get this question, I wonder myself. Is social media appropriate or relevant for smaller nonprofits organizations? Would about mid-size organizations? Should they stay away? What is the opportunity cost of not participating?
Today, I got an email from a blog reader, Cindy Williams, who is the founder of a nonprofit, Teaching Hands. They are located in Boise, Idaho. Cindy's nonprofit teaches kids and adults to knit hats and sweaters for less fortunate people in their community. Cindy wrote:
"A couple of months ago I was reading an article about Twitter and went to your blog. At the time was getting my feet on the ground with social networking. I set-up a Twitter account, forgot it, figured a waste of time, until now. I connected with @chrisvoss and learned from his videos how to use Twitter to help my organization.
Today, we are listed as #21/100 from Twitterholic in Boise, Id. From my knowledge we are the only nonprofit in the top 100. We have people around the world talking with us. Building bridges with other nonprofits around the world. We received our first business hiring us as their charity of choice to send proceeds to.
Thank you, for encouraging the little guy like me to tackle social networking. "
So, if your thinking that social media is just for corporate giants and fancy flash web sites to support national campaigns or chains and has no value if you doing work in your local community - think again. Be like Cindy Williams and give it a try.
What do you have to lose with small low risk investment?
What do you have lose by having the conversation?
What is the cost of not participating?
And, if you are small organization and have succeeded, I want to hear about it.
Leave a comment sharing how you're using social media to support your organization's work in a local community or regional effort and using a shoe string budget to do it. And, if you could win a copy of "Twitter for Dummies" that the good folks from Wiley just sent me.
Update: Julio disagrees. He feels that small nonprofits should "just say no" to social media and focus their limited resources elsewhere. I think they should open the conversation and look at what they're doing, what's working and start experiment. It's possible get started without a major investment. What's the opportunity cost?
Last week, I had the opportunity facilitate a "Social Media Strategy Map" workshop for over 100 Bay Area nonprofits. The workshop was hosted by Compasspoint, with support from the Lucile and David Packard Foundation.
I don't get an opportunity to do this workshop with a large group, so this was fabulous learning experience to work out some techniques to make it scale. And they worked! I wanted to capture a couple of reflections on the process as well as content learnings by way of this post.
Ant Trails As Learning Opportunities
One of the things that is essential to good instruction (or presentation) is knowing your audience. Every time I present or facilitate a workshop, I review the web sites and social media ant trails (social media properties) of participants.
This takes a lot of time because I'm not just browsing, but I'm doing a pattern analysis for best practices that I can incorporate into a presentation about social media principles and nonprofits. I think people are more likely to pay attention if they know that they might in the presentation. Also, it allows for a more interactive discussion because participants can share their knowledge. It's a shift from sage on the stage instruction to honoring the learners for what they know.
A couple things I discovered by following participants' ant trails:
The Bay Versus the Bay: This was an excellent example of how social media strategy can support behavior change or action. Some really good design points. For example, note their call to action right on the YouTube video. They were able to share some insights about how they track the success of this effort.
ACLU-Northern California: They are recruiting for a social media intern on Facebook. They used "tagging" on Facebook to make people aware of the note. The note itself is an excellent job description for a social media intern. This prompted a thoughtful discussion about to effectively manage social media interns.
The Valley Medical Foundation: This organization provided an example of the personal versus organizational voice issue that social media often brings up. They shared how they worked through this internally.
Robot Voice Disguiser for Large Group Facilitation
I was lucky enough to be working with good folks at Compasspoint (Nelson Layag, Sue Bennett, and Sierra Catcott) who are experienced facilitators and workshop leaders. They brought along their chimes which are a great tool for getting people's attention when they are working in pairs or small groups. My son lent me his Robot Voice Disguiser which was good for an opening laugh, but the chimes were preferable. It makes me wonder about the various techniques for getting people to shift attention from small group to large group.
I've done this game enough times to know that one key to success is making sure the small groups have people with knowledge of communications plans, hands-on experience with the tools, someone who can facilitate the discussion, and people with hands-on experience using the tools. I've used a couple of techniques to accomplish this and they worked.
Using a google form, I sent a pre-survey that asked detailed questions about social media experience, communications planning, budget size, and job role. On the name tags, we indicated people with social media experience with a "T" and those with communications planning experience a "C." We made sure that these folks were not all seated at the same table - having them spread their experience through the room so there was a C and T at each table.
I also created a stand up, sit down exercise. One part included having people stand if they had a formal or informal communications plan/strategy (half the room) -and then had them sit down in waves to determine formal communications, Internet strategy, and social strategy. There were only a handful of people who had a formal communications plan with a social media strategy.
Next, to ensure that all the people who very comfortable with social media aren't seated at the same table, we did the spectra gram. I learned this technique from Allen Gunn who uses it during Penguin Day. I have people line up from "very comfortable" to "not so comfortable" and facilitate a conversation. Then, had them count off by table numbers.
Wikitation: A wikitation (word coined by Allan Levine, Cogdog Blog) is a wiki that you use to share you presentation slides and links. I used the wiki to take notes and add resources on the fly that come up during Q/A. The wiki becomes an electronic flip chart and resource collector. What's nice is that allows you save paper and be a little bit green, although you do need a couple of key paper handouts (instructions/cards). The wikitation for this workshop is here.
What's the Hash Tag? With more and more people tweeting, I announce at the beginning what the hashtag is and encourage workshop tweeting. I've be using a tool called "What the Hash Tag" that easily aggregates tweets into a transcript. Monitoring the tag stream during the workshop provides a backchannel for people in the room and allows for remote participation.
Revising the Cards/Game Aspect
As my own learning and thinking about social media and nonprofits has evolved, so have the principles and strategies. This has had an impact on the design of the cards, game instructions, etc. I spent a lot of time last week tweaking the point system on the tool cards to guide better strategy decisions. It worked, but the strategy framework itself needs to be rethought.
The first iteration of the strategy cards consisted only of online approaches and was scaled based on amount of time (listening, participate, share story, generate buzz, and online community building). The tools aligned to the components. I've evolved this to engage/listen, social content, spreading buzz, movement building, and offline impact and more fluidity in choice of tools, also adding new ones. A concept framework for strategy could be tweaked further and I have some ideas.
We had enough time so we could use the "life happens" cards where groups lose or win points based on a real life situation. You know, resistance, staff turnover, lack of resources, etc. The groups were thrilled to win points. So, it is making me think that I need to revise the "life happens" to win points if they solve the problem in their strategy.
Report Out Technique
With such a large group, I thought ten reports using the same scenario would be deadly boring. So, we had three scenarios and 3-4 tables working on each scenario. I did the reports out for each scenario which worked really well. People really got into the making up the context part. For example, one of the organizations all of sudden had a famous rap star alumni who made YouTube videos for the organization's campaign.
I asked each to report out and I listened for three things:
What was a best practice or innovative idea and acknowledge it?
Ask a strategy question about something that was missing?
What specific how to resource would be useful to know about?
Is there a tactical tip to share?
We ended with a reflection about what they will take back to the organizations and, of course, I brought along some extra books I've been sent to do a big social media book giveaway (shared myself some postage costs!)
All in all - I can say that I learned a lot and hope participants did too!
Last week we invited people to help us crowd source a Hollywood Ending for the WeAreMedia Wiki. We've spent the last 18 months focused on how social media can support communications and fundraising strategies and now it is time to turn attention to program delivery and other issues.
And you responded with your thoughts! But I wondered, is there a larger frame?
Kismet!
David La Piana released a report last week on the "Next Nonprofit" Blog taking a look at how five key trends are helping shape a new social sector. The trends are:
• Demographic Shifts Redefine Participation • Technological Advances Abound • Networks Enable Work to Be Organized in New Ways • Interest in Civic Engagement and Volunteerism Is Rising • Sector Boundaries Are
According to the executive summary in the report:
This exploration of the five key trends yielded important learnings: While each dynamic has profound implications for how nonprofits will do business in the future, it is their interplay that will transform the sector.
The insight that resonated most was a paragraph in the summary about the importance of rapid experimentation and learning is to the future of nonprofits. I just have to quote it:
For the nonprofit sector to survive and thrive, everyone — nonprofits, funders and capacity builders alike — must become futurists. This does not mean predicting the future (an impossible task if ever there was one) but instead means being attuned to rapid and continual shifts in the environment; continually evaluating and interpreting how organizations can best adapt; and experimenting with new responses and approaches. Being a futurist requires both individual and institutional curiosity, and a willingness to take risks. No one of us can afford to rest on our laurels, assuming that the old ways of doing business will continue to serve us in this dramatically new and ever-changing environment. Nor can we rely on external experts, scholars or think tanks to map the road ahead for us — it is our responsibility to envision and shape the future for ourselves, our organizations and our society.
The section about technology and social media describes a few key projects and trends. Technology, which is a significant driver of change, also affords powerful tools for collective thinking and
action to position the sector to be proactive — not reactive — regarding the trends outlined in the report. What I found most thought provoking were the questions we should ask about technology in charting the future.
One, in particular, very relevant to question we're asking right now as part of the WeAreMedia project:
• What if the sector employed social media tools to engage both professionals and volunteers in designing new approaches to service or program delivery?
Have some thoughts? Add them to the WeAreMedia wiki here.
Twitter has been rolling out new features for its web interface to small groups to get feedback and then onto full roll out. It did this with Twitter Lists. Over the weekend, I noticed that Twitter's beta retweet feature was available on my account and played around with it.
Brian Solis picks out what's interesting about it.
The new retweet feature is particularly interesting as it organizes
your experience directly at Twitter.com much in the same way
third-party clients such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic have offered all
along. Unlike these desktop applications however, Twitter.com remains
as the pervasive interface
for engaging on Twitter. For example, your lists, real-time search
results, DMs, Twitter stream, and now retweets are key pillars to the
personal experience at Twitter.com. For most users, the new retweet
functionality, combined with important, cached searches (including your
username), the need to stray from Twitter’s online hub begins to
dissipate.
The new feature makes re-tweeting a single step versus a two-step process. What I don't like about it is that I can't add my own two cents about Tweet. By making it so easy to retweet messages will this cause an explosion of too much information on Twitter?
I thought about Woodsy Owl.
Woodsy
has been USDA Forest Service's environmental champion since
1970, and is most recognized for his wise request, "Give a hoot. Don't
Pollute." That was before we had to deal with the amount of digital
information we deal with
daily from our email, Twitter, and social streams. So, give a hoot, don't retweet pollute.
And with more retweets, the more likely it is that you will see duplicate retweets. This points to the need for more filters better at filtering than our human brains or relying on changes of human behavior. Louis Gray recently reviewed a new product under development, called Cadmus. It filters your real time streams to group similar posts in your
feeds to reduce the noise. The service currently works on your Twitter account, your FriendFeed account, or on any number of blogs you add. You can also add many RSS feeds at once via OPML.
This is on my list for 2010, to take a deeper dive in filtering tools. Maybe I'm just behind on getting fluent on filtering tools and thus finding the duplication annoying.
What filtering tools are you using to avoid information overload or "too much retweeting"?
About an hour ago I noticed a Tweet from Andy Carvin, NPR's Social Media Guru and social media disaster volunteer coordinator:
Please retweet: Online volunteers needed to help prep for Hurricane Ida, updating HurricaneWiki.org, etc: http://bit.ly/2lPQkr
I also received a follow up email with more details:
So it looks like we're going to get a hurricane after all this season.
Ida is expected to make landfall on the Gulf Coast near the
Alabama/Florida border late Monday or early Tuesday. I've already
started updating the feeds on the homepage to aggregate Ida-related
information, but there are still some tasks to be done.
Most importantly, we need to update the wiki: http://hurricanewiki.org.
We need volunteers to review the wiki section by section and make sure
that there are resources collected for Florida, Alabama, Mississippi
and Louisiana. Much of this was done last year but it can't hurt to be
sure it's up to date. If you plan to work on a section of the wiki,
please let us know which one.
Next, we need to identify useful Twitter accounts so I can begin
aggregating them using the new Twitter Lists feature. If you come
across any useful Twitter accounts related to Ida - local news
accounts, weather spotters, volunteers, local orgs, etc - please add
them to the wiki here:
If you can help out in the next 48 hours, please let Andy know by responding to this thread.
Last summer, during the height of the hurricane season, Andy Carvin, interrupted his self-imposed
summer blogging siesta, to help organize online efforts and coordinate
volunteers in advance of Hurricane Gustav. He set up a Ning site Hurricane Information Center. This site worked much like Katrina Aftermath, with aggregations of content generated by the public, news orgs and
govt agencies.
I've just come across another site/platform that is designed for aggregating information for emergencies and they have also established a Hurricane Ida Information Site. Well, off to do my micro-volunteer task for the day and add it here.
