Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Deliberative Democracy at Work in North Quabbin, Massachusetts

Photo from Audience Works

Hands Across North Quabbin Network (HANDS) serves the nine-town North Quabbin region of north central Massachusetts and is a deliberative democracy project that seeks to bring members of the nine town North Quabbin community together to form a solution to community problems.  Many local communities often can't get to solutions because of attack politics that divide people,wastes energy,keeps many people from running for elected office, builds cynicism and allows pressing problems to go unsolved. To reduce polarization and strengthen local democracy, HANDS is experimenting with methods to help residents with competing ideas find common ground over how to address the tough problems they care most about, like education, jobs, housing, crime, health care, land-use and taxes.

The Hands project is a top 20 finalist for the Make It Your Own Awards, a grants program that forgoes the traditional grant application model to embrace a more grassroots, "citizen-centered" approach to seeking funding. After selecting the top 20 ideas from an initial 100 announced this past October, the Case Foundation is now inviting America to get online and vote for the Final Four, each of whom will be awarded an additional $25,000 in grant dollars to help realize their dreams.

Voting is happening online at www.miyo.casefoundation.org/vote.

Here's but one example of how this process works.   On Saturday May 3, from 10:00 to 4:00 at Mahar High School in Orange MA, HANDS will hold an "Action Forum" where participants will first identify a priority community problem, then spend the rest of the day developing the rough outlines of an action plan for addressing the underlying causes of that problem. Everyone living in the North Quabbin or affiliated with organizations serving the North Quabbin is welcome to attend. 
   

HANDS is sponsored by six North Quabbin organizations: The Ralph C. Mahar Regional School District; Athol-Royalston Regional School District; the Athol Area Interfaith Clergy Association; Orange Ministerial Association; Athol Lions Club; and the Institute for Community Building. HANDS was founded by representatives of these organizations who saw a crying need to revitalize the North Quabbin region's democracy so that it has a stronger capacity to meet the increasingly complex challenges our area is facing and is likely to face in the future.


The Case Foundation selected HANDS' Deliberative Democracy Project from a nationwide pool of nearly 5,000 applications evaluated not only on subject matter, but on their strength as examples of "citizen-centered" change. All top 20 finalists have already received $10,100 and one year's worth of counsel from a Case Foundation Social Investment Manager.
   
"The Make It Your Own Awards" said HANDS Network Coordinator Mark Shoul, "has really helped make possible the HANDS founder's idea of revitalizing our region's democracy. Not only will our project improve the community, but it will provide a chance for citizens to come together to make a difference as a group. We truly appreciate the Case Foundation's help with this project and their belief in our ability to make it happen.  We're excited to keep building on the lessons we've learned about gaining community support for our efforts."

Do you have something similar in your community?  How does it work?  What are the secrets to success to finding a solution that works for all?

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Carie Lewis, Human Society

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Notes

ABOUT ME
My name is Carie and I’m the Internet Marketing Manager for The Humane Society of the United States.
I run the org’s web 2.0 and online advertising campaigns.
I love animals and I love the internet, and I’m a self-proclaimed social networking junkie.

ABOUT THE ORG
The HSUS is the nation’s largest and most powerful animal protection organization.
Our mission is “celebrating animals, confronting cruelty.”
We’ve been responsible for bringing animal cruelty and animal welfare related issues into the media spotlight and on the minds of average Americans.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN
What Vick did was a horrible thing, and dogfighting is a dispicable crime. It’s now a felony in all 50 states
But this case brought dogfighting into the spotlight and raised awareness to people that may have never heard of it before.
Since this brought dogfighting into the spotlight and put it on the minds of many Americans, we figured it was a good time to reach out to people.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN
People were buzzing about the issue online and obviously outraged by their comments. We could tell by all the comments and images floating around.
We wanted to take that energy and give people an outlet to express their feelings about michael vick and dogfighting in general.
We wanted to be creative and capitalize on the media attention to bring dogfighting into the spotlight.
We wanted low cost and high impact

WHAT CAMPAIGN
In the middle of the Vick dogfighting drama, we launched a UGC campaign called the “Knock Out Animal Fighting YouTube Contest”
An Integrated campaign using website, email, social networking, video sharing, TV

PROCESS - contest
Asked people to go to our website to learn about the contest
Create videos about how they and their pets felt about dogfighting
Then, they uploaded it as a video response to our dogfighting video and filled out our submission form

PROCESS - contest
We picked a winner and also allowed people to vote for their favorite, generating a people’s choice winner
This gave people who didn’t or werent able to participate by creating a video a way to be engaged – important with higher-engagement leveled UGC campaigns

PROCESS - marketing
Email
Website
Social networks
Web badges
Blogger outreach

OUTCOMES
Both tangible & intangible
Increase list members (we don’t spend money on online marketing unless its tied to a donation, advo, or other list building campaign. That way can recoup the $ spent and justify time spent. Great thing about online marketing – trackable
Raise awareness – youtube video views
Get original contest – videos
Encourage engagement - # of votes for people’s choice award. High engagement contest – to be able to make a video – engaged in issue and also have equipment

OUTCOMES - tangible
Number of video submissions
Number of new list members from video / voting page advo (worth = $3 per list member)
Number of page views to the winners announcement on HSUS.org
Number of votes for people’s choice award
Number of youtube video views of winning submission

MEASUREMENT TOOLS - tangible
Sourced links for new list names from marketing – to quantify ROI
Page views from our stats program & Video view count from youtube – to quantify exposure
Time spent on page & Vote count from poll program – to quantify engagement

PROCESS / STRATEGY
Measuring buzz
-link love – google syntax to show you who’s linking to you
-referring URLs in stats program
-google rss alerts (can be set to daily, as it happens, etc.) – good for time-sensitive response (answer questions, defense, etc)
-do a regular google search for related terms
- Pr / newspaper coverage
Friend recruitment (TAF)
- bulletin reposts on myspace
Not just number, but quality of blogslook at technorati and alexa rankings

PROCESS / STRATEGY
Top 10 referrers were all from mail programs – aol and yahoo
Indicates that people were forwarding in order to share

MEASUREMENT TOOLS - intangible
# blogs / websites mentions and links
# comments on social networks / blogs
# related inquiries
# RSS subscribers (n/a)
Rating of youtube video
Comment content
Keywords leading to page to define interests
Referring sites (count, quality) to find out where people are coming from
Friend request / commenting trends in relation to other activities

WHAT I LEARNED FROM THIS CAMPAIGN - GOOD
people’s choice involvement
Timing w/ media
Using youtube – technical support on their end, cost effective, mainstream venue, increasing video views (it was on the homepage)

WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN?
How do you know if it was successful? If the numbers are good? If it was worth your time?
Time spent = amount of outreach compared to number of venues
We do not use a formula to determine if a social media campaign was successful. We also do not track time – everything is an estimate.
Did you build a relationship with a blogger that will cover your stuff in the future?
Media coverage - Tv, blogs, newspapers

Was it worth it?Youtube UGC – yes – we had to start somewhere
Made a TV PSA that otherwise we would have had to pay to get an agency to do.
We learned - were running a flickr contest right now that takes lessons learned from wendys and has been successful.

KEY TAKEAWAYS ABOUT ROI, MEASUREMENT, and METRICS for nonprofits using social media
If you or your boss are stuck on time spent ROI, track as you go.
Pick one link and market it for consistency – will be easier to track – use a vanity URL. and have all resources available (related press release, web story, etc.)
One person to know where all the moving parts can be brought together to evaluate in the end. Also helps for communicating with UGC contestants and winners.
Disclose policies in contest rules - this is the easiest way to incorporate list building in UGC campaigns is to disclose that all entrants will be auto added to your email list and can unsubscribe at any time.
Next time, we’re thinking of having a celebrity judge so that we can collaborate with them and generate more excitement about submissions.
Most of my time was spent doing contest logistics since this was our first contest. Next time put more time into creating buzz.

The complete panel notes can be found here.

 

Women Who Tech Conference: Social Media Hot or Not? My Slides

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Later today, I am speaking on a panel at the WomenWhoTech Conference

Web 2.0: Hot Or Not? 5:15 PM EST Twitter! Facebook! Ning!

Panelists share their opinions on the latest trends in Web 2.0 and how organizations can effectively use them to build community as well as as how to measure the real ROI’s.

Panelists: Heather Holdridge, Care2.com, Connie Reece, Social Media Club and Frozen Pea Fund, Beth Kanter Moderator: Allyson Kapin, Women Who Tech and Rad Campaign

Some participants blogged about the webinar
Christine Martell
Jill Foster
Connection Cafe

Rest in Peace Dith Pran: We Will Not Forget

As we were boarding the plane to Florida, I read a tweet from Ben Greenberg and was saddened to learn that Dith Pran, of the Killing Fields fame, had passed away.  When we decided to adopt from Cambodia, we tried to learn as much as possible about the country.  We read books and rented movies (including the Killing Fields).   

Little did we know that one year after bringing home our first child, we'd get an opportunity to meet Dith Pran at a Cambodian New Year's Celebration in Rhode Island.  Dith Pran came to a New Year's Celebration at a friend's home that included many children adopted from Cambodia.  He was very excited to meet the kids and spent a lot of time with us, the parents. He talked about his campaign against genocide everywhere.  The quote from the New York Times obit says it all:

“One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”

In those days, I kept a manual blog.  Here's the blog post I wrote about Harry meeting Dith Pran and the Year of the Snake Cambodian New Year's Celebration.  I remember showing Dith Pran my digital camera and he showed him nikon digital camera.  He gave me a photography tips.

 

I sent him the photo above that I snapped him holding Harry.  Harry did not cooperate.   I made a copy of the email thank you note for Harry and some day he will understand the great mean that held him at age 1.

Minnesota Nonprofits and Technology Conference Keynote: Slides

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Audience feedback here.

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: ROI of Listening, Wendy Harmon, Red Cross

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ROI of Listening

NTC Presentation Notes
3.20.2008

Slide 1
Introduction: Even liberal arts kids can measure. It’s not all about math. You can measure stories and connections through documentation, too.

Slide 2
American Red Cross background: Post Katrina, ARC knew there were negative blog posts about it but had no capacity to respond or even monitor. Hired social media integrator to “combat” bloggers and to increase organizational transparency.

Slide 3
Listening is the What: First order of business to get handle on existing conversation. Hundreds of mentions across social media platforms each day. Exponential increase in times of disaster, nature, man-made and PR varieties. We monitor and track all of it, and respond to a lot of it.

Slide 4
Why We Listen : ARC wanted to correct misinformation, to be informed about public opinion, to track conversation trends, to identify influencers, to create relationships.

Slide 5
Outcome of Listening:
Successfully correcting misinformation
Able to track conversation trends (for example, know that most people who post about blood donation also mention type of cookie they receive afterwords – this informs advertising, PR outreach to increase blood donations)
Instead of “combating” bloggers, found most are passionate and positive and want to help, so now engaging them and giving them tools to tell their stories on big platform.

Slide 6
Outcome of Listening:
ADOPTION: Sharing social media mentions internally is increasing ARC employee social media adoption
CUSTOMER SERVICE: Compiled data for each line of service (Blood, Disaster Response, International Services, Health & Safety, Service to Armed Forces, Preparedness) with info regarding various aspects of customer service and the “end user experience.”
STRATEGY: Able to inform PR strategy example: J&J sues ARC for trademark infringement, monitoring real time mentions informed immediate strategy.

Slide 7
Listening Process Step 1: The search
Not rocket science – just keyword search across social media platforms, lots of em (Technorati for blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Terraminds, Facebook, etc).
If have special circumstance, use special additional keywords to track. For example, did lots of J&J searches during first days of trademark lawsuit.

Slide 8
Listening Process Step 2: Blog Update
Cull all of the daily mentions into a daily update email that’s distributed widely to internal ARC audience.
Compile by line of service and/or subject matter, depending on day’s news.
Note which posts I need help answering, consult with subject matter experts.
Generally keeps everyone abreast of daily conversation.

Slide 9
Listening Process Step 3: Response
Determine who will get a response, whether it’s a thanks or something that needs fixing/addressing.
Spend time reading, watching, or looking at the other content before responding.
Use judgment in avenue of response: email, comment, or leave it alone.

Slide 10
Listening Process Step 4: Tagging
Tag all posts mentioned in the Daily Blog Update by line of service and other appropriate keywords
Over time, evaluate areas where people find their intersection with the Red Cross to be compelling enough to post about publicly.
Good for tracking past outreach

Slide 11
Listening Process Step 5: Reporting
Send monthly update of aggregated conversation data categorized by line of service or disaster or big event
J&J example: We watched mentions to determine where various industries stood so we’d know whether to back off or continue our aggressive PR push to shame them into dropping the suit.

Slide 12
Listening Metric: Authority
Use # of readers and tools like Technorati authority to determine influence of mentions.
Authority matters but is not everything. Sometimes most compelling story or most pressing issue comes from social media user with smallest influence.

Slide 13
Listening Metric: Anecdotal Evidence
Internal Feedback
“The blog update helps me do my job better.”
“Makes me feel more connected to our stakeholders.”
“Helped me understand the power of social media.”
External Feedback
Most one-on-one outreach results in positive public response
“I’m glad to see you here”
“Thanks for reading!”
“You really helped me.”
“Great to interact with a human being over there.”
Write it down!
Document all of the anecdotal evidence of return on investment and keep it in one spot so you can easily grab it when questioned.

Slide 14
Challenges to Measuring ROI of Listening
ARC is stodgy and slow to change. Lots of baby steps are necessary for organization-wide adoption of social media.
Culture shift is huge for this organization. It is happening, but slowly.

Slide 15
Challenges to Measuring ROI of Listening
Firewall. Only a handful of employees are able to access ANY social media sites.
If more employees were able to view and interact, impact of listening would be MUCH broader.
BUT – with some of the evidence here, I’ve nearly convinced senior leadership of need for opening access.

Slide 16
Successes in Measuring ROI of Listening
By documenting the conversation, created value. Everyone wants the feedback now.
Documenting successful one-on-one outreach with stakeholders lays groundwork for future social media campaigns.
Taking the baby step of listening has made the case for integrating appropriate social media tools in all ARC communications – opening the door to 2 way communications department instead of one way.

Slide 17
Successes in Measuring ROI of Listening
By reading and reaching out, created external value as a listener. Send message that you matter as a stakeholder by taking time to listen and incorporate your ideas.
Achieving higher degree of transparency.

Slide 18
Key Learnings in Measuring ROI of Listening
Listening is a gateway drug to increased social media adoption
Easy to aggregate conversations into data to recommend systemic change and to inform organization of trends and possible strategies.
Don’t forget the little guys – they can become passionate influencers with continued relationship building.

I got my N95, now what?

I took the N95-3 plunge recently (so did Amy Gahran).  My goal is to use as a mobile video blogging tool to replace my little Cannon that I use for video blogging.  I hope I don't run into a brick wall, although I'm not going to be using the keyboard.   Steve Garfield shared his learning journal/blog that he set up when he got his Nokia and I'm going to being my exploration this week. Right now the phone has a much different interface and grammar than my treo which I've had for years.  So, there will be a little bit of discomfort zone and learning curve. I've started a separate sandbox for testing and learning here.

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Eve Smith, Easter Seals

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The following is from an NTC 08 Panel called "Social Media ROI Case Study Slam" that I designed and facilitated at NTC.  Here are Eve's slides and her notes.

Hi, I'm Eve Smith, Assistant Director of Interactive Marketing at Easter Seals. I manage our online fundraising campaigns and integrated projects to attract new supporters and donors.

I’m going to share with you what we learned from participating in the recent Facebook Causes Challenge – as I was telling my colleagues before coming to NTEN, this is my “do as I say, not as I do” presentation.

Many of you may have heard of Easter Seals – we’ve been around for nearly 90 years providing help, hope and answers to children and adults with autism and other disabilities and support to the families who love them. We have a network of 80 affiliates in the United States, Puerto Rico and Australia.
When you think of Easter Seals, you may not immediately think of us on Facebook. But we’re there.

Like many of you, we learned about the Case Foundation's Giving Challenges when they were announced in December of this past year. There were 2 challenge competitions -- one with Parade Magazine and the other with Facebook Causes. Both competitions were based on attracting the most unique donors to your cause. The competitions ran from December to February.

We decided to test the waters and participate in the Facebook Causes Challenge. We thought this would be a good way to learn more about Facebook and the community.

We already had a Facebook fan page and a few causes, and we were eager to do more.

This seemed like a good opportunity. And we learned many valuable lessons along the way.

Our goals were pretty simple –

We wanted to identifying and get to know Facebook users who have an affinity with autism – We know they’ll be more likely to become our supporters and donors.

We wanted to see how well known the Easter Seals brand was in Facebook. And, we wanted to gather friends to build our cause and presence in Facebook for future messaging.

Let me just save you all the trouble in the future -- don't ever pick the last few days of a $50K challenge to compete for the daily challenge! The top fundraising orgs going for the $50K grand prize were driving up the daily totals to numbers we couldn’t compete with. 

Seems so obvious now, right, to not pick the last week of the contest for our push?

Learn from our mistake!

We published a post on our public autism blog -- they’re an audience more likely to join the cause.

Because of the tight timeframe, we decided to not solicit our house email list or engage our affiliates. We wanted to keep this a small experiment – we were really testing the concept more than anything else.

And, we know that our house file responds to email over about a three day period, so the single day challenge would have been over by the time many looked at their email.

We personally thanked supporters. But not as much as we should have – the groups who were really successful in the Challenge poked, prodded and motivated their supporters constantly, asking them to reach out to new people.

I estimate we spent about 8 hours in prep for the Cause, and about another 4-6 hours executing the campaign, responding and sending emails.

And based on the results, clearly that wasn’t enough. The results were, frankly, pretty dismal … We didn’t reach our goals or come close.

And we didn’t set a goal for gathering new friends, but we had 68 people join by the end of the 24 hour period which made us happy.

But … based on our experience, we’re on the new measurement train … and have a new way of measuring our effectiveness for these types of experiments.

For example, our Shine the Light on Autism Facebook cause keeps growing and attracting friends, even with little activity on our part. We're up to 163 members. The topic of autism has “stickiness” in Facebook and that’s a good thing for us because we’re launching a new campaign this month.

We’re also in this for the long haul – we’re not just looking for supporters for a day or a month. We want to engage with people for a long time.

We definitely learned some valuable lessons from the Facebook Causes Challenge.

One was we choose the wrong date. Clearly that was an oops.

Second, we learned it was really hard to carve out time from our very full schedules to take on this type of outreach. It was much more of a deep dive, then a toe dip, for sure.

Overall, that’s our big takeaway -- we learned that small experiments like the Facebook Causes challenge really do add up.

We're much better equipped to move ahead with a Facebook strategy than before the challenge.

We understand that its going to take a larger commitment of staff time and resources.

And that we know we weigh the risks and rewards about future experiments.

… So Whether you deep dive or just dip your toe, go ahead and test the water. I think you’ll find it’s just fine…

This is my contact information and I’d be happy to talk more about our work in Facebook and other social networks, and share what we’re learning to do, and not to do.

Thank you.

 

NTC08: Social Media ROI Case Study Slam

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I'm beginning to post the slides and detailed notes from the session at NTC08 here on my blog and on my Social Media Metrics Wikispace.   The introduction set the ground rules and offer these overview points to the what and why of social media ROI.

• What do we mean by metrics, measurement, and ROI?
  

• What are the challenges in measuring the success of social media?
  • A lot of intangibles, but they're important
  • No standardized metrics for social media (yet)
  • Not many tools to make it easy to extract data

• What's important to keep in mind?
  
  
  • Learning is important
  • While numbers are critical, it isn't all about math
  • Need to collect qualitative data re: intangibles
  • Different ways to calculate
  • You may need to do small low risk pilot to figure out what can or cannot be measured for the ROI

Heads Up: The Week Ahead ..

It's been a crazy month of being on the road, workshops, keynotes, and conferences. I've been behind in posting slides and notes from sessions here and many are in draft and a flood will appear shortly. Then, I'm off for a week for a brief break. So there will be lighter blogging except for a few pre-planned posts and perhaps some quick notes about what I'm learning about the N95-3 video camera.

NpTech Tag Summary: 10 Web 2.0 Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes!

Photo by SpacePotato

The NpTech Tag Summary went on hiatus to give some space to
rethink, reinvent. It came back earlier this week in a new format and aggregation process.  I'm moving beyond monitoring the NpTech tagged items and meta feeds to incorporate nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, friend feeds, and USG. The summaries will be briefer, focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice.  Inspiration may come from outside our silo and together we'll remix it ..

Stephen Downes points to Lisa Neal's "Ten Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes To Be A More Successful E-Learning Professional."   He uses the ten things in ten minutes meme and writes the Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional.   So, I'm remixed this memo into Ten Web2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be A Better Nonprofit
Professional 

1.  Set up a twitter account.  Go to the nonprofit twitter pack find and follow ten people who may learn something from.  Use your blog or twitter or whatever tool to solicit practical ideas on how to use social media to make connections.  (Lisa Neal)

2.  Set up Google Alerts to follow what's being said about your organization and cause online so that you can act on what's being said, join the conversation and build your community. (Deborah Zanke) (Jason Shim)

3.  Set up a feed reader for other organizations in your "subject matter area" and comment on a few blog posts a week or the ten most influential blogs in your area. (Gregory Heller) (Sarah Marchetti) (Amy Sample Ward)

4.  Create an OPML of blogs your colleagues on staff might be interested in reading and import it into a reader for them, a starter pack. Or use nonprofit.alltop.com (Sue Waters)   (Allan Benamer)

5. Truly embrace social networking by encouraging your staff, your volunteers, your donors and your Board to join Facebook or Myspace and teach(!) them how to promote your cause. For many in the boomer
bracket, this is all new...but so important to integrate into traditional marketing and fundraising efforts. (Jane Arsenault and Anne Yurasek)

6.  Goto animoto.com and create a :30 video using photos of people, logos, and text related to your cause.  Post that video on your website, any major sharing sites, and social networks -- then encourage people to share the videos far and wide!!  (Tyler Willis)

7. Convince your team members to set up individual bookmarking accounts, agree on a unique tag and start building a bookmarking collection for your organization.  Don't forget to sign up the feeds on the agreed tag
in your RSS reader and to add the del.icio.us application in your Facebook account. Collective bookmarking is an extremely powerful learning tool! (Johannes)

8. Want to know buzz? Use tools like Technorati, Bloglines, and Forum Tracker to monitor what people are
saying about your organization as well as to find new marketing leads to contact with your messages and stories of hope. (Jonathon Coleman)

9. Want inspiration? Search YouTube and Flickr for descriptive keywords that are part of your mission statement to see what your target audiences might find compelling and inspirational. (Jonathon Coleman)

10. Want to learn from the best of the best?  Visit SlideShare and read through great presentations on just about any topic. (Jonathon Coleman)

Bonus Tip

11.  Use new media before pitching new media sources (CarrieBethH)

Okay folks, can we run this up to 100 tips that you can do in ten minutes using Web 2.0 to be a better nonprofit professional?  Here's how you can help:

-If you blog, ask your readers to contribute
-Leave a tip in the comments
-Twitter it at @kanter

The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology.  Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

Internet Marketers Can Change the World by Roger Carr of Everyday Giving

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My colleague, Roger Carr of Everyday Giving has created a great presentation that shows the results of socially networked personal fundraising.

BarCamp in Cambodia?

Last summer it was the Cambodia Blogger's Summit, this year might be BarCamp in Cambodia ....

Ten Web2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be A More Successful Nonprofit Professional

Stephen Downes points to Lisa Neal's "Ten Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes To Be A More Successful E-Learning Professional."   He uses the ten things in ten minutes meme and writes the Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional.   So, I'm remixing this memo into

Ten Web2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be A Better Nonprofit Professional.  I'm only going to write one and then ask the twitterverse to add on to it.

1.  Set up a twitter account.  Go to the nonprofit twitter pack find and follow ten people who may learn something from.   

Marnie Webb's Chicken or Egg Question: Twitter or Blogging?

Yesterday, Marnie Webb asked an interesting question about choice of tools - specifically the choice the question of "Twitter or Blog?" 

Great question.  It was too hard to answer in 140 characters in any depth or without it being misunderstood.    It would be hard to answer this as a comment of a blog post too or if someone was doing a quick poll.  I don't think it is a black of white question, a question of voting on one tool versus other.  I think it depends ...

And, of course, it may also be a both/and answer or neither.

What does the person want to accomplish? 
What types of conversations are they hoping to engage in? 
What type of learning? 
Who are the people they want to talk to? 
What are the preferred communications channels of those people?

Twitter is easy to use because of its simplicity.  The 140 character limit forces you to be succinct and zero in on the essence.  That's a good skill.  The downside is that it can lead to miscommunication or misunderstandings.  And beyond quick information exchange -- if you want a deeper reflective conversation, twitter is not the place to have it.  Summarizing Twitter responses - if you want a facilitated conversation - is not easy, although with tools like this - that may change.

Twitter is great for just-in-time, quick answers.  What's your best tip for x?  What camera should I buy?   Help, I'm stuck in Minneapolis airport, anyone to share a cab? 

A blog is great for more reflective practice.  And while some say it is difficult to track conversations on blogs, it is possible to have a cross blog conversation (it is messy, like conversation threads on Twitter.)   Blogs are also an excellent place to aggregate conversations - on twitter that difficult, although the 08NTC Twitter account helps to do that more effectively.

What do you think?  If you were advising a nonprofit just entering the social media space, in what circumstances would recommend one versus other?  What questions would you ask?  What advice would you give?

Summary of Responses

Hayduke suggests the question should be Twitter or Facebook and points to video above.

Amelia Murphy suggests both - Twitter good for short ideas and blogging for more fleshed out ideas.

Netwoman says I've been blogging much less, but not necessarily only because of twitter...SNS take up a lot of time. X-post tools are essential.

Socialbuttrfly says I just asked this same question yesterday after reading a post about 'how twitter is hurting my blogging"

CoreyPud says like you said, depends on your goals @rosevines has a great case where they are getting sis Helen Prejean to twit rather than blog

Nina Simon says "On Twitter I'm a voice, on my blog, I'm an authority"

Why Short Is Tweet from Jeff Jarvis

What are your best tips for wiki adoption for new users?

At the Message + Medium + Mission Conference in Minnesota, I did an afternoon session using the Social Media Game created by David Wilcox.   One of the techniques I did during the report out of the small groups was throw questions out on Twitter.   There were some fabulous responses.

One group came up with an idea about using a wiki for internal collaboration.  So I asked on Twitter, what is your best wiki adoption tip for internal collaboration?

Here's the responses:

Laura Whitehead suggested reading this article about wiki collaboration and happiness

Ted Fickes (note the dog in the avatar)  I'm trying to use relatively high profile project for wiki-type adoption internally. Or there is prize

Eduardo Jezierski "Build a sense of what to shape the wiki into, a goal, beyond a dumpster. I'd borrow, steal & give credit.

Watford Gap: wiki adoption tip - everyone in the org can share thier stories and buildup a collaborative picture of what they do - any good?

Csuspect: Only send links around via email to wiki pages. i.e. Can you email me the job desc? Sure! Here's the wiki link, edit it there please.

Peter Campbell prep, don't give newbies a blank page; rewrite how-to's in simple format for basic editing/linking.  Wikis aren't intuitive

EricaG Categories & crossreferencing. Otherwise easy to lose track of where you've documented what in an internal wiki

davidLeeking give all staff access, make it easy, say you want their contributions

Seth Schneider Prepopulate the wiki with documents/information that people inherently need to access.

Ericskiff Start by getting line level people to use it one by one. They'll see the utility and it will spread. Slow, but it works!

Kalabird we used google docs wiki-like platform to build our new website's copy decks and implementation plan. start using it and invite others to join. best to start with a project that needs to be accomplished quickly and requires all

bethdunn on the first page, spell everybody's name wrong by just one letter, so they have to go in and fix it.

Greg demos, demos, demos! Once they see how fast you can create a page - they'll be hooked

What is your best tip for wiki adoption in a nonprofit for internal collaboration?

Reflections from the TechSoup Flickr Online Event

A few days ago TechSoup and Flickr sponsored an online event discussion about the use of Flickr and photography in non profit organizations.  Michaela Hackner participated and had some great insights.  She blogged her reflections into one excellent post!  Enjoy!

More from the TechSoup blog.

Digital Natives Speak from Minnesota Conference, I Twitter, Twitterverse Responds

Digital Natives Panel

Elana Wolowitz, Communications Director/Senior Trainer, Wellstone Action gave me a brief interview.

I had the honor of delivering the keynote this morning at the Message + Medium + Mission Conference in Minnesota.  I talked about the Cute Dog Theory of Social Media Adoption, A Few Tools, and A Story about social media and fundraising.  A few minutes before speaking I remembered a Minnesota story about my early years as a executive director for a small organization and using social networking to get Garrison Keillor as our celebrity for a fundraiser.  This speech also had a big first for me and the reaction was shock, then laughter.

I went to a morning session called "Digital Youth and Analogue Adults" facilitated by Garham Heartley which includes a panel of digital natives talking about what young employees should expect of their nonprofit employer as it relates to technology.  It also covered the differences in technology styles of digital natives  compared to analogue adults or can old dog learn new tricks? It was a fantastic bi-generational question. 

Some  Key Takeaways:

• Learning styles are really important and it isn't just about age/generations, although in general younger people may more fearless. (Twitter Comment)
• Passion is important!  People will forgive. 
• The social media strategy implementation shouldn't just be delegated to the young people or interns in the office. (Twitter Comment)
• Look beyond the technology of a younger age
• Don't dump the role of tech support on the younger more fearless people - especially if it is not in their job description.
• When digital natives are giving tech support, understand how much of the why versus how the person needs and have patience. (Twitter Comment)
• Having job descriptions that have skills like "the ability learn" versus specific technical skills. (Twitter Comment)
• Have a conversation with people about what channels they prefer for communications  (Twitter Comment)
• Digital natives have the capacity to take in more information at a faster pace and "older folks in the workplace" don't understand that (Twitter Comment)

I twittered the whole session and the conversation back from Twitter was pretty amazing.   I asked for Best Practices for working with analogue adults.  RoseVines responded:

Blog post "Embracing My Digital Youth"
Reflections from Aaron Landry and Corporate Babysitter and Blandin Broadband

Vote now for video contest on Immigrant Rights

[Via Will Coley ...My *funny* video is a finalist in this contest (#3) and I'd love to get more folks to see it and the other entries. The deadline for voting is March 31. Thanks for your great work! ]

The Movement Vision Lab Video Contest — Cast Your Vote!

The Movement Vision Lab received a dozen entries in their first ever video contest.  And now it's your turn to weigh in and tell them which ones you like most, as they decide which to award the $1000 prize to.

The Movement Vision Lab staff has winnowed down the entries to their top five.  Check them out below --- and log-in to the Movement Vision Lab and post a comment on this page saying which video you like most and why.  OR you can vote directly on the You Tube pages via the links.  The comment period will last two weeks, and then they'll announce the winner!  So tell them what you think today!

Remember, the contest is about Immigration and Community Values.  Vote for the video that you think best tells America that, immigrants and citizens alike, we're all in it together!

So, without further ado, the finalists (in no particular order) CLICK HERE: http://www.movementvisionlab.org/blog/your-votes-community-values-immigration-video-contest

An Act of Reciprocity got Cisco

The good folks at Cisco supported the NTEN/NTC Day of Service in New Orleans (read about it).  So when their PR agency asked me to blog about this event, it got high on my random acts of kindness list.

Join Cisco for a fascinating 60-minute video Webcast that reveals how wikis, blogs, social networking, and other Web 2.0 applications are creating a "mass collaboration" paradigm.

Get valuable insights and practical game plans from the thought leaders in Web 2.0 applications, including:

Don Tapscott, coauthor of "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research's Senior Analyst for Social Computing

Robert Scoble, new Managing Director of FastCompany.TV and author of "How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk to Customers"

The Webcast airs April 3rd, 2008 at 10am PST.  Click here for more information.

 

Is Happiness Only A Warm Puppy or Two?

Photo by Emarquetti

Via the Convio blog, "Can Money Buy Happiness" points to some research from Harvard Business School and the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, that suggests that how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn.  The study, published this week in the journal Science, was featured in an article in the Monday, March 21 edition of The Boston Globe. The article and study, Money makes you happy - if you spend it on others, suggests that money, spent on other people can make you happier.

That was the 4th or 5th reference to happiness that I've seen in the last month.  Tara Hunt has a Happiness Workshop slide show.  And, this slide show above the Happiness Foundation.  And Dave McClure's thoughts on securitizing happiness.  Not sure what it all means, but thought I'd just acknowledge the pattern I'm seeing.

Help Caminos Rebuild!

Via my colleague Rachel Weidinger ..

Staff of this org are friends of mine (and neighbors)...any help/ coverage/ support of this devastating fire at a digital divide-bridging nonprofit on Valencia Monday night would rock.  I donated $100 and plan to donate more. 
Caminos, when they have a classroom, provides tech training to low-income Latina immigrants--and only for women. Students often start not knowing how to turn on a computer, and end up with assorted Microsoft Certifications, or starting design businesses.  Serious learning goes on here, and all in Spanish,

Twitter had great coverage of the fire as it happened thanks to density of Twitter users in the Mission, but I only learned today that Caminos was destroyed..they lost everything.

The fire yesterday evening ravaged               our building. We walked into our classrooms to find that all of               our 40 computers in the computer lab where rendered unusable due               to the extensive water damage. We will have to replace all of our               computer equipment, which will be costly for CAMINOS. Our server               alone was $3,500! CAMINOS will also have to find a temporary home               from where to continue our computer training and work force development.

Set up this Facebook Cause for the cool kids: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/causes/73459
Donations accepted most directly at Paypal here: http://tinyurl.com/29axh9
 
Thank you for any support you can lend.  I want Laura and Petra to know they're not alone.  Laura, the Executive Director of Caminos is cc'd above, as is Alfredo Pedroza in the Mayor's Office. They can provide additional details, if you need them.

Yahoo! Supports OpenSocial; Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to Form Non-Profit OpenSocial Foundation

 

Back in November when Open Social was announced, we had a round of discussions in the NpTech space that summarized on my blog.  Just saw a press release from Yahoo, Google, and MySpace about OpenSocial Foundation.

For now, here's the basics culled from the press release, official blog posts, and blog commentary.

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

The official blog posts from Yahoo and Google
Yodel Annecdotal
Google Blog

Lots of folks covering the announcement:
Read/Write Web
FaceReviews (includes analysis)
Examples of apps built on opensocial (ugh, Shelfari)

Marketing Pilgrim adds:

Facebook is steadily refusing to participate in OpenSocial or the foundation, choosing instead to support Facebook developers. Facebook is credited with starting and fueling the development of social network applications.

Google is emphasizing that OpenSocial is a community effort (or as Mozilla puts it, “a public benefit”) and not for Google’s benefit only. In true form, it has a web site (OpenSocial.org) built on Google’s new Google Sites platform. There’s also a Blogger blog for OpenSocial.

OpenSocial is creating a common API that works on multiple websites. According to the site: “The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.”

Nick from Social Times adds:

My biggest problem with the standard so far has been that it’s not easy! There are multiple standards that must be supported to launch your application on MySpace and other social networks so far. It appears that this new foundation will focus on bringing together the community to help further the OpenSocial standard. A statement from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

I look forward to reading what other nonprofit folks think the implications, if any, for nonprofits.  If you are the Internet marketing person or responsible for your organization's web strategy, how does this impact your strategy?

A Flickr Best Practice from TechSoup Event

Today, I'm co-hosting an online event on TechSoup about Flickr with Heather Camp, Flickr Community Manager.   I love online discussions with a mix of experience.  I just learned something really important from colleague Michaela Hackner about uploading.

I think there is a benefit of uploading only 4-6 photos at a time because your followers only see the last 4 images you've posted anyway. Sharing a few photos at a time helps you be more thoughtful about captions, tags, and categorizing, and gives people a chance to catch up on your stream. When I was at the height of my Flickr obsession (and living overseas when I had a lot more time), I limited myself to posting no more than 4 images at a time for this reason.

This event will run today.  Ask questions, share your learning, and learn from others.  Click here participate.

Wired Wealthy, Budha and Freud ....

The connection between these two items are two people, Mark Rovner and Katya Andresen. 

The Wired Wealthy

The first $50,000 fundraising contest I won for the Sharing Foundation was the Yahoo/Network for Good Charity Badge contest in 2007.   (We raised $53,000, plus we got a $50,000 prize).   Do you think the $53,000 came from $10 gifts?  We actually received 2 $5K and one $15K gifts - not to mention a number of $1K.   What was surprised me was they came from people we didn't already have on our radar (yep, we've cultivated them since).   So, the reminder and more data about ways to connect and cultivate your middle and major donors online is a good one.

Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research asked 3,000 donors from 32 nonprofit organizations about their online behaviors and preferences.   I had coffee with Gene Austin at NTC and he told me that the study is available for free but you have to register first to get your copy.

Kami Huyse has a write up of the study, summarizing some of the key findings.

The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We're Forgetting) about Online Outreach

That was the title of a session by Mark Rovner and Katya Andresen at the NTC in New Orleans that I really, really wanted to attend, but was presenting at the same time.  I'm hoping that will put their slides in slideshare.    Thank god Britt Bravo and Michaela Hackner took such terrific notes.

And, while I wishing for slides to magically appear on slideshare, I hope Bill Strathmann will post his slides from his ROI session -- another session that I wanted to attend, but was also presenting.