Social Citizens One Year Later

Just back from the WeMedia conference.  Had a terrific time and will post highlights of my interview with Alberto Ibarguen, President of the Knight Foundation, as soon as I receive them.

As part of my presentation, I wrote a reflection piece on what we’ve learned about Social Citizens in the year or so since the paper was release by The Case Foundation.  This is cross-posted on the Social Citizens blog and here is the entire reflection the paper from the WeMedia site.

Social Citizens One Year Later . .

<p>This time last year we were reading drafts of the Social Citizens paper and wondering whether it was sea worthy, meaning would the findings and assumptions hold up over the course of a few stormy tosses and turns. And now we know the answer: mostly yes. Of course, we missed one big thing coming on the horizon, more than a storm, an economic tsunami really, but, then again, so did everone else!&nbsp;</p>
<p>In preparation for the <a href=”http://www.wemedia.com”>WeMedia</a> conference taking place this week in Miami, I wrote a short reflection piece on the Social Citizens paper a year later.&nbsp; Here is a quick summary of that paper.</p>
<p>Certainly the intensity of interest in social causes, and the rapdity of growth of individual causes and cause events, has continued and perhaps even quickened because of social media. Twitter, the<a href=”http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/”> fastest growing</a> social networking site, has spawned events like <a href=”http://tweetsgiving.org/”>Tweetsgiving</a> and <a href=”http://www.twestival.org”>Twestival</a>, raising thousands of dollars to build schools in Africa and buy drinking wells and filters for clean water worldwide.</p>
<p>But the construct of Social Citizens has also changed throughout the year. One issue in particular that we wrestled with throughout the year was whether Social Citizens are by definition Millennials (ages 15-29). And I think that the answer is, naturally, more complicated at second glance than at first. Not all Millennials are Social Citizens, and not all Social Citizens are Millennials.&nbsp; But there is more movement on the later idea than the former, particularly when you see the <a href=”http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1093/generations-online”>data that the Pew Foundation recently released </a>showing that older people are coming online faster than any other segment of the population.&nbsp; And old in this instance isn’t me (regardless of what my kids say) it means over 75!&nbsp; Your grandparents are on email, your parents are on Facebook, and you’re on Twitter, and we’re all pinging and poking and tweeting about causes. Increasingly, we’re all social citizens.</p>
<p>That’s the good news. Unfortunately the bad news is really bad, the fast sinking economy is the first economic crisis young people have ever faced. Sagging beneath a pile of credit card and student loan debt, unable to find jobs, unwilling to live at home, the patina of effortessness that had clung to Millennials all their lives is beginning to wear off. How this will affect causes is uncertain at this point, but it’s difficult to imagine that the cup of coffee grown on an organize farm by an entrepreneurial native family will do as well today as it would have last year against the less expensive one.</p>
<p>One very interesting issue to watch moving forward this year is the growth of the public sector as the stimulus money begins to move through the system. Certainly the early signals are that Millennials who were very involved in the presidential campaign are not as drawn to the messy reality of governing. However, if the only growth area for jobs in the next year or two is the public sector, that may change the wariness and distance that young people have had from the public sector as a whole.</p>
<p>We’ll continue to watch from our perch here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter and whatever the new Twitter is and continue to learn how people engage with one another for causes and how those causes affect our relationships and our communities.</p>

Are You a Person or an Org on Twitter?

There was a great post on the Chronicle’s website today about the use of Twitter by nonprofit organizations.

Great quotes from my Social Citizens blog pal Kari Dunn Saratovsky at the Case Foundation and Beth (of course!) on the various ways that foundations and nonprofits are using Twitter to share news, raise money, organize events and generally connect with their supporters.

But one of the tips at the end of the article left me pondering. It said: Be professional. While for an animal-rights group blogging about vegan recipes may make sense, posting about how disappointed you were in last night’s episode of Lost probably doesn’t.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I do like my Twitter friends to focus mainly on their work and our shared passion for the various ways that social media are enhancing social change efforts. But one of the nicest things about Twitter is how easy it is to get to know someone in such short bursts of communication. I’ve learned that my old friend Ruby is pregnant, and my new friend Qui is moving to the Northwest. I hear about job openings, job woes, what people ate at their business dinner and who is stuck on the tarmac. I am getting to know my business contacts as real people, not as suits behind a desk.

Here’s the best way to see the difference. I am friends with Andy Carvin (who I’ve only met through email and Twitter!) through his personal Twitter account, he also writes the more formal NPR tweets. Andy tweets as a person, where he’s going today, what he’s reading, who he’s seeing, and what great stories are online at NPR.org or other sites that I should read. And I often do. But when his tweets behind the formal NPRpolitics logo show up I hardly ever read them. I’m not friends with a logo and I find them cold to look at on my screen.

So, I think I disagree with the advice that one should be professional on Twitter. I think you should be yourself – which is always the best thing to be anyway, right? You should use Twitter to its best advantage, meaning use it to help you to connect in meaningful ways with large numbers of people who care about you and your cause.

My Questions for Albert Ibargüen of Knight

I’m on my way to Miami shortly for the WeMedia conference.  On Thursday afternoon, I will have the pleasure of having a conversation with Alberto Ibargüen, the President of the Knight Foundation, about the future of our communities.  I’ve tweeted, emailed, pinged, and read to gather some thoughts about topics to talk about.  So, here they are so far.  Of course, I hold out the possibility of having a minipheny on the plane ride down! If you have additional topics, please feel free to pass them my way.

• Is there a balance between citizen journalism and traditional newspapers?  If so, what is it?
• A year ago you announced a major investment in arts in Miami. You said, “We need to build a sense of community that is inclusive and functional, a fusion culture that works for us in this place and time.” How can communities best support the arts in difficult economic times?
• You’ve invested in “Nerds, news and neighborhoods.” through the Knight News Challenge.  What have you learned so far through these ambitious efforts?
• Do you think the nonprofit model for newspapers makes sense – or is it an attempt to protect an unsustainable model?  Does it possibly give foundations and big donors too much sway in journalism?
• The Foundation’s focus has been largely on new forms of journalism.  Are there any funding plans to research new economic models?
• What are you most excited about undertaking professionally in the next five years?

Twitter Lessons Learned

With more than a few examples of activist efforts primarily organized or powered by Twitter, I thought it would be a nice time to take a deep breath and see what we’re learning so far.  The efforts that I am specifically looking at include Twestival, and Tweetsgiving and Beth’s successful effort to raise tuition for students in Cambodia. Some of these lessons also reflect my own experience from Twitter Vote Report, although ironically, we did most of our organizing using a PBWiki not Twitter!

I want to build on reflections from Beth on these types of events:

• It’s not about the reaching a large number at once, but identifying the right six or seven influencers who can re-tweet your message and have their networks respond
• Small gifts, but incorporate some incentives or recognition for larger gifts
• Have universal human theme or tell stories
• Have a reporting page or widget that shows your real-time results
• Incorporate something visual that can also spread across Twitter
• It isn’t just about Twitter – remember you need multi-channels – blogger outreach, email, organizing a team of people to reach to their networks, private messaging, phone calls, etc
• Use a hash tag and have that be part of the retweet so your campaign can benefit from extra visibility from the twitter trending
• Don’t have your first foray onto Twitter be your campaign ask, build social capital first.

Here are a few more thoughts based on efforts like Twestvial and Theetsgiving that scaled fundraising significantly using Twitter:

• These efforts to date have been spearheaded by very influential volunteers. People who are very fluent in the social media toolkit and have large networks of their own.
• Very short time frames for campaigns are imperative. All of these efforts have been spearheaded by volunteers with no infrastructure or staff to support their efforts.. Any longer than a few weeks and everyone would be too exhausted and have to focus on their regular work;
• Very simple asks are critically important.  $10 for clean water. $20 for college tuition for a Cambodian student. Simple, easy to understand, a universal need – water, education, food, etc.
• The role of the nonprofit organization, if there is one, is complicated in these efforts. There definitely is a role for them, but to date, it’s been a bit muddled as to where the volunteers end and where the organization begins. Since all of these efforts were spearheaded by volunteers, it has left the organizations in a rather passive role. But there are places where organizations are needed to step up:

1. Financial accountability. I think efforts to raise money for nonprofits should go through services like Network for Good to provide donors with an assurance that they are legitimate nonprofits. Anyone person or organization can use PayPal and it’s just a matter of time before some Twitter effort is used to scam people that way. Network for Good, Global Giving, Causes on Facebook, Chipin are creating norms for giving oneline and they should be followed for Twitter efforts as well.
2. Transparency. Volunteers may not have the capacity or wherewithal to post the process and structure of a giving campaign. An organization should. I’d like to be able to go their website, read about the campaign, who is responsible for what and how funding will be recieved and used.  Of course, I’d also like to see the 990s and board minutes and a host of other documents on these websites as I wrote about last week!
3. Follow up. Volunteers really are exhausted at the end of these campaigns.  Staff may be too, however, they are paid, whether they like it or not!, to continue these efforts.  Organizations need to become the keepers of the institutional memories. They need to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Frankly, this has been a great difficulty for Twitter Vote Report for just this reason; there wasn’t an institution to help facilitate a post-event reflection session. Organizations can also more systematically reflect on who the influencers were in a given campaign and how they operated. This is a critically important area of network analysis that needs more data to help us all learn how to identify, activate and build upon the role of influencers.

This is just a beginning of some reflections on Twitter as a tool for activism. There will be more coming in the next months, years as these efforts continue to evolve and unfold.

Who Are You?

In find myself asking this one question a lot recently.  And it’s making me cranky  (yes, I know, crankier than usual!) Because one of the greatest attributes of the Connected Age is people connecting with one another. But when companies or organizations hide behind social media tools and make it difficult to figure out who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish it is very aggravating.

Here’s an example: ActiveCause.  It is part of a slew of new social networking sites for causes.  The site is very slick, calling for a higher purpose in philanthropy:

Financial donations are just one part of your giving power – learn how to take philanthropy to a higher level with The Social Giving Network.

I don’t really know what that means. So, I click on the tab for contact us and get a form. I clicked around and can’t find any people on this social site – no Twitter feed, no blog, no About Us. I assume it is intended to be a money making operation, perhaps by taking a percentage of donations given, but that isn’t specified anywhere.

Beth wrote the other day about the difficulty that she had tracking down the cause associated with the Tweetathon:.

I looked the charity up on guidestar and could not find a nonprofit named “Water for Life” that had Ken Surritte listed as the contact.   On the Water is Life site there is not a fleshed about “About” page that tells me anything about the organization’s board, founding, budget, or a donation link.  After a bit of googling, I discovered that the nonprofit has a different name “Hearts and Hands International” and the Water Is Life is a project. (Still couldn’t find them on Guide Star or Networked for Good perhaps their 501-c3 is under a different name?)

Should it be that difficult to track down a legitimate cause?

A few thoughts.

First, radical transparency has to become a standard operating procedure for nonprofits and companies using social media.  The onus isn’t on us, the user, to figure out who you are. The responsibility lies with you to explain who you are and what you’re doing.

Second, if you’re in the business primarily of making money, please tell me rather than hide behind phrases like “giving power”.  I’m not fragile, I won’t crumble because a dot com has found out that millions of people give millions of dollars to causes every year and you want a piece of that.  Of course, it’s a crowded field and others are already doing it, and doing it well, like Network For Good and Change.org.

Third, nonprofit organizations have an even greater responsibility to be radically transparent than businesses — and no reason not to be.  Please put up your tax returns, your board minutes, your strategic plans, org charts, whatever you have, put them up and show the world that you have nothing to hide. It’s going to be a very difficult year to raise money, and transparency will help you to do that.  It used to be that all you needed was a heart-tugging cause.  There are too many causes and too much need to rely only on that strategy now. We need to know why you need money, how you use it, and, most importantly, who you are to make our giving decision.

But most of all, I need people to talk to online.  I need to see the faces of staff people, I need someone to answer questions who has a name, I need to connect with them personally.  So, please, tell me Who You Are!

The Social Giving Network.

Identity as the Next Frontier

I love BIG ideas.  Why mess with small or incremental ones when the big ones are out there to really stir the pot? Nokia has created new site called the Ideas Project where brilliant people, like Jerry Michalski and Esther Dyson, among others, put forth a really big idea.

Charlene Li was interviewed for the Ideas Project site. She spoke about the future whereby we all have just one identify. In the future, Charlene predicts, our Flckr, Facebook, Twitter, email and cell phone identities will all merge into one that we, the user, controls.  Of course, I love it, and it is VERY BIG. Here’s the interview with Charlene about this:

The idea of one identity isn’t entirely new, folks like the brilliant Kaliya Hamlin have been promoting it for a long time. And I would politely disagree with Charlene in one small way that the future of one, common identity doesn’t rest with a new device as it does with new software – but maybe she meant that it was just a slight misspeak in an interview. Nonetheless, it seems like this future is inching ever closer and maybe this year or next we’ll finally get to a place where each one of us being able to seamlessly control our identify, our content (see the embroglio this week over Facebook’s proposed new Terms of Service – the ongoing saga of Facebook trying to figure out how to make money continues!)

My question back to Charlene is this:  How do we create the Groundswell to get there?

Is Twestival Lost on the Pony Express?

Amanda Rose, one of the chief organizers of Twestival, sent out a tweet early this morning that read:

@amanda: Twestival cities organizers. Still missing about 25% of the reports. Fundraising continues post event. So please submit what you know now.

This followed a tweet that she posted earlier that read, in part, “I think everyone knows that Twestival was about more than just raising money.” Uh-oh. These are bad signs from a fundraiser. So, what’s going on with Twestival since it’s worldwide party last week?

I want to be clear that I loved the fact that Twestival was organized by volunteers through Twitter. I loved the fact that it scaled organically and spread to 202 cities around the world with no marketing or development costs. I loved that I could “watch” the day unfold on Twitter from Asia to Europe and Africa to the US throughout February 12th.

But since February 13th, I haven’t loved Twestival as much. It has been very difficult to find out the results from Twestival. I assumed that there would be some press release or blog post or tweet or something the morning after giving a broad brush stroke accounting of what happened. Something to the affect of, the first count is that we raised $250k through TipJar alone last night but that more time will be needed to add up the rest.  When that didn’t happen, I assumed that it may have been because the organizers didn’t want to put out numbers that are disappointing, because once first numbers go out, no matter what percentage of the total they may be, that will be what most reporters and bloggers latch onto.

Now, I’m not so sure that that was a deliberate strategic decision. Rather, I’m leaning towards the “campaign exhaustion” theory.  OK, it’s not really a theory, I just made that term up, but it happens at the end of all intense campaigns. That is that the people doing the heavy lifting during the campaigns are so exhausted by election night, in this case Twestival night, that they don’t have the time and capacity to think beyond that. It appears, and it’s just a supposition on my part but there isn’t any other information to go on at this point as neither the Twestival or charity:water websites have any substantive information on the results, that the organizers simply ran out of gas to develop a clear, comprehensive and safe process for gathering up donations and reporting on results.

I am NOT suggesting that there are accounting or financial problems with Twestival. I am suggesting, rather, that reporting is a significant challenge for global events organized by volunteers and that we need to know more about what’s happening here to inform future events.  We have terrific lessons learned about how to scale a global fundraising event using Twitter, we should also be developing lessons on how to complete the process in a timely, transparent and accountable way.

The Twestival fundraising goal was raised from $500k when the event had fewer than 200 cities. Reports late last week were that New York and London raised about $22,500 and $28,000 respectively. Smaller cities, like Boston and Detroit raised less than $5k each. It’s hard to figure what’s taking so long to count if most cities are like Boston and have less than $5k to count.  Even if it’s in cash in one dollar bills, you can count that in a day, can’t you?

Here’s my guess as to what’s going on based on the little data coming out right now:

• There has been a huge capacity shortage on the part of the organizers who have been trying to ensure that media coverage of Twestival continues while answering many questions from local organizers;
• There was no clear reporting format or process established before Twestival and the organizers have been scrambling to do so since;
• Much of the money was raised in cash and collected by multiple people locally making it difficult to get accurate numbers from local organizers;
• Tipjar may be having accounting problems or reporting;
• Local organizers, volunteers all, have simply disappeared. Again, this is not to infer nefarious intent. Rather the local organizers may have been so exhausted that they needed downtime, or went back to their everyday activities and have been ignoring, and are simply slow to report.

It may be one or all of some combination of these factors. And, as Amanda mentioned in her tweet this morning, fundraising continues in many cities, so maybe folks are still adding up their accounts locally. It’s hard to know, but we need to know before too much more time goes by.

As the World Turns:Twestival, the Hartford Opera and Wordle

It’s very hard not to feel a Dickensian tug today as amazing and dreadful things keep happening simultanouesly.

Yesterday was a lot of things: both Abe Lincoln’s and Charles Darwin’s bicentennial birthday, my friend Sam Kyzivat’s 13th birthday, and Twestival.

I’ve written about Twestival before.  And it seemed to go off amazingly well in 175 cities across the world, beginning in Asia in our wee horus of the morning of the 12th and steadily working it’s way across the globe through Europe and Africa, to the US and right across the country. There were tweets, photos on Flckr, YouTube videos.

According to the Chronicle, the in-person events that have been counted already in the US were quite impressive:

• New York’s Twestival raised $22,500;
• Detroit Twestival total of $4,600;
• Cleveland,raised $1,410, and;
• Boston tweeters raised $3,855.

A final tally from all of the sites will naturally take a few days. The only dark lining I can see to all of these silver Twestival clouds is that the process of tallying and submitting the amounts raised at each of the event sites is unclear and one hopes that there are clear enough guidelines to ensure that the remainder of the Twestival process remains as transparent and twouble free as the rest of event.

I was in Hartford, CT yesterday, invited to speak at an event by the United Way of Central and Northeastern Connecticut. It was a lovely event hosted by a lovely group of people.  While there I learned that the Connecticut Opera Company had decided to forgo bankruptcy and shut down yesterday.

I was left with a profound sense of sadness at what is being lost culturally, historically and institutionally in places like Hartford and across the country right now. And wondering how we can help last century’s (and before) institutions like performing arts organizations, newspapers and others to at least explore ways to unlock themselves from the trap of high overheads and staffing costs that hinder their ability to expand and contract as the economy dictates without having to fold completely.

It appears from this article that Birthright, a nonprofit that provides free tips to Israel for young Jewish adults, may be on the right path of embracing an accordion style of service provision and smaller.

The question to ponder over the next several months is this: how can organizations maintain the essence of what they do, their expertise, capacity to be effective, institutional memory, their existing networks of supporters in smaller, more agile and sustainable packages?

Oh, and if you haven’t seen it, Wordle is really, really cool! Here’s a Wordle for this blog.

Issue Fatigue

There is a terrific post called Issue Fatigue – Fighting for Attention and Funds in an Aware World by Jill Finlayson and Hildy Gottlieb on Social Edge.

With so much attention paid to donor fatigue, the authors posulate if perhaps the real problem isn’t issue fatigue. The authors write:

Are you changing your lightbulbs? Driving less?  Exercising more? Are you voting for the best social entrepreneur idea?  Joining a cause?  Signing a petition? Are you blogging and twittering to raise awareness?  Loaning money to people ining markets? Feeding the homeless, donating new pajamas to foster kids, and giving toys to tots? Are you saving the rainforests one candybar at time and providing clean water one bottle at a time? Are you recycling, composting, reusing? Are you bringing your own shopping bags and your own coffee cup? Are you shopping ethically?  Sustainably? Organicly? Locally?

Aren’t you tired?

I am!  The solution is to go back to basics: building strong relationships with your supporters. For all of the pinging and poking and clicking and razzle dazzle of cause chatter, social change continues to happen through social connections. For causes it is more important than ever that they focus on how to strengthen those ties, with and without social media, online and on land, to support their efforts. This year, in particular, social capital trumps financial capital – so we better get to building it one person, one connection, one conversation at a time.

Rebooting Tawain

Last year I had the great good fortune to edit a compilation of essays with my friends at Personal Democracy Forum called Rebooting America. The essays are all focused on reimagining our democracy for the digital age. Essayists are a who’s who of digital luminaries including Joe Trippi, Newt Gingrich, Tara Hunt, Craig Newmark, with a terrific foreword by Esther Dyson.

We decided to walk our talk and “open-sourced” the book by posting all of the essays for free online. This may have depressed sales of the hardcopy book, but we weren’t in this to make money (alas) but to get these ideas out into the cyberworld and, more importantly, the real world.

Yesterday we received an email that shows what an interesting little journey these essays are having.  Charles Chuang, the founder of the Drupal Taiwan Community asking for permission to translate the book into Chinese to distribute online in Taiwan.  Why exactly did he want to do this, we asked.  For three reasons, wrote Charles:  1) Reboot Taiwan, 2) Encourage and engage like-minded people, 3) Promote cyber-activism concept to elder people in local political parties.  Can’t argue with any of those reasons!

We’ll keep an eye on his website at http://net2.netivism.tw/projects/rebooting-america to see how Rebooting Taiwan is going.