Twestival Update

It’s just three days until Twestival, so I thought I’d check in and see how things are progressing. And in one word it’s: amazing!

Since I first posted about Twestival, there has been a doubling of events listed on the website, particularly overseas.  If you want to know about the origins and dynamics of Twestival, I strongly suggest reading Beth’s amazingly comprehensive and thoughtful case study. There are now 175 Twestival parties planned for Thursday.  Check out the list of tweeters signed up to host parties, particularly the long list of organizers from Africa and Asia.

There have been a few subtle changes to the website. More discussion of the controls that are in place to organize events and ensure donations go to charity:water. Here is new information on the website to help the organizers manage the amazingly large number of events being held on one day:

There will be certain creative restrictions on city sites, especially for those with a web developer on their team; but it was important not to compromise these features due to the scale of this grassroots event.

Feel free to link in social media sites or any other website relevant to the Twestival.

• Phase one: Launch the homepage with a list of cities which have already registered. Over the next day, organizers will be given a password and instruction to upload information to their own city site (start thinking about a first blog post). Please have a bit of patience as we are working as quickly as we can.
• Phase two: All of the cities should be linked up to the homepage. Features to donate, bid on an auction, raffle and other fundraising projects will come online as buttons as they are completed.
• Phase three: On 12 February 2009, Twestival will be working with partners to have live broadcasts of the events around the world.

I am an egghead for this specific purpose; to wrestle with what we  can learn from this Twestival for future Twestivals. So, here are a few issues that the Twestival raises for me:

• First, would Twestival have been possible without the “rock star” quality of the organizers and charity:water’s CEO, Scott Harrison? Do you have to be Bono to scale fundraising this way, or can you do it if you don’t know the CEO of Twitter?
• Second, the technical know-how of the organizers is very impressive. How can nonprofits harness this technical prowess for their needs? Matching professionals with nonprofits through pro bono programs has been a staple of the nonprofit landscape for years. (For instance, here is one organized by the Tap Root Foundation.) But those historically tend to be a few hours of professional time given in a rather sporadic way.  I often hear from frustrated nonprofits that they didn’t get enough help during these engagements, and from frustrated professionals that the nonprofits didn’t have a clear vision of what help they needed. The organizers of Twestival are amazingly proficient technically and well connected socially. They have turned their lives over to Twestival for the past few months. As did the very talented technical folks who volunteered on Twitter Vote Report. What happens in these cases is that the energy and impetus for those efforts comes from the volunteers not from an organization. Is that the polarity that has to happen for Twestival-like efforts in the future?  Do efforts like these only scale as a groundswell not as an organizationally conceived event? (Please don’t confuse this idea with the fact that organizations can organize very large, multinational events. This point is that this effort has scaled organically and enthuistically because it is volunteer not organizationally driven.)
• Third,  is there any benefit to organizations to raising money through epic events like this, or would it behoove a group like charity:water to use tools like Twitter and TipJoy to create regular, monthly giving habits for people intersted in their work. Which is better in the long run? Or maybe they need to co-exist?

“Social Good” Podcast on Text Campaigns

This month’s Social Good podcast is available today on iTunes and the Chronicle’s site. This month’s edition is on text messaging campaigns to raise awareness and funds for causes. My guests are Katrin Verclas, the Co-Founder and Editor of MobileActive.org, and Chuck Scofield, Chief Development Officer for Share Our Strength. We discuss the logistics of managing a text message campaign, Share Our Strength’s text messaging campaign, Operation No Kid Hungry, the expense of these campaigns, and the opportunity to begin to experiment with other mobile tools, like Twitter, in the future.

So, take a listen and share the word!

What is the Tax Choice Program?

Well, it’s nothing yet, I just made the term up. But it could be something really interesting.

Yesterday, I came across a site called, Pick. Click. Give. It is a site created by the Alaska state government to encourage Alaskans to apply for rheir PFD (Permanent Fund Dividend, not to be confused with PDF, Personal Democracy Forum) the money that each resident gets as part of the state’s oil fund, and give a percentage of it to a variety of nonprofits in the state.

Nice idea, although perhaps more idealistic than realistic in today’s economy.

Nonetheless, I started to think that redistributing part of a government refund isn’t that far from possibly redistributing part of the taxes that we pay to government. Because paying taxes feels just awful, doesn’t it? Even when I know in my head that the bulk of the money is going to things that we all need; roads, military defense, education, Social Security, it doesn’t feel any better. The government just keeps taking and taking from our paychecks and purchase and investments and it all goes into this big, black hole that the politicians and lobbyists get to play with while we’re struggling to make ends meet. But maybe for just a small portion of our taxes we could use social media to change the dynamic and give us more choice as to where our taxes go.

Why can’t we create a Tax Choice Program whereby we all get to determine where, say, 10% of our state and federal taxes will go. It would be our own personal tax discretionary fund.

Imagine submitting your taxes electronically and then clicking on a button that says Tax Choice. A screen pops up that provides choices of where your 10% can go – a school infrastructure program, a clean, green recreation program, mass transit, health clinics. Maybe we’ve voted on what these choices are before hand, similar to the terrific effort just concluded by Change.org called Ideas for Change in America.

We know, scientifically, that giving money to causes and programs that we care about makes us feel better, not just psychologically, actually, physically makes us feel better. So maybe,  just maybe, the other 90% wouldn’t feel so bad if we felt really good about our discretionary 10%.  Maybe.

The Paradox of Losing Control

SenJohnMcCain

I often talk of the need to “push power to the edges” in networks. This describes the need for organizations to push action and decision-making power outward and invite  potential supporters to participate in their efforts in meaningful ways. By doing so you both gain power and lose control of your effort. This is perhaps the most difficult part of living in the Connected Age. For people who were taught that control is power or by people who find that they have lost control of a conversation that is actually about them, pushing power to the edges can be difficult and scary.

My friend Katya Andresen, a tried and true Connected Age participant and proponent, found herself in the uncomfortable later position last week.

She describes it here in the aptly titled post The Totally Annoying, Often Wonderful Lack of Control You Have In The Social Web. Here’s what happened:  Katya wrote a post about skipping the ineffective pre-ask dance with potential cause supporters and always having a clear “call to action.”  Peter Panepento of the Chronicle of Philanthropy interpreted that to mean always ask for money, which is actually not what Katya means by call to action.

So, online discussions swirled and ensued, and Katya was left feeling that her initial intent was being misinterpreted by people . . . out there. . .and she had lost control of the conversation.

But the answer, as Katya succintly puts it, is The Conversation.  It’s all about the conversation, and unlike monologues, TV ads, billboards and soliloquies, a conversation takes more than one person to work. And so she participated on her post on her blog. Too often when I talk to senior staff of organizations, whether htey are for profit or nonprofit, they sit back and watch social media conversation with either horror or disdain and think that it’s for someone else to participate in. If it’s about your cause then it’s your conversation in which to participate.  As a friend of mine says, your admin. assistant (if you still have one!) can’t Twett for you!

Although, one does wonder if this really is John McCain tweeting.