Nonprofits are Falling Behind Gov 2.0

A few days ago, I tweeted my friend Marty to ask him about an article he had mentioned a while back on how the Department of Defense uses network structures to combat terrorism. I thought this would be a great example to get the attention of nonprofity folks: “Look, even the Dept. of Defense is embracing network structures, so, why are you stuck in your hierarchies!”

Within minutes, I got a tweet back from — YES — the Department of Defense!  A very nice tweeter named ArmyNYC was doing a good job of listening on Twitter and responded immediately and offered help in finding the materials I was looking for. The twitterer was in real life a public affairs officer at the Army Public Affairs office in heart of Manhattan.

The revolution in how government works is in full force right now. We really are at a historic moment in time wherein all of the pie-in-the-sky that I and my fellow geeks speculated about last year in our anthology on next generation government in Rebooting America is happening. Now, chronicled every day by the brilliant folks at the Sunlight Foundation and TechPresident,is Gov 2.0 for transparency. Conversations are fully embraced and, hopefully, maybe, a growing, trusting relationship and conversation between constituents and public officials on blogs, websites and Twitter is happening. It certainly helps that we have the tech savviest administration in history using the internet as effectively to govern as they did to campaign.  Check out Recovery.gov and Serve.gov is you haven’t already.

And then I saw this post from Katya: Nonprofit websites even worse than government ones . . . Turns out a new research report by a market research firm called ForSee entitled Trends in Constituent Satisfaction
with Nonprofit Websites: Building Membership, Donations, and Loyalty through the Web Channel [Warning: very annoying and unnecessary amount of personal info needed to input before able to download the report!] reports that nonprofit websites score a mediocre 73 out of 100 on their quality scale, a point behind E-government sites!

I did a survey in 2007 for the Overbrook Foundation that found that only 25% of the human rights grantees in our sample had a blog that allowed for comments. And I’m not sure the results would be much different today even though nonprofits are joining online social networking sites at a torrid pace as the NTEN survey revealed this week.

Why are we so slow as a sector to embrace Web 2.0? It’s confounding, but here are a few guesses:

1.We are an extremely risk averse sector. Foundations and large donors are by nature risk averse, and this trickles down to grantees. Web 2.0 feels too open and trasnparent to feel safe.  See, look what happened to Domino’s Pizza, after all?

2. We are terrible listeners. Ongoing learning, whether it’s the serendipitous learning of listening to the blogosphere and Twittersphere about your cause and issues, or the more systemic learning of evaluation, are simply not valued in the sector. If they were, we would have more data on what’s effective and how much evaluation is funded and done. We don’t. Period. Feel free to disagree. You can find the one shining example of an org. that learns brilliant on an ongoing basis. Trot out Teach for America and City Year for the umpteenth time. OK, that’s two, only 699,000 to go!  If you’re not focused on listening to and learning from your constituents, then embracing social media that enables that becomes less important.  I’ve never listened before, they seem to say, so why start now?

3. The generational divide is so much more prevalent and harmful to the sector than the digital divide. The Boomers that run organizations from staff or board positions don’t get it. It’s what their kids do, not what grown-ups should have to do.  They just want to close their eyes and go back to their Rolodex’ and date books and wish the whole thing would go away.

Of course, I don’t agree with any of these reasons!  But they are my best guess as to why we’re  falling behind even the government in making the transition to the new world. We’re like print media, desperately clinging to the shores of the old world in the hopes that the storm will blow over.

Nonprofit Social Network Survey Released

NTEN, Common Knowledge, and ThePort released the Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report.  The surveyw as conducted in March, 2009, and 929 nonprofits responded representing a really good cross section of the sector by size and issue area.

A few highlights of the findings:

• Among commercial social networks, Facebook is the most popular with 74.1% of non-profit survey respondents maintaining a presence on this commercial site.  Community sizes are still small, however, with an average size of just 5,391members.  Tenure on Facebook is relatively short, with most nonprofit survey respondents (94.4%) present for 2 years or less.  For Twitter, 93.9% of organizations report using this channel for one year or less.
• Good news on the staffing front: 80% of survey respondents are committing at least one-quarter of a full-time staff person to social networking efforts.  More than half of nonprofit surveThe communications and marketing departments are most likely to own the social network efforts, with fundraising and executive management the next most common shepherds of nonprofit’s social network projects.
• Very few nonprofit survey respondents are generating real revenue on commercial
  or house social networks via fundraising. On Facebook, about 39.9% of respondents
  have raised money via fundraising, but 29.1% have raised $500 or less over the past 12
  months.
• On house social networks (meaning social networking sites started by nonprofits themselves as opposed to commercial sites like Facebook) , 25.2% of nonprofit survey respondents are fundraising, and 1/3 of these fundraisers accumulated $10,000 or more over the last year.
• Among nonprofit survey respondents 30.6% have built one or more house social networks, but here again the community size is relatively small, with 86.6% of house social network-owning nonprofit survey respondents hosting communities of 10,000
  members or less.

These survey results are terrifically helpful as a snapshot of where we are as a sector in using social networking sites. I’d love to see a companion qualitative data collection effort to explore the following questions:

• I’d like to know more about what it means that these sites are thought of as “marketing” opportunities for the groups. Is it a chance to “sell” your org to people (I hope not!) or an opportunity to build a community of people who are interested in your cause (I hope so!)
• In that same vein, connecting social networks to programs doesn’t seem to be happening; is that true or simply a limitation of the survey?
• I wonder why groups would choose to set up a house social network rather than use a commercial site? What are the benefits and drawbacks of doing so?
• It’s very interesting and surprising that when asked which metrics they include in their definition of success for their house social networks,
  the number of members, and the amount of user-generated content were the leaders, with 68.5% and 68.5%, respectively of respondents including these two variables. Fundraising was the lowest ranked metric with just 16.1% of survey respondents indicating that this
  variable was important in measuring the success of their house community. Do the respondents think that fundraising will never be a significant part of the equation for social networking sites?
• One of the barriers to using these sites was expertise.  I wonder what expertise these groups think that teens on Facebook have that they don’t have?

Social Media Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

I am a techtopian, or so I’ve heard from other people. But, I accept this description only as it applies to social media. Not all technology is beneficial to who we are and how we live. I’m not in love with huge databases and those who use them to catalog everything about me to market products to me or encourage me to vote for a certain candidate. But, I do love the array of inexpensive (particularly, free!) social media tools that increases everyone’s opportunity to participate in conversations and create their own content in text, video, audio — or some combination of all of the above!  Of course, being anything that ends in -topian can lead to enthusiasm that borders on zealousness.

I sometimes launch into advocacy mode with the passion of a suffragist when I read what I believe to be unconsidered criticisms of social media efforts. This happened last week when the Washington Post published a poorly considered article about the “ineffectiveness” of Causes on Facebook. My criticism of the article centered on the fact that the Post had written an identical article to it last year with no new information in this year’s edition, and that their narrow definition of success belied other areas where Causes has been very successful, such as raising awareness of issues by friends connecting with friends to share information about causes.  This was followed by what I thought was a very silly response to the Post writers to the criticism that, “We’re not in the business of responding to criticism on blogs, but if people are interested enough to contact me directly I am more than willing to have a conversation with them.”

I had a similar reaction yesterday when I read Matt Bai’s opinion piece about Twitter and politics in the NY Times Magazine.  Bai, a generally very thoughtful chronicler of new media and politics, came to this conclusion about Twitter and politics, “And whatever else Americans may be craving in our politics these days, brevity and immediacy aren’t among them.” Really, American’s don’t want immediacy in their politics, we’d prefer politicians and policies to keep at a far distance?  That blanket statement sums up Bai’s blanket dismissal of politicians using Twitter as entirely banal and counterproductive, lumping all Twitterers into the inane category. Certainly there is more than enough inanity going on on Twitter, but not all of it and certainly not the instances that enable politicians, not their staffers using Twitters as a direct mail piece, to talk directly to interested constituents. I like knowing that Claire McCaskell is a real person who is trying to figure out what to eat for lunch — and trying to fix the health care system.

And that brings me to the pont of my post! At the end of last week, a reader, Alfred Gracombe, posted a comment about the Washington Post flap that read, in part:

While I generally enjoy the content of this blog, it has been a bit dispiriting to see how the dialogue here has evolved. I think it lost its civil tone and the waters have been muddied and the battle lines drawn to the point where it’s not clear what the main points of the disagreement are anymore. And this is coming from someone who would normally be on your side of the argument. I’ve been working in the nonprofit sector for almost 15 years on technology and communications issues. I embrace social media. I’m often frustrated with the mainstream media. But with all due respect, I just don’t feel this is the best way to seek truth and promote healthy, civic dialogue.

And it stopped me short. One thing that is very, very easy to do as a blogger is to slide quickly and irreversably from criticism to sarcasm all the way to snarky. And I appreciate this reader’s thoughtful comment that he felt that I crossed over to the dark side last week.  My frustration boils, and sometimes boils over, with the constant drumbeat from the mainstream media that social media is ruining civilization as we know it; whether it’s Maureen Dowd asking The Twitter guys why they have set out to destroy civilization as we know it (read this delicious satire of Dowd’s column here) , or the Washington Post reporters seemling taking some glee in what they see as the ineffectiveness of Causes, or Matt Bai declaring that politics is doomed because of Twitter.  Theirs is a too-often knee-jerk Chicken Little approach to Twitter or any other social media tools that is in love with the blanket dismissal of their use and utility without taking a more careful and nuanced approach of when, where and how the tools are most useful.  Their instant and overarching dissmisal of the benefits, and more importantly as we’re just beginning this revolution into a new, connected world, the positive potential of social media is disheartening.

My response to Mr. Gracombe is three-fold:

1. I apologize if my posts last week appeared unnecessarily and unconstructively dismissve to you. It certainly wasn’t my intention and takes away from the points I was trying to make;

2. I an open to suggestions of ways to help engage the mainstream media in a more constructive conversation about the benefits of social media, although I suspect this will only happen once their terror of being permanently replaced subsides.  It’s very difficult to talk to people who are petrified that the world as they know it has come to an end — although it already has come to an end for the mainstream media whether they realize it or not. My suggestion to them, if they want to listen!, is that if they stopped panicking for just a minute they’d realize it and, perhaps, embrace new media since the alternative is increasingly irrelevance on their part; and,

3. I have tried to find positive aspects in the criticsm that others have leveled at social media, but this is a good reminder to redouble my efforts to stay again.There is so much good that social media enables and enhances, particularly in the arena of social change, that it is a shame to spend energy, my own and my readers, wallowing in negativity.  Thanks for the reminder Mr. Gracombe!

OK, now onward!

Now the Washington Post Dissess Bloggers!

On Wednesday the Washington Post dissed the Causes application on Facebook with a lazy, inaccurate article. Last night, they dissed those of blogging about it, too!

There has been quite an uproar about the lazy article in the Washington Post about the Causes application on Facebook last Wednesday. A lot of people have read and commented on my post about the inaccuracies of the article, the fact that it was a rehash from last year, and the need to reframe the Causes application for which I am very grateful. I have really enjoyed the conversation and learned that I could have been more accurate in my initial assessment in two ways: 1. The incredible growth of new Facebook users who are women over 50 has raised the average age of Facebook users overall to over 25 for the first time (which should be good news for Causes!); 2. The 8,000 Causes users who have partnered with Network for Good are not the only groups that can raise money on the site. Others can sign up for donations as well, however, the reality is that those 8,000 have raised the overwhelmingly amount of donations using Causes.

As these posts and conversations were whipping through the tubes, Michael Ames, the Tech Hermit, took the initiative to reach out to the Washington Post writers directly and ask for their feedback on the inaccuracies in their article and the feeling that the article covered no new ground.  He received a startling response, here is the entire email exchange:

Kim/Megan,

On twitter and in the blog world that deals with development and social media, you guys are getting hammered on a couple of points.

1. Old information rehashed. Nothing new here, what prompted you restirring this year old conversation?

2. You focused on wrong stats. Network for good only works with a 8000 causes that have used causes to also ask for donations. 242,000 causes aren’t asking for money, aren’t registered with network for good in order to ask for money. You evaluation is off because you confuse causes with intentional fundraising.

3. You blanket sweep the word “ineffective” with donations being your only metric. The development sysle measures effectivesness in very different ways. Some causes are about advocacy, not donations. Some cause are about both, but don’t use the cause app to ask for money.

Either way, you are getting dismissed.
If you are having trouble finding where the conversation is dismissing you, let me know, I’ll steer you to the most influential of the bloggers who are leading the charge against your analysis.

Michael

The response…

Hi Michael,

We’re well aware of the blog chatter out there. We stand by the reporting, obviously, and dispute the alleged factual inaccuracies. While it’s true that only 8,000 nonprofts with Causes pages have signed up with Network for Good, it is incorrect to say that those are the only ones who can raise money through the site — just by having a Causes page, a nonprofit can receive donations through Network for Good without signing up or doing anything special While not all of those nonprofits got into Causes with the goal of raising money (a point we made in the article, quoting the Nature Conservancy), those who DO hope to fundraise through the application have not raised much — thus our point that it’s ineffective as a fundraising mechanism. That doesn’t mean it’s a worthless operation, just that it hasn’t shown a ton of progress on the fundraising part of its mission.

As for the point about it being old news, I don’t think that’s true except among a small number of social media types. I know similar topics have been undertaken on a number of nonprofit/social media blogs for as long as Causes has existed (we quoted the author of one of those blog posts), but the vast majority of our readers don’t follow those blogs, and we thought it was important to bring an analysis to the general readership. Others are free to disagree on that point, but that was my perspective when I decided to crunch some of those numbers.

I hope this is a useful explanation, and I’ll say the same thing to anyone who contacts me. We’re not in the business of responding to criticism on blogs, but if people are interested enough to contact me directly I am more than willing to have a conversation with them. So thanks for writing!

So, the good news was the quick email response.  However the response is breathtaking in its arrogance and dissmissal of online conversations. Wow!!!  You’re “well aware of the blog chatter” and it’s not old news becuase the only folks who would remember the same article from last year are “social media types” but here’s the real kicker, “We’re not in the business of responding to criticism on blogs, but if people are interested enough to contact me directly I am more than willing to have a conversation with them.”
I’m trying to regain my equilibrium here.  Let me walk through this WashPo logic:  1. We’re doing a story on the use of social media to raise money and awareness of causes so we feel free to dismiss those people working in social media. We’re losing our shirt, like the rest of the newspaper world, but we won’t deign to engage in the online conversation. The disdain with which the phrase, “criticism on blogs” is dripping from the screen. So, WashPo writers, you’re above bloggers, which means you’ve decided you’ve above participating in the conversation about your own article. So you write, inaccurately, and then post it, and then walk away but deign to have a few private email conversations (which even you must know will be posted online by the blogger to whom you just sent it) it’s difficult to imagine what business the Post thinks their in — or how they’re going to be in business much longer working this way.  I have often wrote recently that my heart goes out to those papers, their employees and communities that are suffering right now — but, boy, these arrogant journalists make it awfully hard!

Wash Post Disses Causes on Facebook

This morning’s Washington Post article, “To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green”, takes some not-very-new shots at Causes, the friending and fundraising app on Facebook, while not providing any new insights. From the first sentence, “It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. ” my antenna went up because this article was entering Causes and Facebook through the wrong door; the dollar per donor door.

Let’s begin by deconstructing the article itself, which according to my friends at Network For Good, contains a number of inaccuracies.  Causes and Network for Good have a partnership to process donations made through Facebook.  One huge point of ongoing misinterpretation about the number of causes on Facebook requires clarification. There are around 250 thousand causes on the Causes platform. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. That leaves about 46,000 nonprofits that are connected to a cause. But, of these only 8,000 are using Network for Good, meaning they’ve created an official profile, can use their npo dashboard, and can raise money. Therefore in trying to determine the average size of donations, it is more accurate to use the 8,000 active fundraising efforts for nonprofits rather than the 176,000 used in the Post article. When the universe of causes that includes the Green on Sundays groups is included in the overall cause number,  divided by the total amount of dollars given resulting in an itty bitty average gift. This is enormously skewed by the number of inactive causes on FB or the number of causes who never intended to raise money using Causes.  So, according to Network for Good’s data, 8,000 causes have actively raised money using Causes for a total of $7.5 million — or an average total of donations to each cause of over $930.

The news here is that there isn’t any new news. This issue first surfaced last year.  Beth raised the question then of how much was being raised on Causes and what that means for fundraising via social networks.  Conor also raised similar questions and issues. Givvy took a look at the numbers last year and saw pluses and minuses. The only reason to run with this old news that I can think of is that the the recession has made fundraising more difficult this year,which in turn has made fundraisers more anxious (which I didn’t think was possible since they’re such an anxious bunch to begin with!) and Causes an easy target.

But, looking at the success and drawbacks of Causes to date is helpful in assessing where we are in the Connected Age with fundraising.  Here are a few thoughts about the importance and lessons of Causes to date:

1. Causes enables a lot of people to “support a cause.” In old thinking that meant only one thing: give us money.  But in connected thinking, it means that each one of us is can be more than an ATM for our causes.  Causes on FB enables us to tell our own world – distinct from the world -  about the issues, campaigns, orgs that they are passionate about. We can bring our networks of friends, our ingenuity, our passion, our time, our expertise to support causes.  It enables lots and lots of people to learn about causes and to share them with their friends easily, quickly and inexpensively.

2. Episodically, Causes has demonstrated the amazing power of distributed fundraising for causes.  Last year’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation is a perfect example. Beth and I were commissioned by the Foundation to assess the Challenge late last year. We found that the Causes Giving Challenge on Facebook raised a total of $571,686 from 25,795 unique donors for 3,936 causes. That’s an average gift of just over $20, a very respectable amount in the online direct mail world (if one feels compelled to measure things that way). What was important about the Giving Challenge experiment was that it showed what could happen through this mechanism when it was engaged and ignited in the right way; meaning a time limited competition in which the bar set by the Foundation wasn’t the dollars raised by each cause but the number of friends raised. The winners of the Giving Challenge raised significant sums (meaning tens of thousands of dollars, which is a lot of money to small orgs that won) and friends using Causes – most of whom were first time donors to their cause.

3. The Washington Post article calls Causes “largely ineffective.” Well, that depends on how one defines effectiveness. And this is one place where the Causes folks have some culpability because they have raised dollars raised as a critical measure of their application’s success. This is what I call malmeasurement, grabbing onto an easy data point and equating it to success whether it fits or not. Using dollars raised as a critical measure of success has allowed others to hammer Causes without much cause. Remember that the overwhelming number of Facebook users are still under 25 years old. This is very young for donors, and it is unreasonable to expect them to give the number and size gifts of their parents and grandparents.

4. There is a framing issue here. If Causes was judged on awareness only it would get an A+ – there are very few mechanisms that enable communities of people to  learn so much about causes so inexpensively.  So, let’s reframe: what if Causes was judged the number of people who know about a cause who didn’t know about it before; the number of people who increase their involvement with that cause by sharing information with friends about it, organizing an event, blogging and tweeting about it, and so on; the number of people who have self-organized an event for the cause. I’m sure there are other meausres, but you get the point, what measures we use to define success will utlimately define us and while dollars in might be easy to measure it’s not alwasy the best one to use.

This leaves us with is the spigot issue.  I was speaking at a conference last year when a development director asked, “How do I get money out of Facebook?”  Oy, or for my lovely readers from the midwest, Ugh! The broad public perception that Causes is a spigot that when turned on will start a gush of donations to causes needs to change. This does not mean that Causes can’t be useful for raising money, the Giving Challenge is proof of lots of money being raised by lots of activists and causes in a short amount of time.  But as Frogloop noted last year, “The problem is that the same challenges apply in any medium — you need to cut through the noise, develop a list of supporters, get those supporters to pay attention, and encourage those supporters to do something.” This takes work and constancy and resilience and patience – nothing qualities that journalists and online watchers are known for!  The bottom line here is that Causes isn’t just about raising money, it’s also about raising friends and awareness, and in the long run turning loose social ties into stronger ones for a cause may be more important than one-time donations of $10 and $20 dollars right now. Our rush to judge this application effective or ineffective over a very short time period with a primary user base of very young people is off base.

NY Times Says I’m Remarkably Dull

I was relaxing and reading the national edition of the NY Times on the train ride home from DC yesterday.  As I finished the sports section I found myself on the weather page. This is a page I clearly don’t read often enough as I wandered around DC and NYC yesterday in torrential rain without a rain coat or umbrella!

The little blurb next to the weather icon for yesterday, Monday, read, “Remarkably dull. Thunderstorms.” Huh, that’s strange, I thought, I’ve never seen the phrase, “remarkably dull” in a weather forecast before. It’s not like it was 72 degrees and sunny which might might make some sense. (Remember the terrifically funny movie L.A. Story wherein Steve Martin pre-recorded the weather as sunny and warm in LA?)

I threw out the paper in Philly, makes an awful mess around your seat on the train, and made a mental note to show this strange forecast to my husband when I got home. I opened up yesterday’s paper this morning at breakfast to show him, and there was yesterday’s blurb:  “Thickening clouds will yield showers by midday.”  What the heck?????  My friend Lisa has been telling me that the social media wizards at the Times have been cooking up some really cool stuff; and they have see here. But this seems amazing; is it possible that I am getting my own personal weather report from the Times, and such an accurate one?

And then it occured to me that the Times wizards have leap-frogged over Jarvis and Rosen and Doc Searls.  The Times isn’t micro-targeting ads to my interest and searches; it is altering the hard copy CONTENT to my moods and needs.  Ha, take that Google! Can’t wait to see what these guys come up with next.

Orchestrating Answers on YouTube

I have a new favorite YouTube video.  (Well, OK, I will admit to getting a bit teary-eyed watching Susan Boyle live her dream on Britain’s Got Talent — but I’m not alone on that one!)

But, here’s my new favorite video, the Internet Global Symphony Mashup, a compilation of the virtual auditions YouTube sponsored.

In her brilliantly titled post, “How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?  Upload Upload Upload,” Beth describes the process that led to this mashup:

“The YouTube Symphony Orchestra released the first performance, a premiere of the Tan Dun composition “Internet Symphony, Eroica”  The performers were selected from thousands of video auditions from around the globe. The finalists winnowed down by a jury of professional musicians, not unlike a traditional audition, but the winners were crowdsourced by YouTube users via online voting.  The resulting “mashed up” symphony orchestra, had more than 90 players representing over 30 countries.”

The mashup video is a beautiful piece of artistry in its own right. And it naturally leads to questions of whether and how video auditions and virtual orchestras might aid an ailing arts community in the future. But I need to catch myself before I go too far down that pathway.  It’s too darn easy to race into a cul de sac of zero-sum questions of whether virtual orchestras are better or worse than live ones, rather than a more productive conversation (even if it’s in my own head where I have a lot of conversations!) of how social media can improve and augment orchestras and create a better experience or the players and the audience and a more sustainable model in the future.

Will blogs replace newspapers? Will YouTube replace the local symphony orchestra? Will the Kindle replace printed books?  Those are questions perched precariously on a platform of fear and anxiety and despair, rather than explorations of how we can create new and better models. Maureen Dowd’s column on Wednesday was just this kind of thinking; look at how Google is destroying journalism!  Oh, MoDo, say it ain’t so.  I know you’re scared, I’m scared for you, and newspapers and arts orgs. But journalism isn’t under assault, the business model that depends almost entirely on paid advertisements and classified ads is. The models that were teetering on irrelevance got kicked in the stomach first and hardest by the recession. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need arts and journalism – we just need them in different forms; slimmed down financially and people-wise, beefed up social media-wise.

So, back to our virtual orchestra.  Let’s brainstorm; what could be better about orchestras in the future using social media:

1. As Beth points out, this could be a lighter, less expensive auditioning process for the future.  Virtual auditions would be good for orchestras that could do first-cuts by video, good for auditioners who wouldn’t have to spend the time and money to travel to auditions and have everyone watch them sweat for eight hours.
2. Virtual orchestras could give audiences a preview of upcoming performances with comnentary by conductors and links to references so that the watchers could become as well informed as the players. This would be really helpful to educate younger audience members and remind performing arts orgs (who, sadly, seem to need this kind of reminding a lot) that not everyone comes to their live performances fully educated on the works.
3. Virtual performances could allow composers to try out new works much less expensvely.  It could also allow players to practice new works and get feedback less expensively via social media.
4. Finally, of course, social media lets the rest of us who can’t participate in a live performance share in a syphony’s beauty and joy.

This past Wednesday, the YouTube Orchestra, performers selected by the YouTube community plus members of the world’s finest orchestras, performed live at Carnegie Hall. Enjoy!

Worst Listeners of the Year (Or Maybe Ever!)

The worst listener of the year, no actually make that the decade so far?  Easy, really it’s a no-brainer, it’s Tropicana. You probably saw the expensive results of their closing their ears if you looked in your supermarket for OJ at the beginning of the year and thought there was a new, cheap, generic brand. Here is a mind boggling story of corporate incompetence that I hope resonants with activsts who could be doing a better job of listening (meaning everyone!):

• Tropicana decided last year that their old look wasn’t jazzy enough, wants to boost sales, and does what big companies do; reflexively hired expensive outsiders to create a new look. [Note: if you want to see an ad guy talk gobbldygook for 3 minutes in a way that begs for a bit on The Office, watch Peter Arnell bumble his way through a nonsensical presentation of this rebranding effort.]
• Launches new brand image on January 1, 2009.
• Tropicana sales plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22.  As one blog post noted, “A brand that’s been cultivated for 30-plus years loses a fifth of its customers in fewer than 60 days! Not only did Tropicana lose ground but its competitors gained.”
• Tropicana pulls the plug on the re-branding after tens of millions of dollars on the effort.

How is it possible to fail so spectacularly?  By not listening.  I asked an ad agency friend of mine why didn’t they talk to customers about this lifeless, generic, tepid new look?  And that’s what makes the story so much worse; she said they did!

I would feel better if the MBAs just decided that they liked what they saw from the hired guns and went with their guts – a Bushian decider moment. What makes this episode the most egregious case I’ve heard about in years, is that they DID ask people and then actively chose not to listen. That takes a lot of gumption. Passive non listening – the kind of nodding your husband does when you’re telling him about the sale you just found at the mall is one thing – looking at the focus group data where customers HATED the rebranding (and rightly so) and then choosing to ignore them is an amazing act of active nonlistening.

I hope these guys were fired, ’cause there are a lot of competent people looking for work nowadays.  But, I’m also wondering which activist groups are actually listening and which are either passive or active not listening?  Are you nodding when your volunteers are talking and hoping they’ll stop soon so you can get back to work? Or are you really listening and engaging them in a conversation?  Are you using all of your social media tools like Technorati and Google alerts and Twitter to listen to what folks have to say about your and your cause?  Whatever you’re doing, redouble it, because if you’re not listening, they’re going to stop talking and working with you if they haven’t already.

Change the Web Finalists Announced

NetSquared has announced the 24 finalists for the Change the Web contest. The finalists are:

Please note: these are listed in alphabetical order:

• Amazeeng – search social action everywhere!
• Beyond the Bite
• CauseSense
• Charity Meter
• Citizens Voice Social Application
• Democracia 2.0
• District-by-District Organizing Tool
• Giveback’s Take Action Widget
• Micro-Lending Widget
• Social Actions + Cell Alert = Social Actions Alerts
• Social Actions for Facebook and Myspace
• Social Actions Interactive Map (and location extractor)
• Social Actions Map
• SocialActions Search for Firefox
• Social Actions Tuner
• Social Actions WordPress Widget
• Social Connect
• Social Friends
• Squarepeg: iphone app manages social actions, posts to twitter, facebook, email, rss
• “Take Action” Button
• Take Action for Firefox
• Take Action iGoogle Gadget
• Volunteer Connect – The Easiest Way to Volunteer
• Zemanta’s related social actions for bloggers

You can also take a peek at them in the Project Gallery and comment on them as well. The winners will be announced at NTEN’s National Technology Conference in two weeks.

The judging is interesting to note here.  There was a crowdsourcing effort speared by Social Actions to nominate and vote on judges five judges who were then supplemented by experts selected by the orgs. I like the idea in theory and principle; a nice way to engage a community in the selection process will also allowing for minority voices to be recognized.  It’s a little hard to tell if there was enough of a crowd here to source it and who was selected by the group versus the orgs – but the idea is a good one to keep in mind.  And a reminder of the need to balance majority and minority views and input.

Twitter Vote Report Goes to India

The month long elections in India begin on April 16th, and Twitter Vote Report will be there for the ride! Here is the skinny on Vote Report India from Jon Pincus:

Vote Report India will partner with citizens’ networks, human rights organizations, and journalists to contribute direct SMS, email and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). It will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map. The interactive map will allow tracking the irregularities in the campaigns leading up to the elections, the voting experience on the day of the elections, and the results themselves.

At one level, Vote Report India will serve as a critical initiative aimed at nurturing transparency and accountability in the Indian election process. At another level, the platform will provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.

“Vote Report India is powered by two path-breaking non-profit open-source projects — Ushahidi and SwiftRiver — and managed by eMoksha. Ushahidi is an award-winning platform that crowd-sources crisis information. SwiftRiver is a platform that makes sense of multiple sources of information in a fast-changing crisis situation. eMoksha is a non-profit organization that aims to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.”

The amazing life of Vote Report continues!