$10K in Free Social Media Advice from Fenton

This just in from Fenton Communications:

Fenton is offering three $10,000 Social Media Grants to nonprofits in the New York City area. This is the perfect opportunity for your organization if you’re ready to jump into the social media waters but are unsure about how, or if you’re not sure if your current social media strategy is working. Enter here now.

If it’s anywhere near as successful as the Case Foundation’s Social Citizen Makeovers, three lucky groups are in for a treat!

Assessing Games for Change and Learning Loops

I had the privilege of attending a day-long seminar yesterday organized by Games for Change, a terrific nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the dissemination and understanding of video games that are created for the purpose of educating and activating people for social change.

It was quite an august gathering of folk!  About forty people attended including Christine Bachen, Associate Professor of Communication, Santa Clara University, James Gee, Professor, Arizona State University, Barry Joseph, Director of the Online Leadership Program, Global Kids, Joseph Kahne, Dean of the School of Education and Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group, Mills College, Dan Schwartz, Professor of Education, Stanford University, Suzanne Seggerman, President and Co-founder of Games for Change, and Valerie Shute, Associate Professor Florida State University, Educational Psychology and Learning Systems.

Our host was Alex Quinn, Executive Director, Games for Change. We saw demos and discussion of assessments for Quest Atlantis and Our Courts (spearheaded by Sandra Day O’Connor!) I’m not a gaming expert and I found it really interesting, if a bit overwhelming, learning about the complicated double challenge of creating video games that are both fun and educational. As Jim Gee said, ‘Games are at root model-based thinking and are by definition an oversimplification of any issue.” but the logic that has to go into designing a game that has sticky and raises awareness, even action, for issues, seemed quite complex and challenging to me — and when done well, really magical.

Alex was kind enough to ask me to share a few thoughts on what Beth and I have been thinking about in regards to assessing social change efforts involving social media.  I shared our Listening and Learning Loops model which is built on KD Paine SobCon ROI of Relationships in Social Media. KD’s model illustrates a ladder of engagement that moves people from Social Networks to  Engagement to Relationship to Return on Investment. We have adopted this model specifically for social change purposes in which Social Networks generate Social Capital for Social Change with listening as the connective tissue.

Here is an illustration of this progression that our Chair of the Charts Committee (Beth!) whipped up:

WE are trying to illustrate a real-time, lighter assessment process that activists can use to engage their community in developing efforts and make real-time improvements and adjustments. But it only works with constant listening and conversations. At each level of engagement, and again this is not intended to be an entirely linear progression, some people will start at social capital or social change and others will stay at social networks, there are a variety of ways for a social change effort to get feedback and data on how they’re doing. For instance, to measure the size of your social network you can track statistics on your website and blog, links to your site and do social network analysis of your network.   To measure an increase in social capital, which we define as an increase in trust and reciprocity within the network, you can look at what others are doing on your behalf, like retweets, comments on blogs and YouTube (for which you can also do content analysis) and blog posts by others about your cause or campaign. And, of course, measuring social change happens largely as it always has, by tracking what people are doing online and talking to them about what they’re thinking and doing on land through surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

This is a work in progress and we would appreciate any feedback you have for us!

A New Relationship with Donors

I was struck a few weeks ago when I read this article in the Chronicle about the rise of anonymous giving this year.  I suspect that this is due to these donors not wanted to be stalked by causes. the giving cacophony for causes is bad enough in a good economy, but the incessant pressure to give to many causes and give larger gifts in a bad economy is overwhelming.

Then I saw this report from Pam Fessler on NPR about the rise of giving circles. Giving circles certainly aren’t new, informally friends have been talking to friends about giving to causes for years, and the more formal versions really started to coalesce about fifteen years ago. But, nonetheless, it’s interesting that they’re on the rise in a bad economy. We all want to feel better now, and talking to friends about causes that we’re passionate about, what we want to share with them makes everyone feel better. Also, giving circles are a good way for everyone to give a little that adds up to more for a cause.

Then I began to think about what Katya might say about all this.  And here’s my guess:

We know that donors want to a real, meaningful connection to causes. We also know that too many causes continue to treat them like an ATM machines.  You gave $50 last month/quarter/year, how about $100 or $1,000 this year?  Causes also treat donors like data points in a big database of givers who are never connected to one another. It simply doesn’t occur to many causes to create a network of donors rather than continue their hub and spoke model of individual to institution giving.

Let’s imagine a different way of doing this. Giving circles are generally oganized by friends to give to a variety of causes, leaving the cause in the passive position of hoping to be supported.  What if causes organized giving circles to support their cause — and other causes. I know, really scary to think about organizing your own donors to possible give to other organizations, but, hey, that’s what people do. What if you took all of your donors in one zip code, regardless of how much they gave and helped them to organize a get together at someone’s house to talk about the cause. Maybe they don’t even talk about giving the first time they meet. Maybe they just to talk about the cause, what it means, what it does, how it could do better, etc. They could come back onto your Facebook page or on Twitter and share what they learned, what they thought and dreamed for the cause. And then the second meeting they begin to talk about giving to the cause.

Maybe you would get less from a big donor this way, but you’d also get more from the little donors – that’s what giving circles do. They would learn from one another, they would feel like a community rather than isolated donors. Maybe it’s worth a try!  So, Katya, how’d I do?

What Americorps Can Do For Nonprofits

I was reading this article in the Christian Science Monitor (thanks to Kari Dunn Saratovsky for the link) on the surge in Americorp volunteers about to hit communities and was struck by this sentence in regards to the potential dangers ahead if communities and nonprofits aren’t ready for the volunteers:

“Otherwise, the surge in volunteers may mean thousands of good intentions and billions of dollars that don’t move the dial on tough social issues.”

I stopped short. It had honestly never occured to me to view the service programs as anything but experiences aimed at educating Corps members and preparing them for a life of service either as nonprofit employees or volunteers. For instance, when the president describes his time as a community organizer it is always through the lens of what that time meant to him, not what it mean to the community.

Ok, so let’s change the lens. What could all of these eager, bright, idealistic young people do for communities? Naturally, given my interests, I’d like to see them bring their digital fluency and help reinvent nonprofit organizations. Here are a few ways that they could do that:

• Organize regular learning opportunities, say brown bag lunches, for their nonprofit, or better a community of nonprofits, on social media. Take a tool a month and show their colleagues what they are, why they’re important, and sign them up, right then and there, as a participant.
• Become reverse mentors for staff people at their organization. Assign a Corps member as a social media buddy for an older staff member to show them how to use social media — and more importantly to demonstrate what it means to be open and transparent in practice every day.
• Pilot a listen, learn and adapt effort as Beth’s describes it within the organization. Organize and train a small group of staff and volunteers to listen about your issue on multiple channels (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.), join a conversation about your issue, engage this community in helping you to do something, organize a fundraiser or a march or a meeting or a new service, something that connects your organization to the community and your supporters better.

The service community has been surprisingly and amazingly slow to adapt social media tools to their efforts and engagements with Corps members. Let’s take advantage of this moment in time to switch gears.

Women of Kuwait Win Again

In Momentum, I wrote about the women of Kuwait using their blackberries and cell phones to email the Kuwaiti legislation in favor of full women’s suffrage.  Much to the surprise of the men of Kuwait, laws allowing women the right to vote and the right to run for office were passed in the spring of 2005. This past weekend, four women were elected to the Kuwaiti legislature!

My friend Rochelle Lefkowitz describes this historic event this way on Huffington Post:

This past weekend, Kuwait’s civic glass ceiling got a seismic crack when four women won seats in that small Gulf state’s parliamentary elections. News reports said their victory marked the first time that women won parliamentary seats since given the right to vote and run for office in 2005.

Amidst the bigger, scarier goings on in the Gulf, this transformation barely registered. Unfortunately, the seemingly objective phrase “given the right to vote” is one of many examples of “credit theft” that silently seeps from headlines into textbooks, fueling the fearful helplessness, in realms from work to governance, that living Code Orange inflames.

It’s fine by me if it barely registered in the Gulf. Let the men take their naps and assume that the status quo continues, even though it never does. And please don’t tell them, but soon they’re going to wake up and find ten women in their midst, and then twenty-five, and then a women foreign minister and a woman prime minister. Whether the men of Kuwait (or India or Iran or Japan or the United States) like it or not, whether they’re ready or not, the women of Kuwait have their blackberies and they know how to use them!

Twitter Storytelling by Dan Baum

Here are a few main stream media memes that I’m tired of: Jessica Simpson’s and Kirstie Alley’s weight, stories that try to make us believe the RNC and Michael Steele are at all relevant, and the Twitter Jumps the Shark stories. Sadly, I can’t yet do anything about the first two, but I can comment and try to change the discussion regarding the third.

For every euphoric story on Twitter gaining critical mass in the last six months, there are the ones that Twitter users are not sticking around. Certainly the number of Twitter users has skyrocketed this year. Oprah came and so did the rest of the world.  And a lot choose not to stick around, or to lurk, or just to let their accounts languish. The fallacy is the presumption that every social media tool is for every person or for every purpose. The social media revolution is all about the variety of easy-to-use, often free tools that we can each choose to use for our own purposes. They allow for people to talk to one another on their own time, with their own content. Twitter suites me well, I like it’s brevity and the links to sites that my Tweeps who also are immersed in social media for social change post so I don’t have to surf around so much. But, frankly, I find Facebook dizzying, too many people, too many applications, too many invitations and causes. The point isn’t for everyone to be on the same platform; the point is to use a variety of means for sharing and connecting with people.

Twitter is only as good or bad, as useful or not, as the people you are following. If the folks you’re following are inane, well, then the conversation won’t be too interesting. But, yesterday, I found more than an interesting, immediate, 140 character conversation on Twitter, I found a story teller. Dan Baum is a writer, he used to write for the New Yorker, a fabled haven destination for all professional writers, but he doesn’t any more. And he wanted to tell us why. So, in a series of tweets on May 8, 11 and 12th he told us. Here is an excerpt from his blog on which you can find the whole story:

It seemed to me that in each case, the reason for the story being spiked had nothing to do with the quality of the work.

But maybe I’m wrong. That’s why I put them on the website, to let others decide. Maybe they really were stinkers.

These killed stories were the reason Remnick gave when he called in early 2007 to say he wouldn’t renew my contract.

I love Dan’s story and the way he told it. He gave us his background, why the initial courtship with the New Yorker was so thrilling, the start of the down hill slide and then the door hitting him on his backside on the way out. He was candid, reflective and critical.

I love the idea of using social media tools in new and unexpected ways. I began to think about how great it would be for causes to tweet whole stories and hook us into their journeys.  One thing I was curious about was whether his serial was written in pieces or whether he wrote the whole essay out first and then tweeted it.  He responded via email:

I started writing it tweets using Twitterpost. Then, for the rest, I’d write a paragraph, with Word set to 140-character lines, and move the lines into Twitterpost. I was rarely more than a paragraph ahead. and if you’ll notice, i changed the way i was breaking lines part way through, in response to reader feedback.

We should take Dan’s experience to heart as social change folks. I love the idea of using social media tools for storytelling and have posted before about both the power and limitations of doing so. Here’s a great example of ways we can challenge ourselves to look at the variety of social media tools we have and think about how to use them to share with people who we are, what we’re doing, what makes it so hard, what we’re learning, and how they can help us to change the world. To tell a whole story not just the immediate bits and pieces of it.  Thanks for the great example and reminder of the power of storytelling, Dan!

Change.org Launches Jobs for Change

Received an email from Ben Rattray, the founder of Change.org, about the launch of Jobs for Change on their site.

My first thought was, “Hmmm, do we need another job bank?” But then I read Ben’s message further (always good to read the whole email, right?) and saw that what the Change.org folks are doing is fundamentally different from other efforts.

Here’s the key:  “We’ve created the site in partnership with more than a dozen nonprofits, including Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, AmeriCorps Alums, Echoing Green, Network for Good, and Encore Careers.  Among other things we’ve hired a team of career advisors to help people find and advance a career in social change – whether that’s in the nonprofit, government, or social enterprise sectors – and are hoping to serve as a gateway for people looking to enter the sector.”

The bottom line is that this is an effort to not only share great job opening using the social networks that Change.org is building, but also offer people-to-people help for folks looking for careers in the social sector.  All good stuff.

I signed up as an ambassador for the program here, take a peek.

No. 1 Killer of Women

The number one killer for women is heart disease, causing more deaths than all forms of cancer combined. The Sister to Sister Foundation has started a great web-based effort called the Screen Four campaign. Screen Four includes taking the pledge to get screened, get screened, telling 3 women, and taking action to lower your risk of heart disease.

So, now you know.  Go and tell your mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends. Get screened yourself, and spread the word to make sure the other women in your life do, too.

It’s Plethora Monday!

Not sure what happened over the weekend, but woke up to a Plethora of amazing social media stories! Too many really great ones to choose from, so here are a bunch. We’re living in an amazing time — If we could just get rid of this darn recession.

So, here goes:

• Open Cuba was created by Orbitz (yup, the travel site!) to press the administration to open up travel between the United States and Cuba. According to the site: Orbitz believes that Americans should have the freedom to travel the world, because our journeys lead to cross cultural understanding and stronger ties between citizens of all nations.  I find it fascinating that a corporation that has lots and lots of destinations to offer its customers has started an online campaign that risks a backlash of customers who disagree with this political stance. Very interesting, wonder what the back story is here?  I’ll keep watching and digging into this.
• Valdes Krebs blogs about this really great use of social network analysis.This post is a must read, but to summarize: A local economic justice organization had been working for a long time tracking the multiple, terrible violations that slum lords continuously ignored. Tenants and the group would keep reporting these slum lords for violations like raw sewage leaks, multiple tenant children with high lead levels, eviction of complaining tenants, utility liens of six figures to no avail because the properties kept changing hands.  Using social network analysis, this tenacious group found that each ownership group, ” LLCs were not independent business entities. The business transactions were happening within extended families! A conspiracy was coming into focus.”  All of the properties turn out to be owned by one diabolical mortgage group!
• Two great articles in the Times: this one by Stephanie Strom on the prevelance of online contests using social media (which Beth associates with this goldfish feeding frenzy, you know, she’s just saying . . .) and this one on about Annie Leonard’s terrific video, The Story of Stuff.

Phew, I think that’s it for now, enjoy!

New Podcast: Newspapers, Nonprofits and Social Media

The latest edition of the Social Good podcast that I host for the Chronicle of Philanthropy was just posted.

This month I had a conversation with Jessica Clark,Director: Future of Public Media Project, Center for Social Media, American University. Our discussion is on the topic on many minds lately; the demise of in-print newspapers.The recession has taken a huge toll of many paperse as advertising revenues have, on average, dropped about 30% in the first quarter of this year. Online, in print, even in Congress this week (why, not quite sure, but, I guess, it kept John Kerry out of other trouble this week) everyone is talking about whether newspapers can survive as the recession.

It’s a sad story, but there are bright spots on the horizon according to Jesica.  She points us to great new models of journalism that are hybrids of online and on land and that may be financially sustainable (still the big question) including Pro Publica and WNYCs The Takeaway.  Enjoy!