Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards

The 2009 Nonprofit Tagline Awards sponsored by Getting Attention is on!

Nancy Schwartz the brains behind Getting Attention describes the competition this way:

The contest is a great means of motivating nonprofit folks to focus on the basics (e.g. powerful, distinctive, succinct messaging) in a time of such distraction (from the economy to social media and on)

Last year’s winners got a lot of mileage from their awards – really boosted fundraising efforts in several cases – and thousands of other orgs downloaded last year’s tagline report to benefit from the tagline guidance and database (over 1000 taglines entered in 2008, great models of dos and don’ts!).

Here’s what you do: Take 3 minutes now to enter your nonprofit’s tagline here (http://is.gd/19skW).

All entrants will receive a free copy of the fully-updated 2009 Nonprofit Tagline Report in late 2009. It’s the only complete guide to building your org’s brand in 8 words or less — filled with how-tos, don’t-dos and models.
Enter today, while it’s on your mind.

Deadline is July 31st. Good luck – may the best tag win!

Women’s Philanthropy Grows 223 Percent

The Foundation Center and the Women’s Funding Network released a report yesterday called Accelerating Change for Women and Girls: The Role of Women’s Funds on the growing impact of philanthropy by women for women and children’s programs.

Key findings:

• The study found that between 1990 and 2006, giving directed to women and girls by the broader foundation community climbed 223 percent, after adjusting for inflation, compared to an overall giving increase of 177 percent.The nation’s private and community foundations increased their giving for activities targeting women and girls from an estimated $412.1 million in 1990 to nearly $2.1 billion in 2006.
• Giving by the 55 women’s funds analyzed in the report also rose an inflation-adjusted 24 percent between 2004 and 2006, while foundation giving overall increased 14.8 percent in the same period.
• The over 145 member funds of the Women’s Funding Network provide an estimated $60 million a year in grants and leverage millions more through their wider relationships and connections.
• Women’s funds take a comprehensive approach to social change, focusing their giving on human rights, health, and economic empowerment.

Although the study ends in 2006, the women’s funds continued to grow in 2007 ($2.3 billion) and 2008 ($2.4 billion.)

IssueLab’s Excellent Post on Innovation

IssueLab posted a terrific piece today further assessing the design and intentions of the White House’s proposed Office of Social Innovation. They were riffing on my negative reaction to the Fund last month which received a lot of heat from the MBA crowd.

What I liked best about the post was the thinking about the intersection of innovation and legitimacy. Government, like many foundations, are loathe to be out on a limb testing new social programs and ideas. There is just too much heat that they’re going to take from a bevy of critics when they do so. Legitimacy includes all of the externality, all of the window dressing and norming and social acceptance that comes with being tried and true, and large and successful. Just the opposite of innovation in my opinion.

The post ends with these questions:

What are the equivalent measures in the sector for judging the legitimacy of organizations? Other funders, name recognition, buzz, scale, earned income revenue, the ability to measure results and impact? How many innovative startup projects and organizations can claim all these measures? And will they have access to either the Office of Social Innovation or to ever scarcer foundation funding?

These are exactly the right questions to ask. Now, where else are we going to have this discussion, do I hear a vote for a group pow-wow in the Rose Garden? Hope so, I’ll buy a new hat for that one!

Assessing America’s Giving Challenge

The Case Foundation released this morning the asseement report that Beth and I co-authored on their Giving Challenge. It was a wonderful opportunity and experience really digging into the Challenge to better understand how and why it worked, we hope you’ll read and enjoy the report.

Here’s the skinny on what the Giving Challenge:

• The Giving Challenge was a 50 day event from December 2007 through January 2008.
• The Case Foundation provided awards to participants who raised the largest number of friends, not money, every day and in total by the end of the Challenge.
• The Challenge raised $1.8 million from more than 71,000 donors, benefiting thousands of causes.
• Individuals were encouraged to participate as champions for their causes as well as organizations (and they did so in large numbers)

All of that is nice, but when it eneded something really remarkable happened. When the final winners were announced they were a Who’s Who of . . .who?  They weren’t Amnesty International and the Red Cross, wonderful causes, of course, but not the winners of the Challenge. It turned out that 11 of the 16 Giving Challenge award recipients were for causes with annual organizational budgets of less than $1m. They included Love without Boundaries, Beth’s cause The Sharing Foundation, Nourish International , and the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund. Not exactly household names. So, how were these groups, many of which don’t even have staff, able to be so successful in The Giving Challenge? What’s the secret sauce? That’s what Beth and I set out to find out through lots of interviews and surveys last year.

Here’s what we learned:

• The structure of the Challenge lent itself to leveling the playing field and enabling smaller groups to be successful. Those key elements included the use of Causes on Facebook that enables smaller groups to connect friend-to-friend at no cost, the short time frame that enabled smaller groups to hang in there and give it all they had for a limited albeit exhausting, period of time, the urgency of the Challenge created by the significant matching dollars offered by The Case Foundation, and the leader board that enabled everyone to see how they were doing and spur their volunteers to do more to keep up with the competition.
• The winners were able to make their efforts go viral, meaning friends of friends were working on their behalf to support their Challenge efforts, because they had talented individuals who spent an enormous amount of time as network weavers and cheerleaders-in-chief. The winners had an inner circle fo volunteers who outworked less successful groups not by a few but by hundreds of hours.
• Winners pushed power to the edges through their social networks and were agile, real-time learners. Winners didn’t have set plans when they started, they just started. Friends of friends blogged on their behalf, sent text messages, walked dorm room to dorm room laptop in hand raising friends, asked their office colleagues for help. There was no one right way to win the Challenge and all of the winners had a robust mix of online and on land efforts and learned in real time throughout the Challenge how best to connect with their friends and potential supporters.
• Personal connections were critical in activating the viral effect of successful cause efforts – by large margins (between 61-74%), cause champions reported reaching out for donations and outreach assistance to people they knew personally, including known supporters, family, friends and colleagues first to spread the word and encourage participation in the Challenge.
• Most winners reported that the friends that they raised during the Challenge were new donors to their organizations. The urgency of the effort enabled groups to turn friends into funders. This is a critically important finding not only for the Challenge but for groups using Causes on Facebook.

I hope you’ll have a chance to read the report. I’d love your feedback as would The Case Foundation as they prepare for the next Giving Challenge later this year.

Who’s the Smartest Guy in the Room?

I’ve been wondering about your definition of the Smartest Guy in the Room lately. In fact, I’ve just finished the book by the same name about the rise and implosion of Enron. What an epic story of colossal greed and unethical behavior – and yet, for the brief time (it really was only about five years) when Enron ruled the natural gas trading markets, they were known far and wide as the smartest guys in the room.

Why? What is it about these guys that we think is so admirable, and why do we nonprofits continue to pack our boards with people who bring financial and corporate skills and experience at the expense of work and relationships in the communities that we serve? (This is not supposition or sour grapes on my part – although I’m prone to spouting both – but data from BoardSource.)

Blogger Carlo Cuesta of Creation in Common has written this terrific post about the need for people to stop assuming that “acting like for profits” should be the goal of the nonprofit community. He writes:

This statement [act like a for profit], commonly heard by nonprofits, stinks. It is akin to diagnosing a broken toe by telling the patient she has a fever. All nonprofits must be operationally effective, but this is not what the statement implies. It furthers the perception that if you do not operate with a profit motive you do not understand business. It says: “for-profit expertise trumps nonprofit expertise.” It is one of the greatest barriers to deep collaboration among board and staff members—pitting the knowledgeable business leader against the knowledgeable community worker. Money vs. mission.

Given the demise of GM, the meltdown of AIG and the implosion of the banking sector, the entire real of Smartest Guys as we’ve thought of them, I’m hoping that we can create a new definition of Smartest Guys for for profits and nonprofits that fits a new age of humility and connectedness.

So, here’s my shot at the new definition of Smartest Guys. They are people (you now we’re just using Guys generically here, right?) who are great at:

• Relationship building. Not networking, but building two-way, equal relationships that builds social capital and makes good karma (Tom Watson’s word) go ’round;
• Network weaving. Connecting with large numbers of people and inviting them in to participate in efforts that benefit everyone.
• Credit giving. It’s easy to take credit, but, sadly, harder to give it, particularly when we’ve been taught not to. By generously giving credit, as well as taking it appropriately, leaders reassure their networks that they are interested in all boats rising not just their own.

What would the world look like if we valued these attributes more than financial skills?

Hillary Clinton and Twitter

According to the NY Times yesterday, the State Department asked Twitter not to perform their regularly scheduled maintenance Tuesday night in order to keep the site up for tweets from Iranian protestors. (It would have been nice if the story had included the fact that there were lots and lots of voices on Twitter asking the company to do the same thing.)

That’s HIllary’s State Department doing that and she has been out front recently talking about the impact that social media can have on diplomatic relations.

She also has a Twitter account of all things Hillary here.

But, then, yesterday, she says during a press conference, “I wouldn’t know a Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it is very important.”

Now, I love Hillary, really I do. I was an ardent supporter of hers during the primary campaign last year and think she will make a great president. But, this is a perfect example of the way that too many Boomers treat social media. It’s something other people, generally young people, do that isn’t infused in the way that they work.Knowing that Twitter is important, reading reports that Iranians are using it to share their stories this week isn’t enough. Hillary has to try it out. I’m not suggesting that she has to be a devoted tweeter, but she has to kick the tires and give it a whirl around the block to really see what the fuss is all about.

There is an opportunity here.  There are Boomers and even reluctant Gen Xers in your organizations who are either resisting the social media resolution mightly or hoping that it’s something other people do. This isn’t a sustainable way to work; social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental way of reorganizing your work and your relationships with the rest of the world. My suggestion is setting up reverse mentoring brown bag lunches where the Millennials can walk them through some of the tools and let them test drive them. Think of opportunities for your Luddites to be guest bloggers and tweeters. Get them using the tools and they’ll see for themselves how powerful they are.

And while Hillary is recuperating (I had the same thing happen a few years ago – ouch!), I’m happy to have lunch at her house in Chappaqua and tweet together with her!

Echoing Green 2009 Fellows Announced

Exciting news from Echoing Green yesterday as they announced this year’s fellows.  From their announcement:

Our 2009 Echoing Green Fellows are ready to spark change around the world, in areas such as civil and human rights, education and youth leadership, health and public service. Newly announced Fellows Barbara Bush and Jonny Dorsey are working on Global Health Corps, an organization that will improve the quality of healthcare services for the poor by connecting young professionals from around the world with health-focused organizations. David Del Ser’s project, Frogtek, aims to increase the opportunities and income of small shopkeepers in the developing world with affordable business tools that can be run on mobile phones. Esra’a Al Shafei’s Mideast Youth connects youth from the Middle East and North Africa online to promote human rights and free speech.

One particular not of hurrah from me is the inclusion of The Extraordinaries in the mix!  I had interviews Ben Rigby the co-founder of The Extraordinaries, a smart phone platform for micro volumteerism, as part of my Social Good podcast a few months ago.

The Revolution is Tweeted, Does it Matter?

There has been much ado over the last two days over the role of Twitter in reporting and spurring on the election protests in Iran. The outrage of Twitterers that cable news wasn’t covering the election swayed the MSM, particularly CNN, according to the Times.  The Revolution will be Twittered Andrew Sullivan breathlessly declared of the power of Twitter and Millennials (who actually don’t use Twitter here in the US as much as they use Facebook) to shape events and the coverage of them. And then, of course, the pushback from smart commentators, like Tom Watson, declaring quite firmly that the Revolution Won’t be Twittered! Tom warns about the “catnip” quality of Twitter for jouanlists looking to crown the little digital tool as a catalyst of revolutions. He writes:

But I think there are limits, especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall. Sure, Twitter (and Facebook and text messaging and blog and YouTube) can be effective information outlets for revolutionaries, but it’s utterly facile to suggest that information technology is driving the currents of unrest in Iran. I can understand the impulse, though; after all, we (the digerati, the plugged in, the Twitterverse) are watching it unfold online. And, you know, wherever we are, well, that’s where the action is.

But there are interesting lessons here, both positive and negative, that are important to highlight as we continue to learn how best to use social media during fast-paced social events. Here are a few thoughts that I hope others will continue to expand upon:

1. This weekend certainly showed that the mainstream media is listening to closely to what is being tweeted about them. In fact, that may be one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter, the fact that journalists are using it as part of their practice of finding stories, hearing from more voices and distributing their stories makes it a great vehicle for communities of people to shout loudly at them and be heard. We’ve been shouting for a while, but being heard is quite another thing.

2. To remind us that there are no silver bullets. It is so tempting to want to annoint the latest tools; Twitter this year, Facebook last year, blogs the year before, as THE catalyst for social change. There are lots of different channels on which to have lots of different conversations and no one tool or conversation creates a revolution. There is a rich stew of social media and it is the combination of them that we need to keep trying to understand and use for social change.

3.  As Jeff Jarvis pointed out this morning (via Twitter, of course!) @jeffjarvis: To a reporter today that Twitter is not news source.Source of tips & temperature & sources. Reporting follows. Twitter doesn’t replace journalism, it is a first cut, real-time stream of conversations and information, some of which is helpful, most of which is either restating the observations of other people or false rumor. But that’s what history is before it’s history, isn’t it? Just a jumble of events, conversations, observations for others to make sense.

I was thinking this morning about the remarkable juxtaposition of the twentieth anniversity of Tiananmen Square last week and the Iranian protests this week. The only thing the world knew of the Chinese protests were still photographs of incredibly brave young people protesting together, or singly standing right in front of tanks, that we saw hours later. Compare that to the real-time reporting from within Iran by brave people using whatever tools were working, cell phones before they went down, Flckr, Facebook, and Twitter, to tell the world what is happening right now. I’ll take the real-time social media stew anytime and leave it to others to figure out what’s historically important later!

The Connection Between Online and On Land

Amy Sample Ward posed a question for the Net2 Think Tank for this month: How do real-world (offline) events fit into social media conversations and campaigns?

I can’t think of a single time I have spoken at a conference or event when this question didn’t come up. A Boomer will stand up and pretend to ask a question but actually make a statement that goes something like this, “Social change can’t just happen in that cyber space world of yours, it has to happen on the ground, with real bots, where real people are and where real change happens.” Sometimes they throw a profanity or two in there.

Now, what’s missed by this listener is the opener qualifier that I put into every talk I give. It goes something like, “Now before you get too concerned that I’m going to tell you that social change is only going to happen in cyberspace in the future, please hear me: social change will continue to happen where it always has, in person, on the ground. We need to create meaningful connections and intersections for people online and on land.” And yet, no matter how loudly I say that the accusing question always comes.

Why?

The easy answer is that people are afraid. The statement maker feels assaulted by all of the wizardry of the Connected Age and really hopes it will just fade away. Their anxiety comes out in this accusation that I am suggesting that every aspect of our lives moves online. I alone appear responsible to them for the death of in person relationships, newspapers, and probably General Motors, too!

The harder answer is that social media activists haven’t emphasized the on land piece enough. Remember the old advertising adage; it’s not until they scream that they heard you that they actually have. We need to yell it louder. Online and on land are inextricably linked, social change can’t happen online alone, social change can’t scale on land alone. But techtopians like me get really, really excited about a new mapping of the Iranian blogosphere (see it here, it really is sooo cool!) and are less focused on parlor meetings and coffees and Meetups – they’re not as sexy. But  the change that we want to see won’t happen without them.

So, what should we do?

We need to get much more intentional about the intersection of online and on land. We need to keep asking the question, “And how does this [effort/campaign/outreach/gadget] connect to on land efforts?” Think of it as a physics equation; every online activity and event has to have an equal on  land component. We need balance to our efforts, we need to strengthen relationships and build our social capital in ways that can only happen on land.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good

Mashable has announced a giving campaign that runs from June 1st through August 28th of this year to raise money for four terrific causes; The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund and LiveStrong.

It will be very intersting to see how this effort unfolds. Mashable is a very widely read site with amazing reach on a host of other channels like Twitter and Facebook. As Jocelyn wrote, “I’m excited to see how this campaign unfolds as it will provide additional benchmarks and information regarding the ROI of social media and how nonprofits can best use these channels.”

So, of course, I wish them well and hope the Summer of Social Good turns out better than the Summer of George. But I was stopped short when I read the first sentence on the Mashable’s site about the campaign, “Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet.” This is simply not true, in particular they would have been well served to take a peek at how America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by The Case Foundation unfolded. As a result of that fifty day effort over 80,000 people gave $1.7 million.

But more than the total numbers of people who gave and total dollar amount that they gave, The Challenge (FYI: Beth and I authored an assessment report of the Challenge that will be released by the Foundation this month)

What that Challenge had that the Summer of Social Good is a sense of urgency for donors, without which it is too easy for people who intend to give, want to give, mean to give, to just put it off. The urgency of the Challenge resulted from the financial match that The Case Foundation offered daily and at the end of the effort to reward the causes that raised the largest number of friends not dollars. A sense of urgency to motivate people to give also came from the length of the campaign (which was too long at 50 days) and a leader board that provided real-time data for participants to know how there were doing.

Again, I hope that the Summer of Social Good is phenomenally successful, just wish they had built their effort on the lessons learned from previous campaigns.