NTEN Guide on Managing Technology

Holly Ross, Executive Director of NTEN, kindly sent me a copy of the guide they just published in partnership with Wiley (Full disclosure note: Wiley is my publisher as well) called Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.

The book is an anthology of essays by a group of really smart folks including Peter Campbell, Beth Kanter, and Edward Granger-Happ. You can see the whole list here and read the book online or buy it.

The book is a great primer for people charged with IT responsibilities for nonprofits. But, the book also makes a point of reminding us that technology is an integral part of organizational life internally and externally, and that the big boxes in cold rooms run by guys named Buzzer.Understanding the larger context for technology is critically important as we continue to morph from big boxes to hand held, mobile devices.

My favorite chapter was Managing Technological Change by Dahna Goldstein. Too many tech books speak only to the line staff charged with setting the boxes up and pluggin them in. Dahna’s chapter tackles head-on the fears and anxiety around technology that are the biggest stoppers within organizations.

Digital Divide and Social Change

Much ado about the digital divide this week. It surprises me when it pops up once and again because the data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has consistently indicated over the past five years that the divide, access to Internet-based technology, that has kept low-income people off line, is closing extraordinarily fast.

Those findings are in keeping with an article in the Times yesterday about the shrinking divide primarily because cell phones to access to the Internet by young African American and English speaking Hispanics. The article states:

The report found that nearly half of all African-Americans and English-speaking Hispanics (the study did not include a Spanish-language option) were using mobile phones or other hand-held devices to surf the Web and send e-mail messages. By comparison, just 28 percent of white Americans reported ever going online using a mobile device.

But also yesterday, Andrew Sears, the Executive Director of TechMission, posted a passionate argument that the divide not only continues to exist but is perpetuated by institutional racism in the nonprofit sector by foundations and tech capacity builders. Andrew writes:

Addressing the digital divide and trying to help under-resourced communities is an extremely complex system. My assessment is that some of the largest efforts to address the digital divide by social entrepreneurs, including those at Google, may have unintentionally made matters worse among nonprofits.

There is a very interesting tension in the field of social change that becomes apparent when you see the difference between the fact that young people of color are naturally closing the digital divide and the fact that nonprofit organizations that serve them aren’t.

So, is the digital divide growing or shrinking as it relates to social change efforts?

I think the answer hinges on where you think social change comes from. In the pre-web 2.0 days I assumed that it came from organizations. Now, I don’t think so. Organizations are important, but they don’t lead change as much as follow it, particularly if they are adept at working in a networked way. So, who leads, the individuals with the power of an organization now in their palm with their cell phones. Look at the most dramatic instances of change this century anywhere in the world, Moldavia, Kuwait, Obama, Iraq (a work in progress), immigration marches, you will see a core network of passionate individuals supported by organizations, not the other way around.

In the cases when organizations are trying to lead change you get, well, our stalled health care reform (I’m a bit bitter about how all of the institutional players just left us passionate, smart, capable folks sitting on our couches while they went behind closed doors to get nothing done.)

Of course, these kinds of broad brush strokes about how change happens may be chimeric at best. But one thing is certain: although the divide does exist today, it won’t sometime in the future as these young people of color come of age clicking, friending, texting and surfing and organizations that can’t keep pace with them had better beware!

Pollyanna Principles: Power of Thinking Differently

I love when someone challenges the lens through which I look at the world, challenges my assumptions, and helps me to see things differently.

That’s what the Pollyanna Principles written by Hildy Gotlieb does — in spades!

The book is based on Hildy’s considerable experience hands-on working directly with people and communities. This isn’t a theoretical framework, but a very practical and practiced one that applies across organizations, issue areas and geography.

Here are The Pollyanna Principles:

1. We accomplish what we hold ourselves accountable for.
2. Each and everyone of us is creating the future, every day, whether we do so consciously or not.
3. Everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent, whether we acknowledge that or not.
4. “Being the change we want to see” means walking the talk of our values.
5. Strength build upon our stengths, not our weaknesses.
6. Individuals will go where systems lead them.

Brimming with enthusiasm and optimism, Hildy challenges each one of us the future that we want. Hildy encourages us to throw off the yoke of the “culture of can’t” weighing us down of what we can’t do and what isn’t practical or doable at the moment. What if we envisioned the world as it could be? What if envisioned a world full of abundance and could envision addressing the underlying issues that are keeping people hungry, homeless, disempowered and disenfranchised not just, in social work language, as their presenting problems?  It is a freeing and empowering notion – and the essence of real social change.

I’ve been thinking lately about the meaning of social change and social change organizations. Not all nonprofit organizations fit into this category. Hospitals aren’t creating social change. What about direct service organizations that don’t have an advocacy component? How about businesses that sell things, like books, or confections, and give money to causes – are they doing social change work? I’m not sure that I know all of these answers yet – but Hildy has given me an interesting and helpful framework for thinking about them. Thanks, Hildy!

Amy Sample Ward also has a very illuminating review of the book on Beth’s Blog as also.

Facebook Is Run by Jewish & Asian Mothers

According to Mashable, if you want to deactivate your Facebook account you will get the following guilt-ridden message, “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account, [friend name] will miss you.” This message is accompanied by five photos of friends who, presumably, would miss you terribly if you were gone.

Did Facebook focus group this approach with a sample of Jewish and Chinese mothers who are the world best guilt givers?

Seriously, it’s hard to know whether to to be appaled or impressed. On the one hand, it is a clever marketing approach. On the other hand, it seems to me that someone who deactivates from their account are very aware of the friends that they no longer want to connect with on this particular social media channel.

But there is a larger issue here, and it is the ongoing passive aggressive relationship that Facebook has with its users. The struggle that they are groping their way through as to how to maintain their momentum of adding new users as an astonishing pace, increase its valuation in order to make itself increasingly attractive to advertisers and potential buyers is, at times, uncomfortable to watch.

I have written about the discomforting disconnect between the corporate face of Facebook and the robust, Facebook social network that we, the customers and users and their raison d’etre, experience every day.  And this is yet another example of it.

Why shouldn’t people be allowed to leave Facebook easily and guilt free?

People come and go in social networks – and they should be encouraged to do both. Networks need to be easily accesible to newcomers, and by the same token it is important that they be allowed to leave when they want to. Facebook really needs to begin to reconcile it’s financial interests with it’s responsibilities as a host to people’s personal social networks. Maybe a few minutes with Craig Newmark might help to clarify the difference.

My advice to the Facebook folks (because I know they’ve been waiting for my advice!) is make it as easy to go as it was to enter, and give people very, very good reasons for wanting to rejoin.

Note: Based on feedback fromLisa C. Hoang on Twitter, the title of this piece was changed from Chinese to Asian mothers.

The Social Credit Card

My friend Paul Lamb has sponsored a very neat idea on Ideablob. Paul wants to create a Social Credit Card.

If you haven’t spent time surfing around Ideablob you should. It’s a really terrific idea of crowdsourcing new, entreprneurial ideas, both for profit and nonprofit, can post their ideas. The crowd can then review and vote for them; the winner gets $10,000.

Paul’s Social Credit Card idea is a way to use a mechanism, like a credit card, to store and social capital for exchange. Here’s Paul’s description of the idea:

Every time we make a social contribution (helping a neighbor, volunteering at a homeless shelter, donating to charity, etc.) we accumulate points that appear on our monthly statements. These points are then redeemable, similar to frequent flyer miles, for the purchasing of goods or services. The points can also be used to pay down debt or donated to other individuals or charities as a financial contribution. By combining social with financial capital we create incentives for good works and a more comprehensive picture of our net worth.

Go and take a peek, and if you are moved, vote for Paul’s idea today. Thanks!

Social Network Analysis For the Rest of Us

Social  Network Analysis or SNA can feel overwhelming and confounding to newcomer. The basic premise isn’t complicated, we live in a variety of personal and professional networks wherein people are connected to one another; or many people are connected to particularly influential organizations or people. We should be able to create a diagram that shows us what that network looks like.

For social change efforts the purpose of drawing the map is to see who is connected to whom, how strong those connections, who the influentials are, and conversely who isn’t on the map who should be.  Here is the profession of social network according to the two smartest folks in the field Valdis Krebs and June Holley.

There are very sophisticated software that research organizations use to feed in lots of data about the people and organizations in a network, how information flows, who they are connected to, how often and at what trust level, etc. And then they spit out those amazing Spirographic pictures that look soooo cool.

But, it’s always seemed daunting to me about what us regular folks who can’t afford the fancy software experts can do to see and understand our networks.

And today I found the answer (courtesy, of course, Beth and this amazing post of hers!) the Net-Map Toolbox by Eva Schiffer!

Eva provides a step-by-step overview of the process on her blog, plus a video and a handbook. It’s an amazingly common sense approach. If I can do it, you can, try it out!

How Newsweek Got My $6.95 and Lost My Subscription

A few days ago my lovely husband came home from the market with a copy of Newsweek magazine that he knew I’d like. The cover was a photograph of a young  Michael  Jackson. It was a tribute edition to the singer with only the words “The Meaning of Michael.”

I had a delicious vision in my head of  leisurely reading the magazine on my back porch, cold drink in hand on a warm summer’s night. And I sat down to do just that last night. And then I realized that I had been scammed.

See, we’re regular subscribers to Newsweek, have been for a long time. After flipping through a few pages I realized that I was reading the exact same issue I had just read a few days. The only difference was that the issue we received in the mail had a picture of books on the cover for a story about the books that we read and what they say about us.

I flipped to the front of the magazine to find this statement from the editor, Jon Meacham:

“There is one cover, Jackson, for the newsstand, and another, about books, for our subscribers, a solution we think helps make us part of the current conversation in the marketplace and gives our committed readers a broader-guaged cover with the same content inside.”

I was stunned and had to read that sentence that ended with “wiht the same content inside” three times to believe what I was reading. How is producing two covers with the same content providing greater value to the reading public? More importantly, how is tricking Newsweek fans (which is how I felt, tricked, swindled, baited and switched) into thinking there was a special edition just on Michael Jackson on the newsstands helping the magazine better connect with their readers? And, why am I, a person focused on using social media for social change, reporting this saga to you?

I am relaying this story because it is yet another example, a particularly egregious one, of the tone-deafness of the mainstream media in the Connected Age and their complete inability to imagine a different relationship with their readers. Because that is the true power of social media, it changes the relationship between istitutions and individuals and enables us, the reader, to develop a stronger relationship with the people behind the magazine. But, only if they want to, only if they let us in and stop hiding behind logos and multiple covers!

There are lessons here for all organizations. The main lesson, the one Newsweek and many other publications don’t seem to get (no matter how often I say it, if they just listened to me or better Jay Rosen a little more . ..) is that the relationship between the publication and the reader has changed.

In the old paradigm the publication talked at us and we didn’t have many other choices but to buy what they were selling. Now we have lots and lots of choices and I’m only going to stick with particular organizations and publications that treats me well. What does “treats me well” mean? Well, for starters, how about not snookering me into buying an expensive extra newsstand copy of the magazine? And how about inviting me into conversations and treating me like a thinking member of a community not a walking wallet. I’m really tired of publications thinking that their entire social media “strategy” consists of additional content online that wasn’t good enough to go into the issue. Or reporters reluctantly blogging but not really participating in the conversation through the comments.

Enough! We have brains and interests and we used to have institutional loyalty to magazines like Newsweek, and still could, if they treated us like people, respect our relationship and strengthen it. Let us suggest stories, and crowdsource content and have real conversations with reporters, and many other things that I’m not creative enough to think of but the crowd certainly could.

So, Newsweek, you win this round, here ya go, take my $6.95. But you lost the war, we won’t be renewing our subscription.

80 Million Millennials Meeting Today in DC

OK, well, not exactly eighty million young people, but a coalition of organizations called 80 Million Strong that includes Mobilize.org, SAVE and the Roosevelt Institution as well as our committed steering committee members, including GenerationEngage, Advocates for Youth, Global Grind, The Concord Coalition are meeting today in DC.

They’re going to be talking about jobs, jobs, jobs and more jobs, particularly green ones, national security ones. Education and health care also top their list of agenda items.

You can watch the meeting unfold on UStream.

Tweeting for Children

The Christian Children’s Fund has changed its name to ChildFund International. To celebrate their new, well, let’s call it “christening”, they will be giving gifts of agricultural love and hope from the organization’s gift catalog for every 200 Twitter followers @childfund receives.

These efforts will directly benefit children in Gambia, Zambia, Kenya and Ethiopia. There is no cap on on followers, and the offer will continue through July 27.

So, go onto Twitter and follow @childfund today!

Causes on Facebook: An Update and Lessons

The latest edition of my Social Good podcast was posted yesterday. The topic this month is the Causes application on Facebook, where things stand and how to be successful using it. My guests were Joe Green the co-founder of Causes and Amy Eldridge, the founder and executive director of Love Without Boundaries. I first heard about Amy’s group through the research that Beth and I did for the Giving Challenge assessment effort for The Case Foundation.

Causes just had its two year anniversary. To date about 200,000 Causes have been created, and about 50,000 of those have been created for a specific nonprofit organization. And this just in from the Causes folks today, they surpassed $10 million in total donations using the application.

As you’ll hear Amy and Joe caution, uses Causes takes the same persistence and elbow grease that all fundraising efforts require. In addition, here are a few lessons learned from their experiences:

• As I mentioned Causes and Facebook are not ATM machines. Successful efforts have built relationships with their supporters.
• Successful efforts have been time limited, urgent campaigns that have engaged people — and then let them go when the campaign is over.
• Causes augments, doesn’t replace, your other fundraising efforts.
• It’s important to know when to lay fallow and spend your energy building your community and raising awareness of your Cause rather than trying fruitlessly to fundraise.