Branding is About Trust Not Control

I have had several conversations recently with nonprofit staffers that have been eerily similar. These staffers want to help turn their organizations outwards and engage in more conversations using social media. But they are blocked by their senior communications and development who are afraid that their brands will be diminished or harmed by all of this activity happening by people other than themselves “out there.”

I have struggled for a long time with the notion of nonprofits “branding” their organizations. It is one of the concepts that we borrowed in whole from the for profit sector — whether it fit or not.

The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), otherwise known by smarty pants like me as the Association of Associations, distributes a monthly newsletter. One recent article starts with this sentence, “Your brand is your most valuable asset.” Put that way it makes perfect sense that opening up the brand on social media channels would feel unacceptable. It would be like taking the Declaration of Independence out from behind glass at the National Archives and passing it around person-to-person on the national mall.

Let’s say that an organization’s brand is the compilation of all of it’s good assets: mission, services, reputation, values and performance. In some instances, the brand is venerable and iconic, think about the Girl Scouts and the American Cancer Society. But what is about these brands, or about the notion of brands, that makes social media use unacceptable?

The struggle is about the intersection of control and trust that the leadership of too many nonprofit organizations are struggling with right now. Here’s the argument. Staffers and volunteers on social media channels like Facebook cannot be counted on to talk about our organization in a way that won’t do harm to the perception by people that we are trustworthy and reliable and valuable. And the people out there can’t be trusted to participate in these conversations in civil, constructive ways.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When organizations use social media to have conversations with their networks they are building real relationships with people. Those relationships are built on trust.  Everything that a nonprofit organization needs to accomplish happens because their community trusts them. They trust them to use their donation well, provide quality services, treat their own staff and their community members with dignity and respect.

The reaction of senior staff to their fear of harming the brand by engaging with social media is astounding for their lack of trust that it reveals. They don’t trust that their networks that have their best interests at heart to engage in conversations about their services. Any criticism, in their minds, will damage their brands. When the opposite is true, criticism usually comes from people who care enough about an organization to voice a concern. And it is an opening for a constructive conservation about what the organization can do better or differently.  Shying away from criticism doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, it just means the organization isn’t listening to it.

But even more than not trusting those strangers out there, the concern about losing control of the brand is illustrative of the lack of trust that senior staffers have of their own staff. If you don’t trust your own people to talk about your organization then why aren’t you training and supporting them? And, again, just because you haven’t sanctioned the conversations of staff, again, doesn’t mean that they’re not happening out there.

Moreover, not engaging and building relationships because for fear of losing control leaves organization sitting alone behind their locked doors talking to, well, no one. It’s hard to imagine social change happening that way.

C’mon, development and communications folks, let your brand out for a conversation with people who care about your organization!

 

Redlining Online

Ivan Boothe wrote a terrific post last week about Causes taking down its application from MySpace. Causes is an application for use on social networking sites. it enables users to highlight causes that they care about asking friends to join their cause and also to make donations.

Since its launch in 2006, there are around 250,000 Causes on Facebook. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. They are people who are passionate about something, say the high cost of tuition or global warming writ large, and want their friends to know about it. That leaves about 46,000 causes that are connected to a specific nonprofit organization.I have written before about the meaning of Causes on Facebook.

Last year Causes broadened its reach to MySpace. By shutting down the application on MySpace, Causes is leaving about 184,000 cause enthusiasts out in the cold.  The number of users on MySpace was tiny compared to the reported 30 million active monthly users of Causes on Facebook. And, according to the Facebook Causes blog, the application has helped raise more than $12 million for nonprofits based in the U.S. and Canada. Over $5 million has been raised in 2009 alone.

This stirred quite a bit of commentary last week with very thoughtful pieces from Ivan as mentioned above, Amy Sample Ward, and Sean Stannard-Stockton. They noted the lack of robustness of the Causes application on MySpace compared to Facebook, the lack of conversation by and from Causes about why they made the decision, what it means for MySpace users, and the risk that nonprofit organizations take when they use third party applications like Causes to help build community online.

But there was one argument in particular that really resonated with me. When I first heard the news, I immediately began to think about a terrific, provocative talk that danah boyd gave last summer at the Personal Democracy Forum. It was appropriately titled, “The Not So Hidden Politics of Class Online.” Here is the video from her talk. She talked about the emerging online divides by race and class that are appearing, particularly the differences between the college-oriented people on Facebook and the non-college population on MySpace.

danah’s talk resonated with a post by Justin Maasa entitled “Social Networking Redlining.” Redlining was the practice of banks to steer their mortgages to people of certain races and ethnicities in certain neighborhoods. In other words, a way to keep African Americans out of certain neighborhoods was for banks not to lend them mortgages. This short post really summed up something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, the tension between the natural friending that happens on social networking sites that create cliques and silos and that can’t be avoided, and the institutional boundaries that are being created between sites like Facebook and MySpace.It is the institutional boundaries that nonprofit organizations should be fighting the hardest to try to breach.

Causes made a business decision, they were not making, or foreseeing, a return on investment for the application on MySpace. That’s entirely their right. The problem from a social change point of view are the number of nonprofit organizations that are shying away from MySpace in favor of Facebook. some assume from the popular press that MySpace is dying – it isn’t. Some assume that it isn’t cool to be on MySpace now. Or worse, they are focusing their organizational efforts towards Facebook because that’s where they hang out in their off time, that’s where their friends and family are socializing.

Social change needs to happen everywhere. Nonprofit organizations are charged with making it happen, intentionally, in easy places and harder places. MySpace may be a more challenging environment for some nonprofit organizations but it doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be there. Perhaps it means that they need to be there even more, to help raise awareness of issue, listen to what people are saying, and help to organize. Only by intentionally reaching out to communities that are too often overlooked will nonprofit organizations be able to help take down the boundaries that are keeping the voices of marginalized communities from being heard.

I’m glad that this issue was raised and led to a constructive conversation about the need for nonprofits not to overlook MySpace. Thanks to everyone for participating in an interesting dialogue.

 

 

Give List on the Blog Watch

Becky Bright of the Blog Watch on the Wall Street Journal site was kind enough to give a shout out to the Give List this morning.

I also love the other resources for volunteering around holiday time that she lists.  They include:

DO GOOD, FEEL GOOD
WeTV.com/blogs/do-good-feel-good/index.html

There are many reasons why people don’t volunteer more, but one of the biggest is lack of time. In a recent post, blogger Britt Bravo offers five tips to help readers find time to volunteer. Among the suggestions: Practice “voluntourism” by helping out while on vacation.

Ms. Bravo also regularly provides ideas for other volunteer opportunities, including a new campaign by YouTube LLC soliciting video submissions to help specific causes, such as animal-welfare organizations.

THE JAYNE BLOG
Blogs.Forumer.com/jcravens

Blogger Jayne Cravens is a consultant who works with nonprofits on many issues, including their use of volunteers. In a recent post she alerts readers to the surge of volunteers around the year-end holidays and offers advice on how they can avoid being turned away by organizations that simply can’t use any more helping hands. The key, she writes, is to start looking as soon as possible for volunteering opportunities, and she offers links to several Web sites that help match volunteers with causes.

All good stuff. Also take a look at VolunteerMatch to find opportunities by zipcode. Go, do, now and make the world a better place!

 

Beth Asked a Question

Beth asked a question on her blog the other day:

Do we have examples of using nonprofits using social media for:

• Volunteer or board recruitment strategy
• Ooutreach or educational program delivery
• Crowdsourcing ideas for program development
• Professional development
• Integrated in other areas

The answer is that there are a growing number of examples of organizations, and individuals, using social media as part of their programs not just part of fundraising and communications efforts. For instance:

• One of my favorite crowdsourcing efforts that happens online and on land is the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. It’s over a hundred years old and now uses a variety of social media tools like Flckr, online databases, blogs and online videos to recruit bird counters and share their data.
• WeAreMedia which Beth helped to organize and launch with NTEN is a terrific example of a wiki to help a community learn together that is being continuously updated and improved. The increased use of webinars by organizations is reducing the cost of professional development for organizations.
• The Extraordinaries is a new effort for volunteers to dip into volunteering on-the-go using their smart phones.
• The Meyer Memorial Trust in Portland, OR hosts a terrific blog on its site about new media and its uses for social change.
• And, of course, the use of Facebook and other social networking sites are being used to build relationships and a sense of community for thousands of nonprofits.

I was concerned about two years ago that social media were being relegated for use largely to political and advocacy campaigns. The nonprofit community began to dip their toe in for fundraising and some communication efforts. It is really only in the last year or so that the use of social media more broadly to help organizations meet their mission is beginning to happen for both nonprofit and foundations. This is great news, we will only see more of these kinds of activities unfold.

But, Beth does mention one area that isn’t seeing enough change and development with social media right now. It is boards and governance. There are many ways that governing boards could use social media to connect board members to one another and to their communities through wikis, social networks, and blogs. But, to date, there has been a great deal of hesitation about opening up governance. It is one more frontier that will begin to change soon — it has to because governance is too important and social media are too powerful to continue to work in isolation from one another.

America’s Giving Challenge Reflections

America’s Giving Challenge concluded last week. The event, the second such challenge, was sponsored by The Case Foundation ($150,000), The Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy & Social Innovation ($20,000) and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($75,000). Nonprofit organizations competed to raise the largest number of friends online using the Causes application on Facebook and on Parade Magazine’s site. The winners received matching grants from the funders mentioned above.

Although there will be a much more thorough assessment conducted by The Case Foundation, I thought I’d capture a few reflections immediately upon the competition’s completion.

This is one few online competitions to happen a second time, so it’s a great moment to reflect on what stayed the same and what was different. I’ll base these reflections in part on the assessment report that Beth and I wrote for The Case Foundation on the first Challenge that took place from December 2007 to January 2008.

There were a few changes from last time.

• A shorter competition time, down from fifty days to thirty days.
• An intensive effort by the Case Foundation prior to the Challenge to provide technical assistance through a series of videos calling Giving Gurus series (I participated in one.)
• A crushing recession.

So, what happened? According to the Nonprofit Times, the total giving was up from last time. The first Challenge round resulted in nearly $1.8 million from more than 71,000 donors. This time, 106,000 unique donations generated more than $2 million. In other words, many more people gave slightly more in total over twenty fewer days.

Here are my initial thoughts about this:

• It looks like the recession may be depressing the average amount given. Nonetheless, a lot of people gave.
• The nature of the Challenge is that friends are likely to give to friends for a cause. That would explain the large numbers of givers even if they are each giving a little less.
• One of the most interesting findings from the first round was that the winners were a collection of very small, relatively unknown nonprofits. Beth and I had a concern that given the success of the first round that this one could be dominated by the biggest and best known nonprofits that would have far more resources to throw at the competition. But that doesn’t appear to have happened. Again, the winners are small, relatively unknown groups. Overseas China Education Foundation, in Houston, Texas; The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF: Food for People), in Los Angeles, Calif.; Overseas Save Chinese Children Foundation (Save Chinese Children), in Toledo, Ohio; Fitness Challenge (Ride 2 Recovery), Calabasas, Calif.; and, Atlas Service Corps (Atlas Corps = International Cooperation), in Washington, D.C.  Only Atlas Service Corps was a repeat winner from the first round.

Questions I’d love answers to now include:

• Did the participants have a great comfort level with social media, particularly Facebook, than the first round of participants?
• Is the assumption that the average gift size per donor was lower than the first round and can this be attributed to the recession?
• Did participants use other social media tools like Twitter to help get the word out?
• Did the big large nonprofits participate and fizzle out, or did they choose not to participate? And if they chose not to, why not?

Those are my thoughts for now, can’t wait to learn more!

The Inconvenient Truth of Social Media

I saw a tweet today that was terrific. It was from Trevor Neilson of the Global Philanthropy Group and it read, “The inconvenient truth of social media and philanthropy is that awareness does not equal impact.”

It’s true, awareness  is not the same as impact, but it never has been  on land either. The question that we have yet to fully wrestle with as to what all of the clicking and friending adds up to, if anything, for social change efforts. We know that social media are very effective tools for connecting people to one another and helping them to build relationships. Social media do this between people and between people and organizations.

It is between these nodes in a network (to be super geeky) that people learn about issues and organizations. A friend asks a friend to join their Cause on Facebook. Someone’s cousin sends out a link to a video about an issue. A trusted source for news, a blogger or journalist, posts a story with a link to an organization. Awareness has been raised and we’re on the road to action, but not quite there yet.

Of course, not everyone who is aware of an issue will take an action. But a small percentage will donate, raise money, attend a rally or a protest. This happens when connections turn into social capital. Social capital that develops between people, or people and organizations, that enables one to ask another for help. We respond to these pleas because we trust these folks, we like helping it makes us feel good and we know that if we need help in the future, we believe that they’ll be there with us.

The challenge to nonprofit organizations is to expand their thinking beyond hits, clicks, and friends and start to think about, and measure, whether and how they are building social capital and how this is turning into action.

Thanks, Trevor, for getting me thinking about this!

Nonprofits and Transparency

Lucy Bernholz, in her usual smart and insightful way, has written a terrific post on philanthropy and transparency, Downsides of Transparency. She is riffing on an article that Larry Lessig wrote for the New Republic entitled, Against Transparency.

Lessig’s arguments are more provocative than right. There is, of course, nothing inherently bad with opening up the black hole of government and sharing data with the public. And the Sunlight Foundation, of which Lessig is oddly an adviser, has led the charge in making data available to the public to enable it to connect the dots of connections between contributions, lobbyists and legislation. Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, the co-founders of the Sunlight Foundation, make a terrific counter argument to Lessing writing, “we argue that more transparency in politics will enable a healthy dynamic of rising public attention and engagement in demanding more accountability from government.”

As one would imagine, there was considerable pushback against Lessig’s take around the web. You can see different opinions here, by Patrice McDermott a long-time advocate for government openness, and David Weinberger here, and in the incomparable way that only he can, Micah Sifry here.

I don’t buy Lessig’s argument that there is such as thing as too much transparency in government. But I do buy Lucy’s concern that requiring too much transparency of foundations may drive them into the dark, back rooms without any sunlight of donor advised funds. The difference is that government is public and foundations are private entities. Even with their enormous tax breaks, foundations are private entities that more than any other kind of  institution has very little incentive to make their operations and programs more open and transparent except out of a noble assumption that by doing so they will be more effective.

My area of interest is in nonprofit organizations, which I think in some ways are harder to get our hands around in regards to transparency (does everyone thing that their sector is the most important?)  because nonprofits aren’t public entities and aren’t as private as foundations. We’re somewhere in between. Esther Dyson was right when she said at Transparency Camp a few months ago, “You cannot be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.” And, of course, no one would want a social service agency to reveal the private files of their clients or a clinic to reveal their health records. So, where is the transparency middle ground for nonprofits?

We need to begin from one fundamental premise: Transparency is not a technology tool. It is aided by technology. At its core, a value that creates organizational norms. The default setting for too many nonprofit organizations, to date, has been to the closed, proprietary side of the dial. We need a new transparency default setting and err on the side of openness, or sunlight as Ellen would say!

Nonprofits need to begin to ask themselves questions about transparency to guide their work. These questions include:

1. Will sharing this information advance our mission of benefiting our community?

2. How can others build on our content and make it better?

3. Will revealing this information improve morale and make staff feel better informed and able to make decisions on their own?

4. Will sharing this information better connect us to our network and help us to build relationships that we need to be successful?

Nonprofits spend too much time worrying about things that could go wrong or how they might be able to create a new revenue stream with their content. Both conversations are time spent putting up big walls between organizations and their communities. Take the walls down, make transparency the default setting.