Learning From the Network Builders

I have the honor next Tuesday of facilitating a conversation at the Case Foundation of an amazing group of nonprofit network builders.  The goal is to learn more about what they do and how they do it to inform the field and, hopefully, spur more nonprofits to engage in network building. Here is my post on the Case site more thoughts about the session.

Attendees scheduled to participate are: Scott Beale of Atlas Service Corps, Kate Bladow of Pro Bono Net, Jake Brewer of the Sunlight Foundation, Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Foundation, Deborah Drysdale of the Women Donors Network, Sethi Dushyant of Aid India, Tammy Gordon of AARP, Wendy Harman of American Red Cross, Caitlin Johnson of the Forum for Youth Investment, Carie Lewis of The Humane Society of the United States, Dave McMurtry of Habitat for Humanity International and Jenn Roccanti of Miriam’s Kitchen.

I am enormously grateful to the Case Foundation for their continued support and constant forward leaning efforts to experiment and learn about this new networked environment and its impact on social change.

And, of course, none of this work wouldn’t be possible with the pioneering efforts of June Holley, Valdis Krebs and Jack Richuito have been doing for years at networkweaving.com.

Looking forward to sharing the outcomes of the conversation next week!

Donors Down on Giving for 2010

Fenton Communications released a survey of individual donors this week. The results were sobering. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents report they plan to either reduce their giving or keep it the same as last year.  This is on top of already reduced giving levels for 2008 and 2009.

Particularly bad news is that the critical cohort of adults over 50 are planning to reduce their giving the most.

On the positive side, 80% of respondents think nonprofits in general on doing a good job. The following nonprofits are the top ten ranked as “extremely” or “very effective.”
1. (tie) American Diabetes Association
6. American Heart Association
1. (tie) Special Olympics
7. Susan G. Komen Foundation
3. American Red Cross
8. ASPCA
4. Habitat for Humanity
9. American Cancer Society
5. Make-A-Wish Foundation
10. Humane Society

In addition, Joycelyn Harmon, a national expert in online fundraising, says that most nonprofits are missing the board in terms of readying their websites to be attractive for donors (she uses saltier language, go and read it.)

I think and hope that these findings having a catalyzing effect on medium to small-sized nonprofit organization. If I were the Executive Director or Development Director (which, thank goodness, I’m not because they’re really, really hard jobs!) looking at these data, here is what I’d do:

• Move from content development to relationship development. We’ve moved from the Web 1.0 of online brochures to Web 2.0 content development to Web 3.0 relationship building. Take whatever resources I could find, staff, volunteers, anything and throw them into relationship building. Connecting with lots of people morphs into content development – but not the other way around. In order to make friends on Facebook and Twitter, you have to tell authentic stories and share the stories of other people. Link your blog to anyone else blogging about my topic, celebrate their efforts, retweet them. Show the world that you’re interested in connecting with people in meaningful ways about your issue not treating everyone on the outside like ATM machines.
• Find a friend. Senior managers need to become facile with social media themselves and be central to the relationship building of their organizations. Find someone who is facile with social media and make them your mentor. This is a great job for a young person. Carve out an hour a week to practice with them. Use the tools yourself, connect with people, model good relationship building practices for others in your organization.
• Start to experiment with ways to turn those friends, particularly the younger ones, into funders. It is imperative to build a strong, wide, resilient base of supporters to replace the old direct mail donor bases. Don’t worry that the average gifts are low or that they come and go, keep talking to your online friends and start to experiment to find out what issues spur them to give or do something.

What would you do?

Is there a “Special Sauce” for Social Fundraising?

Our third Conversational Case Study for the assessment of America’s Giving Challenge has been posted on the Case Foundation’s blog today.  The topic of today’s discussion is whether there is a “special sauce” that makes some groups or individuals successful social fundraisers.

In the post, the pattern that we saw in the Giving Challenge and in other contests is some combination of personal appeals, thankfulness, transparency, crowdsourcing, visual stories and face-to-face engagement that make groups successful.

But, still (naturally!) we have more questions.

Our questions to readers, doers and thinkers are:

• In your experience does a concoction, some blend of activities and tasks, exist, that makes some groups or people more successful than others in fundraising contests? And if so, what are they?
• Under what circumstances does some combination of activities work best?
• Is there a tool or action you think might work well in the future that you’d like to test next time (e.g. a geo-location service like Foursquare?)
• Are we trying too hard to be prescriptive in discussing sauces, and should we just let people create their own recipes?

Tell us what you think on the Case site.  Thanks!

Mindful Social Media Strategies for Contests

The sector has been awash in contests the last two years. Here is a list of public contests compiled by the White House recently – it’s huge!

Beth drafted our second Conversational Case Study for our assessment of America’s Giving Challenge. This case study is about the experience of one of the winners, Students for a Free Tibet.

The first decision point for this group is to decide whether to enter the contest at all. Their decision oints include:

They determine whether the contest has value by asking:

• Do we have the bandwidth?
• Do we have enough members who will volunteer to reach out to their friends and family?
• Will our participation in the contest help us grow our network of people who we can educate and engage about political freedom in Tibet after the contest is over?
• How does the contest fit in our overall fundraising plan for the year?

In addition, like Darius Goes West, Students for a Free Tibet also personalize their appeals for help.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences by commenting on the blog post on the Case Foundation site.

Discount for the Personal Democracy Forum

One of my favorite events of the year is the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) (full disclosure: I have had myriad business ties to PDF and am now engaged as a consultant with them.)

I consider PDF to be my home base for learning about what’s new and hot in the social media, politics and civics space. This year’s conference is shaping up to be awesome and Beth and I have the honor of talking about our book, The Networked Nonprofit, on Friday morning.

This year’s agenda includes:

-An in-depth look at how the internet fosters freedom and democracy, with speakers from all sides of that debate: Jimmy Wales, Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Evgeny Morozov, Ory Okolloh, Ethan Zuckerman, Cheryl Contee, Newt Gingrich, John Perry Barlow and Clay Shirky.

-Shop talk from online innovators from both sides of the aisle, including Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington, Jane Hamsher, Mindy Finn, Rob Willington, Todd Herman, Natalie Foster, Stephanie Taylor, Dan Cantor, Eli Pariser and Ryan Gravatt.

-Visions of the networked future from thinkers like Howard Rheingold, Tim O’Reilly, Aneesh Chopra, Nick Bilton, Bernard Avishai, Craig Newmark, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash, Jen Pahlka, Bryan Sivak and Susan Crawford.

And as an added incentive, Micah Sifry, co-founder of PDF, is offering readers of this blog a $100 discount on their registration!  To save $100 on registration, go here:

https://personaldemocracy.com/product/pdf_2010_early_registration and use the following code: AFINE

Let me know if you’re coming, I’ve love to say hi there!

Conversational Case Study for America’s Giving Challenge

I’m cooking up some fun with Beth and the Case Foundation again. We are engaged in the evaluation of the second America’s Giving Challenge contest that the foundation sponsored last year. We did a survey and we wanted to do some in depth case studies to better understand the experiences of some of the winners. But rather than do it behind closed doors we decided to do it networked style!

So, here’s the lowdown. Beth has posted the first of what we’re calling a Conversational Case Study on the foundation’s blog.  This first one is about Darius Goes West – they’re a small nonprofit that did a great job of using videos and personal appeals to activate their network to become a winner in the Challenge.  Read their story, it’s really fun and exciting. But their story also raises a couple of interesting questions that Beth outlines in the case study:

• Whether you’re participating in an online contest or implementing a fundraising campaign using social networks, you’ve got to engage your fans and make it easy for them to share your organization’s story with pride and joy. What techniques are you using?
• How have you used social media to personalize your interactions with potential supporters?
• If you are with a small organization, how have you used social media successfully without a big marketing budget?
• How can we put to rest the assumption that large organizations have an automatic advantage using social media?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please comment on that post or share your insights on a tweet using the hashtag #agc2.

We’ll be posting two more Conversational Case Studies in the next two weeks.  Thanks for participating!

Geolocation Services and Nonprofits

The latest version of the Social Good podcast is up on the Chronicle website. I interviewed Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation about the use of geolocation services, like Foursquare and Gowalla, by nonprofits.

I became interested in this topic a few months ago when odd messages began to show up in my Twitter stream. So and so was standing at the corner of such and such. Someone has just unlocked a badge in a certain location. Hmmm, wonder what this is all about?

It’s about geolocation services. Web-based services accessible by cell phone that enable a person to say “I am here right now!” It’s like the Who finder from Horton Hears a Who. I am here! I am here! I am here!

Of course, Beth Kanter answered the question of how these tools work for nonprofits for me on her blog a few weeks ago when she shared the story of the Brooklyn Museum using Foursquare. Beth quotes Shelley Bernstein, the very creative Chief of Technology at the museum. Shelly said, “as people explore our area, the Brooklyn Museum staff help them along in their journey pointing out the joys of pancakes at Tom’s Restaurant or the killer wine selection at Abigail’s.” In other words, the Brooklyn Museum is using FourSquare to take down the walls between the museum and its community and enable its visitors to share their experiences with one another in the museum and in the neighborhood.

If you have a chance to listen to the podcast,you’ll hear Danielle share how powerful real-time, location based experiences are when enhanced with social media. But it also got me thinking about the interesting juxtaposition of social media as a tool for virtual interactions and as a tool for real-time location-based interactions. Of course, one isn’t better or more important than the other, and what will be interting is watching groups like the Brooklyn Museum and National Wildlife Federation figure out how they can come together in new and interesting ways – all for the purpose of connecting people to information, places and one another. One last takeaway from my talk with Danielle is the importance of staff experimenting with new tools, like Twitter, Yammer and Gowalla personally in order to understand them better and think about how to integrate them into their organizational efforts.

Mother’s Day for Mama Lucy

There are just some causes that are impossible not to love. For me, one of those is Epic Change started a year and a half ago by Stacey Monk and Sanjay Patel. Epic Change supports grassroots changemakers around the world. Their focus in their early history has been to support Mama Lucy, a vibrant and charismatic woman in a village in Tanzania, and in particular Mama Lucy. Here is how they describe this extraordinary woman: “Mama Lucy Kampton is the founder and headmistress of Shepherds Junior School. Mama Lucy used to sell chickens. She saved her income and, in 2003, used it to start a primary school near her home in Tanzania, believing that education is the key to transforming a country gripped by poverty.”

Jill Finalyson of Social Edge pinged me about a really heartwarming effort spearheaded by Epic Change. Here is how the project is described on the site:

“To Mama With Love is a collaborative online art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in one remarkable Mama who dreams of building a home for children in her village.  Funds raised will be invested in support of Mama Lucy Kamptoni, a remarkable grassroots changemaker in Tanzania who once sold chickens and used her income to build a primary school that now provides a high-quality education to over 400 children in Arusha.  Her next goal, which To Mama With Love seeks to fund, is to build a boarding facility on campus so that every child who attends her school has a place to call home.  To Mama With Love is a project of US 501c3 nonprofit Epic Change.”

Here’s a look at the home page:

Take a peek at To Mama with Love. So, go ahead, donate and create a “heartspace” honoring your mother and supporting Mama Lucy and the children of Tanzania she helps every day.

Contests, Competitons and Prizes

I attended a symposium last Friday hosted by the Case Foundation and the White House on promoting public innovation through prizes and contests. The Case Foundation blogged about the purpose of the event prior to it here.

If anyone had told me two years ago that two hundred people in DC, mainly from federal agencies, would get together to talk about using social media for innovation through prizes and contests I would not have believed it. And yet, there we were – at HUD no less!

A few takeaways for me were the array of agencies interested in working this way. They aren’t all able to do it because of the layers of red tape that prevent prizes from being given. But the gravitational pull outwards to openly sharing innovation and good ideas, lessons learned and processes for innovation is happening. It’s spearheaded by amazing people like Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck who are working from the inside of government outwards.

I was also struck by the amazing array of contests taking place right now funded by federal agencies and foundations. Of course, I’m well aware of the high profile contests like America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation, Chase Facebook Challenge, and Pepsi Refresh Project. What I didn’t realize was how may contests and challenges were being sponsored by the feds.  Here is a report that provides an overview of the types of prizes and contests offered.

We’re living in interesting times!