Participating in the Ping Pong Match

Beth and I had a fun discussion at Fenton Communications about The Networked Nonprofit last week. Over and again the notion of integration came up, integration of old media and new, online and on land efforts. On the media side, Geoff Livingston calls this the “ping pong match” between old and new media.

There were a number of times during the conversation at Fenton when someone said something to the effect of, “The effort started to go viral online, and then really took off when (insert mainstream media outlet) reported on it.” For instance, Sean Stannard-Stockton blogged about FORGE’s struggle to stay afloat which is then picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle - and then picked up by more bloggers.

My gut feel is that recently, particular as budgets have been slashed at newspapers, some of the pong has been lost in this equation. I mean that it feels  as though there are far more instances of mainstream media picking up stories from social media, and then it rebounding back and forth, than the other way around. But, I could be wrong about that. I’ve been known to be wrong about other things, like the whole metric system taking off here!

What is important is to help senior staff and boards of nonprofits overcome what I call the nonprofit zero-sum game. The knee jerk, defensive posture, that working online precludes working on land, or using social media is at the expense of traditional forms of outreach. The future of nonprofit is not going to be one channel, one tool, one medium ever, but a blend of many different types of tools and channels. The real challenge for organizations is figuring out the right combination of tools and channels that will be unique to their efforts and organizations.

What’s the Point of Pepsi Refresh?

The first round of the Pepsi Refresh Project has just concluded its first round of funding. The Chronicle reported on the initial grant awards to 32 groups of $1.3 million here.

Pepsi will continue to give out monthly grants until it reaches it’s proposed grant amount of $20 million. That’s all great, but when the awards were announced I began to wonder what it all means. To their credit, Pepsi created a very easy-to-use site, that worked after some initial glitches, and a fairly transparent process (although there are some grumbles of gaming by Pepsi and participants), but, in particular, I keep going back to what Beth wrote initially about the contest, “what’s the theory of change?”

When the contest was first announced it was framed in the media as Pepsi choosing philanthropy over Super Bowl ads. But as Mashable warned, if the campaign worked, “..the company can build brand awareness while also helping out communities across the world. On the flip side, if not executed properly, the company could wind up spending $20 million on philanthropic causes (which is to be commended), without getting the benefits of a buzz-generating ad campaign.”

As Geoff points out, this is quite a delicate dance. He writes, “Perhaps the greatest trend of the moment is the fusion of corporate and philanthropic interests, which in turn is producing growing pains and change. It’s likely that the requirements of online transparency will demand a new era of authenticity in corporate community investment efforts.”

One area of transparency I’d like to see Pepsi transcend is that of their intended outcomes for this effort. Which is it, Pepsi? Are you interested in the kinds of returns that an expensive ad campaign would create? For instance, are you interested in greater sales? Or are you interested in philanthropic outcomes, improved reading skills or greener classrooms or better health outcomes? Or are you betting that that this new form of philanthropy can create a hybrid of the two?  One thing I do know is that if it is philanthropic outcomes, then this model needs to be extended beyond the contest to a platform for reporting and sharing results. I need to know, Pepsi, please tell me!

My Lowest and Highest Nonprofit Moments

Katya Andresen facilitated this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival. Although I missed the deadline (deadline, schmeadline!) I’m going to play anyway because it’s my blog and I can do what I want!

Katya asked us to share our great successes and flaming failures of our nonprofit careers. So, here goes:

As for failures, well, it’s pretty darn hard to pinpoint just one since I’ve had so many. But rather than share  an event, I want to share an old habit. It’s a widespread nonprofit trap, the one of being a proprietary thinker that I fell into when I ran Innovation Network (InnoNet). I created an organizational culture that framed other evaluation groups as competitors and my job, as the chief fundraiser, was to elbow them out of the way  to get to the pot of gold that foundations were holding It was successful in the short-run, but desultory and deflating in the long-run and contributed to my own burnout with the organization.

I am a recovering proprietary thinker and actor now. Although, like all addictions, it’s a day-to-day struggle. And sometimes I relapse and don’t do as good a job of sharing information or giving credit as I should.

But, now, onto the good news. My highs come from my participation in social media over the last five years. It happens because of and within the conversations everyday here on this blog or on Twitter or Facebook. It is energizing when someone  comments on my blog, or retweets me on Twitter or introduces themselves on Facebook. It is exhilarating every day when people connect side-to-side, share something that they know, educate me, tell me what they’re thinking about or doing or learning about, when I connect people to one another, when I share what someone else is doing and celebrate it. It makes me awfully lucky to be living here and now and doing what I’m doing with folks like Beth, Katya, Geoff, Holly,  Lucy and Tom.

Bottom line: it used to make me feel bad to hoard information and grab credit, and now it feels good to share and link and connect with people.

Time for a Nonprofit Natural Disaster Gameplan

The outpouring of concern and donations for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti confirmed what we already know, people are good hearted and want to help.

Geoff Livingston has done a fantastic job over at  Mashable identifying the five social media lessons learned from Haiti: the maturation of mobile giving,  the unfolding narrative of the disaster shared on channels like Twitter, the integration of social and traditional media, the glossing over of the underlying issues and story of Haiti’s history of poverty and corruption that excerbates natural disasters, the potential for short-attention spans for the long and difficult road to recovery for Haiti.

I’ve also been blown away by the reaction of the tech community, spearheaded by the inexhaustible Andy Carvin of NPR, of an event called Crisis Camp organized by a grassroots networked called Crisis Commons. The commons and the camp are geeks coming together around an urgent need to crowdsource a panoply of efforts to support, in this case Haitian, relief efforts. They include translation, basic maps of the country, mapping of NGO efforts, mobile applications for crisis response, and family reunification systems.

I am struck by a few things from all of this swirl of activity. Just how quickly people can be mobilized to do more than give money is amazing. But there is something else going on. After Katrina, there was a huge gap between the amount of money given by individuals and foundations and the amount given by governments, specifically the difference was $6b from private donors vs. $120b from the government.

That gap will be much closer this time for two reasons in particular: the economy that has strapped individuals and governments and the destitution of the Haitian government. Just a week after the earthquake, Americans had already pledged $275 million for Haiti. The US Government and the World Bank combined had pledged $200 million.

In light of this growth in the size and importance of private donations for natural disasters around the world, we should have some guidelines as a sector on how to advise people to give. This is to avoid the confusion and diffusion of giving that happens in a sector that is genetically predisposed to order of any kind. For instance, many people, including me, immediately added Jean Wyclef’s Yele Haiti to their short list of organizations to give to. My rationale was that they were established in country and could help facilitate the logistical mess of trying to disperse food and aid within the country. But now I think that was a mistake. They aren’t a large organization, they don’t have any particular expertise in disaster relief, and there have been reports of previous financial mismanagement.

I liked Rosetta Thurman’s post here on what to give — and what not to give — for Haitian relief. For instance, she said don’t donate cans or clothing, there is no transportation to get them to Haiti, and even if they were delivered there isn’t the infrastructure to distribute them.

So, here’s my proposal. We need a Nonprofit National Disaster Gameplan for the next disaster. Our efforts are too large now to be ignored, we are not just a shadow of government, or UN or World Bank support efforts. We need an agreed upon plan, similar to what the Crisis Commons is developing of the kind of aid, and the best groups to provide that assistance, in the immediate wake of a disaster.

I know this flies in the face of free choice in funding that we hold so dear as a sector, but, really, folks, don’t you think we can agree that when hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of lives are lost or at risk, we can agree that The Red Cross has to be first responder? But there are others, like CARE and Doctors without Borders. We need to make a short list of the organizations we should endorse who have the size, expertise and expertise to provide support anywhere in the world for a disaster.  Seems to be a good job for Independent Sector.

A Compass for Social Media for Social Good

Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston posted a summary of their findings from a recent survey of nonprofit donors and their attitudes about causes and giving online. A common complaint of online giving to date (see previous post about Blackbaud survey here) is that the dollar amounts are too low per donor and donors are tending to be one-time givers. In other words, online donors aren’t the elixir to replace the dying direct mail donors. Here are a few sub-highlights (meaning a summary of their summary) of their survey results from 426 online respondents:

• The axiom that older donors give more because they have more to give doesn’t change because of the mechanism of giving;
• 84 percent of the social media savvy aged 30-49 and 55 percent of those older than 50 used conversational media to discuss philanthropy;
• Seventy-seven percent of those 50 and older and 71 percent aged 30-49 prefer email. Additionally, 45 percent of 30-49 year olds prefer social networks and 31 percent of those over 50 also use social networks;
• Blogs represent the second most viable source of information next to social networks (among both the digital rich and the traditional brackets);
• 81% want information from a highly credible or quality source
  • 77% from a trusted organization
  • 59% would like to interact with other donors
  • 58% want to interact with philanthropic experts
• In summary, nonprofits and charities have a strong opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations (that may lead to contributions) with the social media savvy (30-49 and >50) – especially those who are uncultivated.

Add to this mix the fact that the fastest growing segment of Facebook users are women over 55 and we can see that social networking sites will be rich areas for discussion, organizing and fundraising for causes from now on.

So, the difficult question for nonprofits right now is: how do we navigate from what has been to what will be while still making payroll? To take that question a bit further, it is really about how you can create the capacity within yourself and your organization for seeing the world as it is but moving towards what it will be. And, for right now in this time of transition, we have to do both.

It is curious to me how often a discussion of social media becomes a zero sum game in people’s minds. If we’re using direct mail we’re not raising money online, or everything that was on land has to go online. The world doesn’t work in such stark black and white contrasts, it is, for better and worse, a continuum of grays.

If you’re struggling wtih how to manage the transition to the connected age of the future for fundraising, here are a few steps to help you get unstuck:

1. Keep doing what works but know and plan like it isn’t going to work forever. In fact, you should plan that this is the last year you’ll be able to do what you’ve done before successfully. You don’t want to get caught totally off guard like newspapers that thought they had much longer to transition from old to new than they really did.
2. Get your conversations going online NOW! Pick one or two places, say Twitter and Facebook, and start talking about your issues and listening to the conversations that folks are having about your cause. Don’t worry if the conversation is small, don’t worry that it isn’t leading to donations right now. You need to practice talking to people online about your cause; these aren’t skills that more traditional orgs have in their DNA.
3. Find one fundraising event or idea to take online this year. Use Facebook to ask your folks for ideas for fundraisers, should we pick a day and everyone does their own thing like Red Nose Day, or should we have one event in person, maybe a lower key breakfast this year instead of a fancy dinner, or maybe a virtual event or contest? Don’t prescribe, listen and learn.

OK, those are you marching orders – get going!