Response to “It Gets Better”

In response to my post and podcast yesterday about Dan Savage and the It Gets Better Project, I heard from my friend Lucy Bernholz. She noted that the gay community was upset about the videos and in the process of pushing back.

The concern is that It Get Better is too passive, it is counseling gay teens to grin and bear it until adulthood when they will have more control of their lives and it will get better. Responses have included: Where’s the Proof it Gets Better? to Stop Bullying Now! to Groundspark’s “Make it Better NOW” project. On on the Groundspark site I found one of the most moving videos I’ve ever seen fro

Any large community of people is going to have vigorous debate about an issue that is important to their well-being. And this is a big, healthy debate. I don’t think it detracts from the amazing story of the It Gets Better Project, an entire YouTube channel going viral, but it does remind me that there is no one right way forward for any social change issue.

Thanks, Lucy.

Social Analytics Meet Community Engagement

The title of this post isn’t from me, it’s from Lucy Bernholz who is being awfully smart again over at P2173. She recently wrote about what I believe is the next phase of development in the arena of social media for social change. In Lucy’s words, “Finding the ways in which “data trails on the web” – click throughs, “likes,” tweets, forwards, favorite lists, recommendations, diggs, etc – relate to action on the ground are key new measures of activity.”

This is the third phase of development for nonprofits and social media. The first phase was trying to figure out how the tools worked. For instance, how do blogs work and what should we do with them? The second phase was figuring out how organizations need to change to become networks. That’s the crux of The Networked Nonprofit.

This third phase of development is about the “so what” of social change.  The conclusion to The Networked Nonprofit asks a question posed by Marnie Webb for a paper I wrote a few years ago called Social Citizen:  “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging, and “friending” add up to in the end?

One of the myths that we bust in The Networked Nonprofit is the notion that social change is going to happen primarily online in the future. It isn’t, all social change efforts, whether direct service or advocacy, ultimately happen on land. Legislatures need to pass laws, hungry people need food, parks need to be cleaned. How are we going to know how social media is affecting these kinds of outcomes?

We do know a few things for sure. Networks of constituents for causes can be grown bigger and faster using social media. The more people that we ping about causes, the more potential donors, marchers, petition signers, Meetup participants we have. And we know that there is a ladder of engagement for online volunteers just as there is for on land volunteers -some will just watch, some will give money, some will organize events and bring their friends into the tent, some, the most engaged, might even start their own cause. Beth has written about the wonderful ladder of engagement used by the Surfrider Foundation.

What we don’t know is whether when we create a stir just online whether it automatically translates on land, and if it doesn’t if it matters at all for social change. We have spent so much time as a sector over the past decade trying to articulate immediate and long-term programmatic outcomes. What will people know, be able to do as a result of our efforts? What is the “so what” for program? Once articulated, the next challenge was to measure them. How will we know that children are more enthusiastic about reading or math and science? What does a growing environmental movement look like?

Now that task is made harder by the addition of the social media stew into the mix. If people post pictures of oil-drenched pelicans on Flckr but don’t donate, don’t call their representative, don’t actually do anything else, are they moving the needle of change?

Lucy gets us started by outlining the kinds of online outcomes we could measure:

• If I join a disease-oriented social network do I manage my medications better and am I healthier because of it?
• If I read and comment on a story on my neighborhood on a local blog am I more or less likely to show up at the supervisors’ hearing on a subject than if I read about it in the print paper?
• What about if I submit a story to that same blog?
• If a follow the tweets from a nonprofit am I more or less likely to donate or volunteer to that organization?
• If I become a “fan” of an organization on a social network site will I do anything else to raise awareness of the group? Will I take any offline action to support its work?

I would add a few additional thoughts to this list:

• Are the people who are donating online the same as those who are donating off line?
• Have we intensified the experience of existing supporters of causes or created new ones who are separate and distinct from their on land brethren?
• Is it more important when a person is touched by a cause and under what circumstances or how often their touched?

We are at the infancy of this discussion. I can’t wait for it to develop further!

What’s Sticky About The Networked Nonprofit

Launch day for The Networked Nonprofit was a blast yesterday. Our virtual launch was great fun and helped shoot us to the top of Amazon lists — and resulted in Beth gracefully diving into her pool!

In the evening we had the honor of attending a reception at the Packard family home, Taaffe House, by Carol Larson, the president of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

A book launch means that the ideas that have been in my head and Beth’s head (what we affectionately call her 10 1/2 floor!) for a year are finally out in the hands of other people. Naturally, our friends are the first to comment, blog and tweet about it, and yet it is still fascinating to see what from the book is sticking in their heads, what has captured their imaginations.

From our first talk at NTEN in Atlanta, the stickiest idea and image is that of non-Networked organizations acting like Fortresses.  Marcia Stepenak has a great post here calling us, and others like us, Fortress Fighters. And a slogan is born!

The imagery of free agents, like Marc Horvath (Hardly Normal), crashing into the closed gates of fortress organizations resonates with people who are on the outside trying to get in and on the inside trying to get out.

Our friend Lucy Bernholz notes that the notion of organizations working as networks. She liked it so much, in fact, that she made it one of her Buzzwords for 2010!

Finally, folks are noting that the book feels very real and practical and useful because of the real-life stories of organizations that are in the process of becoming Networked Nonprofits. Tom Watson writes, “What makes the book sing are stories and the voices: many terrific examples of how nonprofit organizations – big and small – have used these tools, and the ideas of the people who make it all go.”

Momentum speculated about what was coming, how social media was going to change nonprofit organizations. The Networked Nonprofit is about how organizations as traditional as The American Red Cross are turning themselves inside out. The world powered by social media has changed organizations forever, and locking oneself up in a fortress leads to isolation and irrelevance, the death knell for nonprofits.

We have a fun party planned in San Francisco today hosted by TechSoup, and then onto DC.  We’re looking forward to hearing what others think about the book and what ideas and concepts they find sticky — and what they think we’ve missed.

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.

Database of Social Entrepreneurs From Social Edge

Exciting news over at Social Edge. They have just released a widget for a searchable database of vetted social entrepreneurs. I imagine happy chirty sounds coming from Lucy Bernholz’s boggy part of the world! According to the web announcement:

“This open source database is available to anyone who wishes to query, syndicate, or republish the data on their own websites.  To make it super simple, we have created widgets so anyone can search and add a real-time list of social entrepreneurs to their webpage.”

A few things of interest in this announcement. A group of funders working together to share their databses of people and organizations in whom they’ve invested is a welcome development. Making the database sharable through the widgets is a great idea. And enabling social entrepreneurs to connect with one another by geography or issue area is an important step in the creation of a more cohesive field.

Glasspockets is a Start for Transparency

The Foundation Center announced a new effort called Glasspockets last week. The name comes from Russell Leffingwell, Chair of the Carnegie Corporation in 1952, “We think that the foundation shoudl have glass pockets.”

The site dives deep into the internal processes, rules and procedures of ten of the largest foundations in the country: Carnegie, Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Irvine, Kellogg, MacArthur, Packard, Moore and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Each foundation has a page on the site. On each page is a long list of criteria intended to add up to transparency and accountability. The list includes governance policies, hr procedures, financial information, performance measurement and communications channel. Each broad category is broken down into sub parts. For instance, here is the portion of the page for the Carnegie Corporation dedicated to governance:

The magnifying glasses indicates that those data are available. [Personal Peeve Alert: clicking on a magnifying glass downloads a document. I'd much rather have a pop up window rather than these PDFs now sitting on my desktop.]

No complaints here about foundations sharing more information about how they operate. However (you kinda knew a “However” was coming, didn’t you?) I wouldn’t call it Transparency 2.0 as the site claims. This is Transparency 1.0, and again, it’s a good thing, however, it just scratches the tip of what transparency in philanthropy could be.

There has been a lot of discussion of transparency and philanthropy over the past six months. I’ve written about it from the nonprofit perspective, Lucy and Elizabeth Miller have from the philanthropic side. And each one of us have urged institutions to think of transparency as a value not a process or a tool.

Standing behind a glass wall isn’t transparency. Taking the wall down, whatever it’s made of, is what we’re aiming for. In our book, The Networked Nonprofit, Beth and I call this acting more like sponges – the natural kind, that are anchored to the ocean floor but open themselves to a huge amount of water and nutrients rushing through. As Michael Hamill Remaley writes on the Public Policy Communicators blog, “But until foundations are willing to simply open themselves up publicly to examination and critique, they will never truly be understood or accepted as leaders in social change.”

Yes, it’s good to know how the Ford Foundation compensates its executive staff and I certainly don’t want to go back to not knowing. But Transparency 2.0 means that the foundation’s program officers, not just its communications staff, was on Twitter discussing what they were learning, what they were planning, and their struggles. Here’s my advice to the Foundation Center. Keep going wiht this area of the site, but call it Transparency 1.0 (I didn’t say they would do it, just what my advice would be!) Then create another area of the site called Transparency 2,0 with examples of Foundations like the Case Foundation using social media to really engage with world.  H and maybe we shouldn’t expect the largest, most visible foundations to get there first, but we can start to define what we hope, ultimately, philanthropic transparency will look and feel like. We’re inching our way there.

Fundraising Using Social Media Tipping Point

Blackbaud released a study last year that provided start evidence that fundraising through social media had not yet reached a maturation, much less tipping, point. The study (based on a very small sample of 24 nonprofit organizations that are significant because of their size) revealed that online giving was still just a tiny fraction of giving through direct mail and in person.

However, the earthquake in Haiti may have permanently changed sizes of the fundraising pie slices. According to a new study by the Pew Center for People and the Press, “Haiti Dominates Public’s Consciousness” (highlighted by Lucy Bernholz)  37% of giving since the earthquake in Haiti was giving online or by text message. And, we know that it hasn’t been small change, either, with the Red Cross reporting $22 million raised by text message one week after the earthquake.

So, have we reached the tipping point? I think so, but with a caveat and a caution (you didn’t think this was going to be straightforward, did you?)

Here’s the good news. It is clear that in the time of a disaster or an emergency a lot of people are ready and willing to give donations using social media. Donating by text, in particular, fits the bill perfectly. But millions of dollars have also been raised on Facebook, websites and Twitter.

But, here’s the drawback. One of the first lessons is that giving by text is easy for the donor but not so easy for the organization. It takes some time to set up the donation process with the mobile carrier (isn’t anything that involves a telecom going to be complicated somewhere along the line?) It is a cumbersome mechanism on the back end – it takes time to set up (the Red Cross that is so fortunate to have Wendy Harman on staff had already put this mechanism in place.) More disconcerting there is ordinarily a lag time between pledges made by text and the time the organization receives it because the phone bill has to be paid. The phone companies agreed to pay 80% of donations up front for Haitian relief because of the urgency of the situation. This also raises the issues of pledges made in the moment that may  not be paid later by the donor, unlike giving online using a credit card or PayPal.

The other important lesson is that just because text and, say, Twitter worked under these circumstances doesn’t mean that they are appropriate for other fundraising needs and efforts.

So, the bottom line for me right now is hooray for the increased trust and facility with a variety of social media tools that people are showing right now. However, that doesn’t mean that all of these fundraising channels are going to work for every organization in every circumstance. More reason, again, for organizations to continue to experiment with the tool set and focus on building relationships  through online social networks rather than just ask random people for money online — and to focus on learning what works for your organization over time.

Best Videos of 2009

My last post for this year will highlight my choices for the best videos by nonprofits and for causes of 2009.

But, first, I’d like to thank a few people who have enriched my life, taught and inspired me, and helped me in myriad ways this year — and hopefully will continue to do so next year:

1.  Beth Kanter – Beth is the best nonprofit blogger there is, hands down. But luckily for me she is more than that. She is my partner and co-author on our book, The Networked Nonprofit, that Wiley & Sons will release in late spring 2010. We have complimentary skills and perspectives — but most of all we have fun together, particularly as we spend copious amounts of time trying to decide whether to get dressed or clean the kitchen.

2. Lucy Bernholz – You can’t mention Lucy’s name without using the phrase, “super smart.” That’s simply who and what she is. She is courageous and forward thinking without ever diminishing anyone else’s contributions or skills. I learn something new and interesting every time I talk to her or read her blog. She is a unique thinker and we, as a sector, are lucky to have her on our side.

3.  Micah Sifry – I met Micah in 2003 at Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 conference and he has been my primary social media educator ever since. Micah challenges, nudges, supports and guides me constantly and consistently. His Personal Democracy Forum reflects his energetic curiously. It is also the only tech conference that I go to that consistently has equal representation of women as panelists and keynoters reflecting Micah’s unwavering egalitarianism.

Now, onto the best videos of 2009!  Here they are, in no particular order, enjoy.

1. The Anaheim Ballet. Actually any of their videos would do as they’re doing a marvelous job of letting us into their rehearsals and creative process:

2. Rory Sutherland: Lessons from an Ad Man. Of course, it’s very hard to pick any particular Ted Talk to include on the list as so many of them are brilliant. This one is hilarious and provides good stuff for nonprofit folks to ruminate on.

3. The Lost Generation. It’s important to watch this one all the way to the end.

4. United Breaks Guitars. Again, this one isn’t specifically a cause video, however, it is a perfect example of the ability of individual activists, in this case the singer Dave Carrol, to use videos to express their outrage – particularly against large, faceless corporations.

5. The story of charity:water. I’m hard pressed to think of another nonprofit that does a better job of storytelling than charity:water. Watch founder Scott Harrison, a master storyteller, do his thing in four minutes.

A great resources for outstanding nonprofit videos is DoGooderTV from the smart folks at C3 Communications (and don’t miss their great video on their home page also.)

Let me know which ones I missed.

Wishing everyone a safe, fulfilling, prosperous 2010!

Disrupting Philanthropy

Well, there, Lucy goes again being super smart! Lucy, Ed Skloot and Barry Varela of Duke University have just released a draft of their paper called “Disrupting Philanthropy.” I had read and commented on an earlier draft of the paper and am delighted to see how much furhter it has come along since.

Here are the highlights:

• Reproducibility, remixability, and availability of information are possible with the digitization of data. For philanthropy this means greater transparency on who is doing what and fundamental changes in how and where philanthropic capital flows;
• The long tail of philanthropy is now the participation of lots of small dollar donors through online giving platforms like GlobalGiving;
• The crowdsourcing and actions that are enabled by the available of new data and technologes (such as the work of the Sunlight Foundation) that lead to….
• Lots of interesting new models and stories — but you have to read the paper to find out what they are!

Enjoy the paper and let Lucy know what you think.

The Unthinkable Power of Conversation

Lucy pointed me to this great post on Change.org about Tori Hogan’s video series called Beyond Good Intentions. Tori takes a hard look at conventional wisdom in activism. Her latest video questions the efficacy of microfinance, a sacred cow in social change and philanthropic sectors. Here is how Tori explains her trepidation about stepping into taking on the iconography of microfinance as the unquestioned antidote to poverty worldwide:

I was a little bit nervous for Episode 9 (and this blog entry) to come out because I am well-aware that I am questioning a beloved organization and a highly popular development initiative. However, I feel that I need to be honest about what I witnessed in the field and, most importantly, I need to encourage a meaningful dialogue about the realities of micro-lending. After witnessing micro-lending programs on three different continents, I came to the conclusion that in most cases the poor don’t need loans, they need jobs. From what I saw, micro-lending isn’t pulling the poorest of the poor out of poverty.

Sacred cows exist everywhere.  Until recently General Motors is sustainable and newspapers aren’t dying. Sacred cows become ossified truths, untouchable, unapproachable, and unpopular to unmask. As Clay Shirky wrote, “When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.”

Unthinkable things aren’t talked about, it’s just too scary or radical to question issues and subjects that have become sacrosanct. Unapproachable, off limits issues can’t be changed because we refuse to talk about it. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception Tori’s doubt’s about microfinance has; will it be ignored and ridiculed as naive and superficial (the easiest way to dismiss dissent) or will people open and honestly engage her in discussions about where and how microfinance works and where and how it doesn’t.

I’ve been thinking about conversation lately. Making it a noun, like the way that search became a noun a few years ago. Conversation is the natural, driving force of social change. In order for change to happen, people need to talk about it first. In safe places, with their girlfriends and daughters and co-workers. And social media makes this easier.  You can plug into conversations on lots of different platforms and channels; on Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and, of course, by email. Social media speeds up the conversations and allows more people to participate and shape them. These conversations are how we learn to embrace unthinkable things.

But, too often, we think of the unthinkable in only tragic terms; as people or industries dying. Let’s flip it over to a more positive place; after all, a black man is president and gay people can get married in Iowa!

What if we thought the unthinkable about the Supreme Court. In a country where the majority of law school graduates are women, why not a court that is majority female?

What if we thought the unthinkable about education and had the collective courage to believe that critical thinking is more important to children’s and the country’s future than test scores? And what would happen if we built a world-class education system around that idea?

What if we thought the unthinkable about program evaluation and had the courage to say that social science constructs are simply a bad fit for managing social change organizations? That the outcomes evaluation push of the last decade has been a dismal failure, is undoable and has had no effect on the efforts of social change organization? What if we had a conversation about a more natural, intuitive way of learning in real-time for activists instead? (More on this to come soon.)

Who would be willing to have these conversations? Unless and until we are, the problems they represent won’t change.

What are you afraid to think about?  How would you work and your world be different if you could bring yourself to think about it?