The Online/On Land Disconnect

Nancy Scola wrote a terrific post about a new report from the Berkman Center called Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing.

The paper is a great primer on political activism in repressive regimes, how change happens and what makes it so hard and risky.

Nancy nails the key, and most provocative, argument in the paper: “We might, in other words, watch in awe as  video of Neda Agha Soltan’s death during Iran’s post-election protests goes viral, to give an example, and be too quick in seeing in it evidence of some sort of powerful social and political resistance, when the actual facts on the ground might not bear that understanding out.”

Here is one of those videos just as a reminder:

But what changed on the ground, politically as a result of the protests? We’re not sure, certainly not as much as the protesters or the watchers hoped in the moment. Of course, as the authors of Political Change in the Digital Age quoting Marshall Ganz point out, these kinds of regime-change movements take a long time to realize. So these protests may have planted a seed, created supporters, put into motion future change that we won’t know about for years.

The authors hit on the key issue facing activists using social media. This is what I’ve called Phase Three in the development of social media for social change. Phase One was the wonderful euphoria at the beginning of this century of discovery of social media. Look at this amazing stuff, we shouted. Look at all of these free, ubiquitous, easy-to-use tools that enable regular people blog and have a voice they’ve never had before. Watch them create videos, make their own playlists and share songs, and then watch them connect with new and old friends online and create their own social spheres.  Wahoo, look at power seep from institutions and move towards individuals!

Phase Two was seeing what all of these tools did to organizations that embraced them. That’s why Beth and I wrote The Networked Nonprofit, to understand and examine what happens internally and externally to nonprofits that are organized more as social networks than stand alone institutions. In short, wonderful things happen as outsiders get out and insiders get in. Networked Nonprofits include wonderful organizations like MomsRising.org, charity:water, Surfrider Foundation.

And now we’re inching our way into Phase Three. We’re connecting, pinging, poking, friending, fanning, running for our causes – made much easier in countries like ours that encourage free association and speech – but what is it all adding up to? In other words: so what?

The Berkman paper focuses on the use of the Internet to strengthen and power nongovernmental organizations and efforts to reform authoritarian regimes. There have been significant limitations to these efforts, largely because these governments simply shut down the sites and flows of information to the networks of activists. As the authors note, “Efforts at digital organizing in Iran do not appear to have been effective. In the run-up to the disputed election, the Mousavi campaign sought to use Facebook to rally supporters. The government responded by simply blocking access to Facebook. Online communities that congregate at a single URL are easily dismantled; organizations that rely on a centralized nodes and hierarchical structures are trivial to break up.”

Although our government is less likely to shut down sites, at least publicly, we still haven’t connected all of the dots from outrage or empathy or concern expressed online and political success on land. We know they need to be connected, that social change actually happens on land, always, but how we make that connection and whether lighter engagements, all of that pinging and fanning (derisively called slactivism by some), actually makes a difference in and of itself is the next set of questions to be answered.

Lucy began this discussion a few months ago. And it needs to continue. Here are a few first steps:

1. Organizations need to o consider more carefully how to integrate their online and on land efforts.
2. We need to overcome our addiction to online analytical tools, all of those pretty and instant charts and graphs and engage in more traditional evaluation methods to find out what people knew as a result of their online engagements and what, if anything, they did as a result.
3. Most all, I want to know what is working, where is social change actually happening (distinguished from acts of loving kindness, like collecting coats in winter time, which are wonderful, necessary things to do but not social change.) Where and how are all of these efforts actually making a difference?

Don’t be cowed by the difficulty of these tasks. As I wrote above, we’re just at the beginning of Phase Three, so we have time to explore it and figure it out. It’s good to know, at least, what phase we’re in!

Malcolm Gladwell Strikes Out on Activism

The normally spot-on Malcolm Gladwell took a big swing and completely whiffed in ruminating about the activism this week in an article in The New Yorker entitled, ‘Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.”

More than misunderstanding the role and power of social media, what I found most disturbing and disappointing about the article was that Gladwell doesn’t understand activism.  Activism has come to represent a wide continuum of efforts, voluntary and professional, that, like the tax code I mentioned last week, cannot all fit neatly under one umbrella. The term activism has come to include society changing social movements, political advocacy, and acts of loving kindness, like giving clothes or food to people in need. Gladwell lumps all activism into the social movement category. There will only ever be one civil rights movement, and the every day overuse of the word “movement” (akin to the overuse of the word “gate” to describe political scandal highlighting a true lack of imagination on the party of the “gate”ers.)

Social movement are intense, long-term efforts developed by a core of people and then spread widely because of the moral indignation that galvanizes them. Gandhi spearheaded a social movement, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. The civil rights movement laid the groundwork for the women’s movements, and later still the gay rights. And that’s it, all of the other “movements” since have been advocacy or awareness campaigns (think climate change, recycling, drunk driving, breast cancer) to raise money or change public policy. or direct service efforts like feeding the hungry. They amount to a series of campaigns with very specific, intended outcomes. They are not social movements.

Gladwell’s assertion that social movements are based on tight ties and online efforts on, say, Facebook, are participatory efforts based on loose ties is simply not true. When one looks under the hood of a successful activism efforts, as Beth and I did for The Networked Nonprofit, whether part of movements or campaigns, they have a combination of initially tight ties, someone does have to drive the train, and loose ties, others have to join the effort for it to take off. In addition, all of the successful social efforts in the connected age happen both online and on land – see Moms Rising’s onesie campaign, Surfrider’s advocacy efforts, the Humane Society’s Spay Day efforts on Facebook and on land.

In this smart post, Jillian C. York agrees with the mis-characterization of the loose/tight ties by Gladwell.

On the social media side, Gladwell again misses the point. As Nancy Scola points out, “But where Gladwell seems guilty of contributing more to the froth than the substance is where he goes from questioning to drawing the conclusion that enormous personal courage that characterizes the desegregation of the mid-20th century American South is found but in pale imitation in the modern….”

Gladwell assumes that techtopians (count me in that category!) make no distinction between in person friends and online friends. He cites no evidence for this broad generalization. Networked Nonprofits that I have studied are very good at developing a “ladder of engagement.” (check out the awesome video that Beth has on this post of Chad Nelson of Surfrider Foundation describing their ladder of change.)

Organizations like Surfrider clearly understand that there is a wide funnel for organizations connecting with people; a large number of lightly touched people at the top (e.g. someone clicking that they “like” a cause on Facebook) and successive smaller numbers of people who then choose to engage in deeper and more meaningful ways (e.g. commenting on blogs, self organizing events, raising money.)

I agree with Nancy, this is a disappointing effort by Malcolm Gladwell, one of the smartest people in any field. He could have taken a few examples of networks enhancing activist efforts and really done an in interesting analysis of where and how they work well.

Blurred Definitions of Social Good Organizations

Nancy Scola of TechPresident sent me a link to her post, “Why Should Non-Profits Get a Break?” which asks interesting questions about the differences, and different treatments of, socially responsible businesses and nonprofits.

Nancy makes an excellent point when she writes, “the nature of work is changing faster than our old categories for what it is we’re all doing to make a buck (even if we re-invest that buck into our organizations).”

There has been an explosion in the number of new business that have social responsibility at the core of their business. There has also been a trend of many nonprofits organized to do work like corporations – with fee-for-service revenue and ROI at the core of their organizations.  There is a blurring of the lines between nonprofits and socially responsible businesses,  but there are still two very significant and important differences.

The first difference is about accountability. Lucy Bernholz coined the phrase, “embedded giving” whereby for profit businesses can say some portion of their profits are going to charity, but they are under no obligation to say how much was donated, or even to which specific organization. Even if a company pledges that 5% of the profits will go to charity, there is no way for a consumer to know if it actually did go or exactly how that 5% was calculated.

The second difference is that nonprofits are provided tax breaks for providing a public good. There is a clause in the tax code for public charities called the public support test. Basically, that clause says that at least one-third of all of the support for an individual charity needs to come from the public – not from one individual and not from business operations unrelated to its core mission like sales or subscriptions. Many nonprofits would fail this test if the IRS were paying attention – but the intent is that nonprofits have tax breaks because they provide a pubic good that is supported by the public.

There has been an explosion in the number of corporations that specifically have social responsibility at the core of their purpose. For instance, the increasing number of corporations designed as “B Corporations”. In addition, as President Clinton reported this week from the Clinton Global Initiative, corporations that don’t have social responsibility at the forefront of their purpose are finding that philanthropy is good for business.

But it doesn’t mean that these corporations have the same fundamental purpose as nonprofits.

One more important difference between nonprofit and corporations. Some nonprofits, not all of them, have as their mission doing unpopular work. Take Volunteers of America. They provide a host of social services, and have for over one hundred years,  for the hardest to reach, hardest to help people. People with severe physical and mental handicaps. People who will never hold a steady job or own a home. People who need never ending charity from people and organizations with never ending patience. Those organizations don’t have a profit margin the way a corporation does, and they shouldn’t, and they need to be protected to do their work.

The tax code bunches too many disparate organizations into one overall umbrella of nonprofitness. Universities, hospitals, advocacy groups, direct service providers are clumped under the same tax exempt designation. It doesn’t make any sense any  more. And there are some nonprofits that are organized like businesses that shouldn’t be tax exempt at all. But, then, there are organizations that are in the business of performing acts of loving kindness ever day. They provide almost no reward for their employees and volunteers but psychic ones that need to be protected and honored for their work and not lumped in with the rest of the business world.

Citizenship Is Not a Game of Gotcha

Election Day seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? There was the great exultation that at long last a new day was here in America. Hope had returned, but just for an instant, as the economy kept going down, down, down and the inevitable “now what?” questions arose. Eight years of pent up frustration have come pouring forth from Deaniacs and Obamanics who poured their hearts and souls into two campaign cycles and now, at last, the kingdom is theirs.

So what to do when there is no clear Election Day deadline or structure to keep us focused? Naturally, a phalanx of well meaning efforts have sprung up from Obama CTO to Change.gov. All chaotic, cacophonous, well meaning efforts that will inevitably add up to nothing.

Oh, the sacrilege of criticizing well meaning crowd sourcing!! Shouldn’t citizens be allowed, nay encouraged!, to throw do-goody ideas against the wall so that we can then all vote on them and then . . . and then . .. well, somebody should do something, right? These well-meaning, misguided efforts have fallen into two categories:

1. The Confusion of Service Category. The discussion of using a Craigslist approach to scaling up service, as my friend Nancy Scola outlines rightly points out is not very helpful if it’s just more of the same. The notions of increasing voluntary, community service as the solution to government not working right needs to end. I have written about this morphing of public and private service before, most recently here and the basic premise of my argument still holds. Americans have increasingly been volunteering (particularly young people who are required to do so in school and are continuing to do so beyond school), the number of nonprofits has exploded in the past twenty years and yet problems abound. That is because the size of government far overshadows the size of volunteer efforts in terms of resources. Peter Levine compared philanthropic dollars to government dollars for Katrina repair and you will see the difference, $6.5 billion in private philanthropic dollars, nothing to sneeze at, but compared to $120.5 billion in government aid. So, more volunteer databases are not what we need to strengthen the civic infrastructure of the country and overhaul our government.
2. The second category are the idea generating sites that are automatically set up as an “us vs. them” paradigm to help the Obama administration “set priorities”. Ah, yes, we are going to tell you what we think you should do — as if we haven’t just had that conversation over an exhausting marathon of an election — and then we’re going to hold your feet to the fire by stomping our feet and holding our breath until you do. Or just as bad, we, the Obama campaign, are going to “listen” to you as you fill out a survey (oy!) and then we’ll . . . well, we’ll say that we listened to you.

I know I am verging on curmudgeonly, really I do, but I want to make a point, that is that we need to get focused and constructive before we look up and it’s April and all we have are millions of frustrated people who are feeling left out. (Oh, and btw, I don’t buy the idea that because Obama has a large mailing list its the same as a constituency, it’s a mailng list of people who were involved, not a list of people who have signed up for the next phase of the journey – big, big difference that campaigns and nonprofits need to understand much better.)

So, here’s my plan of action:

1. The focus has to be on changing government to include citizen participation. In many of the essays in Rebooting America, essayists wrote that the relationship between the governing class and the governed has to change. As Jeff Jarvis wrote, “Today the default in our discussion of government is negative: they are doing bad things badly, and we are the watchdog who’ll catch the bastards in the act.” The fundamental premise of this election was that the old Reagan adage that government is the problem is dead. Our government needs us to help it to govern. The advocacy models of the 1960s were created to protests against government; we need a new model of advocacy that helps us to participate in government. So, the question changes from, “What do we want government to do?” to “How are we going to participate in running our government.”
2. Continue the training. One of the most successful elements of the Obama campaign was training local organizers. Now we need to educate and train people on what government does. We are starting from scratch, young people aren’t being taught about government in school, older people, if they ever knew, have become caught in the gotcha game described above. We should set a date of say, January 3rd and 4th and use Meetup.com to get everyone go to your local library for a seminar on the fundamentals of government; local, state and federal. How does it work, what does it do, how can we participate?
3. Start local today. One of the dangers of the “throw an idea up against the wall” strategy is that the ideas tend to be too big (“alleviate global poverty”) and too hard for individuals to participate in tackling (not that you can’t participate, go give $25 on Kiva today and you’ll feel better.) Let’s make a national to-do list for transforming local government, someplace where we really can make a huge difference right now, today, if we show up and participate. Steve Clift gets us started here. Run for office, go to planning board meetings, ask your town supervisor to start blogging and post the budget online (and keep it updated in real-time!), promote local businesses, revamp the outdated recycling program.

Start, now, today, make a huge difference by transforming advocacy and government for the 21st century — this is the change that we need.