One First Step for EDs

One of the biggest shifts on the social media lanscape this year are traditional organizations inching their way into social media use outside of a crisis. To date there have largely been two kinds of organizations that drank the social media Kool Aid – those born connected like charity:water and those forced to change quickly and dramatically because of a crisis (usually in funding or confidence) like the American Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina.

But now organizations are beginning to change because the tipping point of data and conventional wisdom has become such that working in old, proprietary ways is no longer sustainable. I have talked to a few very large national nonprofits over the past few months who shared with me that their direct mail donor bases are half or less of what they were five years ago. That’s scary. Of course, the recession added to the impetus because continuing to press the old direct mail button wasn’t working so well the last two years.

And yet, it’s also the emergence of the Millennials, and the closing of the digital divide spurred by inexpensive, easy-to-use social media that is forcing organizations to change. And as organizations have begun to embrace social media one thing has become very clear – without the support of senior leadership, organizations can test drive social media, but they won’t be successful in the long term. Senior leadership needs to try out the tools, engage, participate and understand the rythyms and power of social media in order to turn their organizations inside/out.

Charlene Li posed this question last week on Twitter: “What One Thing Should Leaders Do To Prep for Social Media?” Let’s modify this for a nonprofit perspective: “What First Step Can Nonprofit Executive Directors Take to Begin to Embrace Social Media?”

Remember, there is no one right way for become more connected and social, every organization, every person, will create their own pathway and journey. But, there are some first steps that have worked for leaders that were previously entrenched in proprietary behavior (like me!)

A first step could be:

• Identifying a young person to spend one hour a week to mentor you in the hands-on use of social media.
• Choose one channel, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, and spending enough time to master just that one thing.
• Take a class in social media
• Read and comment on a few blogs

What other first steps would you recommend to an Executive Director?

Land Lines as Buggy Whips

A friend dropped off her son at college last week. There were a host of new fangled differences about dorm life from when she had gone to college, well, let’s just say a while ago. One in particular caught my eye.

He brought the usual stuff, clothes, posters and a toothbrush, the same things we did. He also brought his laptop, and a flat screen TV. But then she noticed something different. Instead of calling the telephone company to turn on the land line, they called the cable company instead for the DSL line. He had his cell phone, which is good because there are no land lines in dorm rooms any more.

This makes perfect sense, why should the university have to wrangle with the maintenance of the phones when kids aren’t using them.

But it gave me pause beause although I know that land lines have been replaced by cell phones by millennials as part of the research I did for the Social Citizens paper, I never really thought about a land line less world. Would it matter?

Well, one thing for sure is that it reduce one ugly wire that runs from the street to the house. That’s good.

It should be less expensive as it is overseas, however, it isn’t and may not be here because of the telecom vice grip on pricing. Hooray for deregulation, so glad they broke up that AT&T monopoly!

The fact that most everyone has a cell phone now, and the tiny sliver that doesn’t will soon, certainly is a great thing for social change. Think about these data according to International Telecommunications Union, ” our planet is now home to about “1.27 billion fixed lines and 2.68 billion mobile accounts,”As MobileActive.org has shown us over the past few years, there have been amazing efforts to organize people with the ease of cell phones and text messaging.

I think the big thing for social change organizations is that they won’t have to worry so much phone lists aging out of date. We’re all going to carry our numbers with us regardless of the carrier or hardware. Organizations are going to be able to reach supporters wherever they go. They onus is then on those same organizations to treat those numbers and their owners with great respect so that they won’t opt out of those lists.

Numbers staying wiht us are also a huge plus for those of us who have a really hard time remembering our own phone numbers!

Note: The same friend who just dropped off her son at college just forwarded this article from the Des Moines Register on the growing trend of colleges removing land lines.

Social Citizens One Year Later

Just back from the WeMedia conference.  Had a terrific time and will post highlights of my interview with Alberto Ibarguen, President of the Knight Foundation, as soon as I receive them.

As part of my presentation, I wrote a reflection piece on what we’ve learned about Social Citizens in the year or so since the paper was release by The Case Foundation.  This is cross-posted on the Social Citizens blog and here is the entire reflection the paper from the WeMedia site.

Social Citizens One Year Later . .

<p>This time last year we were reading drafts of the Social Citizens paper and wondering whether it was sea worthy, meaning would the findings and assumptions hold up over the course of a few stormy tosses and turns. And now we know the answer: mostly yes. Of course, we missed one big thing coming on the horizon, more than a storm, an economic tsunami really, but, then again, so did everone else!&nbsp;</p>
<p>In preparation for the <a href=”http://www.wemedia.com”>WeMedia</a&gt; conference taking place this week in Miami, I wrote a short reflection piece on the Social Citizens paper a year later.&nbsp; Here is a quick summary of that paper.</p>
<p>Certainly the intensity of interest in social causes, and the rapdity of growth of individual causes and cause events, has continued and perhaps even quickened because of social media. Twitter, the<a href=”http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/”&gt; fastest growing</a> social networking site, has spawned events like <a href=”http://tweetsgiving.org/”>Tweetsgiving</a&gt; and <a href=”http://www.twestival.org”>Twestival</a&gt;, raising thousands of dollars to build schools in Africa and buy drinking wells and filters for clean water worldwide.</p>
<p>But the construct of Social Citizens has also changed throughout the year. One issue in particular that we wrestled with throughout the year was whether Social Citizens are by definition Millennials (ages 15-29). And I think that the answer is, naturally, more complicated at second glance than at first. Not all Millennials are Social Citizens, and not all Social Citizens are Millennials.&nbsp; But there is more movement on the later idea than the former, particularly when you see the <a href=”http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1093/generations-online”>data that the Pew Foundation recently released </a>showing that older people are coming online faster than any other segment of the population.&nbsp; And old in this instance isn’t me (regardless of what my kids say) it means over 75!&nbsp; Your grandparents are on email, your parents are on Facebook, and you’re on Twitter, and we’re all pinging and poking and tweeting about causes. Increasingly, we’re all social citizens.</p>
<p>That’s the good news. Unfortunately the bad news is really bad, the fast sinking economy is the first economic crisis young people have ever faced. Sagging beneath a pile of credit card and student loan debt, unable to find jobs, unwilling to live at home, the patina of effortessness that had clung to Millennials all their lives is beginning to wear off. How this will affect causes is uncertain at this point, but it’s difficult to imagine that the cup of coffee grown on an organize farm by an entrepreneurial native family will do as well today as it would have last year against the less expensive one.</p>
<p>One very interesting issue to watch moving forward this year is the growth of the public sector as the stimulus money begins to move through the system. Certainly the early signals are that Millennials who were very involved in the presidential campaign are not as drawn to the messy reality of governing. However, if the only growth area for jobs in the next year or two is the public sector, that may change the wariness and distance that young people have had from the public sector as a whole.</p>
<p>We’ll continue to watch from our perch here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter and whatever the new Twitter is and continue to learn how people engage with one another for causes and how those causes affect our relationships and our communities.</p>

The GiveList is Launched!

The GiveList was launched yesterday as a resource for supporting causes in a year when many of us won’t have the means to write a check (although if you do have the means, please do so!)

The site is a really simple way to aggregate great, creative ideas for supporting causes. Just use the tag #givelist on Twitter or de.licio.ous for ideas on ways to give and support communities and causes and they’ll pop up on the site. Of you can post a comment on the site of a great idea that you have.

The most creative ways of supporting causes without have to spend, buy or donate any  money  (as determined by, well, me!) will be listed under the favorites category. So, start thinking and pinging and tagging!

The idea for the GiveList began to crystallize when my colleagues and I at the Case Foundation began to think about reviewing last year’s Guide to Good Giving for this holiday season’s giving. But, sadly for the world, this year feels very different from last year.  We began to think about providing more alternatives for people to support causes in a really tough economy.

In partnership with my friend, Marnie Webb, the co-CEO of TechSoup Global (really, global!), we did what good Social Citizens do — we put up a WordPress blog overnight, started to populate it with the tag givelist, and away we went.

As I posted on the site last night – wow, what an immediate response!  Here’s more from that post:

In the few hours that GiveList has been up and running, we are delighted and thrilled with the enthusiasm and excitement with which our idea has been received.  Thanks to Beth Kanter for so creatively adding GiveList to an upcoming presentation in Boston, and Lucy Bernholz

for posting about it so quickly.  Thanks to the tens of tweeters using the #givelist hashtag and sharing ideas and helping to spread the word.  Here’s my favorite tweet of the day from Missashe, “swoon #givelist (Hat tip, everyone I follow on twitter…) love, love, love this idea!”

So, thanks again for giving our idea oxygen and love, as someone said to us this afternoon, “Just because I’m poor doesn’t mean that I have to be stingy!”

I’ll provide updates here on the great ideas we’re receiving, but, please help spread the word and put on your thinking cap ’cause it’s going to take a lot of creativity and elbow grease to help our causes and communities through the winter.

Fantastic Offer for Social Citizens

The Case Foundation wants to give a makeover to five lucky Social Citizens!  Are you a Social Citizen?  Well, take the quiz and find out.  Then apply for the Makeover and five lucky Social Citizens will win:

• a Flip video camera,
• a $100 Apple gift certificate, AND;
• a suite of tools including a WordPress PremiumAccount,  Flickr ProAccount, AND;
• and two hours of consulting time with a social media expert.

What are you waiting for, take the quiz!!

Summit Highlight: Columbia Students

The Presidential Summit at the inaugural ServiceNation event at Columbia University tonight was fascinating to watch.  But it wasn’t so much the heavyweight presidential contenders that were mesmerizing, rather the thousands and thousands of young people who came to Columbia and sat on the lawn and the steps of Low Memorial Library, on the walls and banisters and sidewalks and if the security guards had let them they would have hung out of the windows to watch an enormous outdoor video screen of the event happening about one hundred yards away indoors.

I have been to a Super Bowl, and even to one or two operas.  I was at Invesco Field in Denver when Senator Obama accepted the Democratic nomination. Yet, I have never seen a large audience as quiet, rapt and intense as the young people on the lawn.  In unison they sat to watch the candidates interviewed and then stood to stretch during commercial breaks.  They were largely polite during McCain’s segment – although derisive hoots and some boos were heard when he emphatically stated that ROTC should be allowed on campus.

Obama was, of course, on his home turf at his alma mater with his most vocal and passionate supporters in attendance; well-educated, young people.  A mighty roar did go up when Obama came to the stage.  And yet, the rapt audience quickly quieted down and sat so as not to block the view of the person(s) behind them.  There was no multi-tasking going on.  Cell phones were tucked away accept for an occasional call to find a buddy, laptops were in dorm rooms or backpacks. Honestly, you could have heard an ear bud drop.

As I wrote in Social Citizens, a paper commissioned by The Case Foundation, I find the enthusiasm for social change and facility with technology of Millennials awe-inspiring.   They are passionate about this election; but polite about other people’s choices, which was amazing to see on a campus that was literally torn apart exactly forty years earlier during another national election.

And now, just a few observations on the actual presentations:

*  Contrary to Judy Wodruff’s introductory statement that Time Magazine “launched the national service movement” last year, the national service movement has been growing in size an stature for several decades.  In fact it has grown in size as quickly as computer chips have decreased in size.  As a participant in the development of the national service field during the 1990s, I am astonished at the maturation of the field.  National service is not an add-on program or an afterthought for politicians trying to appeal to young people.  As we hear during the introductory remarks, volunteerism and service are embraced by corporations like Target that gives 5% of its revenue and millions of hours of voluntary service a year by employees, government at all levels, young people in school and immediately out of it, and twenty million AARP members a year.  Volunteerism has always been a fundamental part of American culture; it is now a central part of our economy as well.

*  Observers of events like this, meaning people like me who are housed in rooms filled with sister bloggers, are aglow with a potpourri of social media gadgets – we are writers, photographers, videographers, bloggers, and, using Twitter, microbloggers.  That’s a lot of wires to cross and flash drives to juggle.  My colleague Julia Rocchi of The Case Foundation Twittered that she was watching my laptop screen as I was Twittering making it macro-micro blogging experience!   I won’t attempt to figure out what blogging now about our macro-micro blogging experience might mean!

* There is an intersection of politics and volunteerism that is happening that I don’t quite understand right now.  Not nonprofit organizations interest in shaping public policy, that’s been going on for a long time; think about the way education reform groups and health care organizations have been educating members and constituents and lobbying Congress for years.  I mean that volunteerism and community service have become important elements in political campaigns and that means something, I’m just not sure what yet.  If anyone has any ideas, feel free to let me know, otherwise, I’ll sleep on it.

The Privatization of Public Service

In researching the Social Citizens(beta) paper, I was struck by a potential problem in public life. We have been witness to an explosion in interest in volunteerism nonprofit careers has and In summary, interest in volunteerism has exploded over the past two decades while interest in government careers has waned. Elected officials and other community leaders regularly laud the importance of the nonprofit sector, is it time for nonprofit leaders to extol the virtue of government service?

The Social Citizens paper is focused on Millennials (ages 15-29) a super-sized generation in terms of their total number, their passion for causes and their use of social media. Their size and passion are mirrored by the increase in size and relevance of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. As I say in the paper, young people are marinating in causes as volunteers, nonprofit careerists and social entrepreneurs.

But, there has been a cost to this explosion in altruism. It can be summed up by one statistic: A study by the International City Manager’s Association in 2006 found that only 13% of professional local government managers today are under 40. In the early 1970s nearly 71% were 40 or younger. (A shout-out to Bethany Henderson for her fascinating paper on this topic.)

I told a friend of mine about this statistic the other day and she said, “Of course, who wants to work for government, it sucks!”

As volunteerism went into schools in the late 1980s, education about government and public policy came out. This has been coupled with the far right’s agenda of demonizing government service that has largely worked. The result: working for Kiva is cool but working for Clark County, NV government sucks.

“Service” today means working for causes and communities larger than oneself, which is laudable and terrific. However, the use of the term service is applied almost entirely to nonprofit activities to the exclusion of government or military service. Aside from the Peace Corps and Teach for America, two quasi-governmental efforts, public service today means supporting nonprofit work. Compare this to President Kennedy’s call for public service, which invited the best and brightest to come and work for the government.

Please don’t get me wrong; volunteerism is a wonderful, uniquely American approach to community problem solving, however this new definition of “service” raises two problems; one is scale the other is scope.

As much money and attention is given to voluntary efforts, they still generally pale in light of public funds for the environment, schools and community infrastructure. For instance, after-school programs that are intended supplement public school efforts, with a fraction of the time with students and money that school districts have.

Private voluntary efforts can pick and choose the issues and populations with which to work. Organizations like Volunteers of America choose to work in very distressed communities with people who have significant, sometimes overwhelming, problems. Most groups don’t – and that is their choice, they are private efforts and can choose where and with whom to work. Through public policy, government is supposed to serve all people and communities. (If you want a refresher of how important this concept was to the Founding Fathers, take a peek at the Federalist papers, you will be taken aback, I think, by their passion over this particular issue.) We know that it often doesn’t, but, this is what government is intended to do, and what idealist young people can press it to do better, to help those least able to help themselves by directing resources to large public problems.

I am not advocating a lifetime of work in the cramped cubicles of government offices. I am suggesting that we include government service as part of the sector hopping between the private and nonprofit sectors that has become the norm for so many people throughout their careers. What my friend Marty Kearns calls the need for greater “churn,” or turnover in public sector leadership positions. Not as an afterthought but as a fundamental part of a lifetime of service and social change that has become so important to us, particularly for young people.

Nor am I advocating for the growth of government services. I am not interesting in continuing the ping-pong conversation about big versus small government, which is as unproductive as talking about red versus blue states when most states are actually purple, meaning a combination of both. I am interested in a conversation about effective over ineffective government, which we won’t get to until more talented people are attracted to government service.

So, help me out. Does the distinction I am making between public and private service make sense to you? Am I overstating the crisis in government service? Should we care about this?

Come and Chat on Tuesday

I will be e-chatting on the Chronicle of Philanthropy website about the Social Citizens paper next Tuesday, May May 27th from 12-1 pm eastern time. I”d love to hear your thoughts about the paper, maybe even a challenge or two — and a prize for the most unusual (but still relevant!) question — I am the judge and jury on that one! I’ll post the link to the comments section when it goes up this weekend.

Georgia Council of Nonprofits

I had a wonderful opportunity yesterday as the keynote speaker at the Nonprofit Summit organized by the Georgia Center for Nonprofits to share thoughts on connected activism and the Social Citizens (beta) paper.

After my talk, the Q&A focused, as it naturally does with nonprofit professionals, on how to use the stuff.  Do I need a blog, which web browser should I be using, how much should I spend on a new computer?  I understand these questions, coming up to speed in the Connected Age can feel very overwhelming for those of us who came of age last century (doesn’t that sound old!) but we did have a moment of truth together.  Here’s how it went:

Questioner:  Do I really need to know about all this stuff?

Me (looking fabulous in a new suit by the way!): If we don’t figure out how to
incorporate Millennials into our nonprofit organizations, they’re just
going to start their own causes, overnight, using free tools.”

It was nice to see 500 heads nodding in unison.  Even if we don’t know exactly what to do about it yet, it was affirming for me to see the general consensus in the room, and probably in the larger nonprofit sector as a whole, that the Millennials have figured out how to self-organize very quickly and inexpensively and nonprofit organizations need their help to stay relevant.  It was nice moment, even if a bit angst filled.

The Release of Social Citizens (beta)!

The release of Social Citizens ^BETA today is very exciting for what it isn’t – and what it is. Late last year, Kari Dunn and Ben Binswanger of The Case Foundation asked me to write a paper for the Foundation about the emergence of Millennials, 15-29 year olds, as activists. They wanted to know more about how these young people are using all of their widgets and gadgets for causes.

And that’s when we talked about what the paper isn’t.

We decided to go beyond a simply litany of the ways that young people are using blogs, social networks, and videos to share information about their favorite causes. We wanted to go a step further and ask harder “so what” questions. What does it mean to Millennials to have the ability to become an advocate for their cause instantly, broadly, inexpensively, and what does their ability to do so mean for the rest of us?

The Foundation provided me with an opportunity to cast a wide net across the real of Millennial activism; from Facebook to the Red Campaign, from the presidential campaign trail to the human devastation in Darfur, from Gossip Girls to Invisible Children, a documentary about the difficult lives of the children of Uganda. I followed the trail of email, blogs, YouTube videos, websites, donations, Tweets, and IMs around the country and even across the globe. I interviewed over thirty people, read many articles, papers, books, and websites, and examined the data on who is doing what for causes. And what I found was astounding for its scope, scale, and idealistic intentions.

Marnie Webb, a key informant in the paper, asked, “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging, and “friending” add up to in the end?” And my answer is, “Far more than I imagined, far greater than I had hoped.”

Millennials are doing more than pinging and poking and sharing information about causes. They are radically altering the very notion of what it means to be an active citizen in the process, and that’s why we’re calling them Social Citizens. They are viewing their responsibility to their larger community solely through a cause lens. They are clicking, buying, running, hammering, petitioning, and sharing information with their friends.

And, you, my careful reader, have noticed that there is a “beta” on the end of Social Citizens in the title of the paper. This is to remind that this field of youth activism is changing at breakneck pace. American humorist James Thurber said, “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” And certainly, in this case, we know that there are lots and lots of questions without answers yet — and this is fantastic news to folks like me and my colleagues at the Case Foundation who like having conversations with other people who are interested in increasing the number of people who are actively engaged in trying to improve our world.

However, as encouraging as this news is, their activities raise serious questions. Is it possible to envision a very large generation of citizens who lead their lives at a great distance from government, even lives infused with causes, volunteering and a hopeful outlook about the world. Can government really be irrelevant to their lives, and, if so, is this a good thing for society? Is it important that young people are engaged in public policy advocacy? Is our tendency to connect only with like-minded people using our on line and on land social networks a good thing for activism or a critical bottleneck to the effective scaling for causes? Are social change institutions critical to the future of Social Citizens and their causes or are they becoming old-century anachronisms of top-down hierarchies that can’t survive much longer?

So, what do you think? I hope you’ll read and enjoy Social Citizens ^BETA, and I’m looking forward to our upcoming conversation and your ideas, thoughts, comments, and questions about Social Citizens.