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.

I Have a FREE HP Laptop and Printer to Give Away!

Morning, peeps, I’ve got a special surprise today!  Beth and I have helped to plan and assess online contests such as America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation over the past several years. Now, we’re part of a group of bloggers who get to help sponsor a contest and give away free HP stuff!

The giveaway is part of the HP Create Change effort. For every purchase from the Create Change site that is part of the HP direct purchase website, HP will donate 4% to one of the following seven nonprofits that you can designate. The nonprofits are: American Red Cross, CARE, DonorsChoose.org, Junior Achievement, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Susan G. Koman Race for the Cure, World Wildlife Fund.

You can download a widget for the HP Create Change effort form their site and follow their conversation on Facebook.

Back to our contest. HP has asked me and a few fantastic bloggy friends: Beth (of course!), Tom Watson, Katya Andresen’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog, Jolly Mom, and Amy Sample Ward to ask our readers a question about social change. And then each of us bloggers will pick a winner from the comments on our blog.

So, here’s my question to you: What conversations on which social media channels do you  most want to have with your community this year?

Extra points will be given to anyone who works Foursquare or Tumblr into their answer!

AF Note: The contest closes on February 26th!

The Revolution is Tweeted, Does it Matter?

There has been much ado over the last two days over the role of Twitter in reporting and spurring on the election protests in Iran. The outrage of Twitterers that cable news wasn’t covering the election swayed the MSM, particularly CNN, according to the Times.  The Revolution will be Twittered Andrew Sullivan breathlessly declared of the power of Twitter and Millennials (who actually don’t use Twitter here in the US as much as they use Facebook) to shape events and the coverage of them. And then, of course, the pushback from smart commentators, like Tom Watson, declaring quite firmly that the Revolution Won’t be Twittered! Tom warns about the “catnip” quality of Twitter for jouanlists looking to crown the little digital tool as a catalyst of revolutions. He writes:

But I think there are limits, especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall. Sure, Twitter (and Facebook and text messaging and blog and YouTube) can be effective information outlets for revolutionaries, but it’s utterly facile to suggest that information technology is driving the currents of unrest in Iran. I can understand the impulse, though; after all, we (the digerati, the plugged in, the Twitterverse) are watching it unfold online. And, you know, wherever we are, well, that’s where the action is.

But there are interesting lessons here, both positive and negative, that are important to highlight as we continue to learn how best to use social media during fast-paced social events. Here are a few thoughts that I hope others will continue to expand upon:

1. This weekend certainly showed that the mainstream media is listening to closely to what is being tweeted about them. In fact, that may be one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter, the fact that journalists are using it as part of their practice of finding stories, hearing from more voices and distributing their stories makes it a great vehicle for communities of people to shout loudly at them and be heard. We’ve been shouting for a while, but being heard is quite another thing.

2. To remind us that there are no silver bullets. It is so tempting to want to annoint the latest tools; Twitter this year, Facebook last year, blogs the year before, as THE catalyst for social change. There are lots of different channels on which to have lots of different conversations and no one tool or conversation creates a revolution. There is a rich stew of social media and it is the combination of them that we need to keep trying to understand and use for social change.

3.  As Jeff Jarvis pointed out this morning (via Twitter, of course!) @jeffjarvis: To a reporter today that Twitter is not news source.Source of tips & temperature & sources. Reporting follows. Twitter doesn’t replace journalism, it is a first cut, real-time stream of conversations and information, some of which is helpful, most of which is either restating the observations of other people or false rumor. But that’s what history is before it’s history, isn’t it? Just a jumble of events, conversations, observations for others to make sense.

I was thinking this morning about the remarkable juxtaposition of the twentieth anniversity of Tiananmen Square last week and the Iranian protests this week. The only thing the world knew of the Chinese protests were still photographs of incredibly brave young people protesting together, or singly standing right in front of tanks, that we saw hours later. Compare that to the real-time reporting from within Iran by brave people using whatever tools were working, cell phones before they went down, Flckr, Facebook, and Twitter, to tell the world what is happening right now. I’ll take the real-time social media stew anytime and leave it to others to figure out what’s historically important later!

Greatest Loss of 2009: Social Capital

The biggest problem with having smart friends is that they ask smart questions, and then one is obligated to try and answer; hopefully smartly, but failing that, at least pithily.

Yesterday, my friend Katya Andresen, the magnificent brains behind Katya’as Nonprofit Marketing Blog and the book Robin Hood Marketing, posed this question to me on Twitter:  @Afine one in ten arts orgs are on the brink of collapse but movie attendance up – is this a marketing problem?

Katya ws responding to a report yesterday from the AP that Bob Lynch, the President of Americans for the Arts estimated that 10,000 arts organizations will close this year, 10% of the total number.

Certainly some portion of that number are organizations that are poorly managed, or have no real base of local support so that any shaking of the apple cart sends them spiraling downward. But, still, a large percentage represents opera companies, symphonies, museums and theater companies that will be huge cultural losses to those communities, and of a course a huge and heartbreaking loss of jobs.

As Katya suggests there is definitely a business model element to the struggle of local arts organizations. Local performing arts organizations are too labor and capital intensive that makes the cost of participation for casual supporters very high in comparison to movies. It is financially impossible to make a ticket to the opera the same cost as a ticket to Slumdog Millionaire (although once you throw in the cost of popcorn and soda you are getting closer) without a significant subsidy from the government or private donors that doesn’t exist in today’s economy.

Even though the meltdown of the newspaper industry has gotten far more press (from the press, naturally!) than the collapse of local arts organizations, there are pathways that make future local news gathering and dissemination possible. The newspaper problem is a classic business model problem; the process of gathering and reading news has fundamentally changed and organizations are scrambling to catch up with newer, more efficient mechanisms for delivering news to readers. But, there is a marketplace for news as online readership continues to rise, and we are in the messy process of transitioning to a new model.

The problem of trying to figure out a new business model for arts organizations is much more difficult. This is due in part because the cost of delivering the product is largely fixed; there is no way around the fact that orchestras need violinists and cellists. Consumers of news exist in large numbers, some say even growing numbers, but many arts organizations that face the prospect that there may not be enough patrons to support their efforts — ever.  It may be that performing arts organizations cover larger regions. For instance, perhaps Hartford, CT cannot sustain a symphony orchestra, but lower New England may be able to. Or that the orchestras get smaller, or that the players aren’t full-time professionals.

Tinkering with the size and catchment area for performing arts organizations (and museums, too) misses a much a bigger problem for communities.  The loss of newspapers and arts organizations creates an enormous, perhaps irreplacable, loss of social capital for local communities.

Tom Watson really nailed this issue in a terrific post on the Huffington Post yesterday when he wrote:

As Shirky writes (correctly in my view) the casualty isn’t so much the newspaper (and the companies who operate them), as it is the journalist – and professional journalism itself. And that is a huge loss for society that no one should be welcome with glee (though some digital triumphalists cannot seem to restrain themselves)

And Tom is no luddite, he is the author of CauseWired and works every day to help organizations transition to the Connected Age.

And in a follow up email to me yesterday he made a point that has been overlooked in much of the debate:

Most ‘observers’ don’t know the scale of this disaster – we’re talking
tens of thousands of reporters at thousands of newspaper in thousands
of cities and towns and counties. A whole system of informing the
public commons is dying – blogs simply won’t replace it, citizen
journalists will be a tiny fraction of what went before. It’s truly an
American loss.

We are losing the institutional memories of institutions that are in the business of connecting individuals to one another, to their communities, to beautiful and inspiring stories and works of arts.

I’m not quite as pessimisitc as Tom about the future of local news efforts. The models that we’re discussing and testing right now may not work, but that doesn’t mean that a model for news won’t or can’t exist in the future, a model that is financially sustainable and does a credible job of informing the citizenry and keeping local institutions accountable to the public. But what I don’t know is if or how social media can make up this loss, it may simply be that this is one casualty of the Connected Age. One thing we can do is to insist that the growth of social capital be a part of the discussion and implementation of new models for news and arts organizations.

Making money isn’t the only measure of success for news and arts organizations in the future; reconnecting citizens locally to one another; regenerating the social fabric is just as important and necessary to the success of these efforts.

Administrative Costs Are Not Optional

The panel I was on yesterday at the onPhilanthropy Summit yesterday was terrific (kudos to Tom Watson for doing a great job of facilitating a lively conversation!) Near the end of the session, Charles Best, the CEO and founder of DonorsChoose.org, mentioned that the organization provides an option for donors to support administrative costs — or not — for any project they fund. Now, taking exception with DonorsChoose is akin to criticizing Santa Claus, really it’s a lovely organization providing an easy opportunity for people anywhere and of any means to support all or part of school projects and needs like pencils, books or disposal cameras in largely low-income communities. It’s a wonderful organization that has been magnificently launched and run by Charles and his colleagues — except for the fact that they make the true cost of operating DonorsChoose optional for donors.

As Charles said on the panel yesterday, transparency and openness are critical components of relationships between causes and donors. Agreed, and his organization does a wonderful job of explaining their own operating costs. Here is a paragraph from the area on their website called “Sustaining Operations”:

The price of a student project includes an optional fulfillment fee covering the work performed by DonorsChoose.org (see Fulfilling Student Projects). After clicking to fund a project, the donor may decide not to include this fulfillment fee. By choosing to include it, donors support the necessary resources—staff time, office space, and technology—to bring their chosen projects to life.

Charles said that over 80% of donors choose to provide the fee. But, the problem I have is that it shouldn’t be optional. There has been an overreaction in the nonprofit sector to critics of overhead and administrative fees (prompted by the actions of a few bad apples with excessive fees and costs) to make it appear to donors that it doesn’t actually cost anything to make good things happen. Unless we want Charles and his colleagues to stand outside on a street corner shouting to attract donors to great school projects, they actually do need staff and offices and desks and phones and email and a website to be successful. And we need to stop apologizing for it or pretending that it’s optional. DonorsChoose can be as transparent as they are about the true cost of their services while not giving 20% of its donors the option of not fully supporting their efforts.