Wired Causes

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A big topic at the Fast Company Innovation Uncensored Conference in New York this week was how to foster innovation at your workplace.  Thought leaders from JetBlue, Hulu, Pepsi, OWN/Oprah Winfrey Network, DonorsChoose and even Jared Leto weighed in on the topic.  Here were some of the more helpful themes:

1. Take the time to define for everyone in your office the kind of organization you want to be, or else it will just happen to you by default.  For example, Hulu defines itself as a customer company, not a media company, which affects how to approaches just about everything.  Their aim is to create a service that “users, advertisers and content owners love.”  They designed Hulu to work for all of those audiences - rather than to just disseminate videos.

2. Have a few simple shared values that serve as everyone’s North Star.  For example, JetBlue stands for safety first, as well as caring, passion, integrity and fun.  This permeates the culture (though as JetBlue said themselves, one flight attendant managed to violate all of them.)  When you have these, you can empower people throughout the organization to make decisions as long as they follow the values.

3. While everyone needs formal processes in the workplace, needless bureaucracy squelches creativity and discourages innovation.  At Hulu, staff raise their hand if they see signs of bad bureaucracy.

4. Stories are a great way to do just about everything: inspire, communicate and bring people together.  “The center of our culture is narrative,” as FX executive John Landgraf put it.

5. Be a dreamer.  Build a company on what you hope to happen, not what you fear will happen.  It works better.

For more on nonprofit innovation, check out this month’s blog carnival at RAD.

Whenever I teach a workshop or give a presentation,  I ask the audience these questions and to jot it down on a 3×5 card.   These have become a wonderful collection of small steps, easy actions that can be taken after the training to immediately apply learning and improve practice.
Here’s one for Twitter.
It’s really important to [...]

I attended the Fast Company Innovation Uncensored Conference in New York yesterday.  Thought leaders from JetBlue, Hulu, Pepsi, OWN/Oprah Winfrey Network, DonorsChoose and even Jared Leto discussed the future of marketing, branding in an age of social networks, and how to create culture of innovation at your organization.  Today I’ll share what Jennifer Aaker, author of the Dragonfly Effect, said about inspiring infectious action.  Tomorrow, I’ll share what I learned about building a strong culture at work.

At her session, Jennifer discussed the Dragonfly Effect, named for “the only insect that is able to move in any direction when its four wings are working in concert.” 

Here are the four wings:

1.  focus on a concrete goal
2.  have an appealing cause that grabs attention and tell a great story about it
3. provide an experience that engages the individual
4. feature an easy call to action

“Small acts can create big change,” she said, “and you can generate momentum for a movement when you connect meaning to social media.”

By way of illustration, Jennifer told the story of her friend Sameer Bhatia, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who got leukemia and needed an elusive match for a bone marrow transplant in order to live. Through Facebook, YouTube videos, and friends recruiting friends through many other means online, a match was found—but in addition a movement was started to enter donor registries and donate bone marrow. While Bhatia eventually passed away, what lives on is a massive registry of potential donors for others in need of bone marrow transplants. The four wings were flying: a concrete goal, a compelling story and the basis for and call to action. Online organizing prompted offline action.

Good principles to keep in mind when you seek to connect - and inspire - action for your cause.

(I guest posted at the Dragonfly Effect blog with my thoughts on social media here.)

In our book, Networked Nonprofit, we describe the principles for becoming a networked nonprofit – a nonprofit that is simple, agile, transparent, and works more like a network than an isolated fortress.   Networked nonprofits are experts at using new media (social media, mobile, and other emerging technologies) to spread their missions, design and scale programs, [...]

The bigger the scale of what you’re communicating, the smaller the impact on your audience.

Do not overwhelm people with numbers and statistics. They shift people into an analytical frame of mind, which disconnects them from the emotion of an individual story.

If you want to communicate with your audience on the scale they comprehend — a human scale — then take the big issue your organization addresses and communicate it through stories about one person, one whale, one tree. Make that individual relatable — less than perfect.

Small — NOT big! — is what evokes feeling, and feeling is what prompts action.

I’m just beginning a new crop of peer learning projects for nonprofits to learn the practice of being  networked nonprofits and use social media effectively at Zoetica and through my work as Visiting Scholar at the Packard Foundation.
I’m also trying to shift my own practice into more design and train the trainers and coach the coaches [...]

One Economy and AT&T recently launched the Applications for Good Challenge. The challenge aims to encourage the development of fun and engaging mobile applications and games that can help ordinary people become connected learners, find jobs, get healthy, and build financial security.  The submission period began March 14 and runs until May 16. The winners will be announced June 1.

A single entry can win in up to two of the eight categories. The Grand Prize is US$10,000, plus $4,000 for ceremony expenses. Total cash prizes amount to $50,000. Winners in all categories will also receive recognition in press releases and blog coverage.

All submissions will be screened initially by members of One Economy’s Applications for Good team, who will select the top entries based on the criteria below. The best submissions will then be judged by experts using the same criteria:

• Potential impact of the application on target audience
• Demonstrated understanding of the need addressed by the producers
• Creativity and originality of the application or prototype
• Potential for further development or as a viable business in the communities we serve

To enter the challenge:

• Register on the website and read the complete official rules.
• Use the entry form to create your entry. If you are already a project lead on an existing solution at A4G, a button will allow you to quickly convert it into a contest entry. You will then be asked to answer additional questions and attach relevant files.
• When your entry is ready and if you agree with the official rules, check “I agree” and submit.

All contest entries will appear on the site as solutions. From the time of your submission until the contest deadline you may add to or change your description, images, demo video, or links by logging in with the user name and password you used to enter.

To learn more about the challenge visit the Applications for Good contest site: http://applicationsforgood.org/contests/

These beginner sessions are an excellent opportunity for nonprofits that are just getting started using social media. The following post has been cross-posted from the TechSoup Forums:

May is global Social Media Month, when people come together to exchange information, create and build relationships and celebrate the newest form of communication, social media.

Social media has definitely changed our nonprofit world - the way we recruit volunteers, fundraise, and tell our story. As you know, it is TechSoup’s mission to empower you (nonprofits, libraries, social benefit organizations, and so on) with technology, both education and products, to fulfill your mission.

We are especially excited to participate in Social Media Month this year with the recent launch of our Nonprofit Social Media 101 wiki; a starting place and hub of curated content from our nonprofit partners and social media experts. It is designed for beginners, as a curriculum, to walk you through the six of the biggest social media platforms (that we use), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Delicious.

This May, we will featuring content and hosting four live Twitter chats, discussing various topics covered in the curriculum. A TweetChat is a guided conversation around a particular topic, organized by a hashtag (for example, #npsocialmedia101). More explanation and how they work, read How to Participate in a Twitter Chat.

Join us Mondays in May at 9 a.m. Pacific time, as we discuss:

• Facebook, May 2: Tag and follow #npfacebook
• Twitter, May 9: Tag and follow #nptwitter
• Video, May 16: Tag and follow #npvideo
• Tagging, May 23: Tag and follow #nptagging

We will be posting more details in our forum and answering your questions. You can also follow @techsoup for more details!

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has done a nice job showing why the value of narrative in your organization extends well beyond telling stories in your nonprofit marketing materials. Integrating narrative throughout your work has four advantages, according to this article by Thaler Pekar:

Brand: Story makes what you stand for both clear and appealing.  “Stories help to make seemingly indefinable and intangible organizational values and attributes (such as unity and sustainability) concrete and tangible.” 

Engagement: Stories humanize your organization, which is important because people engage with people, not with concepts or organizations.

Smart leadership: Stories build credibility and trust, as well as deepen relationships, start conversations and catalyze action.  “Stories also help smart leaders introduce the meaning of new projects and products. In a narrative organization, leaders are skilled in linking current projects and challenges to the narrative of the organization’s past, present, and future,” note the article.

Knowledge sharing: Stories work well for sharing knowledge and putting useful frameworks around information. They help us grasp data, learn and surface tacit knowledge. They help us make sense of ourselves and what we do.

Via Junta42 content marketing blog, comes this nice visualization of the art of story by Fathom.  I like it as an accompaniment to this posts’s reflections on narrative: