You are browsing the archives of 2011 May.

Are you about to start a conversation with a statistic?

Stop.

Emotion must lead, reason must follow.  Because that’s how you commune with the human brain.  Emotion first, reason second.  Heart, then facts. 

Please, REMEMBER THIS.  Whatever your cause, whoever your audience, you must start every conversation with the emotional heart of your cause, not the facts of its scope or scale in the world.  If you don’t create emotional space in the mind for your cause, there will be no place for your information to find a home.  And if you do not create a social landscape for a relationship, there is no place for human connection.

If I had a dollar for every person who asked if this applied to them, I’d have a lot of money for my nonprofit.  My answer is always this: There are no exceptions to the rule that you must awaken the heart to arouse the mind.

David Brooks says this so very eloquently in his new book, The Social Animal:

“Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it.  Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.  The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.”

Decision making is not a point in time, says Brooks: “We are primarily wanderers, not decision makers… We are pilgrims in a social landscape.”

So true.  So well said.

Please join us for the 2011 Nonprofit Marketing Conference in DC, July 11-13.
The line-up is amazing, the presenters an incredible mix of nonprofit marketing experts.

Here are a few of the tech-related highlights:

• PRE-CONFERENCE TUTORIAL - July 11
  Social Media Success for Nonprofits

  More than three-quarters of surveyed nonprofits in 2010 said that social media works best for “enhancing relationships with existing audiences.” But, are there more benefits coming with evolving use? Should nonprofits be using one networking site or more? Are there any strategies to managing the time it takes to grow social networks? And, how will services like Facebook and Twitter be changing in the future?
  

  Register for this three-hour, pre-conference workshop with renowned social media expert, Blue State Digital, the company that has crafted and implemented powerful social media campaigns for dozens of issue organizations and cultural institutions. We’ll talk about some tactics that have worked well for BSD clients (like Obama for America, the NAACP, the Jewish Federations, Share Our Strength, US Soccer, and the It Gets Better Project) and others. We’ll discuss where the biggest bang for the buck is for nonprofits, and where the risks are. We’ll have a special conversation about prioritizing staff time in an era of limited resources. And, we’ll reserve time to discuss your own programs and challenges.
  

  Lead presenter Rich Mintz will be joined by other members of BSD’s communications team to talk about social media programs they worked on, why they made the decisions they did, and what results they achieved.  
  

  This is a hands-on session. Bring your laptop or mobile device!
  Presenter: Rich Mintz, Vice President, Strategy, Blue State Digital

• All a Twitter July 12
  A recent study shows that 78% of nonprofit organizations find Twitter to be the most effective social media tool for reaching new supporters. This interactive session will focus on the future of social media and Twitter as they are being played out in the nonprofit sector and will include:  

  ·         Twitter best practices for nonprofits

  ·         Successful nonprofit campaigns on Twitter

  ·         Fundraising/membership on Twitter

  ·         Tools and tricks to use with Twitter

  ·         How Twitter benefits your integrated marcom strategy

  Bring your laptop or mobile device for hands-on practice!
  Presenter: David Neff,Senior Digital Strategist, Ridgewood: Ingenious Communication Strategy, co-author, The Future of Nonprofits: Innovate and Thrive in the Digital Age

• Nonprofit Customer Acquisition and Retention: Traditional vs Digital Methods for Maximizing ROI
  

  July 12
  In order for nonprofits to survive and thrive, they need to continually acquire/recruit new donors, members, supporters, clients, and volunteers. Once they’re in the door, however, attrition rates can soar without a sound stewardship and engagement program to retain them and grow revenue.
  

  Presenters: Allyson Kapin, Founder at Women Who Tech, Partner, Rad Campaign; Eric Rardin, Director of Nonprofit Services, Care2

 Get the earlybird discount of $100 if you register before June 11! There are group discounts, too, for nonprofits sending three or more employees. Click the image to find out more! JUST BE THERE!

Note from Beth: Back in 2007,   I presented and attended at the Games for Change Festival.    Over the past few years, games and mobile platforms have become more and more important for nonprofits to pay attention to for their communications strategy.   The annual festival is an excellent opportunity to hear from the field’s thought leaders and see innovative [...]

Every month, the NetSquared Community comes together offline at NetSquared Local events around the world to mix, swap stories and ideas, build new relationships, and collaborate to help the local community. Our local organizers are volunteers dedicated to helping create local opportunities for learning, sharing and using technology to make a difference. In this Organizer Spotlight series we bring you interviews with organizers from around the world.

We’re happy to introduce: Camilla Burg!

Camilla is the lead organizer of the NetSquared Local/Wiser Tuesday group in Paris, France. You can check out her profile and ways to connect on the NetSquared Local Organizer Team page. Are you in Paris? Connect to the NetSquared group here!

Tell us who you are in less than 140 characters.

A nature–loving, community-networking aficionado and French-food worshipping yogi

How do you spend your time when you’re not organizing Wiser Tuesday events?

Other than my main job which is working on communications and outreach for WiserEarth.org (a social network for individuals, grassroots communities and organizations working on social and environmental change), I am a volunteer English teacher at a local school and I help out a nonprofit organization here in Paris called InformEthic  which is trying to build bridges between those working in the field of technology and nonprofits in France. In my spare time I practice a form of yoga called Anusara which signifies “following your heart.’

What inspired you to organize these events in your community?

It was an idea that came from a WiserEarth (WE) member who suggested that we needed to have a way of bringing local WE members together in order to share projects we are working on, to connect and exchange ideas around using technology for social change. Since we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, we felt that the NetSquared local events would be a good format for us to follow at WiserEarth. As a result, we set up a WiserTuesday gathering here in France. This was made a lot easier as we were lucky enough to be offered a meeting space by La Ruche, a collaborative workspace for social entrepreneurs in Paris. I am now helping to grow face-to-face gatherings among other ‘wiser communities’ around the world as I am truly inspired by the energy that can be created in bringing changemakers together.

What’s the hardest part of the job?

I don’t really find any of it hard as I really enjoy meeting people working in many different areas and on different projects. There is, however, a busier time which is just before and just after a gathering – that includes setting up the event and then afterwards, writing a report of what happened and sharing this with everyone. But then that’s enjoyable too.

How do you measure the success of your events?

We work on the basis that whoever comes to an event are the people who are meant to be there. Sometimes there are 10 of us and other times 40 of us. I feel that each event is special in its own right because of the people who make the effort to turn up in the first place, to share what they are doing and take part in the discussions. Success for me is when someone leaves an event with a new idea, an email address, the possibility of being able to work on someone with a project, or with a warm and fuzzy feeling that they are indeed part of a wider community working on social change.

Tell us about the best Wiser Tuesday event. What did you learn from that experience?

One of our most successful events was around the theme “Are you a good social networker?”. We started off the event with an exercise to show how powerful social networking sites can be in connecting people with similar interests. We invited participants to initially spend 5 minutes getting to know 5 other people and learning 5 interesting facts about them. We then asked them how much people remembered including date of birth, where they were born without pen or paper…  After that we asked everyone to do the same exercise but with post-its. Of course we found it a lot easier to remember everything as it had been written down. We then stuck the results on a wall and we were able to read all of them and find out who shared birthdays, similar interests etc. We used Clay Shirky’s ‘Here comes everybody’ model to demonstrate that the post-its had become the social object around which we were coalescing. We learned that it was a powerful networking exercise and a fun way to lead into our presentations and discussions that evening about using social networks for social good.

What’s the local social-web-tech scene like in Paris?

It seems to have really taken off in the 2 years since I moved here. The word ‘social innovation’ is on everyone’s lips right now.

How do you envision Wiser Tuesday events evolving over time?

I think that the Internet and specifically social media tools have really come of age over the past year, especially with the dramatic events that have been taking place in North Africa and the Middle East where social networking platforms such as Twitter and FaceBook are helping to spur democratic change. I think we will see a greater number of grassroots communities and changemakers gathering face-to-face in different parts of the world to better understand how we can effect change using social technologies and how we can work together more effectively to address the critical issues affecting our planet.

What’s your change-the-world philosophy?

“It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community – a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth.” - Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist teacher

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” - Mahatma Gandhi

What else do you want to say?

Drop by to say hi to me at WiserEarth: http://www.wiserearth.org/user/Camilla or if you’re in Paris, do drop by to one of our gatherings

Learn more about NetSquared Local:

• Find NetSquared in your city
• Learn more about the NetSquared Local Organizers
• Start a group in your city 

Eight in ten American women strongly believe in the power of individuals to make a difference by supporting causes, while their male counterparts are more likely to view supporting causes as a fad.  This is according to new data from Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication.

In addition, American women are more likely than men to believe that supporting causes creates a sense of purpose and meaning in life, makes them feel good about themselves and makes them feel like part of a community. More than four in ten Americans (45%) are actively involved with supporting causes, and women make up a significantly larger part of this group than men.  According to the study,

“Men and women are generally in agreement when it comes to which particular causes they choose to support. For both, feeding the hungry and supporting our troops are among those that rank the highest, and as expected, gender-related health issues like breast cancer and prostate cancer are significantly more likely to be supported by women and men, respectively. In addition, survey results indicate that women are more compelled to support youth-related causes like bullying and childhood obesity, while men are more likely to support the Tea Party movement.”

At Network for Good, we’ve seen some anecdotal evidence that this is true in our friends-to-friends fundraising campaigns at Six Degrees.

Here are some additional interesting findings.  An overview of the study is here.  Thanks to Georgetown for sharing the findings!

The Games for Change Annual Festival is the largest gaming event in New York City and the only international event uniting creators of games for change, the public, civil society, academia, the gaming industry, and the media. The event will be held June 20-22 in New York City.

Entry fee for the festival ranges from US$60 to US$520, depending on your demographic (student, nonprofit, or general public) and preferred type of access (pre-festival summit, the festival, or access to all events).

Festival highlights include Al Gore’s keynote speech, the Award Gala, and the Demo Spotlight.

• The Festival Awards recognize excellence in games that address current pressing social issues. The four  categories are: Direct Impact, Learning & Education, Transmedia, and the Knight News Award, which focuses on news games.
• The Demo Spotlight is an opportunity for game developers to present their projects to an open panel of designers and funders on the festival’s main stage.

You can find the complete list of the nominees, speakers, and the full agenda at the festival’s website: http://gamesforchange.org/festival2011/.

Don’t miss out on the workshops, keynotes, and networking opportunities! You can still register for this year’s event.

A colleague recently shared this video that pokes fun of  the  “always on, gotta share everything on social networks” lifestyle for many people here in America.  It is a serious issue for professionals here in the US, especially if  they work in education or youth service nonprofits.    In many places in the world,  sharing [...]

This post outlines how Net2Camb hosted it’s first livestreamed event, provides information about how view the slides and listen to the audio, and overviews our future plans for providing more live and recorded Netsquared Local event content in the future.

About the event

Ellie Stonely graciously offered to share her experiences using Twitter with our NetSquared Local group in Cambridge, UK. The topic was Intro to Twitter for Charities and Social Enterprises. In the talk, Ellie led a strategy-based conversation sharing case studies, lessons learned, and first steps for people and organizations that are interested in trying Twitter for the first time. 

The event was held on 24 May 2011, at Cambridge Online. You can read a few excerpts from the event on Storify.

About the livestream

A few weeks ago I got a note from Steven Flower, the NetSquared Local organizer in Manchester, asking if the group I help manage in Cambridge wanted to collaborate in real-time from 130 miles away. His email started: “Just a random thought, but we too have our Meetup scheduled in Manchester on the SAME DAY! Right now, we haven’t a speaker or anything, so here is my crazy idea”. The email went on to outline a way to stream content over the web to provide an event speaker in both cities simultaneously. I love crazy ideas and I knew it would add value to our efforts, so of course I said YES!

Now, I’m no techie, but Steven had been testing out a tool called Ipadio for streaming and sharing audio within his group. He suggested that we could upload the slides before the event and use Ipadio on a mobile phone to stream the audio live. We could also share ideas and feedback in real-time with virtual participants using the #virtualnet2 hashtag as a twitter backchannel.

His plan worked a charm!

For anyone else intersted in using this solution for their events, here are a few of my lessons learned:

• The speaker needs to give an audio cue to the virtual participants every time she changes slides. We did this by having someone other than the speaker flip through the slides, which gave the speaker a reminder to say “next slide please”. We also tweeted out (using the event hashtag) which slide we were on in the room.
• The speaker needs a microphone. An easy way to do this is to clip a headset/mic that comes with many smartphones onto the blouse of the speaker, and ask her to put the phone in her pocket after you log in. No need to plug the headphones in her ears though - it’s a one-way channel!
• Test the audio before the event. Make sure it’s not too echoy or quiet. Make sure you know how to log in.

It’s not too late to participate!

While we did a lot to provide an interactive experience in real-time, if you missed the event you can still access the content to review in your own time. Here’s how to access it:

1. Open or download Ellie’s Slides
2. Open the audio stream
3. Use the #virtualNet2 hashtag to share ideas on Twitter. The speaker is @e11ie5 and the host group is @Net2Camb.

The future for #VirtualNet2

This wasn’t the first NetSquared Local event to be streamed online and it certainly won’t be the last. The Philladelphia NetSquared group, for instance, have been pioneers at streaming Local content and have inspired much of our thinking for the Cambridge-Manchester event.

In the future, we plan to make it easier for people interested in participating in events virtually. Soon, we’ll be launching a Virtual NetSquared Local option “officially” but if you’d like to be automatically notified of future events you can go ahead and sign up on the Virtual NetSquared Local meetup page today.

Thank yous

The first big THANK YOU goes to the community and event participants in Cambridge, Manchester, and aroudn the world. Thank you for bearing with us when things didn’t go quite to plan (for instance when the slides were posted about 5 minutes before the talk!) and thank you for encouraging us to make the event happen - both online and in-person.

To the fabulous Ellie Stonely. For providing excellent resources, ideas, and conversation. Your situation yesterday wasn’t ideal, but you really pulled through!

To Andrew Entecott and Cambridge Online. For being our gracious sponsors of the event, even during this rough time.

To Steven Flower. Thanks for the hard work, inspiration, publicity, and friendship.

To Manchester Net Tuesday. You guys rock and I can’t wait to have another event where you stream to us!

To James and the other folks at Ipadio. Thank you for your technical support!