Wired Causes

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Yesterday, the Social Media for Nonprofit Conference series kicked off in San Francisco yesterday in War Memorial Green Room with support from Microsoft.   The conference shared practical tips and tools with expert speakers including, JD Lasica, Social Brite,  Susan Gordon of Causes.com, Jonah Sachs of Free Range Studios, Charles Porch of Facebook,  Susan Tenby of [...]

When I was a foreign correspondent, I lived in constant fear that I was missing important news.  I’d be awake at night wondering if there were a business deal or political controversy or factory strike that I didn’t know about.  Someone else would have the scoop.  With a whole country to cover, I was sure to be unaware of something.  So I always worried and never, ever relaxed.  The only time I exhaled was at the foreign correspondent’s club when all my competitors were at the bar and I knew that even if something was happening, nothing was being reported.  At least we were all in the dark together.

When I quit wire service reporting, I remember feeling relief that those days were over.

Well, now they’re back.  And I don’t even work as a journalist anymore.

This is the dark side of social media:  it’s on all the time, and if you’re checked out you’re bound to be missing something: a critical Tweet about your organization, a burning question on your blog post, a news development development you need to understand.  Just like with reporting, responding slowly on social media has its hazards.  I’m on vacation this week, but I’m still online because the old reporter in me knows switching it all off has its costs. 

So what is a person with work-life balance to do?  Here’s my advice. 

1. Choose to do a few things well, rather than many things poorly.  If you don’t have a lot of time, pick one or two social media presences and dedicate yourself to being a good listener, conversationalist and content producer in that space.  I focus my energy on blogging and Twitter. 

2. Make it a priority to be responsive in those spaces.  Establishing an online presence and then ignoring it is foolish.  If you fail to provide great content, it’s like building a digital ghost town that makes you look irrelevant - or dead.  if you neglect to actively listen, it’s like going up to someone at a party, telling them about yourself, then walking away when that person begins to talk.  You have to commit more of yourself than that.  If you can’t sustain a conversation on social media, don’t start one.

3. Pass out the slingshots.  I was on a panel with Joe Trippi last night, and he talked about empowering your champions to spread your message and do your work.  He said it’s like handing out slingshots to an army of Davids.  You don’t have to carry the burden of conversation alone like some Goliath social media guru.  That doesn’t work well anyway.  The more your supporters take over your engagement, the more effective your message—and the saner your life.

On that theme, any volunteers to guest post this week? 

Dashboards are a nonprofit’s best friend because they can be powerful tools in communicating your organization’s important measurement data at a glance.   If a dashboard fails to tell you what need in glance, then you’ve wasted all that data collection time.    What if you married with the power of a dashboard with visual [...]

Here is David Brooks on why we must first grasp who people are rather than what we wish people thought.  We need to find the way to share hopes and dreams before we deliver facts.  We need that skill to make a connection, which is the beginning of making a difference.

He makes three important observations about our minds and humanism:

1. “While the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work.”  It’s invaluable to us.

2. “Emotions are at the center of our thinking.”  When we lose the emotional parts of our brain, we often become quite helpless.  Emotions are the foundation of reason, because they tell us what to value.  That’s the center of wisdom.  A brain is the record of the feelings of a life.

3. “We’re social animals, not rational animals.  We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one to another.”  We react emotionally to the experiences of others.

What does this all mean?  Grasping our humanism could make us far better at connecting in our culture.  Here’s how I think of it: The more we understand human nature, the more we can enter into the minds of others, and the more we can find a true meeting of the minds.  Without that journey, we’ll never get past square one.

Note from Beth: I’m working on the sequel to the Networked Nonprofit – it is a book about using measurement to prove and improve results with the Measurement Goddess KD Paine.    (Her  recent book, Measuring What Matters, is a must read.) So, lately, I’ve been on the hunt for good nonprofit measurement stories.   Last week, [...]

Volunteers are awesome. So the July 5 Net Tuesday is gonna focus on volunteer coordination.

Volunteers are awesome, but the relationship between a nonprofit and a volunteer can be tricky.

VOLUNTEERS: Maybe the nonprofit never got back to you? Maybe the job they offered kinda sucked?

VOLUNTEER COORDINATORS: Are your volunteers creating a ridiculous pile of administrative paperwork and overhead? Can you find volunteers with the right skills? Why is this so hard?

Net Tuesday can’t solve all your volunteer-related challenges. We aren’t MAGIC. But we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves that might help. Check this out:

DATE: Tuesday, July 5
TIME: Doors and (cash bar) booze at 5:30pm, Speakers at 6:00pm, Ends at 7:30pm
LOCATION: Pull Focus film school. 306 Abbott St (upstairs)
RSVP: On Meetup or Facebook

WHO’S TALKING? ABOUT WHAT?

ITEM: Volunteers for Salesforce
 Elijah van der Giessen (Net Tuesday and David Suzuki Foundation) gives a demo of a free (for charities) application that helps manage volunteers and their hours, and creates forms to allow volunteer and job signup on your website.

Learn more:

• An overview of the software: http://groundwire.org/labs/volunteers-for-salesforce
• Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZm7osRj3lY
• 21 volunteer management systems compared: http://www.idealware.org/volunteer_management
• Do you need an integrated database? http://www.idealware.org/tips/tracking_volunteers

But technology can’t solve your problems. It just makes you more efficient! The secret to a strong relationship is a hot three-way. Sweet love betwen you, the volunteer AND the organization. Sound tricky? Sometimes it can be. That’s why Net Tuesday is bringing in Trina Isakson, a consultant with both professional and academic expertise in volunteers.

ITEM: Trina Isakson on how technology can help or hinder effective volunteer engagement
Trina Isakson recently completed masters research that examines effective leadership of volunteers, and is excited to discuss how technology can help or hinder good volunteer engagement. She is passionate about non-profit capacity, engaged citizenship, community development and education. Through volunteer activities and consulting and training work with 27 Shift, she helps non-profit organizations and universities strategically engage their next generation of employees, volunteers and donors.

• Personal: trinaisakson.com
• Work: 27shift.com
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/telleni

Says Trina:

For the research, I interviewed a series of nonprofit staff/board members who had been identified as effectively engaging volunteers. None of the orgs had any problems (or even made much effort) recruiting volunteers, and more likely had to restrict the number of volunteers. While the final results of my paper focused on leadership, the themes that arose from analyzing the interview transcripts I think are most interesting. Examples include:

• volunteers were seen as peers and professionals, not subordinates
• volunteer engagement was seen as everyone’s role in the organiztion (i.e. not just for a ‘volunteer coordinator’)
• the organizations and individuals had a strong culture of learning and change
• while they had volunteers that had to leave their roles/didn’t show to meetings etc., interviewees accepted this as a reality of the volunteers’ busy lives and adapted their volunteer engagement practices/scheduling to plan for this

OUR SPONSOR They’re giving the event a home, and allow the meetup to be free. Plus they make awesome videos. Pull Focus Film School On Facebook and Twitter!  

See you on Tuesday!

– Eli Net Tuesday Vancouver

Are you trying to fix something broken? 

Here’s a great video from Dan Heath for you.  I watch it whenever I’m stuck.  And when report cards come home!

I’m a big fan of the concept of positive deviance, also known as “bright spots.”  Here’s the idea: instead of asking yourself why giving is down, look at which donors gave more this year and find out why. Instead of agonizing over why your latest marketing campaign failed, look at the last one that worked and discover what made it a winner. Instead of asking people in your office why they aren’t hitting their numbers, ask who is succeeding and why.  As I’ve said before and will say again: Spend more time on duplicating what works rather than dwelling on what is broken.

Here’s Dan Heath saying this far more eloquently.