Wired Causes

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Facebook made it official today on the Today Show no less.  The long anticipated changes to Facebook brand pages – switching to the timeline format – is now available to all brand pages.   But Facebook hasn’t played god with us and flipped the switch – they’re actually giving us a month to absorb the [...]

The third post in the February Net2 series features Amy Sample Ward’s reflections on online community organizing. Amy is an experienced online and offline organizer, speaker, and writer. She also the person who lead the strategy for the global NetSquared Community both on and offline until March 2011 when she joined NTEN as the membership director.

Amy’s expertise combines the grassroot feeling with online narrative. She understands the bigger scope of technology driven change while remaining focused on the specific causes of social projects. Read this interview to understand Amy’s point of view, and whether you agree or disagree — join the conversation by leaving a comment or tweeting @netsquared and @amyrsward

Q: What does “online” add to the community organizing?

Successful community organizing across history has always been networked. It may have been a network of organizers in various towns or locations coordinating with each other and then operating locally. Or a team of volunteers that manage communications (from phone trees to canvassing). Or even the networked influence from news coverage and stories from one group or city to the next.

When you bring the Internet, online social tools, mobile technologies, and all the rest into the equation, you do not fundamentally change how communities organize or make change. You do, though, change the scale and the opportunity. Online networking means communities can form that aren’t based in the same physical place. It means community organizers and leaders can communicate with their communities and with other leaders asynchronously. It even means that individuals and groups who thought they “were the only ones” before, are now able to find each other, work together, and do even more.

In the most basic sense, online organizing gives figurative legs to impact and reach.

Q: What makes a community?

To me, a community is a group of people (even if it is organizations, it is still the people within them) who have opted in to participate. It may be a community of geography, cause, or topic. But the opt-in is essential. Simply because I live in a given city, does not mean that I am participating in organized decision making, meeting and collaborating with my neighbors, or even communicating with those around me. Similarly, because I am a certain age, have a certain allergy, favor a specific political party, or even care about a certain social issue, I do not automatically belong to a community with a shared experience. I find that community (today, most likely online) and opt in.

Q: How do you combine working on the ground with online organizing? Anything that works differently in e.g. Europe and the US?

We should approach offline action as one of many channels available to us to reach our mission. Many organizations and groups currently consider multi-channel approaches for a message to include email, website, social media, and blogs. We should expand that view and definition of multi-channel to include offline action and mobile messaging/text. If we put out a call to action and want to organize our community to not just respond but share and distribute the call, we need to think both about where we send the message, but also how the action can be completed. For many organizations and groups, the offline actions are most critical and yet most often forgotten.

Q: What are the current trends in the online community organizing? What is changing and why?

The biggest shift with cause-specific organizing is that organizations don’t necessarily need to be involved. This can be great, or it can be scary. With campaigning tools readily available, and the economy of the web centered on content and adoption, if passionate individuals work together to create compelling content, achievable and measurable goals, and clear calls to action, they can make an impact - from fundraising to policy change - without an organization being involved. Note, though, that those same steps to success are true for an organization. Basically, online organizing tools have leveled the playing field between for-profit and nonprofit groups, as well as between organizations and communities.

Q: Any advice you’d like to share with the other online community organizers?

Start small. Don’t be afraid of failing. And invite people to lead with you at every stage.

More:

This is the last blog in the Feb Net2 series. Another one is coming up at the end of March, and will focus on gender in tech matters. Stay tuned!

•     Read all of the Feb Net2 series posts
•     Check out Amy’s blog
•     Look into Amy’s tips on using social technologies for social impact in the Social by Social book

“How do you kick-start a community group in a major metropolitan city?” This is the question that sparked inspiration for Kat Friedrich, NetSquared Boston’s lead organizer.

For many organizers, growing the tech for benefit community in their area revolves around planning and hosting monthly events. For Kat, her role is much more about curation, listening, and making connections within the community. Below, Kat tells the story of how she re-launched NetSquared Boston, and provides advice to other people interested in running Net2 Local groups.  

A Labor-Saving Approach to Urban Meetup Organizing

By Kat Friedrich

My approach to meetup organizing is half marketing and half industrial engineering. My goals are to keep meetups innovative and entertaining, fill a vacant niche in the Boston community, and make my workload easier. During the day, I have three contract jobs, so saving time matters to me. 

When I volunteered to organize the NetSquared Boston meetup, I saw immediately that the meetup needed to be revamped. From a marketing perspective, I saw we were competing with many other events which paralleled our workshops. 

Boston is a lively city on weeknights. While a city like Las Vegas lights up with casinos, Boston lights up with networking and professional development events. Technology and nonprofit professionals go out to seek their fortune in what I sometimes call the “second shift.” 

On most weeknights, except during the holiday season, there are multiple events that nonprofit technology and social media professionals would enjoy. Boston is dotted with tech-friendly organizations including Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the MIT Media Lab, Microsoft’s NERD Center, the 501 Tech Club, and Boston Media Makers. Many of these events are concentrated in Cambridge. 

But there was an unfilled niche for NetSquared Boston. Despite the diversity of groups and events, there was no events calendar which pulled together nonprofit technology events and highlighted cutting-edge ideas. Few of the local groups were working together to share their calendars and resources. 

Boston tends to have a “silo” mentality; groups work in parallel rather than collaborating. This is true of both nonprofits and other organizations. I saw this meetup as an opportunity to encourage collaboration and to make academic resources accessible to nonprofit technology professionals. 

I turned NetSquared Boston’s meetup into a curated events calendar pulling together listings from all of the sources I found. Our focus is on skills development and networking. I discovered within a month that the networking component was essential.  

Each month, I picked out events that caught my eye as being innovative and useful. Within several months, our RSVP rate doubled. While the group membership hasn’t grown rapidly, I’m receiving compliments and can tell that the new strategy is working. 

Since people often tend to join meetups but not visit Meetup.com regularly, I send out an e-mail twice a month with links to upcoming events and news. I also include seasonal announcements; at the end of December, I sent out a note about computer recycling. 

If you live in a city where networking and tech events are as common as slot machines are in Las Vegas, you may want to add vitality to your group by making it a citywide event clearinghouse and picking out some of the best events to feature as monthly meetups. 

Connect with NetSquared Boston

• Join the Boston group to be notified of upcoming events
• Contact Kat via Twitter
• Contact Kat via Meetup

Get Involved with NetSquared in Your Area:

2. View the map to find the nearest group to you and join the group online to stay up to date on events.
3. Don’t see a group in your area? You can start one today! 
4. Contact us if you want to present at an event (or a few) or have any products, services or other goods you’d like to donate to a local group or the network.

Wow, I never thought I’d get to write a headline like that.

Via the great Oscio blog, here’s an inspiring story about getting Finnish men behind the breast cancer cause.

Roosa nauha 2011 case study from McCann Worldgroup Helsinki on Vimeo.

(If you can’t see the video, watch it here.)

What made this work?  In my mind, it was effective because it wasn’t a publicity stunt.  Sure, it made great TV.  But at its heart, it was about showing courage and love.  And that’s how you get people to care.

Note from Beth: Earlier this month,  the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, hosted the USRIO 2.0 Preparation Conference where policy-makers, practitioners, and innovators discussed how to use connection technologies to advance sustainable development in advance of the June USRIO2.o conference.    Unfortunately, with final book manuscript looming, I could not participate.   But I was able [...]

Today’s post in the February Net2 series is inspired and informed by a conversation I had with Sylwia Presley [reads “Sylvia” in English] . Sylwia is a social media practitioner and consultant who has worked on many projects that involved online community organizing. The thing we focused on when talking though was her engagement in Global Voices — an international community of bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world. Sylwia works as an author at Global Voices and as editor of Polish Global Voices Lingua site . We have chosen Global Voices, because it is the most vivid and sustainable community that Sylwia has been working with. We hope that looking at her lessons learned will prove valuable for the Net2 audience.

Global Voices Online

Global Voices Online is an international, volunteer-led project that collects, summarizes, and gives context to some of the best self-published content found on blogs, podcasts, photo sharing sites, and videoblogs from around the world, with an emphasis on countries outside of Europe and North America. Global Voices is formed by a multilingual community of bloggers who collaborate on a range of projects including a translation project — Lingua. Lingua is about making stories from the Global Voices in English website available in other languages.

The main collaboration tool for the community is a mailing list. Every country, and every region has its own editors, as well as a team of volunteers who contribute to the blog be it by writing or translating the content. What makes them a community are the shared values outlined in the Global Voices Manifesto, a document drafted collectively by participants of the Global Voices 2004 conference and many other bloggers around the world.

To Build a Community

First of the things to keep in mind when approaching the topic of “online community organizing” is, that it is always difficult to manage volunteers, which is the case in this series There are three main ways in which an online community comes to life. The first two are associated with a prestige that is either given or comes when a critical mass of content momentum is reached. The third one is “a spark” that motivates people — a particular passion or interest that will make people both contribute and come back. That latter is the Global Voices case.

To Keep a Community

Respecting and managing people’s emotions an expectations plays a very big role in the community building process. If it is the personal values, if it is the “difficult to grasp” feeling of being safe, and comfortable, you have to be particularly careful. You can’t play with or manipulate people — social media drive transparent communication, and it is very difficult to hide your agenda. And the downside is that once you make people uncomfortable, they leave. Once you abuse people’s trust it is difficult if not impossible to regain it, which is why Global Voices is based on mutual trust and focused on an actual work for the cause.

To Be Able To Let Go

Managing people’s emotions is a tricky and hard to handle task, and it it fails, it might not be your fault. So: be easy on yourself. There is little you can predict — it might be the over engineering, it might be the topic not being interesting enough, it might be the relevance of a project or idea for the local community — in which case it might be even better if it fails sooner than later. It might be for lots of different reasons that your community project won’t work. But with community work, you need to be ready for that: some things catch on, and some don’t.

More:

•     Talking to Sylwia was a pleasure, if you’d like to share it, please feel free to contact her using her Twitter handle, follow her blog, or leave a comment here.
•     Also: If you’d like to read more, and/or get involved in any of the projects that Global Voices is currently working on — visit the site. The contact tab would be the best if you are looking for assistance.

For the month of March, I’m hosting the nonprofit blog carnival.  What that means is not cotton candy (sorry) but rather a mix of contributions from bloggers and readers on a shared theme, right here on my blog, on March 29.

This month’s theme is “picture this” because I feel we don’t do enough to pair great visuals with our stories.  Share your favorite pictures, infographics, videos or even tongue-in-cheek graphs—or tips on how great causes can better show the impact of their work with images. All entries need to include a visual (or it’s okay if they are simply an image).  In addition to featuring the best here, I will of course be creating a board on Pinterest.  Because I love it.

While you’re pondering that theme, check out the February carnival by Marc Pittman on how fundraisers can take care of themselves here.  It will tell you how to handle the sometimes stressful but always important work you do each day.

To enter the carnival for March, fill out this form with your post by March 25th.  If that doesn’t work, email your permalink to nonprofitcarnival at gmail dot com.

And here are two of my favorite visuals to get us started.

Photo posted by Martha Beck on ow.ly

Nonprofit marketing humor by Jan Fonger

For the month of March, I’m hosting the nonprofit blog carnival.  What that means is not cotton candy (sorry) but rather a mix of contributions from bloggers and readers on a shared theme, right here on my blog, on March 29.

This month’s theme is “picture this” because I feel we don’t do enough to pair great visuals with our stories.  Share your favorite pictures, infographics, videos or even tongue-in-cheek graphs—or tips on how great causes can better show the impact of their work with images. All entries need to include a visual (or it’s okay if they are simply an image).  In addition to featuring the best here, I will of course be creating a board on Pinterest.  Because I love it.

While you’re pondering that theme, check out the February carnival by Marc Pitman on how fundraisers can take care of themselves here.  It will tell you how to handle the sometimes stressful but always important work you do each day.

To enter the carnival for March, fill out this form with your post by March 25th.  If that doesn’t work, email your permalink to nonprofitcarnival at gmail dot com.

And here are two of my favorite visuals to get us started.

Photo posted by Martha Beck on ow.ly

Nonprofit marketing humor by Jan Fonger