Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to "digital immigrants" in the personal mastery of these tools.

She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change.

Detailed Biography and Accomplishments

Musican and Arts Manager
Arts & Web Technology Evangelist
Nonprofit Technology
Blogging and Social Media Tools
Cambodia

My Linkedin Profile

From Musician To Arts Manager

She has worked with nonprofit arts and community-based organizations for almost thirty years. She has a B.A. from Bennington College and studied flute performance at the New School of Music in Philadelphia. She worked as an arts administrator for New England Conservatory, Boston Symphony, and Pro Art Chamber Orchestra before she became an independent consultant. She served as an outside evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts for its Advancement and Challenge Grant programs for over ten years.

Arts & Web Technology Evangelist

In 1993, she was hired by the New York Foundation for the Arts as the Community Builder for its Arts Wire program, an online network for the artists. She provided technical support, training in how to use the Internet, and facilitated online forums. While at NYFA, she designed and implemented training and technical assistance programs for the arts educators, arts administrators, and individual artists to integrate technology into their work. She was an instructor for the Empire State Arts Partnership Summer Seminar at Sarah Lawrence College for five years.

During her ten years at NYFA, she developed many online and print resource materials on how the arts organization can the Internet. She developed SpiderSchool where you can find a link to a digital version of the print publication she authored titled "Building Arts Audiences and Communities on the Web." She also created a guide to technology planning for arts organization, training materials for individual artists to use the web, and helped design and implement the resource site for the landmark arts and technology conference, circuits@nys, in 1997.

In 2003, she was commissioned by Npower to research and co-author a white paper on the use of technology in the arts sector. She was also commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts to write case studies on how arts organizations are using web tools and technology to support their goals. Her articles on using email and other tools efficiently and technostress were published in several arts-related publications and some can be found here.

For ten years, we worked as a consultant to the Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations on a variety of projects. She has managed their "E-Institute for Arts Leadership" program, a hybrid e-learning program, a partnership with Cornell University. She provided training for faculty and participants as well as online facilitation of discussions.

Nonprofit Technology Trainer, Consultant, and Evaluator

Since 2000, Beth has collaborated with the Summit Collaborative, a network of people and organizations working to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations, where she works on technology evaluation projects, curriculum development, research, and planning.

Highlights of her work at Summit Collaborative include: She co-authored the curriculum and served as a consultant for Summit's Strategic Technology Program. In 2006, she contributor to the curriculum "Building Online Communities and Networks" launched by IMARK, an e-learning initiative in agricultural information management developed by FAO and partner organizations and co-authored a guide titled "How To Cost and Fund ICT" for the ICT Hub in the UK. She worked on an three-year evaluation of the use of mobile technology to help uninsured residents obtain health insurance and other health care services. She authored or co-authored articles with Summit collaborative principal consultant, Marc Osten, on the effective use of technology and training which have been published on TechSoup and elsewhere.

She has also served as a technology grant evaluator for several funders, including Legal Services Corporation's "Technology Innovation Grants," the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Carnegie Foundation. She gave the Keynote presentation at the Legal Services Corporations Conference in January, 2008 on ROI techniques for Nonprofits and Technology.

She has served as a project consultant for Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network's (N-TEN) Day of Service project where technology assistance providers from all over the world gather to volunteer their time to help local nonprofits in a community since 2002. She is curating NTEN's "We Are Media: Nonprofit Social Media Starter," an online community of people from nonprofits who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. She is facilitating the community to work in a networked way to help identify the best existing resources, people, and case studies that will give nonprofit organizations the knowledge and resources they need effectively use social media.

She has presented at numerous conferences on nonprofit technology topics over the past fifteenyears, most recently on the topic of Social Media ROI and adoption issues.

Over the years, she has organized and facilitated face-to-face and online peer groups on various topics. Examples of the materials and curriculum can be found on her portfolio.She is an alumni and has served a mentor for Full Circle's Online Facilitation Workshop. In 2006, she lead a Webinar for NTEN on "Designing Effective Learning Experiences for Technology Training."

Beth is an accomplished workshop leader, both online and off and skilled at one-on-one or "shoulder to shoulder" training. Through her work in the nonprofit technology sector over the past 15 years, she has provided computer coaching to thousands of people.

Blogging and Social Media Tools

Beth Kanter has been blogging since 2003. Her professional blog, Beth's Blog, is well known in the nonprofit and social change space and beyond. She was recently named one of the top fifty most influential female bloggers (#29 on thelist) and the only blogger who focuses on the nonprofit sector. She currently is the Contributing Editor for Nonprofits and Social Change at blogher and writes for the Netsquared blog.

Her articles have appeared many online nonprofit publications including TechSoup, Nonprofit Times, and others. She contributed a chapter to the NTEN's forthcoming nonprofit technology book, to be published by Wiley, on Technology and ROI and she contributed a "thought leader" essay on social media adoption issues to the recently published book "Mobilizing Generation 2.0."

She has given numerous for nonprofits around the world on how to integrate social media into communications strategies as well as how to workshops on specific techniques. She is in much demand as a workshop leader and speaker. She was the keynote speaker for the Cambodian Bloggers Conference in Phnom Penh, The Connecting Up Conference in Brisbane, Australia, Minnesota Council on Nonprofits, Making Media Conference in Chicago and others. She has presented about nonprofits and social media at some of the leading social media industry conferences including O'Reilly's Graphing Social Patterns, Gnomedex, Blogher, and Podcamp.

Beth has been recognized for her live blogging, having lived blogged numerous conferences and meetings. Recent live blogging projects include: Games for Change Conference, Blogher, Berkman Center iLaw Conference, Boston PodCamp, and many others. She has been video blogging and screencasting since 2006. Her screencasts have been featured in the Learning Center at OurMedia and tagged the "Best of the Week" by Robin Good.

She has been interviewed extensively by mainstream media and social media makers alike.

Cambodian Connections

In 2007, she was invited to be the Keynote Speaker and lead training web2.0 workshops at the Cambodian Bloggers Summit. She launched a highly successful personal fundraising campaign to bring over video cameras to teach video blogging. She is an expert in the use of web 2.0 for fundraising, having raised over $200,000 for Cambodian orphans using her blog and other Web 2.0 tools. She was the first place winner of the Yahoo Network for Good Contest in 2007, raising over $100,000 and came in first place for global causes in America's Giving Challenge sponsored by Case Foundation and Parade Magazine in 2008 raising $93,000. Her fundraising efforts and instructional materials are documented at this wiki.

She writes about Khmer culture and technology at Cambodia4kids blog and maintains a web site with the same name that provides information for U.S. teachers and parents. Her "Typing To Learn Khmer" blog is where she practices her very basic Khmer language skills using Khmer Unicode. Her motivation to learn about Cambodia is to ensure that her two adopted Khmer children know about their homeland and celebrate their culture. She has covered the Cambodian Blogosphere as a former author for Global Voices Online, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Law at Harvard University.

She is a board member of the Sharing Foundation, an NGO that does projects to benefit Cambodian children and FAMCAM , a parent support group of families with adopted Cambodian children. She done volunteer work in Cambodia for the Roteang Village School and her family is currently sponsoring a young woman in Cambodian for her college education.