Many nonprofits, particularly smaller organizations, say their biggest challenge to using social media effectively is that they don’t have the time or staff. Those that have opened themselves up to using these tools and connecting with passionate people in their networks find abundance. Here’s one story about how one free agent, a social media savvy volunteer for a local food bank, saw a problem, reached out to her network, and helped solved in collaboration with the local nonprofit.
Sue Kerr has put her social media savvy to work to fight hunger in the Greater Pittsburgh area and save the environment. In 2009, she was live tweeting a food distribution event at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank when she noticed a man leaving the food bank juggling a lot of thin plastic grocery bags filled with food donations. One bag split and a cabbage rolled out onto the sidewalk and he chased after it.
That’s where she got the idea that food banks should be using canvas tote bags to distribute foods and she tweeted her idea. To her surprise, the Pittsburgh Foundation was following her live tweets. Christopher Whitlatch from the Foundation responded to her tweet with that had a few bags they could donate. Not too long after that, the Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project was launched.
As Sue tells it, “Inspired, I began to reach out to my personal network on Twitter and Facebook and offline through word of mouth. It began informally with a few drives here and there over an 18 month period. I had lots of positive feedback. So, I contacted the Food Bank and proposed we collaborate. We spent some time sorting out the logistics and formally kicked-off on Earth Day.”
The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project collects gently used tote bags for distribution to the region’s food pantries. They partner with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank which coordinates distribution of the bags along with food. The Food Bank serves 11 counties and more than 120,000 people each month (about 1.9 million pounds of food) through a network of more than 300 pantries The project receives bags from a network of permanent drop-off spots, informal and formal tote bag drives (with or without food) and corporate donations of excess schwag.
Her partnership with the local food bank has been productive. Says Sue, “The Food Bank has been very supportive and encouraging to our project. They’ve provided logistical and staff support. Through the Food Bank staff, we’ve heard that the pantries love the idea and want as many bags as we can provide. The Pittsburgh Tote Bag Project has collected 5,000+ bags for local food pantries. Says Sue, “We estimate that our project has kept15,000 disposable bags from being used. “
Sue has also collaborated on social media activities with the food bank. Says Sue, “Beyond tagging and shout outs on Twitter, we organized Pittsburgh’s first ever #blogmob (play on flash mob) , inviting local foodie bloggers to come out to the Food Bank for a tour, a chance to observe a food distribution, and general discussion. We plan to repeat every September to honor Hunger Action Month.” Says Sue, “Our hope is to develop a model that can be replicated in other communities.” The project freely shares its lessons learned with other groups that want to run similar drives.
Has your organization discovered and worked with a free agent like Sue?
As many trainers and teachers already know, people have different learning styles. Howard Gardner has dedicated his life work to this Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Yet, many conference panels are designed to accommodate only one or two styles of learning and go shallow instead of going deep. Would participants learn more and have greater impact if panel designers incorporated different techniques such as visual learning and if they designed for more audience engagement?
After all, how much does one remember after hearing 80 minutes of power point presentations with an expert filling our heads with every detail they know about a topic and leaving only 10 minutes for process with a rapid fire q/a? How much do you retain? How much do you apply? When was the last time you went to a conference and had a deep learning experience through conversation and stimulation of all senses from a traditional panel?
Our panel included Free Agents Mark Horvath and Shawn Ahmed, along with reps from Red Cross, Save the Children, and Common Ground Communities
That’s the questions I asked myself as I designed my panel for the NTEN’s annual conference, the NTC. I designed and facilitated one panel, I’ve Found My Free Agent, Now What? This year I not only facilitated a conversation in the room, but integrated visual facilitation techniques to spark insights and capture learnings. Also, the element of fun, more interaction, and opportunities for sharing in smaller groups. Straight presentation kills all learning. This mixture leads to rich learning and documentation.
I always include an opportunity for people in the room to get to know one another as a “share pair.” Some people might think this is a waste of time, but it gives an opportunity for people to share something they learned or know about the topic. I never get to find out what all the pairs discuss, but I was thankful that Lisa Colton shared what learned Twitter. If you are bored with my description of process and hungering for the content, here’s Devon’s “Storify” documentation for the session.
My panel was about how nonprofits can work effectively free agents, individuals interested in social change but not a traditional nonprofit staff person or volunteer. It struck me that it was all about relationships. So, I used the “Newlywed Game” as the metaphor and had the “free agent/nonprofit” couples answer questions like how they met, their first date, and if they ever had a fight.
As an icebreaker, I asked them to write down one word that leads to a fruitful collaboration. These were telling:
Trust — Transparency — Empathy – Enthusiasm
This was followed by each couple talking from the heart about their experience working together or presenting some examples of their work.
Shawn Ahmed showed a powerful video of people in his network who donated to the organizations he was working with because he was brokering the relationship.
On the organizational side, Ettore from Save the Children made some great points about experiencing empathy so it can help you sell it to senior management who might be resistant to working with Free Agents. He said suggested going out and trying to raise money for your organization as an individual and learn how easy or hard it is.
The insights from the panelists were great conversation starters with the everyone in the room. To capture the nuggets, I had two visual recorders – Rob Cottingham – a cartoon blogger – and Jonny Goldstein who was doing graphic recording. Rob produced several cartoons, but I love the one that captures the key to relationship success with Free Agents below.
Later I quizzed him about the tools. He is now using his iPad with Sketch book pro and a stylus – which makes it possible for more immediate posting. I’m inspired to do more electronic doodling myself.
Rob Cottingham
As the discussion was unfolding, Jonny Goldstein was capturing it. As a facilitator, it is great to have this visual so you can focus on the conversational channeling – and have a record you refer to as the conversation weaves and turns.
Photo by Devon Smith
By the end of the session, Jonny had captured the high level insights in a visual format. Now, of course, I realize that there are also “word smart” people. Laura Lee Dooley captured this blog post about the session, plus you can find my slides all the links and other resources here.
Click to see full size image
I truly believe that the more engaged the audience the better learning and the better retention. So, when it comes to panels, workshops, or other educational settings – design really matters. You need to engage the whole brain in learning.
Over the past month, I have been thinking about a couple of different ideas and how to incorporate them into training design to facilitate learning. My questions are:
1. How can we integrate content sharing and audience interaction in the right balance to unleash pearls of wisdom from both audience and the experts on the stage?
2. How can we use graphic facilitation or graphic note taking in real time to deepen understanding of the topic being discussed?
3. How can nonprofits learn from one another across borders without the barrier of translation, particularly online?
4. How can create a back channel or other social media tools that can engage people in the room, but also around the world with an interest in the topic?
5. How do bridge or connect the face-to-face interaction and back channels to leverage learning?
I designed and facilitated “A Global Conversation: Free Agents and Nonprofits in a Networked World” at the SXSWi Interactive over the weekend as an opportunity to experiment with some of these ideas. As many of you know, I’m comfortable with public learning, so using this post to share what I learned.
Balancing Content and Interaction in the Room and Accounting for Different Learning Styles
I don’t like to facilitate a panel from the stage because I think it puts a wall up between the audience and the presenters. I feel it stifles learning. I like to use a wireless mic and roam the audience and ask questions that help create a bridge between the presenters and the audience.
In order to do this, you need to give people a brief context and articulate the interaction rules. This provides the launching pad for learning in the room, and hopefully the back channel. Most importantly, you need panelists who have wisdom and brevity. A good technique is to have each panelist offer a five minute “talk from the heart” presentation sharing their point of view on the topic. The panelists included: Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), Mark Horvath of Invisible People and Jessica Dheere, of Social Media Exchange Beirut in Lebanon.
In between each presentation, I asked a conversation starter question for the panelist and then roamed the audience asking folks to share their insights or ask questions. For example, after Danielle talked about her experience working inside of a nonprofit, an audience member who worked for the State Department shared their experience. After Mark Horvath, shared some thoughts based on his experience as a free agent, I asked Craig Newmark, who was in the audience, to offer his advice as a free agent.
When you facilitated a full room conversation like this, you have to be careful to strike the right balance between presentation of content and discussion. At SXSW the sessions are only 60 minutes – and with a design like this, it flies by. Mark Krynsky was not able to share his free agent story because we ran out of time, so I captured it after the panel with my Flip Camera.
As a visual person, I often get lost when I’m in a full room discussion – even if it is well moderated and there is an overview. Whenever I’m in discussions, I take notes visually having learned the techniques of visual facilitation and mind mapping to help me process. I suspect I’m not alone. That’s why I invited my colleague, Jonny Goldstein, who is an expert using drawings to capture the insights visually as they unfold.
Graphic Facilitation by Jonny Goldstein - click to see larger image
Having a lot of interaction, plus visual facilitation creates an opportunity for richer learning. Debra Askanase has a terrific blog post that captures the many pearls of wisdom that were shared as a result of the design. Amy Sept also has this excellent round up pointing to tweets that resonated. Devon Smith used storify to capture the knowledge shared.
The Back Channel
But how do can you use social media tools creatively to bring in others who have an interest in the topic into the discussion, but are not in the same room? More importantly, how can you bring them in beyond being passive listeners or re-tweeters but engage in the discussion? Finally, having just returned from the Middle East working with social media/NGO trainers, how can you create a global back channel so that language isn’t a barrier to learning?
The session was live tweeted using the #netnon hashtag, but I wanted to go beyond simple live tweeting or re-tweeting. This takes a bit of logistics and a little help from your friends. You have to give everyone a specific job.
Here’s what I set up:
(1) Twitter Advocate, Twitter Monitor, Twit Pict Person, and URL Tosser: Michael Hoffman, Dan Portnoy, Evonne Heyning, Fran Stephens, Kami Huyse, and Katie Shields played these roles – each person was assigned a specific job. The Twitter Advocate is someone who is watching the hashtag stream and can verbalize to the room what a question or comment posted on Twitter.
It was also important to have someone take photos and post them on Twitter so folks online could see what was happening in the room. In addition, I had compiled a page of URLs explaining the topic that could be easily shared in the Twitter stream.
(2) Twitter Channel SME: I invited Shawn Ahmed who was not able to participate in the session, to hang out in the Twitter channel and answer questions. To make a bridge between the room and the virtual, I used his video explaining the concept of networked nonprofits and free agents in the room.
(3) Live Beirut Tweet Up: @naeema and @sdarine from SMEXbeirut organized a live tweetup in Beirut during the same time as our panel which happen to be around midnight. At the last minute, we were able to bring them in via video skype, although the connection and AV set did not a lot us to interact through that channel. Kami Huyse, provided a back up, with live streaming using Qik.
(4) Translated Tweets: Andrea Burton from Meedan, a site that does Arabic/English translations of news stories, was the Middle East Twitter Advocate. She was in the room and set up a curated and translated tweets using curated.by. Andrea was selectingTweets from the #netnon hashtag, adding them to the curated stream and Meedan translators in Egypt were doing the translation into Arabic in real time.
(5) Global Participation: This was a last minute inspiration to test the out the idea of whether or not we could get other people from others parts of the world to participate. My colleagues at TechSoup Global sent an invitation out to folks to participate in the discussion along with The World Time Clock. I also pinged people in my network from different countries.
My takeaways:
1. My mental model for designing and facilitating face-to-face interaction has been Oprah or Phil Donahue, but if I really want to weave the Back Channel and the Face-to-Face together I have to use Cooper Anderson as my mental model. That means I need a T.V. producer who can help with the AV and two laptops. Also, if you’re using videos, wireless mics, and fixed mics – make sure the conference provider has enough audio inputs.
2. I did not promote the invitation to participate very widely. I used my channels, but lightly. If this wasn’t an experiment, I would have had a more intensive promotion plan.
3. I did not have control over the timing of the panel, but if I was doing this outside of a conference, I’d try to find a time when people were awake. Obviously, you can have everyone in every timezone participate at the same time, unless they like to be up late or early.
What have you learned about creating bridges between face-to-face and online for conference sessions or learning events? How they separate but parallel? How do you best ensure good weaving that leads to deeper learning?
The session title is based on a chapter in our book, The Networked Nonprofit. The audience will explore how nonprofits can unleash the power of social good by transitioning from stand-alone institutions to networks energized by abundant resources. In order to do this, they need to work with free agents, hyper-connected individuals who are passionate about social change, but don’t work within institutional walls. Our session will explore how free agents and nonprofits can work together, bringing together a group of highly visible free agents working on important social change causes, including those in the Middle East, and representatives from different nonprofits for a lively discussion with the audience in the room and through Twitter, around the world.
I'll moderating Oprah style dressed in Hijab
Having just returned from a trip to the Middle East for the E-Mediat project, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to bring many different voices to this discussion – both live and through Twitter. I’ve invited my colleagues from NGOs and Free Agents from around the globe to chime in (provided it isn’t in the middle of the night for them.) This is my most daring exercise in designing an interactive, global learning experience.
Here’s what will happen:
1.) We will have a simultaneous tweet-up taking place in Beirut, Lebanon and connect with them on Twitter using the hashtag #netnon.
2.) Twitter Advocate Andrea Burton, from Meedan, a nonprofit social technology organization whose mission is to increase the access to knowledge on the Arabic web and to scale the amount of social web interaction between English and Arabic language web communities will be in the room and facilitate live translated tweets between English and Arabic.
3.) Jonny Goldstein will be our graphic facilitator and capture the conversation – these images will be shared on Twitter with NGOs around the world.
4.) We will have several Twitter Advocates in the room live tweeting and sharing resources as we go. Twitter advocates include: Katie Shields, Dan Portnoy, Evonne Heyning, and Fran Stephenson. If you’re coming to SXSW and want to help out, leave a comment below.
5.) If you won’t be at SXSW, follow the #netnon hashtag. Here’s the world time clock.
So, come join the fun and learn.
PS My Friend, Frank Barry, asked me to share a link to his SXSW panel on Monday, March 14th at 9:30 am with representatives from social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, FourSquare and more.
Shawn Ahmed, Free Agent and founder of the Uncultured Project, has been invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he will meet with business leaders and heads of state. This year, Shawn’s video was selected from over 100 covering a wide range of topics and debates, to participate in the meetings. A big congrats to Shawn!
Shawn has gotten quite a bit of press in hometown newspapers in Toronto. Today, I got a called from a reporter from a newspaper who wanted to know how I first connected with Shawn. I first encountered Shawn back in 2008 during the annual Blog Action Day. That year, the focus was on global poverty. I wrote a post about his work, describing his work as a free agent. Here’s the post.
It is fantastic to see that nearly three years later, this free agent has been invited to talk about his work with world leaders at Davos. If you can’t make it Davos, you can hear Shawn as part of my NTC panel in March.
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