Archive for the ‘Free Agent’ Category

Aug

2010

17

Category:

Conferences, Free Agent

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Vote and Comment for ALL these Awesome Nonprofit Panels at SXSW!

Illustration by Jonny Goldstein of my SXSW panel proposal. Jonny will provide live graphic facilitation of the highly interactive and fun panel.

The SXSW Interactive Festival (scheduled March 11-15, 2010 in Austin, Texas) is a mega huge social media industry event.  The final program is done through a combination of an open submission and voting process.   The panel picker process has opened – so you can vote for the panels you think are worthy of being on the program until August 27th.

The nonprofit presence at SXSW has been growing steadily over the past couple of years.  In 2008, I was honored to be on one of the few nonprofit panels on the agenda.  It was organized by Ed Schipul.  At the end of that panel, we all hoped there would be a larger nonprofit presence on the agenda for this 2009.    And yes, indeed, in 2009, there were more nonprofit focused panels and happily the trend continued at SXSW 2010.

So, let’s get out the nonprofit vote for the nonprofit panels at SXSW 2011!

I hope you’ll also vote for my panel proposal,  Nonprofits and Free Agents in A Networked World and while you’re there vote for the other awesome nonprofit panel proposals (I’ve shared a list below).  But first, let me share the description and what I’m planning:

This interactive session is based on a key theme in the book, The Networked Nonprofit, co-authored by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.  We will explore how nonprofits can unleash the power of social good by transitioning from stand-alone institutions to networks energized by abundant resources in their ecosystem. 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. Free agents use social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter and can create social movements in the palms of their hands. They organize supporters, raise attention to important social and political issues, seek donations, and organize supporters to walk, run, shout, protest, and vote, things that were once done mostly by nonprofit organizations. The free agents do it when and how they please, making them distinct from and more powerful than traditional volunteers. But free agents are smashing headfirst into nonprofit fortresses—organizations with high walls and wide moats that work very hard to keep insiders in and outsiders out. Our session will explore how and why this needs to change. Kanter will bring together a group of highly visible free agents working on important social change causes and representatives from different nonprofits for a lively discussion with the audience

1. What are the change issues for traditional nonprofits that want to become “networked nonprofits?”
2. What are the techniques and strategies that nonprofits use to find free agents?
3. My nonprofit has found a free agent, now what?
4. What are the lessons learned from Free Agents about working with nonprofits?
5. In what instances is it just better to let Free Agents be?

I’m going to bring together some of the best free agents out there and folks from nonprofits responsible for social media to discuss best practices.    This will be an interactive session with real and remote audience participation.    Jonny Goldstein will do real time illustrations of the ideas swirling around the session which will be projected live and that will help us move towards a common understanding and enable us to share an artifact with others.  (Check out his illustration of the panel)

In addition to the graphic facilitation, there will be other interactive learning elements.   Trust me.  In 2008,   I designed the Nonprofit and Social Media ROI Poetry Slam and last year was a panel on crowdsourcing that modeled crowdsourcing in the design and delivery.

Here’s my picks for SXSW Nonprofit Panels:

A Conversation About Change Agents Through Social Media Social media is causing a revolution in how information is shared and communities are formed. Its true impact has yet to be measured, but Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and every other social media platform have already caused a revelation in how people want to communicate. They want to connect. They want to share in more than one medium. They are in control. The challenge for every business, organization, and nonprofit or for-profit company is that the world of social media is like the Wild Wild West. Everything is changing so fast it’s hard to keep up. What’s new? What works?

The Tools Artists Need Geeks To Create Join us to discuss the digital tools being used and abused by theatre makers, dancers, musicians, crafters, wordsmiths, cinematographers, photographers, painters, and other multimedia artists. There are over 200,000 professional artists in the US — and a bunch of them have problems the techies could help solve. What should we be building to help artists make and sell art, engage their audiences, and connect to other artists? What are we cobbling together today from existing technology, and what could we be doing tomorrow? What artistic problems need a dose of geek teamwork? What are the geeks doing that needs better artistic focus? What lies just beyond the current state of the art, for the arts?

Tiny Strategies: Social Media in 60 Minutes or Less In this quick-hit, practical-tips-focused panel, nonprofit social media experts will share their strategies for maximizing their social media impact with very little time to devote to it. We’ll go round-robin style to find out how you should spend your time, whether you have 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes a day to devote to social media.

Putting the Public Back in Public Media Think NPR and PBS are just broadcasters? Think again. Public media is no longer just a one-way street. In many towns, NPR and PBS stations are the only locally-owned media organizations, and their mission to serve the public demands that they develop new ways of engaging and strengthening those communities.   They’re convening Barcamp-like unconferences called PubCamps all over the country, allowing local techies and citizen journalists to forge collaborative projects with NPR and PBS stations, both online and offline.

Crowdsourcing the Corporate/ Nonprofit Partnership. Who Wins? Online contests that award dollars to nonprofit causes are here to stay. Corporations use these contests to engage potential customers. Nonprofits use them to rally supporters. All participants are grappling with how best to use social media to find and mobilize an audience. Come learn the ups and downs of these contests from brands that sponsor them.

Doh! Lessons from Nonprofit Screw Ups Nonprofits are often team-centric, mission-driven organizations—which can lead to exuberant group cheerleading in the face of mediocrity. In this session we’ll throw those rosy-eyed glasses onto the bonfire and talk (nicely) about notable social media campaigns that didn’t deliver. Each panelist will provide in-depth analysis of a notable social media screw-up they’ve been involved in, isolate key failure factors, analyze the broader lessons, and talk about how these specific organizations improved on their mistakes.

Turning Facebook Followers Into Change Agents 100,000 followers, and you still want more. What are they good for? Online numbers don’t always equate offline results. How do you build an online community that makes a serious impact for your cause? Nonprofit social communications wizards share examples and tips to get your fans mobilized for action.

SoTropia Life in 2040 Let’s peer into the near future. It’s the Year 2040, 35 years after the social networking revolution began. How has human behavior changed? Just how blurred are the boundaries between public and private persona? How much do we share? And how will this impact the way we build relationships and find information? This visionary panel will explore the premise that openness will be ubiquitous by 2040 – when the debate will no longer be private vs. public, but instead public vs. broadcast.

No Hype Online Fundraising A panel of nonprofit fundraisers will cut the hype on text-to-give, email solicitations, social media, e-Cards and other interactive fundraising strategies. We’ll let you know what worked and what didn’t. And, when it depends, we’ll let you know what it depends on.

Getting Advanced With Social Media for Social Good
Online supporters are working to save the world one Tweet at a time. But how can nonprofit and philanthropic causes take their efforts to the next level and stand out from the crowd to increase the success of social campaigns? Hear from technologists and nonprofits on how to define and implement the ideal strategy and get advanced with metrics to make social a key component of online fundraising and advocacy campaigns.

You Mobile Non-profit: a play in three acts
Mobile is changing our lives, but it’s also changing the world for the better. We’re dying to share tactics, tools and trip-ups from organizations who have ventured deep into mobile and lived to tell.

Just ‘Cause: Can Technology Make Brand Irrelevant?
Thanks to technology, the line is starting to blur between the power of a household name brand and the passion of scrappy mission-focused organizations. Yet when it feels like nothing short of a crisis will engage people with your cause, how do you compel them to act? The battle of Cause vs Brand is on.

Creating Successful Collaborations: Right now, with the rapid changes in technology, media and globalization, the ability to quickly create successful collaborations is key to taking things to the next level. Whether you’re a solo-entrepreneur, creating award winning films and documentaries, innovating new or improving old technology, creating co-working environments, or building cross-industry relationships, knowing how (and when) to build successful collaborations allows work to happen in ways brings the most creativity, diversity, and strength to your group and project.

Method Tweeting for nonprofits: Much Ado About Something
When organizations use Twitter to promote themselves, it’s largely about playing a role. The person tweeting is tasked to be on message as the voice of the organization while creating a unique and engaging personality to draw an audience in. If Shakespeare on Twitter, how would he tweet?  We’ll pick the brains of people who live this challenge daily in the nonprofit sector.

Some other nonprofit SXSW lists:

Mark Horvath (@hardlynormal) list
BeaconFire list

So, go and vote for my panel and these others.  If your panel isn’t on the list, add a link and title in the comments.

Aug

2010

11

Category:

Experimentation, Free Agent, Fundraising

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7 Comments

A Twitter follower is worth $0.24

Flickr Photo by Sugarpond

Note from Beth: Last month I had the pleasure of presenting on a panel at Association of California Orchestras with Marc van Bree, an arts and social media blogger I met in 2007.   After Marc finished reading the Networked Nonprofit, he was curious about crowdfunding and free agents, chapters in  our book.  This was also about the same time as the flood in Nashville.   This terrible flood didn’t spare the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO), an event that he first learned about through his social networks. The orchestra’s damages were approximately $42 million and after insurance and support from FEMA, the remaining financial gap could be as much as $10 million.  He wanted to raise some money to  help the local orchestra and test some ideas.   Here is what he learned.

Guest Post by Marc van Bree

The title of this blog post is of course a wildly inaccurate claim. How did I get to the number? In my small-scale “free agent” crowdfunding experiment for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, I ended up with $235 from 1,000 followers by the deadline. That translates to $0.24 per follower.

The goal was $1,000, or one dollar per follower. It was a fairly arbitrary goal and I had no expectations. However, I’m still slightly disappointed I didn’t make the goal. But consider the following:

Networking

  • All communications were strictly limited to my blog, Twitter and Facebook. Since this was an experiment to test social networking, I did not send an appeal to friends and family in the way people do when they raise funds for a run or walk, or want you to vote for a particular contest.

    Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, the authors of The Networked Nonprofit that inspired this experiment, wrote an Assessment and Reflection Report on America’s Giving Challenge 2009. They found that: “Personal solicitations to pre-existing networks of donors and friends through multiple channels were rated as the most effective methods for fundraising. Thirty-five percent of contest participants rated messaging to friends through Facebook as most effective; 32 percent rated personal email to friends, family and colleagues as effective or most effective; and 25 percent rated email to an existing organizational donor base as effective or most effective.” I did not use any of these methods.

  • In light of that, I personally met only 4 of the 12 donors (excluding myself). Two donors were former colleagues who also have Twitter accounts. However, most of the donors were definitely social media contacts with whom I have had more in-depth conversations. One donor was a friend of a friend.

Sharing

  • Kicking off the effort was paired with an e-mail to a list of about 30 classical music bloggers. In addition, I created Web banners for those bloggers to use. Four bloggers wrote a post; one blogger used the banner. (Other bloggers, not on the initial list, also wrote a post. All are captured here).

    In the Assessment and Reflection Report, the authors bring other good lessons and note that “Some like Atlas Corps recruited 150 ‘Campaign Captains’ before the contest started. Other organizations broke their efforts down into bite-size pieces for their volunteers by creating templates to use to send messages to their friends, post and comment on blogs, and create their own videos.” Perhaps I should have recruited similar “captains” and created more multimedia in a shareable format.

  • I counted most on Twitter followers to spread the word. There were 44 followers that used the #floodofsupport hash tag or linked to the Crowdrise page or blog post.
  • Spreading the word was not a case of “build it and they will come.” The hash tag spread fairly well in the first couple of days, after which it dropped significantly. Even after I created an incentive to use the hash tag (a ¢5 donation for each mention), it did not pick back up.

Technology

  • The donation process needs to be as simple as possible. I would have preferred to go straight to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s Web site, but after checking in, I decided it would cost them too much in administrative fees and human resources. Remember, I did know how the donations would start coming in; I anticipated more donations, but smaller amounts.
  • Crowdrise was a good tool, but certainly not perfect: it didn’t allow for $1 donations, as I had wished. The payment process went through Amazon, which created an extra step. In addition, seeing that donations came from different countries, there were questions surrounding paying with credit cards and with foreign currency.

The positives

  • Sure, I did not reach my goal. But I would be willing to bet that the particular donors would not have given a gift if it wasn’t for this effort. Nothing is lost and my “free agent” effort didn’t cannibalize the Nashville Symphony’s efforts.
  • The Nashville Symphony Orchestra fulfills a, albeit large, regional function. But don’t let this geographic boundary limit your campaign. I started this campaign in Chicago, having never been to Nashville, and received donations from different countries and states (England, Germany, and several states within the U.S.).
  • This also tells us something about telling stories and increasing awareness of your issue or organization in general.

The lessons for arts organizations

  • Don’t think of social media as a quick fix to raise funds. This was already obvious before the experiment, perhaps, but even though I felt I had a great cause to support, in the end it was the personal connections and more in-depth relationships that resulted in donations.
  • Beyond using and counting on your social network for donations and spreading the word, find ways to activate your network more concretely: create those “campaign captains.” Going about the effort alone is much tougher.
  • Momentum is tremendously important. Even after a monetary incentive to simply retweet a hash tag, I could not retrieve the momentum. Kanter and Fine identified immersion in the effort and the ability to react on the fly as key aspects in fund raising success.
  • Technology and ease of process is very important. That’s why the Red Cross was so successful with their text message donation campaign during the Haiti crisis. It was easy to explain and simple to execute. Make sure your organization’s Web site and your staff can handle a wave of many small donations, and make it a one-click process.
  • Your key performance indicator is of course the money you raised. But it doesn’t stop there. You will likely have gained more relationships, deeper relationships, behavioral information, and increased the organization’s overall awareness and created opportunities to tell your story. Measure those elements as well.

In the end, this entire experiment was all about just that: experimenting. I wasn’t able to fully engage and immerse myself in the project; life on the outside took over. But remember that the experiment was about creating a low-effort, easy to set up campaign, and seeing where 1,000 Twitter followers would lead. Could I have raised more money? Definitely. But that wasn’t the point.

I am still proud of raising $235 for the Nashville Symphony’s flood recovery effort. It’s a $235 they wouldn’t have had without this little experiment.

Dutch native Marc van Bree is a public relations practitioner with more than 5 years of experience communicating—on and offline—in the nonprofit and cultural environment.

Jun

2010

28

Category:

Conferences, Free Agent, Listening

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9 Comments

Nonprofit 2.0 Reflections: Sharing Practices Around Listening and Free Agents

I attend a lot of conferences, but mostly as a keynote speaker, workshop leader, or panelist. I don’t often get a chance to listen and learn.  That was the gift of attending Nonprofit 2.0 Conference, especially the “unconference sessions“  in Washington, DC on Friday.  A big thank you conference organizers!

Keynote Presentation

We kicked off the conference with an interview style keynote about the Networked Nonprofit, moderated by fabulous Shireen Mitchell (aka digitalsista).    The best part is when the audience joins the conversation.  Shireen did a fabulous job of bringing in their voices.

Rosetta Thurman

Rosetta Thurman

Many in the audience were colleagues that I have met through my blog over years and have helped me with Cambodian fundraising, like Roger Carr.  Rosetta Thurman, who writes about nonprofits and leadership issues from a Gen Y blogger  perspective, shared some thoughts about the generations, nonprofits, and  social media.   Her blog is a must-read and I hope someday that she writes a book.

Wendy Harman from the Red Cross

Wendy Harman from the Red Cross was the next keynote.   Wendy has let me shadow her work for the past five years and share her wisdom in many blog posts.   She shared some insights about the Red Cross’s social media work leading up to Haiti.

She made great points about what they had in place the day before the earthquake in Haiti struck:

  • Robust listening program where staff skims and responds.  Over 1,000 mentions a day.  This gives the capacity to pay attention to what people are saying and be nimble in responding.
  • They do not view social media as fundraising strategy.  The objective is to empower to  stakeholders to make their mission to be more efficient.
  • They have a social media policy and handbook that provides the rule book for volunteers, staff, and affiliates to participate on social media channels effectively.
  • Wendy has been working an internal social media capacity builder.  She trains, coaches, and evangelizes internally on how to use social media.   She has also been training staff in the disaster response department who in turn used tools like Twitter on the ground from Haiti.
  • They had social content.  It’s a mix of serious and fun content.    When not in a disaster, you might see LOLcats doing CPR.
  • A lot of practice on how to move quickly when a disaster strikes.  For example, they immediately start updating their Facebook page letting people know what information is available and they are there.

Wendy’s keynote drove two points home for me:

Don’t give up in the middle:   Many nonprofits embrace social media with over-inflated expectations.   They get  midway through an experiment, view it as a failure and give up.  Everything looks like a failure in the middle as Rosabeth Moss Kanter likes to say.   Don’t give up!

Networks Ebb and Flow Like the Ocean:   Networks have different stages of development and functioning.  And they ebb and flow according to need.  If you’ve built your network, like the Red Cross, they will be there for you.

I participated in two unconference sessions.  Here are my notes.

I’ve Found My Free Agents, Now What?

Here’s a couple of takeaways, but expect some more practical, how-to posts in the next few weeks.

  • Look for Free Agents who already know about your work. Look to your in-house lists for potential free agents.  They may already know about you and just need to be empowered.  Care2 has a social media tracker tool that can analyze your list to see who is on social networks and how many friends.
  • Scan Social Networks for Free Agents. I shared some of my special sauce about how I identify free agents as well as from my perspective of being one.  There are Free Agents with huge networks like Shawn Admed, but don’t over look those that may have smaller networks – they’re just as valuable.
  • Getting to Know and Cultivating Free Agents: Here’s my best advice on this.   It comes down to do a little bit everyday and treating people like people.

Listening in Practice

Wendy Harman was the inspiration for workshop curriculum on social media listening skills.   So we offered to co-lead a session on listening in practice.   Wendy is a real team player and made the session a lot of fun!     We explored people’s listening routines, perceptions about the value of listening, and specific tools and techniques.

Listening to the participants in our session talk about listening, I realized there are three different models:

Actionable Listening:  This is the first step that many nonprofits take for listening.  When social media isn’t successful, it is because they skipped this.  This is the type of listening akin to changing a flat tire on a moving car.  It’s very practical and used to identify influencers, new ideas, and monitor brand.    You can set up a comprehensive listening post or do “quick and dirty” simply set up one alert on your organization’s name.   No matter the approach, it is useful to have a structured approach and track trends over time.

Forensic Listening: Chris Abraham shared this method and is primarily for those who haven’t yet started.  This approach, uses tools like SM2 to do a content scan during a particular past time period.   Think of it as another channel of research for campaign.

Showing Results: This method is for those have been applying listening techniques and want to track results.  One metric that is used is “Share of Conversation” or how much people are talking about your brand.    One method is to compare before/after a campaign to determine how much conversation social media strategy has been generated.

Thank you Geoff, Allyson, and Shireen for organizing an inspiring conference!

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