This is a quick roundup of some of the wonderful reviews, blog posts, photos, and videos of The Networked Nonprofit.
If you’re in the Bay Area and didn’t make it to our launch party at TechSoup, there’s a book party in the East Bay on Friday, July 23rd. The staff of Donordigital Bay Area are throwing a #netnon book party. Join us on Friday, July 23, 2010, from 6 to 8 pm at Pro Arts Gallery (http://www.proartsgallery.org/) at 150 Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, a stone’s throw from the Oakland City Center/12th Street BART station. More information here.
The Networked Nonprofit is Available on Kindle!
Photo by Curious Lee
I don’t yet have a kindle, so I was thrilled to see this tweet from CuriousLee with a photo he shared on our Networked Nonprofit flickr group.
I’ve been enjoying the photos of friends and colleagues with the book popping up on my Facebook Page. Judith Sol-Dyess and Steve Heye shared a couple of “peek a boo” photos. So, I sent them off a couple of the cool NTEN/Netnon t-shirts! Hmm .. might see some photos popping up in the flickr group of people wearing #netnon t-shirts.
A Few Reviews
Rosetta Thurman created this video review. Rosetta is a fellow book nerd. (Yes, I bring nonprofit books to the beach too….). But what I love about Rosetta is her young nonprofit leader nerdiness. For example, check out her “50 Young Nonprofit Leaders To Follow on Twitter” list. She made it easy to follow these leaders – so let’s spread it far and wide.
I loved this post from Devon Smith analyzing the metrics and reaping insights from her post on The Networked nonprofit. I learned about some new techniques for measuring blog stats and Twitter. So, go read her post now.
And last but not least, Idealware has given us a 6 Thumbs Up Review from Johanna Bates, Heather Gardner-Madras, and Steve Backman. Wow, honored!
Swedish-Lesson - (Photo: International Federation of Red Cross/Hakan Flank/VolunteerMatch)
Note from Beth: Last month, we did a Networked Nonprofit session at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service. Robert J. Rosenthal, Director of Communications for VolunteerMatch was a participant. He offered to write a guest post.
Recently I got my first full-on blast of the Networked Nonprofit at a session the authors presented at the 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service. I left inspired, yet I also felt there is still a lot of work we need to do to help our peers in volunteer coordination put these ideas into practice.
There’s no doubt that social networks are allowing organizations to connect with and recruit non-traditional volunteers in new ways. At the same time, volunteer service organizations need to rethink how they work and what technology they use. The question is what can volunteer coordinators – those who are tasked with the work-a-day chores of volunteer engagement – do to help bring about this transformation?
The Free-Agent/Fortress Dilemma in Volunteer Coordination
At NCVS, the audience was a good mix of traditional and non-traditional volunteer coordinators. Some were social change leaders who leverage volunteers; others were administrators who recruit volunteers as their sole function – often at a large nonprofits or national service organizations.
Many of this latter group of are veterans of what Extraordinaries’ Jacob Colker calls the “Command & Control Model” – programs that seek to control the relationship of the volunteer with the organization and/or cause.
Until recently Command & Control made sense. While a few highly-skilled volunteers stalked the boardroom, the rest was left to unskilled hands managed by coordinators fulfilling department orders. This is similar to the “Fortress” as described in the Networked Nonprofit book.
But as volunteers have begun to ask for more responsibility, and as running a social change organization has made it harder for organizations to staff all functions, Command & Control has started to break down.
The central question of the Networked Nonprofit is how organizations can embrace the change. Here are some examples:
Needs Assessment
Needs Assessment is about determining how volunteers can help and whether it’s feasible to support them. In a networked nonprofit, VCs might mine their personal and professional networks for ideation, best practices, and case studies to learn how organizations are engaging volunteers effectively.
Opportunity Design
Opportunity Design is the process of understanding the required skills and experience for a given volunteer role. Innovative VCs in a networked nonprofit might go beyond tradition to explore micro-volunteering, virtual volunteering, service-learning, national service, pro bono, or bringing corporate volunteer programs into the organization.
Outreach/Marketing
VCs need to work with communications folks to get their opportunities distributed, but a VC might also have her own Twitter feed or blog category to share new opportunities The VC could also use her own professional networks to target special skill sets (such as at LinkedIn). Sharing of opportunities among alumni and donors could be encouraged.
Screening
Filtering candidates to assess fit is a crucial step. As applications come in, the VC helps to narrow the pool, coordinate interviews, and run background checks. In a networked nonprofit, VCs might also use Twitter to receive questions, LinkedIn to assess a candidate’s background, VolunteerMatch.org or GreatNonprofits.org to provide reviews from real volunteers, and Flickr and Youtube to inspire and inform volunteer prospects.
Orientation
VCs are often asked to play the lead role in welcoming, training, and doing in-take for new volunteers. In a networked nonprofit, VCs could partner new volunteers with experienced volunteers to save time in orientation. Training could also be done virtually with videos or through shared docs on a wiki.
Supervised or supported service
Recruitment is just the start. Guiding volunteers to success is equally critical. Daily coordination with volunteers could be done through social media to bolster membership in the online communities and encourage interactions. Collaboration could take place on virtual or crowd-sourced projects. VCs could help volunteers share milestones and accomplishments with badges, banners, or widgets that can be shared with the volunteer’s personal network. And volunteers could have the opportunity to share the organization’s story through their personal networks.
Fear of Failure vs. Fear of the Unknown
During the session, a young man introduced himself to mne. At hi s organization, he told me, the system blocked anything with the word “Facebook,” and online social networking was forbidden because the boss thought irrelevant for volunteer coordination.
As they explore in their new book, fear of failure holds many organizations back from a networked nonprofit approach. For those orgs, Beth and Allison advise individuals at nonprofits to go small, try simple stuff, not focus on ROI, be willing to fail, and leverage small successes.
Yet I think it’s another fear – fear of the unknown – that’s one of the biggest limits. When things are unknown, they can’t be envisioned at all. The earth remains flat, and it’s hard to eliminate the barriers that stand in the way of exploration.
As an NP Tech communicator, my takeaway from the session is just how important it is to share stories how organizations are using a Networked Nonprofit approach to transform volunteer coordination. Do you have one? Share it in the comments.
About the Author
Robert Rosenthal is communications director for VolunteerMatch, the Web’s most popular volunteer network, and a regular presenter on topics relating to technology, the nonprofit sector, and media. Nonprofits can find free training resources for volunteer coordination at http://www.volunteermatch.org/nonprofits/learningcenter.
As Visiting Scholar in Nonprofits and Social Media at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, I am coaching grantee organizations and leading workshops and peer trainings on how to become a Networked Nonprofit. It is a fantastic laboratory to take some of the ideas in the book and put in them into a practice.
One of the themes in the book, The Networked Nonprofit, is the importance of doing experiments. They do not frame them as success or failure but as learning. The problem is that many nonprofits approach social media with over blown expectations, don’t realize them, and then throw their hands up and quit. So, I designed and have been testing a training program that embraces thoughtful do-it-yourself social media experiments and a peer learning process for sharing the learning.
The inspiration was part The Lab Theater, a place where you try out experimental works before you bring them to the main stage. There is also a social learning component. Think about those 4th grade science experiments where huddled over your experiment you all learn together. The instruction not only included the content – all the best practices and how-tos, but also took an approach that encouraged and developed reflection.
Last week, we had the final session of the “Social Media Lab,” a social media peer group training with a small group of grantees from the Children, Families, Communities Program, that was launched a few months ago. I was incredibly lucky to have a fantastic group of participants, all passionate about their work, very knowledgeable, and excited about integrating social media into their programs or communications plans. I also was honored to work side-by-side with esteemed colleagues Shiree Teng and Cheryl Contee.
Representatives from Preschool California Share Their Experiment Insights
Participant-Generated Instructional Content
The best part of this design is that participants are the content – the community is the curriculum! The program includes two face-to-face workshops. The first workshop delivers content about becoming a Networked Nonprofit as well as tips and tactics on social media implementation and an “experiment in a box.” We also included a lot of hands-on lab time.
Participants go off and work on their experiments. We used a wiki and conference calls to check in as a group. There was also one-on-one coaching. I approached my instructional role – less as expert and more as network weaver and technology steward – a helpful guide on the side. The final session puts the participants on the stage to share their learnings – either through ignite style presentations or speed geeking.
Treating participants as adult learners – allowing them to take responsibility for their learning and being the experts – produces quite a rich experience. I was amazed to see how far participants had come from a few months ago.
Sharing Insights Around Practice
Each Participant Created A Learning Poster - Notes of Appreciation from Other Participants. Some will use to share with staff or board at their organizations.
You can dig deeper into the details over at the wiki as each participant shared a one-page “lab report.” The experiments were very focused initial forays into social media. They were all amazing. But the biggest value as participants noted is that having to prepare a report or presentation about what they did helped consolidate their learning and insights.
Here’s quick sampling:
LA Universal Preschool. This was a Facebook experiment incorporated as part of the outreach for the 2nd Annual LAUP Dodger Day, an event that brings staff, providers and families throughout Los Angeles County together for a day to celebrate the “graduation” of preschoolers. LAUP has a group of parent ambassadors who serve as their key advocates in Sacramento or on land. They established a fan page for this group so they can be their advocates on Facebook as well. LAUP also discovered that they by providing engaging content on Facebook other super fans will self-identify. PreSchool California
PreSchool California: Did an experiment using Twitter as a way to connect with journalists. With the media landscape shifting from print to online, Preschool California has adjusted its strategy to ensure it is reaching its target audiences through both traditional forms of media and the rapidly growing social media. PreSchool California was able to connect initially with journalists covering their issue. They discovered that Tweets are more informal, less time consuming than email so journalists may be more likely to read. They discovered a slight disconnect between those journalists that wrote print stories on early learning issues, and those education journalists that were on Twitter. Despite only having a few interactions with reporters, Preschool California retweeted and commented on a number of articles, garnering responses from other advocates, which helped increase their issue exposure to a larger audience. They discovered that Twitter has value as a listening channel to support their overall communications strategy.
Fowler Hoffman did a listening experiment to identify who was participating in conversations on social media platforms about two issue areas – summer learning and after-school – listen to what they are saying about the issues, and engage them in conversations on these platforms.
“Tweeting to the Choir” Alone May Not be Sufficient:They discovered a small group of advocates and organizations with a similar focus and looked for ways to engage with those who are not already involved. They discovered there are many people and organizations who are sharing information and engaging in dialog about their same issues and topics but just not in the same way. At first this was a little uncomfortable to outside the existing circle of known allies by @responding to people they didn’t know. But they did an experiment by sharing useful links to summer learning study with moms who were talking about summer learning for their kids. These tweets ended up getting retweeted by these moms and they were able to attract more fans.
Children Now and Partnership for Children and Youth explored how to begin to integrate social media content channels into their newly designed web sites. Both ended their experiments with insights about how to set up systems and structures for content creation across channels, linking, and engaging.
Advancement Project set up a Facebook presence for one of its programs, Healthy Cities as a proof of concept for understanding the work flow of integrating content and engaging with fans. They will use the lessons learned to share with the education program to set up its Facebook presence as the next experiment. The intent is to use the lessons learned to get other staff buy in other departments.
United Ways of California focused on using Facebook to communicate and facilitate networking between staff members of United Ways in California. Several of the organizations participating in the lab observed that it was hard for them to envision using social media because “they don’t touch the public.” Not only do many of their UW members have an organizational presence on Facebook, many staffers us it personally. Setting up a Fan Page is an efficient way to share professional information. This experiment focused on using metrics to evaluate how engaging content was and recruitment tactics.
The Yolo County Children’s Alliance’s (YCCA)/Children’s Health Initiative’s (CHI) experiment was to start a blog for Certified Application Assistors (CAAs). Like the United Ways of California, YCCA’s does not touch the grassroots and the big ah ha for them was they could use social media to support their interactions with different constituents and for the purposes of sharing professional learning.
HCAP is a small agency and its executive director participated. As she notes in her case study, “The world of social media was quite new to our organization. Due to this learning curve, we felt it best to take one step at a time so that we have a better understanding of how it is used both in the personal social world, as well as business, and non-profit world.” They did a listening experiment designed to better advance their understanding of social media and its role in their communications strategy. This is a critical first step towards a social culture for many nonprofits that is often skipped and it is terrific to have a case study.
An Unanticipated Outcome
One of the unanticipated outcomes was the rich discussion we had after everyone shared their case studies. The group realized that there were a lot of opportunities and ways that they could support one another’s work through social media. And, that it didn’t required a huge amount of extra work.
Celebrating Learning
At the end of the session, each participant received a gift – The Networked Nonprofit book and a Networked Nonprofit T-shirt created by the good folks at NTEN!
@Clamo88 (Claire Murray) is a technologist who works for human service agencies
One of the most gratifying things about the publication of the book, The Networked Nonprofit, is that it has re-connected me to colleagues and past clients as well as making connections to new people.
I met Claire Murray almost five years ago this month when I was working as a consultant for the Community Technology Center Networks to do training for human service agencies that provided homeless services. Claire was working with the Cyber Cafe @ Malden Square. I trained her staff on how to blog.
The clients at the Cyber Cafe @ Malden Square were people who were “transitional homeless” – looking for work, getting job skills, finding a place to live, etc. The concept for the blog was to for staff to use to capture ongoing resources that trainers and others might use to assist clients in their goals. It was a good example of using a blog for nonprofits that we shared at Berkman Center Bloggers Meetup.
Claire has a unique perspective because she works inside of fortresses and networked nonprofits: “I have one foot in the networked nonprofit world at the Cyber Cafe. I have another foot in the not-so-networked world with my major organization. They do network with other organizations, but they are not so ready for the digital foray. (Young padouan must practice patience daily while straddling this dichotomy.)” Here’s Claire’s review.
I hope Claire will share her thoughts in more depth on the JigSaw Puzzled Approach over at the Networked Nonprofit Wiki.
We assert the unalienable rights of The Intern. We understand that The Intern might be a high school student, an MBA, a retiree, or anyone in between. The Intern will be taken seriously, given real work to do, be respected for their opinion, and will be patiently taught the things they don’t yet know.
(And, if you are looking for ten ideas on real work for interns, Allison Jones, have found this useful post)
For the past few years whenever I doing a training or speak about nonprofits and social media and more recently when we’ve presented about the book, The Networked Nonprofit, someone always raises this concern: “Social media is a time suck.”
Networked Nonprofits are not only experts in using social media, but they know how to streamline their work flow often based on an understanding of applying network theory to their practice. One of the best principles I learned was from Valdis Krebs who suggests following fewer people to get to the many in his classic post “So Many People, So Little Time.”
It isn’t about following thousands and thousands of friends on Twitter. We don’t have the time or brain cells for that. It’s about finding people who are connected to different social circles and following them. Of course you have to be interested in what information or conversations they are sharing on Twitter. Identifying these people or what Krebs calls “nodes” is core of social network analysis.
And you need to build some redundancy in your network so you have a few multiple paths to people and ideas of interest to you.
He explains why this approach is efficient:
For the time invested, I want maximum return. I use the redundancy of connections, between the many social circles I am interested in, to my advantage. I follow a select group of people that give me the same access as following someone in every group. Follow the few to reach the many!
Strategically I am building a small, yet efficient, group that reaches out into the many diverse information pools I am interested in. I know I am finding good people to follow on Twitter by the number of great exchanges that emerge on many topics. Think before you follow, use your time and ties wisely!
What if you have been following people without thinking and now have an overloaded Twitter Stream? Here are some tips that help you tame the Twitter lion.
What is most important to find and cultivate the connectors and weavers in communities or topics of interest. There are some free tools that can help you visualize your Twitter network or do quasi social network analysis on Twitter. Here’s a few that I’ve used.
Use Friend or Follow to download a spreadsheet of followers. Sort the information to find people to get to know. This works best if you have small network.
Mr. Tweet finds people in your network you should follow (use this after you have built up your following list).
Mailana can help you identify people who have strong affinity. I wrote about an experiment I did last year using this tool. One problem is that it doesn’t analyze your network in real time. You submit the userid and then have to come back a few days later unless it is already in the database.
Twitalyzer is a terrific analytics tool that gives you some good benchmarking metrics for Twitter. Run the impact report to help you identify influencers.
Twiangulate lets you analyze cross over between your Twitter network and another Twitter user. This can be useful to find potential collaborators.
Klout lets you track the “influence” of specific Twitter users, including the growth of their network, who they influence, and who they are influenced by.
Mention Map helps you visualize who is interacting with you around which hashtags. It shows nodes on your network. There is not information about what exactly how the drawings are created though.
Once you’ve started to identify connectors and people to follow, you’ll need to manage it. Twitter lists can help you create sub-groups of all your followers.
Create Twitter Lists of those accounts, organized by topic or community
Keep the lists small and manageable
Add these lists to your Twitter client and set up a schedule to monitor. This makes the Twitter content feel more grounded, as opposed to just flying by.
Create Twitter searches for keywords to find additional sources. Follow them as needed
Tend to your lists regularly and unfollow people who don’t provide value to you, perhaps people who tweet about things you are not interested in.
If you were stranded on a deserted island, and could only follow 150 people, who would you follow?
Apply a little social networking theory and think before you follow. Ask yourself, if you were stuck on desert island and could only follow 150 people, who would you choose? How many people do you follow and why? How do you manage it?
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