Archive for the ‘Networks’ Category

Jan

2012

25

Category:

Fundraising, Networks

Tags:

24 Comments

What Do Facebook’s New Timeline Apps Mean for Nonprofits?

Source: developers.facebook.com via Beth on Pinterest

 

Remember last September when Facebook announced all those changes to individual profiles, including the timeline?    One of the changes  was that your friends and fans can do more than “Like” or “Comment”  on Facebook. Three new actions were announced at the time, including:  Read, Watch, Listen to  help people better understand what their friends are doing online.     Facebook called it the “Open Graph” and the pr people called “A revolution to the whole meaning of listening to music together or family T.V.”   You can read more about how it works from the Facebook developer notes.

You can install an app on your Facebook profile that shares an action and it goes out on your newsfeed and is shared with your friends.   In the example above, the cooking app lets a Facebook user share what they “cooked” with their friends.

Recently, some apps have been using the OpenGraph in innovate ways.   The one that caught my eye was the approach used by Ticketmaster.  They are mashing up apps,  figuring out what music you listen to on Spotify and offering up tickets that might be of interest. This is both interesting but a little scary to me.    I asked folks on my Facebook brand page what they thought.  My colleague, Devon Smith, pointed to a cool application called “Art Finder” that helps people discover their friends’ interests in fine arts.

The Open Graph and apps are becoming more and more critical for marketers given the Facebook changes.   Here’s a description from Social Media Examiner:

Last year, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, allowing brands to connect to a user’s Facebook social graph. This year, it rolled out significant changes, allowing app developers to create custom actions using any verb and object related to the activity taking place on the app.

These so-called “lightweight” activities can be defined by the app creator and pushed throughout the Facebook experience.

Here are the highlights, and how the actions affect Timeline:

  • The Open Graph integrates with the News Feed, Ticker and Timeline, making the app a key part of users’ and their friends’ Facebook experiences.
  • As users engage, the custom action appears on Facebook News Feed, and remains on the user’s Timeline; e.g., Jane cooked a recipe from Best Recipes app.

Changes to the structure of permissions allow a user to give permission one timefor an app to post about that user’s activity on the app thereafter.

This is how you’re seeing so many more postings about what your friends are listening to, for example, if they’re using a social sharing music app like Spotify. It even gets its own designated spot in the Timeline and displays a running list of what the user is listening to.

Debra Askanase has a post about Facebook Timeline Apps and profiles three fundraising vendors that have developed timeline apps.   Debra says the benefits to nonprofits are:

Timeline apps afford an opportunity for nonprofits to promote causes, activities and mission. I can envision apps that promote online campaigns, encourage people to interact with the organization in a certain way, encourage specific actions, track activity, and/or to raise brand awareness. A few ideas:

  • Support the nonprofit: “Jerry supports the Canadian Red Cross”
  • Activism: “Debra signed a petition to stop fracking” or “Eliana contacted a brand to ask about its slavery footprint via Slavery Footprint”
  • Play a game: “Adam has donated 2,173 grains of rice to the UN to date via Free Rice”
  • Donate: “Kylie has started a virtual food drive with Feeding America”
  • Support a campaign: “David is growing a mustache for Movember”

In my opinion, I think the greatest Timeline app benefit is in the information the nonprofit will gain about app users, and how committed a supporter is to the cause. Installing an app is a deeper commitment than passively Liking a Page, or joining conversation on a Facebook Page. App users should be the organization’s most committed online supporters.

When an app is installed, the developer knows a supporters’ email address, other Likes, and how the user is engaging with the application. Ultimately, the app both gathers supporter information that isn’t available from people who Like a Page, and spreads awareness about the organization/campaign/cause through the ticker.

I caught up with Matt Mahan from Causes for a quick interview about Causes use of the new timeline apps based on the Facebook Open Graph:

1.     Can you explain “Open Graph” for non-geeks and why it isimportant?  How would someone at a nonprofit explain to their seniormanagement or board?

Open Graph is a way of connecting any website to Facebook so that people using that website can opt-in to automatically share what they are doing in real time—listening to music, reading articles, shopping, supporting nonprofits, etc.—with their Facebook friends. If this tool becomes standard across the Internet, which I think it will, it will dramatically increase peer-to-peer sharing of social information, making it easier for people to discover what their friends are doing. Nonprofits, especially smaller ones, stand to benefit from these changes because they will reap the equivalent of free advertising as people engage with them online. Because most nonprofits cannot afford significant marketing budgets, their online “mindshare” is low relative to the degree to which people care about them (vis-à-vis companies and other organizations with greater marketing heft). All in all, Open Graph should help nonprofits become a larger part of the mass scale conversation taking place on Facebook every day.

2.    How has Causes integrated the Open Graph on Facebook?

Causes.com has hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph with a number of action types that will allow people to publish their social good accomplishments to Timeline and their friends’ news feed. These action types include: join, pledge, answer, sign, give and a range of other actions people can take to help their favorite nonprofits. As people take these actions they will be translated into Timeline stories that expose their friends to great organizations and timely action campaigns.

3.    What is the value or benefit to nonprofit users of Causes?

Open Graph is particularly exciting for those of us in the social good space because awareness-raising and advocacy are often core to the work we do. You can listen to a song and enjoy it all by yourself, but social change always requires collective action. Nonprofits and their supporters now have a much more powerful tool for spreading a message, via what is essentially digital-word-of-mouth, quickly and cheaply.

4.    What does this look like to potential users?

For potential users the change is minimal. We’ll ask our users to opt in to share the action they are taking on Causes.com with their Facebook friends. We believe that altruism is social and social change requires collective action, but we also respect that not everyone wants to share their cause with others.

5.    What do nonprofits need to do in terms of strategy and tactics to make it work for them?

The short answer is, invest in your grassroots organizing capacity. Over the next couple of weeks Causes.com is releasing a number of new “action campaigns”, including pledges, polls, quizzes, petitions and so forth, that will make it easy and free for even the smallest nonprofits and independent activists to publish great action campaigns, track action-taking, and translate loose online support into coordinated action. I think this is a particularly exciting opportunity for organizations that see awareness-raising and advocacy as core objectives in the coming year. We’re one of the only websites in the world to have fully integrated with Open Graph, so we recommend using Causes.com as a campaign hub for engaging various online audiences (Facebook, Twitter, website, email list, Causes) in deeper action-taking.

6.    How should they think about measurement of successful strategy?

Overall, the measure of success is how many people you can move to take action and how valuable that action ultimately ends up being for your organization or the population you serve. On Causes.com, our top-level metric of success is the amount of action we help our nonprofit partners generate from their supporters. We trust that those nonprofits are in the best position to determine how to best direct action-taking for real-world impact, whether it’s fundraising, awareness-raising, or advocacy action they are generating. Our goal is to build the world’s best platform for collection action-taking, so we measure (and will soon be able to share with our partners right on their causes) conversion rates from top-down promotion of campaigns via email and Facebook, on-site action-taking, and post-action peer-to-peer sharing, or what is often called “virality”. In a few months, nonprofits will be able to do this kind of measurement right on Causes.com at no cost, and those with larger tech teams will be able to do similar tracking on their own websites. Eventually we plan to power this kind of measurement and data analysis no matter where you run your campaigns.

7.    What are the best how-tos, resources for nonprofits to get started on this?

Definitive best practices are still emerging. We put together a quick overview on the Causes blog for our users, focused on what Open Graph means for their Facebook experience: . Our support team here at Causes is happy to answer questions related to our integration with Open Graph

Is your nonprofit or have you seen a nonprofit using the Facebook’s Open Graph in a creative and effective way?     What are your questions about leveraging Facebook’s Open Graph?

Jan

2012

09

Category:

Leadership, Measurement, Movement Building, Networks

Tags:

7 Comments

Metrics for Building, Scaling, and Funding Social Movements

Investing in movements or networks for social change is a strategy that some funders are using.  But, how do you measure the results?

Marino Morino, who wrote “Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity” pointed me to this recent report, “Transactions, Transformations, Translations:  Metrics That Matter for Building, Scaling and Funding Social Movements” by Manual Paster, Jennifer Ito, and Rachel Rosner with the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity and funded by the Ford Foundation.   The report addresses metrics for success for investing in broad field social movements or networked approaches to social change.  The report is written for funders and those on the ground doing the work in the context of networks, although it doesn’t go deep into practice.

The report captures a conundrum in measuring social change movements or networked approaches.    Outcomes for “wicked problems” can be easily counted – policies passed, housing the homeless, educating children.  But there are less tangible results such as “we changed the frame” or “we shifted members’ consciousness” which for grassroots organizers on the ground view as the vibrancy of the network .   The report lays out some new metrics for movement building – that are paths to the more easily counted tangible results and where the unit of analysis is the movement or network, not an organization.

As the report points out,  movement organizers are grappling with big questions.  It is less about how to raise funds for their organizations (although that’s important) but focused on the big picture:   What is the long-term change that we want to see?  What is needed to achieve it?  What roles do different organizations play?    The report identifies metrics to measure progress around this these questions – it asks and answers – “What exactly are the right metrics for today?

“Amazing large numbers of members, staging marches, and winning campaigns – all these remain important measures of a successfully growing movement.  There are, however, other equally important aspects that are often missed in the numbers alone, including the fundamental changes that a leader, organization, or community experiences through their involvement in organizing and advocacy.”

The report suggests that one needs metrics that represent two sides:

Transactions: These are markers, both internal (number of members) and external  (voter turnout).    While the data is not always to collect, such measures tend to be easier to track because they are more tangible.    But they only tell part of the story and skip over the richness of experience and momentum that can be a prelude to social change.

Transformations: These are important, but often “invisible” work.   They should how people, organizations, and movements have been altered through the collective efforts.   They can also show how societal or political views have been shifted.   These metrics are more qualitative in nature which makes them more difficult to define, capture, and track.

The report argues for using a combination of metrics to tell the fuller story of a movement’s success.  It goes on to define both transaction and transformation metrics in different categories for movement or network building which serves as the meat of the report.

  • Community organizing
  • Civic engagement
  • Leadership development
  • Alliance building
  • Campaigns
  • Research and policy analysis
  • Communications and framing
  • Media
  • Organizational Development
  • Movement Building

One of the most useful parts of the report is a two-page spread that illustrates sample metrics for transformations and transactions for each of these categories or a “metrics tool kit.”   The metrics are not intended to be prescriptive, but the reports recommends that movements need to co-create their metrics so the metrics transcend the organization.   For this to happen, organizations need to the space to begin to work together to build the common language and frameworks for these metrics to hold up against different approaches and models.

There is a category for traditional and social media and a couple of paragraphs in the report.    That’s exactly what the book, “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” that I wrote with KD Paine and will publish later this year is about it.

The report included a section on recommendations, including building the metrics tool box and building movement capacity to use metrics.   One of the resources that is mentioned in the book is a Progressive Technology Project’s database technology set up to track this work.   Here’s what the report said about capacity building:

Of course, metrics tools only work if you have skilled craftspeople who can use them effectively.   The presence of such metrics mavens varies across the landscape of movement organizations.    Metrics and measurements need to exist at every level of organization, but it makes a different when someone is in charge and helps organizations stay on track.   While community organizers often find themselves pressed to take the time to assess in light of daily crises and immediate problems, movement builders have learned the power of reflection and refreshing.  Metrics can help, and building them into organizational culture can be facilitated by having someone with responsibilities to make it happen – and to steep others in the new practices.

We spent a chapter or two talking about exactly how to put this into practice because is this a very important point.

The point that the report makes and I agree is that measurement needs to value both transformations and transactions – and that requires new attitudes and approaches.

Anyone out there using metrics to measure movements?

Update:  Special thanks to Victoria Vrana who shared the report with Mario who shared it with me … a networked approach to sharing of networked metrics!

Oct

2011

28

Category:

Guest Post, Networks

Tags:

1 Comment

Top Ten Things We’ve Learned About Networks

Guest post by Gabriel Kasper
The amount of knowledge and experience in attendance at last week’s Grantmakers’ Gathering on Networks was inspiring. So when Diana Scearce asked me to try to synthesize the learning at the end of the conference, I was at a bit of a loss. It didn’t make any sense to just stand up in front of the group and parrot the great things that all of the participants had been saying over the two days.

So I tapped my inner Francis Ford Coppola and decided to break out the video camera to make a short (but obviously masterful) video about the “Top 10 Things We’ve Learned about Networks,” using conference participants—the “people formerly known as the audience”—as the stars.

Gabriel Kasper is a senior consultant with the Monitor Institute, a social enterprise focused on philanthropy and social change that is part consulting firm, part think tank, and part incubator of new approaches.

Oct

2011

21

Category:

Guest Post, Networks

Tags:

Comment

Close the Triangle

Flickr Photo by Tiffany.Ann.M

Guest post by Scott Bechtler-Levin

After spending a couple days with nearly 150 smart, network weavers at the GEO/ Monitor Institute “Growing Social Impact in a Networked World” conference (http://www.geofunders.org/networksconference.aspx), I am reminded of one of my favorite quotations:

“The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know…” (Socrates, according to Plato)

One of many ‘ah-has’ came early during the well facilitated conference.   It was just an off-hand comment from June Holley that the basic building block of network weaving is the “closing of triangles”.

As June explains in a 2006 blog post on “Network Weaving 101”:

“An “open triangle” is where there is an opportunity to introduce two people by the third person who knows them both — it is a triangle with one missing link like in the diagram immediately below. A “closed triangle” is where all three people know each other.”

connection

I’ve always been fascinated by how and why some people “see” open triangles and “act” to close them – while others do not.  It was good to see how different people are aligning sector culture, systems, and incentives to encourage individuals and institutions to take the extra time to magnify their impact by closing triangles.   We saw evidence of it in the networking.  We see it when people share documents/templates.   We see it through curation and what Beth Kanter called sense making.

 

It is ultimately to everyone’s benefit when we see ourselves as a node within a network … and that network as a node within a larger movement.

 

And this collection of innovators certainly tended to see much larger and more complex “triangles” than most others.  That ability to envision and view themselves as movement builders is what made this an especially rewarding gathering.  People recognized that we are all knowingly stumbling through the fog of innovation – and it’s helpful to have peers help identify where the blind-alleys are located.

 

So the week left me appreciative of what someone called the power of the “people formerly known as the audience”.  That is, we each of us contribute our small piece of what we learn and when we share it with others, we help them, ourselves and our movement.   And because so many diverse perspectives were represented, we were all enriched by the insights that can only happen at the intersections of cross-subsector, cross-functional role gatherings.

 

How fitting, for a conference on networks.

 

scott-levin

Scott Bechtler-Levin

Scott Bechtler-Levin is Co-Founder and President of IdeaEncore Network ( www.IdeaEncore.com), an online resource sharing platform that builds networks to disseminate and curate nonprofit tools / templates.

Oct

2011

20

Category:

Guest Post, Networks

Tags:

14 Comments

The Power of Curation

Flickr by Leo Reynolds

Guest post by Paula Goldman

The wisdom of crowds, the insanity of crowds.

Mention the word “network” to most people and their reactions tend to sway between these two polar extremes. It’s either “crowdsourcing is the answer to everything” –or it’s a complaint that social networks like Facebook and Twitter are just “too full of chatter.”

If I have one takeaway from the GEO/Monitor Group conference on Networks earlier this week, it’s about how crucial the curator is in determining the difference between a successful network and one that simply makes lots of noise.

Disrupting Business as Usual

This insight hit home for me when serial entrepreneur Lisa Gansky talked about innovative businesses like CouchSurfing (http://www.couchsurfing.org/), Zipcar, and AirBnB.  Gansky calls these “Mesh” businesses (http://meshing.it/)—enterprises that leverage data and social networks to allow people to share resources conveniently (a car sitting idle, an extra room in your house).  And she argues that they represent the future of our economy.

Gansky may well be right- but it’s not just in the for-profit world that these kinds of start-ups are disrupting business-as-usual.  Some of the most promising innovations in the non-profit space are using substantially similar models. Donors Choose (http://www.donorschoose.org/), for example, allows people to pool small donations to help enterprising teachers get funding for classroom projects. Ushahidi  (http://www.ushahidi.com/) allows people to pool information into online crowdmaps with diverse uses—for example, allowing aid workers to see where resources are most needed after a natural disaster.  And Kiva (http://www.kiva.org) builds on already existing networks (including that network of networks we call the Internet) to give people the opportunity to loan money to entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The Value of Specificity

Of course, Kiva, Ushahidi, and Donors Choose and hardly the only non-profits trying to bring people together for a common purpose- one might argue this is embedded in the mission of almost every non-profit.  And they’re certainly far from the only non-profits trying to take advantage of online networks and the access they provide to reach new supporters and constituents.

What does distinguish these organizations, though, is the specificity of what they ask people to do when once they’ve brought them together in conversation. They don’t just say, “You’re here now, talk amongst yourselves.” They give community  members a very concrete piece of information to take advantage of.  A woman in Kenya (replete with name and photo) who could use your $50 to start a corner store.  A car at the intersection three blocks away which you could use to take the trip to Target that you’ve postponed for two months.  A specific classroom in rural Ohio that needs $200 for a science project.

To produce this high-quality information, these organizations have to make early and careful editorial decisions about the format and kind of information that will or won’t appear on their site—making sure it’s easy to use, (relatively) easy to source, and easily actionable.

Finding the Right Balance

It’s always tricky to find the right balance of specificity and openness–directing people toward action but still giving them room to be creative.  But time and time again, this is what successful network leaders do, whether online or off.  In their effort to catalyze networks of young Jewish innovators to revitalize American Jewish culture, the folks at Reboot (http://rebooters.net/) bring together a group of leaders for a in-person summit every year.  Not only do they very carefully select who will be in the room, so as to maximize the chances of creative chemistry.  They use the ‘open space’ methodology for the conference—allowing participants to set the agenda, while also giving some structure to their explorations.

As philanthropy takes up ‘network thinking’ as its next frontier, there is the danger that we’ll get too caught up in the technicalities.  We’ll focus on the fancy tools of mapping and graphing; we’ll have debates about terminology and definitions.  All of this is very important. But at the end of the day, when you bring people together, the key to spurring collective action isn’t just about our technical sophistication with network theory.  It’s about how well we frame the opportunity.

In other words, the secret to thriving networks boils down to one thing: good curation.

Paula Goldman

Paula Goldman (@pdgoldman) is Director at Omidyar Network and an expert on making unorthodox ideas mainstream.

1234510Last »