Mentors: Bobby Deleon and Michel Daniel and students from ECHS - Speed Networking

Note from Beth: My friend Porter Gale has just launched a new book called “Your Network is Net Worth.”  Porter’s definition about networking is about charting your own course, following your passions, and making meaningful connections, which in turn increase your happiness and productivity.   Her  book shares the secrets of how to do this.

Porter  has been a guest poster to this blog in the past and she offered to write up this guest post about mentoring. As one who has always considered their work in the sector a “calling” versus a job, I’ve been lucky to have some amazing mentors.  Therefore, giving back to others in this space  is something I’ve have always felt was very important and one reason that as much as I could tried to connect with younger people or new comers to the nonprofit online space.    Porter has great wisdom about this topic which is why I feel her book is a must read.

5 Reasons Why Should Make Mentoring A Priority by Porter Gale

It’s true; small actions can have a large impact. But did you know if you put giving back and helping others at the center of your networking and relationship building, you are likely to have more impactful and stronger relationships, among other benefits? One way to give back is by mentoring or sharing your experience with others.  In my book, Your Network Is Your Net Worth, I share several stories that demonstrate the potential impact of mentoring. If you’re worried that you don’t have the time or bandwidth to mentor others, consider that even an hour or two of your time, can make a difference.

Last week, I was an invited guest at an entrepreneurial program for underprivileged youth called In True Fashion that runs out of Environmental Charter High School (ECHS) in Los Angeles. I was one of twenty mentors that visited the school for two hours of conversation and speed networking.
After gifting a copy of Your Network Is Your Net Worth to every 11^th grader, students rotated table-to-table, in fifteen minute intervals, meeting a variety of mentors; including filmmakers, the CEO of Surf Air, the man behind Movember (a mustache growing charity campaign), a jeweler, an advertising executive and more. Some of the mentors and the mentees shared their experiences and five reasons why you should make mentoring a part of your life follow:

1. You Can Fit Mentoring Into Your Schedule. Mentoring others is an attitude and lifestyle choice. You don’t have to have a weekly coffee with a mentee to make an impact. For example, having coffee with a new graduate or even exchanging an email or two can make a difference in a person’s life. Kate F. Spence, an 11^th grader at ECHS wrote, “I am one of the Environmental Charter students you presented to on Friday. I just wanted to let you know how thankful I am that you came to our school and offered us the opportunity to meet all of those amazing people and listen to your words of wisdom! I can’t begin to explain how inspired I am! Being able to talk, and get advice from Linda, Star, Wade, & Brian was an amazing experience. I feel like I have already learned so much, and I haven’t even started your book yet!”
2. Your Efforts Could Change Lives Immediately. Jade Barcley, a therapist and consultant was also at the ECHS event. She shared, “The experience with the teens was amazing. As they connected with each new mentor during the speed networking, the shift was visceral. You could see it change the way they were thinking – about themselves, their creativity, possibilities, and about their place in the world. They got visibly more comfortable in their own skin, stood taller, spoke more confidently, and connected more strongly with their passions and peers in each round.”  Bobby Deleon a Development Executive at Infinitum Nihil, Johnny Depp’s production company in Hollywood, agreed, “There was one girl who was quite shy. Her head was down and she was quiet, but I felt her drawing me near.  I made it a point to go up to her and asked, ‘what is it you want to do?’ She peeked at me and said, ‘petroleum engineer.’ I was blown away. I asked her to repeat it and I looked into her eyes and said don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t do it.”

3. You might find great future interns or teammates. Even with his airline launching less than a week later, Wade Early, the CEO of Surf Air made time to mentor and shared, “I just loved being with the kids. It’s so great to see all these kids focused on education and with well-articulated goals for where they want to be someday. Since the visit to the school I’ve already had students follow up with me.”

4. You’ll Experience Growth And Learning Too. Fran Ellsworth, a Junior Account Planner at Deutsch, shared, “It reminded me how far I have come since high school. I was depressed, shy and lonely at times, but always felt I was meant to do great things and inspire people. Being able to talk with the students reminds me to be true to myself and my values.” Mr. Deleon added, “I was one of these kids. I still am. I was born in a very tough neighborhood that many would consider a dead end path. For me, I wasn’t ready to die or be pushed aside. I’m definitely not a man with all the answers but the advice and time I give comes from my heart, my experience, and it is genuine.  I don’t want anything in return, not a thing.  Yet, every-time after one of these mentoring sessions, as I drive home; it is I who feels that I have just received something special.  Another experience that is as genuine as the one I gave.”

5.  Your advice can be very action-oriented. Some mentors encouraged the students to make eye contact, to sit up straight, to look interested and to have a firm handshake. Mr. Deleon encouraged students interested in filmmaking to “get out there and grab a camera.” He suggested, “We live in a world where advanced technologies can transform any business. Use technology to spread your message and ideas. In the end you will have a finished product, a digital resume, and more important a calling card that can help you move one step closer to a new chapter life.”

By seeing networking and mentoring as an opportunity to help people, I’ve discovered that these actions change me for the better. Remember mentoring doesn’t have to be an overwhelming time commitment.  Mentoring is a choice to share your experience and knowledge with others.  What you will find is that mentoring and giving will come back to you tenfold. It will transform your emotional state, improve your relationships, build your happiness quotient, and teach you the importance of gratitude and will help you make Your Network Your Net Worth.

If you have mentoring tips or networking stories to share, please send me at Tweet @portergale or an email at info@portergale.com.

Click to See Larger Image and Full Data by Marc Smith

How do you measure your network to learn how to improve outcomes?   That was one of many questions raised at during a Twitter Chat last week around the #sm_re hashtag.     The chat was a prelude to a convening on April 25th at the Robert Wood Johnston Foundation of  40 thinkers and practitioners, bringing diverse perspectives and expertise into discussions to develop measures for evaluating the impact of social media on philanthropic outcomes.   I’ll be participating in the session, as part of the context setting by giving an overview of themes in my book, “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” co-author with measurement guru KD Paine.

The chat, moderated by Kami Huyse, and included RWJF staff Debra Joy Perez (@djoyperez), assistant vice president, Research and Evaluation, and  Tina Kauh(@tinakauh), program officer, Research and Evaluation, covered some stimulating questions.   Here’s a curated transcript of the chat that I pulled together.     But for this post,  I’d like to dig into one of the questions,  ”How do you measure your network so you know if it is growing stronger?”

This is a question that is hard to answer in a Tweet or two, and in fact we devoted to an entire chapter to the topic in the book – “Understanding, Visualizing, and Improving Networks.”   Of course, with anything you measure, you have to determine what your goals and success means:

Important to think about network goals, and what being a network member means #SM_RE

— Victoria Dougherty (@VJDConsulting) April 18, 2013

Once this is established, along with goals – the methodology to measure your network relies on having a baseline methodology and using Social Network Analysis.   The latter can be a very geeky topic, requiring expertise in statistics, understanding social network analysis terminology, and hard to master software.   That often intimidates nonprofit folks (including me), but it doesn’t have to be that way.    There are low tech tools and online (low cost or free) SNA tools and great resources like Marc Smith at NodeXL

I’ve been teaching workshops, training other trainers, and developing curriculum on “networked nonprofits,” literally around the world, and one of the first topics we address is understanding your network.   This comes from my first book,  ”The Networked Nonprofit,”  co-authored with Alison Fine.  Understanding and mapping your network is one of the indicators in my “Crawl Walk Run Fly” maturity of practice model and looks something like this:

Click to see larger image

I use low tech tools first – paper, markers, sticky notes, and sticky dots.    Participants spend time working together to draw their networks — people and organizations who are important to reaching their organization’s outcomes.  They are asked to visualize the relationships – and who players are both online and offline.   I also ask them to identify people who are “hubs” – those with lots of connections and those on the “edge” or could be a bridge to new connections.  Also to show the relationships to different clusters (related people or organizations) and nodes (a person or organization).

Here’s a collection of network maps from a couple of recent workshops – and you can see how they use color to show differences as well as different types of lines to show the relationships.

Ventura County Community Foundation - March, 2013

GuideStar India - Networked NGO Workshops - Packard Grantees

Radio Bilingue

The last drawing/map  is from a peer learning group of Packard Grantees that I am facilitating based on “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” from Radio Bilingue.   Since the goal is for participants to learn and adopt these practices,  they are given “recipes” to do the mapping and then share with colleagues.

Community Foundation of Monterey County

Once participants do a low tech drawing, we move to explore some of the online mapping and SNA tools to visualize online networks.  The map above is a visualization of the Community Foundation of Monterey Twitter following using TwitterMap.  It is also a fun way to visualize your Twitter network – and there are some great free apps to do that.

NodeXL and Marc Smith

In 2009,  I was lucky enough to take a social network analysis workshop using a SNA free plugin for excel called NodeXL with Marc Smith, a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction.  (I wrote about it here).    He has set up the NodeXL gallery that is collecting visualizations of different networks online using the tool, especially social network maps of people tweeting with a particular hashtag.  For example, he ran a map of the #gpf13 hashtag that illustrates the network talking about unlocking data in philanthropy.     Marc did a map of the Twitter hashtag for #sm_re (see first image above) and got on Skype to discuss it how one might use a network visualization as a way to measure the strength of a network.

In order to really understand the social network map of people tweeting the #sm_re hashtag during the chat earlier this week,  one has to look at it in context.  The map above depicts everyone who was tweeting during the Tweet Chat.  Let’s imagine for a second that this chat was the beginning activity around forming a network to spread best practices about social media measurement in advance of the meeting next week, and maybe might include other activities.   For all intents and purposes,  this could be the “baseline” depiction of the network.     The next steps would be to get “snapshots” of the network during activities along the way and look at how the network has evolved and changed.

The missing link is understanding what patterns in the network mean – and how those are interpreted against the network goals – in this made up scenario – to spread best practices and knowledge around social media measurement for philanthropic outcomes.  With me?

Marc shared his expert knowledge  and here are some notes.

Click to See Larger Image

What is the shape of the network mean?

Marc showed the slide above that illustrates the different shapes of networks.    The #sm_re network is shaped like an “in group” or a community.   Where folks are well connected to each other and there are pockets of nodes on the edge, etc.   The other patterns illustrate different variables such as whether the hubs are just broadcasting their tweets vs engaging and responding – and whether or not there is just a relationship between the hub and the nodes or whether the nodes are talking with one another.     The overall shape of the network could, perhaps be mapped to a specific outcome or result.

What do we see in this #sm_re map?

You can find a description of the details of the map here, but two top line observations:   There are hubs and islands.

Hubs:   The sunburst shapes are hubs.  These are people or organizations that are strongly connected within a network.   If you look at the map of people tweeting the hashtag, #sm_re – there are two  big hubs.  These are G1 and G2.  There are two smaller hubs G4 and G5.   The overall donut or galaxy shape means that these people are a community around the subject-matter and may be linked in other networks or communities.

Islands:   These are the Twitter users who are not connected to others or the Hubs.    Sometimes these are referred to the “edge” or “periphery” of a network – people not well connected to the network or “weak ties.”  These are arranged in military style in G3.

One SNA concept that Marc shared  comes from Ron Burt and it is about “Bridging VS Bonding Social Capital.”   So one strategy is to look for places where people are not connected to one another and make a connection.  This is a role for hubs or perhaps “network weavers.”    Making connections strengthens the network bonding, but it is also paradoxical.   If you become too much of a tight knit network, then it can lead to stagnation because you are not bringing in new ideas or people.

The map can help us hone the practices we use on Twitter for building the network and perhaps help improve the outcomes as illustrated in this slide from Marc’s presentation.

Social network analysis maps are useful for helping you understand your network, developing a baseline visual, and identifying strategies for making your network stronger.

Have you mapped your network?   What did you learn?  What tools did you use?

I get to work with many grantees from the Packard Foundation, including the Encore Fellowships Network—which enables professionals to transition from private sector careers into high-impact roles in the nonprofit sector—used a network-scaling model to grow from a single pilot program in Silicon Valley to a network of 200 organizations operating in 20 metropolitan areas nationwide.

Wisdom About Networks From Encore Network – A Guest Post by Leslye Louie and Lyle Hurst

Having benefited from the generous advice and expertise of many others, we’re honored to share our experience from The Encore Fellowships Network as the “Action” case study in the Winter 2013 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.  We hope others in Beth’s network will find the SSIR article interesting and helpful.  The bottom line is that the reasons we selected a network scaling model – fast growth, high program quality, with minimal investment requirements – have all been validated for us. We are now passionate advocates of this approach to spreading social innovation, and firmly believe that collaborative networks hold exceptional promise for breakthrough results even as the management practices and policies are being invented and refined as we write this!

When we selected a network scaling model almost 3 years ago, our first steps were guided by the wisdom of a few extremely valuable experts in the field. We have benefitted from broader learning and sharing networks, and wanted to acknowledge some of our favorite sources of wisdom here:

- Our first inspiration for the model actually came from another SSIR article: The Networked Nonprofit, by Jane Wei-Skillern & Sonia Marciano.

- We took Beth’s advice and defined specific ladders of engagement for each of our target stakeholder groups (fellows, host organizations, and sponsors). We have refined these over time and added clear value propositions for each, and they continue to guide our program design and network development today.  Today we continue to reinforce the importance of these practices.

- Our blueprint for the network was based on the Net Gains Handbook, by Peter Plastrik and Madeleine Taylor. This very thoughtful and detailed framework contains a wealth of practical advice for people who are creating networks for social change.

- We joined learning communities led by Stephanie McAuliffe and Kathy Reich of The Packard Foundation and we met fellow networked nonprofit pioneers at the “Networking Conference” put on by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), which has been a good source of knowledge and contacts.

The SSIR case study describes in some detail the history of The Encore Fellowships Network, but due to space restrictions, the SSIR editors were not able to include the important contributions of so many of the pioneering co-creators in our network.  We wanted to highlight just a few of our Community of Practice leaders and their instrumental roles:

- Two program and network champions:  Nancy Peterson and Janet Luce originated the Encore Fellows program model with Civic Ventures. Lucie later transplanted and adapted the model as she moved to a new organization, Aspiranet, and continues to be a leader in our SF Bay Area Collaborative to share assets. Nancy has gone on to pioneer other networks to promote the broader Encore movement.

- A network within a network: Paul Speer and Rona Pryor of Social Venture Partners proactively worked with us to identify and define practices and policies which would co-mingle within SVP’s own national network.

- Pushing the envelope: Nora Hannah and Linda Mason of Experience Matters blazed with outstanding communications and creativity, driving us to keep up with their growth trajectory.

- Adventurous spirit:  all the program directors have shown an incredible willingness to take risks on new ideas, compromise, and contribute time and energy to the collective good.

Lastly, our parent organization, Civic Ventures (now Encore.org) demonstrated their faith in innovation and belief in encore talent over the past three years and is doubling down with another network strategy to help further the Encore Movement.  More to come!

Leslye Louie is the National Director of The Encore Fellowships Network. Lyle Hurst is the EFN’s Network Developer. Both are former Hewlett-Packard Vice-Presidents and both were Encore Fellows in the 2009 pilot Silicon Valley program, matched with Partners in School Innovation of San Francisco.

Note from Beth: I’ve written about the importance of building resilience in networks given the complex and connected environment we live in today.   So, when Pat Brandes from the Barr Foundation sent me this thought piece on building resilience of networks, it resonated on many different levels.

Lessons Learned About Resilient Networks from Super Storm Sandy by Pat Brandes, Executive Director, the Barr Foundation

As Hurricane Sandy was barreling up the Atlantic coast of the United States, a husband and wife in their early 90s, frail of body and mind though resolute (some would say stubborn) of spirit, finally gave in to the pleadings of their family. The couple left their home on a barrier island off Long Island and evacuated inland. But given the size of the storm, even their safe haven was not without damage. They lost power, heat, and light. They could not cook. They had no internet access and – most distressingly for me – no phone service at all. This couple is my parents.

After two days I was driven to distraction with worry about their ability to deal with the cold. I wanted to get them to safety. But major obstacles were in my way. First, no trains, buses, or planes moved to or from New York City.  The only way to travel was by car. But even if my parents could drive (they can’t), and even if they had anyone nearby to drive them (they didn’t), traffic lights weren’t working. Many roads were closed. None of the bridges on or off Long Island were open. When they evacuated from their small island, I reminded them to take their cell phones and chargers. I assumed that would be our safety net. But when that system failed too, I realized I had not bothered to get the street address of where they would be.

Yet even despite these obstacles, on the night of the third day after the storm, I welcomed these two climate refugees into my home north of Boston.

How did it happen?

A network of grandchildren was activated. Aided by technology, they gathered and shared and used data to figure out where my parents were and how to get them out. Tweeting and texting various clues to each another, one cluster of grandchildren figured out the street address. Another cluster evaluated the alternatives and determined that my son (who was also without power on the 23^rd floor of his apartment in lower Manhattan) had the best shot of making his way to them. So, he biked uptown and rented a car. Then, one of his cousins texted directions based on a new smartphone application called “Waze,” which  crowdsources data from nearby drivers to create real-time traffic and road reports and find the best routes. This cousin spent hours assisting my son via text, despite intermittent cell coverage and a dizzying maze of hazards – many streets and bridges closed, while others were a tangle of gridlock – until my son made his way out of the city and to my parents on Long Island. Crowdsourcing also provided information on gas stations that were still open (and where lines were actually moving). This was vital intelligence for an escape route that included a long drive to a ferry terminal at the eastern-most point of Long Island. From there they traversed Long Island Sound to New London, Connecticut, and then drove to Boston.

Upon arrival at my front door, my father’s first words to me were, “I feel like I’m waking up from a nightmare.”  I led him and my mother to the sofa in my living room – complete with modern comforts like heat and light. We turned on CNN and watched together as scenes from New Jersey and New York flashed across the screen. “It’s not a nightmare,” I said, “It’s for real.”

Hurricane Sandy caused over 100 deaths in 10 states and left more people in the dark than any other storm in United States history. Up and down the nation’s most densely populated corridor it caused damage currently estimated at $50 billion. Somewhere during the frenzied media coverage of Hurricane Sandy, the press stopped using the word “hurricane.” It no longer seemed adequate to describe this phenomenon of unprecedented power. And so Sandy became the “megastorm” or, fittingly for its occurrence so near Halloween, “Frankenstorm.”

Sandy exposed our vulnerability to climate change. And while our climate is no respecter of race or class or ethnicity – the winds blow and the rains fall on everyone – this storm also exposed the deep inequities between our haves and our have-nots. Manhattan’s wealthiest 20% have incomes that are, on average, 40 times that of the poorest 20% ($400,000 vs. $10,000). This puts New York City’s economic disparity on par with places like Sierra Leone or Namibia. What that means in the face of a storm like Sandy is that, as the subways and trains started running again, and as much of Manhattan was getting back to some sense of normalcy, thousands of people in public housing were still without heat, water, electricity, or food. The homeless population in the city doubled to 80,000. Those with the fewest resources found themselves most vulnerable to the infrastructure failures.

Undoubtedly, the inequities in who bears the brunt of climate change will play out in similar ways on the larger global stage. Indeed they already are. In Haiti, for example, which was not even in the storm’s direct path, Sandy wiped out 40% of the autumn crop. According to a report by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 450,000 people (including at least 4,000 children under five) are now at risk of severe acute malnutrition.

Regardless of economic status, however, some are always quicker than others to absorb disruptions like Sandy and bounce back. And it isn’t unusual for the most resilient among us to bounce back even stronger than before. Meanwhile, when their peers are knocked down, they stay down for a long time. Some never regain their former footing. What distinguishes the two groups? My family’s experience in the wake of Sandy underscores for me at least two essential ingredients for this kind of resilience – namely, robust networks and a sense of agency.

For weeks after the storm, the same network that helped rescue my parents has remained active on text, email, and social media. They have taken and posted pictures of the damage to my parents’ home (including three feet of flooding in their first floor), registered them with FEMA, and helped them begin the recovery process. I had hoped this experience might convince these two nonagenarians it was finally time to give up living alone on an isolated island. But: no chance. Right away, my father, an avid striped bass fisherman, was on the phone with the Coast Guard to launch a search for his beloved 17-foot Whaler. It doesn’t seem to matter that his short-term memory is going or that there are days when he loses track of where he is. He is a man on a mission.

In similar fashion, my mother has been directing clean-up crews by email via her iPad even though her fingers are so arthritic she has to use a stylus. She doesn’t see well and can barely hear any more. But her mind is keen and she is making sure she gets estimates in advance. Each morning this old couple huddles together to plot the day and to scan the news for indications they can return to their home.

Their resilience is a result of both their supportive network and their own agency. Without the network to help them navigate the maelstrom of plumbers, electricians, demolition crews, oil burner replacements, insurance companies, and FEMA (to say nothing of their daily needs), they would be lost. But just as critical is their ability to shift their thinking – to see themselves not as helpless victims of great trauma, but as agents of their own destiny. With the elderly, it is all too easy to do things for them or just tell them what to do. Left to their own devices, they are often agonizingly slow. They get things mixed up. Their inefficiency tries our patience. It is hard to favor their agency over their fragility. Yet, that agency, that frame of mind is paramount if they are to weather whatever disruptions lie ahead.

This kind of resilience for absorbing and reacting to disruption is as important for individuals as it is for cities and communities. Sandy has added urgency to debates over how best to prepare New York City for a future of rising seas and storm surges that are more frequent and more severe. While “hard engineering” solutions like barrier walls and dikes have their champions, the “soft infrastructure” (sometimes called “ecological”) approach is getting a lot of attention as well.

Architect Stephen Cassell, for example, proposed protecting New York’s financial district with a ring of tidal salt marshes and wetlands around lower Manhattan. Rather than try to shield the city from storm surges, such barriers would literally absorb them. Cassell says, “Our goal is to design a more resilient city. We may not always be able to keep the water out, so we wanted to improve the edges and the streets of the city to deal with flooding in a more robust way.”  Another architect, Kate Orff, has proposed oyster-encrusted barrier islands to mitigate surges off Brooklyn. As Orff explains, oysters “agglomerate to make rich reef mosaics, and reefs are the most effective way of attenuating waves, because they go deep into the water column, stopping the velocity flow, where it starts to do damage.”   What both of these proposals have in common is a focus on enhancing the city’s natural resilience by increasing its ability to absorb the disruption of surges.

In order to adapt to climate change we will need to learn another lesson from Sandy – in the face of major disruptions, centralization can be a major weakness, whereas networks are a source of strength.

Two weeks after Sandy hit, 300,000 people in New York and New Jersey were still without power. In addition, the recovery has been slowed because gas rationing is in effect. Even where there is ample supply, gas terminals and a significant number of gas stations have no power to pump gas. Conceived in the 19^th century, our power grids are simply too centralized. And in the face of a storm like Sandy, our system is actually too big not to fail. This vulnerability places the health and safety of our population at great risk, and it can obviously be enormously disruptive to our economy. So what will replace our centralized power grids?

Once again, networks emerge as part of the solution. Micro-grids that can both be coupled and decoupled from larger grids are within technological reach. Photovoltaics, fuel cells, appliances that generate their own electricity, and ideas yet to be imagined will form decentralized component parts that can be networked together with distributed intelligence. The transition from a centralized grid to locally-generated power systems that can operate independently is not unlike the transition from mainframe to cloud computing. Local agency arranged in networks that can decouple to operate independently is essential to resilience.

As we reflect on Sandy and its implications for the future of our country, we also need to consider the impacts of climate change on poor nations. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were severely damaged and the statue has only just been illuminated again for the first time since the storm. Through our nation’s history, this light has served as a beacon to millions looking for a better life. In the next century, as millions more the world over are displaced by climate change, we can be sure that the pull of that beacon will remain strong.

This is all the more reason to understand and invest in resilience.

Pat Brandes is executive director at the Barr Foundation.   Her twitter handle is @patbrandes

I’ve just returned from keynoting  the first Social Good Brazil conference that took place in Florianapolis,  sometimes referred to the “Silicon Valley” of Brasil and where the nonprofit, social good, innovation, and technology community is leading the social change movement.   Magic happens when social entrepreneurs, nonprofits leaders, technologists,  and young people are brought together for a high energy, creative, and interactive event that exposes everyone to new ideas and stories.

I was so happy to hear the story of how the event got started and the beginning of the network from Fernanda Bornhausen Sa. The presentation is in the form of a network map – so you can tell that they already approach their social change work with a network lens.

The three-day conference was amazing (you can view the schedule  here).   I delivered the ending keynote on the second day and my colleague from the UN Foundation, Aaron Shernian started the second day of the conference, a day packed with ideas, content, and inspiration from the best of Brasil.  Other international keynotes included colleagues Simon Mainwaring and Peter Sims (more about their ideas coming later this week in blogs posts, so stay tuned.) I must confess that I heard so many amazing stories and new ideas that I had inspiration overload!  That’s a good thing because it becomes the seeds of many new ideas, connections, and future blog posts.

I had a lot of fun with my keynote.  It was the first speaking engagement that I was able to scale delivery of my  interactive keynote to  1,000 people in fixed seating and in two languages using a translator. (There’s a blog about that brewing for the Chronicle’s Good Advice blog, so stay tuned)   As this was my 7th International training/speaking engagement this year alone, I was able to draw from everything I’ve learned over the years in terms of presenting on the international stage.    It was the last keynote of the day and it was a long day, so I improvised a movement exercise that involved some Samba movements to keep them engaged (see my post over at the Chronicle).    Now, I can’t wait for my international projects in 2013!

Teens As Free Agents

One of things immediately struck me – the crowd was filled with younger people – teens, college students, and millennials who want to use the technology and do social change on their own terms.   I loved hearing Isadora Faber, a pre-teen girl who lives in Florianópolis and creator of page Daily Class on Facebook.  Isadora, who is only 13 years,  created a Facebook group to help other teens in her country who want to make a difference in their communities and to report problems in their schools.   While her parents were concerned about her safety, she kept going.   ”If your cause is true and right you have to persevere. ”

Philantroteens

The UN Foundation’s Aaron Sherinian was next up for the opening keynote where he gave an overview of different global projects that through the power of social media and networks offer scale to social change issues.   One of the words he used caught my attention:  Philanthroteens.     These are teens with a passion for social change and who grew up not knowing what it was like to not to have a cell phone  or be connected to Facebook.      The media has dubbed this generation – “Qwerty Monsters” who send hundreds of text messages a day and don’t even like to use their phone for calls (and with two pre-teens in my house, I can attest this is true).     But it is more than the technology, it is also their passion to do good in the world.

Un Foundation

He shared the story of  the first-ever Girl Up Leadership Summit which brought together young girls who are helping change the face of global philanthropy.  They were joined by celebrities like actress and Girl Up Champion Monique Coleman, global leader Ambassador Melanne Verveer, and more than 100 young women from across the country.  These philanthroteens lead workshops on advocacy, communications and learned about their peers in developing countries.  Their meeting featured a special conversation via Skype with girls in South Africa as part of the Girl Up  Campaign’s emphasis on uniting girls around the world.

Panelists Cassandra Butts (Millennium Challenge Corp), Betty Hudson (National Geographic Society), and Angela Mwanza (UBS Private Wealth Management), taught them about ways to have an impact in their communities and world.  Together they discussed their personal challenges and accomplishments as leaders in their fields. Speakers Sarah Hurwitz (Senior Assistant to President Obama) and Monique Coleman of High School Musical also shared inspiring lessons. You can see it in the video above, well worth watching.

The Power of Networks and Flip Flops

Brasil is famous for its flip flops, a brand called Havaianas.   I visited the central market where there are many  flip flop vendors.    I wanted to bring back some as gifts for my teen girls in my family.  But I didn’t know their color preference.    So, I texted them. Within two minutes I got an answer.   The flip flop vendor was amazed that I could text two girls around the world and involve them in the purchasing decision.     But think about the power of connecting teenage girls in different countries and unleashing their “philanthroteen” energy to support women’s rights or other social causes.  Now that’s a powerful idea.

What programs do you know that help connect young girls to global women’s rights issues using technology and social media?    Is your nonprofit working with “philanthroteens?”

This is a terrific presentation from Lee Raine from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that looks at the issue being “hyperconnected” or “over connected” to the web, mobile technologies and social media.   It is the same title of Raine’s recent book.   The presentation looks at how younger generations are always connected and are multi-taskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and approach problems in a different way from older generations.    It raises the question (unanswered) whether this is a good or bad thing.

The presentation draws from a 2012 survey of the “Always On Generation” that provides insights from experts on the benefits and drawbacks of a hyperconnected life and how it is rewiring the young people’s brains.

The study and presentation begins with some context.   The most recent Pew Internet Project Internet and technology use studies show how immersed teens and young adults are in the online environment and how tied they are to the mobile and social sides of it.  Some 95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, 76% use social networking sites, and 77% have cell phones.  In addition, 96% of those ages 18-29 are Internet users, 84% use social networking sites, and 97% have cell phones. More than half of those in that age cohort have smartphones and 23% own tablet computers like iPads.

People are using social and Internet platforms –  many of which have immense amounts of  unstructured and often shallow information.   The Pew surveys point out these benchmarks:

• Nearly 20 million of the 225 million Twitter users follow 60 or more Twitter accounts and nearly 2 million follow more than 500 accounts.

• There are more than 800 million people now signed up for the social network Facebook; they spend 700 billion minutes using Facebook each month, and they install more than 20 million apps every day. Facebook users had uploaded more than 100 billion photos by mid-2011.

• YouTube users upload 60 hours of video per minute and they triggered more than 1 trillion playbacks in 2011 – roughly 140 video views per person on earth.

What will the future 2020 be like?

The study talks about the future and what the most desirable life skills for young people will be in 20/20:

Among those they listed are:

• Public problem-solving through cooperative work (sometimes referred to as crowd-sourcing solutions or using collective intelligence).
• The ability to search effectively for information online and to be able to discern the quality and veracity of the information one finds and then communicate these findings well (referred to as digital literacy).
• Synthesizing (being able to bring together details from many sources).
• Being strategically future-minded.
• The ability to concentrate.
• The ability to distinguish between the “noise” and the message in the ever-growing sea of information.

It also shares some predictions by experts -which are both frightening and intriguing:

The environment itself will be full of data that can be retrieved almost effortlessly, and it will be arrayed in ways to help people navigate their lives.

• Teen brains are being rewired to adapt to the new information-processing skills they will need to survive in this environment.

• “Memories are becoming hyperlinks to information triggered by keywords and URLs. We are becoming ‘persistent paleontologists’ of our own external memories, as our brains are storing the keywords to get back to those memories and not the full memories themselves,” argued Amber Case, CEO of Geoloqi.

• Young people accustomed to a diet of quick-fix information nuggets will be less likely to  undertake deep, critical analysis of issues and challenging information. Shallow choices, an expectation of instant gratification, a lack of patience, are likely to be common results. One possible outcome is stagnation in innovation.

• Another possibility, though, is that evolving social structures will create a new “division of labor” that rewards those who make swift, correct decisions as they exploit new information streams and rewards the specialists who retain the skills of focused, deep thinking. New winners and losers will emerge in this reconfigured environment; the left-behind will be mired in the shallow diversions offered by technology.

• A key differentiator between winners and losers will be winners’ capacity to figure out the correct balance in this new environment. Just as we lost oral tradition with the written word, we will lose something big, but we will gain as well. “As Sophocles once said, ‘Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse,’” noted Tiffany Shlain, director of the film Connected and founder of the Webby Awards.

While the study may seem like science fiction,  it makes one pause and ponder.    First,  to self-reflect on one’s own consumption of information on the Internet and social channels.    To me, it reinforces the idea that content curation is the path towards reducing shallow information overload and maintaining focus and expertise.

The other pause – and it is definitely more of a futurist perspective – is how this will play out in the offices of nonprofits and the nonprofit work place.   I think about Lucy Bernholz and Robert Reich’s research on the new economy and where this all fits.  I also wonder if  professional development will include learning and practicing those skills listed above – perhaps as a form of peer or connected learning.

• Have you noticed a change in the way your memory works as Amber Case describes?
• If you are managing or working with someone from a different generation, have you noticed differences in the ways you think or do work?
• How does this play out in your work with a nonprofit?

I was in NYC over the weekend and Monday to attend and speak at the Mashable Social Good Summit,   a three-day conference featuring discussions and presentations with global social activists, organizations, and new media experts.  Held during UN Week and Clinton Global Initiative,  the speakers and agenda was diverse, interesting, and inspiring.

The event was designed for the Mashable audience, a younger and social media savvy group that has the hunger and capacity to consumer a lot of content as well as do good in the world.   The agenda was packed, with 30 more plenary sessions per day (highlights here) ranging from 5 minutes solo presentations, 10-20 minute panel discussions, and live interviews via skype.    But the speakers were not just technologists, they included global leaders – many who are used to a different format for conferences.  As one of #sgsglobal organizers mentioned in his introduction, it was a shift for those used to giving 90 minutes!

There were a couple of big takeaways for me:

Inspiration and Feeling Good About The Desire to Do Good

Very inspired by the bloggers and @mashable @92y & @unfoundation at #SGSGlobal. Remember to watch today at 2:45pm! on.mash.to/RxjKbG

— Al Gore (@algore) September 23, 2012

The Mashable audience truly wants to do good in the world and they were inspired to hear and see many different examples and opportunities to support. And, inspiration was not a one-way street – we also heard from world leaders from the US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice to Hilary Clinton and many others about the opportunity that young people have to do good in a connected world.

Encouraging  (younger) People To Follow Their Passion About Doing Good

#scsglobal young people are capable of doing more good in the world than ever before because of online connectedness — Beth Kanter (@kanter) September 23, 2012

A theme I heard throughout the day on multiple panels was a call to action for people in the room to serve the world by following their passion. This was particularly true in Maria Bello’s story about her work in Haiti with creating a women’s network called We Advance.

What better way to see this in action is to hear it and see it from the young people themselves.   The audience got a performance by J.D. Malkin, known as jdviolinboy on YouTube. In addition to being gifted musically, Malkin is also the newest youth ambassador of Save the Children, an institution that serves children in need in around the world.

But, young people are not just advocates, they can also come up with solutions and opportunities.   This was the theme of a panel featuring representatives from Microsoft and Global Giving called “Bridging the Opportunity Divide.”   (Here’s a reflection from Akhtar Badshah)

Thinking Big About How To Use  Technology For Social Change, But Understand the Challenges

How can new media and technology create solutions in YOUR community? #SGSGlobal mashable.com/sgs twitter.com/gatesfoundatio… — Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) September 22, 2012

There were many examples of how social, mobile, and other new digital technologies are being used to scale good bridge digital divides.

Larry Irving talked about the many ways mobile is bridging the digital divide around the world and helping to deliver poverty reduction programs.  He mentioned developments in the technology – like the $35 tablet in India – that are getting many more people who were left out connected. Irving also acknowledged that there was a lot more work to do to get nonprofits to adopt these new technologies.  He asked the audience a series of questions about whether or not they thought most nonprofits they knew were using the new tools to the great impact.  Not many hands went up.

I was honored to be on the agenda in the evening – in-between Mira Sorvino and Jane Goodall.  I gave a 5 minute talk with a message that I always share when I speak to young people at universities in other parts of the world — to follow their passion for social change and technology, but make sure they are connect with nonprofits and their collective efforts lead to on the ground change.     That it isn’t about the tools it is what you do with them.

Getting from Collective Conversation to Impact

Right now from the Social Good Global Conversation in Oman.#SGSglobal twitter.com/OmnEntrepreneu…

— Sharifa Al-Barami (@OmnEntrepreneur) September 22, 2012

The most amazing part of this summit was the global conversation that was taking place – not just in the room. There were meetups having on the ground throughout the world where people were watching the live stream and participating. In NYC, in the back of the auditorium, there was a multi-language rumble going on as translators were translating speaker’s remarks into 7 languages. I noticed that colleagues that I have met in different places in the world for my capacity building work were joining the conversation.

Conversation and engagement is the first rung on the ladder of social change.    The next step is action.  Many of the speakers offered specific options for people in the room to take action, hopefully followed by collective impact on the ground.

Note from Beth: Last week, I wrote about the launch of LinkedIn’s Board Connect tool that helps nonprofit identify potential board candidates through searching the networks of their board members on LinkedIn.  In the comments, there was some thoughtful discussion about best practices for identifying, screening, and cultivating board members.  Geri Stengel who has written guest posts about LinkedIn on this blog offered to share some tips.   An excellent addition to my collection of curated LinkedIn resources.

5 Ways to Make LinkedIn Board Connect Work for Your Nonprofit by Geri Stengel

With nearly two million nonprofit board seats open, good board members are hard to find. Most nonprofits know that looking for board members can be time-consuming and frustrating. I’ve been there, on the hunt for people who have the expertise and passion to make a positive contribution to the nonprofit I care about.

I have served on two boards, including  Governance Matters, which strengthens boards in NYC through advocacy, education and resources. Now I serve on the board of  Praxis Housing. We provide housing to the chronically homeless who have HIV/AIDS, mental health issues, chemical dependency, and other special needs.

Praxis is expanding its six person board to 11. We knew what skills we wanted and tried all the usual ways. In the past, we had success with BoardServeNYC, a United Way initiative; referrals; direct asks, among other tactics. Recently we started asking umbrella organizations, such as legal and nursing associations for help recruiting board members. Many of these organizations have programs that match their members with board opportunities.

But we still were not  finding the board members we needed. I’ve been a fan of LinkedIn and believed it could be used to fill the gaps in our board that we still had. This was my chance to put my teachings to work for Praxis. And the timing is right for nonprofits to take advantage with LinkedIn’s recent announcement of LinkedIn Board Connect, which makes one its premium services available at no charge. It allows your organization to search for professionals to join your board. Although the recruitment process for Praxis board members isn’t finished, I’ve learned a lot!

For those nonprofits who are intrigued by LinkedIn but don’t know how to get started using, here’s the lessons I’ve learned:

1.) Know what you’re looking for: The Praxis board discussed the expertise that is most crucial for us to have on the board. We also wanted to increase the diversity of the board. If you haven’t evaluated your board before, you can use this board tune up kit, produced by board coach Michael Davidson, as a starting point. Evaluating your board is something you should do regularly but must done before setting out to find new board members.

2.) Build Your Network Before You Need It: Board Connect is free to one person on the nonprofit’s leadership team, but if that person doesn’t have a critical mass of connections (500+ is best, 350 will do), your connections are not going to lead you to a big enough pool of people to find the perfect match. Don’t despair! A board member or a consultant may have a critical mass of connections. If necessary, pay for someone to have a LinkedIn premium account so he or she can do the search and outreach for you. Chances are you won’t need to pay for the service for more than a few months. Or, better yet, use this as an opportunity to get connected to others on LinkedIn.

3.) Experiment with your search: Don’t be afraid to play around a bit and try different search parameters. For Praxis,combing geography (a 10 mile radius from Praxis headquarters) and skills (legal, real estate, and HIV/AIDS expertise) with keywords such as “homelessness” and “volunteering” that might indicate an interest in our cause, limited the pool of people who came up in the search results. So I dropped the words homelessness and volunteering from my search.  Marc W. Halpert, a LinkedIn trainer, helped a Connecticut nonprofit search for board members. He found that using keywords related to its mission was critical.

4.) Email directly or use InMail: Halpert found the right people for his nonprofit client among his first degree connections. I found them among my second degree connections (people who know people I know). With first degree connections, you can send an email directly; you don’t need a premium LinkedIn account. For second degree connections, you either have to ask someone to make an introduction (this is time consuming and leads to a much lower response rate) or you need to use LinkedIn’s InMail service. Happily, Talent Finder, a premium service, is provided for free to nonprofits as part of Board Connect.

5.) Build relationships: While approaches to candidates can’t be cut and dried, my typical process was to start with a 10-minute phone call. If the candidate seemed interested, I arranged a breakfast or lunch with Svein Jorgensen, CEO of Praxis, and other members of the governance committee. Candidates were then encouraged to visit one of the organization’s shelters to meet clients and staff. Since we’re breaking ground on a new facility in the Bronx on October 23, 2012, we invited everyone to this.

All the prospects said they were flattered by my outreach. Interestingly, several also mentioned that they had been thinking of volunteering for a nonprofit so my timing was perfect.

The overall recruitment process will take three to four months and will result in adding two or three members to the board of Praxis.

If you have questions, Halpert, Maria Semple, and I will be doing an interactive webinar about nonprofits and LinkedIn on Tuesday, October 2  from 3-4pm EST. Join us! We’ve all got tips about making LinkedIn work for nonprofits.

About the Author: Geri Stengel is founder and president of Ventureneer.com, which connects nonprofit execs, social entrepreneurs, and socially responsible small business owners with the knowledge they need to make the world a better place and to thrive as sustainable organizations.

“New Skills for a Complex World” was the theme of the seventh annual Nonprofit Management Institute, a two-day conference for several hundred nonprofit leaders sponsored by the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) earlier this week.    I had the honor of being on the faculty to do a master class on leading networked nonprofits.  But I also got the opportunity to learn and hear Rob Reich, associate professor of political science, Stanford University, and faculty co-director, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (Stanford PACS) and Lucy Bernholz, visiting scholar, Stanford PACS present their research in a talk called “New Skills for the New Social Economy.” This post shares my notes from that session along with a reflection about my session and some resources.

The New Social Economy

This session was a high level view of what is happening in the ecosystem in which I do my work.   I heard some many big picture connections to the work I do or rather improvise on the ground, that I know I’ll be mulling over and thinking about what they shared over the next few months.  In fact,  Lucy has been terrific in finding new ways, like Branch, to use the social tools to facilitate a global brain around these ideas.

Let’s start with a definition first.   The new social economy includes all the ways we use our private resources to create social good.   It is using private goods for social good reasons.     Rob started off with some observations about the young people he sees in his business school classes.  It used to be twenty years ago that the “do gooders” would go off and take lower paying jobs in the nonprofit sector.   And, those who wanted to make money would head to Wall Street.     That’s changed.  They want to combine both.   That they have a “Do good where ever attitude.”

There is a blurring between the for-profit and non-profit sectors.  They shared a slide (see above) about new models we’ll see that combine both – especially the “not invented yet.”    The point was that nonprofits can expect to have competition from these different entities for dollars.   [ And those that don't already have business plans, should probably go read this book by David LaPiana]

Lucy talked about how technology is driving the shift to a social economy and picked out a few themes, pointing out it is not the technology itself but how we use it.    She highlighted the impact of crowd funding platforms and the technology to collect, visualize, and share data.

She also said that the pressure of measurement is not lessening and the drumbeat is getting louder.     But that nonprofit sector has struggled for decades about whether or not they could demonstrate impact and there are lots of comparisons between sub-sectors.  And the sector is getting better at measuring social change and that there has been a lot of progress in the way the sector measures and reports on big social change outcomes.  But expect how you report and measure impact with the social business sector.  The social business sector has shared metrics and understanding of being data-informed.    That changes the conversation for nonprofits.

She touched on some of the implications for staffing and governance.  It also will change the types of skill sets that nonprofits will need now and into the future, for example “Data Analysts.”  There are also governance implications with new expectations for transparency and new norms of accountability given the growing influence of  rating intermediaries like Great Nonprofits and Charity Navigator.    If you want to dig into more of this thinking, I suggest you get a copy of Lucy’s toolkits for nonprofit leaders.

I did an interactive master class on networked leadership and the practices of becoming a networked nonprofit for over 300 nonprofits seated at round tables as the last session of the day.   My training craft and what I have been teaching in train the trainer’s sessions around the world – how you blend content with engagement, both online and offline.    I was challenged when I walked into the room and saw a podium, two large screens, and microphones set up in the middle of  a sea of tables.   How could I efficiently use movement, interaction with peers, and report outs without wandering around Oprah style?   [I improvised a technique in the moment that worked for the layout of the room that I will share in another post]

When the people, formerly known as the audience, get to participate,  you always learn something.   Here’s a couple of themes that come up from a few of these nonprofit CEOs:

• Looking at Aggregate Professional Networks of People in the Organization: I’ve been hearing Meg Garlinghouse of LinkedIn talk about “filling structural holes” in networks and shared a couple of those ideas.  Why not have look at the connections of your staff/board in LinkedIn related to achieving a goal or even just to recruit new board members.     The room was silent.   I asked if their silence was skepticism and asked for anyone willing to come to the mic and push back.    There was more silence and one CEO made their way to mic ….

He said,  ”I’m a CEO and I don’t want my staff connecting with my board on social networks.  I want to control the communication between staff and board.” I was taken aback by his forceful tone of voice.    I responded with how do you know that they aren’t already connecting on LinkedIN and quoted Clay Shirky,  ”If you are concerned about loosing control, stop – you’ve already lost control.”     I spoke with the CEO one-on-one to probe further and learned that he wanted board to focus on strategy and not get involved in micro-managing.   I explained that the idea of looking at your aggregate networks was to look for gaps related to strategy – not facilitate communication about management issues.

• Social Media Not As A Job, But Organizational Skill Set: One CEO took to the mic and shared how their organization is getting results with social media and how he is also presence as himself on social networks.   But, he was having trouble getting others to participate, mentioning that he had 70 twenty somethings on staff!     His question:  How do get everyone on board?    I spoke about the need for a social media policy – that was actually discussed in the organization, not biolerplate produced by some online tool, having brown bag lunches, setting up friendly competition and contests inside, and most important of all – start with a small group of internal influencers.   First start off with who is everyone using these tools outside of the organization and is interested.

Does everyone in your nonprofit participate in social networks including the board?    What are the benefits and challenges?

On Friday, I was honored to lead a session for participants in the TechWomen program, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), designed to offer professional development, networking, and mentorships for women in the Middle East working in the technology and science sectors.    This year’s 41 participants are matched with mentors from companies here in the Bay Area and do a five-week internship.   They also receive training and visit other parts of the US.

My session was designed to generate discussion and share tips, best practices and tools for using social media to:

• Build, expand, maintain and leverage professional networks in their countries, region and with new network in US;
• Share the TechWomen experience; Build excitement around the program and expand its reach
• Share experiences and interests openly yet safely and respecting one another’s privacy while achieving the above

This session was a prelude to some more extensive training the women will receive while they are here in the US.  For example, this week they will attend a workshop at LinkedIn where LinkedIn employees will coach them on online networking tips and taking advantage of the platform for online networking.

Flickr Photo by Mike Cogh

In my work with women in Middle East, the issue of privacy, safety, and security often a hot topic, yet using online social networks for professional networking requires us to be open. [The issue of privacy also comes up with US, particularly with nonprofit CEOs]  With privacy online,  if you want to be 100% secure,  the best method is to not to participate online.  Obviously, that is not practical in today’s connected age.     Then it becomes a choice of how open you want to be – and doing it in a way that preserves your privacy.

Flickr Photo by Mike Cogh

There are ways to be open, but you have to master privacy settings, use common sense,  and understand what your digital shadow is online.

Some commonsense principles for privacy and security we identified:

Location Based Social Networks:

• Turn off social location features and geo tagging and use it on a case-by-case basis, not by default.
• Don’t announce where you are right now on Twitter or Facebook

Think Before You Share:

• Is what you’re posting something that you wouldn’t mind being seen by your children, parents, employer, employees, or government?

Connect Thoughtfully:

• Friending policy for each online social network you use
• Don’t accept an invitation to connect if it does not feel safe.

Protect your privacy and that of others:

• Click through the privacy settings on social networks, read the Faqs and be sure you understand what the settings mean for your privacy and that of your connections

We also did a privacy and security technical assessment of best practices based on this infographic and the Me and My Shadow site from Tactical Technology.  The shadow site has a terrific tool box that helps you understand what pieces of your identity are being left online if you are using the Internet.   Especially useful is the tutorial that helps you understand the user agreements for the major social networking platforms.

The rest of session introduced the participants to different platforms that professionals can use to expand the reach of their networks and principles of online networking.

We talked about the importance of having a profile that projects professionalism and competence.   We looked a few examples, including mine.    I also emphasized the importance of having a connection policy.  I shared how I think about it.  I divide potential contacts into three groups:

• PANs = Potentially Active Network
• CANs = Currently Active Network
• FANs = Formerly Active Network

The “CAN” and “PAN” are people I know  pretty well and have a strong reason for being connected (or not).  The “FAN” are people I may not know as well, but who are important because I have a particular goal and they may be helpful.   These are people I specifically reach out to.    This is how I evaluate incoming requests to connect.  I also pay attention to whether the contact request is generic or they have a stated a good reason why we should connect if they fall into the “FAN” category.

How do you balance privacy/security online with professional networking?  What are your best online networking tips?

As part of my work plan as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,  I have the pleasure of working with  networks of grantees to design and facilitate peer learning exchanges on networked nonprofit practices and using social media effectively.    One of the networks I’m supporting are the grantees in the   Friending the Finish Line strategy.  This peer learning exchange is designed to help state-based groups to be more effective in engaging their networks toward covering uninsured children.   Just like message consistency, storytelling, and interviewing skills, proficiency with social media like Facebook and Twitter increases their capacity to make change happen for children in their state.

I’m working in partnership with Spitfire Strategies.  The peer learning exchange offers one-on-one coaching for 16 state organizations that work on children’s health care insurance, monthly peer webinars, and a face-to-face workshop.    This technical assistance design is a balance of expert support with peer learning and an intentional strategy for building the network’s capacity.   As with all the capacity building projects that I’ve designed, it is based on a framework and theory of change.

Assessment Framework and Theory of Change

The framework is a social media maturity of practice model called “Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly” Maturity of Social Media and is featured in my next book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit.  We used to help us design the program, determine process outcomes, and help us evaluate participant’s progress.  For each phase, there are specific criteria and indicators that an organization will develop.    We are tracking progress against a baseline.

When we started the project, most were in the crawling stage, so there was no place to go but up!    When did its first face-to-face convening, participants had just started to communicate with key audiences — we looked at the aggregate Twitter followers and Facebook fans at the beginning and at the end of the second year – and there has been dramatic increases.    This comes from participants integrating social media with advocacy and communications strategy and to learn from each other along the way.   One of the successes was how most participants are learning to balance the strategic with the spontaneous of social media as described in this blog post.

Over the past year, participants have been getting comfortable with social media skills, being strategic, making them a habit, and first steps with measurements.  But these are steps to bigger outcomes for this network – such as making sure there is health care for all children.   Having a theory of change that illustrates the steps towards these bigger outcomes is critical as well as indicators.

Advocates get better at communications – proactive/planning, partner engagement, message discipline

Written social media policy
Strategic integration into children’s health advocacy
Written social media plan
Use of editorial calendar
Use of counting metrics

Advocates have more partners or better partners, more or better relationships with reporters, and more or better policymaker relationships
Increase reach on social media channels
Cultivate “super fans”
Increase engagement on social channels
Support national partner Facebook chats, blog carnivals, and other networked advocacy activities
Amplify peers’ efforts

Communications have more impact

Social media content mirrors other channels
Solicit and share stories

Key influencers take action, including media

Advocates get more attention from policymakers
Lawmakers repurpose key messages

Training Design

This peer learning exchange has monthly conference calls that balance expert content delivery with peer sharing and making a commitment to put ideas and recommendations into practice over the month.   It also includes a face-to-face workshop where there is also the same balance.    This year’s session was piggy-backed with the annual meeting, so the training came at the end of 2.5 intense days of meetings.     The design incorporate many interactive learning techniques to ensure that participants were actively learning and sharing, and not falling asleep!

It takes time to develop a solid organizational practice in social media, so we wanted to celebrate those small victories.   We created a deck of cards with mini-case studies showing examples of how these state advocates had strategically incorporate social media into their social media plan.   For example,  the All Kids Covered has been using the timeline features to create milestones for legislative victories.   We distributed the cards and had participants pair up with peers to learn more about their successes.   This type of active exercise gets people moving,  serves as an icebreaker, and also is an efficient way for the group to share a lot of useful practical learnings.

The skill building sessions focused on content optimization for integrated social media channels and working SMARTer with social media – time saving tips.   For the integrated content strategy,   we begin with some principles for an effective content strategy – techniques for coordination, creation, and curation.    The ideas were interspersed with examples from participants who shared “Living Case Studies.”  This generated useful tips and suggestions on how to manage an editorial calendar and content strategy process.   How do you facilitate others on staff to create content when they might not be have strong content skills?    What tools do you use to manage the your editorial calendar and content creation process?

We did a “Fish Bowl” exercise where several volunteers brainstormed an editorial calendar for the month of September, while the rest of the group observed.  If one of  the observers wanted to participate, they could tap a “fish” on the shoulder and sit down.  This is a good exercise because participants are applying some of the ideas and also come to the realization that sharing each other’s editorial calendars can make their work easier.    I facilitated the group with specific prompts for social content optimization.    This will was followed by a presentation to share those tips drawn from recent research reports:

Ten Types of Content We All Love
http://www.famousbloggers.net/content-types.html

Buddy Media: Twitter Optimization
http://www.buddymedia.com/newsroom/2012/06/buddy-media-twitter-tweeting-best-practices/

How To Get More Likes and Shares on Facebook – Based on Research
http://mashable.com/2012/06/19/how-to-get-more-likes-shares-on-facebook-infographic/

Tips for Optimizing FB Content To Get Into Newsfeeds
http://blog.getpostrocket.com/2012/06/7-easy-ways-to-increase-your-pages-edgerank/

Making Use of the Timeline Features
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-timeline-marketing/

This session closed with a reflection of how they could apply tips and recommendations and use measurement to further test these ideas.

The other skill building session was a session on working SMARTer on social channels – What are the time saving techniques?   But, more importantly how could they save time working as network.     I set this up as a series of online exercises focusing techniques like setting up Twitter lists, curating content from other Facebook pages, etc.    Making the work flow part of the workshop is always a good idea, especially set up tasks.

The last section of the workshop was focused on having participants start thinking about their work plan for the coming year.   Each participants comes up with specific work plan of what they will accomplish based on the overall outcomes for the program.  This second year will be focused on getting participants up on the next level, with an emphasis on building the network and amplifying each other’s work through social channels.

Developing a solid and effective practice in social media and building a network, that is integrated, strategic, and part of the organization’s DNA – takes step and intention.    Having a measurement framework, theory of change, and good instructional design to encourage peer sharing and interaction is key.

This year a lot of my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation is working with grantees outside of the US.    I’ve just returned from leading a training for Population and Reproductive Health grantees from India.   This was the launch of a peer learning group called  “The Networked NGO,” based on the ideas in my book, The Networked Nonprofit.    The four-day intensive face-to-face training was for senior level staff and their social media staffers.  It marked the start of  a six month peer learning exchange where I, along with colleague Stephanie Rudat will work remotely with grantees as they implement an action learning project to put techniques into practice and facilitate organizational change from the inside out.

We are working very closely with  V.S. Chandrashekar, India Country Advisor and his talented  team members,  Ms. Anupam Shukla and Ms. Monica Wahengbam.

This blog post includes some reflections on the instructional design, delivery, and insights that I hope will inform the field building discussion taking place over at the Packard OE Program site.

1.   Program Design

The program design is based on the last six years of delivering social media training sessions and incorporates refinements that I’ve learned a long the way.    I have designed and delivered trainings that were short-term, one-time sessions such as a half-day or full-day workshop to more intensive programs that incorporated face-to-face, peer exchange, action learning projects, and monthly meetings that took place over a six-month period.  The value of doing an extended peer learning exchange is that participants get the opportunity to put the ideas in practice and apply what they learned.

Typically, during a workshop or training with heavy-content delivery (such that is required with technology) the workshop leader or teacher is providing support around “ready” and “set” phases or what we call planing and strategy as well as best practices.    The peer learning sessions that follow focus on the “go” – that’s when the workshop leader becomes more of a coach as the participants actually use what they’ve been taught and compare notes with their peers.   I feel the learning is richer and more sticky.    Peer exchanges help participants not only form good habits, but they also naturally start to collaborate and work in a networked way.

When you design a capacity building project based on peer learning and is focused on topics that will require transformative organizational change to apply skills and knowledge,  it is important to have a realistic and clear idea about what constitutes success.    Not thinking this through at the beginning can spell disaster, especially if there are unrealistic expectations and you are working in places where connectivity is a barrier.

This project has identified the following definitions of success:

• A Peer-to-Peer Learning Exchange

Grantees will engage in peer discussions about integrating social media effectively into their communications strategies and will learn from each other – from challenges and missteps as much as from accomplishments and wins – so success means organizations sharing both.

• Networked NGOs and Social Media Integrated Into Organizational Communications

Through the 4-day workshop in-country and subsequent online and conference calls, grantee organizations will start to embrace the practices of Networked Nonprofits and begin to institutionalize social media strategies and integrate them into their broader strategy for communications on population and reproductive health or girls and girls and women’s empowerment.

• Grantees Implement A Modest and Realistic Action Learning Pilot

Social media practices are just that – they get strong and stay strong with practice – so success means consistent application and learning. With facilitator’s guidance, grantees will design and implement a small action learning project. But smart is as important as strong, so success also means deliberate integration of social media strategies with the organization’s broader communications plan and learning from doing in small steps.

• Purposeful Measurement to Inform Replication

Grantee organizations will measure what matters. Social media can be filled with  metrics to track results. But not all metrics are equally valuable, and choosing the measurements that matter can be complicated.  Even more importantly, the practice of connecting measurement and decision-making will help organizations improve practice and results, and document value. Success means using metrics to learn how to improve practice effectively, both to identify obstacles and track progress.    The action learning project will be designed to help grantees build a habit of measurement, reflection, and organizational learning.

These definitions have informed the curriculum, instructional design, peer learning design, and how we will measure and learn along the way.  The specific indicators of program success are below and were identified with input from participants:

• 100% of participants will develop an integrated and measurable social media strategy that furthers their communications work in population and reproductive health that aligned with institutional goals
• 100% of participants implement a process and write a social media policy that addresses organizational adoption issues
• 100% of participants implement an action learning project that uses measurement to help improve their practice, share insights with peers, and identify opportunities to amplify each other’s voices through social media

The four-day workshop has a different theme for each day as follows:

Day 1:  The Power of Networks
Day 2:  Integrated Social Media Strategy
Day 3:  Practical and Tactical Social Media
Day 4:  Action Learning Projects,  Communicating After Workshop, and Managing Our Attention

2.   Participants Own Their Learning

It’s one thing for an instructor to let participants know what the intended outcomes and learning objectives are for a training, but for true impact participants need to own their learning agenda.     One technique that I learned from Cheryl Francisconi, director of the IIE Addis-Ababa Office in Ethiopia, last month in Rwanda, was to allow time and space for participants to articulate their hopes and fears.    The beauty of this exercise is that it allows for any concerns or skepticism to be voiced and honored.      I was amazed at the transformation in the room during the first day – from health skepticism of social media to seeing its value and importance as integrated communications strategy.

3.   Learning Networks Are Built With People and Reciprocity

While the training was geared for organizations to become “networked ngos,”  it is important to recognize that networks consist of individuals and organizations.   Also, networked learning or peer learning is a person-to-person learning and therefore it is important to establish connections and points of reciprocity during the face-t0-face session.  One of my favorite introductory exercises, is to to build a “ME to WE” network based on individuals knowledge and what they hope to learn.     The exercise helps people get to know each other as a professionals, plus it is another example of visualizing a network with sticky notes.   It works best when you are working with a group of participants who work in the same field and may already know each other.

We also use it an opportunity for participants to get on Twitter as an individual and how to use it as a personal professional learning and branding tool.    In India, the line between personality and brand is not strict as it is in the US – and the identities can be fluid.  We demonstrated and showed how Twitter can be used to connect with colleagues and extend a brand or campaign.      We encouraged participants to Tweet their reflections using the hashtag we set up for the group.    And, how to connect with colleagues in their field.   This is something that nonprofit professionals are just beginning to explore.

4.    Replicating Networking on the Ground Online and Connecting to Strategy

The central thesis of the Networked Nonprofit is that nonprofits should work more like networks than isolated institutions. After we create a shared network based on individual’s knowledge and skills, we move to the organizational network maps. Participants create a poster of their networks, view other the network maps of others, and then do a debrief. The exercise usually takes 90-120 minutes in the afternoon, but participants were so engaged they didn’t want to stop for tea. The big ah ha after viewing the maps on the wall next to each other is that these NGOs had strong and vibrant networks established on the ground. As Pushpa from GuideStar India remarked, “It is very exciting to see the potential of seeing our NGOs become as connected online and through social networks because it can help us accelerate change.”

On Day 2, we take a deep dive into understanding how to develop an integrated social media strategy, beginning with an exercise that helps participants really define what success means.   Many nonprofits are so quick to jump into the tactical of social media and skip over defining success.   One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from working with KD Paine on my next book, “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit” is the important of defining success.  We devote an entire chapter to it and the workshop exercise is based on this chapter.

The morning also includes sharing the principles of successful social media, a talk that I have been giving and refining over the past 5 years and changes with new trends and developments in social media.   We also do a session of with case studies from the participants country or subject matter area.    The case studies method allows participants to identify best practices and collect ideas for their strategy.    The morning culminates with work on the strategy, identifying goals, SMART objectives, audience, and how to measure.     These are done as posters and placed side-by-side to network maps.     This was the first time I had intentionally had participants place both together on the wall and seeing these visually connected made for a more insight discussion.

The afternoon of Day 2 on strategy is focused on strategic web presence and integrated content strategy, with an introduction to content curation.     I used the “Fishbowl” technique for an exercise to help participants experience what it is like to brainstorm ideas for an integrated content strategy.    Four participants sit in the center and use sticky notes and a strategy template to generate ideas for content for different channels.   Anyone observing can tap someone in the shoulder replace them in the inner circle.    Since participants were from organizations working on similar content areas, this helped everyone.

5.   The Importance of Energizers Throughout

I strongly believe that people should not be left in sitting their seats with their laptops open for a training for more than 30 minutes at a stretch.    It puts people to sleep and it isn’t very healthy.    When I present content,  it is done in an active way – participants get to move around, stand up, walk around, and move.   Moving gets blood to the brain, getting blood brain helps people take in new ideas.     We also did fun and creative after lunch energizers.    On the first day, in honor of being in India,  I played a YouTube video of a well-loved Bollywood number called “Chaya, Chaya.”

After a lunch on Day 2, we shared an American classic dance, the Chicken Dance.

We held the training in a beautiful hotel in Delhi, The Claridges, which had a double three floor staircase.   We made people go up and down the stairs three times before settling in after lunch.

6.  It Isn’t Enough To Tell People About Best Practices:  Hands-On, Brains-On

On Day 3, we covered the best practices of using listening, Twitter, and Facebook, with ample time to practice.   I always begin with an orientation exercise that allows participants to draw from their own knowledge of what they already know and what they want to know about the tools.  This is important because there is so much to learn and it can get overwhelming.      I do a variation of  ”speed dating,”  each person creates a name tag with a first name and last name the name of a platform or tool they know about or have questions about.  Then each person gets to speak with another participant for 7 minutes and we do 6 or 7 rounds of speed dating.

We integrate both the best practices and hands-on activity.      Moving from telling, showing, discussing and to actual hands-on practice.    Typically, the practice activities are not just the boring set up steps of the platform, but setting up people’s networks.     I was inspired by a technique used by Sarah Mapes in Colorado for new Twitter users that makes it fun for them.  I wrote about the practice of  Team Tweeting here.   Using this concept, we set up Twitter scavenger hunts to explore lists and users in the reproductive health field as well as to practice tweeting.

When integrating hands-on,  I use a technique called “Laptops Up/Laptops Down” – so when it is laptops up time, it is time for participant to practice their skills together.  I encourage social learning together as I have observed many young people – this helps transfer knowledge.     I ask for “Laptops Down” when I need the group to give their attention to the screen or to debrief the skill.      When participants were working on practicing skills on the wiki or Facebook group, the platforms we will use to communicate after the session, we did a walking around debrief so participants share what they did on their own laptop.  This keeps the training active and helps people attend to the learning.

Since we are trying to build a network of learners, it is very important to encourage participants to be the leaders and teachers.    In some of the debriefs,  I have a participant lead the debrief or instruction.     Once the “teacher” steps aside,  the participants are often very capable to teaching each other.   This is the holy grail of a peer learning group – one that builds it knowledge and share it and is not reliant on the “expert.”

To support participants during the 6 months following the workshop in their action learning projects,   we use several platforms – private Facebook group,  webinar, and conference call.    I learned that while Webinars and conference calls are very familiar to many people in the US,  it is not a common in other places in the world.   That’s why we do a lot of practicing of the conference call platform – we hold a mock conference call and debrief the experience.   We also have participants dial into the webinar platform for a section of training and debrief in the Facebook Group.

7.    Closers to Consolidate Learning

Closers are essential to helping participants consolidate their learning and make a commitment to continued practice.   I have people do silent reflection on sticky notes and I also do a closing circle – and have each person pass an object and speak briefly.   I learned this technique from Cheryl Francisconi, director of the IIE Addis-Ababa Office in Ethiopia, last month in Rwanda,who uses a stone that has been held by many people.  I improvised and had participants pass around a flower.   Someone remarked that we have invited the “Flower Mic”

Finally, each participants receives a certificate, books from a colleague,  and a gift of chocolate from San Francisco!

All in all, a very exciting launch to a peer learning exchange.      Following the session, participants mentioned that they found it very engaging, were not bored, and did not fall asleep after lunch.   The proof will be at the end to see how participants do against measurable objectives.  So stay tuned.

Designing effective training is a both a science and an art form,   what was the most effective training you attended and why?

Note from Beth: I have the honor of leading a “Networked NGO Training” in Delhi for grantees of the Packard Foundation and have lined up some guest posts to supplement my reports from India.

The Collective Impact of Love guest post by Stefan Lanfer,  Barr Foundation

Martin Luther King once said “love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation.” There is a lively debate these days in the nonprofit sector about how the solutions to intractable problems depend on “collective impact” and what it means to be “outcomes-focused.” A new case study in the Stanford Social Innovation Review injects that most potent of weapons – love – into the debate.

The case study – “Networking a City” – features the Barr Fellowship, which is an effort by the Boston-based Barr Foundation to celebrate and connect extraordinary nonprofit leaders in its home city. Every two years since 2005, a different group of 12 such leaders have been surprised by a phone call from Barr.  Chosen from among hundreds of executive directors of area nonprofits, these 12 receive a unique offer – to become Barr Fellows. This means a three-month sabbatical, group travel to the global south, and the opportunity to join a remarkably diverse network of leaders.

Co-authored by Marianne Hughes of Interaction Institute for Social Change and writer Didi Goldenhar, “Networking a City” explores the amazing return on an investment in relationships among social change leaders, even without set expectations or requirements about what might emerge as a result. What has resulted, however, is something the Boston Globe once called, “a web of collaboration rippling through the nonprofit community with increasing effect.”

The Barr Fellowship is certainly a well-deserved “Thank you!” to a group of dedicated, effective leaders. It provides them with an opportunity for personal replenishment and growth. Yet, it is also an example of an approach to philanthropy that takes the long view – one that looks with humility on the complexity of change in a city like Boston, and recognizes that people, not organizations are the real agents of that change. And it makes a bet on the idea that good things would come from a concerted effort to forge bonds of trust and respect among a diverse network of community-based leaders – leaders who are already making impacts on their own, yet whose collective potential is largely an unexplored country. This is why the authors initially submitted the article to SSIR under the title, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?

To read more about the Barr Fellowship and to download the SSIR article, visit: http://www.barrfoundation.org/fellows

How have you seen love as that most potent weapon in change that takes the long view?

Stefan Lanfer manages communications for the Barr Foundation

I love this new video from the Case Foundation about the power of social media for social change.    The numbers illustrate how far the field has come in adopting social media, although not 100% adoption.     The video reminded me of the classic video, “The Machine is US/ing Us.”   I often used the video at social media workshops back then to generate discussion about how our world is changing.  When I first got started with social media training (2004-2007),  I often rain into a lot of raised eyebrows, crossed arms, and skeptics suggesting that “Social media is a fad.”

This was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, “The Networked Nonprofit,” with co-author Alison Fine back in 2008-09.    I noticed a big change in 2010, the year the book was published.   There  were slightly less crossed-legs and arms and more curiosity and questions like, “What are the best practices?.”    In 2012, while I still encounter a few skeptics,  there is more often curiosity and questions about “How can we use a networked approach with more impact.”   Does this signal that working in networks been become normal in the nonprofit sector?

One of my all time favorite Clay Shirky quotes: “When the technology gets boring, it becomes socially interesting.”   Have networks become a more accepted way of working?   We have witnessed the Twitter powered Arab Spring and more recently the intense backlash at the Susan Komens Foundation for withdrawing funding from Planned Parenthood and the uproar.   From Occupy Wall Street to KONY 2012, we’ve witnessed how social technologies fuel and scale grassroots self-organizing.     We’ve also seen networks of organizations and people work together to solve complex social problems.     While online social networks may have become “air” as Charlene Li has say, I think the way we work with it – the competency of having a networked mindset is developing.   More and more in the nonprofit and philanthropic  sector are learning that being fearless is still a critical skill that needs further development.

The Packard Foundation has recently published a report commissioned from the Monitor Group called “Ideas Into Action: Reflecting on Three Years of  Building Network Effectiveness.”      The top six takeaways about network effectiveness  from the report are:

1. Combine network effectiveness with organizational effectiveness
   Network effectiveness is clearly a distinctive set of behaviors and strengths for a leader or organization to build. But the approaches for building network effectiveness that this experiment supported were typically combined with more traditional organizational development activities.
2. For consultants, networks expertise is an addition to standard skills
   A consultant’s ability to build network effectiveness is clearly a distinct skillset—and of most value when used in concert with standard capacity-building skills.
3. Low-technology settings require high-touch network facilitation
   In areas where the use of high-tech communications is not yet widespread, working in networks can be slower and more time-consuming and require a more high-touch process for supporting the network. But the benefits remain substantial by comparison to working with one organization at a time.
4. Peer learning builds capacity, builds network effectiveness, and enables collaboration
   Not all capacity is best built through one-on-one consulting. Peer learning fills a distinctive and complementary niche: it helps grantees explore an issue that is central to their work, builds their overall ability to engage collaboratively, and also connects them with potential partners for doing collaborative work.
5. Networks are proving their value to program outcomes
   Network-based approaches have become central to the work of a number of program officers at the Packard Foundation. Each has discovered their own reasons for achieving strategic goals through network-centric modes of working.
6. Field-building work remains critically important
   The past three years have seen significant progress in the development of network practices and the level of interest among funders; but there is substantial work to be done before network effectiveness is considered an essential capacity to build.

The conclusion about investing in network effectiveness suggests that network capacity building will become an important part of the capacity building repertoire, but it is not yet mainstreamed.

The investigation into network effectiveness began in 2007, a moment when social media was starting to take off and the notion of networks as a vehicle for social change was just coming into focus. Over the past 5 years, network capacity building has become much more commonplace, although it is not yet mainstream. Looking forward, we expect there will be a point when specialized support, specialized consultants and specialized language won’t be needed. Building network effectiveness will be a common part of the capacity-building repertoire. We’re seeing seeds of this transition today, and OE’s work can be credited with making a meaningful contribution to that shift.

But we’re not there yet. We recommend that OE continue supporting network effectiveness in the many forms it has done in the past three years, including research to capture and codify the new practices. And that it do more work to bring those practices to program officers at the Foundation and wider audiences in the field, acting as an advocate and guide for using network strategies as a new avenue to impact.

You’ll want to read both the executive summary and the full report – not only do they contain a wealth of insights about network effectiveness, but also use data visualization techniques.

Has working in networks and with networks become a “mainstreamed” idea in your nonprofit?

@Rubsfido @jfclearywisc social media ia a great platform for learning

— Agnes Binagwaho (@agnesbinagwaho) April 30, 2012

I’m headed to Rwanda to participate in a training for the  ACE project, a network of African Women’s Leadership organizations in the Sub-Saharan region.  The project is designed and implemented by IIE/Sub-Saharan Office and funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation PRH program.   The participating NGOs include Women’s Leadership NGOs from Ethiopia   I’ll be co-training with Kalyani Menon-Sen, a feminist activist, researcher and adult educator based in Delhi, India to deliver sessions on the Networked NGO, networks, and networking with social media.   Over the next two weeks, I will be sharing what I learn about the connections of networks, networked approaches, and social media for Women’s Rights NGOs in Africa.

Over the past couple of weeks,  I’ve been applying my online networking and network weaving skills to discover the conversations and people on Twitter (and other social media spaces) talking about Women’s Leadership issues.     I took a deep dive with Twitter to discover where African women are tweeting after seeing this report, “How Africa Tweets” and focused in on Rwanda.

Many government leaders in Rwanda have embraced Twitter, both in the “official’ capacity, tweeting from their Ministry’s profile for formal communication or often from a personally branded profile.    There are many women in leadership government positions in Rwanda, and many are on Twitter. The first of the Rwandan Twitter “peeps” that I discovered was the President of Rwanda – Paul Kagame who is very active on Twitter.  He responds to questions and has conversations as well as confrontations with journalists (and others)  in his personally branded Twitter account.   There is also the “official” President of Rwanda account which is for more formal communications.   While I was not able to find the First Lady Mrs. Jeannette Kagame on Twitter (if anyone does know her account, please share in the comments), I discovered that her NGO, Imbuto Foundation, was on Twitter.

Feed a child, feed a nation! fb.me/V572VRhP

— MIGEPROF (@MIGEPROF) March 13, 2012

The Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion office keeps a consistent schedule of informational news on gender issues with a focus on Rwanda and Minister Inyumba Aloisea also tweets from her personal account.   The Ministry of Health is also quite active on Twitter both from the formal, official account Ministry Twitter profile and  Minister Agnes Bingawaho who is very active on Twitter.     She hosts a bi-weekly Twitter Chat called “Minister Mondays” which kicked off 6 months ago with a Twitter chat about family planning, curated on Storify by Packard Foundation Program Officer Sandra Bass.

I was quickly able to identify some great lists of Twitter users including Women Rights Organizations, News Sources, Funders, and a wide variety of African Women’s issues – all sharing information and engaging in conversation on Twitter.    While there bandwidth challenges,  Twitter is accessible for by SMS in some of the countries – and it would be an simply way to network and keep on top of one’s professional area.

My friend and colleague, June Holley, has written a much anticipated book, The Network Weaver Handbook.  If you are interested in building networks or working as Networked Nonprofit, you need this book right now!

The Network Weaver Handbook is designed to give you skills and resources you need to build effective and innovative networks.  The handbook offers advice and resources for those who just starting out to those involved in well-established networks.   The book gives you the basics of networks and network building and moves on to more advanced topics such as scaling networks and transformation.

A network weaver is someone who is aware of the networks around them and explicitly works to make them healthier. They do this by helping people identify their interests and challenges, connecting people strategically where there’s potential for mutual benefit, and serving as a catalyst for self-organizing groups.    As June points, the role is multi-faceted -and has four different roles – Connectors/Catalyst,  Guardian,  Coordinator, and Facilitator.    In the books, she describes each role and the specific skills required.    She also includes her famous “Network Weaver Checklist” that helps you figure out how to inspire people in your network to become network weavers while improving your own practice.

In many sections of the book,  June offers fantastic stories and resources on how to use social media to support and build out your network.     As she points out, increasingly the Internet has become the platform of networks – and of interaction and self-organizing.     I love how she points out that one of the most important behaviors needs for a successful network approach is “learning how to learn.”    And that as networks evolve and grow,  you experiment with different tools and then spread the knowledge of how to use the tools to the rest of the network.

What I like best about the book is that the narrative is accompanying by terrific reflection questions and worksheets so you can easily adapt all the wisdom shared in the book.  It is also packed with resource lists and stories.   To me, this creates the perfect book to help guide your practice of building and working within a network.

At this year’s NTC, there was a lot of discussion about innovation and nonprofits – so I was particularly interested in Chapter 10 which is about Innovation and Transformation in Networks.    It covers concepts essential to understanding how innovation happens and explores some simple practices to introduce to your network that may lead to innovation.    June offers some frameworks for creating a network culture that supports innovation, how to identify innovation assets,  how to tune-up the network for innovation, how to train and coach people in the skills and processes required for innovation, and structures that support innovation.

If you are need to understand how networks work and grow – and need to develop and hone network weaving skills – this amazing handbook will give you what you need!   Order it here.

Day 2: Certificates Awarded To Senior Staff Attendees

This year a lot of my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation is working with grantees outside of the US.    Last week, I had the pleasure of working with a group of Population and Reproductive Health grantees from Pakistan on a peer learning group called “The Networked NGO,” based on the ideas in my book, The Networked Nonprofit.    The four-day intensive face-to-face training was for senior level staff and their social media staffers.  It marked the start of  a six month peer learning exchange where I, along with colleague Stephanie Rudat will work remotely with grantees as they implement an action learning project to put techniques into practice and facilitate organizational change from the inside out.

We are working very closely with Dr. Yasmeen Qazi who is the Pakistan Country Advisor and her very talented team members,  Dr. Iftikhar Soomro and Seema Zameer — all of whom understand capacity building programs. organizational change, and technology.

This blog post includes some reflections on the instructional design, delivery, and insights that I hope will inform the field building discussion taking place over at the Packard OE Program site.

1.  Program Design

Peer Learning Exchange: Theory of Change

When you design a capacity building project based on peer learning and is focused on topics that will require transformative organizational change to apply skills and knowledge,  it is important to have a realistic and clear idea about what constitutes success.    Not thinking this through at the beginning can spell disaster, especially if there are unrealistic expectations and you are working in places where connectivity is a barrier.

This project has identified the following definitions of success:

• A Peer-to-Peer Learning Exchange

Grantees will engage in peer discussions about integrating social media effectively into their communications strategies and will learn from each other – from challenges and missteps as much as from accomplishments and wins – so success means organizations sharing both.

• Networked NGOs and Social Media Integrated Into Organizational Communications

Through the 4-day workshop in-country and subsequent online and conference calls, grantee organizations will start to embrace the practices of Networked Nonprofits and begin to institutionalize social media strategies and integrate them into their broader strategy for communications on population and reproductive health or girls and girls and women’s empowerment.

• Grantees Implement A Modest and Realistic Action Learning Pilot

Social media practices are just that – they get strong and stay strong with practice – so success means consistent application and learning. With facilitator’s guidance, grantees will design and implement a small action learning project. But smart is as important as strong, so success also means deliberate integration of social media strategies with the organization’s broader communications plan and learning from doing in small steps.

• Purposeful Measurement to Inform Replication

Grantee organizations will measure what matters. Social media can be filled with  metrics to track results. But not all metrics are equally valuable, and choosing the measurements that matter can be complicated.  Even more importantly, the practice of connecting measurement and decision-making will help organizations improve practice and results, and document value. Success means using metrics to learn how to improve practice effectively, both to identify obstacles and track progress.    The action learning project will be designed to help grantees build a habit of measurement, reflection, and organizational learning.

These definitions have informed the curriculum, instructional design, peer learning design, and how we will measure and learn along the way.  The specific indicators of program success are below and were identified with input from participants:

• 100% of participants will develop an integrated and measurable social media strategy that furthers their communications work in population and reproductive health that aligned with institutional goals
• 100% of participants implement a process and write a social media policy that addresses organizational adoption issues
• 100% of participants implement an action learning project that uses measurement to help improve their practice, share insights with peers, and identify opportunities to amplify each other’s voices through social media

It is also important clarify these expectations with participants.  We did this on Day 1.  It followed a presentation of the program design where we facilitated an exercise and discussion about their hopes and concerns for the program.    On our monthly calls, we will be measuring progress based on these indicators.    I’m sure issues will emerge, but hoping to find out what works and what doesn’t and discuss openly with participants as the technical assistance and action learning projects unfold!

2.    Design for Organizational Reluctance

An important design consideration is the selection of participants.      For this project, participants were carefully vetted, avoiding organizations that were in a leadership transition, had other organizational priorities to address or did not have the capacity to apply the skills or knowledge.   The latter includes a lack of a formal communication strategy or staffing limitations.

The program was designed for two participants per organization, a senior level staff and the staff person who implements social media.   Focusing peer learning exchanges on one group or the other doesn’t go quite as a far nor can it effectively overcome reluctance and get at transformative change within the organization.    In addition, as part of opting into the program, the CEO or Executive Director had to sign a letter of agreement that clearly articulated the time commitment.

The workshop lasted four days, with each day devoted to a specific theme:  1)  Networked NGOs, Networks, and Change from the Inside Out 2) Integrated Social Media Strategy 3) Effective Practice and Techniques 4) Action Learning Pilots, Measurement, and Remote Support.    The senior staff participated with social media staff for the first two days and then the social media worked together (without their bosses present) for two days on the practical and tactical.

During the training,  I put “red” dots on the name cards of the senior staff and “yellow” dots for social media staff.     Since the curriculum addressed organizational barriers head on and different scenarios about sharing control or organizational concerns,   we started to talk about  the different “red dot”  and “yellow dot” challenges when it comes to using social media in an organization.     We did a lot of role playing and scenarios as well as concrete work on developing their social media policies.   In addition to the tactical and skills instruction we did with the social media staff on Day 3 and Day 4, we also covered how to manage time and work efficiently – and how to best provide support for the strategies.

Peer Synergy is also important — and for the next six months we will have two tracks for the peer groups.   We will work with the “red dots” on developing the social media policy and strategy as well as working with the “yellow dots” on their action learning project.    I’ve worked hard to incorporate the principles of leveraging peer learning that the Monitor has begun to codify through interviews with me and other Packard grantees and providers working on peer learning projects.

3.   Dealing with Connectivity Issues, Remote Work, and Use of Social Platforms

A lot of more of my work recently has been with nonprofits in countries where Internet connectivity isn’t as robust as is in the US and where even electricity can be a problem.    Over the past 20 years of providing capacity programs online, I’ve  faced my share of bandwidth challenges.     That’s why we will not rely solely on online channels to facilitate discussions.  We will use SKYPE out which is more rebust for monthly conference calls, scheduled for business hours in Pakistan so participants can use the Internet connection at their offices.   We are recording the calls so those that face electricity/connectivity problems can download it as a podcast and listen to the recordings later – and view slides/ notes.

In addition, we will be using a wiki to showcase learning and a private Facebook group for daily contact and “just in time” support.   I selected the latter because all participants are on Facebook and can access it on their mobile phones.  As part of the face-to-face training, we spent a day introducing participants to the different platforms and because we had wifi at the training, integrated using it as part of the exercise report outs.      We are also using a Facebook group for daily communication.  The Facebook daily check-ins in-between our calls are to provide support and facilitate discussion

3.     Create A World Fusion Curriculum

All of my workshops are customized design, so I know how to infuse the participant’s voices – whether it be their own living case studies or examples from NGOs in their country or field.    I was very lucky to work with Stephanie Rudat on this project who has spent a lot of time in Pakistan training Youth Activist NGOs to use social media.   Her knowledge of the country and the culture made it easier to localize the curriculum.

However,  it is important to have a mix – examples from other fields and countries.    If participants can see themselves in the case studies and examples, there is less resistance.   If you can expose them to examples from other fields or countries, then it broadens their horizons.    You need that for new ideas, innovation, and fresh thinking.

This mixture  was embedded in every aspect from the instructional design – from icebreakers to reflection exercises to presentation content, examples, and frameworks.

For example, on Day 2 we covered strategy and social media integration.   The curriculum includes the  ”Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly”  framework that I developed over the past couple of years and is included in my next book.   There is also an self-assessment exercise.   However, to localize it,  Stephanie incorporated Pakistani imagery, including a photo  of Arfa Karim, the youngest female Microsoft ‘expert’ in Pakistan, to represent fly.  She was very famous in her country although, sadly she recently passed away from complications of a seizure.

Also on Day 2, we shared examples of Networked NGOs from different places in the world as well as used a case study exercise focusing on NGOs in Pakistan that had used social media effectively.

We even localized and mixed up our energizers and icebreakers.   On the first day, we all sang “Dil Dil Pakistan,” a well-loved song that most people from Pakistan know.

But on Day 2, we shared a famous dance from America (The Chicken Dance) and made everyone do it after lunch so they were energized for the afternoon.

4.      Design To Build A Community of Practice

Throughout the four days,  there were many opportunities for peer interaction and group exercises designed to build trust, identify common points of experience and knowledge, and opportunities for reciprocity.    On Day 1, since the theme was networks, we created a knowledge network of our existing knowledge and desired knowledge areas using a visual facilitation technique with sticky notes.    I was impressed with range and breadth of strategy and tactical skills of people in the room.  There was a lot of synergy and points of reciprocity.   Having this network map on the wall during the whole training, let us as the trainers acknowledge the expertise and knowledge in the room.

That’s important because after the training is done, the participants will need to have grown in their comfort and skill levels to proceed without.   My indicator of success for capacity building and training projects is that I’ve put myself out of a job.

Building on the theme of networks for Day 1, we had participants draw a network map of their networks as is suggested in the Networked Nonprofit.  This exercise is very useful because after participants create their maps,   they’re taped on the wall, and participants give feedback using sticky notes.  Then each group presents their map as we do a walk around the room.    This exercise not only leads to places where peers can share knowledge, but since it is an organizational lens – it also opens the door for ideas for networked approaches.  It almost always naturally leads to discussion about how to amplify each other’s voices using social media.

What I loved about this exercise, is that after Stephanie and I modeled taking photographs and sharing on our Facebook Group or Twitter,  participants started to also document digitally.  We were able to thoroughly document the exercise here.

We had participants begin to work through their social media strategy, but to encourage insights about how to leverage a networked effect, we had them create SMART objectives as a gallery. Using this visual techniques, allows participants to give each other feedback and also see points of connection.

On Day 3, when it was time to focus on more time on teaching the tools, we started with an opening exercise designed to help identify those in the room who had knowledge.   Participants made name badges using selecting tool names for their first and last name.   They had to create name that represented a tool they already knew and one they wanted to learn more about.   Then we did several rounds of speed dating which allowed for a lot of peer to peer help on using tools. One participant told me that she never learned so much about social media in so short a time.  The power of peer knowledge at work!

We had wifi in the room and participants brought their laptops – this give us the opportunity for open lab time or what I call “shoulder to shoulder” learning.  We spent half of Day 4 introducing participants to the various platforms we would using to keep in touch over the six months as they implemented action learning projects.    For example, the wiki, where participants will keep journals, we had them do some of the exercises related to designing their project on the wiki to learn how to use it.     This helped us identify participants who were already comfortable with the wiki and we put them to work teaching the others.

5.   Integrate Practical Use of the Tools for Reflection, Network Weaving, Getting Ideas, Follow Up Work

We incorporated hands-on time and shoulder to shoulder learning from Day 1.  We started by introducing Twitter as a networking and professional development tool and succeeded in getting all the senior staff (red dots) tweeting by the end of Day 1.     At different points in the day,  we took “Twitter breaks” for reflection or networking.

And, if questions emerged about a specific case study or example we shared – we would point out that they could tweet that person and ask them the question.   This happened when we shared some examples from the American Red Cross and participants tweeted their questions to Wendy Harman (who answered).

We introduce the Facebook Group on Day 2 so that both senior managers and the social media staff could add themselves.  Then we incorporate the use of the Facebook for reflection exercises and to capture some of the knowledge that was shared in the room.     For example, for one exercise, we had participants document their contribution to the “me to we” networked exercise.

6.   Design for Reflections and Connections To Actual Work Experience

It is really important to build in plenty of time for reflection so participants can connect what they are learning in a workshop to their work experience. A workshop that simply attempts to stuff content into people’s brains is highly ineffective.    The curriculum incorporated “overnight” reflections everyday as well as many exercises to help process what they learned. On Day 4, we incorporated some role playing exercises that helped participant learn about being efficient with social media or managing situations where control issues might occur.   This was an area that I improvised on the spot based on what I hearing the room – and again I realized the importance of not only teaching the how-to of how the tools works, but to understand how to integrate a new way of working into your daily routine and manage time better.

7.  Make It Fun, Celebrate

I believe strongly that professional learning can be fun and it can be more effective that way.   We engage our learners in many different ways – from role playing, games, interactive exercises, interactive presentations,  self-directed learning, drawing, teaching others, and having conversations about the topics.

International trainings tend to be longer because participants may traveling from different locations.     That’s why it is good to have different moving around exercises.   One that I use when people get tired, is to have them stand in a circle and we toss a ball. But, I usually bring a “ugly” doll.     It makes a game out of learning – and keeps people involved.

We also gave awards, certificates, and chocolates as well as surprise and humor to keep everyone involved.

I am looking forward to the next six months of working with this amazing group of Packard Foundation grantees half-way around the world.

What has been your experience designing capacity building programs?  Discuss here

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?

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!

Note from Beth: This week I’m live blogging the GEO conference, but since I can’t cover it all, I’ve enlisted an awesome live blogging team of grantmakers and others attending the conference who will share what they are learning in guest posts on this blog!    You’ll be able to learn in real time with grantmakers and engage in a conversation in the comments.   So, in the next few days expect a series of thought-provoking guest posts about networks, organizational effectiveness, evaluation, grantmaking, and philanthropy like this guest post.

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.