I’ve been a board member of Ushahidi for 6 months. Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. It was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008 and has been used for many other projects, including tracking disaster relief efforts in Haiti. More recently, the London Tube used it to track disruptions from the Tube strike.
The board meets virtually most of the year – via online and old fashioned conference calls. It can be difficult to coordinate a meeting for 7 people across 7 different time zones – so once a year the board meets in Kenya. I’m looking forward to seeing their work first hand.
I just got an email from another board member that told me that they’re using Ushahadi in Pakistan for the PakReport System! They’re looking for volunteers. Here’s the information:
Give 30 minutes to help Pakistan
Enabled by a global outpouring of support for the Pakistani people, relief aid and resources have been immediately dispatched to the affected areas. But access to relevant, timely, and up-to-date information about the flood remains elusive in this emergency context.
PakReport is a centralized database for gathering information on disaster-related variables, using information communicated through SMS and reports available in the media. With your help, PakReport can create a useful map of the crisis, available and accessible to all. All it takes is a simple text message to 3441 relating your observations of the flood.
Pakreport urgently needs volunteers to process the massive influx of data they’re receiving from the field, through SMS direct reports, media monitoring, and partnerships with humanitarian organizations. All it takes is a few minutes and a few clicks to get this key data ready for the map. With your help, we can make sure relief reaches those who need it most. People from anywhere in the world can volunteer for this effort!
I’ve learned now that when Facebook announces a new feature, it is a signal for me to check into my settings and make sure that I’m happy with the way the default works. Do I want the world to know my location (if I choose to use that new feature?) Do I want to give my friends the ability to share my location with others?
Parry Aftab, one of several Internet safety experts who Facebook helped develop Places as part of a volunteer advisory board, said the feature does include enough controls to protect privacy.
But Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.com, said people who use social networking and geo-location technologies need to learn what the controls are so they can protect themselves.
“If you’re going to play, it tells you what you need to do,” Aftab said. “If you don’t like it, you can turn it off. I won’t use it, but my guess is my daughter will. As we move forward and these things become more and more robust, the question is do you turn off new technologies that allow more interaction and sharing or do you make sure people are empowered to use them safely.”
I posted some resources and questions on my Facebook page asking for some how-to information and Debra Askanase shared this good tutorial link that she got from a tweet from Mari Smith. Here’s how to turn it off:
1. Go to privacy settings
2. Go to “customize”
3. Scroll to “things others share”
4. Disable “friends can check me into places.”
Are you using the Facebook location feature or have you turned it off?
As Visiting Scholar in Nonprofits and Social Media at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, I am coaching grantee organizations and leading workshops and peer trainings on how to become a Networked Nonprofit. It is a fantastic laboratory to take some of the ideas in the book and put in them into a practice.
One of the themes in the book, The Networked Nonprofit, is the importance of doing experiments. They do not frame them as success or failure but as learning. The problem is that many nonprofits approach social media with over blown expectations, don’t realize them, and then throw their hands up and quit. So, I designed and have been testing a training program that embraces thoughtful do-it-yourself social media experiments and a peer learning process for sharing the learning.
The inspiration was part The Lab Theater, a place where you try out experimental works before you bring them to the main stage. There is also a social learning component. Think about those 4th grade science experiments where huddled over your experiment you all learn together. The instruction not only included the content – all the best practices and how-tos, but also took an approach that encouraged and developed reflection.
Last week, we had the final session of the “Social Media Lab,” a social media peer group training with a small group of grantees from the Children, Families, Communities Program, that was launched a few months ago. I was incredibly lucky to have a fantastic group of participants, all passionate about their work, very knowledgeable, and excited about integrating social media into their programs or communications plans. I also was honored to work side-by-side with esteemed colleagues Shiree Teng and Cheryl Contee.
Representatives from Preschool California Share Their Experiment Insights
Participant-Generated Instructional Content
The best part of this design is that participants are the content – the community is the curriculum! The program includes two face-to-face workshops. The first workshop delivers content about becoming a Networked Nonprofit as well as tips and tactics on social media implementation and an “experiment in a box.” We also included a lot of hands-on lab time.
Participants go off and work on their experiments. We used a wiki and conference calls to check in as a group. There was also one-on-one coaching. I approached my instructional role – less as expert and more as network weaver and technology steward – a helpful guide on the side. The final session puts the participants on the stage to share their learnings – either through ignite style presentations or speed geeking.
Treating participants as adult learners – allowing them to take responsibility for their learning and being the experts – produces quite a rich experience. I was amazed to see how far participants had come from a few months ago.
Sharing Insights Around Practice
Each Participant Created A Learning Poster - Notes of Appreciation from Other Participants. Some will use to share with staff or board at their organizations.
You can dig deeper into the details over at the wiki as each participant shared a one-page “lab report.” The experiments were very focused initial forays into social media. They were all amazing. But the biggest value as participants noted is that having to prepare a report or presentation about what they did helped consolidate their learning and insights.
Here’s quick sampling:
LA Universal Preschool. This was a Facebook experiment incorporated as part of the outreach for the 2nd Annual LAUP Dodger Day, an event that brings staff, providers and families throughout Los Angeles County together for a day to celebrate the “graduation” of preschoolers. LAUP has a group of parent ambassadors who serve as their key advocates in Sacramento or on land. They established a fan page for this group so they can be their advocates on Facebook as well. LAUP also discovered that they by providing engaging content on Facebook other super fans will self-identify. PreSchool California
PreSchool California: Did an experiment using Twitter as a way to connect with journalists. With the media landscape shifting from print to online, Preschool California has adjusted its strategy to ensure it is reaching its target audiences through both traditional forms of media and the rapidly growing social media. PreSchool California was able to connect initially with journalists covering their issue. They discovered that Tweets are more informal, less time consuming than email so journalists may be more likely to read. They discovered a slight disconnect between those journalists that wrote print stories on early learning issues, and those education journalists that were on Twitter. Despite only having a few interactions with reporters, Preschool California retweeted and commented on a number of articles, garnering responses from other advocates, which helped increase their issue exposure to a larger audience. They discovered that Twitter has value as a listening channel to support their overall communications strategy.
Fowler Hoffman did a listening experiment to identify who was participating in conversations on social media platforms about two issue areas – summer learning and after-school – listen to what they are saying about the issues, and engage them in conversations on these platforms.
“Tweeting to the Choir” Alone May Not be Sufficient:They discovered a small group of advocates and organizations with a similar focus and looked for ways to engage with those who are not already involved. They discovered there are many people and organizations who are sharing information and engaging in dialog about their same issues and topics but just not in the same way. At first this was a little uncomfortable to outside the existing circle of known allies by @responding to people they didn’t know. But they did an experiment by sharing useful links to summer learning study with moms who were talking about summer learning for their kids. These tweets ended up getting retweeted by these moms and they were able to attract more fans.
Children Now and Partnership for Children and Youth explored how to begin to integrate social media content channels into their newly designed web sites. Both ended their experiments with insights about how to set up systems and structures for content creation across channels, linking, and engaging.
Advancement Project set up a Facebook presence for one of its programs, Healthy Cities as a proof of concept for understanding the work flow of integrating content and engaging with fans. They will use the lessons learned to share with the education program to set up its Facebook presence as the next experiment. The intent is to use the lessons learned to get other staff buy in other departments.
United Ways of California focused on using Facebook to communicate and facilitate networking between staff members of United Ways in California. Several of the organizations participating in the lab observed that it was hard for them to envision using social media because “they don’t touch the public.” Not only do many of their UW members have an organizational presence on Facebook, many staffers us it personally. Setting up a Fan Page is an efficient way to share professional information. This experiment focused on using metrics to evaluate how engaging content was and recruitment tactics.
The Yolo County Children’s Alliance’s (YCCA)/Children’s Health Initiative’s (CHI) experiment was to start a blog for Certified Application Assistors (CAAs). Like the United Ways of California, YCCA’s does not touch the grassroots and the big ah ha for them was they could use social media to support their interactions with different constituents and for the purposes of sharing professional learning.
HCAP is a small agency and its executive director participated. As she notes in her case study, “The world of social media was quite new to our organization. Due to this learning curve, we felt it best to take one step at a time so that we have a better understanding of how it is used both in the personal social world, as well as business, and non-profit world.” They did a listening experiment designed to better advance their understanding of social media and its role in their communications strategy. This is a critical first step towards a social culture for many nonprofits that is often skipped and it is terrific to have a case study.
An Unanticipated Outcome
One of the unanticipated outcomes was the rich discussion we had after everyone shared their case studies. The group realized that there were a lot of opportunities and ways that they could support one another’s work through social media. And, that it didn’t required a huge amount of extra work.
Celebrating Learning
At the end of the session, each participant received a gift – The Networked Nonprofit book and a Networked Nonprofit T-shirt created by the good folks at NTEN!
Yesterday, Allison Fine and I, along with colleagues Danielle Bridiga and Marc Sirkin gave a Care 2 Webinar on the Networked Nonprofit. Here’s a link to a summary and the recording over at the Care 2 Frogloop blog.
As someone who loves to play with analytics, visuals, maps, and other geekery, I explored some of the tools and techniques to apply some of the big ideas about understanding social networks that are our book, The Networked Nonprofit. My notes follow below, but let’s begin with some of the big picture ideas about what it is and why you’d even use it.
The above visual is a social network. Each dot represents a person or in network jargon, a node. A connection between people is called link. The definition of links or how you’re connected is defined however you want in social network analysis. Some examples:
A follower on Twitter or someone you’re following
Someone on your mailing list or rolodex
Someone you know well enough to call
Family members
Organizational reporting
Communications flows
Information flows
As you can see there are many different ways to apply social networking analysis to understanding networks. It is really a technique to understand relationships. One of the first social networking analysis map was created by Jacob Moreno. It looked at the relationships between players on a football team. Who liked each other, who didn’t. Apparently this team chemistry is important to winning.
In the book, we talk about the using low tech tools like crayons or post-it notes to map out your network. Marty Kearns has a diagnostic tool over in his Advocacy 2.0 wiki that gives you a good set of questions to ask after you’ve created a descriptive drawing. Net-Map Tool Kit is an interview-based low-tech mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss, and improve situations in which many different actors influence outcomes in a community or network. It includes a step-by-step guided approach.
What I’m most interested is how to use social network analysis and the various tools to better understand your network on Twitter or Facebook or elsewhere. You need software to do it. Without social networking analysis, it’s like a weatherman trying to predict a snowstorm without seeing a whole weather map. Social network analysis gives you a 10,000 view of your ecosystem. Without this visualization, it’s like three blind men touching the elephant. There’s too much unstructured data (comments, replies, likes, etc) – you need to see a picture or map.
When you map your network, it tells you a story. Who is connected to whom? How are they interacting? Where are the clusters? Who are the influencers? Who are the bridge builders between clusters? Who is in the edges? Who isn’t connected? Who should I spend my time responding to and cultivating? The analysis looks at frequency of interaction, relationship structure (two-way, one-way), and helps reveal structural similarities.
Using this information to shape and refine your social media strategy can make it more effective.
Use Friend or Follow to download a spreadsheet of followers. Sort the information to find influencers and people to get to know. This works best if you have small network.
Mr. Tweet finds influencers in your network you should follow (use this after you have built up your following list).
Mailana can help you identify people who are influencers. I wrote about an experiment I did last year using this tool. One problem is that it doesn’t analyze your network in real time. You submit the userid and then have to come back a few days later unless it is already in the database.
Twitalyzer is a terrific analytics tool that gives you some good benchmarking metrics for Twitter. Run the impact report to help you identify influencers.
Twiangulate lets you analyze cross over between your Twitter network and another Twitter user. This can be useful to find potential collaborators.
Mention Map helps you visualize who is interacting with you around which hashtags. It shows nodes on your network. There is not information about what exactly how the drawings are created though.
NodeXL Created by a Marc Smith, a self-described “Internet Sociologist,” this FREE software works as an add-on template in Excel, allows you import data from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Email and create social network analysis maps. It doesn’t require that you know a programming language, although you need to understand the basic vocabularly of social network analysis and how to translate this to your social media strategy.
I also learned about a tool from Care 2 called “Social Network Tracker.” It matches your list of supporters against all of the major social networks. It will tell you which of your donors/activists are on social networks, what social networks they are on and how many friends they have in aggregate.
How are you using social network analysis techniques and tools to analyze your network? How has this helped your strategy become more effective?
Note from Beth: Please join me on June 21st from 1-2 PM PST for the virtual launch of The Networked Nonprofit. One of the key messages in the book is that nonprofits need to work less as isolated institutions and more as networks. Over the past year, I’ve has the pleasure of working with the good folks from Monitor Institute this past year as part of my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to explore network effectiveness.I invited Heather McLeod Grant to write a reflection base the case study of KaBOOM! which you should read in full.
By Heather McLeod Grant, Monitor Institute (and co-author of Forces for Good)
At Monitor Institute we are interested in “emerging practices” in the social sector—including new more networked ways of working. Just last week we published a new case study of KaBOOM! called “Breaking New Ground: Using the Internet to Scale,” by myself and Katherine Fulton. (KaBOOM! is a national non-profit dedicated to saving play through engaging communities; creating dialogue; and providing tools, training and resources to build playgrounds across the United States.)
Instead of taking a traditional non-profit approach to scale, KaBOOM! has used the Internet to disseminate its model, empowering local communities to self-organize and build their own playgrounds using free resources on its website. While the idea of giving away a non-profit model itself isn’t new, KaBOOM! is one of the first non-profit organizations to take this approach online.
And the results have been impressive. Through a suite of online tools—including a social networking site, online training, do-it-yourself content, and a Google-map mashup—KaBOOM! has empowered more than 6,000 communities to build local playgrounds in the past few years (far more than the 1,700 it has built directly in 15 years). In so doing, it has had more impact for less cost. In 2009, a dollar spent by the organization on online tools helped to improve 10 times as many neighborhoods as a dollar spent on playground equipment.
With assistance from KaBOOM! and several social-media experts—including Beth Kanter—we identified seven key lessons for nonprofits that want to use the Internet to evangelize their program model and increase their offline impact:
1. Keep it simple and concrete. The more you can simplify your program model and codify it, the easier it will be to help others replicate it in their own communities. Programs that are really complex, or which rely on tacit knowledge or specialized expertise, are harder to transfer to the online environment.
2. Treat your online strategy as mission-critical. KaBOOM! quickly realized that its online strategy isn’t just another means of communication—it is now central to how the nonprofit delivers impact. In other words, KaBOOM!’s social media strategy is not the icing but the cake itself.
3. Build your own technical competency. Because the online strategy is so critical, KaBOOM! recently moved its website development in-house; relying on external vendors increased costs and delays, and didn’t give the nonprofit enough opportunity to iterate and learn.
4. Nurture your online community via its leaders. KaBOOM! is now doing more online “network weaving,” connecting leaders in various communities with one another, and with others in its network.
5. Create incentives for action. In order to encourage more action, KaBOOM! is developing systems to recognize and reward those who are having the most impact both online and offline.
6. Give up credit to increase your impact. Like many nonprofits working in more networked ways, KaBOOM! has learned that it must relinquish some control; in fact, it has had to take its brand off of some online tools, as this inhibited local adoption.
7. Care more about real-world outcomes than online metrics. While KaBOOM! does track online metrics, its leaders actually care more about what happens in the real world as a consequence of someone visiting the website or using its tools.
This approach hasn’t been without challenges—in fact, KaBOOM!’s current offline business model hasn’t transferred to the online environment. But, it has proven to be an effective way for KaBOOM! to scale its impact dramatically in a relatively short period of time. We think that KaBOOM! has a lot to teach other nonprofits just starting down this path of integrating online and offline action .
For those interested in reading more about networked ways of working—including networked approaches to scale—check out the recent cover story of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), entitled “Working Wikily” by Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, and myself. The SSIR article explores how social media tools are driving more connected ways of working (what we call “working wikily”), characterized by principles of greater openness, transparency, distributed effort and collective action. Research came out of our work over the past three years with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (along with Beth) and other clients. We are also eagerly awaiting the release of Beth and Allison’s new book, The Networked Nonprofit. (Having had a sneak preview of the manuscript, I predict this is going to be the next BIG book in our sector. )
So: what other examples have you seen of innovative approaches to scaling social impact? How are other nonprofits using online platforms to disseminate real-world program models? What lessons are YOU learning?
Heather is a published author, speaker, and advisor to high-impact organizations; she recently joined the Monitor Institute as a senior consultant. She is the co-author of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, which was named a Top Ten Book of 2007 by the Economist.
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