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News for May 2008
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 28 May 2008 |
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| Live Online Community Organizing Seminar on July 9, 2008 |
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It's become very clear to me recently that one of the most powerful models for online communication is essentially community organizing. I think this is true whether we're looking at the rise of social networks, blogs, and other peer to peer tools or whether we're looking at how to get the highest return on our investment in online efforts. Our online seminar on this topic - Online Community Organizing: Proven Techniques for Building Power, Leadership, and Connection - is one of the most important ones we've developed recently. Our method in this seminar is to star with the programs, resources, and stakeholders that you already have and build your organizing strategy from there. The seminar will be offered live on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 12:15 Pacific Time.
Posted: 5/28/08; 3:08:45 PM # |
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27 May 2008 |
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| Discussion of Failure at Social Edge |
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There's a nice little discussion of the relationship of civil society to the taboo of failure over at Social Edge. I've written before about how avoiding revealing or exploring failure is a crippling part of the culture of much of civil society. The Social Edge participants explore some of the dynamics of that, present a few exceptions, and point the finger at the dynamics of giving and fundraising as a key reinforcer of this problem.
Posted: 5/27/08; 6:02:23 PM # |
| Boards of Midsize Nonprofits: Their Needs and Challenges |
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I have long held that the nonprofit corporate model, with its hierarchies attempting to match those of the for-profit world of shareholders, is a poor match for civil society, in which social service and social change have such rich webs of stakeholders. One bit of evidence for this is the fact that board-staff problems are the rule, not the exception. Great effort is required to make this model work. Nowhere does tis become more evident than in the Urban Institute's recent report on the Boards of Midsize Nonprofits: Their Needs and Challenges. The short summary is that leaders are not happy with their boards. I wonder what we could come up with if we took ten percent of the resources expended on board development and instead invested that in developing new organizational models.
Posted: 5/27/08; 5:47:40 PM # |
| Special Issue of Community Informatics: Wireless Networking for Communities, Citizens and the Public Interest |
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Have you been following what's happened to municipal wireless projects recently in North America? After using every legal and political pressure they could to prevent cities from getting into the wireless business directly so that they would have to partner with ISPs, now those same ISPs (EarthLink in particular) are abandoning the projects.
It's in this context that the Journal of Community Informatics has released a special issue on Wireless Networking for Communities, Citizens and the Public Interest. They don't tackle the ISP issue directly and their focus is not limited to the corporate welfare states in which it's happening, but they have some great topics, including: the iReach Project in Cambodia, whether municipal wireless fulfills digital divide promises, and a paper on community building in Toronto by Hanna Cho that we first published in the Journal of Networks and Civil Society.
Posted: 5/27/08; 5:36:07 PM # |
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19 May 2008 |
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| Dismantling Peace Movement Myths |
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Every movement and issue has its deeply held tropes that have not been well tested against reality. Here's a great example of someone working to address that dynamic. In a speech for Peace Action Maine in April, in an effort to help inspire new strategy, Frida Berrigan talked about Dismantling Peace Movement Myths. She addresses five of these tropes (which she calls myths): (1) In the 1960s, the peace movement was so much more powerful and so much cooler than we are today. (2) There are no young people active in the peace movement. Don’t they care? (3) We are marginalized and we are not having an impact. (4) We are not smart enough to end the war. (5) We can elect our way to an end to war.
Posted: 5/19/08; 7:04:34 PM # |
| Webby Winners 2008 in Activism |
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The 2008 Webby Award Winners in Activism and other categories were recently announced. I'm not really sure that the Webbys matter overall or that their winners should be emulated, but they are no doubt valuable in some way to the organizations that win them and the designers they hire. The winners in activism include Love is Respect, Invisible Children, Eyes on Darfur, Fashion Against AIDS, and Make It Right.
Posted: 5/19/08; 6:59:16 PM # |
| Going Postal: Mailing Rate Hikes Pinch Small Magazines, Thanks to Time Warner |
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I have been known to mock the way it sometimes seems like the only issue that really unifies nonprofit organizations is the matter of postage rates. (Why they can't seem to care about net neutrality, which is essentially the same issue, really baffles me.) But I paid close attention to the recent rate hikes affecting independent publishing, because they were less about the right of nonprofits to send gobs of solicitations than about the ability of small organizations (nonprofit and for profit) to be able to publish successfully in print.
In Going Postal, Callie Enlow describes how Time Warner ramrodded through a proposal to drop one of the essential premises on which the U.S. Postal Service was created - promoting the free flow of ideas by giving preferential treatment to their most common method of conveyance: the printed pages of periodicals - in a complex overhaul of the rate system that would favor their publications over those of anyone smaller than them.
Posted: 5/19/08; 6:53:31 PM # |
| What Does Gartner Really DO? |
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How much of technology consulting is really CYA for anxious IT staff? I remember attending a few Gartner conference calls (offered for free to nonprofits with much bowing and scraping by the latter) and wondering what all the fuss was about. The calls were absurdly focused on brand oriented buying decisions and making people feel like they were behind the times. Where was the real strategy, I wondered. Well, I'm guess I'm not the only one who wonders this. Bob Cringely's recent column asks: What Does Gartner Really DO? How much of this same critique can we level at portions of the nonprofit tech field that doesn't have anything like Gartner's stature, but often seems to wish it did?
Posted: 5/19/08; 6:42:01 PM # |
| Domestic spying under Bush; Al-Haramain in Oregon, NSA warrantless wiretapping |
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Despite the continuous stream of stories about the Bush administration's spying on domestic organizations and U.S. citizens, we've only touched the tip of the iceberg on this piece of the decline of American civil society. In Blacklisted by the Bush Government, part of a Salon Magazine investigative series on the topic, you can learn more about the case of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Oregon. It's ugly and getting uglier. Are you really certain none of your staff or members are on a government list?
Posted: 5/19/08; 6:36:43 PM # |
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14 May 2008 |
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| Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks, Now Available On Demand |
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We are steadily expanding our training catalog by adding online seminars that are available on demand, with hands-on coaching and personal attention. Today, I'm pleased to announce the availability of a two part seminar on Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks.
This is a workshop for anyone who sees the writing on the wall in regard to how networks are transforming fundraising, volunteer management, education, and advocacy. We need to get ahead of the curve on these issues, so that we are able to preserve and build on what's best about our organizations while taking advantage of the opportunities and meeting the challenges presented by the rapidly changing boundaries and relations within and around us.
Posted: 5/14/08; 4:51:51 PM # |
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13 May 2008 |
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| Trouble at Kookaburra Hollow: How Media Mediate |
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The latest issue of the Journal of Community Informatics is out. My favorite paper so far is a case study by Arnold, Shepherd, and Gibbs entitled Trouble at Kookaburra Hollow: How Media Mediate. Essentially it looks at a public conflict in a housing estate and how four different media - a community intranet, hand-made signs, public and private meetings, and a television broadcast - mediated the actions in the dispute. They also lay out three factors as accounting for the differences between each medium: the medium's domain, it's "register", and it's patterns of circulation.
Posted: 5/13/08; 5:03:39 PM # |
| What Does a Nonprofit CRM Implementation Cost? |
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Although the blog is SalesForce focused, NonprofitCRM's Anand Sethupathy's recent post on the cost of a CRM implementation is worthwhile reading for anyone thinking about planning such a project. All the major cost factors are described, including: Business Functions, Business Process Re-engineering, Iteration Cycles, Training & Documentation Needs, 3rd Party Applications, Consultant, Custom Code, Systems Integration, Web Integration, Data Migration, Reporting Requirements, and Do It Yourself costs.
Posted: 5/13/08; 4:57:30 PM # |
| Journal of e-Media Studies Launches |
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The new Journal of e-Media Studies has published its inaugural issues. Published and supported by the Dartmouth College Library, the papers are available in full online. The first issue includes pieces on e-poetry, an examination of FolkVine, and a review of Fred Turner's excellent From Counterculture to Cyberculture.
Posted: 5/13/08; 4:44:33 PM # |
| IssueLab Research Closeup on Veteran's Health |
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This month's research theme at IssueLab is on Veteran's Health, a timely topic that is in desperate need of sober assessment. It opens with an editorial by Vanessa Williamson of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I like the very fact that there is an editorial involved. It's the multiple frames of reference here which reflect that, even though we must strive for quality in the specifics of our methods of investigation, research is not a socially or politically neutral phenomenon.
Posted: 5/13/08; 4:38:47 PM # |
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8 May 2008 |
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| Playing it Safe is a Trap: Five Syndromes in Online Marketing |
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As part of preparing for an upcoming seminar, I've been giving a lot of thought recently to patterns of failure in online marketing efforts. I had a very big list for a while and then suddenly it hit me: Most of these patterns reflected a desire on the part of the organization to play it safe. I share some of these with you in today's feature article, entitled Playing it Safe is a Trap: Five Syndromes in Online Marketing. Briefly, the five syndromes relate to "best practices", the wrong metrics, self-promotion, cautious language, and control. These really helped me see online marketing programs in more strategic terms and I hope you find them similarly useful.
Posted: 5/8/08; 3:57:42 PM # |
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6 May 2008 |
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5 May 2008 |
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| Meaningful Acts of Appreciation for Boards and Staff |
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The nonprofit web magazine Blue Avocado is off to a great start. It's got small tidbits in a blog format, with a weekly mailing - so what's not to like? I recommend you just go ahead and subscribe, but in the meantime I'll get you started with a link to a very useful little piece. I'm a big believer in the power of authenticity, as you probably know, so I found the article on Meaningful Acts of Appreciation for Boards and Staff to be very worthwhile. If you have ever sent or received one of those robotic, generic messages that substitute for mindful gratitude these days, then I think you'll enjoy this piece.
Posted: 5/5/08; 5:29:19 PM # |
| What We Don't Know about Open Access: Research Questions in Need of Researchers |
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Over the course of the last year, I've repeatedly found myself stuck in regard to my own progress in thinking through the logic and business models of open access in regard to the two journals we've launched recently. Of course I want to implement it. I also want it to be sustainable. I know all of the quick and dirty answers to the obvious questions, but there is a decided absence of deeper research.
Turns out I'm not alone. In the recent issue of the Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber, the foremost advocate of open access, has written a detailed piece entitled What We Don't Know about Open Access: Research Questions in Need of Researchers. I would love to see nonprofit tech folk who are advocates of open access take on some of these. The most obvious one would be an up to date comparison of the software platforms available for open access deployment.
Posted: 5/5/08; 5:22:11 PM # |
| 2008 eNonprofits Benchmarks Study |
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The 2008 eNonprofits Benchmarks Study is out, covering the 2006 to 2007 time frame. I worry a bit about how benchmarks are used, but people really want to know how they are doing in the tactical mechanics of communication, in comparison to other organizations.
The authors define their key 2008 findings as: (1) Email open rates, click-through rates and response rates have fallen from 2006 to 2007. (2) The average nonprofit in the study sent an average of just over 4 emails per subscriber per month. (3) The annual churn rate dropped from 21 percent to 19 percent. (4) The total amount raised online increased by 19 percent. (5) The average advocacy email response rate was 7.5 percent. (6) The average fundraising email response rate was .13 percent. (7) Although less than 1% in numbers, $1,000+ gifts made up 20 percent of the amount raised online. (8) Almost 60 percent of subscribers did not take any online advocacy actions over the course of the year. (9) Subscribers taking 6 or more online actions in a year, made up just 5 percent of list size but accounted for 42 percent of organizations' total actions.
Posted: 5/5/08; 5:13:03 PM # |
| The South African Civil Society Information Service |
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I'm incredibly excited to see the launch of The South African Civil Society Information Service. I remember conversations with the SANGONeT leaders a couple of years ago in which the notion of such a service was clearly starting to come together. The implementation looks top notch and they couldn't have a better leader than Fazila Farouk. I'm looking forward to following it closely - I believe this project will be broadly influential and eminently replicable.
Posted: 5/5/08; 3:46:51 PM # |
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1 May 2008 |
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| May Day! May Day! |
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I have seen dozens of people come to wide-eyed amazement when they learn a bit about the political history of May Day. Myself, I'm fond of both its nature based history and its connection with labor and democratic values. In May Day! May Day! Zephyr Teachout writes that "May Day is to Labor Day as Martin Luther King, Jr. is to President Lyndon Johnson". I like that.
Posted: 5/1/08; 3:14:13 PM # |
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