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News for January 2009
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 27 January 2009 |
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| Scaling Up Listening: Powerful Online Relationship Building Seminar on March 11, 2009 |
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More and more over the last couple of years, I have seen online communication experts using variations on the word "listening", when describing what it takes to succeed. This is fantastic news, because for too long we have thought that the only way to increase our influence was to scale up talking. The loyalty and engagement exhibited by people who feel barraged with messages is nothing compared with that exhibited by those who feel heard and understood. I'm pleased to be offering a workshop on this topic on March 11, 2009: Scaling Up Listening: Powerful Online Relationship Building. I look forward to teaching this one!
Posted: 1/27/09; 6:01:21 PM # |
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26 January 2009 |
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| Social Media Predictions for 2009 |
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Peter Kim has collected the prognostications of a dozen or so writers about social media (23 page PDF). Although they are uniformly commercial in their orientation, I find most of these insights absolutely spot on. Plus, there is a great balance between positive and negative predictions, which should keep us all on our toes. I highly recommend this as discussion material for staff meetings, luncheons, and conferences.
Posted: 1/26/09; 5:46:46 PM # |
| Crisis as Opportunity for World Social Forum Goals |
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The President of Brazil has decided to attend the World Social Forum, a global gathering of civil society organizations and movements, rather than the World Economic Forum, a global gathering of the business and government elite. Which gathering are your leaders attending? This is how Mario Osava opens his article on Crisis as Opportunity for "Another World", in which he describes the potential for convergence and impact that faces this year's gathering of 100,000 activists in Belem, Brazil.
Posted: 1/26/09; 5:39:02 PM # |
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21 January 2009 |
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| The Guide to Nonprofit Email: Finally Available in Hard Copy! |
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I'm pleased to announce that, as of today, one of our signature publications - The Guide to Nonprofit Email - is now available in a hard copy edition, similar in format to that of our other larger print editions. Every time the hype cycle announces that we should all give up email for the latest proprietary tool, the evidence keeps bringing us back to just how critical email is to any communication strategy.
Posted: 1/21/09; 6:14:09 PM # |
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20 January 2009 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Returns from End-of-Year Doldrums |
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I have yet to share what happened in December to get me to pretty much stop writing for the last few weeks. I still intend to, but I decided that it was better to just write first. So, today I'm sharing with you just a few items that I think you'll like. I don't want to overwhelm you with a backlog, but there will be lots more in the coming days.
Posted: 1/20/09; 5:20:36 PM # |
| Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online |
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I got a huge kick out of Michael Agger's Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online at Slate Magazine. Part visual experiment, part research report, and part straight up goofiness, he does communicate a lot about how people really behave when they hit a web page. I think he's slightly wrong about blogs and even more wrong about how people read authors and sites to which they have established some loyalty or habit, but for the typical nonprofit website, there is a lot to learn here.
Posted: 1/20/09; 5:17:29 PM # |
| Enterprise RSS: The State of the Industry |
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Over the years, we've done a lot of work on the use of RSS in the nonprofit sector, particularly its application to philanthropic organizations. Greg Reinacker's recent short piece on Enterprise RSS caught my attention. It's a straight up corporate perspective, but a valuable one to any organization that tracks "enterprise" trends. His team talks to about 50 large companies every week and what he has discovered is that RSS plays a vital role in a number of critical business functions, including portals, alerts, tracking systems, knowledge capture, social networking, and collaboration. Just like email, it's not flashy and it doesn't attract hype, but it's critical.
Posted: 1/20/09; 5:02:41 PM # |
| Social Movements 2.0: Five Ways They're Important and Eight Things We Don't Know |
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I can barely bring myself to link to anything with the label two-point-oh on it, but Brendan Smith, Tim Costello and Jeremy Brecher are writers I truly admire. Their recent piece on Social Movements 2.0 is a solid overview piece, not breathless or defensive in any way. It opens with a "virtual strike" of an Italian company by picketers in Second Life, runs through a range of well-linked stories and resources, and explores what we do and don't know about online organizing. Their five reasons why network communication is relevant to social movements are: (1) the ease of group formation, (2) its capacity for scale and amplification, (3) its interactive nature, (4) its capacity to undermine hierarchies, and (5) the cheapness and ease of its tools. They get some things wrong - the Internet and the Web have been interactive and peer to peer from the beginning - but their key points are important.
Their descriptions of the eight things we don't know - and need to find out - are what's really interesting about this piece: (1) What does it mean when individuals begin organizing outside and without the help of traditional organizations? (2) It's easy and cheap for organizations to bring people together into a swarm or smart mob, but what do you do with them then? (3) Will offline social movement organizations be willing to cede control as ordinary people increasingly leverage social networking tools to channel their own activities? (4) How do labor and social movement organizations address the dangers associated with online action? (5) How do we track the demographics of who's online and who's not and what tools they are using? (6) How do we present complex ideas online? (7) How does offline and online social movement building fit together? (8) How can social movements wield real power online?
Posted: 1/20/09; 4:41:26 PM # |
| The Whitehouse has a Blog |
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The Obama Whitehouse has a blog. Does your organization? I have been watching the blogging conversation for a decade now, from puzzled dismissal to curiosity to scornful dismissal to mixed camps. I suspect this will bring down one more barrier in those nonprofit organizations that, as little as a year ago, were saying that blogs were a fad and if not, that blogs were dying.
Posted: 1/20/09; 4:28:45 PM # |
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13 January 2009 |
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| Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks Seminar, Feb 18 & 25, 2009 |
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One of the major barriers for organizations in leveraging the resources that networks (social, professional, and otherwise) have to offer is the range of impacts that they can have on roles, responsibilities, management, and other structural elements of the organization itself. Organizations have to adapt to networks if they are to influence them and thrive in them. Our upcoming workshop, Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks, addresses this issue in a practical, hands-on manner. The seminar is in two parts, designed to give you things you can do with your organization in time to have an impact during this difficult downturn we're all facing. We look at both cherry picking short term opportunities and laying the groundwork for long term strategic change. We pay particular attention to the potential impacts on fundraising, volunteer programs, and other networks that harbor the resources our causes need to succeed.
Posted: 1/13/09; 5:08:30 PM # |
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7 January 2009 |
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