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News for June 2009
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 25 June 2009 |
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23 June 2009 |
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| Building National Campaigns: Activists, Alliances, and How Change Happens |
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Oxfam International has tremendous organizational experience in supporting campaigns around the world. They are also doing their best to share that experience with others. On Building National Campaigns: Activists, Alliances, and How Change Happens (cover page for 115 page PDF and hard copy order, Dave Dalton describes and analyzes five campaigns in Colombia, Morocco, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Among other things, he digs into the practical aspects of building and maintaining alliances in the face of hardships and developing sustainable strategies. Too many case studies barely scratch the surface of replicable lessons and insights and that's often why I don't like them as a teaching tool. But in this case, it's all organized in terms of those lessons and how they can be generalized. I highly recommend it.
Posted: 6/23/09; 6:24:09 PM # |
| Competition or Collaboration? |
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Several years ago I had a discussion with a well-known nonprofit technology funder who argued that large results from online nonprofit projects could best be achieved through a winner-take-all model. This was important enough that he even funded an excellent report in support of the argument, and I wanted him to consider funding an alternative point of view: that open standards, open APIs, good business models, a little arm-twisting, and visionary (but not necessarily substantial) funding could accomplish much larger results through nourishing open information ecosystems, innovation, and win-win collaboration. The example at hand at the time was interoperability (or rather lack thereof) between the major online volunteer opportunity databases.
So it's with great interest and the investment of years of my own passion for this topic, that I direct you to a conversation on Competition or Collaboration at Social Edge. It's being hosted by Peter Dietz of Social Actions and the trigger once more is interoperability of volunteer opportunity databases! It's already a great discussion.
Posted: 6/23/09; 6:09:35 PM # |
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22 June 2009 |
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| Hype, Anxiety, and Hope: How To Do Social Media Wrong |
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We did it with Web 1.0 and we're doing it again. We're told we're falling behind and that we need to catch up with the flock. We're adrift when it comes to meaningful metrics and tangible guidelines. We're looking at social media and framing our strategies in terms of hype, anxiety, and hope. In How To Do Social Media Wrong (and How To Do It Right), I get even more blunt about it. And I offer three symptoms of our errors, four recommended practices, and five ways to get started on a better path.
Posted: 6/22/09; 7:34:06 PM # |
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17 June 2009 |
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| Beyond the Email Blast Seminar Now Available On Demand |
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Despite the hype of other media, email is still the single most powerful online communication tool we have. But most of us have managed to treat it like another broadcast tool and then wonder when our open rates and clickthrough rates decline! Why are we surprised? It's basically the same thing we did to postal mail, but it doesn't have to be like that. I am very excited about my seminar entitled Beyond the Email Blast: Tapping the Full Power of Email Marketing. It's now available on-demand, which means you can watch it whenever is most convenient to you. As with all our on-demand seminars, it also includes a 30 minute consultation.
Posted: 6/17/09; 4:27:53 PM # |
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16 June 2009 |
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| The First Principle of Voluntary Action |
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I try to follow the work of grantmakers and others who share my concern with the health of civil society in general. One such organization - The Baring Foundation - commissioned a series of essays on the topic of the "independence" of the nonprofit sector in several countries, entitled The First Principle of Voluntary Action (140 page PDF). These essays focus on the matter of independence from government, not from corporate influence. Despite this shortcoming, the historical analysis, principles, and comparisons included here are absolutely critical to any long term vision of civil society.
Posted: 6/16/09; 6:29:01 PM # |
| Migrating to Electronic Media: The State of Print and Electronic Publications in Higher Ed 2009 |
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I've talked for years about the "money on the table" with nonprofit print publications for which there are likely electronic alternatives. As with so many things, it's only with hard times that some organizations are coming around to doing real audits of how much money they could save migrating to online media for various types of communication. But it's happening. In a recent survey on The State of Print and Electronic Publications in Higher Ed 2009 (7 page PDF), migration rates are anywhere from a low of 23% for annual reports to a high of 64% for campus news. Fundraising is still at the low end, at 33%, with people clinging to ever narrower margins in their direct mail programs.
Posted: 6/16/09; 6:13:46 PM # |
| Insights into Participatory Video: A Handbook for the Field |
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Video is one of these media that can draw us into focusing too much on form and not enough on substance, too much on the product and not enough on relationship-building. But when the whole point of a video project is to encourage people to speak for themselves, then the power of video is aligned with its strategy. That is very much the case with Insight and its free guide: Insights into Participatory Video: A Handbook for the Field (cover page for 129 page PDF). This isn't just another video production guide for nonprofits. It's just as much about community organizing, communication, and development.
Posted: 6/16/09; 6:06:37 PM # |
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15 June 2009 |
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| Assessing the Health of Your Network |
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Although I think that Madeleine Taylor's scorecard on Assessing the Health of Your Network is a fine quick and dirty tool for getting you to focus on some key questions related to networks and community building (as with so many things of this nature, a result of Kellogg Foundation funding), it fundamentally approaches networks from the wrong angle. Everything about the health of networks derives from the combined effects of the individual relationships. For example, a key metric as to whether a group is actually a network or just another group, is something called the Clustering Coefficient. That coefficient measures how richly interconnected the members of the group are - that richness of connection is what makes networks so much greater than the sum of their parts, and so much more than just another list. I would love to see simple tools for helping organizations genuinely approach networks as networks.
Posted: 6/15/09; 8:23:07 AM # |
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10 June 2009 |
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| The Impending Demise of the University |
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Although I find it a little Libertarian for my tastes at times, I still read the online magazine Edge regularly. Don Tapscott's recent piece on The Impending Demise of the University is wonderfully provocative. He identifies five challenges to the current model of the university: a challenge to teaching, a challenge of the revenue model, a challenge to credentialing, a challenge to the campus, and a challenge to the relationship of the university to other institutions. My favorite sentence after my first read: "Universities should be places to learn, not to teach."
Posted: 6/10/09; 3:24:15 PM # |
| Ethics and Nonprofits |
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Although the topic is important, I am always a little worried when I see attention directed at the ethical lapses of nonprofit organizations. Even if individual stories get us riled up, the scale of evil committed by government and business dwarfs anything we're able to do in civl society. Sometimes it's the enemies of civil society doing the finger pointing. Sometimes, it's our inferiority complex at work. Sometimes, it's just another form of infighting.
Deborah Rhode and Amanda Packel, writing on Ethics and Nonprofits are none of these things. Instead, they are smart contributors to a conversation that is crucial for the protection of the assets of civil society. The authors explore the types of ethical breaches, their causes, and steps we can take to address them. To me, the most interesting ideas are related to building an ethical culture, because that same culture will contribute to innovation, job satisfaction, and effectiveness.
Posted: 6/10/09; 3:15:09 PM # |
| Journal of Arts and Communities |
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The first issue of the Journal of Arts and Communities is out and I'm very excited about it. The role of the arts in building community and the corresponding role of communities in making art are both tremendously important topics for civil society in general, not just so-called "arts" organizations. My favorite papers are: "Improvising in Ruyang: Community Art as Ecological Practice", "Senior Well-being, Music-based Participatory Arts and the Value of Qualitative Evidence", and "Song and the Presence of Absent Communities".
Posted: 6/10/09; 3:01:43 PM # |
| Communicating for Impact Guide |
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As readers will probably know, I'm an unabashed fan of GrantCraft and its programs. It's most recent Guide - Communicating for Impact - touches on a topic of some importance to me: How can foundations better integrate good communication into their work? The weaknesses of the report are the weaknesses of the field of professional communication in general, including the fact that "communication" itself is defined as only half of what it actually is: the talking part and not the listening part. But given how communication of any sort is "bolted-on" after the fact in most foundations, this Guide - through its model of a "communication lens" if nothing else - will go a long way toward correcting that problem, and thus giving grantmakers a greater range of tools for meeting their goals.
Posted: 6/10/09; 2:56:48 PM # |
| Beyond Good Intentions: A Film Series about Improving International Aid |
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The final film in the Beyond Good Intentions series has been released. Committed to "uncovering more innovative and effective approaches to international aid worldwide", the series follows filmmaker Tori Hogan around the world as she talks to aid workers and communities in eight countries. (The series caused quite a stir with its critique of microfinance and of Kiva in particular.) The ten episodes explore these topics: Disaster Relief, Faith-Based Aid, For-Profit Approaches, Higher Standards for Non-Profits, International Aid Workers, Micro-Lending, Peace Corps, Research in Development, Social Entrepreneurship, and Volunteering Abroad.
Posted: 6/10/09; 2:45:45 PM # |
| A Lexicon of Disappointment |
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Civil society organizations trade in a dangerous substance. It's called "hope" and sometimes it seems like an antidote to fear and sometimes it seems like a cause. In A Lexicon of Disappointment, Naomi Klein captures something I've been feeling in many American nonprofits in the last few months, as the reality of the Obama administration sinks in. Here are some of the words she proposes we start using: Hopeover: "Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame." Hoper coaster: "Like a roller coaster, the hoper coaster describes the intense emotional peaks and valleys of the Obama era...." Hopesick: "Like the homesick, hopesick individuals are intensely nostalgic." Hope fiend: "With hope receding, the hope fiend, like the dope fiend, goes into serious withdrawal, willing to do anything to chase the buzz." Hopebreak: "Like the heartbroken lover, the hopebroken Obama-ite is not mad but terribly sad. She projected messianic powers onto Obama and is now inconsolable in her disappointment."
Posted: 6/10/09; 2:39:21 PM # |
| 5 Warning Signs of a Project In Danger |
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Georgina Laidlaw has a nice little piece on the 5 Warning Signs of a Project In Danger at WebWorkerDaily. The great thing about this article is that it's from the perspective of a consultant, who might not have much of an inside view as to what is going on with a project politically at any given time. The warning signs she lists are a little vaguely titled, but the gist of each of them is quite useful: Moving Away from the Agreed Plan, Unprecedented Behavior, Silence, Fast Talking, and General Unease.
Posted: 6/10/09; 2:32:38 PM # |
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3 June 2009 |
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| Small is Beautiful: Using Twitter, Flickr, Microblogging... Seminar on July 8, 2009 |
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In the nonprofit sectors, we love our content. Our issues are the reason for our existence, after all! But one result is that we're enamored of weighty, "publication" style models of communication - just look at most nonprofit newsletters, while the rest of the world is building entirely new ecosystems of engagement on top of microcontent. On July 8, 2009, I'll be teaching a brand new seminar entitled Small is Beautiful: Using Twitter, Flickr, Microblogging, Links, and Other Microcontent for Engagement. If you're interested in microcontent strategies that are firmly grounded in existing resources, reality, and relationships, rather than hype, hope, and hubris, then this would be a smart workshop to take.
Posted: 6/3/09; 6:03:52 PM # |
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2 June 2009 |
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| Low-Wage Workers and Nonprofits: A Must-Read Article by Jan Masaoka |
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We don't talk much about how many low-wage workers there are in the nonprofit sector. (The reasons are no doubt complicated, but I wonder if we're ashamed or defensive.) Writing in Blue Avocado, Jan Masaoka doesn't shy away from the topic. In Low-Wage Workers and Nonprofits, she looks at the problem head-on, admits that the path toward "just paying people more" is far from obvious, and offers short, medium, and long term approaches, including flex time, paycheck options, employee assistance, cafeteria plans, and so on, as well as discussions and advocacy that can be pursued by consultants, board members, and managers. There are plenty of articles I will recommend as valuable, where reading them is a good idea - reading this one is a responsibility. Make sure everyone you work with has seen it.
Posted: 6/2/09; 6:03:31 PM # |
| How to Counter Resistance to Change |
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Peter Bregman's How to Counter Resistance to Change is valuable, but a wee bit confusing. The title suggests that the author believes people resist change, but that is just there to draw us in - since most of us seem to believe that people do, in fact, resist change. But then he points out something that anyone who is paying attention will realize: People make all kinds of changes all the time. It's not change that people resist, it's BEING changed. I find this is especially true in the world of nonprofit technology, where we still insist on the idea that people just don't want to change and then we act to try to make them change (for example: by threatening that they will fall behind, or through excessive hype).The author proposes specific change management approaches to address this dynamic, which will seem obvious once you read them. I just wish I saw them in action more often.
Posted: 6/2/09; 5:56:32 PM # |
| A Practical Guide To Implementing Web 2.0 In Your Organization |
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It's been too long since I linked to Dave Pollard, but his recent Practical Guide To Implementing Web 2.0 In Your Organization reminds me why I like his work. He pulls no punches. His reasoning is firmly based in the realities of human communication. And he is clear and thorough in his presentations. The focus here is on specific tools (which in another author's hands would worry me, because we get obsessed by tools and forget their purpose). He presents his eight favorites: real-time conversation, virtual presence, mindmapping, blogs (and newsletters), canvassing tools, simulations and planning, affinity detectors, and facilitation.
Posted: 6/2/09; 5:47:18 PM # |
| Remediating Cultural Services in Second Life: The Case of Info Island DK |
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A Danish library system tried to build a presence in Second Life. I'm not sure why they thought this was a good idea, but then its been my impression that most Second Life projects are driven primarily by people who think it's cool. That's a powerful motivator, but not always one that produces strategic discipline. First Monday has now published a paper on this project, entitled Remediating Cultural Services in Second Life: The Case of Info Island DK. The paper is worth reading, but I'm disappointed that it brushes off the fact that none of the three target groups - project members, library professionals, or library users - adopted the tool. It looks to me as though they never did even the most basic communication mapping - looking to see whether users of the library were also users of Second Life!
Posted: 6/2/09; 5:29:10 PM # |
| A New Intersection: The Surprising Effectiveness of an Online Art "Class" |
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Jillaine Smith has been in one of those open spaces we all find ourselves in from time to time, when we're wondering how things connect in our lives and what's going to happen next. In A New Intersection, she shares a discovery she made when taking an unusual online art course. The new intersection she's referring to here is that of ICT and art instruction, with intriguing observations about surprising details.
Posted: 6/2/09; 8:28:53 AM # |
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