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News for July 2009
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 28 July 2009 |
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| Facing Facebook Seminar Now Available On Demand |
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We're bringing out our on-demand workshops much closer to the dates of our live recording sessions these days. So, our new Facing Facebook workshop is particularly timely. This is one of the few workshops that proposes an actual coherent strategy for approaching the Facebook social network, rather than just offering a collection of tips and weakly analyzed case studies. Most importantly, since we all have this worry at times, this workshop focuses on how to make sure that Facebook is a tool for your organization, rather than the other way around. As with all our on-demand workshops, a normally pricey one-on-one consultation is included in the package.
Posted: 7/28/09; 3:53:30 PM # |
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27 July 2009 |
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| Collaboration in Action: A Survey of Community Collaboratives |
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Scott London's Collaboration in Action is a survey of collaboratives from sixteen different communities in four major strategic categories: Appreciative Planning, Collective Strategies, Dialogues, and Negotiated Settlements. It's not a huge report, but rather a solid and useful read for anyone looking at community-based, multi-organization initiatives.
Posted: 7/27/09; 4:47:30 PM # |
| How to Think Strategically: Six Approaches |
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We use and misuse the word "strategy" constantly in civil society. Thus it's interesting to examine what it actually means to think strategically and how we might encourage that in our organizations. This is something explored by Michael Watkins in his 2007 Harvard Business review article on
How to Think Strategically. He recommends six ways to learn this skill: immersion, apprenticeships, simulations, game-theory training, case-based education, and cognitive reshaping. Are our capacity-builders investing in these things, I wonder?
Posted: 7/27/09; 4:42:47 PM # |
| 38% Decline in Direct Mail Predicted |
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I can't track down the methodology, but some marketing experts are predicting a 38% decline in direct mail in the coming five years. Intuitively this seems right to me. The digital alternatives have needed time to mature. And the economic crisis will be a serious kick in the head to expensive media. Finally, there is the rumor that the USPS will eliminate Saturday delivery. There are a lot of interesting factors at play.
Posted: 7/27/09; 4:34:35 PM # |
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21 July 2009 |
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| Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar on Sept. 2 & 9, 2009 |
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I'm very pleased to be teaching our Course Corrections, Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar in September. The people who participate tend to be those with vision, experience, and commitment. I used to teach workshops for people just starting to think about doing value-driven work for the first time, and their focus was often more on school, less on the discipline of their own ideas. This workshop is a lot more oriented to people have already had the pleasure of making interesting mistakes! If you think it's time for a course correction of sorts in your own work as a leader, either where you are or someplace else, you might want to check this one out.
Posted: 7/21/09; 5:29:13 PM # |
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20 July 2009 |
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14 July 2009 |
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| The Barefoot Guide to Working with Organizations and Social Change |
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Way too late last night, I finished reading The Barefoot Guide to Working with Organizations and Social Change (cover page for 171 page PDF, separate chapter downloads, with Creative Commons License). If you are involved in any way with social change work, you owe it to yourself and your colleagues to spend at least a little time with this insightful, engaging, and (without a doubt) colorful guidebook. The book starts in the right place - a whole systems perspective on organizations, grounded in the importance of understanding ourselves and the inner lives of others. Then it ventures into its focus area: How to facilitate change in organizations and thrive while doing it. Read this book.
Posted: 7/14/09; 5:09:42 PM # |
| The Next Open Source Movement: Colleges Show Us How to Pool Resources to Build Software |
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Colleagues of mine have often tried to organize groups of organizations to pool their resources to create open source alternatives to tools on which they currently (collectively) spend millions. These collaborations are very hard to organize. With relationship management software, we're left with Salesforce (a superb commercial product), some hard-to-implement open source tools that mostly don't compare well, and getting sucked into the fragmentation of the walled gardens of social networks. We can do better than this. Colleges are showing us how, as we learn in The Next Open Source Movement, an article about a high end open source tool for the management of college financial transactions and reporting.
Posted: 7/14/09; 4:59:50 PM # |
| Conducting Quality Impact Evaluations Under Time and Data Constraints |
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I taught a really satisfying workshop recently on Integrated Program Evaluation, so my filters are still set for interesting resources on that topic. Sometimes, we're pressured to do evaluations that are not merely unintegrated, but downright awkward. The World Bank (of all places) has produced a solid guide to Conducting Quality Impact Evaluations Under Time and Data Constraints (31 page PDF). It has well-conceived ideas for simplifying evaluation design (something that often helps with integration, as well), building genuinely functional comparisons, working with secondary data (something we should all learn to do more of), and reducing the costs of data collection (another hallmark of integrated design). I highly recommend this.
Posted: 7/14/09; 4:53:50 PM # |
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13 July 2009 |
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| Why Your Nonprofit's Volunteer Base Should Blog for Your Nonprofit |
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We've been doing a lot of social media and blog network organizing for our clients over the years (actually, we first advocated for the weblog as a model for nonprofit websites in 1999) and interest seems to be picking up these days. "Why Your Nonprofit's Volunteer Base Should Blog for Your Nonprofit" lays out one specific argument in favor of this approach - search engine optimization. Although much SEO can be either sleazy or counterproductive, the one fail-safe strategy is building what might be called "network relevance". That is to say, if other people online care enough about you and your cause to blog about it, your site and sites related to your cause are more likely to be discovered by people searching.
Posted: 7/13/09; 8:22:19 AM # |
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9 July 2009 |
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6 July 2009 |
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