[Printer Friendly Version]

News for February 2010

23 February 2010

Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, and the Campaign to Kill Community Organizing

Something terribly unsettling is going on in the world of community organizing. The phrase itself and possibly the concept are under attack by the right-wing meme machine in the US. David Neiwert summarizes a lot of what's going on in this post at Crooks and Liars: Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, and the Campaign to Kill Community Organizing. He opens with a video (which I can't really tolerate watching) of Beck doing his bizarre schtick against ACORN. Looks like ACORN itself may dissolve as a national organization, despite the independent investigations vindicating the organization. But acorn itself is not the only target. Funding for community organizing is muddled in general as is the entire dialogue. This ongoing strategy to use sleaze and innuendo and propaganda to undermine the language of civil society is deeply disturbing to me. I for one don't plan to stop using the phrase "community organizing". It's a noble practice that contributes to the heart of our democracy and economy and, in many respects, is the antidote to much that ails us as a society. Posted: 2/23/10; 6:06:02 PM #

"Collaboration and Community" by Scott London

I'm teaching a workshop soon on Online Community Organizing and I took the time to re-read Scott London's super essay on Collaboration and Community. It's jam-packed with insights that we keep ignoring in our online efforts. For example, London lists five key weaknesses of collaboration in general: (1) Collaboration is a notoriously time-consuming process and is not suitable for problems that require quick and decisive action. (2) Power inequalities among the parties can derail the process. (Boy is this a big one that we ignore, especially when funders are at the table.) (3) The norms of consensus and joint decision-making sometimes require that the common good take precedence over the interests of a few. (I find this is exacerbated by our tendencies to want to pretend these issues don't even exist.) (4) Collaboration works best in small groups and often breaks down in groups that are too large. (5) Collaboration is meaningless without the power to implement final decisions. Posted: 2/23/10; 5:55:20 PM #

New Judges for Just Awards: Aaron Dorfman, Alana Conner, Paul Light, and Rosetta Thurman

The Just Awards nominations are getting some good attention. (Thank you for spreading the word.) Since I last wrote about the awards, we've added four new people to our panel of judges: Aaron Dorfman, Alana Conner, Paul Light, and Rosetta Thurman. We have short bios (and photos) of each, but briefly: Aaron Dorfman is the Executive Director of the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy. Alana Conner is a Senior Editor at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Paul Light is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service, and Rosetta Thurman is a prolific blogger at places such as Perspectives from the Pipeline and Change.org. Posted: 2/23/10; 5:45:41 PM #

Wall Street, by Doug Henwood: A (Now) Free Book that Many of Us Need to Read

People who work in civil society are not immune to the personal and political delusions about wealth that permeate our culture. Those delusions, combined with the service vs change dynamic in our sector, means that we often embrace "change" strategies that reinforce the status quo -- whether it's in our personal lives, organizational lives, or our economic lives as citizens. Given the prominence of the finance sector on our minds these days, I find that it's a good time to recommend Wall Street, a book by Doug Henwood. Mr Henwood is one my favorite economists, right up there with Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. The book was written before the current crisis, which I believe gives us exactly the right analytical perspective. We are easily lost in the spin of the day, even our own. Posted: 2/23/10; 5:29:35 PM #

16 February 2010

The Voice of Your Community: The Strategic Role of Stakeholder-Generated Content - Seminar Now Available On Demand

The phrases used to describe social content on our websites are not the best. I use the phrase "stakeholder generated content" and most people favor the unfortunate "user generated content" moniker. I don't care for these phrases because they focus our attention on content and not on communication. What's really happening with this ongoing revolution is that we are empowering our stakeholders to communicate, in support of their own interests and relationships. That's the game-changing perspective that makes this all so important. We teach that perspective, along with the practical planning considerations needed to implemented it, in the latest addition to our on-demand seminar catalog: The Voice of Your Community: The Strategic Role of Stakeholder-Generated Content. Check out the details and remember that, as with all our current on-demand workshops, it comes with a 30 minute private consultation, focused specifically on the issues you and your team identify as most important to your organization's success. Posted: 2/16/10; 3:49:39 PM #

15 February 2010

Inaugural Issue of the Journal of New Organizing

As a publisher, editor, and contributor to various journals, I'm very happy to witness the launch of Journal of New Organizing. It has the support of the well funded and vibrant New Organizing Institute, which means we can expect open access and a critical mass of interest. It's inaugural issue is a little too Obama focused for my taste, but I nevertheless enjoyed every piece: Socially Networking Your Data: An Obama Campaign Case Study, Coalition Organizing on Campus: A Student Perspective, Keeping Hope Alive: The Story of Obama's Neighborhood Teams Following Election Day, and Lessons Organizers Can Learn From the Military. The Internet has made us all organizers, so this one is worth your time. Posted: 2/15/10; 5:42:16 PM #

5 Tips for Creating Non-Profit Online Communities

I am pleased to see that, more and more, listening is becoming a critical early step and key ongoing practice in recommended communication strategies of all kinds. As little as a year or two ago, it was more of an off-handed acknowledgement, quickly passed over in favor of discussions of tools and how to turn social media into broadcast media. Geoff Livingston's 5 Tips for Creating Non-Profit Online Communities is a great example of this new strategic commitment. He gets it right from the start with tip #1: The Cause is the Purpose. Too often nonprofits will make the organization itself the purpose. Big mistake. Tip #2 is listening and he explicitly identifies the need for ongoing systems for paying attention to stakeholders. Read on for more detail about these two, along with his other three tips. This is inspiring stuff. Posted: 2/15/10; 5:35:11 PM #

Cheap, Fast, and Good. Can Nonprofits have them All?

There is occasionally a culture of exceptionalism in the nonprofit sector: We think our audiences are different and thus they will read our email newsletter, sent out as a 20 page PDF attachment. We think we shouldn't have to look at efficient workflows because we can always squeeze more time out of our staff. We think we shouldn't have to pay for expert advice because, well, we're a nonprofit. You're probably familiar with some of these. I'll admit that I've caught myself on both sides of these dynamics. There is a saying among techies: "You want the project done cheap? You want it fast? You want it good? Pick two." Michelle Murrain tackles the question of whether nonprofits are the exception to this rule: Cheap, Fast, and Good. Can Nonprofits have them All? Posted: 2/15/10; 5:18:27 PM #

Massachusetts Government Blogging Toolkit

The Massachusetts State government has published a pith Blogging Toolkit (for some reason published as a 4 page PDF) that is as valuable to the staff of civil society organizations as it is to government employees. It's full of smart questions about audience and business goals, policy and security considerations, approval processes (which might actually be handy for some nonprofits to emulate), and recommended blogging practices. Posted: 2/15/10; 5:11:34 PM #

Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life

I'm fond of convincing nonprofit leaders that it's smarter to focus on workflow integration than on database integration. Most of the time, the real problems we face with isolated, proprietary, non-interoperable applications is how many inboxes we have and how much re-entering we have to do. Gina Trapani gets that in her short but useful piece on Mastering Your Social Media Life. She advices us to (1) integrate our inboxes, (2) integrate our interfaces, and (3) separate our roles. You would think these issues would be obvious, but in fact they often stop nonprofit leaders from pursuing social media altogether. Posted: 2/15/10; 5:04:31 PM #

10 February 2010

Online Community Organizing Seminar on March 17, 2010

I really love this upcoming seminar: Online Community Organizing - Proven Techniques for Building Power, Leadership, and Connection. It focuses on leveraging the strengths of organizations, avoids technocentric traps, but most importantly, creates a clear vision for the use of many contemporary online tools, especially social media. If you're in any way involved in community building (or want to be) or if you are looking for an organizationally empowered approach to social media, then I recommend you consider this seminar. It will be offered online Wednesday, March 17, 2010. Posted: 2/10/10; 5:34:10 PM #

8 February 2010

Recession Forces Nonprofits to Consolidate

Some buzz on various mailing lists has followed the publication of this article in the Wall Street Journal, by Banjo and Kalita: Recession Forces Nonprofits to Consolidate. Despite my own reputation for "business-like" processes, there are a lot of pernicious concepts that arise when we enter the realm of civil society as seen from the world of business. For example, in this article, the notion of the "weakness" of certain organizations is tossed about freely, when what it really means is financial weakness. But in the world of business (and the Wall Street Journal), that's the only weakness that counts. More significantly though, this article raises the cliched notion that there are just "too many nonprofits". (It's funny how nobody ever says that about small businesses in general.) Now I think there is plenty of silly turf preservation out there and I have managed many a nonprofit merger. But I tend to think that we need to direct our attention to the structure of the sector as a whole. How can we structure things so that, like in the world of small business, it's a good thing that people want to start small organizations doing good works? How can we make that sustainable? That said, I think this article is a valuable reality check in today's economic circumstances. Social service organizations are being hurt the worst and that has real meaning for people's lives, in the here and now. And it too raises structural issues as to how such services are best delivered. I keep wondering what we can learn from the social democracies of Europe and how those models of success might be blended with the social entrepreneurialism of our American civil society. Til then, there are people that need real help, right now. And they aren't getting it. Posted: 2/8/10; 5:55:38 PM #

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy

A great many of my communication and planning engagements can be classified as some kind of "knowledge management". Thus I often run into the now classical hierarchy of data-information-knowledge-wisdom (each one is presumably a refinement of the former). But Dave Weinberger points out the problems with this model. Just like "knowledge management" was this fancy-sounding (but empty) bucket into which sales operations could toss just about anything, the DIKW hierarchy lacks the sort of rigor that actually leads to good planning. The term "knowledge" is bad enough. When you get to "wisdom", you know you are no longer in a place to agree on terms. Some people like it that way, since it allows the appearance of agreement. I have to say I'm with the author. I don't. Posted: 2/8/10; 5:43:43 PM #

The Small School's Technology Planner

I'm teaching a new Technology Planning workshop soon - from the You're Doing it Wrong series - and I am still pretty disappointed with many of the planning guides out there. The Small School's Technology Planner is a great exception. It avoids the common tech-centered flaws of most such guides, embraces user involvement (but not in the "survey and shopping" list sense of the term), and makes a strong case for pilot projects as a part of planning. This isn't just for schools. Posted: 2/8/10; 5:31:53 PM #

3 February 2010

Idealist Needs Our Help

As you probably know, Idealist.org has done tremendous things for civil society over the years. Their directories, job fairs, the Nonprofit FAQ, and many more projects have touched the lives and careers of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people working for social change. Their model for supporting most of this was classified ads for nonprofit jobs. During this economic downturn, that revenue has slowed to a trickle. They need our help to weather this recession. I'm a big believer in the organizations, like Idealist, that help make our sector successful. I am familiar with every business model for this work. They are all very hard to fund. The fact that Idealist has made it work and at the same time done so much for so many is a remarkable thing. I have only once before asked you, as a reader of Nonprofit Online News to support another organization. But when I do, it's because it really matters - not just to one part of civil society or another, but to every part. Please take a moment to visit Idealist, read what they are facing, and make a donation of whatever size you can manage. And pass it on. Posted: 2/3/10; 5:51:05 PM #