Monthly Archive for September, 2008

Good rules for using Twitter

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 29, 2008
in issues, marketing and socialmedia
. 5 Comments

Is your organization using Twitter?  Are members of your staff using Twitter to representat your organization?  The wave of companies and nonprofits joining the growing Twitter community is increasing rapidly.  That doesn’t mean every group signing on has a good set of rules though…

Jeff Trexler asked if nonprofit staff using Twitter, Facebook and other social media during the election are doing so responsibly.  On the uncivilsociety blog, Jeff writes:

One effect of online social networking technology is that it intensifies the environment that Marshall McLuhan called “all-at-onceness.” Old divisions fall away–near and far, high and low, word vs. picture–in favor of composition.

Part of this integrative process is the fusion of the personal and professional. Topics that were once taboo in polite conversation–money, religion, politics–are now a salient feature of the connected self.

In most respects I have no problem with this. I see myself primarily as a Watcher when it comes to organizational technology–I’m interested in seeing what happens but have little to no personal stake in any particular tool.

But there’s something going on that’s gotta stop.

Namely, political campaigning in social networking accounts connected to 501(c)(3) organizations.  Read more…

Jeremy Pepper, a friend and PR-Social Media guru, coins a new term with Twitteriocy, claiming too many companies joining Twitter are doing so irresponsibly.  He suggests six rules for organizations adopting Twitter (and really, these rules can be expanded to work for most social media tools):

1. Don’t have your PR firm set up and be your Twitter account.
2. Don’t follow everyone willy nilly.
3. Get Tweetdeck.
4. Be engaged. Be personable. Be responsive.
5. Be a person.
6. Twitter is not for everyone.

You can read more of Jeremy’s post as well as explanations to all of these points on the POP! PR Jots blog.

What concerns has your organization had with using social media?  What policies has your organization adopted that really work for helping staff use social media tools responsibly?

Congrats Allyson, Joining FastCompany Blog!

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 29, 2008
in otherblogs
. 1 Comment

Allyson Kapin avatarAllyson Kapin, the president of the Rad Campaign as well as a friend of mine and many from launching Women Who Tech, deserves a big CONGRATULATIONS!  This earlier this month she joined the team at FastCompany.com as a blogger for Radical Tech.  You can read her blog posts here.

Here’s an excerpt from her first post about how the web 2.0 community came together to develop hurricane08.org:

When Hurricane Gustav threatened to crash into New Orleans and bring more destruction to the city that never recovered from Hurricane Katrina, Andy Carvin, a social media strategist for National Public Radio, used his Web 2.0 savvy skills to take action and start the websites hurricanes08.org and hurricanewiki.org. The sites serve as an information aggregator for the latest information on hurricanes threatening the US and provide an easy way for volunteers to connect with communities.

“I thought we needed something that could connect the dots,” said Carvin. Once Carvin developed the idea he put up the “Bat Signal” and friends and volunteers including Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigs List and Deanna Zandt, a media technologist for progressive and grassroots activist organizations pitched in to help. Newmark helped promote the site while Zandt spearheaded the development of the wiki.  Read more…

I’m looking forward to Allyson’s weekly posts and seeing what the conversations and community are like on the Fast Company site.  Find Allyson’s Radical Tech blog here.  Congrats again!

Google is looking for your ideas!

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 25, 2008
in issues
. 0 Comments

Originally posted on the NetSquared blog.

Google Project 10 to the 100 logo

The questions from Google’s Project 10^100 are: what would help? And help most?

According to the Project, we are in an interesting time.  One in which individuals have more information accessible at their fingertips than ever before and yet there are so many people who need help; while studies show that ultimately it is helping others that makes us the most happy.

“At Google, we don’t believe we have the answers, but we do believe the answers are out there. Maybe in a lab, or a company, or a university — but maybe not.  Maybe the answer that helps somebody is in your head, in something you’ve observed, some notion that you’ve been fiddling with, some small connection you’ve noticed, some old thing you have seen with new eyes.”

If you have an idea about how to help someone, especially how to help lots of people, share it!  Submit your ideas by October 20th!

But, how does it work?

  1. Send in your idea by October 20th.
    Fill out the submission form here. (You can supplement your proposal with a 30-second video.)
  2. Voting on ideas begins January 27th.
    A selection of one hundred ideas will be posted publicly for you to choose twenty semi-finalists. Then an advisory board will select up to five final ideas.
  3. Project 10^100 will help bring the ideas to life.
    We’re committing $10 million to implement these projects, and the goal is to help as many people as possible.

Next Steps:

What ideas do you have about helping other people in your community, country or even the world?  Does your organization have an idea?  Does your child?

Bounce your ideas off the NetSquared community for feedback or collaboration by posting to the NetSquared Community blog! Can’t wait to read your ideas!

Online Engagement: London Fundraising Summit

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 25, 2008
in events and fundraising
. 1 Comment

Today was the second day of the London Fundraising Summit from the Center for Nonprofit Success.  I presented with Jonathan Waddingham, the Charity Champion at JustGiving.org, about online engagement and fundraising.  It was a three-hour session and we could have gone all day!  Great attendees, conversations, and learning taking place.

Jonathan’s presentation focused on some great examples of nonprofits using a range of social media tools.  My presentation concentrated on the why and how side of things, including some examples from the e-Nonprofit Benchmarks report.  You can see Jonathan’s slides here.  After our presentations, we had a few rounds of small group activities with short scenarios and prompts calling on the new online engagement and fundraising ideas Jonathan and I talked about.  The groups did an excellent job creating strategies for engaging their fake organizations’ communities.  Thanks so much to everyone who was there!

Here is my presentation:

Lfs Online Fundraising Preso Asw

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: engagement fundraising)

Here is the PDF version with all my speaker notes:

LFS Online Fundraising PDF Asw
View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: engagement fundraising)

My main points included:

Conversations = Conversions

  • shouting rarely works!
  • two way conversation empowers your constituents and the larger community to:
    - give you feedback when things are bad
    - give you praise when they are happy
    - ask questions
    - get involved
  • two way conversations also turn your staff into real people.
  • if a conversation is taking place online and you aren’t there to hear it, does it still happen?  YES!
  • by putting yourself and your organization online, you can be part of the conversation that is already taking place.

Management = Messages

  • people are all different, even if they are all interested in your organization.  what they want to do for you, how they want to hear from you, what they plan to say about you and even how they want to support you.
  • comprehensive donor/volunteer/constituent management software will let you track, trace, separate
    and sort your members.
  • better messages means more messages, but not drastically different.  just enough so that your online
    activists have something they can do when they get an email from you, your donors can donate, your
    supporters can spread the word, and your lurkers can keep hanging on.

Testing

  • testing can be small scale to large scale - really just depends on your budget, your time, and your staff capacity.
  • start small and in-house and see how much you can learn right away
  • try changing simple things with small groups: subject lines, images, calls to action, etc.

If you were at the session today, what questions did you leave with?  What conversations helped you the most?

2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 23, 2008
in digital learning
. 0 Comments

Originally posted on the NetSquared site.

The second Digital Media and Learning Competition from HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation is here!  This year, the competition focuses on participatory learning, including “the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together.”

Awards range from $5,000 to $250,000 in the categories of Young Innovator Awards and Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards.  The deadline to apply is October 15th, so get your submission in now!

Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards

This category is intended for large-scale projects, most likely involving collaboration, of new learning environments, whether it be adaptations or entirely new products.  “Awarded projects must demonstrate a strong commitment to making possible new ways of valuable participatory learning, as opposed to simply creating new content.”

Organizations from outside the US are invited to participate in this category, including groups from Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Nigeria, The People’s Republic of China, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, or the United Kingdom.  But collaboration can include organizations/individuals from all places.

For more information, visit the Digital Media and Learning Competition site.

Young Innovator Awards

These awards target innovators between the ages of 18-25 to support smaller-scale, participatory learning projects.  “The aim of this category is to encourage young innovators to think boldly about “what comes next” in participatory learning and to contribute to making it happen. These awards are designed to support young innovators in bringing their most visionary ideas from the “garage” stage to implementation.”

Young Innovator awards consist of two components:

  1. Support for project development, including the awardee’s independent work on the proposed idea, and
  2. An internship with a sponsoring organization that would be beneficial to the awardee’s project. Internships can involve physical placement with a sponsoring organization or a mentoring relationship maintained by other means, including online communication.

For more information, visit the Digital Media and Learning Competition site.

Next Steps:

If you apply, be sure to let the NetSquared community know about your project and progress!  It is a great place to find collaborators!

NetSquared & Sun Microsystems in Brazil!

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 22, 2008
in events
. 0 Comments

Do you have friends at nonprofits in Brazil who might benefit from having hands-on techies help them address technology needs?

The short story:
NetSquared.org and Sun Microsystems are organizing developers to kick-off a project designed to help NGO’s harness the power of open source and web-based technologies to address the social issues they’re working on.

We need help from people with experience at the intersection of tech and civil society beyond the U.S. in order to mobilize Brazilian NGO’s, University Computing Clubs, and others to participate at this October 1, 2008 event, Collaborating for Change.

Next steps:
Know of organizations, friends, or colleagues who would be interested in participating?  Here is a quick message you can send to them:

My friends at NetSquared.org (a technology nonprofit based in SF, CA) are working on a project that leverages the technical expertise of University developers on behalf of Sao Paolo-area NGO’s working on social-benefit Projects.

I’m writing today to invite your participation. Find all of the details below!

Here’s the easy next steps:
1. Register at https://events-at-sun.com/collaborate/register.php
2. Please let NetSquared know how it goes! (http://netsquared.org or net2@netsquared.org)

Questions about this event?
https://events-at-sun.com/collaborate/english/index.php

You can contact collaborate_saopaulo@sun.com with additional questions.

Thanks!

I appreciate your help and outreach - we are so excited to offer such great, on the ground expertise and assistance for nonprofits in Sao Paulo.  Check out where we are headed next!

Building Community with NetSquared!

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 18, 2008
in networking
. 4 Comments

Below is Britt Bravo’s post to the NetSquared community announcing my new post as the NetSquared Community Builder.  If you don’t already know Britt, you should!  Her blog and website are below - check them out!

Welcome New Net2 Community Builder Amy Sample Ward!

I’m thrilled to announce that Amy Sample Ward is the new NetSquared Community Builder! You can contact her at award@techsoup.org.

Many of you are familiar with Amy’s great work through her NetSquared Blog, her personal blog, Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech, and as the Organizer of the Portland, OR Net Tuesday. Amy recently moved to the UK, where she will be starting a Net Tuesday London.

Here’s a little more about the fabulous Amy:

Amy Sample Ward is dedicated to supporting and educating nonprofits and the progressive social change sector about evolving technologies that cultivate and engage communities. Her passion is in connecting nonprofits with new media technologies, watching the field of nptech evolve, and having conversations about where we can go next while still getting everyone on board with what we have already.

She has worked both in private philanthropy and advocacy nonprofit
organizations, with job responsibilities that include communications,
technology, information, organizational learning, and more—Amy has
felt firsthand the weight of too many hats on staff in small
nonprofits and is excited to help organizations leverage the social
web to make reaching goals and attaining visions more efficient.

After three years as NetSquared’s Community Builder, I’m thrilled to be passing the reins into Amy’s capable hands. I’ll be moving on to other projects, but will still be blogging once in a while for NetSquared. You can stay in touch in a number of ways:

britt@brittbravo.com
@Bbravo
Big Vision Consulting
Have Fun * Do Good
Big Vision Podcast
Changeblogger Network

Thanks for a life-changing 3 years!

I’m thrilled to be taking on this new role and excited for the learning opportunities, conversations, and connections I can both be a part of and help facilitate within the nptech community.  Let me know if you have any ideas, questions, requests or other comments!

News and updates from Net2 and London

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 18, 2008
in community, events and workblog
. 1 Comment

I’ve made it!  We are safely in London, UK, now and staying with friends of friends who we had never met before and are much too hospitable.  The pieces of life for finding housing, food, friends, and fun are all falling into place so far, and we’ve been here less than a week!  Now, to find reliable and consistent internet!

Here are some great news bites I wanted to let everyone know about, straight from my blog on the NetSquared site:

Is your ‘database’ made of paper?

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 11, 2008
in webtools
. 0 Comments

Thanks to Paul Lamb for this news.

The UnaMesa Association, a nonprofit serving organizations and individuals around the world by providing free software tools and web services for schools, clinics, and other community organizations.  UnaMesa is currently conducing a pilot in the greater San Francisco area for nonprofits and other social benefit organizations needing a simple and secure way to move data-entry and storage online: making information more easily accessible to staff, clients, and partners. Trainees will receive facilitated needs analysis and design, technology tools, training, and on-going technical support — all free of charge! To see a sample of an UnaMesa project and relevant technologies, watch this short video. Contact heather @ unamesa.org for more information.

Tu Diabetes Fundraises with YouTube, do you?

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on September 11, 2008
in case studies and fundraising
. 3 Comments

Originally posted on the NetSquared blog.

I recently wrote about Tu Diabetes’ use of Twitter and the strategies the online community has employed to find and engage with new people. Today, I want to take a look at another social media tool Tu Diabetes is using successfully: YouTube.

YouTube is an online video tool “allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.”

Tu Diabetes has a YouTube channel with over 60 videos and over 70 subscriptions. Manny Hernandez, community founder, explained the group’s YouTube strategies to me recently.

I asked Manny what the original idea or example was that got Tu Diabetes using YouTube for fundraising. Manny said that Tu Diabetes adopted video as a tool to communicate with members since the very beginning. Early on, before they were even a non-profit (2007) they produced weekly podcasts to summarize the highlights in the community and do a member update. (You can see an example here.) All the videos included on YouTube have previously been posted in the video section on TuDiabetes.com (or EsTuDiabetes.com, if they are in Spanish).

I think the power and success of fundraising with video is one of the most interesting aspects of Tu Diabetes’ use of YouTube. Manny said that, so far, ALL the funds raised through the members (close to $3,500) since they started the fundraising campaign have been tied to video-based-asks. We have had three videos during the campaign so far, which started in June, with each one getting more and more on target:

One of the most frequently asked questions I come across when organizations are considering using videos on organizational websites or places like YouTube is the burden of resources, costs, etc. For Tu Diabetes, the only technical resources used are Mac-based. Manny shot the first two using the built-in iSight camera on his MacBook. The most recent one was done on his wife’s Mac Pro, combining images posted by our members in the community. All videos were edited using iMovie. The most recent one had music donated by the duo Hammock (one of his favorite bands - http://hammockmusic.com).

It is important to keep in mind the goals an organization has when considering the use/adoption of social media tools, because there are just so many to choose from. One of the goals of the Diabetes Hands Foundation is to raise diabetes awareness. Based on that, you have to look at video views. The most viewed videos to date are here: the Drawing Diabetes video with close to 27,000 views, and the Word In Your Hand video with close to 2,500 views + several thousand more views through TuDiabetes and other outlets.

The other goal is to help connect people touched by diabetes (they’ve found diabetes to be a “closet” condition where people that have it barely talk about it with others). Based on this, the Spanish videos have been the most successful, resulting in proportionally many more people touched by diabetes joining the community (EsTuDiabetes.com). Manny thinks this is because there is a bigger need for Spanish content about diabetes and, specifically, content that people can understand easily.

Social media tools are ultimately about building community and making connections between the organization and new members. With YouTube, Tu Diabetes reaches out to new members. They do periodic searches for “diabetes” on YouTube and leave relevant comments to people who also share their diabetes stories on YT. It is very important that the comments be contextual and valuable. We take the opportunity to tell people about the community. Normally invitations to join result in people joining.

Besides YouTube, Tu Diabetes has used:

So, what are the future plans for Tu Diabetes’ use of YouTube? They are currently waiting on the approval of 501c3 status. Once approved, they will be able to take full advantage of the YouTube for Nonprofits program. Tu Diabetes will continue to publish video content, which they do on the YouTube channel, because they feel it is a great means to accomplish the goal of raising diabetes awareness.

What do you think about Tu Diabetes’ use of YouTube? Has your organization considered using videos on your website or on a public channel like YouTube? What goals would you want to address with the help of video?  Comment with the Net Squared community, too!