Supporting local businesses

This is always high on my list, but I made sure that this year our gifts came from shops owned locally, featuring products made locally as well. This means that products had less transportation costs and are tied to sustaining the community’s economy. For me, my favorite part of shopping locally means that I can create relationships with the shop owners and learn more about the products and producers they work with. I’ve found some of my favorite things this way and enjoy being able to share recommendations with friends – then it is a gift and a connection!

Supporting real crafters

I know I said that I’ve taken my turn a few times with DIY projects, but I’m just a casual crafter. Etsy certainly makes it easy to find those crafters that make my homemade soap look like a class experiment! I’ve also found with Etsy that sellers are eager and open to talk with you about the products they use and how they are working to be sustainable as well. This year, I took it a step further and connected with an incredibly talented crafter locally (double whammy!) so that we could meet in person to discuss the gift idea and ensure it is going to be perfect.

Supporting real impact

The holidays are also the end of the year when many nonprofits are running fundraising campaigns and preparing for the next year. I have given DonorsChoose.org gift cards as “thank you” gifts in the past (especially for speakers or presenters!) and enjoy hearing when someone writes back to tell me which project they funded and why. Razoo also has gift cards you can purchase online and email to recipients, and instead of giving to a classroom project like DonorsChoose.org, Razoo cards can be used to donate to over 1 Million organizations!

Whether you’re a Millennial, budget-conscious, DIY-specialist, or not, I certainly recommend these three options for your last-minute holiday shopping!

Photo: Flickr gazeronly

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Who are you friends with on Facebook? Do you care who sees where you check in on FourSquare? Last month, Farra Trompeter of Big Duck and Danielle Bridgida of National Wildlife Federation presented at the Bridge Conference last week about personal and professional branding. In preparation for their presentation, they circulated a survey to over 200 nonprofit professionals, asking how they use various social platforms. The responses lean towards a reality in which our online presence is just as diverse as our offline personalities – people are connecting with a mix of others on difference platforms.

Are you mixing your personal and professional self online? Here are some helpful tips to keep you on your own message:

Use privacy options to your advantage! “72% of the 209 respondents describe their approaches to personal/professional use of social media as either ‘blended’ or ‘segmented by channel’.” Facebook friends aren’t created equal; or, rather, Facebook gives you the options to treat your friends differently. Use the functionality in the system to ensure you can share as much as you like, with the people you want to see it. Create lists so that you can easily add people as you connect with them, and set your privacy settings to some secure options like none of your photos or photos that you are tagged in are visible to people in your “work only” list. Similarly, Google+ allows you to filter general actions or content as well as post-by-post content to certain groups.

Set your own tone! According to Farra and Danielle’s survey respondents, Twitter is the top three platforms for both personal and professional use. Twitter doesn’t provide much room for a bio, but be sure to squeeze in a statement that “the views expressed here are my own” (or however you’d like to phrase it in your own way!). You can include a disclaimer in all of your profiles, actually! Additionally, on Facebook or any other social platform, you may want to include an explicit statement about who you want to connect with and how. For example, you could include a statement that says your personal friends are encouraged to make a friend request but that all professional contacts should subscribe to public posts – or whatever your preferred options are.

Be a social recommender! “Almost everyone uses LinkedIn, but hardly anyone asks for recommendations with any regularity (despite the fact that your LinkedIn profile is one of the top results for your name in Google).” The social Web is social because we are all humans, connecting and talking with each other. And it is the Web because we are connected and networked across and around the world. Don’t be shy: Ask for a recommendation, and give one to someone else! Think of it as the social media version of a good deed or social capital investments.

Choose your own path! “Most people tend to favor using blogs and LinkedIn ‘professionally’ and Foursquare, Google+, and Instagram ‘personally’.” Do you love taking photos of your kid (also known as the worlds cutest kid, I know!)? Not sure you want to overwhelm your professional network every evening with more photos of her cute face? You don’t have to mix your channels! You can keep that flickr account or Instagram profile private and shared with just your family and closest (photo-tolerant) friends. Even if you are a social media manager or a social tech lover, you can still claim profiles and platforms as purely personal or professional, especially if it means you enjoy the connections and content that much more. After all, some of this is supposed to be for fun, right?

I’d love to hear what you think about the results of Farra and Danielle’s survey: do you mix your profiles or use some for only personal or professional purposes? What are your tips for keeping them straight and managing your personal presence online?

[Photo credit: Flickr hassmanm]

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Normally, I stay away from assumptions: We all know the saying about what assuming does to you and me! When it comes to managing or building communities, online or on the ground, the work can seem overwhelming and sometimes even never-ending.

Wherever you are, and whatever the kind of community you are wrangling, there are some general lessons that I recommend.  These five assumptions always help me remember the role and responsibilities a successful community manager needs to best serve and engage a community. I hope you’ll share your lessons, too!

1. You don’t [really] know your community members.

I don’t say this to offend you, but just as a good reminder. When you are drafting messages, calls to action, or even just conducting day-to-day customer service type communications, assuming that you don’t know the community at large or the individual you are speaking to directly will help prevent you from overstepping boundaries or making statements that can instiguate that, “you don’t know me!” feeling on the other end. I won’t say that we’ve all experienced this – see what I did there? – but I know that I have and have heard direct feedback from people when I’ve made this mistake.

All that you can really assume are the things that aren’t assumptions; give your community the chance to tell you their preferences and interests, and track what you can (from email opens and clicks, to actions taken) to be sure you are responding to the facts whenever possible.

2. You know more about the tools.

There are mind-boggling reports and stats our there that show just how much time many of us are spending [wasting?] on social media platforms like Facebook each day. That said, it is best to assume that your community isn’t hip to every trick you’ve found for Facebook, Twitter, and any other site you may use. This is especially true if you have a separate community platform connected to your website or operated specifically for your community online.

Assuming you know the most about these tools means you have the opportunity and responsibility to share your knowledge and help the community be as savvy as you! When you post a call to action for people to share a message, be sure to include reference to how they can do so; or if you are asking people to create content themselves, be sure to provide instructions and examples to help them respond to your call.

3. You know more about the cause.

Just like the assumption about the tools, it is incredibly valuable to maintain the position that you (read: your organization, if not you personally, smartypants) know more, have more access to information about, and are more closely following news related to your cause and work than the community. When you are sharing news or calls to action, be sure to provide relevant context and history or links to where people can learn more.

Many of your community members may be following things closely with you, but, per assumption #1, you will be able to speak to them directly in the action alerts they’ve signed up for instead of only the general messages you may post elsewhere. If you create a microsite or special landing pages for campaigns, topics in the news, or specific programs, be sure to make links prominent for people to learn more and understand the why and how behind the actions.

4. You have more time than your community.

This is a big one. It may seem like so much fun to round up friends and record a video about why you are all so passionate about a cause, then edit it with catchy backgound music and effects, and post it on YouTube. Assume you are the only person in the community with the time and energy to do it, though. If creating content is an essential part of your campaign, make sure you provide options for someone that wants to give you, for example, 30 seconds, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 30 minutes. That may mean it is a quick text-based response, a photo, a very short video, or a good sized video, respectively.

Creating options and recognizing that community members have varying amounts of time to spend on your cause will help people self-select the option that they prefer – back to #1, track it so you can suggest similar options in the future! – and they can feel that you appreciate their participation even if they don’t have the time to make a video for you.

5. People are coming from a good place.

Trolls are real, it’s true. But operating and communicating as if every commenter is a troll will shut down conversation very quickly. Even if someone posts something negative or critical, assume they are coming from a good place, agree with and support your mission and view of a better world, and are voicing a concern that may be felt by others; take a breath and then reread their comment without taking it personally.

These kinds of comments are an opportunity to show your amazing, and patient, customer service abilities! Thank her for speaking up and sharing her comment/question/concern, point them in the right direction for more information and resources, and offer to speak with her directly offline (or at least off the comment thread) about the topic.

Doing this in public, whether on your Facebook page or on your own blog, will show to others that you are open to engaging with people who may disagree, that you have resources and information on the topic of contention, and that you are even willing to be available personally. That’s a much better tone to set.

Well, those are my five; but I have no doubt there are many more lessons and assumptions out there. Would love to hear what more you’d add to the list!

[Photo credit: aflier Flickr]

Creating Great Content

When it comes to creating great content, there are four important elements, especially with social media, as you can see in the image at the top of this post. You’ll notice that the goal is in the middle of all three because it is always the core of your success and the first step in any decision. The people you want to talk to are closely connected to the goal and if one changes, the other may react. Your tools are defined both by the goal of what you want to do, but also by the people – are they tools that that audience uses and likes? And the content – is that a platform or application that supports that kind of content? Similarly, the content is defined by the goal, but also by the tools at your disposal and the people who will consume it

So, what is the content you want to share? Do you want to be sharing what you know and learn with other volunteers? Inspiring and recruiting your friends to volunteer with you? Or are you trying to promote the organization? Maybe even using these tools to document and share back with the organization all that you’re doing. What you want to be doing with your voice and story via social media will shape the tools and content. Anyone in here want to share what you are now or want to start doing? Start with the goal, and then complete the circle identifying the people, the tools, and the content.

Creating Buzz

On Twitter, look up hashtags that your community uses and follow them to track conversations. Be sure to use relevant (but not spammy!) hashtags in your posts to connect them into related topics. Consider participating or even starting a Twitter chat – the Association Chat is a great example of a weekly chat with an online archive. Be sure to use @ replies to bring people into your conversation directly or thank them for engaging with you. Here are some Twitter-specific tools:

What do you think?

I’d love to hear how you’re using social tools to support an organization you volunteer for, or how you share your knowledge and experience as a volunteer with others!

As a community organizer and network weaver myself, I am incredibly excited by the #OccupyWallStreet movement that started in New York just over three months ago now (on September 17th) in response to a failing federal economy and political process that impact local, national, and international markets. In less than a month, over 1,700 other cities started Occupy events – both in solidarity to the thousands protesting around the clock in New York’s financial district, and with a loud voice that these issues are not unique to the US. The “leaderless” organizing of the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped avoid strategic arrests or censorship but has also prompted a powerful use of social technologies.

Online Homebase

Over the past few years, the use of social technologies during disaster response has become a central component to news and information delivery. One key element is the use of an online homebase. We are now seeing this put to great use with #OWS. There are many free online website and content creation tools available. Creating a space where you can collect and aggregate the news, content, and updates of your movement is important for people to better understand, follow, and join you. It doesn’t have to be fancy (remember: less is more) – it just needs to pull all the pieces together for your community.

Brought to you Live

The power of “now” is what makes something go from news, to breaking news. Thankfully for members of #OWS, there are various tools to livestream events, just from your mobile phone. The livestream – whether it’s video, audio, or just text – can be embedded in your online homebase and shared across social networks. The updates and first-hand accounts bring attention to a movement and generate more participation.

Personalize It

The most successful fundraising campaigns, advocacy efforts, and even personal experiences center on one person, one animal, one story, especially when trying to support a huge, faceless issue. #OWS has made the economy and political process a personal issue, inviting people around the US and the world to put their story on paper and share a photo of themselves with the story online. This level of personal connection inspires sharing and participation by those on the ground, and those following remotely.

How To: Use Tech to Organize Today

1. Build your online homebase with a wiki, a website (like WordPress.com or Google Sites), or a blog (like Tumblr or Posterous).

2. Keep people connected to live video (like Livestream or Vimeo), regular audio updates (like CinchCast or Audioboo), or live feeds of text from a Twitter hashtag or an open chat like CoverItLive.

3. Invite everyone to join the movement by sharing pictures, stories, and signs to spread your message (try Flickr or Tumblr).

Timing

Originally these were monthly chats. I opened up a blog posts similar to this one where much of the feedback said a monthly chat was all that people had capacity for. But, the downside of a monthly chat is that there are so many weeks in between to forget about it! Again, I would always set up the CoverItLive widget ahead of time so participants could sign up for a reminder when the chat was starting. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on moving to a weekly chat!

>> Share your time preferences!

I also have a scheduler set up where you can share the times during the week that you prefer having a chat! The times are set with 11 am EST as the earliest time (in case the times don’t auto-update for you when you open it). Please treat these dates as generic days of the week and not actually next week’s dates.

Topics

Normally, these chats functioned as an online open discussion. I always had questions, topics, and tools at the ready in case participants didn’t have a question to pose but it was rarely necessary for me to ask the question. Some times, people shared questions or topics with me ahead of time so I would queue those up when we started the chat to ensure we addressed them ahead of any other in-the-moment conversations. How do you feel about the free form nature of the conversation? Would you rather have a set topic or set of questions ahead of time? Do you like showing up with a question and posing it to the group for feedback?

Platform

As I said above, the chats normally took place on CoverItLive, with the most recent chat using Google+ Hangouts. I like using a tool that provides an easy way to archive and save the conversation – something that a video chat on Google+ doesn’t do. The CommBuild chat was borne out of the #4Change chats, a group-moderated monthly chat series that took place on Twitter of which I was one of the moderators. The topic was so large and many felt like we could talk every month just about community building, so I said I’d take the responsibility of wrangling (I mean, moderating!). We moved away from a chat on Twitter itself because of the regular issues faced with Twitter being down, search options not updating, and many finding too much other fun stuff on Twitter to talk about and dropping out of the chat. So, what do you think? Want to have the chats on Twitter, on a tool like CoverItLive, or something else entirely?

Volunteers

I’m happy to continue moderating and wrangling as a lone wolf, but I would really love to have a pack of volunteers working together. If we move to a weekly chat, perhaps we could split of up the month and have a different person leading the chat each week to distribute the work load. I also recognize that there are MANY people far more knowledgable and experienced than myself who would be great moderators and instigators on this topic. Please let me know if you’d like to be part of the team making #CommBuild a living chat again!

Anything else? What other ideas or suggestions do you have for the chat? Would love to hear from you! And, as always, thanks for all your feedback and participation both over the last year of chats and going forward!

If your group is ready to organize, DemocracyInAction is ready to help! DemocracyInAction is a nonprofit dedicated to building a strong progressive infrastructure through effective online organizing. They’ve just launched the Occupy Wall Street Empowers Grant!

DIA will award “Salsa” – their organizing platform for nonprofits – to five organizations that demonstrate the ability to effectively organize. The first grant was awarded to Occupy Philly already! The deadline to submit is Tuesday, November 15th.

Grants will waive setup and monthly fees for one year. Groups not selected for an Empowers Grant are eligible for a $500 award towards Salsa.

Get the full details and apply for your grant today!

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I’m really excited by tools that enable digital or transmedia storytelling. I think there’s huge potential for organizations to use multiple mediums, content, and locations to help document and advocate for the change they want in their communities and around the world. I recently attended the US launch event for Historypin is a new (and free) application for Android, iPhone, or the web that arranges photos, videos, and text in the context of time and location (leveraging the Google Maps API). I was so energized by the tool—both its current functionality and its potential for future application—that I downloaded the mobile (Android) version and started testing it on the spot. It’s been a few weeks now; I’ve used it to share photos from a work trip to Portland, Maine, and to explore my neighborhood in New York.

In the most basic terms, I see Historypin as the interface between people (you can be in the exact spot you’re looking at on the map, or around the world), places (the geography, the buildings), and things (the events, small and large, that change those people and places over time). It’s a way of interacting with other people, other places, and other times from anywhere you are. So how can social good organizations take advantage of an innovative tool like this? Here are some ideas:

Share Community History – Non-organizational community groups and nonprofits that focus on a specific locality can create hyperlocal community engagement through pictures and documentation. Do you have a hyperlocal online network/space? Encourage volunteers, program officers, donors, or other community members to become social reporters and document events in their neighborhood.

Promote Campaigns – Pull together information, data, and multimedia power (maps, photos, videos) to create a compelling, interactive campaign story for your nonprofit organization. Encourage community members to join, follow, or share their own related media, giving them a way to participate in and connect with the campaign.

Create Digital Classrooms – Education programs—schools, after-school programs, and youth-focused nonprofit—can work with established collections in the classroom; and students can document the area around their school to create their own collections, and potentially trade collections with other schools.

Create a Custom “Tour” – Your organization can arrange pieces of media and information so that they unfold in order—great for telling a story, or walking people through highlights or history of an area or place. People can follow along via the mobile application or the website. Museums, tour groups, and history societies could all make use of Historypin for sharing tours and routes, complete with images and stories. Nonprofits: What if you created a digital annual report that walked viewers through your service area, giving them a tour of your work and impact?

Go explore the map: Use the time slider and address search to wander around the world and check out the 51,000-plus photos already uploaded.

What other ways do you think this tool could be used to support the social sector? I’d love to hear your ideas.

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I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar for the National Center for Media Engagement, focused on community-driven engagement, and present a session at the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, talking about building a social media strategy. Both of these presentations had participants primarily from the public media sector. There were some similarities and differences in both the questions and perceptions around engagement and community. I normally separate my post-presentation blog posts and slides but think it will be valuable to group them together this time.

Defining Community

One of the biggest barriers to sharing our experience and knowledge, and learning as organizations is the belief that we are all so different we can’t actually share or learn from each other. A great example of this is when we talk about working with our communities. To talk about what community means, it’s often helpful to also talk about what community is not: You’ll notice that none of the words on the graphic above say “audience” or “service area”; that’s because all three sections – the community, network, and crowd – are part of your station’s service area, or your organization’s audience. We are not actually engaging with every member of our service area, we don’t know who they all are or what they all do. The people who donate, listen in, connect with our programs by calling in, reading or commenting online, and coming to our offline events are our community. Their friends, colleagues, coworkers and family are the network – the people we reach through our community. The network knows about us but isn’t yet directly connected – maybe their friend told them about a story or a news segment they heard on our station, or they have family members that attend an annual concert. And the crowd is everyone else; yes, they are part of your service area or your “audience” but you haven’t reached them yet. Just because everyone in New York, the US and the world can subscribe to the New York Times, does not mean that the world is the community.

Engaging Community

My NCME webinar focused on community-driven engagement. Using the definition above, the point of the webinar and discussion was to talk about ways that organizations (of any kind) can create opportunities for the community to decide, organize, orchestrate or otherwise fuel engagement. Some of the questions raised in the webinar chat focused on the role of public media organizations as content creators and how community-driven engagement fits in the work they do. I was pleased to see that the responses I gave on the webinar were echoed at the PMDMC conference by the Friday keynote presentation from American Public Media’s Jon McTaggart. The questions he raised include:

• 

is our community directly informing the services we provide?
• is our whole community involved with our station?
• 
are we providing something unique and distinctly valuable to our community?
• what other organizations have a vested interest in the success of our station?
• what do we do that has the whole community talking?

Let’s focus on that first question for a moment: is our community directly informing the services we provide? How is your station creating ways for the community to actually inform the services or programs or content you provide and create? What options do you provide to your community to have share responsibility or ownership for a service, program, or event? How does the community see their impact and influence on your station?

Using Social Media

Many public media organizations are looking to use social media as a way to have conversations directly with community members. Some are using tools like Twitter or Facebook to invite listeners to a post-segment conversation with reporters, moving them from a passive action (listening) up the ladder of engagement to an active action of commenting and discussion. While many organizations of all kinds face the struggle of convincing staff or leaders that social media is worthwhile, many stations are tackling the opposite end of that spectrum, with widespread adoption without any strategy or plan.

The PMDMC conference had a 4-part social media track. My presentation was the first in the series, setting the foundation for using social media. In the presentations section of this post you can follow how to set up a community map, content map, and basic tracking documents; and templates for all of those are in the resources section below. Once you’ve decided you are ready to start exploring how social media can benefit your station, even if you only have 30 minutes a day, here are a few steps to guide you:

1. Start Listening

You can’t know where you want to be or what topics are of interest to the segments of your community using social media unless you start by listening. You can use RSS to subscribe to searches on Twitter even without an account, set up Google Alerts to receive notifications via RSS or email when your station, reporters, segments or programs are mentioned online, and track the blogosphere for people talking about your content.

2. Start Joining

Once you have a feel for who’s talking about what, where, start joining them by leaving comments on the blogs, pointing to content or discussions from your station’s website or blog, and so on. Don’t feel like you have to think of something to say, simply use what you’re hearing in your listening online to reply and join the conversation.

3. Start Creating

After you’ve listened and started joining in, you can now start creating profiles that have a goal and strategic use to compliment the rest of your communications and engagement work. Remember, even once you get to this stage, you never stop listening or joining. Just because you have your own profiles now, doesn’t mean you can stop listening to the community or replying and commenting. The 2-way engagement of social media is especially important to honor for public media organizations looking to create and sustain supporters.

Here’s a quick video interview I did with Annie Shreffler:

Presentations

Resources

Templates:

• Community Map Template
• Content Map Template
• Metrics Template

Books & Collections:

• We Are Media
• Social by Social
• #SOCIALMEDIA NONPROFIT tweet Book01
• Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

Blog posts:

• How to: Create a Listening Dashboard
• 5 Step Social Media Strategy
• Google Analytics for Facebook Pages
• Google Analytics for your Wiki
• List of Social Media Management Systems
• DIY Community Engagement Metrics
• Crowdsourcing vs Community-Sourcing
• Slacktivism: Turning a Like Into Action