I knew it was hitting many more people than the average news story when I saw tweets, facebook posts, and other online comments coming from people in my community and network that I rarely see participating online. And just as quickly as people responded with outrage against Komen, the conversation changed to be about the women who would continue to need support and the services that help them. Breast Cancer has impacted my family, like many others, and I grew up participating in Komen’s Race for the Cure in Portland every year with my mom. Komen’s announcement changed people’s minds and it didn’t matter that they later said PP affiliate could apply for funding (whether or not they are granted will be seen then) because the “break up” was final for many.

Jumping into action, Allison Fine, Beth Kanter, Stephanie Rudat, Lisa Colton, and Lucy Bernholz starting moving beyond the updates and long conversation threads and towards a collective call to action. You can read the summary of how the free agent community came together to self-organize and create a public action as well as a full report of the lessons learned and reflections on the #TakeBackThePink campaign in this public google doc.

10 Lessons from Community-Driven Organizing

After the #TakeBackThePink twitter campaign during the Super Bowl, Beth prompted all of us to share lessons and reflections in a google doc to be captured and shared. Here are the lessons we pulled out as a group:

1. We could not plan for an event like this, however as individuals who are  unencumbered by organizational rules or policies, and that we have our own large networks of people to bring to an effort, and that we are comfortable working in a dynamic, flat, environment, we reacted very quickly and nimbly to events as they unfolded and provided avenues for action for other people angry at Komen. A core group of the organizers are fluent with a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Pinterest (a fun opportunity to take it out for a social change spin, thought Beth!) and Facebook, plus Stephanie’s graphic design expertise. As one participant recalls, “There was an immediate sense of relatedness amongst the group conjoined by leaders.  We all saw something in the uproar and possibility for ourselves and those we care about.”
2. #takebackthepink was a particularly resonant phrase with our group because it represented the opportunity to begin to separate Komen from the color pink. As Lucy would tweet later, “Pink is a color not an org.” A fundamental part of our effort was to reestablish the primacy of women’s health over the branding concerns of a single organization. We believe we created an opportunity for a large number of people to participate in this process, and the momentum to continue the discussion moving forward.
3. There were two moments of tension during the week between a centralized approach and a network approach. The first time, the effort split in two; with one group focused on fundraising and another on advocacy and awareness. The second, a faction chose to opt out of the Super Bowl effort. Both times it was brought up that it was no longer about recouping money to PP (as that was already achieved in the first 48 hours) but was about redirecting people’s emotional responses, keeping people connected to causes and organizations even if they weren’t Komen, and demonstrating the importance of knowing what the orgs do that you support.
4. There was a flow of people in and out of the effort depending on their interest and availability. A public thread rather than the private email thread would have been more in keeping with our interest in and value of transparency. We chose the email vehicle believing that the element of surprise would be important to our efforts. It turned out not to be the case.
5. Finding the messaging middle ground in a fast changing environment was very challenging. Take Back the Pink was seen by some as Komen bashing and by others as “too nice.” We did our best to find a positive place for Super Bowl Sunday: there are a lot of organizations and way to support breast health, here are options in addition to Komen. It was harder to communicate than, “Screw Komen, fund Planned Parenthood” and it’s unclear how successful we were in explaining the shift and making the message clear.
6. We could have done a better job of looking for other hashtags in real-time and piggy-backed on them in order to weave together different conversations.
7. We developed and shone a spotlight on nonprofits and transparency, an unusual element to a discussion of pro-choice and women’s health issues.
8. Defining success in a very fluid situation was also very challenging. If fifty people retweeted with our hashtag was that success? Five hundred people? Five thousand people? An interesting model to use for comparison is Occupy Wall Street. Rather than using numeric outputs as goals, perhaps our effort, simply being and spreading, was successful. We are still wrestling with this question, although perhaps one answer is that if a single person learned about a new resource or organization that was success. Having the single largest media event of the year on the immediate horizon made for a great leverage point.
9. It would have been great to have advocacy organizations sign on as participants and partners in this event, however, when we did bump up against organizations they were unable to move fast enough with their approval processes to fully participate. This will continue to hamper the ability of organizations to work with “free agents” like us who need to meet an opportunity like this with speed, agility and a lack of concern for traditional message controls. Perhaps organizations can more fully participate in the next phase of development of the Facebook page.
10. This group is open to continuing the Facebook page and the conversation about general breast health and the array of organizations and resources available to women.  Clearly, there is a void in the digital space for being a resource to those who want to learn, contribute, volunteer, receive services but don’t know of all of the options or how to vet. Our capacity is stretched, though, we all participated in this effort as volunteers.

Observations & Reflections

Additionally, I want to pull out a few things I keep reflecting back on from the campaign and the organizing process that I think are influential to how we plan for and execute actions as community members and how we support them as organizations.

How do you evaluate and recognize “critical mass” of a free agent community? As Allison points out in her reflection post, after she created the Causes campaign and witnessed the response, she knew there was enough interest and people to do something bigger. But how did she know? How does your organization evaluate, on the fly in real-time, what critical mass is around a piece of news, an issue, a campaign, or even just an idea? How do you then say “this is it” and move to the next stage? In this case, I think critical mass was established by having more than just two or three, but actually five, six, even seven or eight people willing to jump in to help – and help by organizing and thinking and planning, not just sharing the message or plan once it was created. For organizations working on evaluating critical mass in real-time, it may be different as you would also factor in staff capacity to support the organizers from the community.

In a crisis, there are two versions of reaction: one against the perpetrator (in this case it was Komen, “how could they?”), the other in support of the victims (PP at first, and then quickly women in general). It is hard to switch the focus of a campaign after it is launched, so it’s important that you frame the story, your calls to action, and the actions themselves consistently. It was discussed openly and repeatedly on email chains and Facebook threads whether the focus was against Komen or in support of PP or even in support of women’s health. It was agreed every time that the focus was really on women’s health and redirecting people’s outrage, emotion, and attention so that instead of giving up on Komen and all breast cancer or women’s health issues, people would continue to participate, donate, and support organizations working on these issues. That’s why the resources on the TakeBackThePink wiki point to nonprofit and donor directories so people can research all the organizations working on breast cancer and women’s health, for example.

To organize and operate nimbly, you need to leave a crumb trail for others to join and follow you. This is incredibly important. It was necessary that the group collaborating on email and across multiple comment threads on Facebook create a cohesive place to refer new people when they jumped in, and a place for people to follow if they had to jump out. To the lesson above about the flow of participants in and out of the group, creating some central places to point people would support the people consistently reaching out to engage people as well as those who did not want to be involved but wanted to share the plans with others. To that end, I helped quickly create a shared google doc so that the messaging, calls to action, and other important links could be docked and shared easily. I also created a customized bit.ly link for the google doc so that sharing the information and inviting people to participate would be easy to do. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the google doc of messaging and information that was helpful, but that in the doc and on Beth’s wiki we provided direct links to the Twitter search for #takebackthepink and places to engage like the Facebook page, Allison’s Causes space, and Deanna’s Tumblr. Creating shortcuts like this by aggregating all the related links or resources together helped both the “main organizers” and all those coming in and out of the thread.

What do you think?

What other lessons or observations do you have from this campaign or others? What have you tried or experimented with? Would love to learn from you!

Lessons and Opportunities for Supporting Technology Innovation

 In the innovation marketplace, adoption is the only currency that matters.

As the speed at which new ideas can step out on the stage continues to increase, it is less about finding a great idea and pitching it for support. Ultimately, it’s the adoption by the community that matters in the long-run, and now can be proven even in the short-term. The advantage of the technology sector is that even if it is rudimentary or preliminary functionality, you can expose a new idea/tool/app/platform to the community from the very beginning, getting their feedback and support. This can help prove the value and need, as well as begin the iteration and development with the community’s engagement from the beginning.

Look to fund projects, not products.

The infrastructure that supports new innovations and social enterprise requires capacity, just like any other organization. Likewise, what we have as far as a product on Day 1, could and should look different on Day 15 and Day 50 and Day 500. Funding projects instead of just a specific product ensures that organizations or teams can fail quickly and softly while working towards something better, can invest in research and evaluation, and engage the community not just market to them.

Recognize the role of technology across all our work.

Technology is a catalyst for data, analysis, scalability, effectiveness and efficiency. It is not something confined to an “IT department” any more as everyone (if we are looking at a nonprofit, for example, staff use the website, database, email marketing, etc.) can be harnessing technology to improve their work and impact. As such, we need to invest in raising the level of technology education and understanding across the social impact space so that the organizational catalysts, those in a nonprofit that are not in the IT department but would be the ones engaging with the community or program, have enough technological familiarity that they can recognize the value and opportunity for adopting a new application or tool and implementing it in their organization. After all, the potential to scale one entrepreneur or organization’s new application is hugely tied to the numbers of organizations and communities that can adopt it and spread it.

Focus on why, not if, something works.

To work on scale and replication of any tool, we have to understand why it is working now, not just whether it is or isn’t. Once we know why it is working, we can know if it is even able to scale or the success is tied too closely to the specific segment already engaged. We can also look at the why to understand the ecosystem for new or complimentary tools. Supporting analysis and evaluation may not sound as exciting to your board as funding a new tool, but it can be at least as important!

Let the community drive the innovations you want to support.

As it turns out, the community knows far more about itself than you do (unless you are actually part of that community, of course!). So, look for opportunities to be a catalyst, supporting an environment for the community to help itself. As a recent MIT study showed, communities were better able to align aid with those that needed it than objective measures were to assigning that same support, and they felt far better about it. The same has been true in my experience with supporting new technologies.

Debunking Myths About Funding Tech Innovation

After the panel remarks, there was some great discussion with questions from participants. One question was raised, and I want to share my response as it is something I’ve been asked by foundations and philanthropists before: what are the biggest mistakes funders can make when supporting tech innovation? I have three key myths to highlight:

“Money is Gold”

For many projects, money is obviously a key ingredient to staying afloat and going forward. But so often, supports (whether financial supporters or other sponsors/partners) overlook the power their endorsement carries. Sometimes what is really needed is a recommendation, or an introduction, or a stamp of approval publicly. When projects are small, involve people that haven’t yet “created something” to get their name out there, a few thousand dollars is important, but so is your support.

“History is Enough”

Just because some person created Facebook, doesn’t mean their next idea will be the “next Facebook.” Obviously that’s an exaggeration. But what I’m really getting at is that the it shouldn’t matter whether someone or some team has created the coolest, shiniest, sexiest application in the past, but whether they can show their new application addresses a real need (and isn’t just another random “solution”) and has community interest. We are all learning from the success and failure of others in this sector, so a first try or a 50th try shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

“New is Better”

If there are funds to give out, they may as well be for something new, right? Not always. Sometimes the funds could actually go much further towards scale and impact by supporting a project that already has a tool but can use your support to fund staff and time to create documentation or clean up code so that it can be released to the open source community, or (as said above) quality investigation can go into the why of it’s success. Looking at deeper or wider can be more exciting than just new.

I’d love to hear your ideas, experiences and additions to these remarks though and especially any examples you have!

Image credit: Flickr opensourceway

Read the post below or visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog to comment.

How can we and how are we using social media tools for social change? That’s the question that the monthly #4Change chats (that take place on Twitter) address, this month focusing on the Climate Change movement.  This was a very lively conversation, filled with examples and experiences from people involved in climate change organizations and campaigns leveraging social media in their work.  “Social media is all about moving people up the ladder of engagement” (@JeffM2001) and is designed “to inspire (and to have lasting effect)—build fields and bridges, not brands” (@tropology). These points and the full #4Change conversation are applicable to the Climate Change movement, but also to many social impact sectors and the campaigns reaching around the world.

So, what are the biggest lessons for using social media in a global movement?

There were three main lessons or focus areas that emerged in the discussion.  These three lessons focus on what is successful, unique or important about using social media for the Climate Change movement (or any social impact area).  Note: the @names provide links to the Twitter users who made specific comments, just in case you want to connect and continue the conversation!*

Lesson #1: Voice

“Social media is a storytelling tool, it’s let voices effected by climate change be heard around the world” (@amysampleward).  Many social media tools are specifically designed for users to tell stories and voice opinions, others are built as aggregators and distributors of users’ stories.  Think about a tool like YouTube, where people can share videos (uploaded and created in various ways from mobile phones to laptop computers to high quality cameras) and then find others who care about similar issues.  It is impossible to tell a story about someone else being affected by Climate Change as well as the authentic voice of the person who is living with Climate Change.

“I’m really interested in how people are starting & joining movements – and how they’re growing via people-powered social media!” (@engagejoe)

The power of social media and the authentic storytelling that takes place is in the opportunity for people to inspire other people to take action, which leads to lesson #2.

Lesson #2: Action

@HildyGottlieb asked a great question, “How many ppl think that by “following” a climate change guru, they’re creating change?” Her question spurred some interesting comments that targeting the idea of taking action.  Social media is still the tool or the medium, not the change or the action.  The challenge, then, is how to use the tools to effect change, “not just talk about change we want to see one day” (@replyforall).  The power of social media in this context, “is in networks growing and collaborating, not silo-ing” (@amysampleward) or “connecting/leveraging/magnifying the work of people who’re already aware” (@HildyGottlieb).

Another side of empowering action via social media is to focus on what hooks people in: “Social Media can only inspire ACTION when people EASILY see how their action a) is part of something bigger, b) makes a difference” (@SethHorwitz).  “People need choices of action, if they are listening to you they are more than likely interested in your cause / initiative” (@BeverleyPomeroy) so provide opportunities to take action; your supporters are ready!  As, @@JeffM2001 explains, “awareness of climate change is already very high, we need to raise awareness about what we can do about it.”

Lesson #3: Local vs Global

The final focus area is on the local vs global impact of social media.  With tools that let us connect in real-time to anywhere else in the world, it can be hard for us to streamline, focus, or even tell our stories in ways that makes sense to the audience.  It especially poses problems for campaigners looking to collaborate around the world and create meaningful opportunities to take action (someone in Taiwan may have a compelling story about Climate Change, but they may not respond or be empowered by a US legislative petition, for example).

“Real world movement needs to allow 3rd world (biggest victims) to take leadership” (@SethHorwitz.)  “The accumulation of climate conscious communities will slowly add to a big pay off. People don’t see ‘big picture’ but relate locally” (@kristianakocis).

The local issue also takes the shape of real people, connecting in person.  “Social Media can’t be a replacement for getting one-on-one commitments from people—we need faces in the movement, not Facebook newsfeeds” (@replyforall).  Linking in global messages or large-scale campaigns to “to offline events and opportunities across organizations/campaigns” (@amysampleward) can bring local communities into the mix and create more ownership for outcomes.

Examples of Social Media

There were many, many examples cited in the discussion.  Please follow the links to learn more as I’ve tried to pull out as many as I could:

• There are many organizations using Twitter to promote actions, including: @350 @1sky @tcktcktck @replyforall @avaaz @PowerShift09 @wiserearth @focusthenation @consequence09
• Collaborative mapping of climate change policy http://bit.ly/1Jol4U
• http://climatelab.org is a climate change wiki
• http://consequence09.org/TimeToLead
• CoP15 Global Observatory worth a look http://globalobservatory.net
• http://climatecamp.tv
• Kinda technical, but for any nerds the drupal.org profile of TckTckTck is worth a look http://drupal.org/node/585950
• #Dreamact -ers have expanded the role of SM, not just to stay connected, but informing supporters on how to use SM themselves
• 1 way social media inspires action is by making it really easy, e.g. http://consequence09.org/call
• Pinc is using http://bit.ly/18nurm 2 inspire & inform, evoke w/ built in actions other platforms do similar w/ their applications
• Climate Ntwks, @1sky @powershift09 @focusthenation & @consequence09 each have own branded window into same 435 groups

Learn more about #4Change or review the full transcript.

*For transparency: I am @amysampleward in the above chat.

What do you think? Visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog or comment below!