Tag Archive for 'nonprofit'

Third Sector New England Provides Answers via Video

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on January 8, 2009
in resources and storytelling
. 0 Comments

I originally posted on the NetSquared blog.

How should managers and staff plan for an executive transition at their nonprofit? How would you define capacity building? What is ongoing learning for an organization?

Do you know the answers to these common nonprofit questions?  Third Sector New England wants to be sure you can find the answers, to those three questions and many more, in a way that’s engaging than searching and reading.  How?

Third Sector New England’s Video FAQ

Thanks to the work of Denise Moorehead of Third Sector New England, the distinguished videographer Steve Garfield, and Deborah Elizabeth Finn, a growing number of videos are collected on TSNE’s Strategic Communications Blog.  As Deborah explains, “We’ve put together a number of short segments in which TSNE’s mavens respond to frequently asked questions about topics such as finance, human resources, program evaluation, diversity, and fiscal sponsorship for nonprofits.”

The plan is to move these videos off the blog and into a web-based video reference tool that nonprofit managers and staff could access as needed.  Deborah says she’s hoping, “that we’ll eventually be able to add Seesmic to the mix, so that nonprofit professionals can use their web cameras to add comments and follow-up questions, thus sparking a real exchange of knowledge.”

Check out Third Sector New England’s Strategic Communications Blog to find videos on the questions above and many more.

Interview with John Carnell: Social media at use in BullyingUK

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on November 3, 2008
in case studies and interview
. 0 Comments

Originally posted on the NetSquared blog.

bullying uk logoJohn Carnell,  co-founder and project manager of  BullyingUK, a nonprofit organization working on anti-bulling campaigns in the UK including services for youth, parents and schools, recently took time from the active participation in social media to chat with me about the organization’s work.  BullyingUK has incorporated social media tools into communications, fundraising, and community buildling.  Learn more about how they are succeeding in the interview below.

Tell us a little about who BullyingUK is and the work you do:
Bullying UK was founded in 1999, then known as Bullying Online. I had a simple goal to create a new breed of charity that was light on its feet, able to react quickly to changes and be low cost but very high impact.

At the basic level we provide help, advice and support to people being bullied.  We have over 200 pages of advice and content dedicated to the subject matter, as well as tools and services to help spread the anti-bullying messages far and wide. We have a history of using the cutting edge technology to challenge convention and push the agenda in new directions.  We create the projects that others would say are too difficult or impossible.

What are the Unite Against Bullying badges?
UniteAgainstBullying.com is our online world-wide campaign site and has an associated offline campaign.  At its heart is a simple widget that can be embedded into any social site or webpage that tells everyone you’re United Against Bullying.

The campaign widget is currently served by over 3,000 websites and seen by 170k people a week. This year, we are offering 50 U.A.B badges to supporters who would like to sell them to raise a donation for Bullying UK - email supporters@bullying.co.uk with your name and address to get yours!

How have you seen social media help the organization?
Being a founding part of the modern web means social media is what we do, not just something we actively work into our organisation. It’s a core feature of our work and how we communicate.

That said, sites like Facebook and FriendFeed really help to create engagement and find like-minded people. We are out there having the conversations where people tend to find us and latch on with ideas for ways they can help.

How are you leveraging social media in your current anti-bullying campaign?We have a number of off-shoot campaigns from the UAB widget I mentioned above to more low level work connecting with bloggers and supporters to create buzz around our services.

One thing that’s important to me is that people don’t feel obligated to help us, and social media is the perfect way to find those sorts of people.  I feel there is more value added to our work by people who truely feel a connection to us than those that are just involved to be involved.

What was the order or progression of social media adoption at BullyingUK?
As I said before, social media has been a part of our work since before “social media” was a buzzword.  As the founder and CEO it’s my job to identify technologies and services years in advance of becoming mainstream. I then look at how that technology can be used to further our Anti-bullying work: Click, Create and Print is a perfect example using technology that so far no other charity or business has thought of combing the way we have.

Click, Create and Print is an online poster creater that allows schools to build and print their own posters (saving schools £34,000 so far).  Each poster then has a special barcode that allows a child to snap the code with their mobile phone to download a copy of the poster which they can then share with friends via bluetooth or mms or upload back to the web—creating a perfect circle!

I think this is the first time anyone has created a project that fills in the digital divide in such a unique way—it really is a whole new spin on a very old issue.

What has surprised you about social media use with the organization/campaigns?
The most surprising has been how quickly we can achieve critical mass (the point at which you don’t have to promote a service because supporters do it for you and pass the word along to their friends).

Historically we reach critical mass on a service in a little under 6 weeks; I consider critical mass to be 100 new supporters per day at an increase of 10% day on day (it fluncuates but its a good line in the sand).

Using a new supporter network we have been building we received over £1500 of badge pledges in just 2 days from a few thousand new supporters who had only just discovered who we were. That’s amazingly powerful.

How do you engage your supporters via social media and how can readers help out?
We have a presence on every social network site, all life streaming sites and preety much everywhere people from the UK are. Do a search for BullyingUK and you will most likely find us.

We are always looking for bloggers and social media users to help spread knowledge of our service either by adding the UAB widget, or linking to bullying.co.uk. Even just knowing we exist and mentioning us in conversation to someone dealing with bullying can have a huge impact.

To steal a tag line: “every little helps!”

Digital Makeover Project

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on July 7, 2008
in case studies and socialmedia
. 3 Comments

Simon Fairway is up to something across the pond: He is coordinating a digital makeover of South Yorkshire Funding Advice Bureau, a “voluntary organisation and registered charity set up to help voluntary and community organisations get the resources they need.”  The digital makeover project will focus on SYFAB and come to “grips with their organisational challenges, and dreaming up some innovative but appropriate digital solutions for a few of them.”

SYFAB was chosen from many nominations to the Charity Technology Trust because of their pattern of innovation and openness to new technologies.  They also have a staff of 12, making them comparable to many nonprofits.

Here are some of the first areas identified by Simon and the team working on the Digital Makeover.  (Take a look at the SYFAB website and the blog as reference for the below options.)

1.  Introducing Google Analytics to the website to get a stronger understanding of the volume and demographic of site visitors and the most useful content for service users.

I think this is a great way to begin identifying and learning about core usage of the website.  Many organizations are surprised by patterns that emerge and pages that are popular, as often the view of the organization’s website by staff is very different by users.  Some things that I would look for are

2. Adding an RSS feed to the website’s funding news page, so that regular visitors can be informed of updates to the website.

I think adding RSS is a must; the news page (which is the home page with the current site configuration) as well as the training and IT Project sections (you want RSS wherever content will change and people will want to know about it!).  The blog is in wordpress and automatically has RSS.

3. Establishing a regular email newsletter, initially with events and training information. In the longer term this could provide an alternative to the funding newsletter or members’ case studies.

The email newsletter is a great transition step from mailing hard copies towards only electronic materials.  SYFAB probably has the email addresses of nearly all the members already, but it is still a good idea to send out an email to everyone explaining that an email newsletter will begin next week (or whenever) and will be distributed from info@syfab.org.uk (as an example) so they can be sure the email address is in their contact list (some spam filters will block messages sent to many people unless they are in the contact list), and to reply if they do not want to be automatically added to the distribution list (an opt-out).

4. Migrating the feedback process on-line to make it more efficient as a whole, and providing an opportunity to provide feedback directly to funders.

By migrating feedback to an online process, especially one that is shared/stored and public, you really can serve more people by doing less work!  People that have a similar situation or question can review what has already been answered instead of starting the question/investigation process over.  Creating a learning center (like Tech Soup) or forum-type approach to the question-investigation-answer process, you can relieve yourself of having to duplicate research/work but also allow for other members to jump in and contirubte their experiences and knowledge to make even better responses.

I would like to see this have two parts: one side is for the funder investigation and process, the other is for case studies and success stories.  I think it is important for a collaborative approach in finding information and researching options, but it is also really important that case studies be public and searchable, as well as include feedback/commenting just like the learning center side.

5. Offering multimedia content through the website.

I hate to see any organization adopt new technologies that aren’t appropriate for the specific goals and projects.  That isn’t to say that multimedia options aren’t applicable to SYFAB, but I don’t want SYFAB to feel obligated to grab at cool, new things.

The most valuable and directly applicable avenue for multimedia in the SYFAB site, that I see, is:

  • Record (either video or just audio) main presentations at events
  • Create a video or audio instead of a text blog entry, like a quick tip on searching for funders, or a commonly misunderstood issue dispelled, etc.
  • When compelling case stories are submitted (see #4), interviews be recorded with a representative from the organization and posted in the learning forum and on the blog

6. Re-establish the blog as an informal counterweight to the website that welcomes contributions from SYFAB’s service users.

In the Issues and Priorities document available in Simon’s initial post, it says, “Danny freely admits that if the blog is to succeed, it needs find its niche alongside the website.” This is very true!

You have a few ways of doing this, and the first is to prominently display the blog/link on the website, and vice versa.  It is also helpful to textually link to the blog when discussing something that is mentioned on the blog, etc. (linking textually means you link the words in a setence, opposed to a graphic, etc.).  The blog, if it is going to be the counterweight to the website, should be updated often, at least as often as the website is updated, which is weekly.  If finding content is the issue (though I assume finding time is the issue), you have many resources for digging up content; my favorites include:

  • subscribe to industry RSS feeds, and report on news
  • watch/subscribe to RSS feeds of social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) to see sites and stories that others are discovering in your field
  • share something you or your organization learned
  • interview someone from the office/organization
  • ask for feedback or experiences about a certain topic related to the organization’s work or field

As far as the blog goes, there is very little that is social about it, except that commenting is enabled.  Any other social media adopted by the organization, should be displayed on the blog: ie, if you have a Facebook, Myspace, Ning, or other social network presence, the logo and link should be included; if you have a Twitter, Pownce, Utterz, or other microblogging tool, it should be included; if you have a presence on YouTube, Bebo, Blip TV, or other media sharing sites, it should be included; etc.  There are also widgets you can create using tools like Sprout Builder that ramp up your social media feel.  You can also use widgets from tools like MyBlogLog or Twitter that show recent activity.  Wordpress (which you are using for the blog currently) has a number of widgets you can enable to show recent activity as well, like comments, posts, etc.

7.  Optimise the site for search engines.

This, like adding RSS, is a great first level step to advancing any organization’s website.

8. Development of online training opportunities and provision of interactive online resources to help organisations develop their fundraising skills and knowledge.

It would be wonderful to do either live or archived online trainings in the form of a webinar or a screencast.  You can look at tools like SlideShare as well.  Connecting these with the learning forums and case studies would be a great way to add context and user stories.  The multimedia options (#5) are a great way to begin providing some online resources as well.

Follow along with the updates on Simon’s blog on NetSquared here:  http://www.netsquared.org/blog/simonfairway/

This is a social media project, meaning you can contribute and get involved in myriad ways: blog about some of your ideas (tag it with digitalmakeover), video blog about your ideas (tag it with digitalmakeover), or post to the community blog at NetSquared (tag with digitalmakeover).  You can also speak to Simon about other ways to get involved and the project’s progress by emailing him at simon @ ctt .org

What are your thoughts about the digital makeover project and SYFAB’s options?

connec+ipedia public launch!

Published
by
Amy Sample Ward
on June 12, 2008
in wiki
. 0 Comments

connec+ipedia is public! I’m happy to announce that a project I have worked on for the last 18 months and that others have worked for even longer is now ready for your eyes and minds:

“What if there was a place where we could all exchange what we learn as we go about our daily business? What if nonprofits could see the data and information that foundations use in their due diligence process? What if organizations and people could easily determine which foundations’ interests match their project goals? What if foundations could quickly see what groups are working on an issue they are investigating? And so on…

Well, we are building such a place. A place where people and organizations can connect about subjects and places. A place called connectipedia…”

connec+ipedia is, in my opinion, an awesome new tool that will change the way many people think of wikis.

Reason #1 - The Wiki Way
It is a wiki, yes. But it is a wiki that has database capabilities and functions in a more complete definition of the wiki way. What’s the wiki way? Well, as Ward Cunningham (the man who invented wikis and who spoke at our public launch event on Tuesday) explains, what makes wikis really different is that they incorporate what isn’t yet created. You can make links to topics that don’t exist. A link to something that doesn’t exist? Yes. Exactly. A way to create a placeholder and a reminder that there is more needed here or this item is important but not fleshed out yet. By clicking on that link, you are redirected to create that page. When you incorporate database functionality into a wiki, the opportunity to further this idea is even greater.

Reason #2 - Nonlinear
I have seen many examples of wikis that try to be very linear. What do I mean by this? Well, they want to create a wiki that is very structured (traditional) and appears like a standard website, as far as navigation tabs, site map, layout, etc. connec+ipedia is nonlinear. It has content divided by People, Places and Things. But, content also exists in the intersection of these categories. So you can go to a card for after school programs, but you could also go find after school programs + Portland, OR, and so on.

Reason #3 - Community
Wikis are inherently a community of users (regardless of size). connec+ipedia takes this to a new level. It exists to connect you to information, not store the information. So, with so many links to organizations and projects, the community creates a pull for those who are linked to but not using the tool to engage, at least so far to make sure their information is correct! Many nonprofits and foundations (public and private) from around the region are already listed in connec+ipedia. It has the unique capacity for connecting topic areas with funders who support them and organizations doing the work. It is encouraging to the community grow to use the site in this way and ensure that information is correct - keeping people connected!

I invite you to check it out! connec+ipedia is free, open source tool. It runs on WagN which you can learn about here.