Odjinud

Heroes with A Heart Grant Recognizes Unsung Nonprofit Heroes

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Pá, 03/02/2012 - 17:56

Heroes with A Heart Grant Recognizes Unsung Nonprofit Heros – Guest Post by John Haydon

If you’re like most people, you get most of your inspiration from people who are quietly changing the world each and every day. They’re not on the front page of the newspaper, and they’re not mingling with the Gates and Buffets of the world. They’re everyday people like you and me who have shown extraordinary commitment to making this world better than when they found it.

The CTK Foundation “Heroes with a Heart” Grant Award asks YOU to nominate a “Hero with a Heart,” and give them a chance to win $5,000 – a simple thanks for the hard work that they do.

What are the details of the “Heroes with a Heart” Grant?

Here’s an overview of awards the CTK Foundation will offer and details on how you can nominate your Hero:

• $15,000 for Three Heroes One Hero with a Heart from each of the three categories of Health and Human Social Service, Animal Rights and Environmental Protection and Arts and Literacy will be awarded $5,000 USD and a professionally produced video about their affiliated nonprofit for use in public awareness or education.
• $1,500 for One Hero The CTK Foundation will also be offering a $1,500 (USD) President’s Choice Award (the Susan Lee Winter Grant Award) for an individual working to provide creative and innovative approaches to HIV/AIDS education or prevention.
• Blogger’s Choice Award Lastly, there will be a Blogger’s Choice Award of $1,000 (USD). The CTK Foundation will choose a blogger (hopefully Beth) who will hand-pick one winner from any category.

Applications for all Heroes with a Heart grant awards open on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 and close Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at midnight.

Finalists will appear on the CTK Facebook page for public voting during April and winners will be announced on May 1, 2012. This award is open to registered nonprofits or charities of all types and sizes, worldwide.

Go to www.communitytech.net/foundation to nominate your Hero with a Heart today!

For regular updates on the Heroes with a Heart Grant, check out the CTK Facebook Page.

Good luck, Heroes!

John Haydon blogs about social media tips and tools here and is the co-author of Facebook for Dummies.   This post was originally published here.

 

Kategorie: Odjinud

Komen Kan Kiss My Mammagram, PinActivism, and Newsjacking for a Cause

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Čt, 02/02/2012 - 07:54

Source: thefastertimes.com via Noland on Pinterest

 

On Tuesday, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a leading breast cancer charity,  pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars in breast cancer screening funds from Planned Parenthood.  Each year millions of women are screened for breast cancer at Planned Parenthood, and Susan G. Komen’s funding pays for about 170,000 of those screenings.  These services are particularly important for women from under-served communities.

The AP reported that Komen for the Cure has decided to halt grants to Planned Parenthood and the decision was politically motivated.   Within hours, Planned Parenthood sent a fundraising email out to its network, asking supporters to replace the money that Komen had pulled for breast cancer screenings for low-income women.   As the news traveled from email boxes to social networks to mainstream media, activists, men, and women expressed their outrage.

My Networked Nonprofit co-author, Allison Fine, started a fundraising campaign on Causes this morning called “Komen Can Kiss My Mammagram”  quickly raising several thousand dollars.    I observed conversations happening in threads on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks – people urging their friends to donate or take action.        I started receiving emails from organizations like Momsrising urging us to email the Komen organization and ask them to restore this much needed support of women’s health.

My colleague, Kivi Leroux-Miller, wrote an astute case study documenting the social media response and provided an analysis about why it happened.    As Kivi says, “This is what happens when a leading nonprofit jumps into a highly controversial area of public debate without a communications strategy, stays silent, and therefore lets others take over the public dialogue, perhaps permanently redefining the organization and its brand. Watch and learn, so you don’t make the same mistake on whatever hot button issues your organization might be wading into.”  Read her analysis.

Let me go a little meta here.  Last week Kivi wrote about “newsjacking” the technique of piggy backing on a crisis to get more media attention.   And it worked!  Kivi got a call from a newspaper in Dallas writing about the nonprofit marketing angle.  She also got quoted on an influential blog.

I asked Kivi to share her process:

I was on the Washington Post site reading something else when I saw the AP story. Literally five minutes later (around 4 pm ET), I got the fundraising appeal email from Planned Parenthood (nicely customized with my name and state, I might add). I immediately forwarded it to Nancy Schwartz, because she had blogged about Komen’s Kentucky Fried Chicken partnership and I knew she’d want to follow up. Again, literally minutes later, I started to see mentions on Facebook and Twitter.

Nancy and I tossed around the idea of doing some kind of joint post about the story, her on the branding, me probably on how Planned Parenthood grabbed the moment, to publish on Thursday since Nancy was busy all day Wednesday. But then the story just exploded on Twitter and Facebook in the early evening, and I kept waiting to see what Komen would say. And I waited, and waited, and waited.

Absolutely nothing.

The fact that they had this totally inane tweet about prostate cancer in a mummy as their most recent tweet when they were getting eaten alive on Twitter just made me crazy. Same thing on Facebook — their most recent post was about a partnership with Energizer and people were just going wild on Energizer, because they just happened to be the most recent update on Komen’s page.  I probably checked Komen’s Twitter and Facebook pages 20 times Tuesday night, pleading with them in my head to say something to their supporters. All the while, I was taking screen captures, which I’ve made a habit, because it’s so much easier to just grab it as you see it, rather than trying to find it later.

Whenever I get obsessed on a nonprofit story like this, where I find myself spending an hour, or two, or more focused on it, I know I have to blog it right away. If I’m that taken by a story, I know my readers will be too, and if I’m going to put that much time into something, I have to turn it into content I can use — I’m trying to blog five days a week after all, and it’s not always easy!  Before I went to bed, I’d decided to post on Wednesday and to focus on Komen’s non-reaction and how I really believed they had completely changed their positioning within field, I assumed without really meaning to do so. I’d posted on both my personal and Nonprofit Marketing Guide Facebook pages that I was probably going to write about it the next day.

Got up Wednesday morning, saw that Komen still hadn’t said anything, and started writing. Building out a blow-by-blow post like that, then adding your own commentary, takes some time, especially when dealing with a controversial topic like abortion. My own personal feelings aside, I really wanted to focus on the nonprofit marketing angle, because that’s why people read my blog.  I probably spent a solid two hours on the post this morning, not counting all the research the night before.

I really didn’t think about the newsjacking potential of the post until I got into writing the commentary, and decided to really call out Komen for the lack of responsiveness to their supporters. I knew it would be a good lesson for my blog readers, but then mid-morning, Komen posted on Facebook (but still not on Twitter), and I found the response to be really lacking given the outrage.

I published around 11:30 a.m. ET, and at that point, I figured my post would probably get covered by the nonprofit trade press, like the Chronicle of Philanthropy (which it did). I really didn’t appreciate that the story had gone beyond the nonprofit news world until my phone rang around 1:30 pm and it was Kate Nocera from Politico.com. That’s when I thought, “Damn, I just newsjacked this story!” She had been searching for reaction to the Komen story and came upon my post. I was so irritated with Komen at that point that I was pretty critical in the interview.

I usually publish my weekly e-newsletter on Tuesday or Wednesday and hadn’t gotten to it Tuesday, so it only made sense to include the Komen story in the e-newsletter too. I had planned for that edition to be a longer article on using photography, but I cut that back and led with Komen. Traffic to my site was so heavy this afternoon that the site started crashing every 15 minutes, so I had to call my hosting company and upgrade (I was already on a decent virtual private server, but had to double the capacity.)

 

This isn’t the first time that Komen has endured a social media backlash. It’s ill fated “Buckets for the Cure” backfired.

 

Source: Uploaded by user via Beth on Pinterest

As I reading the comments on Allison’s campaign wall over at Causes, my friend Stephanie Rudat has posted some of the visuals.    This made think of Pinterest.  Given that Pinterest’s demographics are mostly women, I wondered whether it might be worth experimenting with some “Pinactivism.” I set up a board named after Allison’s Campaign, “Komen Kan Kiss My Mammagram” and invited other women who work in social media and activism to add to the board.   All the visuals are linked to Allison’s campaign. The board got over 500 followers in less than half hour.   Whether they donate or not is another story.

The point is that social networking platforms provide a canvas for people to find each other, self organize actions in something they believe, and do it.   A lot more nimbly than the most likely fortress like communications machine at Komen.   In the book I just finished with KD Paine,  we talk about the importance and a method of measuring relationships.    This public relations disaster also shines a light on the importance of measurement of relationships and the ability to respond in real time.

 

 

Kategorie: Odjinud

Google + for Nonprofits: Invest Time or Not? Nonprofit Starter Steps

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - St, 01/02/2012 - 20:39

Alex Abelin: Google + for Nonprofits

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Does Google + have the potential to be a valuable platform for nonprofits or is it just another shiny object to distract nonprofits?  Should your nonprofit do more than simply set up a presence on Google + and not invest any more time?  What is a productive way to experiment and learn to the answers to these questions without wasting time?  These were the questions that were going through my mind as I listened to a presentation on Google + Alex Abelin at the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference as he explained some of the benefits.     This post will help you create a plan for getting started with a low risk experiment.

Before jumping in, hit the pause button.   What are your communications objectives and the audience you want to target?   Do you have a couple hours a week to devote to a learning experiment to get comfortable with the platform, the work flow, and learn something about what what content and engagement works on Google +?    Are there other ways you should be investing your time?        If you don’t have the time or good answers to these questions, simply set up a presence for now and come back to it when the timing makes sense.

But if you Google + seems like the right next step in your integrated social media strategy, here’s how to get started.

Become Familiar with the Google + Landscape

If you’re new to Google +, here’s the official set up help pages and instructions from Google + . Set aside some “play and explore” time to observe, read, and interact with your colleagues and peers who are on Google +.  One of your first tasks will be to find interesting and valuable people and brands to “circle” and follow to support your goal to become familiar with the Google + landscape.

If you set up you presence when Google + first launched,  but you didn’t organize it to learn, now’s your opportunity for a fresh start.

My first step with a new platform is to create a “Circle of the Wise” consisting of people who regularly share useful tips and news about the platform. I look for people in the nonprofit space, but also those who work for the platform or have specialized in blogging about the platform.  Or people whose Google + is focused on Google + tips, news, and resources.  Ask around if you don’t know who they are.   I start with a handful and expand from there.   Also, my circle of the wise is constantly changing, but here’s a few for you to get started.

• Debra Askanase Blogger and trainer who share useful tips about Google + (and other platforms too!)
• Janet Fouts: Blogger and social media coach who is consistently blogging some excellent posts about how nonprofits can leverage google +.
• John Haydon: Blogger and Facebook Guy also shares tips on Google + along with tips about other platforms
• Louis Gray He’s on the Google + team and shares items about new features, analytics, and other stuff.
• Lynette Young:  Curates Women of Google +
• Toby Stein: Google + mobile and pages Community Manager
• Natalie Villa-Lobos Community Manager for Google + she shares information about Google +, but also more broadly resources about building online community that are applicable to Google + strategy
• Jesse Stay, Author of Google + for Dummies
• Vincent Mo – technical lead for google + photos
• Google for Nonprofits They are sharing information about hangouts about Google products, how-to resources, and important feature changes.
• Nonprofits Organizations This is Heather Mansfied’s Google + brand page. You can cruise through her public circles of nonprofit brands and check the nonprofit of the week on Google +

If I’m just getting started on a platform, my circle of the wise is a tightly curated list so I don’t get overwhelmed or distracted.  Not everyone in the circle is tightly focused on Google +, but I know I can find good information there.   But, if you want more suggestions, see 22 Must Circle Nonprofit Bloggers and Nonprofits on Google + that Heather Mansfield aggregated.   It is a diverse list of different nonprofits and people  that have a presence and share information information on Google + that might be of interest to nonprofits.

Next, I put together a circle of nonprofit brands that I could observe and learn from. I have two nonprofit brand circles. One where I’m simply aggregating nonprofit brands I discover on Google + that has over 700 nonprofit brands and more tightly curated list of nonprofit brands that are sharing content or engaging with their audiences in interesting ways.  That second circle is a “watch list” and I look for patterns and ideas.

Heather Mansfield put together this list of 22 Must Circle Nonprofit Brands that are active on Google +.  If you want to easily circle them, I created this shared circle based on that list you can grab.  I was curious and started a conversation asking these questions:

• What is your definition of success on Google +?
• How are you measuring that?
• How much time are you investing?
• What content do you find resonating?

What I learned is that most are defining success by the number of people who have circled them and are testing to see what content resonates with their audiences.    Once they’ve mastered the work flow, the time investment is 1-2 hours per week.

Set Up A Learning Experiment

After you have explored as an individual, you may decide that you only need to set up a presence and be done with it.   You are now ready to set up your Brand account.    Heather Mansfield has a good set of instructions for doing this AND avoiding some common set up mistakes.

If you want to stick a toe a little deeper into the water, the next step is create a simple plan to test the waters for your brand. You are testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Most importantly, determine a focused, but brief amount of time daily that you can spend on learning about Google +. When in the phase of learning a new social media platform, you’ll need to block creative immersion time (a few hours) for set up and learning the daily work flow.

If you already have established an editorial calendar, spend some time thinking through how your Google + can align with your editorial focus, but be differentiated from other channels. (And, not take you a lot of extra time).  For example, what if your nonprofit is launching a new program and you’re holding a press conference.  Why not hold a google hangout to share that news as well?     Google + recently added a feature of doing video status updates, why not a regular video status update thanking a supporter?    Or maybe your audience will respond to a content curation strategy – that you share and annotate the best links on your topic.

You can mix it up with specific content for Google + and content cross-posted from your other channels.   Mari Smith shared an excellent list of tools and suggestions to make this efficient.

Once you’ve internalized the work flow (creating and posting content, reviewing Ripples (the Google + metrics tool), and listening and engaging with your audience), you can most likely get the daily time commitment to a few hours per week.

Mashable published “How To Build An Effective Brand Presence on Google + which includes six best practices you should use in this early stage.

Measurement and Learning

You will waste your time if you don’t pick out the important metrics that allow you to learn whether what you’re doing is working.     I think the most important piece is to figure out what the right mix of content and engagement is – and if that can lead to traffic or conversions.

Google + has an analytics tool that is very basic, called Ripples. It offers a quasi social network analysis to see how your posts are shared: when, by whom, and to whom.
An analysis of Googe + posts against these metrics can help you make some decisions to improve your content, engagement tactics, and identify your influencers.    Debra Askansae wrote this informative piece about what it does and how to get started using it.   Frank Barry shared this piece from Dan Soto that digs deeper into the metrics, but before careful not to collect data you don’t need.

Is your nonprofit on Google +?  What’s your definition of success?  What have you learned?   Have you decided not to invest time?  Why?

Kategorie: Odjinud

Guest Post: Infusing “Social” into Social Justice Organizations

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Út, 31/01/2012 - 14:31

Infusing Social Into Social Justice Organizations – Guest Post by Daniel Jae-Won Lee, Executive Director of the Levi Strauss Foundation

Time Magazine provocatively named “The Protester” as its 2011 “Person of the Year” for its riveting influence on last year’s social and political events. As courageous citizens connected with each other to express dissent and organize public actions, social media tools spurred activism and social change in unprecedented ways.

Chalk up my vote for 2011’s “Best Debut Artist” and “Best Supporting Actor.”

But for legal and advocacy organizations that defend civil liberties in the United States, forays into the social marketplace come with a unique set of challenges – and, no doubt, risks:

• In the decentralized (indeed, some might say cacophonous) field of social media, engaging in two-way conversations means surrendering “message control” and the traditional calculus of “message discipline.”
• In this sound bite culture, social justice organizations must carve out nuanced positions on complex social issues, from racial and gender equity to immigration reform. What this often means is that their messages might not garner the media attention or viral traction they deserve.
• While emotive storytelling is crux to engaging the hearts and minds of social media consumers, advocates are ethically bound to preserve the privacy of vulnerable clients.
• Finally, substantiating impact and success to risk-averse board members may be vexing.

The Levi Strauss Foundation launched the “Pioneers in Justice” initiative to tackle the “social media for social change” zeitgeist head-on. Through this initiative, we are supporting a group of dynamic, next-generation leaders in the social justice field in the San Francisco Bay Area as they retool their organizations for greater impact. The Bay Area, after all, is renowned as a cradle of innovation – both for technology and social movements.

“Pioneers in Justice” operates as a forum to explore social media tools that may power their local advocacy work and explore “networked” ways of collaboration within the social justice sector – and equally important, a space to address any concerns that may surface along the way. The Pioneers’ approach is flexible yet focused:

• We encourage these organizations to take sensible, measured steps to integrate social media into their organizational and social change trajectories.  As Beth Kanter invokes:  Crawl, Walk, Run and Fly.
• We also aim to help them measure incremental progress against their goals of engaging younger and more diverse constituencies, driving successful campaigns, and building a moral and political consensus around their change agendas.

MiACLU is a one-of-a-kind project born from this framework.

MiACLU.org is an online, Spanish-language platform created by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, an organization well-known for its spirited defense of civil liberties (advocating free speech, marriage equality and immigrants’ rights, among other issues). As rapid demographic shifts powerfully reshape the cultural and political landscape of California, they also give rise to anxieties that may render immigrants vulnerable.  Latinos, who comprise the bulk of California’s immigrant population, tend to be younger and less affluent than the state population as a whole.

Against this backdrop, the ACLU-NC is seeking a crucial opportunity to grow its impact. This year, MiACLU seeks to engage 10,000 monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking Californians. MiACLU is a new entry point – amplified by ethnic media and personalized through community outreach—to engage this population on the key issues that affect them.

MiACLU isn’t just a cookie-cutter to an English website—it’s an independent portal for original content in Spanish, with its unique set of tools. Facebook, Twitter and text messaging are also in the pipeline. It’s the first web-based space to promote the understanding and protection of constitutional rights among Spanish speakers by the ACLU affiliates in California. Check out this manual with vital nuggets of information about knowing your rights in the wake of natural disasters, or this article explaining how immigrants who are victims of crime may apply for a U.S. visa.

In time, it may become a platform for immigrant communities to help ACLU-NC drive momentous legal and policy victories. For example, ACLU-NC is working to keep local police and sheriffs out of immigration enforcement; Latinos account for 40% of all Californians and many experience racial profiling that is exacerbated when local law enforcement gets pulled into immigration enforcement.So, that’s the spirit of “Pioneers in Justice”:  taking leaps of faith (big and small) with social media to drive engagement and action among new and unexpected audiences.

Can justice roll down like waters, propelled by viral?

Daniel Jae-Won Lee is the Executive Director of the Levi Strauss Foundation, an independent private foundation that conveys the pioneering spirit and enduring values of Levi Strauss & Co.: originality, empathy, integrity and courage. He leads the Foundation’s international grant making in four areas: confronting HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination, advancing worker rights in the apparel industry, helping low-income people save and invest in their futures, and advancing social justice.

 

Kategorie: Odjinud

What Can Nonprofits Learn from Robin Good, the Best Content Curator on the Planet?

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Po, 30/01/2012 - 14:09

Content Curation for Nonprofits

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Here are my slides and curated resources materials for a talk called “What Can Nonprofits Learn from Robin Good,  the Best Content Curator on the Planet?” that I will be presenting at the Social Media for Nonprofits.   This area, content curation, is a social media competency that I’m focusing  in my own learning and teaching.  One of the best ways to learn is the study, observe, or interview the experts.   That’s why I invited Robin Good to skype into my session.

Last week, in preparation for this talk,  I had a skype call with   Robin Good, one of the best content curators on the planet.   He  will join me via skype  from Italy for an interview and discussion.    I recorded the above skype interview as a technology back up – it is filled with great advice and worth listening to for 14 minutes.   (If you’re short on time,  I have a transcript linked to resources here)

The session will begin with a simple primer about content curation, the benefits, and a few examples of nonprofit content curators and their tools.   Then, if all works well, I will bring in Robin for a discussion.  If not, we’ll roll the video.  Either way,  you’ll learn a lot!

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is the organizing, filtering and making sense of information on the web and sharing the very best content with your network.   If you think about what a museum curator does, it is very similar.  The museum curator does research, is an expert in the artistic style,  selects the best examples, puts them together in an exhibit, provides important context with the annotation on the labels, and so on.    Not too long ago content curators used to be called journalists!

I like the metaphor of a sommelier,   They know the grapes, the winemaker and their techniques, and vintages.  They taste many wines to find the best of the best to match with the food in the restaurant.  They can answer questions about the wine to help diners navigate a wine list to make the best choice.    The content curator does this as well, although with information.

One reason content curation is becoming more and more appreciated because of the huge amount of information available on the web.   There’s some much of it that it is now measured in exabytes which is equal to a quintillion bytes.    The creation and sharing of content on social media and social networks is contributing to this information overload.   The average user on Facebook shares/creates 90 pieces of content a month.    With over 800 million global users on Facebook, if you do the math – that’s  a lot of information!

We can’t blame it all on the amount of information.   The problem is our  information consumption — we’re indulging too much at the buffet called the web.   We need to go on an information diet.    And guest what? Mindful consumption of information is at the heart of content curation practice.

Benefits for Nonprofits

There are benefits for both nonprofit organizations and the people who work for them.

• Improve staff expertise:  It used to be that we could be trained to do our work and we wouldn’t need to update and synthesize new information on a daily basis.   That’s less true.   One 21 century work place literacy is sense-making of information together and alone.
• Improve Thought Leadership:  If your organization is curating content on a particular topic, it can help with branding your organization as thought leaders in the space.
• Content curation forms the base of your content strategy pyramid.  It’s about curation, creativity, and coordination across channels.   Your content strategy is essential to the success of an integrated social media strategy.
• Content curation can help increase the shelf-life of your content – it gives it an extra half life.

A Simple Method For Getting Started

I’m a huge fan of Harold Jarche’s “Seek, Sense, Share” model.   I’ve written a lot about how nonprofits without a lot of time or money  might apply this easily to content curation to get started.

A Few Good Starter Tools

Robin suggests that you need two sets of tools: discovery and curation tools.  The discovery tools help you discover the best stuff through the use of RSS feeds and persistent search.  (You also have to know your sources!).  The second set, curation tools, help you organize and present your collection.   Robin has tested hundreds of tools – from free to enterprise level.   He kindly put together two mind maps with links to tools that are free and easy to get started with.   You”ll find them linked here.

The Practice

I will ask Robin some questions about his practice as an expert content curation to see what we can learn.    Here’s two resources I put together.  One is a collection of selected articles, slide decks, and interviews with Robin Good.   The other is a collection of content curation for nonprofit resources that I have to used to develop workshops and trainings.

Is your nonprofit doing content curation?   Let me know in the comments.

Kategorie: Odjinud

Peeragogy: Self Organized Peer Learning in Networks

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Čt, 26/01/2012 - 18:16

Photo by Aussiegal

My dream is to see more robust informal peer learning networks in the nonprofit sector.

As a trainer,  I’m intensely interested in creating learning experiences that integrate or about how to use the technology for nonprofits that engage and inspire people to put the ideas into practice.    I’ve been obsessed with peer learning and self-directed learning models in my own learning and the trainings I design and facilitate.

The term Peeragogy came fluttering through my network, like a butterfly, and it caught my interest.  It resonated.  When an idea or concept makes me want to scuplt it out of mash potatoes,   I pay attention.

Peeragogy comes from Howard Rheingold via his Social Media Classroom and he explains it here:

When I participated in the Change: Education, Learning, and Technology MOOC, I grew even more interested in the intersection of digital media/networks with self-directed learners and collaborative learning methods. I knew that I wasn’t the first person to explore this space, and I was fortunate that Charley Danoff was in my second cohort of online co-learners. Danoff, it turned out, had written a paper on “Paragogy” with Joe Corneli (who coined the term). When I started talking to people about this exciting idea, some of them inevitably mishear it as “peeragogy.” Although “paragogy” is a more rationally derived word that extends “pedagogy” (teaching children) and “androgogy” (teaching adults), I’ve started calling it peeragogy because many people get the point as soon as I use the word.

UC Berkeley Regents’ Lecture: Howard Rheingold (Presented by Berkeley Center for New Media) from Berkeley Center for New Media on Vimeo.

On Monday,  Rheingold delivered the UC’s Regents Lecture, “Social Media and Peer Learning: From Mediated Pedagogy to Peeragogy” prior to working with a group of students in a seminar and launching a process to  co-construct a peeragogy handbook/sourcebook.

Rheingold published this post as a backdrop to his Monday evening talk.   He talks about the powerful combination of social media and peer learning.    His post reflects on his years of “learning in action” on his instructional practice of  peer-to-peer, global learning via social web.   What struck me was his authentic co-learning process with his students.   He explains it better here:

In retrospect, I can see the coevolution of my learning journey: my first step was to shift from conventional lecture-discussion-test classroom techniques to lessons that incorporated social media, my second step gave students co-teaching power and responsibility, my third step was to elevate students to the status of co-learner. It began to dawn on me that the next step was to explore ways of instigating completely self-organized, peer-to-peer online learning.

The ultimate test of peer learning is to organize a course without the direction of an instructor. Although subject-matter experts and skilled learning facilitators are always a bonus, it is becoming clear that with today’s tools and some understanding of how to go about it, groups of self-directed learners can organize their own courses online.

Howard’s goal is to ignite a a peer-created guide to pure peer-to-peer learning. In preparation for this project,  one of his students has prepared  a peeragogy literature review, based on his links about paragogy.

My questions:

• How can this idea be best adapted for learners in developing countries that may not enjoy the same level of internet access?
• How can this idea be best adapted for professional development activities for nonprofit folks?

This should be a fascinating learning  journey.

Kategorie: Odjinud

What Do Facebook’s New Timeline Apps Mean for Nonprofits?

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - St, 25/01/2012 - 18:39

Source: developers.facebook.com via Beth on Pinterest

 

Remember last September when Facebook announced all those changes to individual profiles, including the timeline?    One of the changes  was that your friends and fans can do more than “Like” or “Comment”  on Facebook. Three new actions were announced at the time, including:  Read, Watch, Listen to  help people better understand what their friends are doing online.     Facebook called it the “Open Graph” and the pr people called “A revolution to the whole meaning of listening to music together or family T.V.”   You can read more about how it works from the Facebook developer notes.

You can install an app on your Facebook profile that shares an action and it goes out on your newsfeed and is shared with your friends.   In the example above, the cooking app lets a Facebook user share what they “cooked” with their friends.

Recently, some apps have been using the OpenGraph in innovate ways.   The one that caught my eye was the approach used by Ticketmaster.  They are mashing up apps,  figuring out what music you listen to on Spotify and offering up tickets that might be of interest. This is both interesting but a little scary to me.    I asked folks on my Facebook brand page what they thought.  My colleague, Devon Smith, pointed to a cool application called “Art Finder” that helps people discover their friends’ interests in fine arts.

The Open Graph and apps are becoming more and more critical for marketers given the Facebook changes.   Here’s a description from Social Media Examiner:

Last year, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, allowing brands to connect to a user’s Facebook social graph. This year, it rolled out significant changes, allowing app developers to create custom actions using any verb and object related to the activity taking place on the app.

These so-called “lightweight” activities can be defined by the app creator and pushed throughout the Facebook experience.

Here are the highlights, and how the actions affect Timeline:

• The Open Graph integrates with the News Feed, Ticker and Timeline, making the app a key part of users’ and their friends’ Facebook experiences.
• As users engage, the custom action appears on Facebook News Feed, and remains on the user’s Timeline; e.g., Jane cooked a recipe from Best Recipes app.

Changes to the structure of permissions allow a user to give permission one timefor an app to post about that user’s activity on the app thereafter.

This is how you’re seeing so many more postings about what your friends are listening to, for example, if they’re using a social sharing music app like Spotify. It even gets its own designated spot in the Timeline and displays a running list of what the user is listening to.

Debra Askanase has a post about Facebook Timeline Apps and profiles three fundraising vendors that have developed timeline apps.   Debra says the benefits to nonprofits are:

Timeline apps afford an opportunity for nonprofits to promote causes, activities and mission. I can envision apps that promote online campaigns, encourage people to interact with the organization in a certain way, encourage specific actions, track activity, and/or to raise brand awareness. A few ideas:

• Support the nonprofit: “Jerry supports the Canadian Red Cross”
• Activism: “Debra signed a petition to stop fracking” or “Eliana contacted a brand to ask about its slavery footprint via Slavery Footprint”
• Play a game: “Adam has donated 2,173 grains of rice to the UN to date via Free Rice”
• Donate: “Kylie has started a virtual food drive with Feeding America”
• Support a campaign: “David is growing a mustache for Movember”

In my opinion, I think the greatest Timeline app benefit is in the information the nonprofit will gain about app users, and how committed a supporter is to the cause. Installing an app is a deeper commitment than passively Liking a Page, or joining conversation on a Facebook Page. App users should be the organization’s most committed online supporters.

When an app is installed, the developer knows a supporters’ email address, other Likes, and how the user is engaging with the application. Ultimately, the app both gathers supporter information that isn’t available from people who Like a Page, and spreads awareness about the organization/campaign/cause through the ticker.

I caught up with Matt Mahan from Causes for a quick interview about Causes use of the new timeline apps based on the Facebook Open Graph:

1.     Can you explain “Open Graph” for non-geeks and why it isimportant?  How would someone at a nonprofit explain to their seniormanagement or board?

Open Graph is a way of connecting any website to Facebook so that people using that website can opt-in to automatically share what they are doing in real time—listening to music, reading articles, shopping, supporting nonprofits, etc.—with their Facebook friends. If this tool becomes standard across the Internet, which I think it will, it will dramatically increase peer-to-peer sharing of social information, making it easier for people to discover what their friends are doing. Nonprofits, especially smaller ones, stand to benefit from these changes because they will reap the equivalent of free advertising as people engage with them online. Because most nonprofits cannot afford significant marketing budgets, their online “mindshare” is low relative to the degree to which people care about them (vis-à-vis companies and other organizations with greater marketing heft). All in all, Open Graph should help nonprofits become a larger part of the mass scale conversation taking place on Facebook every day.

2.    How has Causes integrated the Open Graph on Facebook?

Causes.com has hooked into Facebook’s Open Graph with a number of action types that will allow people to publish their social good accomplishments to Timeline and their friends’ news feed. These action types include: join, pledge, answer, sign, give and a range of other actions people can take to help their favorite nonprofits. As people take these actions they will be translated into Timeline stories that expose their friends to great organizations and timely action campaigns.

3.    What is the value or benefit to nonprofit users of Causes?

Open Graph is particularly exciting for those of us in the social good space because awareness-raising and advocacy are often core to the work we do. You can listen to a song and enjoy it all by yourself, but social change always requires collective action. Nonprofits and their supporters now have a much more powerful tool for spreading a message, via what is essentially digital-word-of-mouth, quickly and cheaply.

4.    What does this look like to potential users?

For potential users the change is minimal. We’ll ask our users to opt in to share the action they are taking on Causes.com with their Facebook friends. We believe that altruism is social and social change requires collective action, but we also respect that not everyone wants to share their cause with others.

5.    What do nonprofits need to do in terms of strategy and tactics to make it work for them?

The short answer is, invest in your grassroots organizing capacity. Over the next couple of weeks Causes.com is releasing a number of new “action campaigns”, including pledges, polls, quizzes, petitions and so forth, that will make it easy and free for even the smallest nonprofits and independent activists to publish great action campaigns, track action-taking, and translate loose online support into coordinated action. I think this is a particularly exciting opportunity for organizations that see awareness-raising and advocacy as core objectives in the coming year. We’re one of the only websites in the world to have fully integrated with Open Graph, so we recommend using Causes.com as a campaign hub for engaging various online audiences (Facebook, Twitter, website, email list, Causes) in deeper action-taking.

6.    How should they think about measurement of successful strategy?

Overall, the measure of success is how many people you can move to take action and how valuable that action ultimately ends up being for your organization or the population you serve. On Causes.com, our top-level metric of success is the amount of action we help our nonprofit partners generate from their supporters. We trust that those nonprofits are in the best position to determine how to best direct action-taking for real-world impact, whether it’s fundraising, awareness-raising, or advocacy action they are generating. Our goal is to build the world’s best platform for collection action-taking, so we measure (and will soon be able to share with our partners right on their causes) conversion rates from top-down promotion of campaigns via email and Facebook, on-site action-taking, and post-action peer-to-peer sharing, or what is often called “virality”. In a few months, nonprofits will be able to do this kind of measurement right on Causes.com at no cost, and those with larger tech teams will be able to do similar tracking on their own websites. Eventually we plan to power this kind of measurement and data analysis no matter where you run your campaigns.

7.    What are the best how-tos, resources for nonprofits to get started on this?

Definitive best practices are still emerging. We put together a quick overview on the Causes blog for our users, focused on what Open Graph means for their Facebook experience: . Our support team here at Causes is happy to answer questions related to our integration with Open Graph

Is your nonprofit or have you seen a nonprofit using the Facebook’s Open Graph in a creative and effective way?     What are your questions about leveraging Facebook’s Open Graph?

Kategorie: Odjinud

What Comes First, Content Creation or Curation?

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Út, 24/01/2012 - 17:59

Flickr Photo by Carissa Marie

This is definitely not a chicken and egg question!   A debate in content marketing circles is whether or not you should simply focus on creating original content and forget content curation.   Let’s be clear as my fellow content curator, Jan Gordon, says:  There is no curation without original content.

I might qualify this a bit by saying, there is no curation with awesomely addictive social content!  And that means creating content – blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, YouTube Videos – that is valuable and high quality.   Not sure if you have awesomely addictive content?   Noland Hoshino recently pointed to this excellent checklist from the Content Marketing Institute.

 

Source: contentmarketinginstitute.com via Beth on Pinterest

 

But, remember don’t think content creation vs curation or as  is an either/or.  It is a both/and.

I might also add:  There is not social content creation with content curation.     Content curation, the process of seeking and making sense of the best content on your topic or issue from other content creators,  can be the foundation of a content strategy.   It can not only help you create original content, but also helps you builds your audience or network.

There are many other benefits to content curation – it can help build your staff expertise in a topic area, build thought leadership,  reduce mindless information consumption, and inspire  high quality original content.     While content creation and content curation are two different activities, requiring different skill sets,  there are a couple of places where they overlap.

Curated Content Formats

We know that content curation is much more than slapping together links or engaging in “push button” sharing with your circle of friends.   Professional content curation is making sense of the topic by researching what’s out there.  I like to think of content curation is going the library to research sources for your term paper!

This post from Social Examiner called:  26 Tips for Writing Great Blog Content is an excellent example of a blog post that is curated from many resources.     I’m being a little ironic pointing out an example that includes lots of excellent resources and links to how to create awesomely addictive content for your blog.    If your organization is writing a blog,  this post is worth 30 minutes of your time to sit down and to explore with your team.  You’ll come away with some very useful tips for taking your blog content to the next level, from the technical stuff like SEO to getting into the writing zone.    (There’s a very simple and useful blog editorial template)

Newsjacking

Source: nonprofitmarketingguide.com via Beth on Pinterest

 

A big hat tip to Nancy Schwartz for curating on Pinterest this blog post from Kivi Leroux Miller summarizing David Meerman Scott’s e-book on Newsjacking which is well worth the $6.99.      Newsjacking is piggy-backing on timely news or Meerman points out “the second paragraph of a news story.”    It is done by creating original content that takes advantage of timely events that are getting mainstream media attention and providing your organization’s view or take on the topic and sharing it with your audience, including journalists.

Now, this is exactly what one does with curation on a day-to-day basis.   Once you discover related content, you describe giving it your point of view or relating it back to your organization’s programs.   A good curator will do with content that is not, at first glance, related to their subject (This skill is called “Transdisciplinarity,” or  ability to understand and translate concepts across multiple disciplines)

Kivi suggests making Newsjacking part of your staff meetings – because you have to be agile to be able to pounce on the news.  Leveraging current events as part of your content strategy – either by curating or creating original content – can also help your get more attention, but provide useful content for your network.

How are you creating awesomely addictive content for your organization’s strategy?   Is content curation or newsjacking part of your strategy?

Kategorie: Odjinud

Teaching New NYU Social Media Course #wnpNYU

CauseWired blog - Po, 23/01/2012 - 20:44

This year, I’m honored to be team-teaching a new course at New York University with my friends Marcia Stepanek and Howard Greenstein. The class is “The Wired Nonprofit 2012: Social Media Strategy and Practice” and it’s a new elective in the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising Master’s program. The overall goal is to help graduate students to “create a comprehensive social media strategy for their organizations.” The course begins this Wednesday and some of the discussion, guest speakers, and links will be shared. Look for the #wnpNYU hashtag on Twitter.

Kategorie: Odjinud

The Information Diet: Not Just A Book, A Movement For Conscious Consumption of Information

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Po, 23/01/2012 - 17:51

I’ve been curating resources and teaching workshops on the topic of information coping skills for a couple of years.   I first became interested in the topic after reading  David Shenk’s “Data Smog” in 1998 using the metaphor of environmental problems to talk about the dangers of having too much online information, primarily email.  This was in the era before Facebook and there was far less information available compared today.  (My favorite practical principle from Shenk was “Give A Hoot, Don’t Email Pollute” when talking about the need for developing will power in consuming and sharing digital information.)

Click Through to Amazon and Get This Book!

So when I heard about Clay Johnson’s  The Information Diet:  The Case for Conscious Consumption that uses the metaphor of the obesity epidemic and sustainable food production to frame and discuss how the problem impacts us today, 14 years later,  I immediately put the book on my plate!      As the author explains in the introduction,   what we know about food has a lot of teach us about how to have a healthy relationship with information.        He gives the history and context of the obesity problem and points out the similarities to information consumption problem.

The problem of “information overload” is nothing new and has been around for centuries.   All you have to do read Ann M. Blair’s  ” Too Much To Know:  Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age” and you’ll get a historical perspective of the problem.   Johnson reframes the problem in a modern age as “information consumption” suggesting the problem isn’t the amount of information we have at our disposal, but our mindless consumption of it.

In the six well-researched chapters in part 1, he takes through the economics of information and the biological consequences of our information consumption.    He references the leading thinkers,writers, and researchers in this area – from Linda Stone (email apenea), Roy Bautmeister/John Tierney (Will Power), and Nicolas Carr, (Internet Shallows).   Given he his background as founder of Blue State Digital and working with the Dean Campaign and Sunlight Foundation, he tells the story through the lens of political campaigns and movement building on the social web as well as a personal narrative. I love the chapter on “The Symptoms of Information Obesity” where he shares a persona based on his wife, Rosalyn Lemieux, that illustrates how too much information can warp our sense of time and other ways it can be toxic to our lives.

The second part of the book takes us from theory into practice where he offers his recommendations for the Information Diet.  Rather than take the philosophy of information overload community and productivity books that are aimed at helping  you get “everything done” and in the process help you continue to consume too much information, he provides some principles for taming our information gluttony.   If you’ve been through weight watchers, you’ll immediately make a connection to some of the techniques he suggests. For example,  keeping a journal of what you consume and taking incremental steps towards reducing it so it becomes a lifestyle change.  Here, he draws from the work of Howard Rheingold when talking about data literacy and attention fitness as well as others and lays out an information diet that is intended to help us change in our daily habits.     He doesn’t recommend quick fixes like “unplugging” which is the metaphorical equivalent to a crash diet because it doesn’t work.

His chapter on “Data Literacy” describes what  sounds a lot of good content curation skills minus the social sharing part.  The steps of intelligent seeking of information by having good filters and knowing your sources and making sense of the information or synthesis.  This is good, basic digital literacy principles that have been taught by educators and librarians taught in the early 2000′s and continue today.  I think the social sharing part is important because that is part of consumption habits and it takes having restraint – not mindlessly clicking a button.

His specific tips are geared for folks (like me) who because of their occupation, have a lot of screen time and are geeks.   His methods make use of some of the online software that helps you keep track of time.   Personally, I also believe in adding in other methods such as time for reflection and slowing down like those recommended by Bregman’s 18 Minutes Book.     His chapter on what to consume, gives us a suggested information intake that reduces the 11 hours a day we spend consuming information to 6 hours per day.    It might look something like this:

7-8 am:  Information consumption time (newspaper, social media feeds, etc)
11-12: Email
4-5: Email
8-10pm: Entertainment time – television, social media
10-11 pm:  Book Reading

He suggests filling in the reclaimed hours producing, rather than consuming.    This is what Harold Jarche has called “sense-making” as part of an elegant framework of seek-sense-share that has helped me curb my over consumption habits.    Johnson also engaging in other activities that sharpen the mind – like paper journal, writing, photography, or other synthesis activities that get you away from that stream.  I know for myself that a return to keeping visual journals on paper and drawing with magic markers has been incredibly useful in this area.

The most provocative ideas of the book are in the third part – a call to action.    As Johnson points, our information consumption patterns have a social consequence – it isn’t just about our individual habits.   There is also a social change role.   We have to break the insidious cycle that we create with bad information consumption habits – we have to consider the suppliers – and especially in light of another election coming around.   The author not only wants to change our habits, but start local campaigns to encourage our social connections to change as well.   He suggests these goals:

1.   To increase digital literacy of our communities with good digital literacy skills
2.  To encourage consumption of local information
3.  To reward good information provides and to provide economic consequence for those who provide affirmation over information

He is encouraging us to self-organize around this idea through his site, Information Diet to improve digital literacy in your community by organizing meet ups.   And, above all, to act.    In order to improve digital literacy in your community, you need to start with kids.   He suggests finding and funding nonprofits that teach children digital literacy skills in school or after school programs.   He also suggests sharing what we’ve learned in terms of taming our information overdoing it.

The ultimate goal of this book is for us to improve our collective information literacy and consumption skills so we have the greatest ability to understand the truth and make our communities and society a more just world.

Now, that’s inspiring!

See also this review in the Atlantic

Kategorie: Odjinud