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Two or three years ago, I received an email from Chris Brogan asking if I would give some advice to a recent college graduate named Avi Kaplan who was interested in a career of using social media for nonprofits.   I chatted with Avi and answered some of his questions.    Not long after that, Avi helped Stacey Monk develop a strategy for the very first Tweetsgiving.

A few weeks ago, Avi asked me if I would participate in a blog tour for the Jewels of Elul focused on renewal and beginnings that benefits a residential addiction treatment center in Los Angeles.  The Hebrew month of Elul (which started on August 11th), the site will feature reflections from prominent figures on Renewal and Beginnings and a blog tour as well.   While I don’t have a strong connection to the nonprofit or even the cause,  I know Avi and wanted to support his work.   In addition, the theme of new beginnings and renewal has been on mind lately.

This last year has been a year of many new beginnings – a move across the country,  a new title, a new book,   a new blog,  a new company, and new friends and projects.   Starting something new is hard for some people.  It is a change after all.   But with every new project, you always need an end point for reflection.

And that’s the point I want to relate to social media.    Whether your begin a new campaign or a new routine, it is important anticipate a point of reflection.  We begin a new project – sometimes with to high expectations or excitement.   But what we don’t anticipate is the stuff that won’t go perfectly.

When end up avoiding talking about mistakes and we avoid reflection that explores and opens up new breakthroughs because we’re moving too fast into the next action.    So, with your next social media beginning, be sure to hit the pause button at the end asks some questions that might lead you to new insights.   Here’s a list of questions that my colleague, June Holley,  shared with me that I’ve been using.

1.What worked really well in this project?
2.Did it accomplish goals or outcomes? In what ways?
3.Did it fall short? Why?
4.What would you do differently?
5.What surprises came up during the project? What unexpected happened? What could you learn or capture from that?
6.What insights did you get during the project?
7.What processes did you use that worked well? Which didn’t work so well? Why do you think that was?
8.How did people work together? Were there conflicts? How were they handled? Did people get any new insights or perspectives as a result?
9.Were there people or perspectives missing from this project that you would include next time?
10.What skills and processes did you help people learn as part of this project? What skills and processes would you spend time on if you did this over again?
11.What were the most innovative aspects of the project? How did they work?
12.What did you do in this project that you could transfer to other projects?
13.What is the most troubling aspect of the project? What might you do to deal with it differently?
14.What skills came in most handy during this project? What skills did this project make you realize you need to acquire?
15.What really puzzles you about this project? What are unanswered questions you have about what happened?
16.What intrigues you about this project?
17.What would you like to learn more about that would help this (or other projects) in the future?
18.Where did we mess up? Make mistakes? Fall on our face? What can we learn from this?

“This post is part of Jewels of Elul, which celebrates the Jewish tradition to dedicate the 29 days of the
month of Elul to growth and discovery in preparation for the coming high holy days. This year the program is benefiting Beit T’shuvah, a residential addiction treatment center in Los Angeles. You can subscribe on Jewels of Elul to receive inspirational reflections from public figures each day of the month. You don’t have to be on the blog tour to write a blog post on “The Art of Beginning… Again”. We invite everyone to post this month (August 11th – September 8th) with Jewels of Elul to grow and learn.”

Flickr Photo by Metro Transportation Library and Archive

Successful social media is like going to the gym because the discipline of a good routine gets results much like  working out on a daily basis.

If you have put on running shoes for the first time, do you think you can really expect to win the Boston Marathon? If you are just starting out or if you haven’t identified a strategy and a good regular routine, can you really expect success? You need to make social media a daily habit; understand the rules, the landscape, and above all give it time to work.

Actionable Measurement

The gym metaphor resonated because lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of  “SpreadSheet Aerobics, an actionable social media measurement strategy that is fit and trim and light on its feet!   When I coach nonprofits on tactics and talk about measurement, their facial expressions change happy to annoyed.    Collecting data is often viewed as an onerous task.   It doesn’t have to be that way.

We know that good practice is to establish SMART objectives for your social media strategy and identify the audience before you executive.  You also need to think through your content and engagement strategy.  You should also be thinking about what to measure and set up an efficient method for collecting that data.   And, of course, making the time to actually look and think about what the data means.

We get so overloaded by meaningless data collection, that we’re exhausted before we get to do the fun part:  making sense out of it.  I don’t try to measure everything.   I find it overwhelming and a lot of  it won’t help me refine my strategy.  Spreadsheet aerobics is actionable data.   What does that mean?

• Measurement should inform specific decisions and/or actions.
• Do not measure everything, but do measure what is most important to your objectives.
• The data you gather should help you learn.

Avoid Measurement As Therapy and Drive By Analysis

Another pitfall is doing “drive by” analysis.    Let’s take Facebook pages as an example.   Rather than download a spreadsheet of the most important data points for a month from Facebook Insights (the Facebook page analytics tool which was recently upgraded) and comparing it against content, engagement, and outreach strategies,  administrators glance at the summary insights on their page and draw subjective conclusions.

Avoid this measurement as therapy trap.   When we see the green arrows pointing up and the numbers look good, we might think — “they like me, they really like me.”   But you can’t really put that data into context and learn from it.

Here’s my spreadsheet aerobics daily and monthly routine.    I grab the monthly daily data from the insights tool (old version)  and download into a spreadsheet.    Out of the 25 or metrics I could look at, I only collect the following metrics:

• Total Interactions
• Likes
• Comments
• New Fans (Likes)
• Unsubscribes
• Page Views
• Photo/video Views (optional if I’m testing as content strategy)

I also have columns in daily spreadsheet for labeled “content format”, “content topic” and “promotion”.  In the content line, I put a link to the actual post noting the type, voice, or if it was a fan posting.  I also make notes about what promotional tactics I used.   Then at the end of the month, allocate a half hour to look at the numbers for the month in comparison to other months – and look for insights and trends.

In reviewing my spreadsheet, I discover what works. For example, open-ended questions work, particularly those that allow people to share their knowledge or ones accompanying a good resource link.

• Questions that encourage people to share wisdom about their social media strategy or tools:   Anyone Using Flowtown to track social behavior of people on their email lists?  Anyone Play With New Insights Tool?
• Questions that encourage people to share their take on a research report:  Seniors Embrace Social Media Faster Than Other Segments, What Does That Mean for Your Nonprofit?
• Questions that encourage people to share resources: “What are the Best Social Media ROI Posts?“
• Questions that encourage sharing of stories:   or “What are the best approaches to managing bi-lingual Facebook Pages?“
• Blog posts that summarize a discussion thread from the Facebook Page.  Take for example, “What Tools Does Your Nonprofit Use To Make Your Social Media Efficient?“

I’ve looked at frequency of posting and day/time of the week, but have learned what my sweet spot is for my audience on Facebook and no longer track it on a regular basis.

It is also important to track exactly how you promote your Facebook page and what helps you recruit more fans.  I keep notes on when I’ve tweeted a link, speaking dates, posting updates in my status about my fan page and all the multi-channel ways you need to promote your page.

I’ve also discovered that it is important to identify as many opportunities to set up experiments that you measure and learn as you go. This is where I’ve gleaned most of my insights – a combination of quantitative metrics culled from Insights and what people are saying on the page.

What are you learning from your social media measurement strategy?   How have you kept your data collection trim, fit, and actionable?  What is the most compelling thing you learned about your social media strategy through measurement that lead to better results?

Based on the discussion threads in my Facebook page,  I’ve updated my mega list of tools in my social media listening and engaging instructional wiki.   In reflecting over the past three years,  the definition of listening tools has broadened beyond “monitoring” or “research” to include several categories:   social media engagement management,  analytics, influencer identification, and social network analysis.

Here’s a couple of new tools I’ve been exploring:

RowFeeder should be in your spreadsheet aerobics routine.   It searches Twitter and Facebook for phrases or hashtags and dumps them into a google doc spreadsheet.  Saves a lot of cut and paste time and great for analysis.   The basic version is free, but you can add on data like Klout scores for a minimal fee.   It’s particularly useful for aggregating hashtags from events or trainings.

NutshellMail:   About a month or so ago, Manny Hernandez mentioned this free tool as a social media time saver. It grabs all your “bacn“  from social networks and aggregates into a single email.  The sources include Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  You need to customize which updates (wall posts, friend requests, Twitter lists, etc.) to make it useful for your needs.   I’m testing it with Facebook because it grabs both my personal profile stuff as well as from Facebook pages that I am an administrator of.

You can also customized the delivery time and frequency.  That means it can arrive in your email box when you’ve scheduled to work on it.    The email that arrives links you to the places you to respond. This seems like a good tool for those starting out and and with small followings.  Saves you time logging in and checking or getting separate notices in email from the social network site.

My colleague, Devon Smith, mentioned another tool, Postling, which aggregates your social networks into a single dashboard online and is also free, although it lacks the robust features of paid tools like Spredfast or SmallAct.

I’d like to update my listening/engaging tools list.

What tools you are using for listening, engaging, social media management, and finding influencers on your social media outposts?

While some may think there are not a lot of high quality women who can speak on technology issues or are starting tech companies, it simply isn’t true.

Women Who Tech brings together talented and renowned women breaking new ground in technology who use their tech savvy skills to transform the world and inspire change.  The summit provides a supportive network for the vibrant and thriving community of women in technology professions by giving women an open platform to share their talents, experiences, and insights. The 3rd annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit will take place on September 15, 2010 from 11AM EDT to 6PM EDT, with over 800 women from across the US and abroad in the non-profit, political and business world and featuring an incredible lineup of thought provoking panels featuring technology change makers.

I’m honored to be included on this “dream team” roster of women (and a few guys including fellow Zoetican, Geoff Livingston) working on the forefront of social change and technological progress, among them: Mary Hodder, Technologist and Founder of of Dabble.com,  Author Blogger and CEO of Zoetica Media, author Clay Shirky, Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Founder of BlogHer, Rashmi Sinha, Co-Founder of SlideShare, Connie Reece, Co-Founder of Social Media Club, Amy Sample Ward of NetSquared, Kaliya Hamlin of Shes Geeky, Genevieve Bell of Intel, Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch, Irene Au of Google, Lynne D. Johnson of the Advertising Research Foundation and Tara Hunt, author of the Whuffie Factor.

Here’s the list of panels.   I’ll be presenting on a panel “Social Media ROI” with Lauren Vargas from Radian 6, with Cheryl Contee as the moderator on Sept. 15th from 2-3 PM EST.  Here’s the description.

Social Media ROI

Do you know what kind of an impact social media is having on your brand, mission, or bottom line? How do you put a monetary value on branding? This panel will discuss realistic metrics and benchmarks any organization can use in their campaigns and ensure that your using the right strategies and tools to listen and engage your audiences on different social networks.

Details about how to register and more program details here.

I have two comp tickets to give away.   If you’d like a chance at winning those, leave a comment below on why you want to attend.  I’ll pick two winners at random.

Colorado Project View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

Chip Conley was the keynote speaker at last week’s Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp and one thing that he said that has been stuck in my head is:  “You can have a job, a career, or calling“    The latter, a calling,  is when you can tap into an internal motivation that fuels and inspires you.    It resonated.  I feel that my technology training for nonprofits work is more like a calling for me than simply a job or career.   For the past 15 years, I have been excited about nonprofit technology training design and delivery and it is what I will continue to focus on as part of my role  at Zoetica over the coming years.

This week I lead a full-day workshop for 300 nonprofits and foundations on social media strategy and tactics.   The workshop was presented by the Colorado Association of Funders and the Colorado Nonprofit Association and sponsored by Gill Foundation,  Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, The Colorado Health Foundation, and The Colorado Trust.

The day was designed as a one-day  interactive strategy session in the morning and intensive mini-workshops on tools and tactics in the afternoon  lead by a cadre of local social media specialists and experts.   The morning had two segments, beginning with content and small group exercises on several themes from the Networked Nonprofit including culture change, transparency, and simplicity.    Geoff Livingston did a great job at live blogging the first section in the morning.

The second part of the morning was designed around the Principles of Social Media Strategy and used a new version of the Social Media Game intended for a large group of people.   The afternoon featured six mini-workshops that drilled down in the use of the tools such as Facebook, Blogging, Storytelling, Listening, Twitter, and Social Media 101.  (The Colorado Trust blog has notes here.)

Some Reflections

Balancing Learning Through Content Delivery and Sharing Experience

I’ve constantly stretching myself to learn new techniques that help nonprofits embrace and effectively put social media strategies and tools into practice as well as address the change management issues of becoming a Networked Nonprofit.   It isn’t about content, although that is important.  What I’m most excited about is “networked learning” – it is part peer learning, part content-delivery, and another part engaging people in the room and not in the room in conversation through the use of social media.

The stretching part for me with this workshop was how to do you design for small group conversations and then full group sharing with 300 people in the room?    You offer some ideas, concepts, and good conversation starters.    The video above shows the whole room discussing an important Networked Nonprofit concept, simplicity (focus on what you do best and network the rest.)

From Conversational Keynote To Conversational Workshop

I’ve been playing with the conversational panel or conversational keynote models for short sessions (60, 75 or 90 minutes.)  I started experimenting with these concepts back in 2008 at SXSW session on Nonprofit ROI and SXSW Session on Nonprofit Crowdsourcing as well as at the NTC in 2009 on a session mapping metrics to strategy.   I’ve using the technique to deliver conversational keynotes at conferences.

A conversational approach is not an expert or a group of experts talking the whole time.  Nor is it a 40 minute expert presentation or a series of expert presentations on a panel followed by Q/A.    That is the “Sage on the Stage” model.   A conversational panel or keynote does some blending of learning modalities – it includes some content-delivery and structured small group and full group conversations.    There is a lead facilitator – in the panel or keynote model – it’s the Oprah with the mic.

My design question:  What is the best way to use this approach for a full-day workshop for 300 people?

With shorter sessions with half as many people and a decent room layout, you can run the mic yourself.   The biggest challenge for me was scaling with mic runners.    I had mic runners stationed at different quadrants of the room who would go to the person who wanted to speak.    It was hard to get people as engaged as a full group after the table discussions.  I’m not sure if this was just the way it is,  stage fright to report out to a large group that included funders, or perhaps it needed another method than mic runners (fixed mics stationed around the room?)

Social Media Game: Scaling Small Group Learning Exercises

The second part of the morning included a brief presentation about the principles of social media strategy based on what I’ve been teaching for the past 5 years.   Geoff Livingston did a great live blog post on the content.

The interaction component was a new version of the Social Media Game that I first used in 2007 with David Wilcox.    The largest group I ever worked with was with the Meyer Memorial Trust in Portland for 150 nonprofits and with Compasspoint for a 100 organizations.  I’ve done many, many reiterations of the cards, the game design, the learning objectives, the composition of the small groups, modalities (peer assist versus simulation), etc.

The Environmental Defense Fund has used the game for an internal training for 300 people.   I applied the lessons learned from that to the challenge was scaling this for 300 people from different organizations in a way that helped experience a strategy brainstorm and help them make choices about the tool/tactical sessions later in the day.

When I’ve used this curriculum, I listen to the conversations at the tables to see if people are engaged, stuck, or have questions.    It is hard for one person to do that with 300 people and 30 tables, but the experience has given me some great ideas on how to scale that.   Also, there is the perennial issue around expertise groupings — the tension between mixed levels and like cohort groups.   I’ve experimented both ways and have come to the conclusion that you cannot please everyone.

Refining Real-Time Networked Learning

Real-Time networked learning is incorporating social media into your instruction – before, during, and after.   You can learn more from my “Social Media For Trainers” presentations and wiki.    Our hashtag #ztrain generated 567 tweets from 126 people -the majority were in the room.    The priority was to use social media to enhance the experience of people in the room, although not everyone views using live tweeting as a benefit to the conversational process or learning.

Hashtag Stats

What the Hashtag is a simple tool for aggregating tweets into a transcript and some simple stats, but after experiencing Marc Meyerand Jason Breed’s Hashtag Social Media Chat and their tool that aggregates tweets, I need to do some re-thinking.

My Zoetica colleague, Kami Huyse, suggested a tool called rowfeeder.   It has a lot of features, but most importantly it grabs hashtags or keywords from Twitter (and Facebook) and dumps into a google doc spreadsheet with other data points.   It’s free but you can purchase additional data for reasonable amounts (for example you can get Klout Scores).

The best thing about having a transcript like this it allowed me to do a pattern analysis and learning assessment of the  tweets.    This will help improve the networked learning design for next time.   Some analysis questions:

• What points were the participants in the room tweeting?   How did that relate to the learning objectives?
• What is the form of the Tweets as related to Bloom’s Taxonomy?
• Were there conversations taking place between Twitter users that extended the learning or were people mostly parallel online note taking?
• Were people not in the room engaged in any of the conversation beyond retweeting?

What Powers Learning:  Sharing Experiences and Stories With Peers

I am a big believer that people can learn as much from the peers in the room as the “expert on the stage.”    As an instructor, if you go in with the idea that you will be “filling people with knowledge” you don’t let the most valuable form of learning emerge – sharing the wisdom that comes from experience.  (The Colorado Funders Association is doing this on its blog about philanthropy stories. )  The fun part of instructional design is embedding opportunities for this to happen.

Whenever I teach workshops, I also like to collect stories from participants and add them to the materials.    I taught a breakout session called “Actionable Listening and Engaging Techniques.”    One of the topics we looked at was the issue of how to respond appropriately to negative comments and trolls.    Samantha Horoschak from the Gathering Place (an agency that servces homeless women) shared their experience dealing with a troll on Facebook, illustrating best practices when the troll is not some random stranger.

On this two minute video, Dan Hanley, Director of Development, Boulder County Aids Project, talks about how Twitter is a useful tool in his fundraising work primarily for Twitter’s ability to connect and develop relationships with new donors.

Lisa Harris from Colorado Health Care Foundation and Kindle Morell from Colorado Health Institute shared how they have formed an informal social media peer group of people from different health care organizations in the Denver area. They meet for breakfast and do not have a formal agenda – they discuss areas of practice, including working as change agents inside and outside of their organizations.

The Challenge of Transfer

One-day or half-workshops are only one touch point.  They are good for getting a large group of people of to speed.  But the real learning comes happens by putting something learned (an idea, a method, a tip, or technique) into daily practice.    That is what guided the design of my “Social Media Lab” that continues the peer learning while getting past the challenge of transfer.

That is one reason why I always incorporate a reflection at the end that helps participates identify one small action step.  I ask participants to share on an index card as part of a raffle for my book.   The information is also valuable for improving the learning design.    In addition to the concrete technical and tactical action steps (e.g.  set up a listening post), here some additional action steps that indicate the learning from the day will be taken back to others in the organization:

• Bring learnings from the day back to my team as soon as possible
• Sit down with my executive director to discuss a process for a social media policy
• Have a social media strategy brainstorm with staff
• Clarifying exactly what we want to accomplish with social media and the audience
• Sharing what I learned from my colleagues at the workshop with staff

I can only echo the tweet above:  Thank you so much for everything I learned and meeting great people.

Source: Facebook Blog Post

Earlier this week, Facebook added  “where” to the list of personal information members share with the world.  There was much speculation what this feature might mean for FourSquare and the subsequent riddles, “What happens when you add Foursquare to Facebook? (Answer:  Facebook).

I’ve learned now that when Facebook announces a new feature, it is a signal for me to check into my settings and make sure that I’m happy with the way the default works.    Do I want the world to know my location (if I choose to use that new feature?)  Do I want to give my friends the ability to share my location with others?

These questions (and others) prompted a discussion about privacy concerns.   The San Francisco office of the American Civil Liberties Union asked whether Places has again left Facebook members open to privacy problems.    In article in the San Francisco Chronicle,  a privacy expert gives some good advice:

Parry Aftab, one of several Internet safety experts who Facebook helped develop Places as part of a volunteer advisory board, said the feature does include enough controls to protect privacy.

But Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.com, said people who use social networking and geo-location technologies need to learn what the controls are so they can protect themselves.

“If you’re going to play, it tells you what you need to do,” Aftab said. “If you don’t like it, you can turn it off. I won’t use it, but my guess is my daughter will. As we move forward and these things become more and more robust, the question is do you turn off new technologies that allow more interaction and sharing or do you make sure people are empowered to use them safely.”

I posted some resources and questions on my Facebook page asking for some how-to information and Debra Askanase shared this good tutorial link that she got from a tweet from Mari Smith.   Here’s how to turn it off: 1. Go to privacy settings
2. Go to “customize”
3. Scroll to “things others share”
4. Disable “friends can check me into places.”

Are you using the Facebook location feature or have you turned it off?

Facebook is doing a live stream at 11:00 am PST and you can find out more.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of participating in Twitter chat series #socialmedia.   It’s been a one-hour  weekly chat on Twitter for the past 10 months  organized and hosted by Marc Meyer and Jason Breed.     The way it works is they invite a “host” to ask 3 compelling questions, 20 minutes each, that revolve around a topical subject within the business of social media, but that play to their strengths or backgrounds.

As host for #sm73, I selected three questions on social media and non profits:

Q1: How can social media work for non profits? (Backstory: we know they have time and need money / sometimes volunteers. Can social help this & how?)

Q2: What is the easiest way for an NPO to figure out how to do social?

Q3: What are some of the best case studies of NPO’s using Social and what was the impact?

Prior to the chat,  Jason Breed wrote this post about the chat.  In addition,  leading up to the event – even the last few hours and minutes,  both Marc and Jason sent Tweets letting folks know the chat was about to start.   This helps builds anticipation and excitement for the event.   They also ask the moderator to do the same – this leverages the hosts network.

What I enjoyed about this Twitter chat was the opportunity to ask pointed follow up questions and to draw out specific people.    I always learn a lot when I’m get a chance to ask other people questions and this experience did not fail in delivering that.

If you read through the chat transcript there are so many nuggets in there.   Two that standout:

In response to my question about how to avoid waiting time,  someone responded that you need to have clear objectives and KPIs  (Key performance indicators) .   Someone asked what the definition of a KPI was, and since I noticed that Tom Kelly who is an expert in evaluation was following the chat, I asked him for a definition.  Best definition I’ve seen.

I also learned about this NGO from Pakistan that is using social media efficiently to communicate with its stakeholders.

The complete chat is aggregated here.    You’ll notice that the application they’re using allows them to pull out the moderator’s tweets on the side.    A couple of Twitter moderator techniques I used to try to get some deeper insights from the discussion:

• I had a search open on #sm73 the whole time.   I was watching for answers to the questions.   In the beginning, I was summarizing the answers using Q1:A1, Q1:A2 in my tweets.    This is what a focus group moderator would do in a face-to-face session.   Ask a question, listen to the responses and aggregate them in summarizing statement like “Here’s the ideas that I hear in response to the first question, (xyz).
• Simply summarizing isn’t enough to get to your insights.    As I was reading,  I looked the aggregated answers and asked follow up questions.   Is there something missing on the list?   Can I get more clarification to an answer?   Is there a more specific follow up question based on these responses?   These are standard types of  “question probes” and active listening that you would do if you were interviewing someone or moderating a focus group.

• The beauty of Twitter is that you can do a little bit of network weaving to bring other people in the thread.  I was scanning who else was on Twitter, but not participating in the thread and I tweeted a question or invitation to join them.   I noticed another Twitter chat with a hashtag going on – and “waved” to that group by directing a Tweet to someone I knew and using the hash tag.   I also clicked through to people who were participating by re-tweeting the tag or other people’s answers and specifically @reply to them to draw them out.

• As the host,  I wanted to be the neutral traffic cop as much as possible – summarizing, drawing out specific people,  restating, asking follow up questions, and the like.    Another technique is ask the group whether they agree or disagree with someone’s answer.   This also sparks more in-depth conversation.

Now, I have some questions:

• This is to my hosts.  What is the application that you’re using to aggregate the Tweets?
• What are your best Twitter moderation techniques?
• Has your nonprofit done an online Twitter chat?  What was the experience?

Next week, my business partner at Zoetica, Kami Huyse will be the host on #socialmedia.  If you haven’t participated in one of these chats, it is well worth your time.  You’ll learn a lot, and particularly because Kami is an awesome Twitter moderator.

Illustration by Jonny Goldstein of my SXSW panel proposal. Jonny will provide live graphic facilitation of the highly interactive and fun panel.

The SXSW Interactive Festival (scheduled March 11-15, 2010 in Austin, Texas) is a mega huge social media industry event.  The final program is done through a combination of an open submission and voting process.   The panel picker process has opened – so you can vote for the panels you think are worthy of being on the program until August 27th.

The nonprofit presence at SXSW has been growing steadily over the past couple of years.  In 2008, I was honored to be on one of the few nonprofit panels on the agenda.  It was organized by Ed Schipul.  At the end of that panel, we all hoped there would be a larger nonprofit presence on the agenda for this 2009.    And yes, indeed, in 2009, there were more nonprofit focused panels and happily the trend continued at SXSW 2010.

So, let’s get out the nonprofit vote for the nonprofit panels at SXSW 2011!

I hope you’ll also vote for my panel proposal,  Nonprofits and Free Agents in A Networked World and while you’re there vote for the other awesome nonprofit panel proposals (I’ve shared a list below).  But first, let me share the description and what I’m planning:

This interactive session is based on a key theme in the book, The Networked Nonprofit, co-authored by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.  We will explore how nonprofits can unleash the power of social good by transitioning from stand-alone institutions to networks energized by abundant resources in their ecosystem. In order to do this, they need to work with free agents, hyper-connected individuals who are passionate about social change, but don’t work within institutional walls. Free agents use social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter and can create social movements in the palms of their hands. They organize supporters, raise attention to important social and political issues, seek donations, and organize supporters to walk, run, shout, protest, and vote, things that were once done mostly by nonprofit organizations. The free agents do it when and how they please, making them distinct from and more powerful than traditional volunteers. But free agents are smashing headfirst into nonprofit fortresses—organizations with high walls and wide moats that work very hard to keep insiders in and outsiders out. Our session will explore how and why this needs to change. Kanter will bring together a group of highly visible free agents working on important social change causes and representatives from different nonprofits for a lively discussion with the audience

1. What are the change issues for traditional nonprofits that want to become “networked nonprofits?”
2. What are the techniques and strategies that nonprofits use to find free agents?
3. My nonprofit has found a free agent, now what?
4. What are the lessons learned from Free Agents about working with nonprofits?
5. In what instances is it just better to let Free Agents be?

I’m going to bring together some of the best free agents out there and folks from nonprofits responsible for social media to discuss best practices.    This will be an interactive session with real and remote audience participation.    Jonny Goldstein will do real time illustrations of the ideas swirling around the session which will be projected live and that will help us move towards a common understanding and enable us to share an artifact with others.  (Check out his illustration of the panel)

In addition to the graphic facilitation, there will be other interactive learning elements.   Trust me.  In 2008,   I designed the Nonprofit and Social Media ROI Poetry Slam and last year was a panel on crowdsourcing that modeled crowdsourcing in the design and delivery.

Here’s my picks for SXSW Nonprofit Panels:

A Conversation About Change Agents Through Social Media Social media is causing a revolution in how information is shared and communities are formed. Its true impact has yet to be measured, but Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and every other social media platform have already caused a revelation in how people want to communicate. They want to connect. They want to share in more than one medium. They are in control. The challenge for every business, organization, and nonprofit or for-profit company is that the world of social media is like the Wild Wild West. Everything is changing so fast it’s hard to keep up. What’s new? What works?

The Tools Artists Need Geeks To Create Join us to discuss the digital tools being used and abused by theatre makers, dancers, musicians, crafters, wordsmiths, cinematographers, photographers, painters, and other multimedia artists. There are over 200,000 professional artists in the US — and a bunch of them have problems the techies could help solve. What should we be building to help artists make and sell art, engage their audiences, and connect to other artists? What are we cobbling together today from existing technology, and what could we be doing tomorrow? What artistic problems need a dose of geek teamwork? What are the geeks doing that needs better artistic focus? What lies just beyond the current state of the art, for the arts?

Tiny Strategies: Social Media in 60 Minutes or Less In this quick-hit, practical-tips-focused panel, nonprofit social media experts will share their strategies for maximizing their social media impact with very little time to devote to it. We’ll go round-robin style to find out how you should spend your time, whether you have 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes a day to devote to social media.

Putting the Public Back in Public Media Think NPR and PBS are just broadcasters? Think again. Public media is no longer just a one-way street. In many towns, NPR and PBS stations are the only locally-owned media organizations, and their mission to serve the public demands that they develop new ways of engaging and strengthening those communities.   They’re convening Barcamp-like unconferences called PubCamps all over the country, allowing local techies and citizen journalists to forge collaborative projects with NPR and PBS stations, both online and offline.

Crowdsourcing the Corporate/ Nonprofit Partnership. Who Wins? Online contests that award dollars to nonprofit causes are here to stay. Corporations use these contests to engage potential customers. Nonprofits use them to rally supporters. All participants are grappling with how best to use social media to find and mobilize an audience. Come learn the ups and downs of these contests from brands that sponsor them.

Doh! Lessons from Nonprofit Screw Ups Nonprofits are often team-centric, mission-driven organizations—which can lead to exuberant group cheerleading in the face of mediocrity. In this session we’ll throw those rosy-eyed glasses onto the bonfire and talk (nicely) about notable social media campaigns that didn’t deliver. Each panelist will provide in-depth analysis of a notable social media screw-up they’ve been involved in, isolate key failure factors, analyze the broader lessons, and talk about how these specific organizations improved on their mistakes.

Turning Facebook Followers Into Change Agents 100,000 followers, and you still want more. What are they good for? Online numbers don’t always equate offline results. How do you build an online community that makes a serious impact for your cause? Nonprofit social communications wizards share examples and tips to get your fans mobilized for action.

SoTropia Life in 2040 Let’s peer into the near future. It’s the Year 2040, 35 years after the social networking revolution began. How has human behavior changed? Just how blurred are the boundaries between public and private persona? How much do we share? And how will this impact the way we build relationships and find information? This visionary panel will explore the premise that openness will be ubiquitous by 2040 – when the debate will no longer be private vs. public, but instead public vs. broadcast.

No Hype Online Fundraising A panel of nonprofit fundraisers will cut the hype on text-to-give, email solicitations, social media, e-Cards and other interactive fundraising strategies. We’ll let you know what worked and what didn’t. And, when it depends, we’ll let you know what it depends on.

Getting Advanced With Social Media for Social Good
Online supporters are working to save the world one Tweet at a time. But how can nonprofit and philanthropic causes take their efforts to the next level and stand out from the crowd to increase the success of social campaigns? Hear from technologists and nonprofits on how to define and implement the ideal strategy and get advanced with metrics to make social a key component of online fundraising and advocacy campaigns.

You Mobile Non-profit: a play in three acts
Mobile is changing our lives, but it’s also changing the world for the better. We’re dying to share tactics, tools and trip-ups from organizations who have ventured deep into mobile and lived to tell.

Just ‘Cause: Can Technology Make Brand Irrelevant?
Thanks to technology, the line is starting to blur between the power of a household name brand and the passion of scrappy mission-focused organizations. Yet when it feels like nothing short of a crisis will engage people with your cause, how do you compel them to act? The battle of Cause vs Brand is on.

Creating Successful Collaborations: Right now, with the rapid changes in technology, media and globalization, the ability to quickly create successful collaborations is key to taking things to the next level. Whether you’re a solo-entrepreneur, creating award winning films and documentaries, innovating new or improving old technology, creating co-working environments, or building cross-industry relationships, knowing how (and when) to build successful collaborations allows work to happen in ways brings the most creativity, diversity, and strength to your group and project.

Method Tweeting for nonprofits: Much Ado About Something
When organizations use Twitter to promote themselves, it’s largely about playing a role. The person tweeting is tasked to be on message as the voice of the organization while creating a unique and engaging personality to draw an audience in. If Shakespeare on Twitter, how would he tweet?  We’ll pick the brains of people who live this challenge daily in the nonprofit sector.

Some other nonprofit SXSW lists:

Mark Horvath (@hardlynormal) list
BeaconFire list

So, go and vote for my panel and these others.  If your panel isn’t on the list, add a link and title in the comments.

Flickr Photo by Roberto Ferrari - Creative Commons License Some Rights Reserved

Note from Beth: Social media is not a waste a time, but there are ways to waste your time.   On Saturday, I had the honor of presenting at Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp and one of the burning questions was about efficiency.   So, I’m going to explore this theme over the coming weeks.

A  few weeks ago,  I started a thread on my blog’s Facebook Page,  “What are the best tips and tools for saving time managing your nonprofit’s Facebook Page?”   I summarized the tips shared in this earlier post. Managing your organization’s Facebook page, particularly tracking, content, and engagement can be a time suck, particularly as your network grows.     For example,  we know that identifying and engaging with super fans/influencers on our Facebook presence is important.   But keeping a spreadsheet of the names of people who “like” and comment on threads involves a lot of cut and paste.   Is there a tool that can automate this someone asked on my blog’s Facebook page?  (unfortunately, FB Insights doesn’t do this)

Or what about a tool that helps you plan out your content strategy for the week and even schedule posts on days when you can’t?  What if you want to aggregate and look at all the comments and responses to threads before responding?

There is an evolving category of tools (some free, some not) that can help make the tasks associated with content strategy, engagement, and tracking less onerous.   On the free side, Manny Hernandez mentioned NutShell Mail, software that aggregates comments and likes on your fan page and delivers it in one email.   James Young mentioned SpredFast (he works for them now) and he offered to write a post about how he manages him time.    And while this guest post is about one particular tool, remember when looking for a technology tool solution, think carefully about what pain point is it solving and whether it can truly work for your situation.   If you know of other tools (or tips) that make you more efficient managing content, engagement, and tracking on social media, please share them in the comments.

Guest Post by James Young,  SpredFast

And as a marketer like you, who has added social media to the mix, I struggled with the same issues you face with being efficient with my and showing the results.    Here’s how I use Spredfast to help me with these challenges.

So Many Social Networks, So Little Time

Doing social media right takes time. We engage in multiple social networks, some that you probably also use: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, our own blog, and a few other networks.

Aggregating Conversations

Conversing with people in all of these places, and creating interesting, value-add content for each is a time consuming business.  It gets worse when you consider that you have to duplicate efforts across different social networks.  With Spredfast, I can do two things that make this so much more efficient.  First, I can pull in all of the conversation taking place across all of the networks into one place, read through it, and participate where I want to. Each and every day, I look for all of the people who have mentioned us or retweeted our tweets, and I thank them. I can do it easily right from my listening dashboard.

Planning Content on Weekly Basis

Second, I can plan out the content I want to publish, schedule it out for the next few weeks, create the content (or, one day when we grow, assign it to someone to create), choose the social network or networks I want each piece to go to, and save it.  Spredfast will publish it on the schedule I’ve set. Typically, I will get a week’s worth of content ready to go ahead of time, and then spend the majority of my remaining time just engaging with individuals.

Tracking for Insights and Value

Like all activity within a good company or organization, I have to create some value. To prove I’m doing that, I need data.  Some of the social networks provide a lot of good data, others not so much. Regardless, it used to take a lot of time to go into each network and gather the data I needed, pull it back into my master spreadsheet, and then do some crunching.

Spredfast makes that a lot easier for me, because it gathers two types of data into one dashboard. First, all of the content that I send out (both planned communication as well as off the cuff conversations I engage in) is tracked. For example, for each tweet I send, I can see how many times it was retweeted, by whom, what they said, how many people could have seen the retweet, and if I included a link I can see how many times the link was clicked. For every post to my Facebook Page, I can see when someone comments, who they are, what they said, how many times the post was liked and how many times the link in my post was clicked. The list goes on across a wide variety of social networks and kinds of interaction people can have.

Second, I can see data that relates to my social media account (as opposed to my content), like number of friends, fans and followers. I can also see the volume of the conversation about my brand, like mentions in Twitter, references in blogs, etc.

The big deal is that all of this data is in one dashboard, so I can jump straight to analysis, making my weekly report a whole lot easier to produce. I just create a graph or report in Spredfast, or I export the data and use Excel and PowerPoint.

It is important track conversions and Spredfast can be integrated with my  integrated my Google Analytics account, and I tag all the links I send out in conversations.  Spredfast does some cool stuff like creating unique shortened links for each content piece (including separate links for the same post sent into both Facebook and Twitter, for example), so when I look at my web funnel data, I can actually track a conversion all the way back to the individual tweet or post. Literally, I can tell my boss how many subscriptions came from social media activity, from each social network, from each account and from each individual content piece I published.

Now, I know that not all value is measured in conversions. So, all of those other things that are valuable, like engagement levels and reach, are available too, using the data in my dashboard. We have some internal, soft values we attach to that data, and ultimately arrive at a total value comprised of soft and hard (conversion) values for my activity this week, month, or quarter.

Scaling Engagement

I know many organizations are worried about giving a lot of staff and volunteers access to the organization Twitter or Facebook accounts. This has some serious consequences. First, it usually limits the number of people empowered to engage in social media. Consequently, it decreases the quality of the social media engagement that does happen. How? Let’s face it, we don’t all have an unlimited supply of time, patience and creativity.  Having more people involved raises the quantity of engagement, time to response and content variety.

Spredfast makes this easier too, because the many authors you may have are not logging into your Twitter account directly. They’re logging into Spredfast, creating content and then publishing it to that Twitter account. One trusted person has already come in and connected Spredfast to the Twitter account.  Spredfast also has “draft” function which is particularly useful is you’re working side-by-side a social media intern.

Best practices in social media is listening, engaging, identifying influences, and tracking.    Spredfast can help your nonprofit be efficient with these tasks.  

Questions from Beth:

What tools and techniques are you using to make your social media content, engagement, and tracking more efficient?  Spredfast is one, but are there others?   What has your experience been?   At what point does it make sense to move to a paid tool for content strategy, engagement, and tracking?

The Red Cross is hosting the Emergency Social Data Summit today Thursday, August 12, 2010 from 9:00 AM – 4:30 PM (ET).   This is a hybrid event which means you don’t have to be in Washington, DC to participate.

You can participate remotely.  There are two ways:

1) First is via U-Stream, which will be hosted on the NextGenWeb site (http://nextgenweb.org).  This U-Stream will be archived via The Emergency Social Data blog

2) Via Twitter and #crisisdata hashtag.  There will be a formal Twitter chat at 1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT featuring questions from @ntenhross and @ikepigott.  This is a great way for your voice to be heard and added to the Crisis Data wiki (http://crisisdata.wikispaces.com)

The American Red Cross is hosting the Emergency Social Data Summit to bring together government agencies, emergency management professionals, disaster response organizations, tech companies and concerned citizens to address how to reply to these digital requests for help more effectively. That means what you bring to this discussion is really important.  There are a variety of ways to participate remotely:

In addition to the above, in person attendees will update their observations and impressions via the Whrrl Emergency Social Data Society.  Feel free to join!

You can also add or comment on the Summit’s aggregated information via the Emergency Social Data Wiki

You can read the complete agenda here. All of this information is also available at our Emergency Social Data Summit on the American Red Cross blog. If there are any questions, please contact Kami Huyse  at @kamichat, kami@zoeticamedia.com or Geoff Livingston, @geoffliving, geoff@zoeticamedia.com.

Flickr Photo by Sugarpond

Note from Beth: Last month I had the pleasure of presenting on a panel at Association of California Orchestras with Marc van Bree, an arts and social media blogger I met in 2007.   After Marc finished reading the Networked Nonprofit, he was curious about crowdfunding and free agents, chapters in  our book.  This was also about the same time as the flood in Nashville.   This terrible flood didn’t spare the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO), an event that he first learned about through his social networks. The orchestra’s damages were approximately $42 million and after insurance and support from FEMA, the remaining financial gap could be as much as $10 million.  He wanted to raise some money to  help the local orchestra and test some ideas.   Here is what he learned.

Guest Post by Marc van Bree

The title of this blog post is of course a wildly inaccurate claim. How did I get to the number? In my small-scale “free agent” crowdfunding experiment for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, I ended up with $235 from 1,000 followers by the deadline. That translates to $0.24 per follower.

The goal was $1,000, or one dollar per follower. It was a fairly arbitrary goal and I had no expectations. However, I’m still slightly disappointed I didn’t make the goal. But consider the following:

Networking

• All communications were strictly limited to my blog, Twitter and Facebook. Since this was an experiment to test social networking, I did not send an appeal to friends and family in the way people do when they raise funds for a run or walk, or want you to vote for a particular contest.
  

  Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, the authors of The Networked Nonprofit that inspired this experiment, wrote an Assessment and Reflection Report on America’s Giving Challenge 2009. They found that: “Personal solicitations to pre-existing networks of donors and friends through multiple channels were rated as the most effective methods for fundraising. Thirty-five percent of contest participants rated messaging to friends through Facebook as most effective; 32 percent rated personal email to friends, family and colleagues as effective or most effective; and 25 percent rated email to an existing organizational donor base as effective or most effective.” I did not use any of these methods.

• In light of that, I personally met only 4 of the 12 donors (excluding myself). Two donors were former colleagues who also have Twitter accounts. However, most of the donors were definitely social media contacts with whom I have had more in-depth conversations. One donor was a friend of a friend.

Sharing

• Kicking off the effort was paired with an e-mail to a list of about 30 classical music bloggers. In addition, I created Web banners for those bloggers to use. Four bloggers wrote a post; one blogger used the banner. (Other bloggers, not on the initial list, also wrote a post. All are captured here).
  

  In the Assessment and Reflection Report, the authors bring other good lessons and note that “Some like Atlas Corps recruited 150 ‘Campaign Captains’ before the contest started. Other organizations broke their efforts down into bite-size pieces for their volunteers by creating templates to use to send messages to their friends, post and comment on blogs, and create their own videos.” Perhaps I should have recruited similar “captains” and created more multimedia in a shareable format.

• I counted most on Twitter followers to spread the word. There were 44 followers that used the #floodofsupport hash tag or linked to the Crowdrise page or blog post.
• Spreading the word was not a case of “build it and they will come.” The hash tag spread fairly well in the first couple of days, after which it dropped significantly. Even after I created an incentive to use the hash tag (a ¢5 donation for each mention), it did not pick back up.

Technology

• The donation process needs to be as simple as possible. I would have preferred to go straight to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s Web site, but after checking in, I decided it would cost them too much in administrative fees and human resources. Remember, I did know how the donations would start coming in; I anticipated more donations, but smaller amounts.
• Crowdrise was a good tool, but certainly not perfect: it didn’t allow for $1 donations, as I had wished. The payment process went through Amazon, which created an extra step. In addition, seeing that donations came from different countries, there were questions surrounding paying with credit cards and with foreign currency.

The positives

• Sure, I did not reach my goal. But I would be willing to bet that the particular donors would not have given a gift if it wasn’t for this effort. Nothing is lost and my “free agent” effort didn’t cannibalize the Nashville Symphony’s efforts.
• The Nashville Symphony Orchestra fulfills a, albeit large, regional function. But don’t let this geographic boundary limit your campaign. I started this campaign in Chicago, having never been to Nashville, and received donations from different countries and states (England, Germany, and several states within the U.S.).
• This also tells us something about telling stories and increasing awareness of your issue or organization in general.

The lessons for arts organizations

• Don’t think of social media as a quick fix to raise funds. This was already obvious before the experiment, perhaps, but even though I felt I had a great cause to support, in the end it was the personal connections and more in-depth relationships that resulted in donations.
• Beyond using and counting on your social network for donations and spreading the word, find ways to activate your network more concretely: create those “campaign captains.” Going about the effort alone is much tougher.
• Momentum is tremendously important. Even after a monetary incentive to simply retweet a hash tag, I could not retrieve the momentum. Kanter and Fine identified immersion in the effort and the ability to react on the fly as key aspects in fund raising success.
• Technology and ease of process is very important. That’s why the Red Cross was so successful with their text message donation campaign during the Haiti crisis. It was easy to explain and simple to execute. Make sure your organization’s Web site and your staff can handle a wave of many small donations, and make it a one-click process.
• Your key performance indicator is of course the money you raised. But it doesn’t stop there. You will likely have gained more relationships, deeper relationships, behavioral information, and increased the organization’s overall awareness and created opportunities to tell your story. Measure those elements as well.

In the end, this entire experiment was all about just that: experimenting. I wasn’t able to fully engage and immerse myself in the project; life on the outside took over. But remember that the experiment was about creating a low-effort, easy to set up campaign, and seeing where 1,000 Twitter followers would lead. Could I have raised more money? Definitely. But that wasn’t the point.

I am still proud of raising $235 for the Nashville Symphony’s flood recovery effort. It’s a $235 they wouldn’t have had without this little experiment.

Dutch native Marc van Bree is a public relations practitioner with more than 5 years of experience communicating—on and offline—in the nonprofit and cultural environment.

In January, after the Haiti Earthquake struck, if you were participating on social networks, you couldn’t help but notice the many, many Tweets and Facebook status messages about the Haiti Earthquake.   The messages included pleas for support or retweeting the news, but beyond that the stream included pleas from people on the ground in Haiti asking for emergency assistance or letting loved ones and friends know they’re okay.

A new American Red Cross survey shows many web users would turn to social media to seek help for themselves or others during emergencies—and they expect first responders to be listening.   The online survey asked 1,058 adults about their use of social media sites in emergency situations. It found that if they needed help and couldn’t reach 9-1-1, one in five would try to contact responders through a digital means such as e-mail, websites or social media. If web users knew of someone else who needed help, 44 percent would ask other people in their social network to contact authorities, 35 percent would post a request for help directly on a response agency’s Facebook page and 28 percent would send a direct Twitter message to responders.  During an emergency, 41% of respondents would use social media to let their love ones know they are safe.

Social media has radically changed how people communicate, including their calls for help. As we have seen in natural disasters from Hurricane Katrina to the Chile Earthquake, people are using social media to reach out for help. And they expect a response from emergency and disaster response organizations.

 To meet this growing challenge, the American Red Cross is launching an initiative to address how to reply to these digital cries for help more effectively.  This ranges from online discussion of the issue to hosting an Emergency Social Data Summit – or #crisisdata on Twitter on Thursday August 12, 2010, in Washington, D.C., with government agencies, emergency management professionals, disaster response organizations, tech companies and concerned citizens. 

The Summit brings together emergency responders, government officials like the White House’s Macon Phillips, technologists like Robert Scoble and Christopher Penn and civilians like CrisisCommon’s Heather Blanchard to discuss exactly how to address these digital cries for help more effectively.

Disclosure: My company Zoetica and more specifically my co-founders  Geoff Livingston and Kami Huyse  have been working with the Red Cross to develop a strategy for this summit for the past two months.    Geoff Livingston has shared a post this morning from a personal perspective about why how social media is impacting emergency response, the compelling reason for the Emergency Data Summit.

As Geoff describes in more detail, the Summit conversation will use established and more experimental social media tools and platforms to involve people who are not in the room in the discussion. This includes a a wiki, Twitter conversations during the conference via the #crisisdata hashtag, Flickr photos and U-Stream (to be provided by NextGenWeb).

On the blogging side, while the main event page is on WordPress, Geoff will be using a posterous blog for updates about the conference and to publish early chapters of #crisisdata white paper. He will, of course, share his insights about the tool for this purpose.

In addition to using Foursquare and Gowalla for conference attendees to check in and leave tips, the conference will also experiment with Whrrl, a geo location crowdsourced storytelling application. Conference attendees will be asked to download and join the Emergency Data Society.  This will facilitate a self-organized, community scrapbook of the event from attendees.  Again, expect a full report from Zoetica about how this worked as a tool as a back channel and documentation tool for the conference.

I won’t be at the event in Washington, DC, but I’ll be participating via #crisisdata on Twitter and exploring Whrrl.   Hope you will too.

It is the sweltering dog days of August, and our attention may turn to building sand castles by the edge of ocean.  But many nonprofits deep into planning for year end campaigns and perhaps looking for ways to raise money now.  While I was sitting on the beach on vacation,  Network for Good published a free eBook called How to Raise a Lot More Money Now – 50 Great Ideas from 11 top Experts.

You’ll find lots of  advice and tips from these experts: The authors include Jeff Brooks, Sarah Durham, Jocelyn Harmon, Kivi Leroux Miller, Mark Rovner, Nancy Schwartz, Chris Forbes, Alia McKee Scott and, of course, Katya Andresen.  Allison Fine and I have contributed some tips from The Networked Nonprofit chapter on fundraising.

Over 7,000 people have downloaded the book (you have to fill out a form first) and the reviews have been glowing.

A few of my favorite tips:

• Ignore your brand guidelines. They are all about you, not about your donors, and that will hurt your fundraising.
• Organize a volunteer online thank you corps. Donors get a simple training and are then assigned new donors to
  personally thank on behalf of the cause.
• Take a very long walk. You’re more likely to solve lingering problems with creative solutions if you give your brain a break.  Really. Try it.
• If you’re having a creative block on the fundraising front, ask your child (or a family friend’s child) what your organization does. You will get a refreshing perspective that may inspire your next ask. There’s no better way to get out of the metaphorical weeds than to ask advice of someone who is only a few feet high.

Get your copy of  How to Raise a Lot More Money Now – 50 Great Ideas from 11 top Experts.

Note from Beth: It’s vacation week for me, not publishing much this week or next accept for guest posts and a few book reviews or if I find inspiration.  This guest post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell’s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

Photo by Geoff Livingston

I’m on vacation this week and next!   We’re visiting family at the Jersey Shore, but stopping in DC to take the kids to the Smithsonian and other DC highlights.     You might see a few blog posts or tweets but don’t expect a fast reply via email.     Playing tourist in DC,  it is interesting to see how much your online digital life impacts your offline life.

The Smithsonian is one of the Networked Nonprofits we feature in the book.  My kids, who had been introduced to the Smithsonian through the popular movie “Night at the Smithsonian” were excited too.   There were a number of online/offline participatory visitor experiences.

We spent most of the day at the Smithsonian.   At the Natural History Museum, we visited the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,  an immersive, interactive journey through the origins of human beings and the dramatic stories of survival and extinction in the midst of earth’s history of climate change.

There was one exhibit that the kids just loved.   It was a photo booth that took your photo and transformed you in an early human.   That’s me as a Homo floresiensis,.   It’s what I would have looked like if I lived  95,000 to 17,000 years ago on an island in what is now Southeast Asia.

You had the option of emailing the photo to yourself and it came with a description as well as a mention of what to purchase in the gift shop or where to donate.

At the Museum of American History, we visited the First Ladies Exhibit.  Outside the exhibit I noticed this sign and shared it on Twitter.  I wondered whether or not the information was of any value and asked?

Next stop, the Jersey Shore!

Arts Council of Silicon Valley Staff

This year my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation includes training, coaching, and facilitating peer learning sessions for grantees on using social media effectively, becoming a Networked Nonprofit.    It has been incredible laboratory to put the big ideas in the book in practice.

I’ve had the pleasure working with one of grantees in the Local Program, the Arts Council of Silicon Valley, to coach them in making the transition to being a Networked Nonprofit.     There is a wide range of comfort levels and experience using social media on staff, including the social media gurus who manage the Artsopolis which is focused on marketing the arts in SV.

This is an interesting process of spreading the expertise and way of working to all parts of the organization.   This is a fairly small staff, with limited resources.   As we discussed the challenges of culture shifts, many of the concerns were around lack of time.    The Arts Council’s leader, executive director Bruce Davis, came up a great idea.  “Let’s make the process of experimenting fun – let’s start with a Facebook Friday.”    Their experiment is going to be focused on deepening and improving their Facebook presence for the Arts Council and getting  everyone on staff to participate.   Stay tuned for more …

Sharing Some Facebook Friday Insights

I like to have fun experimenting and that’s just what I’m doing on my Facebook Page, a place for learning, and sharing insights about best practices in social media for networked nonprofits.     I learn so much from the conversation threads and people sharing what they do.  I’ve been remiss in summarizing some of the nuggets out here on the blog, so here goes.

Facebook Strategic Objectives

I asked folks on Facebook:  “What is your organization trying to accomplish on Facebook with its Fan Page?“   Here’s a few answers:

• To disseminate short stories that are unique to the fan page, as well as to link to articles on our websites. We are much more successful when the stories come with a blurb than when they are simply automated RSS-feeds.
• To keep up with our friends, to empower them to tell their stories to the world, to find out what they need from us, to introduce them to each other, to offer mission-related action items, and to have fun.

Techniques for More Engagement

Someone said to me during a workshop a few weeks back – it really sucks to log into Facebook and see a two-star post quality ranking.    This prompted me to post a question on my wall:  How many of you Facebook Page admins notice your post quality ranking every time you visit? What I learned is that “drive by” analysis of metrics is really a waste of time.  You need to grab the month’s worth of measures and look at them against your content.

Some folks have been puzzled by the Post Quality score which  is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. (It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis… See More. The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans.)

Holly Ross simply ignores it and track the number of comments and likes on individual posts.   Jon Dunn does something similar:  “I prefer to really try to key in to what days were successful in terms of content. Understand why we had more new fans on a certain day. What about a certain post created that big conversation. Rinse and repeat.”

That particular wall post had 31 comments and 15 likes, way higher than other types of posts.  Even better than the numbers was the knowledge nuggets shared.  And, ah, I found the secret sauce:   Simply Asking Questions That Allow People To Share Their Knowledge and Ideas sparks engagement!

Is there an App for that?

I have been wanting to test a poll app to see if having close-ended questions or running a poll might encourage engagement.   So I installed this app and set up a poll “Do you think polls increase engagement?  Yes or No?”   Of the 43 people who took the poll, 89% said yes.   Those who didn’t participate in the poll at all, but did on my wall asking for their feedback on polling apps said they didn’t like that the app asked for their personal information.

So, sometimes, the simple approaches work better.

A Couple of Useful Tools To Streamline Workflow

I asked an open-ended question “What are your Facebook administrator best practices?“  This produced a rich conversation on techniques.    This was the first time I noticed people posting on the wall taking to one another, not me.    The thread also includes some great nuggets about streamlining the content strategy as well as streamlining interactions with fans.

• NutShell Mail is an software that aggregates comments and likes on your fan page and delivers it in one email.   Manny Hernandez shared this link to a post about it.
• Spredfast is a listening/content distribution tool.  One feature that I like is that it will give you a list of the names of fans and how much a like/comment.
• There is a way to link google analytics to FB insights.

A Couple of Good Facebook Links

I share about 2-3 really juicy how to links about Facebook a week.  Here’s a couple that got the most likes or comments over the past month or so:

How To Contact Facebook for Help: Directory of Help Forms

Ten Cool Status Update Tricks

Be Careful Not To Violate Facebook Promotional Guidelines With Contests

Four Proven Steps to Facebook Page Success

Top Six Social Media Mistakes and How To Fix Them

Creating a Custom Landing Tab

Facebook Book For Your Desk

Finally, Mari Smith has co-authored a book, “Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day” – if you want one book about Facebook best practices that combines tactical and strategic – this is it!

Becoming A Networked Nonprofit

View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to deliver a half-day training workshop for staff members working at Junior Achievement Offices at their worldwide conference.    This workshop is called “Becoming A Networked Nonprofit:  Using Social Media Strategically.”

The learning objectives:

• To understand what a Networked Nonprofit is and why it is important to become one in order to implement your social media strategy effectively
• To understand the basic steps and frameworks for creating a social media strategy that supports a JA Office program or communications goal.
• To identify a couple of basic starter steps for using social media

I used a newly revamped version of the social media game that fits the learning objectives.  Participants also got a copy of The Networked Nonprofit as part of the materials.  This interactive workshop was a wide mix of perspectives – from senior management to education directors to development directors.   We had a range of attitudes about the value of social media.  This mix lead to a very rich and productive session.     Here’s a few insights.

Leveraging the Network

One of the common things I hear when teach workshops on social media is “We don’t have the time.”    We make the point in the book that if nonprofits make the shift from scarcity to abundance thinking – they will be able to leverage their networks.

Amy Boroff (@njdevmgr), development manager for Junior Achievement of NJ in Princeton, shared a wonderful story about her JA office discovered this in the video above.  They had started using Twitter about six months ago and found one of her new Twitter followers was Kate Specchio (@ecsfoundation), co-founder of Morris County-based The Emily C. Specchio Foundation. Through their conversation on Twitter, Amy recognized the potential for working together. They continued to communicate on Twitter in real-time, after working hours, to learn more about each respective organization. After several weeks, JANJ submitted a proposal to ECS for funding for an inaugural event: the Women’s Future Leadership Forum. The ECS Foundation accepted the proposal and granted funds to help support aspiring female high school students become future leaders.

Deborah L. Dalton who works with the Louisville, KY JA Office mentioned her organization reached out to the local Social Media Club to recruit a board member. They were lucky enough to have Jason Falls help them out.

I know it hard to think about “adding on” social media to the to do list.  But reframe it.  Think of opening up to the abundance of working in a networked way.

Do you have a story about how your organization made that shift?

The Networked Nonprofit Has Arrived in Australia. Connecting Up Office has Donnie the Wombat (Aussie Squirrel) and Tim Tams by their computers along with the book!

I’m so thrilled that the Networked Nonprofit has made it Australia! A few years ago, I had the opportunity to keynote Connecting Up, the national gathering of Nonprofit Techies hosted by Connecting Up. I’m thrilled that they shared a photo of themselves eating tim-tams and their #squirrel mascot!

I just had to blog this.

Standing up, from left to right: Doug Jacquier (CEO), Sarah Rayner-Fry, Pankaj Chhalotre, Josh Goodwin, and Kyla Poyner. Sitting Down, from left: Shai Coggins, Donnie our beloved mascot, and Tu-Trinh Vuong.

Photo by Geoff Livingston

Mark your calendars! Citizen Effect’s CitizenGulf project will become a National Day of Action on August 25th, in alignment with the week of the fifth anniversary of Katrina. The benefit — to be promoted by Gulf Coast Benefit — seeks to help fishing families find a new, more sustainable future by providing education resources for their children.  In addition to Zoetica’s support, additional promotion partners for the national day of action include Andy Sternberg, El Studio, Live Your Talk, Sloane Berrent, and Taylor Davidson.

For details on how you can participate in this important event,  see Geoff Livingston’s post.

This is a quick roundup of some of the wonderful reviews, blog posts, photos, and videos of The Networked Nonprofit.

If you’re in the Bay Area and didn’t make it to our launch party at TechSoup,  there’s a book party in the East Bay on Friday, July 23rd.  The staff of Donordigital Bay Area are throwing a #netnon book party.  Join us on Friday, July 23, 2010, from 6 to 8 pm at Pro Arts Gallery (http://www.proartsgallery.org/) at 150 Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, a stone’s throw from the Oakland City Center/12th Street BART station. More information here.

The Networked Nonprofit is Available on Kindle!

Photo by Curious Lee

I don’t yet have a kindle, so I was thrilled to see this tweet from CuriousLee with a photo he shared on our Networked Nonprofit flickr group.

I’ve been enjoying the photos of friends and colleagues with the book popping up on my Facebook Page.  Judith Sol-Dyess and Steve Heye shared a couple of  “peek a boo” photos.   So, I sent them off a couple of the cool NTEN/Netnon t-shirts!   Hmm .. might see some photos popping up in the flickr group of people wearing #netnon t-shirts.

A Few Reviews

Rosetta Thurman created this video review. Rosetta is a fellow book nerd. (Yes, I bring nonprofit books to the beach too….). But what I love about Rosetta is her young nonprofit leader nerdiness. For example, check out her “50 Young Nonprofit Leaders To Follow on Twitter” list. She made it easy to follow these leaders – so let’s spread it far and wide.

My good friend, Roger Carr, wrote a great review of The Networked Nonprofit. More importantly, really appreciated the insights he shared in the comments of this guest post on volunteering by Robert Rosenthal from VolunteerMatch.

I loved this post from Devon Smith analyzing the metrics and reaping insights from her post on The Networked nonprofit. I learned about some new techniques for measuring blog stats and Twitter. So, go read her post now.

And last but not least,  Idealware has given us a 6 Thumbs Up Review from Johanna Bates, Heather Gardner-Madras, and Steve Backman.   Wow, honored!

I’ve been hearing a few reports that copies of the book are hard to find in the UK (and San Francisco)  and I know that they’re working on it!  In the meantime,  Social Edge is hosting a book blog with some excerpts.

If you wrote a review or have a photo to share, let me know in the comments!  And, thank you all for the great response to the book.