The Bamboo Project Blog

Made to Stick Part Three: Sticky Ideas are Unexpected

Quick--which chair do you notice in this photo?

Odds are, it's the red chair. But why does it  stand out? Because in a sea of gray chairs, all the same size and shape, the larger red chair is unexpected. It violates the pattern set by the other chairs and our brain immediately notes that there's something different in the photo.

Our brains are wired to notice novelty, to take note when something is different than what we expect. If something fits into our general pattern of expectations, our brains will blip right over it, saying in effect "I've seen this before, no need to pay attention to this." But if something stands out, then our brains will immediately pick up on the change telling us to pay attention, this is something we need to consider.

Because we are wired to notice and record the unexpected, surprise is a key factor in making an idea "sticky." According to Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick, once we've honed an idea to its essential core, making it simple and profound, then we need to answer two important questions:

• How do I GET someone's attention?
• How do I KEEP their attention?

Getting Attention
To get someone's attention, you use the element of surprise, the violation of their pattern of expectations. As the Heath's explain:

"Common sense is the enemy of sticky ideas. When messages sound like common sense, the float gently in one ear and out the other. And why shouldn't they? If I already intuitively 'get' what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger of course is that what sounds like common sense often isn't. . . It's your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of the idea that are uncommon sense."

So we need to look at the core idea and find the things that are counter-intuitive about it, the aspects of the idea that are NOT common sense.

Like, "Did you know that the "healthy" juice that you're giving your kid is actually nothing more than sugar water, with  juice used only as flavoring?" 

It's "common sense" that juice is healthy for you--that's our expectation. But if you tell someone that the juice they thought was healthy is nothing more than empty calories, that violates their expectation. That gets them to pay attention.

Keeping Their Attention

Getting attention is one thing, and if you're presenting a relatively simple idea, getting attention may be enough. But for more complex ideas, you have to look at how to engage people's curiosity for a longer period of time. You do this by exposing gaps in people's knowledge and then helping them close those gaps. You tease them to draw them into asking questions, wanting to solve a mystery, and then providing them with the information that helps them do that.

News teasers are a good example of this approach--"What if there was a drug that made you sexier AND could get you a raise? Watch Action News at 11 to find out about how one new medication may do both."  To make our ideas sticky, we need to do the same thing. Find the surprising information, the questions in the material, and ask those to create curiosity. Those questions should be relevant and engaging to the audience. And your "sticky idea" should help them answer those questions.

Think of the best teachers you've had. They asked important questions and then helped you solve the mystery behind those questions. And today, years later, you probably still remember the lessons that were taught. Those are some sticky ideas. That's where you want to be.

So . . . simple ideas presented in unexpected ways will get people's attention. The next time I write on this, we'll look at strategies for making ideas concrete.

PowerPoint Homerun

Seth Godin sums up the best PowerPoint presentations:

"The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa)."

Raise your hand if this was your last experience with Powerpoint? Anyone? Anyone?

I didn't think so.

Seth has some other good advice, including no more than six words on a slide. Ever. No excuses. And a ban on all transitions and fades. Personally I'd ban the sound effects too, although on a very few occasions I've seen them used well.

Simple advice, yet I can't remember the last time I saw it adhered to. I'll be the first to say that I'm not perfect either, but I wish more people were moving in this direction. It would make everyone's conference experiences so much more positive.

Made to Stick--Interview with Chip Heath

Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick, was featured on this morning's Radio Times in Philadelphia. You can check out the podcast of his interview here. Very good summary of the book.

When Funding Priorities Change

An article in this morning's Marin Independent Journal about the impact of Marin Community Foundation funding cuts led me to this article on the Foundation's recent decision to change their funding priorities:

The foundation announced in June that its board of trustees had decided to split its giving equally between sustaining and initiating grants. As a result, nonprofit organizations that serve some of Marin's neediest residents will have to reconfigure their operations or face the possibility of losing millions of dollars in funding.

The change will result in a shift of more than $35 million from sustaining grants to fund new initiatives over the next four years. The foundation gave nearly $26 million to Marin organizations during the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Among the reasons they cite for their decision are the proliferation of nonprofits with similar missions and programs and the desire to have a bigger impact. Not surprisingly, this policy change has upset a lot of people from the nonprofit community. But I see it as a change that is actually moving in the right direction.

One of my all-time favorite books is Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. In it, the authors argue that in visionary organizations, there is a tension between the need to preserve the core and stimulate progress.

Preserving the core means that an organization is very clear about its organizational mission and values and sticks to the strategic and tactical decisions that support their core organizational culture. A strong core gives everyone in the organization a sense of purpose and clear guidance for making decisions and taking action.

While preserving the core is important, there's also a need to stimulate progress. Organizations will not grow and flourish if they do not continue to take new action in light of changing circumstances. Recognizing that there's a tendency to stick with the "tried and true" even when the world is changing around you, the most visionary organizations have developed policies for themselves that force their organizations to change and adapt. 3M, for example, requires that a percentage of its business each year must come from new products and services. They will never completely rely on what they've done in the past--no matter how successful--because they know that eventually this will spell their demise.

From what I can see, the Marin Community Foundation is attempting to put this strategy into practice within the nonprofit/social sector environment. They recognize that their continued funding of existing programs will ensure the continuation of the same old same old and discourage innovation or change. They want to be more strategic in their support and to drive greater innovation and collaboration. This is a bold move, one that other foundations and nonprofits themselves should consider. Ongoing change is a fact of life. Developing strategies and policies that encourage the change cycle can have great benefits and create an environment that allows changes to be more strategic and coordinated. I'll be curious to see how things turn out.

Michele

 

New Zealand CYFS Blog Causing Furor

What's going on with a "name and shame" New Zealand blog is raising some interesting questions about the power of blogs and what to do when they're negatively directed at an organization.

The CYFSWatch Blog was started by a man whose daughter was poorly treated last year by Child, Youth and Family Services staff as she tried to give her baby up for adoption. His mission:

This blogsite is dedicated to all those people who have been bullied, intimidated, or "familially raped" by the Department of Child Youth, & Family: people, it's time to get your power back. Please email any and all "name and shame" stories to cyfswatch@hotmail.com, and we will publish them - uncensored. Photos of any and all offending parties are welcome, together with private and public addresses, contact details, car registrations, etc. Your anonimity is guaranteed (unless you choose to publish under your own name) - theirs is not!

Posts on the site are brutal--naming names, describing case workers in some pretty extreme terms (" . . . a troll of a woman . . . a CYFS feminazi par excellence"). They have also promised to post photos and home addresses of the staff they are shaming. Clearly these are people who are furiously angry and have decided to take matters into their own hands. 

The blog might have remained only a tiny corner of the blogosphere, unknown to most people, if the head of the CYFS hadn't found out about it and gone public in a big way, vowing to do everything within his power to get the site down. This naturally blew traffic to the blog out the door as the story hit the papers and readers wanted to find out what was being said that was so bad it required the blog to be censored.

Currently a battle is raging in New Zealand and in the blogosphere between those who want the blog taken down and those who believe that censoring it is a blow against freedom of expression.  Some are even arguing that this supports the position that bloggers and the folks who comment on their sites should not be allowed anonymity on the Web.

The  situation raises some interesting issues for nonprofits and government agencies, which often work hand-in-hand with them.

First, while companies have been dealing for a few years now with bloggers setting up sites specifically to collect negative commentary about their products or services, this is the first situation I've seen where something similar is being directed at a government agency. Like it or not, the Internet makes it easy for someone to criticize your organization and to gain a much wider audience for that criticism than ever before.

Second, the CYFS strategy for handling the situation clearly backfired. Taking it public only drove more traffic to the blog. Most people would never have heard of the site if it hadn't blown up in the media. Now the blog has become a cause celebre for freedom of speech in the blogosphere.

It has also raised the issue of transparency. Many are suggesting that if the allegations on the blog are true, than the blogger is right in holding an organization accountable for its bad behavior, no matter how "extreme" the rhetoric. I wonder how many angry people who have been poorly treated will read about this case and want to see something similar happening in their own communities? How will the objects of their ire handle it?

These are all issues that nonprofits will increasingly need to struggle with and address. The for-profit world has had to devise strategies for managing their on-line reputations. Now it looks like nonprofits and government agencies will need to do the same.

I personally don't think that this is a bad thing. I support transparency and believe that organizations should be held accountable for what they do and how they manage. In my years in the nonprofit and government world, I've seen a lot of mismanagement and waste in the name of doing good. I've always worked to bring change from within but in many cases have found that unless there's outside pressure to change, it just isn't going to happen. With sites like the CYFSWatch on the horizon, looks like some people will be taking matters into their own hands and that organizations will have to figure out what they're going to do to deal with that.

Michele

Creating Nonprofit Skill Networks

Lately I've been exploring the concepts of nonprofit networks here, what it takes to form and nurture connections among various nonprofits and between nonprofits and individuals. We've talked about building connectivity networks that link people to people, affinity networks that reinforce commonalities among network members and production networks that move affinities into collective action.

The other day I was researching learning management systems for a client interested in tracking staff competences and training needs. I started thinking about the need for skill networks within the nonprofit community and what would have to happen in order for us to develop such networks.

What Do I Mean by a Nonprofit Skill Network?
Very simply, a nonprofit skill network would bring together the knowledge and skills of individual staff at all member organizations and make those skills available to the members of the network. For example, a staff person at Agency A might have skills in developing organizational newsletters. This skill would be cataloged in an online location--either a database or in some other form, such as through a wiki using tagging. When Agency B needs someone to do a newsletter for them, but they lack the internal skills for this to happen, then they would be able to find the staff person from Agency A who could then assist them in implementing that project. 

Why Do We Need Nonprofit Skill Networks?
Staff knowledge and skills are the lifeblood of any organization, but this is particularly true for nonprofits. The more skilled our staff are, the more access to good information they have, the more likely we are to be successful. But many nonprofits are small. They don't have the capacity within their individual organizations to cover all the skill needs that may be necessary to create an effective organization. This is particularly the case when we venture outside of traditional program areas into more functional skills, for example, IT, human resources, marketing and public relations, staff training etc.

With the creation of a skill network, member organizations would be able to expand their capacity to access particular knowledge and skills. In some cases, I could see organizations sharing a collective pool of staff. For example, Agency A might employ a marketing person who splits her time between several members of the network. Network members who used the marketing person would either reimburse the employing agency for the staff person's time or they could trade for services, perhaps offering the use of their finance person in return.

Agencies would also be able to access specialized skills and knowledge for special projects. For example, if an organization needed to run a training on case management basics, they might be able to "borrow" a staff person from one of the other organizations to provide the training. Again, they could either pay for the use of the staff person's time or they could trade for other services.

How Would a Skill Network Operate?
The first order of business would be to find a way to catalog the knowledge, skills and abilities of staff from all network member organizations. The network members would need to agree on a common taxonomy for describing skills so that member organizations are comparing apples to apples.

Ideally, these skills would be cataloged in an online system, either a shared database or by using something less sophisticated, such as tagging. If tagging was used, I could see the creation of a network wiki or blog. For each staff person there would be a detailed biography and maybe a copy of their resume, work samples, etc. Their entries would also be tagged with the appropriate knowledge and functions. Interested agencies would then be able to access the biographies by looking under the appropriate tags.

Other issues that would need to be addressed by the network would include:

• Processes and procedures for collecting the information from staff, including what information will be collected and how it will be shared.

• Will participation in the skill network be voluntary or required for individual staff?

• Processes for accessing staff from other agencies to work on various projects

• Acceptable exchanges--will trading be allowed or would it be strictly a financial arrangement? How will the organizations handle the financial side of things?

• Who will be responsible for maintaining and updating the skill database?

Cons of a Skill Network
There would be a number of challenges to creating such a skill network, not the least of which would be getting past the often siloed, territorial thinking of many organizations. Clearly this would be a complicated endeavor with logistical and practical concerns galore. Many organizations might be uncomfortable with the idea of hiring a staff person in the hopes that they would be able to share that person with other agencies and be reimbursed for those costs. (One way around that would be to look into sharing freelance consultants who would not be employed by any single agency). For various reasons, individual staff might also object to providing their services to another nonprofit. And a significant number of nonprofits operate in crisis mode, making the idea of setting up a skill network a pipe dream they feel they have little time to pursue.

Pros of a Skill Network
For all the potential problems in setting up and maintaining a skill network, I think that there are also significant benefits that make it a worthwhile endeavor. Clearly it would expand the capacity of individual organizations to provide higher quality services. They would have access to knowledge and skills beyond their organization that could give their individual organization a new lease on life.

There's also a benefit to individual staff. In many cases, nonprofit staff get burned out from dealing with the same people and problems on a daily basis. The opportunity to provide services in their strength areas to other organizations could re-energize a tired career. They could also give staff an opportunity to stretch and grow in ways that would in turn benefit their employing organization.

Some Possible First Steps
When I'm thinking about possibilities, I tend to take them to the furthest degree. I see the end result, which can be overwhelming to a lot of people. I think there are smaller steps that organizations could take, however, to start moving in the direction of a larger skill network.

Create an Internal Skill Network--The technologies exist for individual organizations to create their own internal knowledge and skill networks. Using wikis and blogs, individual organizations could take it upon themselves to catalog their internal staff knowledge and skills to make this information available to others in the organization. I would suggest delving deeply into what staff know--you may be surprised at the skills that people have developed in other parts of their lives that could be utilized within the organization.

Create a Skill Network with 1-2 Trusted Partners--Most nonprofits have developed relationships with other organizations already. To expand outside of the individual organization, they could reach out to a few of their trusted partners to build a smaller shared network of skills. You may already be doing this on an informal basis. However, making it a somewhat more structured process could reap bigger benefits for all members of the network. It could also create some major value-add for grant applications.

I think that there are a lot of possibilities for this concept and I'd love to hear from you about your thoughts, if you've seen anything like this being developed anywhere, etc. E-mail me or leave me a note in comments.

Michele

Made to Stick Part Two: To Make it Stick, Keep It Simple

Think about the last time you were reading e-mail and talking to your partner at the same time. If you're honest, you'll recognize that you were really only paying attention to either reading your e-mail or talking to your partner. The other activity was happening on auto pilot. Our brains simply can't apply full attention to more than one idea or activity at a time.

That's why Chip and Dan Heath's first rule of stickiness in Made to Stick is that the idea you want to make stick must be simple. It must be the core of an idea, it's very essence. Otherwise, people will be distracted and unable to make a decision. Since the point of a sticky idea is to ultimately move people to action, they must be able to identify your idea. When you say three things, you say nothing.

The problem for most people in getting to the core idea is that it forces us to radically prioritize. We must strip away all of the ideas that are important, but not essential until we are at the idea that is the most central and critical.

Let's use Southwest Airlines as an example of getting to the core. They are THE low-price airline. Their central idea is that they will be the lowest fare in any market in which they operate. This means that everything they do is evaluated against that idea. Herb Kelleher, the former CEO, tells a story about how they use the idea internally:

"Tracy from marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?  . . .

You say, 'Tracy, will adding that chicken caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn't help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we're not serving any damn chicken salad.'"

In Southwest Airline's case, there are other important ideas about them--they are a fun place to work, for example--but fun is not the core. Low cost is their core. And everything they do is measured against that.

Finding the core idea is important because it helps people avoid decision paralysis. Studies show that when people are operating in an environment of uncertainty, they can become paralyzed by choices and will often make NO choice, even if their choice is between two good options. When we keep our idea simple, we can make the choice for them in the sense that they aren't paralyzed by having to figure out which is the most important idea out of several options.

Simple = Core + Compact
Getting to the core of the idea is one issue. But simple also means expressing the core idea in a compact way. The Golden Rule is a great example of this concept--"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A simple idea, economically stated, but so profound you could spend a lifetime implementing it.

How to make your core idea compact? The Heaths suggest tapping into what your audience already knows by tapping into their "schemas." A schema is a psychological term for a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. When you hear the word "car," that calls up all sorts of associations for you. You see a picture of a car in your mind, but you may also have emotional connections to cars because you and your dad worked on them when you were a kid or you were in a bad car accident at one point.

When we tap into people's schemas, we shortcut the process of learning for them. People can make all sorts of connections between their schema and the new idea that you're presenting. That's why analogies and metaphors work so well--they help people understand a new concept or idea in light of one they already understand. The best analogies allow audiences to deepen their understanding of a new idea by delving deeply into what they know about the analogy and then applying it to the new concept.

The Enemy of Simplicity
Why do we have so much difficulty making an idea simple? Because we are under the "Curse of Knowledge." Once we know something, it's very difficult for us to return to what it felt like to NOT know something. Once I can play the piano, it's difficult for me to put myself back into the mind of someone who doesn't know how to read music or move their hands across the keyboard.

Techies are notorious for having this problem. You call with a computer question and the next thing you know you're knee deep in motherboards and processors and have no clue what they're talking about. Nonprofits are offenders in this area, too. We often have program-specific jargon that we all understand because we've been in the business. But outsiders are left completely confused by what we believe is perfectly comprehensible.

Somehow we have to remove the Curse of Knowledge and get back to the Zen practice of "beginner's mind." We have to be able to put ourselves into the shoes of someone who knows nothing about our idea and figure out how we can make our idea simple enough to appeal to them.

Talking to people outside of our normal circles is one way to test the simplicity of an idea. I also believe that you get an "aha!" feeling in your gut when you've finally hit on your central idea and stated it well. "Maximize shareholder value" isn't a core idea that gives me an aha. But "We're going to be the lowest-fare airline in every market," DOES give me that feeling. It's the difference between being able to see the path to clear concrete action and having that path obscured.

So the first test of stickiness is finding your central idea and stating it in a simple, profound way. Once you've done that, it's time to move on to how you present that idea to an audience. We'll take a look at how that works in several future posts.

Note--for more on schemas, read George Lakoff's tutorial on "Framing," which describes how conservatives have made phenomenally successful use of schemas.

Michele

Making Messages Stick Part One: Introduction to "Made to Stick'

Back in November I was doing some thinking on Malcolm Gladwell's notion of "sticky ideas"--those messages that are really memorable and spur people to action. While Gladwell did a great job of describing what happens when messages are sticky, he didn't spend a lot of time talking about how you can actually make your message sticky. Fortunately Dan and Chip Heath decided to dig into this topic a little more deeply in their new book, Made to Stick. 

I got this book around Christmas. Unlike poor Beth Kanter,  I actually got to finish my copy, and it's been on my mind for a few weeks now. As I'm working on some projects that require me to make my ideas VERY sticky, it seemed like this might be a good time to blog a bit and get my thoughts in order. I actually plan to do a series of posts on the book because it's pretty meaty and worth digging into more deeply. So here goes . . .

For an idea to stick, to be useful and lasting, it must get the audience to:

• Pay attention
• Understand and remember it
• Agree with and believe the idea
• Care
• Be able to act on it

Sounds pretty simple, right? Except that we often fail at getting audiences to do any of this--often from the get go.

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan help us remedy that. They outline six major principles that make an idea sticky:

Simple--Stickiness means focusing on an essential core idea. Ideally, the idea is profound AND simple, as simple doesn't mean simplistic. Proverbs are a good example of a simple, profound thought.

Unexpected--For people to pay attention to an idea, it must violate their expectations. The human brain is remarkably adaptable and will habituate itself to stimuli after surprisingly few exposures. Sticky ideas wake our brains up by jolting us out of our habits. When Southwest flight attendants began cracking jokes during the safety features review, that was unexpected. That got people's attention and got them talking about Southwest.

Concrete--Sticky ideas are concrete. They operate in the world of our senses and in human action. One of the problems with "experts" is that they tend to use more abstract language. This makes it harder for non-experts to understand what the expert is talking about. But when you're introducing an idea that's new, you must do so with concrete examples so that your audience can "see" or "feel" what you're talking about.

Credible--Of course people must believe in the idea for it to stick. Sadly, the idea doesn't actually have to BE true. It just has to APPEAR to be true because it's backed up by some sort of statistics or recommended by a reputable person. Urban legends, for example, are incredibly sticky because the SEEM like they could have happened to someone (in fact, in the stories they usually have). If your friend's cousin said it was so, then there MUST be people who are stealing your organs!

Emotional--While we like to believe we are rational creatures, acting on the basis of fact, the reality is that we are guided primarily by our emotions. Sticky ideas appeal to our emotional side, the side that wants to connect to other people, as we're wired to do.  That's why donors are drawn in by the idea of paying for a poor child in Africa, but NOT by the idea of paying for the nonprofit's electricity.

Stories--Humans have always told stories. We respond to them, see ourselves acting through them. Sticky ideas tell a story that allows us to mentally rehearse, to prepare for action.

Naturally our stickiest ideas will possess all of these characteristics. The fewer of these traits our idea has, the less sticky it is.

Now look back at the beginning--remember that there are several things we need an audience to do in order to have the idea stick? Well we can map these principles right back to each of those steps:

• Pay Attention (Unexpected)
• Understand and remember (Concrete)
• Agree/Believe (Credible)
• Care (Emotions)
• Be able to act on it (Stories)

All of this, of course, assumes that you've started with a simple idea. And simplicity may be the hardest part to get right. At least it is for me, because I possess the "Curse of Knowledge," as Chip and Dan call it.

But that's a post for another day. Tomorrow, in fact, when I want to talk about how knowledge can actually get in our way and what we need to do to make our ideas as simple as possible. 

Michele

QEDWiki May Bring Mash-ups to Your Neighborhood

Yesterday I shared a tool I'd found that could help me easily create a Google Maps mash-up. Now it looks like we may be able to add another tool to the toolbox.

To this point, creating a mash-up has been a task for a programmer, or at least someone with a fair amount of technology know-how. Mash-ups have generally been a little too complicated for the regular person to do on their own. But as Dion Hinchcliffe writes at ZDNet, IBM is getting ready to put the power to create simple web-based applications into the hands of non-techies, too.

QEDWiki, which is currently being tested by IBM's corporate customers, allows end users--managers, front-line staff--to create their own simple computer programs using a simple drag and drop interface. Users can pick the type of functionality they want--for example, they want to see addresses represented on a Google Map--and the data sources they want to draw from. Dion's screencast, for example, shows how he creates a simple wiki page that would allow people to enter addresses into a web page and then have those addresses represented in a Google Map. You can also watch the 5-minute demo above to see how an insurance claims adjuster could create a simple web app to tell her which claims to process and whether or not contact information is valid.

The implications of something like this are pretty interesting. In most organizations, front-line staff are dealing with a lot of inefficiencies and have created work-arounds to deal with those problems. As a staff trainer, I get to hear about many of these in my training sessions and I'm always amazed at the ingenuity of front-line staff to figure out ways to do their jobs better.

The problem that these staff face, though, is that their work-arounds are often "paper-based." To use technology in any way, they must rely on some centralized controlled process where IT personnel who often have little understanding of the ways in which front-line staff work are developing applications that may or may not really get the job done. With access to something like QEDWiki, staff would have in their possession the means to create their own computer applications on the fly. They would be also be able to share these applications with their co-workers, who could further tweak and improve the tool. A great way to expand organizational learning and efficiency.

I'm not naive enough to believe that this solution is just around the corner for nonprofits. There are many hurdles to overcome, including cost and providing staff with the context and skills to understand how they might be able to use such a tool. But I think that there's a lot of promise with a tool like QEDWiki because it has the potential to really improve the capacity of individual staff and organizations that use it. I also believe that QEDWiki is part of a larger trend to continue pushing into the hands of individual users the power to create tools and applications that work for them. To my mind, this could be a very good thing, although we will also need to consider all the ways in which it could impact our organizations.

Michele

Need to Mashup a Google Map? Try Wayfaring

In a meeting yesterday, a couple of my clients wanted to be able to see the locations of various employers in their community on a map, but weren't sure how to do this. I knew that this was something we could do using Google Maps, but not being a programmer, I also knew it was beyond my minimal capacities to be fooling around with Google's API. So I started to do a little research and quickly stumbled upon Wayfaring. It's a nice little tool that could prove helpful if you want to create your own map.

Creating a Map
You have to register to start a map, something I did in about 60 seconds. Within about 5 minutes, I had developed my first map showing the location of several employers in Delaware County outside of Philadelphia.

The first step in the process is adding "Waypoints," which are the locations you want to include on the map. You name your Waypoint (I just used company names) and then in the next screen, you enter the street address. Wayfaring will automatically figure out the GPS location of the address and integrate it with Google so that you can see your location as a pin on your map.

If you'd like you can add tags (I had entered a few hospitals, so I tagged them as such) and you can also include notes on each location. In my case, I could use notes to put the contact information of the HR manager at each of the companies we were including on the map (with their permission of course). Once you've added your notes and tags, you hit "Done" and you've added your Waypoint.

Adding additional waypoints was just as easy, although I did run into a few situations where the site couldn't find the address I'd entered. I need to do some more troubleshooting on that problem.

Sharing Your Map
If you want to share your map with someone else, you have a couple of options. You can use the e-mail tab to e-mail your map to your target audience. You also have the option of cutting and pasting the code to include in your blog or website. In my case, I'll probably be including the map in the job search blog I'm going to be creating for the client.

Possible Uses
So why would anyone want to create their own map in the first place? I can actually see a lot of potential applications for the service. Later in the spring I hope to be working with a group of young people on an asset mapping project (we're waiting on grant money--sound familiar?). In that project, we want to gather information about the resources that are available in our community to serve the needs of youth who have dropped out of school. This tool could come in handy as a way to document what we collect. It would also allow us to easily share the information with other people in the community through the wiki and other tools we have planned.

Since we've been talking so much about networks lately, I can also see using this tool to map the location of individual network members or organizations or of various services that clients may access. Brainstorming with the network, you could probably come up with other value-add maps to create that would be helpful to network members. 

Pros and Cons
One feature I'd like to have but didn't see is the ability to use tags to screen locations on my map. In my case, for example, I've included several hospitals. It would be nice if I could use the tag to include only hospitals on my map.

There also doesn't appear to be any "Help" feature--not even a FAQs section--so if you run into trouble, it seems that you're on your own to figure it out.

That said, though, Wayfaring was pretty easy to use and I got myself up and running quickly with minimal problems. And I can't complain about the price, since it's free. So if you're looking for a simple, fast way to put together your own Google Maps mashup, you might want to take Wayfaring for a spin.

Michele