The Bamboo Project Blog

Digital Future Includes Greater Social Activism and Link Between Online Communities and Off-line Action

I'm tired after a day of presentations, but still wanted to quickly write about this. Excuse any incoherence. . .

The USC/Annenberg Digital Future Project just released a report indicating some major shifts in communications and social connections spurred by online activities. The project conducts annual surveys of more than 2,000 individuals nationally and this year's report identifies some important changes in how users are participating in real-life and online community activities.

The findings most important to nonprofits include:

Online communities and offline action -- The Digital Future Project found that involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community. (An “online community” is defined as a group that shares thoughts or ideas, or works on common projects, through electronic communication only.)

Social activism – Participation in online communities leads to social activism. Almost two thirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet. And more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities.

To me, these findings present a major opportunity for nonprofits that are able to create and maintain online communities. What I find particularly interesting is that online activities actually boost offline social activism. Clearly nonprofits that can capitalize on this will be in a stronger position to engage supporters of their cause.

You can read the rest of the report here.

Michele

Bits & Pieces

I'm in Texas for a conference, where it's gray and rainy and we're expected to go from 72 this morning to 42 by this evening. Fortunately I'm inside all day. Anyway, conference time means more sporadic, shorter posts. Which isn't always a bad thing.

In no particular order and on completely unrelated tangents. . .

• Via Guy, a nice Beginner's Guide to Digg is online.

• If you check out our ChipIn widget to the left, you'll see that Beth reached her goal and was able to raise $750 for Leng Soparath's education. Fabulous news!

• I haven't had a chance to fully read and digest this, but Chris Anderson's post "In Praise of Radical Transparency" seems interesting. I think it has a lot to say about the intersection between organizational culture and technology right now and how each informs the other.

Now I'm off to guzzle gallons of coffee and prepare for my presentations tomorrow.

Michele

What Happens When I Have Time to Think

Creating Passionate Users, one of my all-time favorite resources, is devoted to the idea that we need to meet learners where they're at. This, of course, means that we must first understand where they're at and then be able to do something about it.

Lately, I've been trying to put myself in my customer's shoes, something I'm forever advising them to do. Here are some things that I know for sure when it comes to nonprofits and using technology:

• They don't have time to read about all the great stuff that's available.

• There's so much information out there that even if they do have the time, many people quickly become overwhelmed.

• They want someone to explain things to them in easily digestible pieces so that they can understand the technologies, one piece at a time.

• They're most interested in seeing in a concrete way exactly what we're talking about when we say that nonprofits should have a blog or do podcasting. They need to see examples of how these tools are used by real organizations to accomplish the real work of an NPO.

Seeing this need, I went looking for resources that could help. And while I found a ton of good stuff, I didn't find anything that exactly met what I pictured.

There were a lot of great articles and how-to's and examples, but they were spread out all over the place and they were sometimes confusing to understand, especially if you don't know the jargon of the new media. I couldn't find a good "Nonprofit Web 2.0 for Dummies," that boiled down the essence of this stuff into pieces a "regular" person could understand.

So like any good denizen of the Web 2.0 world, I went and created something myself.

Our Web 2.0 for Nonprofits Wiki is meant to give nonprofits a brief introduction to the concepts and tools of Web 2.0 and to provide them with specific examples of how other nonprofits are using these tools to engage in their basic work activities. I assumed that people would either want to know about specific tools ("what is MySpace?") or they would want to know about how to get certain tasks done. To help them, I've tried to organize the wiki by both the tools, as well as by the activities for which nonprofits might use the tools. So there are sections on advocacy and engaging volunteers and there are cross-referenced sections on blogs and podcasting.

Our goal with this is not to be the definitive resource for all things Web 2.0. There are plenty of sites that are doing this, like TechSoup. We're also not trying to get too detailed and technical. Instead, we're trying to create something that's easily digestible and understandable for most nonprofits and that organizes the information in terms that they are most likely to understand.

More importantly, we wanted to create a resource that could serve as a repository of best practice examples for how other nonprofits are using Web 2.0 to do their work. To the extent possible, we wanted to show rather than to tell.

Why Use a Wiki?
I considered putting all of this into a website, and I might do that at a later date. But the reason I chose a wiki was so that other people could add their own content and examples, making this a more dynamic, collaborative resource. One of the major tenets of the Web 2.0 world is harnessing collective intelligence and with a wiki, we can do that most easily.

Isn't This Replicating Other Work Being Done By Other People?
I thought for a while about whether or not I should even begin this project, which has taken many hours to put together. But I wasn't able to find exactly what I was looking for and I felt like this was something that was really needed by our customers. One of the best services we can provide in an information-overload environment such as ours is some simplicity, guidance and pruning back of the garden of knowledge.

Why Should I Care?

Well, like I said, the power of the web is in harnessing collective intelligence. It's also in sharing what you have with other people who may be able to do something even more amazing with it. Ideally, the wiki will at least be a place where people can get some basic information. More than that, I'd really love it if others contributed their best practices and ideas. As much as possible, I'll add new information as we go along. There's also some other work I want to take care of to clean the place up a little and to continue adding information into different sections. It's definitely a work in progress.

So please take a look and feel free to add your comments and best practices to the site.

 

UPDATE: Rallyfan from Random Thoughts on Life and Work is already adding some resources! He reminds me that in order for anyone to make edits, you need the wiki password, which is "nptech," without the quotes. Sorry I didn't mention that previously.

Michele

Applying the Laws of Simplicity

I love my iPod Nano. It's a simple, beautiful piece of technology that looks great, feels wonderful in my hand, and delivers to me what I want without unnecessary bells and whistles. As with most Apple products, it's a reflection of the company's commitment to user-centric design.

I thought of this while reading John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity, which I found via Presentation Zen. While the most obvious application of Maeda's Laws is to product development, I think they also have something to tell us about how we run nonprofits, which can sometimes become bloated and overwhelming as we try to be all things to all people. (Bear with me as I wax philosophical. After a weekend of Christmas shopping, I'm in a mood to simplify)

Law 1: The Simplest Way to Achieve Simplicity is Through Thoughtful Reduction
Maeda's first law tells us  "when in doubt, remove. But be careful what you remove." In other words, know what programs, services, processes, etc. we need to have in place in order to be functional and provide value to various customers and then remove the rest. There's a temptation in this field, I've found, to always offer more, as though we can prove our worth by adding something else to the list of what we do. But then we find ourselves in the position of doing many things, none of them well, which is bad for all concerned.

Law 2: Organization Makes a System of Many Appear Fewer
Per Law 1, many nonprofits offer a range of services and information that can be overwhelming to outsiders. We tend to provide customers with information in a menu format that emphasizes the broad range of things we can do. But for most people, this laundry list is confusing and overwhelming. We need to consider how we organize and chunk the information we provide to people (volunteers, donors, employees, constituents) and how we can use organization to make this data easier to manage and understand.

Law 3: Savings in Time Feels Like Simplicity
In our time-challenged society, we yearn for speed. We're impatient with lines and waiting and give our undying loyalty to those organizations that respect and help us manage our time. Several years ago I worked for a nonprofit that said they operated on "government time," which meant that people waited weeks and months for services and information. Disturbingly, this didn't bother them at all. Today, this is no longer acceptable to most people. One of the greatest services we can provide is ways to save customers time.

Law 4: Knowledge Makes Everything Simpler
There's data and information and then there's knowledge. I find that when we're in a system, we tend to forget what it's like to be on the outside. So we use a lot of jargon with customers. Or we provide information without turning it into knowledge. In the workforce development system, state Departments of Labor have vast quantities of data about unemployment rates, numbers of people employed in an occupation, etc. This is available to the various nonprofits that provide employment and training services to job seekers and to businesses. But what is the purpose of this information? How do I turn this into knowledge that makes the information useful to the customers I'm serving? How am I supposed to use the unemployment rate to help a business or a job seeker? This is when information becomes clutter.

Law 5: Simplicity and Complexity Need Each Other
There can be a danger in committing to simplicity that we pare away too much of what we do. We have to seek balance and understand that simplicity helps us make sense of complexity. It shouldn't be a replacement for the complex web of services that are needed as much as a way to help us make sense of things that are complicated.

Law 6: What Lies in the Periphery of Simplicity is Definitely Not Peripheral
Simplicity requires context. In some cases, what we consider unimportant is in fact of central importance to our customers. We can't afford to assume that because to us a service or program or process is peripheral, that it will be the same for the people using it. Often it's the central piece that we've failed to simplify. And by failing to simplify this piece, our other attempts at simplicity fail as well.

Law 7: More Emotions Are Better than Less
Good design is as much about emotion as it is about logic. We have to understand and honor the emotional space of our various customer groups and we need to build this into our processes. As humans, even when we think we're being logical, we are usually having more emotional responses. Understanding and engaging customer emotions will usually lead us to better design of services and procedures.

Law 8: In Simplicity We Trust
It is easier for us to trust something we understand than something we don't. Complexity provides more opportunities for mistrust to develop because it feels less in our control. When we design things to be simple, we build trust.

Law 9: Some Things Can Never Be Made Simple
Social change is never simple. It usually involves broad system changes that are, by their very nature, complex. There are no simple solutions to ending poverty or to fighting AIDS or to saving the environment. Acknowledging this is important. But within that complexity, the service we can provide is to make aspects of it simple to understand. I may not fully understand global warming and how it occurs and all the ramifications. But I can understand simple things I can do to address the problem. It's good to recognize the complexity. But always be seeking to simplify.

Michele

The Nonprofit Digital Divide

Jayne Cravens of Coyote Communications has written a provocative commentary on the growing digital divide among nonprofits. She asks a powerful question:

"I'm on dozens of online communities, most of which relate to nonprofit organizations and civil society in some way. I also attend onsite conferences each year relating to the same sector. Through these online and face-to-face gatherings over the recent years, I'm seeing a disturbing trend: a gap between those organizations in the USA that are using the Internet in a myriad of ways to support their missions, and those who are still largely on the sidelines and not using network technologies in working with their volunteers. The question is, are these sidelined nonprofits there because of lack of access to resources, or lack of will to embrace them?"

After several recent conference experiences, Jayne comes down squarely on the side of lack of will, a result of command and control, top down organizational cultures that see technology as the responsibility of the Tech department, not as a critical component of their organizational strategy:

Nothing illustrates this contrast in organizations better than two conferences I attended in 2006.

At the first, a major international conference, I spoke to a room full of veteran volunteer managers and representatives of long-established nonprofits. I talked about online volunteering and online communities. From the feedback I received, these were brand new concepts to most of the attendees, even though the practices have been around for many years. No one expressed interest in immediately exploring the practices, feeling that it was something to think about, but not to urgently implement. For them, volunteer management is a top-down endeavor, and technology use in working with and supporting volunteers is something to think about someday, when there's time. Two people even said that they would be providing my materials to their tech staff, implying that it was up to the tech staff to decide if these activities would be pursued.

At the second conference, even tiny nonprofit organizations with entirely volunteer staffs were using computer and networking technology to involve volunteers, donors, advocates and the general public in a variety of mission-based activities. These organizations were very much focused on giving their volunteers a bigger voice at the organization - and, in the end, actually giving these volunteers lots more to do, an increase in work load that the volunteers liked very much. These organizations also had a focus on engaging in activities that exude transparency and openness in all aspects of decision-making and management, and on being immediately responsive to volunteers' and other supporters' thoughts, suggestions and criticisms. Their volunteer involvement is focused on their staff always listening and acknowledging what they have heard from volunteers, by action as well as by words. They made their volunteers feel included and energized, not with pins or mugs or luncheons, but through greater and more-meaningful involvement, through ongoing, interactive support, through greater responsibility, and through actions that showed volunteer feedback had been heard.

In earlier posts, I've talked about the more technical aspects of this digital divide and  strategies to effectively ride the innovation curve. But Jayne brings up the other part of the equation--the openness of nonprofits to the idea of a culture that encourages collaboration and two-way communication.

For those nonprofits to whom participatory culture is as natural as breathing, there's a strong impetus to learn the new technology tools because these fit naturally into their mission and their organizational culture. But for nonprofits that have always relied on a command and control structure, learning these tools can be not only unnecessary, but threatening to their way of life.  New media asks for a level of transparency and "letting go" on the part of organizations that does not fit in to their way of operating in the world. It demands skills that they haven't developed and asks them to fundamentally change the ways in which they do business.

While access to and information about new technologies is important, it is this fundamental need to change organizational culture that may ultimately be the biggest challenge to adopting new media. It's one thing to say "your organization needs a website," which was the change demanded in the first round of Internet-enabled communications. That's still one-way communication that can be controlled by a few people within the organization. But when we start looking at tools that require information sharing, transparency and the ceding of control to volunteers and employees, that is quite another story. It's a cultural shift akin to Henry Ford's assembly line, which fundamentally changed our society.

That, in the end, is what makes this phase so challenging. As Ford's practices were adopted, few organizations were equipped to handle it. They didn't have the management structure or practices--they didn't even have management as we know it, as that's part of Ford's legacy. Some organizations were able to adapt and change and they survived in that new world. Others were not able to make the shift and they did not survive. I'm sure that many of them thought "oh, this is just a fad, it'll go away" or "I don't really need to worry about this--it doesn't apply to my business." I suspect that those are the organizations that found themselves out of business within a year or two.

In my opinion, we've let the genie out of the bottle with new media. People have expectations that they can and should be able to get information about anything, that they should be able to participate in the creation and dissemination of information related to topics and causes that interest them. Ultimately I think they won't accept the old way of doing things and the pressure will mount for non-participatory organizations to change their ways. The question is, will they be able to do so in time to survive?

Monitoring the Blogosphere

Rallyfan at Random Thoughts on Life and Work has an interesting post on how Samaritan's Purse is monitoring  blogs to respond to both positive and negative postings. As Rallyfan notes, the organization did an excellent job of both reinforcing an already excited fan and doing damage control about negative messages spreading through the blogosphere.

This got me thinking about whether or not we're doing a good job of tracking what people are saying about our organizations. A few days ago I wrote about an article on MSNBC and the American crisis of faith in nonprofits. On the associated message forums, there were a lot of very negative comments from donors about how nonprofits do their fundraising and spend their dollars. If people read these things and there's no effective response from nonprofits, then the public is left with only one, unbalanced view of the situation.

Even if nonprofits don't have a strong web presence, this doesn't mean that their donor and constituent base isn't talking about them online. By not monitoring the talk, we lose opportunities to build positive brand images and to respond to negative messages. As more and more people use the Web as their primary information source, this will become a larger problem I suspect.

The Marketing Pilgrim has a great Online Reputation Monitoring Beginner's Guide that lays out some excellent strategies for keeping track of your organization's online reputation. They note:

Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry. Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch?

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.

It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.

A new product launch could take hundreds of TV commercials, dozens of newspaper ads, and an expensive ad agency.

It can also spread like a virus with the praise of just one customer, at one message board.

A company can dominate market share, throttle competition and hold the #1 brand in the world.
It can also crash in months if it fails to listen to what its customers want.

Substitute the word "nonprofit" for "company" and think about this in the context of your organization and you can see how shaping your online reputation is as important as any other marketing or outreach you do. Given the time, energy and dollars you devote to building your image, it makes sense that you'd want to protect that investment in every way you can.

Michele

Sticky Ideas and the Tipping Point

Yesterday we talked about the three types of people necessary to move an idea from "that's interesting," to "I must HAVE it!" as it relates to helping nonprofits adopt new technologies. Today, I want to explore one more area from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point that's relevant to this conversation--the concept of "sticky ideas."

While we need the right kinds of people in an early adopter group engaged in "selling" technology, for individuals to adopt the tech,  we need to make the concepts "sticky."

"Stickiness is a specific quality of the message that makes it memorable and     spurs people into action. Big budget advertisers buy memory space with     incessant repetition – it takes at least six repetitions for people to     remember a brand name. Stickiness is a low-budget equalizer that grabs     people’s imagination on the first or second exposure. A seemingly small or     trivial property of the message – the gold box on a record club coupon, a     campus map on an informational pamphlet, the mixing of puppets and real     people in Sesame Street, the literal narrative format of Blues Clues –     resonates with the audience and grabs and holds their attention. The     stickiness factor is a simple way of packaging a message that makes it     irresistible in the right circumstances." (from Booktalk)

So it's not just about getting the right people talking, it's also about packaging the message in a way that's irresistible. This is where we get into what Seth Godin calls a "viral" message. Says Seth:

For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.

No one "sends" an idea unless:
a. they understand it
b. they want it to spread
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits

No one "gets" an idea unless:
a. the first impression demands further investigation
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time

So to me, here's the heart of what we need to do to help nonprofits  adopt those aspects of the new wave of technology that will benefit them:

1. Within both individual organizations and the industry itself, find the mavens and start communicating with them about the technology. They will be the initial "senders" of the message, so we need to help them:
   • Understand the features and benefits of the new technologies.
   • Provide ways for them to experiment and "play around" with the new technologies. Remember, mavens are all about deep learning, so they need the opportunities to do that.
   • Help mavens see "what's in it for me" to spread the ideas.
   • Give them tools and strategies for spreading ideas that are easy for them to use and that will make sense to the connectors and salespeople with whom they'll be communicating. This means making sure that we create a foundation for understanding these concepts that's concrete and easy for non-technical types to grasp.
2. Help the mavens connect with the connectors and salespeople so that the ideas can start germinating.
3. Support all three groups by providing ongoing information and technical support, as well as venues for sharing ideas and the results of their work.

Of course, all three of these things are going on in various ways through the work of groups like N-Ten  and NetSquared. What we may need to do is look at the nature of the messages we're sending--are they "sticky" enough?--as well as who we're focusing our efforts on. Have we in fact really identified these three types and are we targeting them specifically? Or are we taking a more "build it and they will come" approach?

I hesitate to take too much of a "marketing" approach with all of this--I've never wanted to be in the business of convincing people to buy something whether they need it or not. But what I do think is important is to think about how we can move good tools into wider circulation and acceptance for those organizations that can benefit. For me, it's helpful to consider who I need to be talking to and what kinds of messages I need to be sending to help move the wave along.

Michele

 

Getting to the Tipping Point

We've been talking about how to engage nonprofits in technology and the influence of the innovation curve. What I wanted to think about today was getting to what Malcolm Gladwell calls "The Tipping Point"--that space where an idea moves from the fringes to the mainstream. What needs to happen for us to tip over?

Before I go there, though, one thought that I've had is around the nature of the kinds of people who are attracted to careers in nonprofits. One very simple way to help people think about the careers they enjoy is to ask them if they like working with people, things or ideas. Techies are generally interested in working with things and ideas. Nonprofit service providers are usually interested in working with people.

I suspect that part of the issue in encouraging nonprofits to use technology lies in the fact that we're working with individuals who want to connect to people, not to computers. And even though the new breed of tools is all about communication and collaboration, I'm not sure that the more social individuals want to connect through a computer as much as they want to see a real living breathing human in front of them. Just a thought.

So back to the tipping point . . .

Three Types of People Who Help Us "Tip"
Gladwell suggests that there are different types of people who play key roles in tipping an idea. David Armano has a great graphic to represent what they do and how they connect and also does a nice job of summarizing the three types:

The Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen help fuel the growth of the Social Media Network (shown behind).  Each type of individual possesses a complimentary quality that when combined, creates an infectious momentum which spreads rapidly.

From wikipedia:

* Connectors: Those with wide social circles. They are the "hubs" of the human social network and responsible for the small world phenomenon.

* Mavens are knowledgeable people. While most consumers wouldn't know if a product were priced above the market rate by, say, 10 percent, mavens would. Bloggers who detect false claims in the media could also be considered mavens.

* Salesmen are charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They exert "soft" influence rather than forceful power. Their source of influence may be the tendency of others, subconsciously, to imitate them rather than techniques of conscious persuasion.

The trick for us, then, is to determine who in our industry and organizations are the mavens, the connectors and the salespeople. I suspect that they may have to come from the ranks of the non-technical types, as it's been my experience that there can be a significant communication gap between the technical and non-technical groups. All three groups have to be able to connect in a significant way with the users, and users have to really TRUST that the people they're talking to understand the nature of their work and the challenges of using tech when you're not skilled in those areas.

As we identify individuals from these three groups--and remember, we need all three to create the right synergy--then we'll need to be figuring out how best to educate and market the ideas to them. As David points out, this may have to occur in off-line environments, at least initially because, again, non-technical people haven't necessarily embraced online culture as readily. This is part of the point, of course.

Identifying and Influencing Mavens

According to one recent study, mavens will be the ones in the organization who are reasonably comfortable with technology. They also tend to be more optimistic about outcomes and have a greater sense of self-efficacy. This article suggests that mavens have also been found to be "active media consumers, avidly consuming all media that touches their topics of interest; yet challenging to describe with no discernable geo-demographic characteristics."

Mavens tend to see right through attempts to "sell" them. They want an opportunity to thoroughly explore and experience the media. Once they've convinced themselves of its value, they'll start sharing what they know. So lots of chances to interact with and learn about new tools will be the best way to "market" to mavens.

Identifying and Influencing Connectors

Connectors are easier to identify, probably because they will have identified YOU. From a review of The Tipping Point:

Connectors     are “people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” They     aren’t intimately familiar with all of them, that wouldn’t be possible.     Instead, they cultivate what sociologists call the “weak tie” – friendly     acquaintanceship. Many Connectors move between a range of different     subcultures and niches, cultivating connections in all of them. They tend to     be gregarious, outgoing, helpful, and nonjudgmental. They are the people to     know when you need a job, because they’ll know somebody who knows somebody.     They’re also the people who need to adopt an idea or a product before it can     become an epidemic.

Connectors get their ideas about what to adopt from their connections to mavens. It's the mavens who are the "content experts" who can convince connectors that they should try something new. Then it's the connectors who start telling everyone about it.

Identifying and Influencing the Salespeople
Salespeople are the "arm twisters" who motivate people to take action.  According to Gladwell, salespeople are the ones who are able to pick up on and mirror subtle physical cues that put them "in synch" with those they are talking to. In this process, they are then able to take the lead in the "dance" of a conversation and send their own powerful emotional signals to others, persuading them to buy.

Salespeople will work in concert with the mavens and connectors, getting information from the mavens and networking with the connectors. Keep in mind, too, that individuals can fall into more than one group.

The Synergy of the Three
For an idea to tip over, you must find and harness the power of all three of these types within the early adopter group. Without the three groups working together--mavens to research and inform, connectors to network and salespeople to persuade--an idea won't take hold.

There's one more factor that influences whether or not we reach a tipping point--the "stickiness" of the idea, but I'll save that for another post.

Michele

Nonprofit Carnival is Up

I'm a day late on posting this, but some good stuff over at the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Thanks to Jeff for hosting it this week.

Leng Sopharath is Halfway There!

Looks like Beth's ChipIn campaign is paying off!