Online Communities for Social Change

Organizing lots of people online with little organization skills and little resources

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Notes from SOCAP09: Thoughts on Microdonations, Crowdsourcing, Radical Collaborations and Mobile Tech

Posted by susantenby on September 8, 2009

On Thursday, I attended the unconference/open space portion of SOCAP09.  I found a few tech sessions that were relevant to the purposes of TechSoup, and as is always the case, I collected the business cards of some intelligent people doing good work. The spontaneous conversations in the halls, are really the reason why we go to conferences, right?

That is really the reason we even do F2F these days, as much of the content at conferences is pretty much the same conversation again and again, at least in the Nonprofit Tech world (Twitter or Facebook,? what’s the best platform to do online collaboration on?, etc. etc.) Here is what you missed, so now you don’t have to regret not having gone.
Meet these smart people whom I met, and you may not know about but should:

These  people were talking about very different topics, but there were some emerging and complementary high-level themes that I observed across conversations.

One such theme I observed that that emerged is that there is a justifiable fear of the duplication of efforts. The answer to that, at least the stop-gap measure, was to have an open API with shared data about social entrepreneurship. Another theme is that people who are not in the NPTech sector want to find a place to tell them where to start, in terms of online social networking and social media tools. It isn’t enough to just say, “Go to TechSoup.” Not everyone wants to wade through an enormous website with a less-than-perfect search engine.

Here are some tactical themes that spanned across conversations in the sessions and people to whom I could map the themes:

  • Microdonations:

An interesting theme that I saw recurring was  the cross-disciplinary concept of micro-donations. Whether is be micro-donation of money (Bennett Grassano, former TechSoup Development Director and current Kiva Development Director was present, representing the very successful micro-lending platform), micro-donation of time (the Extrordinaries helps people volunteer their time, via their mobile phones, in very small actionable tasks)or micro-donation of of gifts (Dreambank.org allows an individual to receive a portion of their Dream-gift from many people, instead receiving lots of crap they don’t want, they just tell their friends and family and Facebook network to go to their Dreambank page, and all gift-givers donate a portion to that larger “dreamgift.”) If this idea proliferates, it will lessen waste by unused crap. The platform can also benefit a charity. If people can’t afford to give to charity, they can just give their dreamgift to a friend, and instead they let the dreamgift pay the Nonprofits that are participating in their program. Others in the field who could fall into a bucket of Charity gift giving would be: Changingthepresent.org and a number of Charity Mall sites (Like Givestream, iGive.com or Firstgiving.com) that donate a portion of the proceeds to charities.
Another couple of notable orgs that were relevant in this category were:

  1. World Nomads, through their Footprints program, they fund large scale International development projects through micro-donations. They are currently working in language translation,  their site is all about mitigating risk (i.e. insurance) when you are on the road and enables one to give a micro-donation while traveling in a location.
  2. GlobalGiving Circle: a network of individuals who come together to support creative and innovative solutions to alleviate poverty, through micro-donations and well-organized donations and fund-raising efforts.

All of these programs played to the concept of accommodating people’s desire to give and the need to be fast and abbreviated.

  • Radical Collaboration using online tools, another theme that emerged, took many divergent directions, mainly because most attendees did not know enough about APIs to follow the initial lead of the session designer, Greg Berry.

One source of APIs that Greg was hoping that we would all be able to draw from is the newly launched Social Entrepreneur open API which is a search engine for finding social entrepreneurs, designed in order to provide an exchange and transfer of information. Having shared data would help us move more in the desired direction of not duplicating the efforts of an organization with a similar mission.  It would act as a data-feed for this community. The organization SocialActions.com was mentioned in several conversations, as a site to watch, in this arena. If we encourage a common usage of the API to share the data, the data will be harmonized, it will work with a single search box, to use on all Social Entrepreneurial websites.

Other sites that shared a common theme (and should probably partner, and use the new open API, so as to not re-invent the wheel) that were mentioned were:

  1. Compathos: Connecting volunteers and financial resources with nonprofits through digital storytelling
  2. Media Saves the Day: (still in beta) Connecting volunteers and nonprofits for media and tech needs
  3. Catch a Fire connecting tech volunteers with nonprofits

All of the above projects leveraged the micro-donation of time/effort to help an organization fulfil its mission. They also examined doing social benefit work by harnessing smaller effort by many people using technology, or community-based design, also known as crowd-sourcing. Projects like the ones mentioned above and Openaustin.org (which is one man’s effort to crowd-source the redesign and revuild of the website for the city of Austin) exemplify a new wave in technology that is all about volunteerism, in a quick and easily digestible way, one that takes less of a commitment, but if organized appropriately, can demonstrate great impact.

Although not directly related to the above two themes of crowd-sourcing and micro-donations, I still thought it may be of interest to share some notes from the Mobile Apps for Social Change conversation.  I have just included some key thoughts from that discussion below.
A theme that emerged in the Mobile Apps for Social Change session was that in order to have more cause-based mobile apps, we have to developers to brave the cost and competition, because the odds are stacked against them. Here are some brief facts that I learned on this topic:

  • Blackberry outsells the iPhone (Who knew?)
  • Android– Google’s open source phone that is the main competitor to the iPhone
  • iPhone has 1.5 billion downloads of apps, and there are 75,000 apps on the market
  • 5-10,000 new apps are being developed each week
  • The Palm Pre has only a few hundred thousand users, and therefor very few apps developed, because an average app costs somewhere btw $10,000- $50,000 to build
  • Asia is ahead of US in terms of data-phone and mobile market penetration
  • however, most in the developing world, use cell phones as their primary means of accessing the web, not just laptops
  • youth is migrating to smart phones
  • most phones are becoming web-capable, not only data phones, but the problem is that the data plans are not that affordable
  • the average farmer in rural Africa does not have a smart phone– w/intro of appstore, developers were able to bypass the carrier.
  • It’s difficult to be approved as an app, for cause related developers, because previously the developers had to be approved by a carrier in order to get accepted into the marker
  • One would assume that cause-related apps would get approved easier by carriers, but it’s not so, because they are not profitable.
  • Would it be a politically charged reason that the apps are not easily approved?
  • w/smart phones and appstores, a developer no longer needs to get approved by the carrier, as soon as Apple approves an app, it’s live and available on appstore
  • Another option for building apps outside of the iPhone framework is the text-based apps. For example, an app that is not web-based is to text 2555 to find out where nearest HIV treatment or testing center
  • price of texting is going down in developing world. There is an innovation in developing world that goes twds reverse billing, so bill could go to NGO initiating activity
  • FRONTLINE sms– ALLOWS you to build up a database on yr computer and use that to send out text messages enmasse
  • Some causes that are being tackled: mobile trends in human rights violations, information about agriculture, the health of workers in the field, providing information to health-care professionals in remote areas and allowing for them to upload data, and mobile banking

In all, a very interesting day, and I was impressed by the move towards microdonations of time, volunteerism, and resources by the use of online social networks and mobile technology.

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20 tips for Internal Nonprofit Organizational Twitter Etiquette

Posted by susantenby on July 28, 2009

Ya Think you know how to Tweet?  Well, you may be tweeting inappropriately from your workplace account.

Your organization’s Twitter account can be used by various members of staff for broadcasting messages to get a greater impact than most staff would have from using their personal twitter accounts, assuming they are not a Twitter rockstar with thousands of followers.

Here are some rules of thumb to follow when tweeting from a group account that represents your organization:

  1. Do not make the mistake of accidentally tweeting from the wrong account. If you have multiple accounts, use a Twitter client like Thwirl so you cannot easily make this mistake. (there are many others, like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, cotweet, seismic)
  2. Remember that you are speaking for the organization, so you will be tweeting abt diff topics than you may in your personal Twitter accounts. For example, we only tweet about issues pertaining to nonprofits and technology with the @techsoup account.
  3. Be sure to use consistent language and branding as is specified by the org. For example, don’t use words like Buying, when referring to getting product donations, and remember to use hashtags that are relevant to our community (for ex #techsoup #nptech)
  4. When you are referring to someone, if they tweet, use an @ before their name. (ex, Blog post written by @suzboop cites @techsoup promotion)
  5. If someone Retweets (RT) yr message follow them from your organization’s account, in our case, the @techsoup account. They found what you said to be valuable, so you may find their tweets valuable too.
  6. follow users that have mentioned your org, for example by searching “TechSoup” – use http://search.twitter.com’s RSS feeds to monitor mentions
  7. If you are looking for a reference that is older, search on Friendfeed.com, since Twitter’s archive is not as far-reaching.
  8. In general, it is usually better for an individual to tweet from one’s own account and then Retweet (RT) the message from the organization’s account, showing the variety of voices that are spreading your org’s unified message
  9. When you post a link, shorten it by using bit.ly, so you can track the click though.
  10. Avoid sounding too market-y or canned, add a personal tone to the tweet, so we don’t appear to be spammers
  11. RT useful information that would be relevant to our community, don’t just post stuff promoting us
  12. Always reply to people addressing your organization. For example, if they tweet using @techsoup at the beginning of their tweet, make sure to search your replies and respond to those addressing you with @replied. –Twitter is a many-to-many conversation, not a place for announcements only
  13. When disagreeing with others’ tweets, do it from yr own individual twitter account, and don’t tweet outside of your area of expertise.
  14. Don’t tweet more than 5 times a day, and try to make at least two of those informational retweets and non-self-promotional
  15. Follow Nonprofits with large amounts of followers and those you find through a twitter directory (http://twitterpacks.pbworks.com/Non-Profits or http://mashable.com/2009/03/19/twitter-nonprofits/) and RT their tweets
  16. Use Twtpoll.com to survey nonprofit members
  17. Don’t set up new twitter accounts for new campaigns, or you are constantly starting with zero followers, instead, create short and easy-to-remember hashtags, to identify certain events. That way, you will be able to sort and follow them and others who are involved can also use the hashtag, thereby creating a community from identifying with the tag itself
  18. If you are tweeting only on your organization’s account, you should probably set up sn individual twitter account. Twitter’s all about creating a human face to your organization.
  19. Highlight new, pertinent information, give them exclusive access to something, that may only be available via Twitter
  20. Provide messages that can be easily re-Tweeted (RT) and post links to info that doesn’t require a login

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Learned a lot about online community using TweetChat: tool and content were both teachers

Posted by susantenby on June 19, 2009

tweetchat

Today I had several discovery moments of serendipitous learning via Twitter. I am noticing lately, that I am hearing all my news before it even hits the web, let alone TV, via Twitter. There is something so gratifying about reading a news-ticker on the bottom of MSNBC TV and saying , “Yeah, old news, read a tweet about  that 5 minutes ago.”  Twitter is becoming more important to us every day, and it will soon change the way we live. It definitely changes the way we are perceiving what is current and the way that we are receiving information.

When I was 12, I remember my father used to mock me for obsessively checking my voicemail. “You’re not a doctor”, he’d say, because he was one. I used to obsessively check my email, and then I moved on to obsessively checking my Facebook feed, but now I try desperately to limit my distraction and ADD time and I just manically check my tweet-stream.

Today, one of the hundreds of time i was obsessing on TweetDeck, my lens of choice, to see who was saying what and who was talking or re-tweeting me, I noticed that someone whom I respect in my field, Online Community Manager, Angela Connor, was talking about stuff I found to be interesting and using a hashtag I didn’t recognize, #Cmtychat. I followed the hashtag, and I was all of a sudden immersed in a lively discussion of community managers from all over the world, talking about what we do and sharing best practices.The discussion hour was half over by the time I arrrived there, but I tried to join in without seeing too lame and ignorant. One of the things I learned in this event was the new members to a community often felt embarrassed to post for the first time, and it is imperative to welcome the newbies and encourage them. This is something that is common sense, but it was among hundreds of rules of thumb that were nice to be reminded of.

I joined in and started tweeting about my work with Nonprofits and Online Community and mimicked the behavior of the others. Soon, I was being addressed by them and responded to, and I was really happy to have stumbled upon this spontaneous and free conference about online community. I started observing my own behavior as a community newbie (to their conference) and reflected upon my behavior, using it as a lesson of how to better manage the communities that I run.

I used the #Cmtychat hashtag at the end of my few posts, and then discovered that the technology was even deeper then just tagging your tweet.

I clicked into the discussion and found myself in a new site that was just an aggregator of all of our tweets who were using that hastag. There is a tool called TweetChat and as you can see from this week’s community chat conference, it grabs all the posts with the same hash tag, deposits them into a separate silo, giving you the experience of being in a separate chat room, rather than distributed all over Twitter, which is actually what is happening. Best of all (albeit a little unnecessary, unless you are seriously lazy), if you tweet from the Tweetchat engine, it will add the hashtag for you. I discovered this when I added my post there, with the hashtag at the end, and then saw it posted in Twitter with a double hashtag. (Oh, the many ways we can go on about being embarrassed by tweeting. I guess that will be another post entirely.)

So, it was quite a hyper-real and helpful experience learning about online community best practices and doing it on an entirely new tool, having not been invited to participate and just jumping in and chatting, which put me in the shoes of a newbie, somewhere I haven’t been for 9 years.

Twitter is a networking tool, in addition to all the other reasons we tweet, and I now have dozens more followers and people I follow, whom I may only had met if I was actually attending the same forum or conference with them. However, in this instance, the simple curiosity about a tag, brought me into the event, and I will definitely be going back every Friday at 11am-noon PT.

You can read the transcript of this week’s Community Managers’ Chat here:  http://bit.ly/tDUMg

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Conflicting opinion on whether it makes more sense to host video community on Nonprofit Social Networks or just bring ‘em to Facebook

Posted by susantenby on June 17, 2009

Should the content be portable?  Sure.  Should it also be targeted at a self-selecting audience?  Sure.

Heather Mansfield brings up a good point, about how YouTube, Facebook and Myspace weren’t created for Nonprofits and they don’t have the social networking factor, and groupings by cause. They also don’t work well with the donation factor, with the exception of Causes, but they won’t turn off the ability to sell your snail mail addy, which, as I mentioned in the blog entry below, makes your $20.00 donation invalidated, to some extent.

However, Michael Hoffman of See3 Media and David Neff, of the American Cancer Society disagree. They point out, validly, that the user is complicated, and generally doesn’t go to Nonprofit-only social networks. YouTube has tens of millions of users. DoGooder.tv, Michael’s Nonprofit product that makes it easy and unbranded for a Nonprofit to upload a video, and they make their video embedding purposefully easy to make the videos portable. He said that they will also soon make the videos interactive, such as this one, That’s Not Cool where you, can click into the video without leaving. This has great implications for nonprofits and community building.

David Neff points out the problem with YouTube’s dynamics devolving into that of a school yard playground. Sharinghope.tv is trying to create a safe space for users to promote their videos without this inane rambling.

I haven’t yet seen a nonprofit effectively connecting those who submit videos with each others at this point. They are telling their stories, and they are commenting on videos, but where is the actual community interaction and networking going on, as a result of a tagging functionality assigned to a video, for example?

The question I have is how do we do both, achieve critical mass, promote interactivity in videos, and still keep a nonprofit conversation going?

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MySpace vs Facebook vs Change.org

Posted by susantenby on June 17, 2009

Today, while interviewing Heather Mansfield, I had an interesting realization.  The realization was actually hers, but it was interesting nonetheless, and it shed light on how much of a bubble we (in the twitterverse)actually live in.  Mansfield brought up the point that Facebook is classist and racist, in a sense. These were not her exact words, by any stretch, but she does bring up a good point that most of Facebook users are white, educated and many of the people who are writing about them (like say the dudes at Mashable or ReadWriteWeb) are white, straight and educated. Not that I have anything against this demographic, but it does surface a point. We are told that MySpace is a joke, and anyone who goes there is a total loser, but actually, there are many nonprofit orgs who still have active presences on MySpace. Regardless of what is happening there, in terms of their recent lay-offs, completely denigrating this population is arrogant and insulting. Many small nonprofits, many of whom serve underprivileged populations, are spending time on MySpace. Many organizations that are staffed by people of color have a presence on MySpace. This is because the demographic of their population and the people running the MySpace page uses MySpace.

Mansfield gave an example of Camp Soaring Eagle. They are a nonprofit that provides an outdoor camp for children with serious illnesses. She set them up with a MySpace account and a Change.org profile. They were a small small nonprofit with little recognition, but as a result of these actions that took about 2 hours of work to create, they received 45 new email addys, 100 new supporters, and $160 donated, all in one day, and helped by one tweet by Mansfield.

With an online social network that was set up for nonprofits, the results are even greater. This is because people can look up their favorite nonprofit or cause and locate a nonprofit. Every nonprofit is in Change.org, because they work in the Guidestar database, in order to accept donations.

Facebook and MySpace don’t need to be at odds. Rather, Nonprofits should be focusing on setting up a presence in an online social network that has more clearly defined vertical groupings, (i.e. animals, environmental groups, LGBT, Human Rights, Domestic Violence), like Change.org, and not spend so much time trying to cobble together a loosely defined and distributed presence on Facebook. Ultimately, and ideally, a nonprofit would be able to manage a deck of six online social networking presences: YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Change.org, Twitter, and Flickr. They should try to cross-pollinate these presences and mention their other profiles on each site.

If they don’t have time for this, they should employ an intern to do it for them.  More on the intern thing soon.

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This is where I am while writing this

Posted by susantenby on June 16, 2009

This is the house. And the mile-long driveway.

shorehome

shoredriveway

Just thought you may want a visual.

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Thinking about Facebook Connect

Posted by susantenby on June 15, 2009

I am still a little fuzzy about all the instances that a site could implement FB Connect. I know that it allows you to discuss what occurs on a particular site with your Facebook friends. I also know that it allows you to bring more users to the site that implements it, b/c in your connection to Facebook, you are also, in turn, promoting your comment to your own FB network, who may not have thought about going to that site. It makes the network-within-a-network factor easier to happen. It makes more sense for TechSoup to implement FB Connect, for example, than not. This is because a user may want to highlight a post on our blog, or an article, and their comments beneath it, but would love the feedback of their own pre-sorted community (in this case, the NP Tech community.)

So, it makes sense for a site and it makes sense for a user/commenter/engager.

I read this article Six Months In, The 10 most Interesting Cases of Facebook Connect and I was distressed to see that none of these cases were coming from Nonprofits.

Do you know of any?

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My Workflow Process for the Book Project

Posted by susantenby on June 15, 2009

As my lovely and talented boss, Marnie Webb has observed, I am an instinctive about what I do and how I do it, in terms of online community work. She actually doesn’t yet know that this is also how the great strategy of my life is planned. I am fairly certain that this is not entirely a compliment, but I can’t sit around worrying about the way I process information.

In general, I know that I am not organized, and that I create somewhat elaborate work-arounds to help me get organized.

I am not one to navel-gaze, and I think overly self-evaluative people are a little self-indulgent and are victims of too much free time. Having said that, this much I know to be true: I have a hard time being a teacher and being a student. I like to think I have vision, but I stumble a lot and I am a learn-by-doing kind of person. I am good at getting lots of people to do stuff for free. I am a strong believer of harnessing the energy of the community and letting the leaders lead and taking a back seat to the desire and direction of the community.

With that, I am developing a process for the writing of the book that works with the kind of personality I have and taking into account the ADD aspects of it. I am probably not going to want to talk about the project that much, b/c it will stress me out. So, I will probably just refer people to this blog for updates.

The process will go something like this:

  1. I’ll fill out the skeletal framework here on my new wiki
  2. I will dig around in my head and on the web for people that I want to interview and I will ask them the questions that I develop.
  3. I will record my observations and musings here, on this blog, creating a record of the stuff in my head
  4. I will further develop the structure of the chapters, resulting from the interviews on the aforementioned wiki.
  5. I will write them up a bit.
  6. I will tweet about it.

There you have it. Simple as pie.

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Domestic Service as a community tool?

Posted by susantenby on June 15, 2009

I am noticing that a lot of domestic service sites are popping up.  Criag Newmark’s Craigslist for service site, All For Good just launched.  Read  JD Lasica’s write up about it

I am wondering if the KIVA USA site and the Extrordinaries or All For Good are working to connect the volunteers with each other. These are all sites that will be effective in getting people to do service, but let’s try to build community within these activities, so it’s not just about people doing work for themselves, but also taking advantage of the fact that there are many other people who share similar goals. This falls under the umbrella of the type of community that take advantage of people sharing a similar focus or mission. Online Community is an invisibile, intangible collection of people who are working together toward a similar goal or focus.

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Preparing for interviews

Posted by susantenby on June 15, 2009

I’m off to a good start with the research portion. I realized that before I can write anything substantive, I need to talk to some experts. These are not people like me, whom I meet at conferences, but people whom I look up to, people I respect. So far, I am off to a good start: Craig Newmark and David Neff (American Cancer Society Web/Social Media strategist) both said yes. So, now I am preparing my questions, which means that I am researching Craig’s life outside of his work with Craigslist.

I am also looking to interview Heather Champ about image-sharing communities, as in Flickr

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