A different kind of conference agenda
by Brian Reich | 5 Aug 2009, 10:30am
I am tuning in for the first part of the Comcast New Media Exchange conference today — remotely (thanks to the folks at City Year, who are hosting a gathering here in Boston and streaming the proceedings live). I have a meeting later in the day that will keep me from seeing the whole thing live, so I will have to log on later to watch how the conversation unfolded. Still, I don’t expect to hear much, if anything, that I haven’t heard before - such is the nature of conferences these days in my experience, especially about social media. In fact, as I write this, and watch the opening keynote of the conference, I am doing everything I can not to get upset. As you will see as this post continues, I haven’t done a great job containing my frustration.
Look, I am not one of those people who believes that organizations deserve credit anymore simply for engaging, for getting online, for organizing some kind of online campaign. There really are very few barriers to entry with social media, so what differentiates groups who deserve credit in my mind, and those who don’t, is the impact that they have. What they get done. How they use the tools and opportunities to do something, to change something, to teach someone. So that raises questions for me.
- Comcast has put together an interesting event - but what took them so long to use their broad network to field a conversation about this stuff and help nonprofits?
- Many of the nonprofit organizations who will watch and participate in the event are still having trouble understanding and embracing the incredible potential that technology provides — what’s the hold up?
- The people who are speaking today are all smart, and have great experiences — but how does their story actually help someone who isn’t as smart, and doesn’t have the same experience to actually make something happen?
- I am also curious to see how well the virtual audience can/will be integrated into the process. Comcast has made it possible to participate in this event without being there in person, by opening channels for people watching remotely (or I supposed sitting in the audience) to email, tweet, or otherwise submit their questions and comments. But how will that find its way into the discussion? Will it be a discussion, or some presentations and Q&A that follows? Will the questions be any good? Will the answers be any good?
Whether or not the interaction between the online audience and those who are on the agenda is any good doesn’t really have anything to do with the technology, the facilitation — its the focus of the discussion, the knowledge and ability of the individuals on both ends, and the commitment from everyone involved to have a discussion that is actually designed to help (and not just inform). As I read the agenda, for the event, it looks to me like the discussion will be pretty basic, almost assuming that the people who tune in - nonprofits and others - have such a limited awareness and understanding of social media and online communications that only the most basic information will be understood.
Instead, I would suggest a different approach, a different agenda. Instead, I would suggest that talking down to the audience - any audience - particularly in a forum as broad and potentially innovative as this one, only reinforces the same problems that still exist. So, what should the agenda look like?
1) Instead of asking Josh Bernoff, the author of Groundswell, to talk broadly about “Making Social Media Work for You” he should be challenging people to think differently about how the world operates. Until nonprofits (and everyone else) think differently about how people communicate, and what they expect, no four-step process or series of tools and tactics matter much. I suggest a new title and new focus for the keynote something along the lines of “Five things that will make you think differently about the world today” or maybe “what is your audience doing right now - and why understanding that will change how you do everything at your organization”. The stats and broad trends, case studies and fancy graphs don’t give nonprofit organizations any sense of how their audience, their donors, the people in their community are going to engage. Since its unrealistic to dig deeper and get more specific in this forum, go the opposite direction and shake the whole foundation of what people are thinking about when they wake up in the morning and go through their day.
2) Instead of a panel titled “Choosing your social media strategy,” let’s hear about all the mistakes that groups have made along the way. Put representatives from organizations, some who have been successful and others who haven’t, on a panel and have them detail - yes detail - the bad choices, poor execution, and institutional roadblocks they have encountered and how they have survived and thrived. We learn from our mistakes, don’t we? We are afraid to make mistakes, aren’t we? Talking about what didn’t go well, instead of the limited number of successful case studies that we have put up on a pedestal, will move us further, faster.
3) Instead of a panel about ‘Creative Fundraising Online” a discussion of how organizations must adapt their fundraising efforts period — given the changes that our society is undergoing as a result of the impact of technology, because of how technology has changed how we get and share information, etc. — would be more productive. Creative online fundraising is just creative fundraising powered by technology. But many organizations are slow to innovate offline and expecting that the technology and social media environment will simply, magically, take care of itself. Remember, people won’t give money to an organization if they don’t believe, no matter how many characters are used to make the ask. So what makes people give (and how have technology and social media changed those perspectives) and what are we supposed to do about it?
4) Instead of a panel about the ‘Power of Blogging” the audience would probably benefit more from a discussion about how to be timely, relevant, and compelling on a regular basis. Nonprofits struggle with this. Heck, everyone struggles with this. If you can can be relevant, timely, and compelling offline, you can do that online as well — there isn’t a whole lot of difference (and having a blog certainly doesn’t make you timely, relevant and compelling if you weren’t before). But that doesn’t mean that being timely, relevant, and compelling offline is easy - and in fact, in a highly connect, fast-moving society it does in fact get harder.
5) Instead of a panel focused on “Tweeting with a Purpose,” I would love to hear a discussion about how nonprofit organizations, and organizations more broadly, are re-thinking their missions and operations to deliver greater impact, getting out of that dangerous cycle of serving their causes instead of solving them. Twitter changes the way in which a mission is presented, but its also starts to change how that mission is ultimately shaped (and drives changes over time). Or put another way, the impact of twitter is about far more than just the medium - where so much of the discussion focuses - and really speaks to the broader shift in how we are getting information and the power of short, focused, community-driven, highly-connected forms of communications. What does that do to the world of notoriously slow-moving, averse-to-change, longitudinally-focused nonprofit world?
6) Finally, I know that the Obama campaign has set the standard for online communications. And I know that everyone wants to understand how Barack Obama’s campaign team (and inaugural, and now through the White House communications office) made it happen. But I also know that not a single nonprofit organizations has the resources, will get the attention, or commit the energy that the Obama campaign was able to commit. And thus, the focus should not be on hearing about how the Obama campaign has used social media and online communications, but how those lessons apply specifically to nonprofits, what exactly nonprofits can do to generate huge, ongoing, sustainable levels of involvement around their issues (the way the Obama folks were able to do during the campaign… and really the campaign online). And more importantly, how they can do it with one person, or half-a-person, and not with tens-of-millions of dollars invested, dozens of staff, a hotly-contested presidential campaign and a 24-hour media cycle trained on your every move. Its a lot harder to translate the success of the Obama effort into the hard of work that nonprofits do every day (as I think even the Obama folks would acknowledge, given the challenges they have found engaging audiences around healthcare and other issues now that the campaign is over).
Lots of good stories and lots of interesting ideas will be shared at this event. But what will nonprofits take away from the day? Some company built a successful community on Facebook - we should do something on Facebook? Some nonprofit had a bunch of house parties — we should have house parties? Comcast and Zappos and other companies have lots of employees on Twitter - we should put all our employees on Twitter also? My four-step process is better than yours? This tool is cooler than that tool? Will anyone walk away with an understanding of why those efforts were successful? Will any of the people on stage really reflect on how much work is required to be successful, so that nonprofits can make choices about how this work fits into their operations? Will anyone from the corporate side say that their model, their structure, their policies, their choices, and their people won’t necessarily translate to the nonprofit space? Will anyone from the nonprofit space acknowledge the unique circumstances that they were operating in (i.e. national service doesn’t elicit the same response as cancer, and people aren’t willing to commit the same energy to a cancer charity if they aren’t personally impacted, the same way they might commit to another issue)?
Without a deeper understanding of WHY these efforts are successful, some reflection on the broader CHANGES that are happening in our society - driven by, and reflected in the social tools that we obsess over - and some effort to SHIFT how nonprofit organizations, and companies, and individuals, the media, and everyone else are thinking about these issues, this conference won’t change much, and the conversation won’t evolve much either.
TAGS
: Comcast New Media Exchange conferences fundraising Groundswell Josh Bernoff Nonprofits
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What Makes A Brand Powerful?
by Brian Reich | 25 Jun 2009, 2:26pm
Over on my Fast Company Experts blog, I offered some thoughts on the new Cone Nonprofit Power Brand 100 Study. Here is how my post begins:
Cone Inc released their “Cone Nonprofit Power Brand 100” report yesterday - in which it valued (and ranked) the brands of some of America’s leading social, environmental and animal organizations. Not surprisingly, the report is already generating a lot of buzz. People mostly want to talk about which charities were ranked and which ones weren’t, or who scored highest on the list (and why). But I think that is the wrong discussion to have. I want to focus on something else - the very concept of brand, and its importance for nonprofit organizations, in today’s connected society.
Go read the full post, and let me know what you think.
TAGS
: Brand Cone Inc Fast Company impact Intangible Business Make-A-Wish Nonprofit Power Brand 100 Nonprofits
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A Giant Brain Dump
by Brian Reich | 23 Apr 2009, 10:26pm
I wrote this post off and on all day. I started to write about Facebook Causes and the challenge of getting nonprofit organizations to understand how to truly leverage the opportunities that technology, and the internet, and online communities can create. Somewhere along the way I got off track and launched into a broader discussion of social impact and how to measure it. But then I realized I didn’t have a great answer. I am not even sure what my point is anymore. Anyway, there is a lot here. There might be some nuggets of real insight. Its possible I haven’t said anything of value at all. Let me know what you think.
When it launched two (or so) years ago, Facebook Causes had the potential to change the way nonprofit organizations use the internet. It has not lived up to its potential.
The Causes team gave nonprofit organizations access to a toolset that could change the way they communicate with, engage, educate, and ultimately mobilize people in support of their work (whether that mobilization was around some kind of action, or in the form of fundraising, or whatever) and tap the incredibly powerful community that was building on Facebook in the process. But not enough has been done beyond developing and promoting a robust set of tools to put nonprofit organizations in a position to take advantage of Causes in a meaningful way. And so, two (or so) years have passed and Facebook Causes still hasn’t lived up to the expectations that we all had for the platform.
For two years, I have been telling nonprofit organizations that the Facebook Causes toolset was worth exploring — but that success (however you defined it) would require significant effort on the part of the nonprofit organization to figure out how to communicate effectively, promote the right kinds of actions, and cultivate strong relationships with the Facebook audience. I told them that the Facebook Causes team, while well meaning, did not have experience or insight into how nonprofit organizations work, nor did they seem all that interest in supporting their use of the platform. I have actually been delivering the same message to nonprofits about technology solutions (database solutions, content management systems, advocacy toolsets, email programs, mobile donation providers, you name it) for years. But they didn’t want to hear it — the nonprofit signed on, experimented a bit, and when they didn’t see an immediate, dramatic, or significant return they got frustrated and (largely) abandoned the platform. This story has been repeated over and over and over again.
When I first met the team from Facebook Causes I told them I was impressed with the platform, but that my experience working with nonprofit organizations led me to believe that they had some work to do still before they could have the kind of impact they were talking about. They needed more support for nonprofits, and education for the audience. They needed to marry the robust set of tools with content and guidance on how to take advantage of everything, and what success looked like. At each of the half-dozen or so events where I have seen the Facebook Causes team present, or display, I told them the same thing. Nothing. I know the potential for Facebook Causes to really succeed still exists. And I think the team that Facebook Causes is smart, committed to helping nonprofits succeed. But the list of things that need to happen is still the same.
Here is what I think Facebook Causes needs to really be a game changer:
Part I: Educate and Support
Facebook Causes must educate and support the nonprofits who use their platform: Most nonprofit organizations are still struggling to understand how to use technology and the internet to advance their mission. You can have the best toolset imaginable, but if the nonprofits who are using the platform don’t understand how to take advantage of the resources you are providing, it won’t work. The Facebook Causes tools are relatively simple, but communicating with, engaging, educating, and mobilizing audiences around serious issues and causes is anything but. The Facebook Causes team needs to be in the business of explaining how and why people take action, what motivates them, and how their platform can help to facilitate those efforts. You must also support the nonprofits, continuously, so that they can evolve their understanding of the online environment, the Facebook Causes platform, the audience and how it behaves, and similar. Case studies aren’t enough — learning that some other organization, using completely different messaging and working to achieve a totally different type of outcome, doesn’t provide much in terms of insight to a nonprofit about how to succeed in their work. In some cases this support can be generalized — a newsletter or blog post — but in most cases you will have to work closely with each nonprofit organization who seeks to use your tools and work with them to develop the best possible strategy for maximizing the tools.
Facebook Causes must educate and support the audience that uses their platform. People are willing to organize (online or offline) in support of an issue, give money to support a cause, or take action to help support an organization — but most don’t know how. You’d be surprised how difficult or confusing some of the requests organizations make can be. Moreover, nonprofit organizations often assume that the level of knowledge and comfort that their audience has is greater than it is. Your tools may make it easier to take certain actions, but they don’t help the audience understand what they are supposed to do. They need help and it is your responsibility to help them. If you are Facebook Causes, and your success is measured (at least in part) by the willingness and ability for audiences to take action through your platform, you need to teach those audiences how to get involved. You need to not only show them how to find the causes they want to support - but in some cases help them figure out what organizations are doing work they think is important. Part of that is functional help - explaining which buttons to click or how to fill in certain fields (even when something seems simple, a little extra bit of explaining still goes a long way). But helping the audience to understand how their support is important, and tying their actions into other opportunities to learn more, do more, is also critical. While that is really the responsibility of the nonprofit or cause, they aren’t always capable or realize the need (see above about how you should teach nonprofits as well), and so the Facebook Causes team must pick up the slack or the whole system will fail.
Whether you teach nonprofit organizations and audiences yourself, through white papers, podcasts, video tutorials, live events, webinars and conference calls, one-to-one tutoring, or other methods, or ask the experts (folks like Alison Fine or Beth Katner, among others) who do understand this world to do it for you, you have to do it. Whether you take responsibility for providing ongoing support directly to nonprofit organizations, or simply create a marketplace where consultants or community members help folks to navigate the challenges, without that kind of support, the nonprofits will never fully utilize Facebook Causes, and you will never reach your goals.
Part II: Focus on Impact, Not Activity
I wrote a post yesterday about how I believe the internet has made us lazy. I noted:
“Organizations send millions of emails but settle for ridiculously low open rates. People sign petitions online every day, with one click of a mouse, but those petitions rarely (if ever) change minds or impact the outcome of a vote. Organizations raise millions of dollars online, to cure disease or address hunger, but while the organizations and their reach grows, those problems and many others seem more intractable than ever.”
Basically, I think we have lost sight of what real impact looks like, how to change behavior, and how success should be measured. We’ve settled for low open rates, and dollars raised, and names on an email list — but while those are interesting metrics, they aren’t measure of the organizational missions being achieved. This is organization building and nothing more. If that is your goal, great. But last I checked, most nonprofit groups went into business to do something, not raise money or build email lists for a living. People are doing too much serving of the cause and not enough solving of the the cause.
I want to offer four thoughts:
Awareness is not impact. Organizations send emails, write blog posts, host events, give interviews, and a host of other things on a daily basis. They do this across dozens of different platforms online, and offline as well. And all of these activities are for the purpose of raising awareness about an issue or an organization. Raising awareness is important, and its a necessary step in the process of generating meaningful, measurable (and sustainable) impact — but it is not impact on its own. The fact that people know about the existence of a climate crisis, or the number of food insecure people in this country, or the lifesaving benefits of providing clean water does not result in any significant change in that situation on its own. Other steps are needed, and those steps won’t happen without some kind of directed action. So when organizations measure their success (and claim impact) because they have attained press coverage about an issue, or because they have built a new website or sent a large number of emails, that is not enough. And when we, as a community, applaud the organizations that have raised a lot of money or hosted a great event, we are only reinforcing this misunderstanding.
Measure your impact against your goals. The idea of measuring impact is straightforward, assuming your organization has a clear set of goals. For example, if your mission is to reduce the number of hungry people in the country, you should be able to easily track whether your efforts have had the intended result or not. Simply count the number of hungry people in the country before you mount your campaign and then measure again afterwards - the results speak for themselves. I’m not trying to suggest that measurement is easy, it is time consuming and expensive, and can be confusing. Real impact and measurable change can take time, sometimes generations, to occur, but if you are clear about what you are trying to achieve, the determination of whether you have been successful is not difficult to determine. And if you cant’ measure whether an activity is helping you to achieve your goals, you shouldn’t be doing it. That’s easy to say, but more difficult to make happen, i realize. Maybe you don’t have enough patience (or your supporters don’t) to wait that long to see a real impact, or perhaps you don’t think you can sustain the level of energy across your entire audience all the way until you realize the successful completion of your work. That doesn’t mean you should stop measuring impact, and working towards those goals. There is no single path to success and more than one way to measure something — so establish goals that can be tracked continuously and measured incrementally, so that you are make progress and demonstrate impact as you go. Just don’t let the size of your email list or the launch of your new website get confused with your real mission.
On a related note, there is also a need to measure whether individual actions — or the work of communities for example — are meaningful and contributing to the larger outcome. We are still a ways from figuring out exactly how to make that happen. Its necessary to measure the impact of these actions because without clear data, most of what we do to address causes is guess work. I believe, and have experience to suggest, that canvassing is an effective way to get people to show up at the polls for an election, for example, but what about the canvassing activity is triggering certain action, how those experiences can be translated to nonprofits and serious issues is far from an exact science. And when you start to look at online activities, we have next to nothing to measure against. My personal belief is that the online audience has grown weary of online petitions, and that most email newsletters from organizations are worthwhile (and that’s just for starters), for example. I have open rates that tell me only a fraction of the audience on an email list is interested, but no way to measure why someone does or does not open something, or what changed from the time they signed up. Similarly, I can watch how a piece of legislation moves through the legislature towards approval - but what weight an online petition is given by a legislature is unknown, and there are so many variables its tough to determine what pushed something past that tipping point. My gut says what we are doing needs to change, but experience and perspective only goes so far.
The data you need to collect. There are two broad categories of data that I believe need to be collected, and then analyzed, to begin to measure how individual and community actions result in social change. First you need to measure the activities that people are undertaking at each stage of a campaign. You must track all the different factors that contribute to someone taking a certain action. And you need to keep track of how the effort is progressing, whether people are doing X or Y, and what action on your end triggered that. In most cases, the tools for measuring this level of detail - especially online - exist (though too many of the tools only go one level deep when the really interesting information comes from deeper). But in some cases the tools have aren’t sophisticated enough, or aren’t designed to track individualized behavior, and marry it with personal information and similar. If the tools are available, the organizations don’t have the resources or the knowledge to maintain that level of detail. Its easy to see where the system can break down.
Second, you need to understand why people took certain actions. You need to ask what role your organization’s work had in their decision making, what outside factors influenced them, and what will be required to sustain their involvement over time (if not increase it). You need to understand what kind of environment your audience is operating in, what experiences they carry with them, and the like. This information is very hard to quantify, to apply a score or value to, or to measure head-to-head against other data. In most cases it can’t be. But that is where we are headed, towards the ability to customize and personalize every communication, and request for action, and measure of impact on a certain campaign or a broader cause. Without that, we may never know for sure how to really change things.
How to use that knowledge: Our tendency is to want to roll up that data, to find the larger trends and the broadest of factors that can be applied. But in today’s fragmented society, its reasonable to assume that every member of your audience is unique and the ways to spur them to greater involvement must be unique as well. Consider this scenario: we know that people are more likely to act if they get a personal message from a friend. And we know that people are more likely to act if the request is specific to their interests. With the proper tools and sufficient resources, we could keep track of what triggers people’s behaviors, who are their friends, and what type of message they need to receive in order to do something. But having millions of individual, personalized, issue-specific and detailed conversations is improbable. So what is missing? We need tools that allows us to scale individual conversations on a mass scale. We need to take the data that we have about people’s behaviors, their connections, and their interests and marry them together into a formula that churns out specific directives. We need to take the concept that Amazon.com has mastered in recommending books, or iTunes has developed to suggest music you should buy and apply it to social issues and support of important causes. But more than just an algorithm that measures all those factors, we need to find a way to apply that human ingenuity to make sure we don’t miss out on the special detail that makes things happen.
Part III: What Needs To Change
A few wrap up thoughts:
The news media is a big part of the problem. There are lots of people who ‘get it’ — consultants, nonprofit leaders, technology people and such. We are in the business of helping nonprofit organizations, as well as folks like the team from Facebook Causes, to understand the true value of technology in the context of communications, and fundraising, and other activities online. Its a slow process, but progress is definitely being made. At the same time, nonprofits probably give more weight to something in the Washington Post or New York Times (not to mention CNN, the Philanthropy Journal, and so on) than anything else. And in my experience, most of the news media doesn’t ‘get it.’ You read article after article about the tools and gadgets, or a big story about how one group raised a bunch of money or built a big email list. But those stories rarely get into the heart of the matter and those articles fall short of explaining all the factors that contributed to a set of outcomes. No matter, the message they send is readily shared and embraced by people everywhere, in the nonprofit community, technology circles, and even the broader audience — and their perspective is shaped. As long as the news media continues to tell that limited story, we are fighting an uphill battle.
Technology people need to change their message. One of the contributing factors to all this confusion and frustration are the Facebook Causes folks themselves. They are sending the wrong message to the nonprofits. I have been at numerous presentations by the founders, and other staff from Facebook Causes, and talked with them at various points directly — and at every turn they explain how easy it is for nonprofit organizations to use their tools to raise money. They lead nonprofits to believe that their tools are the reason groups have raised money, or generated a following, or similar. That message resonates, the groups sign on to Facebook causes, and they truly believe they have found an easy way to raise money or grow their organization. And by the time they realize that the technology doesn’t replace the other aspects of fundraising and communications, or that it will take time to cultivate a loyal audience and such, they have expended a lot of energy and reached a high level of frustration and disappointment. The result is a chilling effect across the entire organization, not just for Facebook Causes, but for the internet and technology more widely. Its obviously not just Facebook Causes that does this - technology providers across the board have been selling their tools as the solution to a variety of nonprofit communications, engagement, fundraising and other challenges since technology first came around. Maybe those technology providers really believe their tools will result in a quick win for nonprofits (I disagree). Or maybe they just know that it is effective marketing and care more about selling tools than supporting nonprofits in meeting their missions (I hope not). Either way, the unfortunate result is that too many organizations have invested significant funds in technology and not seen enough of a return, not enough nonprofit organizations truly understand how to use technology and the internet to advance their efforts, and few, if any, are paying attention to how communications and engagement and fundraising have changed as a result of our society being so connected and what that means to how they need to operate as a nonprofit period. The message that the technology folks push is often simpler, seems easier than the long hard slog that is relationship building and community engagement online, and nonprofit groups keep making the same mistakes over and over. That needs to change.
This will take all of us. The nonprofit community is fragmented. The technology community is competitive. The audience is distracted. And while that all happens, the issues that we need to address continue to get worse. We have the potential to transform the way we operate - as individuals and as organizations - to address these serious issues. But we can’t do it without true collaboration and cooperation. We can’t keep investing time and energy in one piece of technology or another, without considering what the outcomes will be and how we measure them. We can’t keep churning out emails and demanding actions from the audience without being able to demonstrate their their work is helping to achieve something meaningful. And we can’t keep talking at a tactical level - how to improve open rates, or how to get more people to give money — if we can’t figure out the bigger issues that will lead to real solutions.
I’m not sure where to go next, but I am trying to figure it out. So any help you want to provide or thoughts you want to offer, I’m all for it.
