We all want to be able to say something similar, and we want “tremendous” to mean many things: right for our company, contributing to a diverse team, passionate about our mission or project, and more. But hiring people who fit that description is more often the exception than the rule, and these are the two main reasons why.”

>> Visit Fast Company to read my latest post in full.

It’s one thing to hire diverse employees, another to keep them around, and still another to build teams capable of actually utilizing all the benefits that a diverse staff can bring. Here’s how I’ve learned not only to solve that problem, but to turn it into a process that happens regularly and repeatedly, right down to the project level.”

>> Visit Fast Company to read my latest post in full.

Postnote: The nonprofit tech sector is a quite different ballpark when it comes to equity among the sexes.  Which is not to say that it’s perfect, but it’s much better, and certainly less vicious.

I do the work I do because I believe that technology in general, and the Internet specifically, have the potential for making the biggest impact on social justice, access, equity, and democracy here in the U.S. and everywhere. With access can come so much. For individuals and for those working to tackle some of the toughest issues in our communities and around the world. I’m often leading trainings for nonprofit groups who work in locations, towards missions, or with communities of people that make the Internet seem like a scary place. I’ve talked to incredibly smart people – from scientists to activists – who openly admit that they personally want nothing to do with the Internet for fear of the comments, the responses, the people that will emerge.

As a supporter and member of various “women* in tech” events and groups, as a member of the nonprofit tech community, as a human, I believe that we need a free and open Web that includes all of us and only if all of us are there will it truly be free and open. So how do we balance that with the level of harassment, the level of fear, the level of hate that exists?

And, is it really so different in the #nptech sector?

I’m a realist (though appreciate the consistency in which others call me an idealist). I don’t actually think that I, or even any small number of us, could change the entire tech sector. But, even thinking about the corner of the sector, the corner of the Web where we spend our time, over here at #nptech, I’m not sure things are very different. I appreciate that Peter admits our sector isn’t perfect. And I want to believe that we have an entirely different stadium in an entirely different town for the ballpark we play in. I don’t have to try very hard, though, to think of a long list of examples (even if they aren’t those currently linked in Peter’s blog post) that remind me we have a lot to change.

How do we tackle digital inclusion – something that is part of NTEN’s core mission but also something that every nonprofit needs to tackle in order to fully serve their communities, communicate with their members, understand the constantly changing needs of their constituents – when we know that we have all, like it or not, cocreated a Web that isn’t necessarily as free, open, and safe as we’d like to believe? How do we encourage more participation when these examples that justify people’s fears of the Internet are so prevalent? How do we continue to engage, start to make the change, and bring others along in the process?

I very much want to be part of cocreating a different story about the Internet.

Update: 10/13/14 

After posting this yesterday, I knew there was much more to say but prioritized timeliness over thoroughness. I appreciated finding that Peter posted the link on Facebook and it prompted some discussion. Unfortunately, that discussion made clear that engaging in comments on a public blog was, as a default, already an unsafe place to participate. The idea that my own blog (a nonbinary femme working in this space) could be seen as unsafe by default because it exists on the Web is already incredibly disheartening for me. I think any conversation we have about moving forward needs to recognize how very far back we are coming from.

I also wanted to highlight here (“for the record”, if you will) a bit more about why I brought up those questions related to the nonprofit angle of this conversation. In addition to all of the same issues the recent personal stories from women in the tech sector have surfaced, the nonprofit sector piles on top the issues we seem to perpetuate, create, or at least be blocked by: lower salaries than for-profit industries, assumption that we do the work only because we want to do good at the sacrifice of anything and everything else in our individual lives, assumed credibility issues to begin with because of the nature of asking for money to do our work, and the misconception that our sector “gets it” when it comes to women in leadership roles (take a look at the data, it isn’t true – for example, “In 2009, women made up nearly 75% of the nonprofit workforce, but held only 45% of CEO positions.” – U of Denver).

I don’t bring this up to make the case that the mountain is too high to climb. But, like I said above, I think it is critical that we put everything on the table so we can have a full, valuable, and forward-moving conversation.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

• Is For-Profit the Future of Non-Profit? – Amy Schiller – The Atlantic – “Charity is for patsies. If you really care about making the world a better place, buy a trendy bag. That was the logic Lauren Bush Lauren articulated in a 2013 interview about FEED, a for-profit entity she founded that creates simple, eco-friendly tote bags whose price covers the cost of donating school meals to children in Rwanda via the UN World Food Program”
• What Solutions Are Hiding In Our PDFS? : The Rockefeller Foundation – “The World Bank recently published a noble and important report with answers to the question Is anyone reading our reports and publications? They note that nearly 50 percent of their policy reports have the goal to inform and influence the social impact sector, yet more than 31 percent of these reports are never downloaded, and 87 percent are never cited.”
• Google’s Ray Kurzweil: The Business Of Extending Human Life Is Going Into “High Gear” | Co.Exist | ideas impact – “Over the last many centuries, human life expectancy has very gradually lengthened with improved health and medical technologies and research. In the next 20 years, we can expect our expected life spans to be extended at a far more rapid pace than in the past.”
• Facebook Manipulated User News Feeds To Create Emotional Responses – “Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on 689,003 users, manipulating their news feeds to assess the effects on their emotions. The details of the experiment were published in an article entitled “Experimental Evidence Of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The short version is, Facebook has the ability to make you feel good or bad, just by tweaking what shows up in your news feed.”
• Which Social Networks Are Growing Fastest Worldwide? – eMarketer –

Listen to the show and subscribe to the weekly episodes via iTunes!

Like last time, I mentioned that I’d share some blog posts and data for those that want to dive in deeper to this conversation. Here are a few posts to get you thinking about platforms you may not yet be using:

• A Primer on Social Media Demographics in 2013 from Business Insider
• Here’s Where Teens are Going Instead of Facebook from Forbes
• Instagram, Vine, and the Evolution of Social Media from Pew Research
• 2013 Mobile Growth Stats (infographic) from digitalbuzz

What new platforms (new to you or new to the world) are on your list to try in 2014? Where do you see your community going and what kinds of tools are they using?

Listen to the show and subscribe to the weekly episodes via iTunes!

On today’s show, I mentioned that I would share various sources for data on social platforms. Here’s a short list for posts that have both commentary and data:

• Facebook stats and leading brands
• Overview infographic for some of the leading social platforms
• Key data points to rethink your strategy from Fast Company
• Discussion on the changing demographics of Facebook (as mentioned on the show!)
• Interesting data on Facebook usage from Slate
• Data on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Join us in January to talk about emerging platforms like Instagram and Snapchat!

Want to participate? Here are three easy ways you can be part of the giving season kick-off:

Donate to the 2013 NTEN Challenge

We are so excited to celebrate the strength of this community, now 50,000 people stong! The 2013 NTEN Challenge will raise $50,000 to support expanded programs and continued accessibility for a diverse set of organizations in 2014. We have over 30 community champions help us celebrate – check out their fundraising pages and donate today!

Join Beth Kanter on Giving Tuesday to talk about collective philanthropy

I’m joining Beth on Tuesday, December 3rd, at 9 am Pacific for a special online video chat to talk about #GivingTuesday and collective philanthropy; I hope you’ll join us! Learn more about why Beth is supporting Giving Tuesday and RSVP to join the online chat on her blog.

Sign your organization up for Giving Tuesday

To be an official partner, you must be a registered non-profit [a 501(c)3 in the United States] with a specific #GivingTuesday initiative, or a for-profit business, school, religious or community group who commit to spearhead a project that will benefit at least one registered charity or non-profit. Families and individuals are encouraged to be generous in whatever ways matter to them, whether that means volunteering at a local charity or donating to a favorite cause. Learn more and sign up on the Giving Tuesday website.

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I love data as much as the next person. Give me an interactive map, a pivot table, even a plain old pie chart and I’m happy. But, there’s more to being data-informed and more to what we should demand of our data, right? When it comes to focusing on the right data, I like to ask myself these two questions.

Is data helpful if you aren’t using it?

We collect a lot of data. People join or renew as members (when did they join, how many times have they renewed, what dues level did they pay, where are they based, who are they…), people get our messages (on which channels, do they open or click, do they share the message, who are they and when did they engage…), people do things with us (webinars, tech clubs, online groups, offline groups, conferences…) and all of those things have their own data sets.

You get my point; before we even start to layer on information from the wider sector or filters to subdivide topics and categories, we have A LOT of information to work with. But, does it matter if we don’t work with it? If we don’t set goals and then create regular opportunities to review the data, does it matter that we capture it?

We can’t forget that to be data-informed as an organization and as decision-makers, we have to actually be informed by that data (see what I did there?). Establishing regular meetings or processes for metrics review helps position us to learn from the data we’re collecting and be better positioned to identify opportunities to improve.

Is data helpful if you can’t change it?

Why are you measuring or tracking something that you can’t (or don’t want to) impact? A common example of this that I hear often is with volunteer engagement. An organization has, for example, 20 volunteers, and they want to track the hours contributed, the impact on programs, and so forth. And the highest level metric that they lead with is that they have 20 volunteers, and they have 20 every year. But what they fail to explain is that they only have 20 volunteer roles. Unless you are going to open up the volunteer opportunities, I question whether reporting that you have 20 volunteers, at least as your lead metric, is helpful at all.

When looking at all of your various metrics, be sure that you are measuring things you want to impact and that you are focused on the data points you can and will change.

These are the reminders I find helpful but I’d love to hear from you! When your boss or your board or your intern ask you what you’re tracking and why – how do you talk about data?

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The new book I co-authored with Allyson Kapin, Social Change Anytime Everywhere, looks at the way nonprofit organizations can use multichannel strategies for advocacy, fundraising, and community building. It’s a practitioner’s guide for planning, implementing, and evaluating strategies that engage constituents across many channels, wherever they may be, and how we as organizations need to structure our work to deliver that experience.

The conclusion of the book is titled “Disrupting the Nonprofit Sector,” and a question that came up in a recent podcast I recorded kept me thinking all week: Why do I think multichannel strategies will actually disrupt the nonprofit sector?

To successfully use multichannel strategies, we need to stop thinking about how we can operate more like businesses, and instead focus on acting more like our constituents. That may sound strange, but let me explain:

Consultants and others often advise nonprofits to focus on business objectives such as streamlining departments, minimizing overhead, and creating a results-focused organization. While those objectives have merit, they are not directly aligned with creating the best constituent experience. Ultimately, if you cannot build a community because engaging with your organization is so difficult, outdated, or cumbersome, you will not have people to support your advocacy, donate to your fundraising efforts, or champion your mission. And to ensure that you do have a strong community of supporters, you need to make supporting your mission fun, valuable, and easy.

What’s more, thinking more like your constituents isn’t difficult. Try this: Stop working for just five minutes. Imagine that you are you, enjoying some personal, non-professional time, then go online. What do you do? Which tools do you use? For example, maybe you notice that you check your email and then go to Facebook. From there, you may click on a news article that a friend posted and then tweet it out using the embedded sharing options. In as little as 30 seconds, you just visited four different platforms, engaged with potentially hundreds of people, and didn’t stop once to think about what you were doing. That’s how your supporters are interacting (or not interacting) with your organization, other nonprofits, their friends, and their family every day.

Multichannel strategies are your keys to creating campaigns, content, and calls to action that meet your supporters where they are and encourage them to support your organization. Social Change Anytime Everywhere is focused on the way constituents interact with each other and organizations, identifying the opportunities for your organization to not just broadcast a call to action, but also create meaningful ways for your activists to take action, your donors to donate, and your community members to share your message on the platforms they prefer.

Extra: Listen to this podcast with Alison Fine, Allyson Kapin and I discussing why charities should use more kinds of social media.