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.

Haven’t We Had This Conversation Before?

One of the biggest lessons I re-learn everywhere I go – in the city or in the world – is that for all the talk about differences, we are often very similar. Whether in my workshops in Romania or in Saudi (or in NYC), I’m often asking myself, “haven’t we had this conversation before?” As social entrepreneurs, innovators, and nonprofit leaders, many of the questions about social media that are always first to be asked have nothing to do with location but about strategy and success. Though, what is interesting to me, is that the question “how can I use this tool?” is usually embedded in the assumption that the answer is based on geographic location and even the specifics of the organization. Remember, these tools are just that: tools. A hammer isn’t fundamentally different in Saudi as it is in Wyoming. But the kind of building we’re interested in or the interests of the users may change. Social media platforms (tools!) should be considered for their functionality and options as part of your overall communications, engagement, and fundraising strategies but not as areas of investment all of their own.

Single Acces Point, to Facebook

Whenever I’m presenting to a group in another country, I spend time investigating any social media data I can find that is specific to that country, especially as it relates to mobile phones, access, and usage per capita. Saudi, again similarly to Romania, has a high percentage of citizens using mobile phones (especially as primary Internet access point) and with Facebook accounts. The power to connect to friends and family beyond our physical location is compelling enough for people to create accounts even when Internet access isn’t always readily available. This is probably not news, but after the first point above, it is a reminder to not make assumptions about who in your community uses which platforms and the kind of information or engagement they may want to have there. Looking only at data about Internet access in the home, one might think that people in your community aren’t online at all, or don’t want to receive email or updates on social media, when this very well may not be the case. It might sound silly or too simple, but I always encourage organizations – no matter their size – to actually ask their supporters which tools they use, and listen to the answers.

Limitations Often Encourage Innovation

During my time at KAUST I was able to meet with various student groups as well as university staff to learn more about their projects, initiatives, and ideas. Just as I experienced in Romania, preconceived ideas about the limitations innovators and entrepreneurs must be under in countries with far less infrastructure and the assumed lack of products and ideas that must exist are squashed immediately. When given no boundaries, it is often much harder to create something useful and new. But given limitations of any kind, people are driven to new ideas and solutions. I was also excited to see incredible openness to feedback and collaboration! Something I often see less of in the US than I think those outside this country think exists.

I’d love to hear your stories and experiences from working outside the US, especially in the Middle East!

(Photo: KAUST and The Beacon, taken by me.)

—–

Who are you friends with on Facebook? Do you care who sees where you check in on FourSquare? Last month, Farra Trompeter of Big Duck and Danielle Bridgida of National Wildlife Federation presented at the Bridge Conference last week about personal and professional branding. In preparation for their presentation, they circulated a survey to over 200 nonprofit professionals, asking how they use various social platforms. The responses lean towards a reality in which our online presence is just as diverse as our offline personalities – people are connecting with a mix of others on difference platforms.

Are you mixing your personal and professional self online? Here are some helpful tips to keep you on your own message:

Use privacy options to your advantage! “72% of the 209 respondents describe their approaches to personal/professional use of social media as either ‘blended’ or ‘segmented by channel’.” Facebook friends aren’t created equal; or, rather, Facebook gives you the options to treat your friends differently. Use the functionality in the system to ensure you can share as much as you like, with the people you want to see it. Create lists so that you can easily add people as you connect with them, and set your privacy settings to some secure options like none of your photos or photos that you are tagged in are visible to people in your “work only” list. Similarly, Google+ allows you to filter general actions or content as well as post-by-post content to certain groups.

Set your own tone! According to Farra and Danielle’s survey respondents, Twitter is the top three platforms for both personal and professional use. Twitter doesn’t provide much room for a bio, but be sure to squeeze in a statement that “the views expressed here are my own” (or however you’d like to phrase it in your own way!). You can include a disclaimer in all of your profiles, actually! Additionally, on Facebook or any other social platform, you may want to include an explicit statement about who you want to connect with and how. For example, you could include a statement that says your personal friends are encouraged to make a friend request but that all professional contacts should subscribe to public posts – or whatever your preferred options are.

Be a social recommender! “Almost everyone uses LinkedIn, but hardly anyone asks for recommendations with any regularity (despite the fact that your LinkedIn profile is one of the top results for your name in Google).” The social Web is social because we are all humans, connecting and talking with each other. And it is the Web because we are connected and networked across and around the world. Don’t be shy: Ask for a recommendation, and give one to someone else! Think of it as the social media version of a good deed or social capital investments.

Choose your own path! “Most people tend to favor using blogs and LinkedIn ‘professionally’ and Foursquare, Google+, and Instagram ‘personally’.” Do you love taking photos of your kid (also known as the worlds cutest kid, I know!)? Not sure you want to overwhelm your professional network every evening with more photos of her cute face? You don’t have to mix your channels! You can keep that flickr account or Instagram profile private and shared with just your family and closest (photo-tolerant) friends. Even if you are a social media manager or a social tech lover, you can still claim profiles and platforms as purely personal or professional, especially if it means you enjoy the connections and content that much more. After all, some of this is supposed to be for fun, right?

I’d love to hear what you think about the results of Farra and Danielle’s survey: do you mix your profiles or use some for only personal or professional purposes? What are your tips for keeping them straight and managing your personal presence online?

[Photo credit: Flickr hassmanm]

SXSW Recap and Highlights

Throughout the conference, I posted notes from sessions and other highlights from the hallways – and you can get all of the posts from the Nonprofit Times!

Hot Button Issues at SXSW: Kony and Homeless Hotspots
We’ve all experienced videos, blogs, photos, or topics “going viral” online before our eyes – the number of views increases, our Facebook timeline fills with reposts of the story, or a hashtag rises up the trending charts. At SXSW, there…

Crowdfunding Social Ventures at SXSW
Start Some Good, a platform for social good groups – whether nonprofit organizations or not – to raise funds and build community, highlighted eight diverse projects working for social impact at an evening event hosted by Center61 at SXSW. Each…

Personal and Professional Identity: Social Media Policies for Nonprofits
I was joined today for a panel at SXSW to discuss the blurry or blurring lines of personal and professional identify online. With me on the panel was Debra Askanase, Jess Main, and Vanessa Rhinesmith. This topic was especially relevant…

Tendenci Released as Open Source by Schipul
Schipul, a web marketing agency based in Houston, Texas, announced yesterday during the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival that Tendenci, a content management system (CMS) will be released as an open source solution. Tendenci was developed by Schipul especially…

Tech Talk at SXSW
South by Southwest Interactive is a major hotspot for new tools to launch, applications and platforms to find early adopters, and those looking for ideas or suggestions to get recommendations from others already exploring the newest, shiny toys. I’ve been…

Stand with Planned Parenthood: Lessons from Crisis Response Campaigns
Just over one year ago, on February 18, 2011, Planned Parenthood Federation of America launched the largest integrated campaign in its history. The threat to defund Planned Parenthood was bundled in a larger packaged proposal of funding cuts to be…

Social Philanthropy: Raising Money on YouTube and Twitter
Money is always a hot topic of conversation at SXSW from new start-ups looking for venture funds to nonprofits looking for philanthropic support, all for innovative ways of changing and shaping our communities and the world. One panel, moderated by…

Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface: SXSW Keynote with real implications for Nonprofits 
“We are all cyborgs. The minute you look at a screen, you are in a symbiotic relationship with technology.” This is how Amber Case opened her 2012 South by Southwest Interactive keynote talk on Sunday, March 13th. Case, and her…

New Empire Builders Podcasts

Throughout SXSW, Brian Reich, ShiftCast host and information strategist, pulled together small groups of people for interesting conversations broadcast live and recorded as podcasts. I had the pleasure to participate in one of these recorded sessions, along with Uwe Hook, co-founder and CEO of Bates Hook, and Kevin Lloyd, founder and CEO of Momentum OS, Inc. We talked about the differences and the opportunities for convergence between big brands, start-ups, and nonprofits.

Listen to our Daily Roundtable conversation or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. You can also check out all of the recorded sessions from SXSW on the New Empire Builders’ website.

If your group is ready to organize, DemocracyInAction is ready to help! DemocracyInAction is a nonprofit dedicated to building a strong progressive infrastructure through effective online organizing. They’ve just launched the Occupy Wall Street Empowers Grant!

DIA will award “Salsa” – their organizing platform for nonprofits – to five organizations that demonstrate the ability to effectively organize. The first grant was awarded to Occupy Philly already! The deadline to submit is Tuesday, November 15th.

Grants will waive setup and monthly fees for one year. Groups not selected for an Empowers Grant are eligible for a $500 award towards Salsa.

Get the full details and apply for your grant today!

—–

I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar for the National Center for Media Engagement, focused on community-driven engagement, and present a session at the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, talking about building a social media strategy. Both of these presentations had participants primarily from the public media sector. There were some similarities and differences in both the questions and perceptions around engagement and community. I normally separate my post-presentation blog posts and slides but think it will be valuable to group them together this time.

Defining Community

One of the biggest barriers to sharing our experience and knowledge, and learning as organizations is the belief that we are all so different we can’t actually share or learn from each other. A great example of this is when we talk about working with our communities. To talk about what community means, it’s often helpful to also talk about what community is not: You’ll notice that none of the words on the graphic above say “audience” or “service area”; that’s because all three sections – the community, network, and crowd – are part of your station’s service area, or your organization’s audience. We are not actually engaging with every member of our service area, we don’t know who they all are or what they all do. The people who donate, listen in, connect with our programs by calling in, reading or commenting online, and coming to our offline events are our community. Their friends, colleagues, coworkers and family are the network – the people we reach through our community. The network knows about us but isn’t yet directly connected – maybe their friend told them about a story or a news segment they heard on our station, or they have family members that attend an annual concert. And the crowd is everyone else; yes, they are part of your service area or your “audience” but you haven’t reached them yet. Just because everyone in New York, the US and the world can subscribe to the New York Times, does not mean that the world is the community.

Engaging Community

My NCME webinar focused on community-driven engagement. Using the definition above, the point of the webinar and discussion was to talk about ways that organizations (of any kind) can create opportunities for the community to decide, organize, orchestrate or otherwise fuel engagement. Some of the questions raised in the webinar chat focused on the role of public media organizations as content creators and how community-driven engagement fits in the work they do. I was pleased to see that the responses I gave on the webinar were echoed at the PMDMC conference by the Friday keynote presentation from American Public Media’s Jon McTaggart. The questions he raised include:

• 

is our community directly informing the services we provide?
• is our whole community involved with our station?
• 
are we providing something unique and distinctly valuable to our community?
• what other organizations have a vested interest in the success of our station?
• what do we do that has the whole community talking?

Let’s focus on that first question for a moment: is our community directly informing the services we provide? How is your station creating ways for the community to actually inform the services or programs or content you provide and create? What options do you provide to your community to have share responsibility or ownership for a service, program, or event? How does the community see their impact and influence on your station?

Using Social Media

Many public media organizations are looking to use social media as a way to have conversations directly with community members. Some are using tools like Twitter or Facebook to invite listeners to a post-segment conversation with reporters, moving them from a passive action (listening) up the ladder of engagement to an active action of commenting and discussion. While many organizations of all kinds face the struggle of convincing staff or leaders that social media is worthwhile, many stations are tackling the opposite end of that spectrum, with widespread adoption without any strategy or plan.

The PMDMC conference had a 4-part social media track. My presentation was the first in the series, setting the foundation for using social media. In the presentations section of this post you can follow how to set up a community map, content map, and basic tracking documents; and templates for all of those are in the resources section below. Once you’ve decided you are ready to start exploring how social media can benefit your station, even if you only have 30 minutes a day, here are a few steps to guide you:

1. Start Listening

You can’t know where you want to be or what topics are of interest to the segments of your community using social media unless you start by listening. You can use RSS to subscribe to searches on Twitter even without an account, set up Google Alerts to receive notifications via RSS or email when your station, reporters, segments or programs are mentioned online, and track the blogosphere for people talking about your content.

2. Start Joining

Once you have a feel for who’s talking about what, where, start joining them by leaving comments on the blogs, pointing to content or discussions from your station’s website or blog, and so on. Don’t feel like you have to think of something to say, simply use what you’re hearing in your listening online to reply and join the conversation.

3. Start Creating

After you’ve listened and started joining in, you can now start creating profiles that have a goal and strategic use to compliment the rest of your communications and engagement work. Remember, even once you get to this stage, you never stop listening or joining. Just because you have your own profiles now, doesn’t mean you can stop listening to the community or replying and commenting. The 2-way engagement of social media is especially important to honor for public media organizations looking to create and sustain supporters.

Here’s a quick video interview I did with Annie Shreffler:

Presentations

Resources

Templates:

• Community Map Template
• Content Map Template
• Metrics Template

Books & Collections:

• We Are Media
• Social by Social
• #SOCIALMEDIA NONPROFIT tweet Book01
• Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

Blog posts:

• How to: Create a Listening Dashboard
• 5 Step Social Media Strategy
• Google Analytics for Facebook Pages
• Google Analytics for your Wiki
• List of Social Media Management Systems
• DIY Community Engagement Metrics
• Crowdsourcing vs Community-Sourcing
• Slacktivism: Turning a Like Into Action

What should we stop doing?

Register: If you will be at NCVS or are near New Orleans on Monday, June 6th, be sure to register to join the conversation! (Limited seats are left.)

Share: Whether you will be there in person or not, we need you to be part of this important conversation! All of us are impacted by our own service and the participation of communities around us. Many of us work in nonprofits and civic service organizations or groups already.

Scott and Brian created a Google form that challenges you to offer as many ideas as you care – as long as they are less than 100 words. You can submit as many ideas as you like – there isn’t one answer, or even one right answer, to this challenge. But we won’t find the right steps to take without the input and insight from the community. Share your ideas in the Idea Throwdown!

Feel free to share your ideas and suggestions here, too, to get the conversation started early!