Thank you!

I am completely overwhelmed by the positive, kind, touching things that so many community members have shared about the work we have all done together during my time with NetSquared and TechSoup Global over the last two and a half years. A huge thank you to all those who participated in the #ThanksAmy meme (on the blog, on Twitter, or on facebook), and especially to my friend and NetSquared Local organizer Ivan Boothe for starting the meme after my departure was first announced, and to Claire and Laney for taking it to the next level.

I want to thank Daniel, Rebecca, and Marnie – the TSG co-CEOs. All of them bring such unique perspective to the organization and the sector. Their vision and leadership supported me in the belief that we can actually change the world.

A huge thank you goes to Billy. He brought me on board when our team was just a few people, spread around the world. We worked closely together for 6 months before we even met in person – and even then he kept me around! I am so thankful for the opportunity to have dreamed together and collaborated on community-driven projects around the world. I know we will continue inspiring each other and finding ways to bring our work together.

A thank you to Claire for all her hard work, passion, and dedication. It was really my pleasure to work with you and support you in your ever-expanding role on the team. I hope I never felt like your “boss” but only your teammate, friend, and co-conspirator!<

A thank you to so many others, too! Too many to list! All those on the CDI team; Laney, Anna, Sarah, Jim, Aletha, Alicja, and Ana. All those working on other TS community projects; Susan, Megan, Jessica, Evonne, Kristy and others. To those working on content and knowledge sharing with Lea, Shab, Elliot, Becky and many others. To all those that I had the distinct pleasure to work with in England (William, Richard, Sarah and others), Romania (Chris, Ruxandra, Zoltan and others) and Poland (Nick, Kris, Adam, Svetlana, Ellen, and others).

And a huge thank you to all those in the TechSoup Global office in SF and those in Partner organizations around the world. You are all part of a really amazing effort to equip this world with the technology and the knowledge needed to make transformation. Thank you for letting me be a part of it!

My Next Steps

Ever since Ivan started the #thanksamy meme a few weeks ago, I’ve had quite a few DMs or emails asking what exactly I’ll be doing next. I’m quite excited to share that I won’t be going far!

Starting tomorrow, I’ll join the team at NTEN as the Membership Director. I’m really excited that I will continue to be in a position to listen to and support the nonprofit technology sector and enthusiastic about the opportunities to co-design programs, services, and resources that deepen our collective capacity and push us forward to make lasting change.

You can still find me here on the NetSquared blog as well as my personal blog; and you can still find me on twitter at @amyrsward. I will also continue hosting the monthly Community Builder chats and hope you’ll join!

If you’re planning to attend the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference in DC this March, please get in touch as I’d love to connect with you in person!

This year, the whole gang is getting roped in!  NTEN is hoping to raise $10,000 from the nonprofit technology community again this year, and Convio is going to match those dollars to help get as many folks to #10NTC in Atlanta this April 8-10.  And what’ll happen to the NTEN staff if we hit $10K?  They’ll be doing their own rendition of the Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody!

So, please join me in helping make the NTEN staff have some fun and support attendees who otherwise wouldn’t be able to make it to Atlanta.  There are lots of ways to get involved:

• Donate now!
• Share the widget or this post on your blog, website, facebook or elsewhere
• Tweet it! (Here’s a tweet you can use: Join me in hitting $10K for the #10NTC – the Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody may be involved http://nten.org/scholarships )

Here’s the widget!

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Hildy Gottlieb’s new book The Pollyanna Principles is a handbook for starting a revolution in social benefit organization design and practice, but it isn’t the revolution. What’s the catch? Well, it is going to take everyone, whether you are part of an organization or receive services from one, whether you are a philanthropist or a volunteer, whether you work for a for-profit business or are a community member. For social benefit organizations to truly “work” we all need to be part of the design, the process, the success.

“When we assume we are separate, we build systems that reinforce that separateness.  When we assume we are interconnected and interdependent, we build systems that reinforce those connections.

The Six Pollyanna Principles

There are six core statements that represent The Pollyanna Principles and they include:

1. We accomplish what we hold ourselves accountable for.
2. Each and everyone of us is creating the future, every day, whether we do so consciously or not.
3. Everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent, whether we acknowledge that or not.
4. “Being the change we want to see” means walking the talk of our values.
5. Strength build upon our stengths, not our weaknesses.
6. Individuals will go where systems lead them.

The Pollyanna Principles boil down to a similar premise I have blogged about before: we are creating organizations that

1. are vested in the social issues they work towards ending in such a way that they require those issue to persist
2. are built in a bubble
3. are consistently missing opportunities to succeed by operating like a business (with competition) instead of as a living part of the community.

You can find previous blog posts (with great conversations in the comments) here, here and here.

Why I’m excited about The Pollyanna Principles

We have a huge opportunity before us to remodel our social benefit organization structure. There is so much talk both online and offline, from inside organizations and from outside, that “nonprofits are broken.” We’ve done step 1: admitted that we have a problem. Now, what?  Well, as Hildy explains, we need to start driving our work with our vision of how we want the world to be, instead of what the problems are before us. What does that mean? Well, imagine that your organization said you wanted to have a public education system in your state that provided opportunities for all students to learn, fair pay for both teachers and staff, opportunities for growth for students, teachers and staff, and an entry point for all students to enter the “real world” prepared. You can imagine that by operating under that vision (instead of focusing on drop-out rates, teacher pay scales, or job skill training) that partnerships with the community, new opportunities for learning exchanges and career paths, and much more start to take shape organically, naturally.

Collaboration is a huge focus of mine: Finding ways for organizations working in the same sector to share calls to action to amplify the impact, helping organizaitons understand where their work aligns to cross pollinate across their networks, and so forth. Reading the Pollyanna Principles was like finding a twin I had been separated from at birth!  But, that isn’t to say it’s the complete conversation. This is truly a great starting place from which we can all move the conversation forward.

There are still many questions I have and that I imagine all organizations, boards, volunteers, community members will have when they read the book. But I want to, am ready to, ask those questions and answer them as a community. Questions like:

• How do we truly create community planning opportunities as funders that include all members of the community when the “community” of interested people is often limited to the grantee pool?
• How do we begin to change the cultural view of nonprofits in society/by the community so that the public, those who use the services or are otherwise affected by nonprofits’ work can have a stake in the responsibility to create organizations making real change and all of the community is shaping its future?
• How do we help organizations redefine their “community” to understand the entire ecosystem in which they operate?
• And many more…

What’s Next
The Pollyanna Principles is about social benefit organizations, but it’s really about community. Community is the most important thing to me, and I truly believe that we can’t create any amount of change, any amount of real world impact, or any lasting effects without participation, ownership, and shared responsibility by community members in the work these organizations do. This means we have to have community members represented in building and implementing an organization’s work, as well as building grant programs from funders. We need to have those receiving the services and those delivering them in constant collaboration.  We need people in the community to expect organizations to succeed and take a stake in making sure they do.

So, what’s stopping us from doing this? Hildy says it’s the Culture of Can’t that we are all accustomed to operating within that holds us back.  Can we move to the Culture of Can? Are we ready? What are the Can’ts holding you or your organization back?

I’m ready to start: to start asking questions and coming up with answer, to think and share collaboratively, and to really focus on the vision we share for a better world and work towards that goal instead of focusing only on the problems – are you?  I’d love to hear your ideas!

You can learn more about The Pollyanna Principles at: http://pollyannaprinciples.org

Visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog to join the conversation there, too!

Why London?
Max, that cute guy in the picture with the dog, (also known as my partner/husband/corroborator) is headed back to school in London this Fall, and I’m super excited about the opportunity to become part of the UK nptech community. We move in one month and are pretty excited. We are surrounded by lists and reminder notes scribbled on scraps of paper, all in anticipation of forgetting many things.

What changes?
I don’t plan on too much changing, well, aside from a boom in Indian food consumption! This blog will keep on going, pretty much the way it does now (though I apologize for the decrease in posts lately, blame it on the list-making). There will be more commentary on UK-organizations, tools, or case studies, but I think it will provide a great opportunity to have a conversation about what is the same/different and how organizations are making social media work for them across borders. I’m really looking forward to learning a great deal, and sharing it all with you!

What to do?
I am still investigating options for where to work. I am very excited to be part of an effort to build out the nptech community on and offline in the UK and am very excited to put my community building experiences to work over there. I will be speaking on Sept 25th at the London Fundraising Summit about online fundraising, so if you are going to be there (or are a Londoner), please let me know!

That’s the story! We have visited London before, and have a few friends who live there now. I’d certainly love any recommendations you have, whether they are for restaurants, events, insider-knowledge, or even jobs!

Photo by 13bobby

Day 29: Write a Commenting Guide for Students
Many of the challenge participants work in the education world (‘edubloggers’ if you will) so a student-related topic is very appropriate.  The challenge focuses on the creation of an age-appropriate guide for commenters.  I don’t think I’m the target audience of this challenge, but I’d still like to get something out of it!

When I think about my blog and the comments/commenters here, a guide, per se, doesn’t seem as appropriate.  Perhaps a statement: “Be nice—everyone has a mother, and they may be one, too.”  At the end of the day, as much as I want to build community, trust, and openness on this blog through comments and conversations, I do want people to have respect for one another and remember that you may not really know who you are addressing (or offending) with a statement.

Day 30: How Can You Use What You’ve Learned about Commenting to Change Your Teaching Practices?
Again, this one doesn’t speak to me as directly as many others, but I’d like to twist it a bit to do so.  What have I learned about commenting that has changed my blogging?

I have continued to ask questions at the end of my posts, and I very much enjoy it when you all share your answers.  I think the biggest thing, though, is the questioning of my own practice of replying to comments personally in email instead of publicly on the blog.  That has changed how I reply here on this blog, and has also changed how I comment elsewhere – whether I expect a direct reply or not, etc.

Day 31: What Were Your Top 5 Lessons from the Comment Challenge?
Oh, gosh!  I don’t know that I have 5!  I’ll try:

1. Ask questions, all the time.  Whether it is a blog or a comment, leave with another question.
2. Answer questions.  I don’t think the point is to have THE answer, but to share your experiences.  The sharing of our ‘user stories’ with each other is where we find the most value in discussing successes and failures with nonprofit technology.
3. Don’t be scared to leave the ‘community.’  I have really enjoyed and have done a lot more of reading outside of the normal community I find myself in.  Philanthropy, nonprofits, technology, etc. are all pretty standard but I have enjoyed reading ideas and stories from those writing blogs on education, marketing, and especially the ngo sector in the UK.
4. Evaluate yourself.  This goes back to the comment response discussion.
5. Brakes are okay!  Not just on bikes But that it is okay to tend to other callings, than blogging and commenting!

I guess that’s it!  Thanks for following along with me – I hope you got something out of it as well.

Did you participate in any of the challenges?  If you were going to evaluate your commenting strategy, how would you classify it?  What would you change about it?

I’d love to hear from you all with questions and topics for posts that are on your mind. I’d love to answer them and help get you some great information as well as questions to get you thinking, too!

Thanks; I’ll miss you!

Should bloggers align with journalists and the standards they (are supposed to) adhere to in order to gain the reputation that journalists have in the media and news realm? I think it can be a slippery slope in trying to answer questions like this one definitely for bloggers because the sphere covers such dynamic areas and niches that can’t be grouped together.

One of the greatest features of blogs is the ability for citizens to be journalists, organizations to have a voice, and people interested in similar things to connect. Blogging has opened up the communications avenues for nonprofits, especially small grassroots organizations, to garner supporters that are outside of the physical service area or who can help the organization grow and succeed who may have never found the group.

All right, so let’s really get to the nonprofit issue here: what standards should nonprofits have when using new media tools, like blogs?

Many nonprofits have the self-identified standard of working for the good and not for the man. The answer to the standards/ethics questions is pretty much summed up in that. Nonprofits, in blog posts, videos, and social networking profiles should always keep the community they are serving in mind. Is that community proud to be served by your organization by the way it is represented online? Are the issues you raise in posts, news you write about, and stories you relate to the world at large representative of the mission of the community and the community served (and often featured in that material)?

When creating your new media plan for your nonprofit organization, answers to those questions are important to consider. AND, if you are ever scrounging for material for a blog entry or video story for compelling new funders and supporters, staying true to your mission is an easy and ethical source for material!