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.

A Thousand Words Without a Photo

We know the old saying that a photo is worth a thousand words. But, when it comes to Pinterest, a social bookmarking site exploding with attention lately, it doesn’t matter if you have a thousand words or not, without a photo, you can’t save your favorite sites and pages. For example, like many on Pinterest, I’m a female that has a board for fashion I like. Many of my favorite online stores have cute dresses I’d like to save to my board (obviously, that’s why they are my favorite stores); unfortunately, Pinterest isn’t able to identify the image when I provide the page URL. As such, I’m out of luck: I can’t pin the dress and share with my friends on Pinterest.

Alternatively, all I need on Delicious is the URL and I can save it. Not only can I save it privately or publicly (like Pinterest), I can also save it to any tags or keywords that I choose in addition or instead of saving it to a stack (the term used on the platform in the same way Pinterest uses “board”). And, whether or not the page even has an image I can still save the link and I can even add context or notes.

Sharing is Caring

On Pinterest, the sharing aspect of content hinges on repinning something to your own board, and, unless you create the board as one that allows contributors, you are creating content in your own silo. You can “like” and comment on pins, or automate your pinning to post to Facebook, for example, but that is the extent to the social capabilities of the network.

On Delicious, your stacks can be created by yourself or with contributors in a similar way, but even if they are closed to only you, others can still suggest links to be included, helping you crowdsource content without losing control, so to speak, of the content itself. You can also comment on individual bookmarks or on the stacks as a whole – something I am consistently wishing I could do on Pinterest. Because Delicious is built on a history of many years as a social bookmarking platform, it has great resources for the social sharing built in, including:

• View all other users who saved the same link and the comments or notes they left about it to their own accounts
• Find other users based on content tags or stacks
• Share specific bookmarks or stacks via Facebook or Twitter, or even email

Browsing is the new Reading

One criticism I’ve seen consistently from new Pinterest users is that it is visually overwhelming. You look at a board that is filled with wedding dress options, for example, and it’s hard for our minds to sort the maybes from the yes as there’s just so much going on.  I really appreciate the more streamlined user experience that Delicious offers as well. It even provides options to view the bookmarks that are multimedia or video separately, to view all bookmarks just as links and notes, or in the full view. Here is an example:

This is my Delicious stack for Nonprofit Technology Infographics:

And here is Beth Kanter’s Pinterest board for Nonprofit Technology Infographics:

And for one last example, here is a stack that isn’t image-centric, my stack for Nonprofit Technology Case Studies:

I do think Delicious could improve with custom URL options, for example, but overall I think it is a much better platform for the goals of content curation and social bookmarking. What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts!

—–

For over a year now, I’ve been moderating and facilitating a monthly online discussion for people working as community builders and for those looking for feedback on community building efforts. It’s called the #CommBuild chat and was born out of a facilitated monthly Twitter chat called #4change. Often in these chats, participants discuss the online tools they are using and new platform functionality, all with the hope of finding ways to increase community engagement. For example, this month’s online chat, normally coordinated via the text chat platform CoverItLive, tried out a new platform, Google+ Hangout. This video chat application is part of Google+ and allows up to 10 video participants to come together—great for #CommBuild participants because they get real face time with each other.

So when Scoop.it, a new content curation platform, hit the web recently, the #CommBuild network seemed like the perfect place to try it out.

Whether you’re interested in community building, hot air ballooning, or the way robots work, you’re never going to be the only person talking about it online. In fact, the web is so full of information that many organizations are finding it useful to pull together topic-specific content on the web and make it available in one place. These can be useful internally and externally—you can share news with colleagues or create a dashboard of resources for your community. Scoop.it positions every user as a content curator. Unlike a blog, which positions us all as topic experts with a soapbox of our own, Scoop.it makes it possible to pull together media of all kinds—blogs, news, videos, etc.—from many different resources.

How it Works

Scoop.it has an impressively intuitive interface for just being in a beta launch. You pick your topic, add a description of the collection, then you can begin searching for relevant articles and other media to include. Scoop.it provides automated searches to match all the keywords you include on your topic—check out the image below to see automated searches on Digg, Twitter, and Youtube.

You can “scoop” content (add it to your topic page) from the Scoop.it dashboard. You can also browse the web and “scoop” up content about your topic using a bookmark (when you join, you can follow steps to add the Scoop.it button to your bookmarks bar). Once you’ve added information to your topic, you’ll want to share it. Every time you add a piece of content to your page, you have the option of sharing the link to your page via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

For the CommBuild topic, I used Scoop.it’s built-in search feature to add news articles and blog posts to my page—they show up as suggested content, and you can click to dismiss or add to your page. Once I put a handful of items on my page, I clicked Share and tweeted that I’d created the topic to my network. Just like that, it was out there. I then opened Tweetdeck, a desktop application for managing Twitter and other social platforms, and watched the stream of content from Twitter flowing by. As I saw links of interest—especially ones shared by the #CommBuild community, I added them to the Scoop.it page by clicking on the bookmark/browser extension and scooping (saving) it! Almost immediately, people replied with links to related resources, creating a place where the #CommBuild chat could go to stay on top of news and posts related to community building.

Why Scoop.it is Worth a Try

We interact with articles and other media all day long, so pulling it together under a central topic should fit into that flow. Scoop.it makes it easy to collect and share the things you’re reading, talking about, and interested in without the feeling that you’re adding a whole new platform to your daily work. I’m excited to see organizations diving in to Scoop.it to organize news and information about their cause, neighborhood, or organization. One word of caution: A topic name (in my case, “CommBuild”) can only be used once, and your name may already be taken, just like unique URLs on Facebook and user names on Twitter. I think Scoop.it could become a very interesting space for real time data in situations of natural disaster and crisis communications. I would love to see Scoop.it allow for group use so that multiple people can collaborate to maintain a single space.

What do you think? How do you collect and share content now? How would you use a tool like this in your organization or work?

—–

Have you thought about running a contest or crowdsourcing ideas for your organization or community group? If you have, you certainly aren’t alone. In a previous job, I had the opportunity to help run crowdsourcing contests for new and innovative technologies that help nonprofits and the world. One of the biggest lessons from my experience running contests and watching the crowdsourcing phenomenon expand online is that if you don’t have access to a tipping point of people, you won’t get the responses or participation you’re after. There’s a new platform hoping to help you do just that: iStart.

The Value of Crowdsourcing

There are many ways you could approach crowdsourcing, but the value of such a tactic usually focuses on these three components:

1. Expose your organization, campaign, program, etc. to people in the crowd (as in, expand beyond your community)
2. Recruit new volunteers, donors, or activists that are excited to continue working with you
3. Receive ideas, products, services, or support for free/cheap (keeping in mind that your time is still a cost)

Whether you’re holding a logo competition or looking for a mobile application that supports rural medical workers, crowdsourcing can play a valuable role by accomplishing that goal, and expanding your organization’s reach in the process.

iStart and options for nonprofits

I’ve been poking around on the newly relaunched iStart platform lately and want to share some of my reflections (and hopefully get some of yours, too!).

The ins and outs

After a start as a business plan competition tool, iStart is now open for many kinds of crowdsourcing contests organizations want to run. Much like the NetSquared Challenges platform, it offers users the option of entering contests and searching through submissions across contests to find ideas. It also gives you options for saving searches and getting alerts when there are new proposals that match your criteria. Most exciting for organizations is the option to administer your own contest on the platform!

The platform requires that participants in your contest submit an abstract, but what is included in that submission is up to you. They also support a range of files so your contest could be a logo redesign or a social media policy, a video clip or a conference session proposal.

It isn’t free – and that’s okay!

Running a contest on iStart isn’t free, even for nonprofits, but I think that’s okay. Crowdsourcing is still something that many organizations think is “easy” and when we think something is easy we don’t put many resources into it. That’s a major reason why many times organizations don’t feel like their crowdsourcing efforts really “work” – they didn’t fully plan for all the effort it takes in recruiting and facilitating a contest.

The fact that nonprofits do have to pay to use the platform (but will save themselves the headache of moderating submissions on their own website, through emails or comments, or however else) means that there will [hopefully] be some strategic planning ahead of launching the contest to identify if it’s really the best tactic to deploy.

Making it work for you

Go check it out and see what you think! Jump right to the FAQ for information about the pricing and getting started process. But, if you think you want to dive in to the crowdsourcing world, here are a few things to keep in mind to make it work for your organization:

• Have a plan – know why crowdsourcing is right for what you’re doing, and how you will engage participants after the contest is over
• Communicate – be sure your email list, your Facebook page, your Twitter followers, and all your partners know you’re running this contest before you launch it so they can get ready to participate and to spread the word for you
• Have rules – make your rules for participation clear and public
• Give it time – don’t hold a contest for 1 day; people need a couple weeks at least to see the contest has launched, think about or work on their idea and then submit
• Stick to your word – if you say you’re going to pick a winner then you probably should, if you say there will be 3 finalists then there should be 3 (or more if there’s a tie); but if you don’t get the kind of submissions you’re after be sure to stick to your word and pick the winner (and work with them to develop it further or include in the rules that winning doesn’t necessarily mean your logo will be used for example)

Have you run a crowdsourcing contest before? How did it go and what did you learn? Are you thinking of diving in – what questions do you have about the process or strategy? Looking forward to your questions and discussion!

Presentation Slides

Here are my slides from the VMNC:

And here are slides from a previous presentation:

Twitter Resources

There are so many resources out there that hopefully this list will help filter and curate for you!

Examples

• $100,000 in 3 Days: Interview about #TeamAutism
• Social media in disaster response
• National Theatre screws up, what we can learn from mistakes
• Journalists using social media in Egypt
• American Red Cross Twitter Mistakes and Fundraising
• Atlanta Councilman chooses Twitter
• Trimet misses the bus on social media

Resources

• Twitter for fundraising
• Twitter (from We Are Media)
• Twitter’s 5-year numbers
• Pew research on Twitter users
• Twitter API wiki

Blog Posts

• Twitter Lists for Nonprofits
• Twitter for Nonprofits Presentation
• Using Twitter for a Global Conversation
• What’s the cost of “following” on Twitter?
• How can nonprofits use Twitter?
• How to make quality content on Twitter
• Good rules for using Twitter
• Nonprofit advantage for future of Twitter and Search
• Twitter at use for Tu Diabetes community

Please add your favorite blog posts or examples to the list, too!

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Social Actions and where does the API come in?

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60+ different sources. That’s today. A few years ago, we had just a handful of pioneering platforms in microphilanthropy.

The Social Actions project began in 2006. I wanted to make some kind of contribution to the world of microphilanthropy. My intent was to inventory every interesting action I came across to make it easier for people to engage in the causes they cared about. There wasn’t much scalability in the way I was pursuing the project.

In 2007, I realized that a much more effective way to aggregate interesting actions would be to subscribe to RSS feeds from trusted sources. I wrote about the potential for aggregating RSS feeds of giving opportunities in a blog post called, Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds. Three months later I had a prototype platform aggregating actions from RSS feeds, with a search element around that content.

Around  the time of the Nonprofit Technology Network’s 2008 NTC conference, an even brighter light bulb went on. I remember sitting in a session by Kurt Voelker of ForumOne Communications, Tompkins Spann of Convio, and Jeremy Carbaugh of The Sunlight Foundation. They were talking about API’s. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, and refers broadly to the way one piece of software or dataset communicates with another.) In fact, the name of the session was “APIs for Beginners.”

I knew I wanted to be in the session even without really knowing why. It was there that I realized my RSS-based process for aggregating actions could be so much more with a robust distribution component. I wrote a blog post called, Mashups, Open APIs, and the Future of Collaboration in the Nonprofit Tech Sector. I left that session knowing exactly the direction I wanted to take Social Actions.

And what would you describe as the social definition of Social Actions API – the purpose?

There’s a groundswell in interest, on the part of “non-nonprofit professionals,” to engage with social movements and causes. It’s well-documented at this point that people are hungry to engage with causes they care about in various forms.

The premise behind Social Actions is that there are enough actions floating around on the web that nonprofits produce, but that they’re not linked up properly or adequately syndicated. There are a million opportunities to take action on a cause you care about, but it’s not easy to find them. The Social Actions API attempts to address the distribution and syndication challenge while also encouraging nonprofits to make their actions more readily available.

What were the limitations that Social Actions and its API were hitting up against before the recent updates?

We have encountered a number of challenges over the years. Originally, adding actions manually. was difficult. That challenge was resolved by creating a platform that used RSS feeds to pull in opportunities,  which in turn evolved into the Social Actions API, allowing people to access the full dataset from any application that connected to it.

The vast majority of applications that have been built since 2008 match actions with related content: for example, by reading a blog post and searching the Social Actions dataset for related actions. The quality of the search results were limited by our querying capabilities and relevancy ranking. The results we were able to produce didn’t reflect the full contents of our database. They tended to reflect only the most recently-added actions, not the most relevant. As a result, we weren’t equipping developers with a platform that allowed for more accurate location- and issue-based searches. Until the recent enhancements, producing the best possible search results for a given phrase or keyword was a biggest challenge.

What did the recent updates accomplish, and how did the opportunity to make them come about?

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.

The enhancements effectively put Social Actions back on the cutting edge of social technology. These were changes that we had wanted to make for a long time. In Spring 2009, we were approached by a group that was building an advanced video + action platform and that wanted to draw on the Social Actions API. Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.

Link TV, along with Doug Puchanski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point. It has been incredibly exciting to see how open source projects like Social Actions tend to grow in fits and bursts, depending on the demands and resources made available by users.

What do “Semantic Analysis” and “Natural Language Processing” mean, and how do they make the Social Actions API better?

Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing both have to do with the process of identifying the meaning of a collection of words together. Semantic analysis, for example, can help to identify the meaning of a phrase like “poverty relief” as distinct from what “poverty” and “relief” mean independently. The Social Actions API now uses a tool called Zemanta to apply these processes when searching the actions contained in the dataset. As a result, we can say with more confidence what an action is about and where it is taking place. When searching for the phrase “poverty relief,” for example, not only are the search results more accurate, but Zemanta helps us to identify other actions that might not in fact use that phrase but are nonetheless linked in meaning to it. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but hopefully this makes sense.

And what does “Linked Open Data” refer to?

Just like in 2008 when I had an “aha moment” about APIs, in June 2009 I had an “aha moment” about Linked Open Data. I was presenting Social Actions at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), describing how Social Actions was an open database and how we encouraged developers to build open source applications that distributed this data widely. Ivan Herman from W3C listened to the presentation asked, “Why are you building something that’s so closed? Why aren’t you publishing this data in RDF?”

I was surprised to the say least. Defeated in fact. I had spent close to three years trying to build this open platform only to have someone more tech-savvy than me explain that what we had built was in fact still a closed platform. It turns out I was at the epicenter of the Linked Open Data community.  Their mission is to link the world’s knowledge in the same way that all of the world’s web pages have been linked to one another.

If you can imagine that today the web is a collection of links between pages, the web of tomorrow (proposed by these folks and Tim Berners-Lee) will be a collection of links between discreet knowledge, or datasets. Anyone will be able to follow the connection that’s been made between one repository of data and another the same way people can now hyperlink between one web page and another.

Linked Open Data essentially refers to building connections between these repositories in a standard format not unlike HTML and hypertext.

What role do API’s, and the people who build them, play in Linked Open Data?

The stewards of databases are no longer just asked to open up their datasets but to make them available in such a way that they link with other data repositories by design. In the case of Social Actions, Ivan from the Wc3 was effectively saying, “It’s great you have all of this data on actions people can take, but what are you doing to link that data with other datasets? What are you doing to help people make the connection between ‘poverty relief’ as an issue, for example, and existing data sets on the prevalence of poverty in a specific location?”

The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

You can see examples of this at http://search.socialactions.com. Search for any phrase. Below each result you’ll see a link to “Entities.”

Can you tell me more about what ViewChange has done?

ViewChange is an example of an application that queries our actions using Freebase and DBPedia URIs as well as traditional keywords and phrases. The application says to Social Actions, “Show me everything that matches this URI.” The same query is submitted to the Social Actions API as is submitted to any data repository – news articles, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s truly commendable that Link TV, through the ViewChange project, has driven these enhancements on our platform.

A lot is also owed to Doug Puchalski, a programmer with Definition who helped lead the development of ViewChange.

To you, what might the future look like for people who want to take action on the causes they care about?

The technology exists for us to do really amazing things when it comes to matching people with actions they can take to make a difference. The technology itself is advancing, opening up more possibilities for even smarter applications.

The future of social technology, specifically creative implementations of the Social Actions API and similar open source platforms, is very exciting provided nonprofits and foundations continue to make rich data available and link it up with other repositories in the way I’ve attempted to described. The future is also very bright if we continue to experiment with how these linked data repositories can be deployed for forms of community engagement that we would not have thought possible a few years ago.

If everything goes incredibly well in the coming years, what might emerge is ubiquitous infrastructure of enabling technology and complementary applications that continuously present individuals with meaningful and relevant opportunities to enact change.

—–

The Social Actions API – a pioneering open source project since 2008 – continues its boundary-pushing agenda by embracing the semantic web and contributing to the Linked Open Data cloud, encouraging the sector as a whole to leverage open source software and linked data for greater impact.

Visit socialactions.com today to learn more!

The Ning issue touches on a topic that’s very important to me and I’ve written about a number of times, including: Letting Technology Lead, Why we need a new way of building, How our tools define ‘community’ and Ning saying No to free networks.  As all of these posts mention, the underlying issue here isn’t whether Ning was the best tool on the Web or not, in fact it has nothing to do with that. As community organizers, campaigners, and organizations working to better the world, we know that the tactics and tools we use can dramatically impact our success, and if the tools we have aren’t accessible and aren’t in our control we put ourselves in a position to negatively impact our own success.

Earlier this Fall, I got a message from Laura on the Chain Reaction network (on Ning) that told members the group would be moving to another platform. I followed up with Laura and have her case study below.

Case study: Chain Reaction

The Chain Reaction network is the online space for those who attend or are interested in the Chain Reaction event, an annual conference in London focused on gathering changemakers and igniting more projects and impact. The group was originally set up on Ning, and with the change to a paid-service, Community Links (the organization behind Chain Reaction) helped the network transition to Grou.ps. They did so publicly with a blog post to the community as well as messages to the members of the network directly through the Ning platform.

Read the blog post about the transition here.

Interview

I asked Laura Hyde from Community Links to provide some additional information about the decision and process:

How did your community respond to the news that ning would no longer be free?
There were mixed responses. Generally I think most could understand why ning would begin charging, but for many community organisations such as ours it’s often a struggle to find the ££’s to pay for extra services.

How did your team decide on a new platform?
We tested a few different platforms such as wordpress, webs, social go etc. We also consulted with people in the Chain Reaction network. Grou.ps seemed to be the best in terms of functionality suited to our needs.

What did you like best about Ning previously?
It was easy to update / add content to. Feedback from network members was that it was pretty easy to use as well.

Is that functionality available on grou.ps?
Yes, although grou.ps can be a little clunkier. For example, I find that changes that I make don’t appear straight away which is a little frustrating. The added advantage of grou.ps is that there is a wiki and polls feature that isn’t available on ning. You also don’t have to pay to have a custom domain name as you do with ning.

What was the work load like to switch?
Very easy. In fact, I thought it might take a day or two to transfer all the files over from ning to grou.ps – in fact it only took about an hour which left me a little unprepared (I hadn’t updated the CR blog in time!)

And the catch 22!
As I was posting this today, I visited the new gou.ps network for Chain Reaction and was greeted with a message that the group was temporarily unavailable. I messaged Laura on twitter and here’s her response (read from the bottom up):

So the platform that touted itself as the free alternative to Ning is now no longer free either!

Phoenix or Fizzle

So, where does this leave us? Where are we now? Have most groups stayed on Ning and found a way to deal with the charges, or have most groups, like Laura’s, moved on? And, perhaps more importantly, have we as a sector learned anything from this?

Examples like the Diaspora project saw overwhelmingly positive responses from the community at large, with people donating more than twice what was requested – many obviously hoping to be early adopters of what they hoped would be a revolution on the Web, but others hoping that by contributing they could have a bit of say in where it all goes.

Is Ning going to be a phoenix – rising out of the backlash and outcry about changing to a paid-service to become the platform of choice and provide users with access and ownership in it’s future? Or will it fizzle into the growing ocean of tools that put all users at a loss from lack of control and transparency?

What do you think? What’s your experience so far? Where are you looking to build?

Slides

Helpful Links

There were some great questions in the session and I promised to send out links to some resources. If there is anything you’re looking for that isn’t listed below, let me know!

• How to create a Listening Dashboard
• Content Map template (remember to recreate your own as everyone is looking at this template and probably doesn’t want to delete to all your content if it is saved publicly!)
• Tools and Apps to Energize Your Base – notes from the recent Women Who Tech telesummit session
• Review past presentations, notes, slides and resources in the Presentations section
• Social by Social: a handbook for using social technologies for social impact – you can read the full book for free online or download in PDF

If you were in the session today and have more questions that we didn’t have time to get to in person, please leave a comment here to keep the conversation going!

Tools and Apps to Energize Your Base

Want to build a powerful movement online? You need two key ingredients – people and tools to connect and engage with them. From “texting” to location based apps like FourSquare this panel will give you the nuts and bolts of the latest apps and tools organizations can use to effectively moblize and energize people online.

SLIDES

NOTES

My slides covered the tools and apps for the back stage side of energizing your community.  Having tools in place to help you monitor, measure, and evaluate your work in real time will help you be more successful with your campaign, better engage with the community, and make more lasting change in the long run.  Since my slides are mostly screen shots, I’ve shared a bit of context below.

Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics/
Whether you have a blog, website, or even multiple, you can use Google Analytics to really drill down into the data and understand how people are visiting and using your site.  Some things I recommend watching for:

• Don’t only pay attention to what people are doing on your site, but watch where traffic is coming from! Whether you are running a campaign, trying out a new social media platform or anything else, monitoring which places are sending in the most traffic can help you focus attention to the best places.
• Use different links on different sites to see what really gets people clicking through.
• Watch for long-term trends, not just what is popular that week or month. For example, if your home page and contribute pages are the highest visited pages consistently, and then one month there is another page that makes it to the top above those, you know something interesting is going on.
• Tip: You can also get Google Analytics for your Facebook Page!

Facebook Insights
These analytics are part of having a Facebook Page. While they aren’t the most comprehensive of reports, there is no point in ignoring free metrics! Pay attention to the “change” in weekly numbers and measure it against activities or messages you were pushing that week.

URL Shorteners – http://bit.ly
There are various URL shorteners out there, but Bitly is one of the most commonly used (I use it!). There are stats built into the tool for the number of clicks and so on, but if you are measuring site traffic already it shouldn’t be new that regard.  What is actually of interest is:

• Who is doing the clicking? Check out who is actually clicking on the links you share to identify passionate and interested people who you could engage on a deeper level (invite them to help share your message in other ways and so on).
• Create easy to reuse links. This is great for use in your Twitter messages but also in emails or even text messages.  Plus, remember to make them something that even your followers/supporters will remember and can reuse!
• Don’t just look at how many clicks you get, but pay attention to when people are clicking. Your interested followers may actually be checking twitter during their lunch break, or in the evening, and not when you’re at work at posting!

Nutshell Mail – http://nutshellmail.com/
Do you prefer getting your infomration in email? If you do, check out Nutshell Mail for reports on your various social media presences.

Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
Google Alerts is one of my absolute favorite tools. It’s free, you can set up as many of them as you like, and you can choose to get roundups or individual alerts as well as subscribe via email or RSS. Here are a few ways you can take advantage of Google Alerts:

• Be sure to set up alerts for your organization name, project or program names, and key staff people (any one that may be quoted or referenced in association with your work).
• Subscribe via RSS in a reader to cut down on emails.
• Prefer email but want to be sure multiple people on staff get updates? Subscribe with an email address like comms@ or another address that forwards to or can be accessed by multiple staff members.

Listening Dashboards
I recommend using a tool like Netvibes because it allows you to have a public and/or private dashboard, and is easy to use and customize. Dashboards or RSS Readers rely heavily on RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. If you are new to RSS, here’s a great video to explain it! You can see an example of a dashboard by visiting my public Nonprofit Tech Dashboard. I’ve also set up a step-by-step guide to creating your own dashboard.

Community Mapping
Community Mapping helps you identify not just the various segments of your audience, but also create a clear picture of which tools/platforms are associated with those groups and which messages are best to target where.  To get started, first brainstorm and identify the various groups or segments of your community.  This may be other organizations/partners, donors, volunteers, fundraisers, event attendees, etc.  Then, for each group, create a chart with 4 columns and identify:

1. Their goal: why do they engage with you
2. Your goal: why do you engage with them
3. Tools: which platforms and tools do they commonly use for online engagement (don’t forget to include your website if they are visitors/donors/engaged there)
4. Action: The action or connection that ties it together

There may be just 1 item, or goal, that is listed or there may be 50! Some groups have many different reasons or pieces of communication that they want to share with you and you to them, and some may be very simple and straightforward.

At the end of the mapping exercise, you can write an overall goal, like connecting offline, or fundraising, or maybe advocating on important issues, and the main platforms where it takes place. You now have a deep understanding and chart of the kinds of engagement for all your community groups, but you always have very high level information you can easily share with your director or other key staff that identifies a group with the core goal for engagement and platform/s where it takes place.

QUESTIONS

After three presentations in such a short amount of time there was going to certainly be questions. We tried to address many on the webinar, but I have no doubt there are more out there. Here are a few questions that were asked during the session and answered via chat:

Was mGive included in the mobile report from M+R?
Yes, there are a couple case studies included in the report of organizations using mGive.

What is the cost of adding text messaging?
Prices vary by platform/provider and what you are trying to do. There are even free options but they include advertising and possible other limitations.  The best place to look for information on prices and options and even case studies is MobileActive.

How do you find time for so many tools?
Most tools allow you the option to cross post to other social media platforms – this can help save time so that you can post a message in one place and have it pushed across the web!

What about risk management issues around geo-social tools?
The best practice with geo-social tools is to practice “checking-out” and not “checking-in” which means to tag yourself at a location as you are leaving, and not necessarily when you show up.

How do you set up an unconference?
Here are two great resources to get you started: unconference and open space technology.

How do you find a developer to build an app?
A great place to start is MobileActive!

How do you know an “influencer?”
In my opinion, an influencer isn’t just someone with a lot of followers but is someone that is passionate and dedicated to making an influence. It can be much more helpful to have someone advocating on your behalf that is willing to ultimately show up at your event or bring others into your work than someone who tweets your message once and is otherwise never connected.

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Have any other questions or tips you want to add? Would love to hear about your favorite highlights from other WWT sessions as well!

Thanks again to Allyson Kapin and the Women Who Tech team, as well as all those at NTEN who made the webinars happen!