I recently facilitated a day long meeting with a group of 7 different community media centers in California. Our objective was to develop grants and programs as a group to strengthen our individual community media centers and support the movement as a whole.

To modify the steps of the game to help tell the story, here’s how Ericha used the Community-Driven Social Impact game with her network of Community Media Center participants.

Who was the community that you were working with?

I am part of the Digital Arts Service Corps, which is an initiative of the Transmission Project that pairs tech-savvy AmeriCorps Vistas with organizations dedicated to supporting community media and technology. My project this year is to create a collaborative among seven different community media centers (CMCs) in the greater bay area. The purpose of the collaborative is to share best practices and resources to create greater sustainability and more impact within our individual organizations and the CMC movement as a whole.

The community I am working with is comprised of the seven CMCs in the collaborative: Community Media Access Partnership (based in Gilroy, CA), Davis Media Access (Davis, CA), Access Humboldt (Eureka, CA), Access Monterey Peninsula (Monterey, CA), Community Media Center of Marin (San Rafael, CA), SF Commons (San Francisco, CA), and Community Television of Santa Cruz County (Santa Cruz, CA).

What were your goals for engaging with them?

During our first meeting as a collaborative, we identified four priority areas to focus on throughout the year. They are: productions, youth media/education, fundraising, and technology. I design and facilitate a day long, in person meeting every other month dedicated to one of these topics. We had our fundraising meeting on March 25. The goal of the day was to develop a collaborative grant proposal for a project that would be pertinent and beneficial to each CMC. This was a challenging undertaking considering the diverse populations served by centers in the collaborative. I used the CDSI game to get everyone thinking about the communities they work with, hear about other communities, and generate ideas about how we could work together to meet their needs.

How did you modify the game to match your community and goals?

I allowed everyone two minutes to write down their responses, then about seven minutes to share with the rest of their group after each question. After the final question was discussed, I brought everyone back together and collected some of the program ideas each generated by each small group. This ended up being a great way to jump start the brainstorming process. Ultimately, we were able to concentrate the broader ideas into three focused projects and chose one we wanted to move forward with.

What did you learn and what would you do differently next time?

I really appreciated the structured and in depth discussion this activity created. One thing I would do differently next time have better examples of the types of responses I was looking for with the first two questions. While there is value in having such open ended questions, some people needed a little more clarification and guidance to get them started. Overall, The CDSI game was an effective utilization of time that yielded meaningful results.

Share your story!

Have you run the CDSI game in your organization or at a workshop? Share how it went! The Community-Driven Social Impact game, like all of the content and resources on this website, is licensed for reuse and sharing with Creative Commons so you can feel free to put it to use in your organization!

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Photo credit: Michael Wesolowski

Get the full archive here!

This month’s chat focused mainly on sharing lessons and examples from the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference, which took place in Washington, DC, last week. Some of the topics from the chat include:

• Engaging specific ethnic groups/communities
• Using content to fuel community engagement
• Engagement for advocacy vs non-advocacy organizations
• Hyper-local communities
• Contests to encourage content sharing
• Social media in CRMs

It was a rich conversation, so I haven’t tried to pull out specific quotes. You can read through the full archive here.

Join the next #CommBuild chat:

• Date: Thursday, April 28th
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Topic: Community Building, of course!
• Location: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

About the CommBuild Chat:

These monthly chats originated out of the #4Change network and are open to anyone interested in learning and sharing about building community, on and offline, with the use of social media or other technology tools. If you have a topic or question you’d like to explore in an upcoming chat, feel free to let me know anytime!

Hope to have you join us in April!

Presentation

Let’s start at the beginning: what is “community-driven social impact” anyway? All of the words probably have different meanings to each of us, but as a term, I mean programming, services, media events or campaigns that emerge from the needs, actions and involvement of the community. CDSI is not something that you thought up inside your organization, even if you thought it up with your community in mind or at heart. It means honestly that the ideas, shape and even strategy came from the community and you as the organization are the ones to support it or nurture it.

But, like many strategies or best practices, it still isn’t right for every organization. First, CDSI requires the right culture; unless your organization, board and staff are going to honor and support an idea that emerges from the community, there isn’t any point in trying to use CDSI strategies. Instead, the community will feel cheated or lied to.  It also requires capacity/staff to make connections and support the community. If there isn’t any capacity to “hear” the ideas, especially since they aren’t usually given directly, then even a well-intentioned organization won’t have what it needs to make the programs or events the community wants. Often times the community’s ideas or needs are shared in ways that require translation, of sorts—someone that can bridge the community and organization, listening to the conversations and identifying the opportunities for the organization.

What’s the foundation of CDSI? You can see CDSI in many things, and most clearly in grassroots organizing or any non-organization led action. The needs and goals of the larger community are listened to by someone or a group of people and they create opportunities for action, service, and change.  But, that doesn’t mean there isn’t real opportunity for organizations to act that part. Especially with the increased use of social media tools to help community building activity around causes or specific organizations.

So, what is that opportunity? Think of it like this:  In “Community-driven Social Impact,” the driving is up to the community; but you can act as the vehicle and event the map for those “drivers.”  Using CDSI strategies and leveraging social media, you can harness the power of the network towards your mission.

Strategy

What are those strategies? Well, you’ll find that much of the work that involves your community, whether it’s building up the community, working on engagement, listening, evaluation, or anything else, involves strategy that goes in a circle. Not exactly as simply as the goldfish, but one that after a few steps feeds back to the beginning. From listening, to creating to evaluating and then back to the listening again so that you can modify and then evaluate, and so on.

The first step: Who’s your community? What are they like: what are the demographics, the data, the stories? Where are they: which platforms or tools do they use and when do they use them? What kind of action and interaction already happens, and what actions or interaction are they looking to find? Whether it seems important in the moment or not, it’s really valuable to make a list or chart or picture, whatever you want, of all the information you have about your community. The more you list and share, the more you’ll start to see patterns or clear paths emerge.

The next step is finding the sweet spot. To do that, you first identify what your community wants to do – what it is coming together around, whether it’s an event, an action, or a movement.  Next, identify what you want to do, what your organizational goals are.  Those two “wants to do” will overlap and that gray area is the sweet spot. It’s important to remember that not everything your organization wants to do or achieve, matches up with with your community wants to do, and vice versa. The key is that that’s okay!  Maybe you provide services, and your community doesn’t want to be providing those services, but they are happy you are doing so. And maybe the community wants to endorse a specific candidate, and your organization doesn’t. But both the community and your organization want to see certain laws passed, things improved, programs created or groups supported.  That’s the sweet spot where you can count on focusing CDSI energy.

After you know who your community is and what they want to do, you probably already identified which tools they’re using. You can compare the tools they are using with the goals in the sweet spot to see if any will help reach those goals or if there are more appropriate tools to start using.  Don’t ever go for a new, shiny, cool social media platform or tool simply because you’ve heard others talking about. Know where your community is and what tools they want to use, and use those. At least if you plan on interacting with them!

Lastly, you’ll want to identify what roles are needed.  Just like throwing a party you need to have someone making food, someone pouring drinks and someone else showing people where the bathroom is.  Just because your network is excited for the party and wants to come, it does not mean that the party can just happen. Someone has to host, someone has to clean up. If your organization has the capacity to do that, there’s a great chance a good party can happen – especially if you’re willing to leave the punch and party games to the community and the natural leaders that emerge, allowing for ownership of the party’s outcome to be shared with the guests, and not just your organization.

Best Practice

That’s a pretty simple four steps for being strategic in CDSI. But what are some best practices? This is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote quite a while ago that compares the roles of gardeners and landscapers in the context of community building. The idea is that as an over all best practice, you want to strive to operate in a way that supports the natural directions of the community, without trying to shape that growth. Here are 3 ways you can operate as a gardener: no short cuts, know your community, and strive to be replaced.

The Gardener creates an ecosystem open to change, available to new groups, and full of fresh opportunities to emerge naturally.  The approach is focused on organic collaboration and growth for the entire community.  The gardener is simply there to help, cultivate, and clear the weeds if/when they poke up.

No Short Cuts

Not taking short cuts means to lead by example:  interact with the community the way you want other organizations and the community members to do.  It’s like the golden rule for community engagement.  I like this picture for this point because often mother ducks will bring up the rear, supporting the ducklings and swimming along side them, instead of shooting ahead and expecting them to keep up.

Another way to not take short cutes is to operate in public.  This means don’t build it in secret and then “launch” it  – regardless of whether it’s an online space, a program or a campaign. If it is really something that is coming from the community, you can’t just take the idea and run; you’ll want to co-create it from idea to implementation.

Lastly, not taking short cutes means asking for feedback and participation from the start. As I said earlier, often the ideas you have come from conversations or learning about the community and not from a specific recommendation (though you may get some of those, too!). So, you’ll want to share what you’re learning and thinking in  real time back to the community so you can find out if you’re right on, or way off the path.

Know Your Community

Knowing your community. Part of doing this well is letting your community know itself. That means don’t take credit where it isn’t yours, highlight the leaders and contributors in the community, and making connections across the network.

Knowing your community also means knowing your role in the ecosystem. It’s important, as I mentioned earlier in the strategy steps, to identify what your role or roles are as the organization and stick to them. Once you start spreading out, you squeeze out room for others to grow and develop or even to explore what’s possible.

Knowing your community also means you help it grow. Sometimes that means making mistakes. Hopefully they are tiny and harmless, and that you’re there to learn alongside the community.  But, it’s just to say that you are in it just like the community is, and not everything we try in life works smoothly. Instead, design for growth and sustainability from the start with lots of room for feedback, evaluation and iterations to continue developing and redeveloping.

Strive to Be Replaced

Striving to be replaced can be a tough one for most everyone. It isn’t exactly in our nature but it is key to the ethos of a community builder. One way to work on supporting your community to not need you managing the program, platform, or whatever else is to encourage interaction without you. This touches back on letting the community know itself. If you’re making connections and supporting conversations across the network, you’re helping the community create strong ties that will not require your time and energy to maintain.

Striving to be replaced also means rewarding and spotlighting leaders. Positive reinforcement is one of the best leadership development practices you can build into your work across the board, whether it’s online or offline, on your facebook page, newsletter, annual fundraiser or neighborhood events.

Lastly, the only way you can really operate in a way that prepares your community to take over for you is to share your toolbox. This is a lot like operating in public but that you are sharing the tools you use and the strategies you use. You can model behavior all you want but if no one can tell what tools you are using to be so successful, there’s no way they can jump in and help man the ship.

Case Studies

Events: NetSquared Camps

Community Driven Social Impact strategies for events – let’s look at the NetSquared Camps pilot. NetSquared had for a few years held a global conference in donated space in Silicon Valley and invited members of the community from around the world to come together offline to learn and share and build.  It was great; the community loved it. Well, they loved the chance to get together offline and build things together, learn from each other and so on. They didn’t love when the government wouldn’t give them a visa to visit the states, or when the costs for international travel around the whole world were too expensive. So, we started listening and asking questions to learn more about what they really liked and what they didn’t need from the old model. And in collaboration with our NetSquared Local organizers, we created and launched the Camps pilot which allows Local organizers to opt-in, receive support and a bit of funding, and get all of our resources and branding to hold regional events that create the same opportunities for convening and collaborating as the global conference did, but without the high costs for travel and logistics.

Campaigns: 350.org

350.Org is a terrific example of a CDSI campaign. When it emerged from the community, it wasn’t an organization at all but a group of people uniting under the call for 350PPM actions and legislation. Using 350 they rallied supporters around the world and it eventually became clear that longer-term “organizational” management could mean more integrated and impacting work from the community.

Media: Connectipedia.org

An example of CDSI media is connectipedia. This resource for funders, organizations and government agencies in the Pacific Northwest was created by the Meyer Memorial Trust in response to the need to capture, share, and retain knowledge from program officers and nonprofit staff that retired their experiences and knowledge with them when they retired from work.

Workshop

Now for the Social by Social game! I created this game in collaboration with my Social by Social co-authors, David Wilcox and Andy Gibson. We’ve modified it and created various versions, depending on whether it was to be played within one organization or with a group (like at the NTC), in just 45 minutes or over a longer period, and so on. This is the abbreviated version and I’m happy to work with you if you’d like to explore other iterations of the game that you can use with your organization.

Step 1

Be sure everyone has a playing surface:

We are going to start in the top left of your grid. You’re going to have about 5-10 minutes for this section so don’t feel rushed. Write down anything and everything you can about your community. As people start to finish at your table, start sharing what you wrote with each other as you’ll probably start to think of more things to add!

Step 2

Great! Now, let’s work on finding the sweet spot! Use the upper right corner of your handout to start identifying the goals shared by you and your community. Again, I’ll ask that you share these with each other as you start to finish.

Step 3

This next part is where it gets fun. I’m handing out cards to each table and you’ll need to share around. These are just to get you thinking so if there is a tool you want to use, you’ll see there are blank cards too.  The numbers represent the level of capacity needed to use the tool, and for the use in this game, I’m going to ask that you use 10 or less so that it’s realistic. Again, feel free to discuss at the table both if you have questions about the tools and which ones you’re choosing.

Step 4

The last section of the grid is for roles. I’m passing out another set of cards to help get you thinking about the roles you may need but note there are always options for other ideas.

Now, I hope that going through that exercise helps you create a framework for talking about projects and ideas, and reinforces that you can in fact discuss social media and technology tools in a strategic way – so long as you put the community and your goals first! We (those in our organizations passionate about technology) also, often, don’t have a way into conversations with people in other departments or with organizational leadership; this process can help you ensure that you can start those conversations by putting the goals and community that everyone in the organization is working towards and with at the forefront of your appeal.

Thanks again to everyone who participated at the NTC! If you’d like to use the game, just let me know and I can help you adapt it for your group!

Location: Washington DC

Topic: Unconference

Description: The NTC Unconference is a place to continue conversations from, ask questions about, or further explore the various tracks and sessions of the conference. The physical space will include sections for all 5 tracks, and a main organizing board where you can post a question or topic to discuss. We know there’s never enough time at the end of a session, passing in the halls, or even at lunch – so this year we’ve carved out a space where you can head with your questions, ideas, or colleagues to continue the conversations.

Related Links:

• Conference registration
• Session info
• Session notes

Location: Washington DC

Topic: Community-Driven Social Impact

Description: This session will focus on strategies and tactics to amplify the impact of mission-based programs through community-driven efforts. We’ll address emerging best practices and discuss the associated opportunities and challenges of community-driven strategies. Participants will walk away with a set of guiding principles and tactics to develop media, events and activities that encourage connections and local leadership among your stakeholders to increase your organizational reach and impact. This session will include a presentation, discussion and small group scenarios. Session Takeaways: 1)Trends and best practices for community building 2)Tactics and strategies for community-driven work 3)Workshop your own strategic plan for community-driven programming, events or content

Related Links:

• Conference registration
• Session page
• Blog post with slides and notes

Location: Washington DC

Topic: New the the NTC Orientation

Description: Join others new to the NTC and a few NTC veterans who will share tips, tricks and what not to miss while you’re at the NTC. I’ll lead this session and present with a few NTEN member volunteers to ensure if you’re new to the NTC you have all the information you need to make it a valuable experience!

Related Links:

• Conference registration
• Session info
• Slides

While they’ve used the public humiliation of their own staff as a theme in the past, this year NTEN is celebrating the collective awesome of the NTEN community. Which means, many of us in the community offered up ourselves or our favorite things to help the cause! For example, I’ve got two things in the auction: a 2-hour community building consultation session, and my very own gluten free and vegan carrot cake recipe!

You can bid on nearly 100 items in the first silent auction, getting something great for yourself, and supporting the campaign at the same time.

Here’s how you can participate:

1. Create an account at our auction site. You must use our link to register: http://allthis.com/rR1BK. (The system will send you a confirmation email you must respond to before you can log in for the first time. It went into my spam filter, FYI.)
2. When you see an offer you want to bid on, click the “I want this button” in the upper right hand corner of the item. You should also choose to “Follow” any items on which you bid.
3. Each day, all auction items will be updated with the latest bids, so keep an eye out to see if you’ve been out-bid.
4. Bidding closes at 5pm Pacific on February 11. We’ll contact winners and arrange for payment then.

Sharing auction items with your friends is easy via the handy Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and e-mail integrations built right into each listing. And you don’t have to be an NTEN member or attend the NTC to make a bid and support our campaign!

You can also support the 2011 NTC Scholarship Campaign by donating an item to the auction. It’s not too late! Just submit your item to us.

So, please go create your account now. Then you can view all the items donated to the 2011 NTC campaign.

Vote today!

Here’s what the NTEN team said about voting:

We received more than 400 ideas this year — a 75% increase over last year — and we need your help to narrow those down to the 100 or so that will make the 2011 NTC the best one yet. I’m not gonna lie: this is not a quick & easy task. It took me about 90 minutes to vote on every session. But we rely on your feedback to help shape the agenda, so we hope you’ll make a little time to at least scroll through the list and vote on your favorites.

The system is the same as last year, with a few refinements, including more social media sharing options. There are 25 proposals on each page. Rate each session from 1 (low) to 5 stars. Click the session title if you’d like to leave a comment.

You can always vote on just the sessions in the track you’re most interested in:

• Communications
• Fundraising
• IT Staff
• Leadership
• Program

Voting will be open through September 30th. Questions? Consult the voting FAQ!

My sessions

If you want to leave feedback or comments about the sessions I am a part of, please do! Obviously, you are welcome to vote for them, too!

• Building a Community Across Platforms
  Most commonly, communities form around an issue, a cause, or even a campaign on many different types of social media, and stretch across platforms. As a catalyst, your organization does not need to force community into a hole, but adapt to managing the cross-platform dynamics that community members use. However, the real challenge is creating community across platforms.
  In this session, we will explore the meaning of community across channels and how to choose and manage the strategic direction of multi-channel community building. Join us to examine where your community resides online using a mapping exercise, think about cross-channel best practices, and talk about examples of successful cross-platform community building.
• Community Driven Social Impact
  This session will focus on strategies and tactics to amplify the impact of mission-based programs through community-driven efforts. We’ll address emerging best practices and discuss the associated opportunities and challenges of community-driven strategies. Participants will walk away with a set of guiding principles and tactics to develop media, events and activities that encourage connections and local leadership among your stakeholders to increase your organizational reach and impact. This session will include a presentation, discussion and small group scenarios.
• Workshop: Using Community Organizing for Effective Online Campaigns
  This participatory workshop will help you answer the question: What does old-school community organizing have to teach the wired activist?
  We believe traditional community organizing helps to inform an effective online campaign for social change, and will lay the groundwork for a sustainable, long-term movement. We’ll present some specific tools you can use, drawn from community organizing, that will help you identify targets, hone your strategy and engage activists to prevent burnout.
  Some of the most successful online campaigns in the past few years — such as Tweetsgiving, opposition to mountaintop removal, government transparency activism in Canada, and the campaign for the Jena Six in Louisiana — have employed principles of community organizing to create effective online actions that helped activists win.
  Participants in this workshop will get their hands dirty planning an online campaign for social change that integrates traditional organizing theory and practice. We’ll invite three participants to serve as case studies, break up into small groups and collectively map out an online strategy. Each group will present its campaign strategy and tactics to the entire workshop, and facilitators will offer feedback and additional ideas.
  The facilitators each have extensive experience both in traditional organizing and online campaigns, and have used strategic planning to move beyond feel-good activism (“slacktivism”) that doesn’t advance toward real social change. We invite both individual activists and staffers in organizations to take part in this workshop.