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

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

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

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 Ultimately, if you cannot build a community because engaging with your organization is so difficult, outdated, or cumbersome, you will not have people to support your advocacy, donate to your fundraising efforts, or champion your mission.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

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

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

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

Location: online with Blackbaud Australia

Topic: Social Change Anytime Everywhere: Best Practices to Build a Multichannel Campaign Plan

Description: From your website to social media, email to mobile messages, online to offline, multichannel strategies require coordination and creative thinking across teams and departments and a focus on the core of your work beyond any one specific call to action. Please join us as Allyson Kapin, Founding Partner of Rad Campaign, and Amy Sample Ward show you how to craft an online multichannel campaign plan to meet your mission and campaign goals, and how other organisations are successfully integrating multichannel efforts into their work

Related Links: Get the recording

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For professional football players, the six days between games are jammed with practice, gym workouts, and travel. They also include time spent watching the film from the previous game, play by play, evaluating, learning, and preparing for the next game. I don’t know as much about other sports, but I’m guessing that professional basketball, hockey, baseball and other players have similar routines during their seasons.

It’s true that for pro athletes, everything they do during the week amounts to preparation for game day. Game day performance is what matters. It’s also true that many pro athletes are supported by extensive coaching staffs, sophisticated video recordings, and powerful analytic tools to help them understand what they did and how they might improve.

But a lot of what nonprofit folks do is similarly performance-oriented: every time you present on a panel at a conference, every time you pitch a prospective donor or funder, every time you talk to a reporter. You prepare (or not), and then you perform well (or not). And even without the same kind of evaluation and training resources at our disposal, we still have tools and capacity to carefully evaluate our performance and plug it in to fast-cycle feedback loops so we can continuously improve. Nearly every nonprofit has a video camera now, tripods are cheap, and it’s easy to set up to record right before you begin your presentation. When you talk with reporters, it’s easy to evaluate the print story or broadcast (not just reviewing it, which everyone already does, but studying it to figure out what you did well and what your screwed up). You may not have someone with you on every funder pitch, but it’s not hard to arrange at least some of those conversations with a colleague who won’t do too much talking during the meeting, so someone else can pay more attention to how well you do. For much of what you do, you can figure out ways to intentionally review your performance, identify what you did well and what you need to work on, and then craft a strategy for improving.

For most nonprofit folks, the limitation isn’t about resources but about how serious they are about improving.

Incidentally, it’s the coaches who really immerse themselves in the film after every game, studying the game film on the flight home or first thing Monday morning, grading every player on every play, and then reviewing the films with the players. What if the more senior folks in your organization were explicitly responsible for coaching the newer members of the team? And what if their job evaluation was based partly on how effectively they are at coaching the more junior folks?

An organizational culture that emphasizes evaluation, feedback loops, learning, and intention improvement doesn’t happen by accident. For most nonprofit folks, the limitation isn’t about resources but about how serious they are about improving.

(Photo credit: Flickr rburtzel)

Gem #1 – Put fundraising in your mission.

In this book, Larry starts at the beginning (that’s even how he describes it!) with the mission of the organization. You have to figure this out first! Your board has to know the mission, and keep it in mind in their role forming the strategic vision of the organization. Fundraising should have a clear role in helping you meet that mission. If it is something separate, your doomed. Larry very rightly points out: If you position fundraising as separate from meeting your mission, donors won’t see why their donations are creating the impact they are interest in.

Gem #2 – Work from the inside out.

This is a great concept and one I often see organization willing to internalize, but not for fundraising. I am often asked by organizations about how they can get their staff to adopt a new tool or platform. You have to start inside the organization. Treat your colleagues like the most important community segment. That means you give them direct training and support, show them how it helps the organization and their own work, etc. When the external community sees your staff using a community platform, a knowledge management resource, or another shared online space it says to them that the organization actually cares and is invested in both collaboration and the resource itself. And that is the best tone you can set! So why would it be any different with fundraising!

Gem #3 – I have an extra copy for you!

That’s right! Larry was kind enough to send me an extra copy that I could give away to a lucky commenter. Please share in the comments below either what your current struggle is or your latest lesson learned with fundraising for your organization. All comments will be entered to win and I’ll draw a name at random this Friday, May 11th, at 5 pm EST.

Looking forward to hearing what you’re working on!

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

• Eric Lanke: Stop Calling It Strategic Planning – "So I'm working my way through Humanize, and like most everyone else, I'm really enjoying it. This will probably be the first of several posts describing the thoughts it provokes for how I am and should be running my association. But dare I start with the endlessly controversial subject of strategic planning? I've heard Jamie Notter (and others) decry this staple of association board meetings as a tool whose time has come and gone, but it wasn't until I read the treatment of it in Humanize that I really understood what he was talking about. And it's convinced me of one undisputable fact. I need to stop calling what my association does strategic planning."
• 2011 NTEN Champions Fundraising Campaign by the Numbers | NTEN – "The funny thing about being the Nonprofit Technology Network is that it can be really hard to practice what we preach. You may recall that the NTEN community recently helped us raise over $15,000 to host more local events throughout 2012. We learned so much while running that campaign, but we also made lots of mis-steps along the way. One of the things we wished for as we navigated the campaign: benchmarks. Besides average gift amount, what might we expect?"
• New Research Proves the Business Case for Product Giving : PitchEngine : Get the Word Out™ – "New research from Indiana University concludes that businesses can do well by doing good through product philanthropy.  Donating products to charities helps corporate bottom lines, reduces waste in landfills, and provides relief for people in need. With a record number of Americans living in poverty today, product donations allow people to use their limited resources to pay for food, health care, prescription drugs, utilities and other vital needs. The study, released today by Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), provides the first detailed examination of the return on investment for donating merchandise as opposed to liquidating or destroying it."
• Is email going out with 2011? | craigconnects – "I took a look at a few articles and studies, and according to ComScore's 2010 Digital Year in Review, email use dropped 59% among Internet users ages 12 to 17 in 2010. Users ages 18 to 54 have reportedly turned away from email, as well — many are instead communicating through social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. An increase in email use, however, was visible in the 55+ age group, who used web-email 15% more in 2010 than in 2009. The report also went into detail on what sites people spent their time on: it illustrated that time spent on webmail sites declined while social networking sites increased considerably." Would love to hear what your experience and perception of email use is! For me, I see the way I use email and treat email changing, but the importance and irreplaceability (is that a word?) of it staying the same. You?
• Multiple Constituent Groups, One Database: Case Studies | Idealware – A great collection of three case studies from very different organizations, including Fight Colorectal Cancer, Sarah's, and Earthjustice. How are you managing your data?

Most notable, perhaps, is Malaria No More, a popular nonprofit that supplies bed nets in malaria zones. Its goal is to end deaths from malaria, a target it sees fast approaching.

The charity has announced plans to close in 2015, but it is keeping its options open in the unlikely event that advances against malaria are reversed.

“We never planned to be around forever,” said Scott Case, a co-founder of Priceline and vice chairman of Malaria No More. “We have thought of this more as a project than as an institution-building exercise, and the project is nearing its completion.”

So far, the number of organizations opting to go out of business for mission-related reasons is too small to call a trend. It is still far more common for a nonprofit to close its doors because of financial pressure, which is increasing as governments continue to pare their budgets and donors maintain tight grips on their giving. [Read the full article.]

Whether I’m talking about Community-Driven Social Impact or community organizing, whether it’s focused on a hyper-local community project or global-reaching movement building, it’s always the same for me: our goals need to be focused on a change, not on ensuring that we keep our jobs. Many colleagues, both in the UK and the US, have also been talking about this for years – sometimes referring to it as a plague in our sector, others seeing it as an affect of nonprofits operating more like businesses.

Two years ago, Hildy Gottlieb published her book, The Pollyanna Principles, and with it she helped bring together many people who were talking about and working on this same topic, even if they didn’t realize it. I reviewed her book in the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog and I’m still excited for the opportunities the sector has as Hildy explains them:

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. [Read the full post.]

Changing the world, regardless of the cause, community or organization we identify with, requires a vision that drives us to actually make that change – work with others, don’t recreate the wheel, create opportunities for engagement that are larger than our organization.

But, it isn’t just Malaria No More, and it isn’t just those organizations and communities in The Pollyanna Principles. I know there are so many organizations, campaigns, and community groups making real change now. I hope that they can create a path for others to follow, an open book that others can learn from, and an open door for others to join them.

Get The Pollyanna Principles!

Hildy is celebrating the two-year anniversary of The Pollyanna Principles with a discount – and if you don’t already have the book, I recommend you get it:

• Get a discount on the book
• Read the first 4 chapters for free
• Learn more about the book

I recently caught up with Mazarine and asked her, “If there was one example or story you could share that exemplifies why you wrote this book, and a few examples of the kinds of content and resources included in the book, what would it be?” And here’s what she shared:

Mazarine Treyz, The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising

When I was growing up, people loved to argue around the dinner table about how people could try to change the world, but every nonprofit was corrupt. (No one in my family has ever worked at a nonprofit, and we definitely don’t have a tradition of giving to causes in our family.) After I graduated from college, I thought about all of the conversations I heard back at home, about how there was just nothing you could do to stop injustices. That you just had to let things go. And I thought, “Wow, really?”

So, I moved to Asia, learned Indonesian, and volunteered at Yayasan Emmanuel, which had just started to run mobile health clinics in Jakarta’s poorest slums. My first day in the clinic, we picked up the doctors who were donating their time, and got to Tanjung Priok, a slum on the water in the center of Jakarta, in the early hours of the morning. The smell of garbage and burning hit my nose as I climbed out of the van. People were living in concrete boxes with only a door, no windows, and sleeping on pieces of cardboard. When the slum flooded, their houses got flooded too. People made a meager living picking garbage and selling what they could. I had all kinds of preconceived notions about what I would find in Jakarta, but nothing prepared me for the massive skin diseases, people with all of their skin flaking off, people who had leprosy so badly that most of their fingers and toes were gone, and their skin was so mottled it looked like it was sliding off their bodies. I didn’t know that you can get leprosy from having a cut on your foot and then stepping into some dirty water, but you can.

Standing far away, I had no idea what people needed. Being there, I realized that people clearly needed access to clean, fresh water. Now WatSan has helped people in Tanjung Priok get filters for creating fresh clean water, and they have started selling it to other slums, creating income, a cottage industry, and money for uniforms for their children to attend school, breaking the cycle of poverty. All from water.

It was an experience that changed me forever. I realized that I could help make people aware of these situations overseas by writing about them. When I returned to America I began my career as a nonprofit consultant. I co-founded a nonprofit called “The Moon Balloon Project” and worked for arts in healthcare nonprofits.

But what I found was that the books for getting started in making a difference with your writing were just DULL. I tried some courses at the Foundation Center, and looked at some books, but couldn’t really get into anything I read. All fired up from my time in Indonesia, I thought, “Changing the world is so exciting! Why do these fundraising books have to be so BORING?” So flash forward to seven years later, I’ve worked full time at nonprofits and consulted part time with nonprofits, and I’ve raised a lot of money. In 2010 I completed my book, the book that I wish I had had when i first started. This book is about every fundraising method, tip and trick that I’ve learned on the way, for people who would like useful fundraising advice written from a cheerful, fresh, graphically rich, interactive perspective that they can immediately apply to their cause.

Some examples of things you’ll find inside my book:

• a CD with 80 pages of templates, FAQs and more that you can open up and instantly customize for your fundraising office.
• a series of quizzes and worksheets for your board members designed to get them to help you fundraise
• a sponsorship letter that has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for me in sponsorships. And it’s helped readers too! Example? Heather writes, “I customized your corporate sponsorship ask letter to put together a package for an event we have coming up, and I’ve already gotten two sponsorships.” -Heather Davis, The Telling Room”
• a cover letter that has generated many interviews for me and others who got nonprofit and government jobs.
• a chapter on how to manage conflict at your nonprofit, something I really wish I had learned in the beginning!

Free Book Giveaway

Want to have a chance at a free copy of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising? Simply leave a comment here sharing your biggest hurdle or burning question. Mazarine will be weighing in with the conversation and one commenter will be selected at random to receive the book. We will select a winner from the comments on March 7th.

Thanks to Mazarine for providing a free copy and for participating in this valuable conversation!

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

• Women Rule the Philanthropic Roost! – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – frogloop – "According to the study, “women at every income level give to charity more often than men do. What’s more, at almost every income level, the amount women gave exceeded that of men in comparable circumstances. For example, women who earn $23,509 or less gave an average of $540 per year to charity, while men in that income bracket with similar life circumstances (such as education and number of children) gave $281. Women who earn more than $103,000 annually gave $1,910 to charity, while their male counterparts gave $984.” You can check out the study here."
• Boston Review — Kentaro Toyama: Can Technology End Poverty? – "Nothing would have pleased my group more than finding a way for technology to advance the cause of poverty alleviation. But as we conducted research projects in multiple domains (education, microfinance, agriculture, health care) and with various technologies (PCs, mobile phones, custom-designed electronics), a pattern, having little to do with the technologies themselves, emerged. In every one of our projects, a technology’s effects were wholly dependent on the intention and capacity of the people handling it. The success of PC projects in schools hinged on supportive administrators and dedicated teachers. Microcredit processes with mobile phones worked because of effective microfinance organizations…"
• YMCA of Metro Chicago Launches Facebook « Chicago YMCA's IT Space – Great resource from Steve Heye, thanks for sharing your facebook manual! "How do you get 50 authors prepared to manage 15 Facebook pages in less than 2 months with a team of 4 people? The YMCA of Metro Chicago faced just this challenge in the summer of 2010. There was a desire to get a presence established on Facebook in order to connect with our communities in new ways and do it quickly! Our bigger challenge was managing the pages once they were launched. This case study will walk through the process we followed to get the pages launched and equipped the authors to manage them."
• New Phone Apps Aim to Combat Harassment – NYTimes.com – “The Internet speeds everything up,” Ms. May said. “If we as activists can’t get the Internet to speed up social change, then we’re not doing our jobs.” There are so many examples of the increased "speed" the internet is able to provide; but I'm curious what people think about the internet's influence on scale, competition, and community. Thoughts?
• The Dragonfly Effect: 4 Principles of Engagement | Social Media For Nonprofits | Advancing the Mission of Nonprofits via Social Media – "I recently read the book The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker (@aaker) and Andy Smith (@kabbenbock). The book is packed with case studies from nonprofits and how they are leveraging the power of social media to do something good. From Charity: Water and Alex’s Lemonade to Kiva and Tom’s Shoes, the authors tell the stories of how these organizations are using social technologies to engage and inspire people to participate in movements for change."

Getting Started

Let’s start at the beginning: what is a “networked nonprofit” anyway? As Beth and Allison explain:

Networked Nonprofits are simple and transparent organizations. They are easy for outsiders to get in and insiders to get out. They engage people in shaping and sharing their work in order to raise awareness of social issues, organize com- munities to provide services, or advocate for legislation. In the long run, they are helping to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place to live.

Networked Nonprofits don’t work harder or longer than other organizations, they work differently. They engage in conversations with people beyond their walls—lots of conversations—to build relationships that spread their work through the network.

Some of What I Like

Something that I think is incredibly important to talk about (because once we are talking about it, the next step is to DO it) is the opportunity we have now to truly focus work on movement building. Our campaigns, services, programs, and even visions can and should be opening up for other collaborators – whether they are individual, free agent supporters or other organizations – to make the biggest, lasting change possible.  As Beth and Allison say,  “But while social media power Networked Nonprofits, they aren’t the only reason nonprofit organizations need to shift their focus from their individual organizations to their networks.” There’s huge potential to be tapped by bringing together free agents and organizations working to build change through a movement.

One thing I always associate with both Beth and Allison is the term “resource.” They both have lots to share and are always looking for ways to contribute back to the community.  As such, I knew that their book would be a great resource and part of what makes it so is the inclusion of reflection questions for every chapter. If you’re reading the book, or if your whole team or organization is reading it, you have great questions to depart from for critical thinking and strategic planning.

One question I liked in particular reminded me of the presentations I’ve done recently focused on Community-Driven Social Impact:

Are there internal processes or conversations that would be appropriate to share for feedback at an earlier stage than you are sharing now?

This reflection questions comes at the end of Chapter 6: Building Trust Through Transparency. Something I discuss in my workshops is that you can’t simply “start” being community-driven, or communicating and expecting a two-way conversation to happen without having in a place the trust and transparency that if the community voices ideas, concerns or passions that they will be met by an organization prepared to respond and possibly act.

Plus lots more – I’m really looking forward to continuing conversations that emerge from the above topics and from The Networked Nonprofit!

Learn More

Review the slides below for an overview and introduction to The Networked Nonprofit. (Hint: remember to click on the “Notes” tab below the slides on SlideShare so you can see the speaker notes that go with each slide!)

You can learn more about the book on Beth’s blog or Allison’s blog – or visit the book listing on Amazon.com to read reviews, leave a review, and order the book today!

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I’m always honored and humbled to call Beth and Allison both friends and colleagues – it’s my pleasure to share a bit about this great resource they’ve contributed and hope you’ll share your ideas, questions, feedback and thoughts, too!