I knew it was hitting many more people than the average news story when I saw tweets, facebook posts, and other online comments coming from people in my community and network that I rarely see participating online. And just as quickly as people responded with outrage against Komen, the conversation changed to be about the women who would continue to need support and the services that help them. Breast Cancer has impacted my family, like many others, and I grew up participating in Komen’s Race for the Cure in Portland every year with my mom. Komen’s announcement changed people’s minds and it didn’t matter that they later said PP affiliate could apply for funding (whether or not they are granted will be seen then) because the “break up” was final for many.

Jumping into action, Allison Fine, Beth Kanter, Stephanie Rudat, Lisa Colton, and Lucy Bernholz starting moving beyond the updates and long conversation threads and towards a collective call to action. You can read the summary of how the free agent community came together to self-organize and create a public action as well as a full report of the lessons learned and reflections on the #TakeBackThePink campaign in this public google doc.

10 Lessons from Community-Driven Organizing

After the #TakeBackThePink twitter campaign during the Super Bowl, Beth prompted all of us to share lessons and reflections in a google doc to be captured and shared. Here are the lessons we pulled out as a group:

1. We could not plan for an event like this, however as individuals who are  unencumbered by organizational rules or policies, and that we have our own large networks of people to bring to an effort, and that we are comfortable working in a dynamic, flat, environment, we reacted very quickly and nimbly to events as they unfolded and provided avenues for action for other people angry at Komen. A core group of the organizers are fluent with a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Pinterest (a fun opportunity to take it out for a social change spin, thought Beth!) and Facebook, plus Stephanie’s graphic design expertise. As one participant recalls, “There was an immediate sense of relatedness amongst the group conjoined by leaders.  We all saw something in the uproar and possibility for ourselves and those we care about.”
2. #takebackthepink was a particularly resonant phrase with our group because it represented the opportunity to begin to separate Komen from the color pink. As Lucy would tweet later, “Pink is a color not an org.” A fundamental part of our effort was to reestablish the primacy of women’s health over the branding concerns of a single organization. We believe we created an opportunity for a large number of people to participate in this process, and the momentum to continue the discussion moving forward.
3. There were two moments of tension during the week between a centralized approach and a network approach. The first time, the effort split in two; with one group focused on fundraising and another on advocacy and awareness. The second, a faction chose to opt out of the Super Bowl effort. Both times it was brought up that it was no longer about recouping money to PP (as that was already achieved in the first 48 hours) but was about redirecting people’s emotional responses, keeping people connected to causes and organizations even if they weren’t Komen, and demonstrating the importance of knowing what the orgs do that you support.
4. There was a flow of people in and out of the effort depending on their interest and availability. A public thread rather than the private email thread would have been more in keeping with our interest in and value of transparency. We chose the email vehicle believing that the element of surprise would be important to our efforts. It turned out not to be the case.
5. Finding the messaging middle ground in a fast changing environment was very challenging. Take Back the Pink was seen by some as Komen bashing and by others as “too nice.” We did our best to find a positive place for Super Bowl Sunday: there are a lot of organizations and way to support breast health, here are options in addition to Komen. It was harder to communicate than, “Screw Komen, fund Planned Parenthood” and it’s unclear how successful we were in explaining the shift and making the message clear.
6. We could have done a better job of looking for other hashtags in real-time and piggy-backed on them in order to weave together different conversations.
7. We developed and shone a spotlight on nonprofits and transparency, an unusual element to a discussion of pro-choice and women’s health issues.
8. Defining success in a very fluid situation was also very challenging. If fifty people retweeted with our hashtag was that success? Five hundred people? Five thousand people? An interesting model to use for comparison is Occupy Wall Street. Rather than using numeric outputs as goals, perhaps our effort, simply being and spreading, was successful. We are still wrestling with this question, although perhaps one answer is that if a single person learned about a new resource or organization that was success. Having the single largest media event of the year on the immediate horizon made for a great leverage point.
9. It would have been great to have advocacy organizations sign on as participants and partners in this event, however, when we did bump up against organizations they were unable to move fast enough with their approval processes to fully participate. This will continue to hamper the ability of organizations to work with “free agents” like us who need to meet an opportunity like this with speed, agility and a lack of concern for traditional message controls. Perhaps organizations can more fully participate in the next phase of development of the Facebook page.
10. This group is open to continuing the Facebook page and the conversation about general breast health and the array of organizations and resources available to women.  Clearly, there is a void in the digital space for being a resource to those who want to learn, contribute, volunteer, receive services but don’t know of all of the options or how to vet. Our capacity is stretched, though, we all participated in this effort as volunteers.

Observations & Reflections

Additionally, I want to pull out a few things I keep reflecting back on from the campaign and the organizing process that I think are influential to how we plan for and execute actions as community members and how we support them as organizations.

How do you evaluate and recognize “critical mass” of a free agent community? As Allison points out in her reflection post, after she created the Causes campaign and witnessed the response, she knew there was enough interest and people to do something bigger. But how did she know? How does your organization evaluate, on the fly in real-time, what critical mass is around a piece of news, an issue, a campaign, or even just an idea? How do you then say “this is it” and move to the next stage? In this case, I think critical mass was established by having more than just two or three, but actually five, six, even seven or eight people willing to jump in to help – and help by organizing and thinking and planning, not just sharing the message or plan once it was created. For organizations working on evaluating critical mass in real-time, it may be different as you would also factor in staff capacity to support the organizers from the community.

In a crisis, there are two versions of reaction: one against the perpetrator (in this case it was Komen, “how could they?”), the other in support of the victims (PP at first, and then quickly women in general). It is hard to switch the focus of a campaign after it is launched, so it’s important that you frame the story, your calls to action, and the actions themselves consistently. It was discussed openly and repeatedly on email chains and Facebook threads whether the focus was against Komen or in support of PP or even in support of women’s health. It was agreed every time that the focus was really on women’s health and redirecting people’s outrage, emotion, and attention so that instead of giving up on Komen and all breast cancer or women’s health issues, people would continue to participate, donate, and support organizations working on these issues. That’s why the resources on the TakeBackThePink wiki point to nonprofit and donor directories so people can research all the organizations working on breast cancer and women’s health, for example.

To organize and operate nimbly, you need to leave a crumb trail for others to join and follow you. This is incredibly important. It was necessary that the group collaborating on email and across multiple comment threads on Facebook create a cohesive place to refer new people when they jumped in, and a place for people to follow if they had to jump out. To the lesson above about the flow of participants in and out of the group, creating some central places to point people would support the people consistently reaching out to engage people as well as those who did not want to be involved but wanted to share the plans with others. To that end, I helped quickly create a shared google doc so that the messaging, calls to action, and other important links could be docked and shared easily. I also created a customized bit.ly link for the google doc so that sharing the information and inviting people to participate would be easy to do. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the google doc of messaging and information that was helpful, but that in the doc and on Beth’s wiki we provided direct links to the Twitter search for #takebackthepink and places to engage like the Facebook page, Allison’s Causes space, and Deanna’s Tumblr. Creating shortcuts like this by aggregating all the related links or resources together helped both the “main organizers” and all those coming in and out of the thread.

What do you think?

What other lessons or observations do you have from this campaign or others? What have you tried or experimented with? Would love to learn from you!

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Aashika Damodar & collaborative technology for social impact

Every day I field questions from organizations and community groups looking to use facebook, Twitter or YouTube.. Most all of these groups are excited and enthusiastic but are coming from the wrong direction: focusing on the tools first. Our programs, services, and campaigns are successful, instead, when we focus on the community first, and that’s why Aashika Damodar’s work impresses and inspires me.

Survivors Connect is an organization supporting activists and building survivor advocacy networks using collaborative technologies to end modern-day slavery and human trafficking. Aashika, the founder and executive director, starting learning about and looking for ways to support the community of survivors when she was studying Anthropology and Political Science at University of California, Berkeley: “When I was in college, I learned of a labor/sex trafficking case right across from my dorm.  I myself was also almost a human trafficking victim for the purpose of forced marriage in India. By that point, the issue of gender-based violence and trafficking had crept into so many facets of my life, prompting me to make it my life’s work to end it.”

Building programs and services to support a community means not just learning about the problems they face, but understanding how technologies can help make a difference. Aashika admits to being “a big tech-enthusiast by hobby” and she “found that the anti-slavery movement was lacking in terms of participation in this field, as well as innovation.”  According to Aashika, “It is these very same technologies that often enable transnational human trafficking; so I felt that I needed to get involved in this way to make our activism smarter, and innovate on both the “process” and “product/software” frontlines.”

The Survivors Connect online platform includes various opportunities for those wishing to report abuse, take action, or otherwise support the network of activists, and relies on a variety of collaborative technologies, from data mapping to online seminars, SMS-powered communications to an online community network. Different regions around the global have a very different level of access than those in North America or Western Europe. Recognizing which tools are available to your community can make the biggest impact on your project’s success.

“It has always been quite interesting to me that in many parts of the developing world, there is near ubiquitous ownership of mobile phones,” explained Aashika. “Here is really where the innovative thinking began. Communication tech, in a sense, is shrinking us as groups while increasing our ability to connect. Why not use this to work on preventing some of the most egregious human rights abuses in the world?”

Taking advantage of mobile technology, Survivors Connect created SMS: Freedom which connects individuals and communities with experts and resources via text messages. In this way, information about scams or risks can easily be distributed to communities, or reports can be shared throughout the network.

“The experiences and stories of survivors were and always are my call to action,” Aashika told me. “They are the strongest souls Ive ever met. Survivors of various forms of slavery give us a glimpse of how the broader crime of human trafficking works, and just how much is involved.” And it isn’t just Aashika that survivors are inspiring; through Freedom Connect all members of the global network fighting slavery and human trafficking are invited to create profiles, share calendars, create groups, share resources and join together in discussions.

Most importantly to the success of Aashika’s work, is her ability to remember that it is not about the tools. Survivors Connect is not just an online platform and network working to end modern-day slavery and human trafficking, but a place to continue to learn and inspire—the technology is simply a tool for letting us connect and communicate. “We will not win the fight against slavery and human trafficking with egos, but with open and understanding hearts and minds.”

>> Learn more about Aashika and Survivors Connect today: http://www.survivorsconnect.org

In 2008, Aashika graduated from the University of California, Berkeley; she is now working on her Masters in Philosophy in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK where she’s a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar.  Her honors thesis from UCBerkeley won the Ronald Frankenberg Prize and the Sylvia Forman Prize from the American Anthropological Association; it was also published in the 2010 Project Censored Journal.

How you can create an online collaboration space!

Working people and communities around the world can make sharing information and even just communicating a difficult task. Like Survivors Connect, maybe you want to share the stories and work from your community. There are various tools available, though, that make public networks or even private collaboration easy and efficient.

Top Tools for Collaboration

Tips for Collaboration Online

If you want to replicate some of Aashika’s success bringing people together online, here are the top 5 tips you need to keep in mind:

• Evaluate your Community: where are they, what kind of access do they have, and what are they looking to do?
• Evaluate your Capacity: how much time do you have, what kind of technical experience do you have, what resources are available?
• Evaluate your Goals: what do you and the community want to accomplish, what do you want to do today and what do you want to do in a year?
• Try Something First: don’t be afraid to jump in and give a new tool a try; if it doesn’t fit your needs, then move on!
• Build on Success: if something is really working, analyze what it is and why to see if

I caught up with Rob Wu, co-founder of CauseVox, the platform used to support this fundraising effort, to learn more about the process and campaign.

How did you co-created the campaign?

That morning, I saw the jaw-dropping photos and videos from the Japan tsunami disaster. The news agencies were reporting that hundreds of people have died and tens-of-thousands were missing.

Within 30 minutes, I registered a domain name, launched a fundraising site on CauseVox, and seeded it with key influencers on Twitter to help build momentum. Meanwhile, bloggers Leigh Duncan and Deb Ng were starting a grassroots effort to raise awareness and support for the Japan disaster too.

A few hours later, we quickly found each other through Jessica Lin and unified our efforts as SXSWcares. The original goal was to raise $10,000 within 5-days. SXSWcares began truly as a grassroots campaign with a handful of SXSW attendees.

What were successful techniques or elements of SXSWcares?

There were a lot of factors that made SXSWcares successful. Many of them were really driven by the community. Here are some of the biggest ones:

• Community Branded – We used a co-branded (with the Red Cross) site to maintain credibility with our 1500+ donors. The site was hosted on http://www.sxswcares.org, which used a URL and design that supported a strong sense of community around the campaign. We also used branded Twitter accounts (@sxswcares and @sxsw4japan) to promote the campaign.
• Personal Fundraising – In order to extend our reach and to leverage personal networks, we encouraged people to create fundraising pages. Businesses gave away products for donations, attendees held competitive fundraisers, and hundreds of others used other creative means to make fundraising personal.
• Influencers – We grabbed session leaders, keynote speakers, bloggers, and social media influencers to extend our message across to their audiences.
• Media – The campaign featured compelling video footage of the disaster and testimonies from Japanese attendees. We also leverage media opportunities to drive traffic to the campaign site.
• Partnerships – We partnered with as many groups and sponsors as we could. This included SXSW organizers, the Red Cross, Hurricane Party, the Hanson Brothers, and many more to promote the campaign. Hanson led a 12-hour telethon that featured over 40+ artists.

What you will change the next time?

Hindsight is always 20-20. There are two things we’d do a bit differently.

First, we would tell a more compelling personal story. We should have created more videos of personal testimonies of Japanese SXSW attendees to add more of a human aspect to the campaign.

Second, we would focus on taking the campaign to off-line events as much as possible to facilitate meaningful connections between the online and offline world. We would tie fundraising to real-world events, people, discussions, meetings to foster stronger bonds in the community.

What factors contributed to the success?

At inception, seeding the half-baked campaign with key influencers helped determine if the campaign had traction. Hustling around the conference to get session speakers, key note presenters, and others with audiences helped us reach a social media critical mass near the beginning. Personal fundraising helped carry the campaign after the initial interest in disaster giving started to wean. Lastly, partnering with groups such as Hanson helped us carry forward the campaign to broader communities — audiences that we would not have been able to reach on our own.

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Were you at SXSW this year? Did you participate in SXSWCares from Austin or around the world? What did you learn, what would you have changed, how did you find the campaign?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the fundraising effort, whether you participated or not – questions, feedback, and ideas. I’ll be sure that Rob sees your comments as well!

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

Check out the interview below to learn more about how My Colorado Project is empowering local change!

How did My Colorado Project come about, how did it get started?

My Colorado Project is a website that highlights the attributes and interests of a new generation of givers. Rather than try to get younger donors to fit into our existing programs, we’ve built a site that encourages young people to do what they’re best at – connect online, build networks of like-minded people, and make philanthropy fun. Based on the “giving circle” concept, we’re giving donors a new way to personalize their giving and support their favorite causes.

My Colorado Project started out as a project of our current CEO Alyssa Kopf who was frustrated with the popular perception that young people don’t give.

“Working as a professional fundraiser, I knew that I was giving and my friends were giving but our common donor tracking systems weren’t capturing how the diversity of our interests and frequent smaller donations added up to a sizeable amount over the course of a year. My Colorado is our attempt to build a new fundraising model for peer-driven giving and create new tools for planning and tracking your philanthropic footprint.”

Alyssa and I talk about the creation of My Colorado Project often and my perception was that she took it kind of personally as a young person and as a nonprofit professional that she and her peers weren’t on the radar screens of their favorite organizations. I don’t think that anything really great gets done without having a serious personal interest and now we’re ready to give a significant asset to young people all over Colorado.

How do you define e-philanthropy and how does MCP align with that vision?

We hope that MCP will better illustrate the difference between transactional and transformational e-philanthropy.  We believe that the latter offers a more sustainable giving experience and that MCP can help young donors along the road to becoming thoughtful, strategic, and happy philanthropists.  The bulk of the online giving tools currently available focus on the transaction.  Hey, we need that, no doubt, but when you focus only on the transaction and on making donations more efficient you miss something even greater! We want young donors and nonprofits alike to know that there is a richer, more fulfilling, and more financially rewarding experience that they can have.  Not only can you provide financial support, but you can tie your cause to your self-identity and transform not only your community, but yourself.

If you do your generational research you’ll find an awful lot of evidence to suggest that this is how younger donors want to get involved. My Colorado Project builds on that interest and offers a very personal and meaningful way to be introduced to giving and develop as a philanthropist.

What was the process, costs, and development of MCP like?

The greatest obstacle for me as the manager of the project is to create a website which meets the user-experience standards of the average Millennial. Do you know how hard that is?! We Millennials (I stand accused with a b-day of 1980) are a fickle bunch and our expectations are high. We’re used to cruising around multi-million dollar websites that have teams of designers, copy editors, and testers.

My Colorado Project has had to make the most of every dollar invested in the project. Every Nonprofit Pro reading this is going to laugh at my feeble attempt at pity!

But we have one thing working in our corner. We have 7 skilled and wicked smart nonprofit Pros who know our community, know our sector, and know philanthropy. We’ve been doing it for 25 years and have proven that our accessible, inclusive, and incremental model adds value.

We’re fortunate to have been able to present this idea to funders who have given us a great start and we recently struck up a relationship that we’re very proud of with one of Denver’s most innovative nonprofits, the Open Media Foundation. They are helping us build the next phase of development  and we hope that our relationship will extend above and beyond that relationship and into entertaining and valuable content development.

My Colorado is completely replicable and we hope that we can share it with other communities.

Can you share some examples of how groups have used the platform so far?

It has been super enjoyable to see both our nonprofit members and passionate individuals use My Colorado Project in its Beta stages.

First are those I call the Ambassadors. About a year or so ago Community Shares started using different terminology to describe our volunteers.  We wanted to refresh how our most committed supporters think of themselves.  Not only are ambassadors treasured donors and drivers of a mission, but in this age of social media they have also become the most important spokespeople and storytellers a nonprofit can have.

Fundraising 101 tells us that the most impassioned and successful messages are the stories that come right from the mouths of people who have shared a significant life experience with that organization. Many giving circles are started by a single individual with an extraordinary attachment to a cause or organization in particular.  They tell their stories, recruit their friends, and use use mainstream social media tools to expand their cause. The cause becomes part of their personal brand and they wear it with pride.

If they are really savvy, they ask for help from the organizations to build trust, and keep the giving circle growing.

One of the giving circles I like is the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Denver.  They’ve used their giving circle to bring in current and past board members to establish a foundation of donor support that they can count on year in and year out. This is a great first step for an organization which is largely staffed by the board of directors themselves.

“Annie’s Amazing Animals” is another inspiring effort.  Annie, who is 8 years old, posted a video asking for donations to her favorite nonprofits instead of gifts! She far exceeded her giving goals and posted a video thank you to her supporters.

My Colorado allows donors to start giving circles and support up to four different nonprofits with as little as $5 a month. The purpose of this is to give donors flexibility to be themselves and support multiple causes. I like to think of some of them as “nonprofit mutual funds.”

One of my favorite moments was when Robert Egger, the founder of DC Central Kitchen and V3, came to visit us a while back and his advice to me was to “keep it local and make sure it translates offline.” I have my notes from that meeting on the bulletin board above my desk.

There are very few things that are as empowering as the internet. I’ve noticed my own personal tendency to want to take projects that were originally small in scale and offer them to the entire world!  But, I think that social media will see a slight correction after its astronomical rise and more and more people will try to fill in the local gaps that really big national websites have missed.  I think My Colorado Project will be attractive because it is small and community based.

What were you most surprised about with the process and adoption – what were you least surprised about?

After this next phase of development is over in February – monthly contests – we’ll take a break from development for a second to focus more on the promotion of the project. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am by the adoption of the program with so little marketing on our part. We’ve really only just begun the extended roll-out phase and already we have thousands of new dollars circulating through the community. We’re a long way from our potential but it is a rewarding start.

What was the role of community in building this platform and now in the further improvements and development?

We’re very conscious of building a Colorado asset with the input and needs of the Colorado community in mind.  Community Shares is first and foremost an organization committed to the 100+ member nonprofits we serve.  Our role in the community is unique in that we interact regularly with local funders and associations, thousands of individual donors and employees, more than 150 businesses, and our 100+ nonprofits and those they serve.

In addition to our staff’s ability to be in 20 places at once, we also did our homework before embarking on such an ambitious goal. As a part of Community Shares’ capacity building program we sponsored a study and subsequent toolkit for Colorado nonprofits titled, Engaging Tomorrow’s Donors Today, which surveyed over 700 donors on generational differences in giving and analyzed the role of social media and e-philanthropy in a rapidly changing sector.

We’re entering the fun part now where we get to more widely market My Colorado Project, but our My Colorado 25 – our first group of giving leaders – and more than 100 nonprofits stand at the ready to tell us what they think and what they want. The time to stand aside and let the comments roll in is near!

What’s on the list for next developments?

The Personal Philanthropy Plan is next. The first phase of that robust effort will be a monthly contest which will use creative and thought-provoking questions to help Coloradans have fun and think more about the values and interests they are most interested in pursuing from a philanthropic perspective.  After that we’ll begin building a more robust plan that each participant can fill out to set goals and put a plan into place to become more strategic and focused in their approach.  Wow – that doesn’t sound like fun! But it will be! It will be, I promise that it will be super fun!

The neat part about My Colorado is that there is always another cause and another organization to hear from and learn about. Always another donor perspective and content to view. The showcase for our community’s nonprofits is going to be more vibrant than ever before.

How can people join or follow your work?

Community Shares and My Colorado Project are both really easy to follow and learn about. If you want to know more about My Colorado Project, please visit the website and take a test drive by forming a giving circle. Whether you’re from this great state, have relatives or friends here, visit occasionally for recreation, or have just been here to catch a connecting flight we hope you’ll support our grassroots initiative. If you’d like to form a giving circle but don’t see your desired beneficiary, you can suggest any 501 c3 as a beneficiary of your giving personal circle.

• @mycoloradoproj
• www.mycoloradoproject.org
• @csharescolorado
• www.cshares.org
• Community Shares FB

Lesson #1: Design an action and invitation that’s doable and interesting – while focused on your goal.

Stacey Monk and I exchanged messages last week, brainstorming the idea of pulling bloggers together to support Beth’s birthday campaign.  We wanted it to be something fun and interesting, so people would want to join – a surprise party!  And we wanted it to be easy to do – write a blog post!

First, we created an open Google Doc where we put in the introduction language, so anyone that clicked through from someone’s blog or Twitter post would have context about what was happening (and included a numbered list up to 53, so people could easily see where to add their name and blog address).

Next, I sent out an invitation that included a simple explanation and invitation to join with easy steps for those interested.  When sending out an invitation, it’s important to remember that the language you use needs to be appropriate for those you’re inviting, as well as to their audience as they could easily repurpose the language or calls to action you use to more quickly and easily share/spread the campaign.  Here’s a copy of the initial email as an example:

Subject: Help wish Beth Kanter a happy 53rd!

Hi friends-

As you probably know, Monday is Beth Kanter’s birthday.  Stacey Monk and I didn’t want the day to go by too quietly so are hoping you’ll join us in making a big splash to celebrate!

Her birthday wish is to raise money for the Sharing Foundation using Causes and we think we could help her crush her goal of sending 53 Cambodian children to school by raising $530.  We’re trying to throw her an online surprise party by assembling a blogsquad of 53 bloggers to publish a post on Monday that shares how Beth has impacted your work and shares her birthday wish with your blog audience.  Of course, I hope you’ll make a gift to make her wish come true too

We’re just hoping to make her birthday super happy by making her wish come true and reminding her just how much good she does.

If you’re interested, just:

1) Write your name and blog address on the signup form here: http://bit.ly/bethbdayblogs

2) Publish your post first thing Monday morning. Include a link back to her birthday wish post at http://bit.ly/beth53

3) Pass this invite on to anyone you think might want to join us.

And don’t forget to wish her a Happy Birthday Monday on Twitter too with the tweet she’s asked us to pass along: “Happy birthday #beth53! Let’s send 53 Cambodian kids to school: http://bit.ly/beth53”

Thank you so much for your help, support and participation!

Amy (& Stacey)

To recap: our audience included bloggers in the nonprofit technology and social impact sector; our goals were to help reach Beth’s $530 fundraising goal and recruit 53 “happy birthday” blog posts reflecting on Beth’s work.  The campaign was focused on the goal and created with the audience in mind (how they behave, what they are interested in, what they could do on short notice, and how they would want to participate).

Lesson #2: Encourage participants to share, invite others and promote their own participation.

Part of using blog posts in the campaign is the strategy that in order to participate, people are promoting!  We also created and provided shortened URLs for the two links we wanted everyone to use (the link to the Google Doc where people were registering their participation: http://bit.ly/bethbdayblogs and the link to Beth’s birthday wish blog post: http://bit.ly/beth53).  Using these shortened URLs and sharing them in the invitation via email and posts on Twitter meant that others were likely to use them and easily share the campaign.

We also included the hashtag for Twitter that Beth promoted in her Birthday Wish blog post (#beth53 – review the Twitter stream for the hashtag), another way that people could find and share tweets about the surprise party easily.

To recap: we took advantage of popular techniques for sharing and networking conversations including URL shorteners and hashtags.

Lesson #3: Create compositions that allow for variations on a theme.

What was key to our approach was that we did not say where people had to post, or exactly what they had to say.  We even said that they could do something else entirely!  This meant more people were empowered to participate because they could make it their own.

Some people posted on their own blogs.  Some posted to community blogs like NetSquared.  Others posted on Facebook (using the Notes application).  Some tweeted.  And others came up with even more unique ways to get involved.  (See the Google Doc for links.)

To recap: we invited people to express themselves in the way they chose while still being part of reaching the goals.

Lesson #4: Create easy ways to track and follow the campaign.

Using the URL shorteners and hashtags made sharing tweets, blog posts and calls to action easy to post and share, but it also meant that everything was easy to follow!  We could follow the hashtag on Twitter using Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) and could use the tracking built into Bit.ly to track clicks on the links (http://bit.ly/) (or try doing a search using Tweetmeme).

The Google Doc that served as an information and context piece for people sharing and finding the campaign also served as the sign-up sheet for participants, so people could add their own name and blog information to the campaign details without Stacey or I having to track them down.  The email invitation also turned into a reporting mechanism as people would reply-all to share their link with others participating.

To recap: the methods for sharing and promoting the campaign were also designed to create easy ways of measuring participation and impact.

Lesson #5:  Say thanks!

What I found most rewarding in this campaign was that saying “thanks!” was part of it from the start: people’s blog posts and twitter messages were all saying thanks to Beth for ways her work had impacted their own.  It had a deep gratitude through and through.

Because of the tools mentioned above (the hashtag and URLs and Google Doc), it was easy to reply on Twitter or elsewhere to thank people for their support and participation.  As people replied to the invitation email, I could also email them directly to thank them for participating and sharing in the celebration.  Stacey and I both sent thank you emails to the full list of participants towards the end of the day, too.

To recap: saying thanks is important – we all know that.  But finding ways to say it where people are participating (if they are tweeting your campaign, thank them publicly in Twitter, for example) will only further spread and promote the campaign.

It’s been a very fun experiment and a great way to spend a Monday!

A huge thanks to my friend and colleague Stacey Monk, the woman behind Epic Change, without whom this surprise party wouldn’t have happened!  And one last thanks to Beth, for giving us a reason to come together in celebration!

NOTE:  Beth was able to smash her goal of raising $530 by getting $4,540 donated to help buy school uniforms and send Cambodian children to school via the Sharing Foundation.  We also smashed our goal of recruiting 53 bloggers, with 66 signed up and many more participating in other ways.  Thanks!

First, let’s settle on an example we can use to walk through all 5 steps:  you work for a small nonprofit that focuses on early childhood education, so you have lots of services for parents and partnerships with hospitals, child care facilities, and doctors offices.  You also have a volunteer program for middle and high school students to work with the children in after-school time in lieu of child care, but find that the current partners you have in the community don’t work for attracting new volunteers to participate.

1. Problem

We are usually pretty quick to highlight problems, so this is probably the easiest step!  Be sure to focus in on the problems you plan to address with your social media strategies (we all want to change the world, but that’s not a specific).  In our example, our problem is that we don’t currently reach those who could participate in our volunteer program.  Our partnerships and current communication streams aren’t ones that would easily get the attention of or shared by that group of middle and high school students.

2. Strategy

The next step is highlighting the strategies that specifically address the problem.  These 5 steps assume that your organization has already used a process to evaluate your audience and your goals and chosen tools and strategies that match the audience and organizational goals.  Assuming our fictional organization has done this, let’s say that they chose to create a blog that the middle and high school students who volunteer in the after school program author, with stories form their work, things they are thinking about, events, friendships, and so on.

3. Benefit

The benefits? These are both tangible and intangible.  It’s also important to remember that there will probably be benefits to your work that you can’t identify know or foresee!  Some of the benefits of the strategy in our example could be: opportunities for volunteers to share their stories, more word of mouth advertising, and more shared learning about the program both amongst the volunteers as well as between the volunteers and the organization.

4. Value

If we were drawing our five steps out on a white board or piece of paper, our next column would be for the values related to the strategy and benefits.  In our example we could identify a core value of connections and “community” growing around the volunteer program.

5. Metrics

So now, finally, we get to the metrics.  By charting out the problems, strategies, benefits, and values first, we give ourselves a better picture to pull out metrics. Given the answers to 1-4 of our example, some of the metrics we could use to measure our success and ROI include: volunteer participation, online “chatter,” and program growth.  So, how do we measure those items?  We can look at the number of middle and high school students applying for the volunteer positions.  We can measure how many people are reading the blog and sharing the information across the web.  We can also look at other online mentions that talk about the organization as a whole, or other programs of the organization that also link to the new blog.

In this example, we are using a blog.  Whether it’s a WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, or whatever, you have access to built-in web analytics or the option to use Google Analytics.  There are lots of resources online that shed light on the different terms and tricks to diving into your web analytics.  But, even a beginner can identify the number of unique visitors to the site.  Setting up Google Alerts for the blog address and title will help you catch whenever other bloggers or organizations mention the blog on their sites.  Tracking how many of your volunteers participate by posting to the blog and commenting on each other’s posts + other online mentions + increase in inquiries and volunteers, etc. combines both online and offline measurement and values so can help you more thoroughly evaluate both the strategy and how to address the original problem.

Remember, your strategies should be integrated online and offline, and so should your metrics.