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).

• How to Prepare Your Community for a Major Change « The Community Manager – "Change: it’s the one constant in life. Whether you’re introducing a change in ownership, new staff, policy change, technical update, or something else, community members sometimes resist change. Usually, they’re afraid of repercussions that could affect the community they care so much about—so, it comes from a “good place.” That being said, their fears and frustrations can create chaos, and part of your job as community manager is to make transitions as smooth and drama-free as possible. Follow these steps to turn your announcement from a sign of the apocalypse into a community-building win they thank you for."
• Interactive: How America Gives – How America Gives – The Chronicle of Philanthropy- Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas – The Chronicle of Philanthropy has launched a great new tool: an interactive map of giving data in the US. You can look at total contributions, contributions by household, discretionary income by household, and percentage of income given by household at the national, state, county, and local level.
• Survey says: Most noprofiteers blend their personal/professional brands | Big Duck – "Last week I had the joy of presenting a workshop with the fabulous Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation at the 7th Annual Bridge to Integrated Marketing & Fundraising Conference in Washington, DC. To gear up for our session on "Mixing Business and Pleasure: Managing Your Personal Brand in Social Media," we asked nonprofiteers (readers like you!) to respond to a quick survey about their own behaviors. We heard from 209 nonprofit staff, consultants, and the people who love us–and some of the results suprised us. While not scientific, the survey offers some interesting insights and we highlighted the key findings in our presentation (included in the slides below and online here). Here are some of those insights…"
• e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics » How a Twitter Rapid Response Campaign Helped Susan Sarandon ‘Get’ Paid Sick Days – "A coalition of diverse organizations in New York City has banded together to escalate the conversation regarding paid sick days for workers, with an emphasis on getting the NY City Council to pass legislation mandating paid sick days. So far, Council Speaker Christine Quinn has not called for a vote on this issue. But now, it just may happen — after the coaltion (with a little help from their friends) gave us an impromptu course in how to run online rapid response."
• Direct Energy | Direct Energy Contest | Reduce Your Use for GoodReduce Your Use – "Nonprofits, you know it: small changes can make a big difference. At Direct Energy, we’re committed to using our energy expertise to make a difference in people’s lives — so we’re donating up to $100,000 to nonprofits like you to help reduce energy use. Just make a short video of two minutes or less showing us the good work you do in your community. Acceptable submission formats include Windows Media, Quick Time and MPEG (files ending in .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg or .mp4). Be passionate. Be creative. Be concise. Tell us about your organization and its vision, how the small things you do make a big difference and why it’s so important that you continue your mission."

Timing

Originally these were monthly chats. I opened up a blog posts similar to this one where much of the feedback said a monthly chat was all that people had capacity for. But, the downside of a monthly chat is that there are so many weeks in between to forget about it! Again, I would always set up the CoverItLive widget ahead of time so participants could sign up for a reminder when the chat was starting. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on moving to a weekly chat!

>> Share your time preferences!

I also have a scheduler set up where you can share the times during the week that you prefer having a chat! The times are set with 11 am EST as the earliest time (in case the times don’t auto-update for you when you open it). Please treat these dates as generic days of the week and not actually next week’s dates.

Topics

Normally, these chats functioned as an online open discussion. I always had questions, topics, and tools at the ready in case participants didn’t have a question to pose but it was rarely necessary for me to ask the question. Some times, people shared questions or topics with me ahead of time so I would queue those up when we started the chat to ensure we addressed them ahead of any other in-the-moment conversations. How do you feel about the free form nature of the conversation? Would you rather have a set topic or set of questions ahead of time? Do you like showing up with a question and posing it to the group for feedback?

Platform

As I said above, the chats normally took place on CoverItLive, with the most recent chat using Google+ Hangouts. I like using a tool that provides an easy way to archive and save the conversation – something that a video chat on Google+ doesn’t do. The CommBuild chat was borne out of the #4Change chats, a group-moderated monthly chat series that took place on Twitter of which I was one of the moderators. The topic was so large and many felt like we could talk every month just about community building, so I said I’d take the responsibility of wrangling (I mean, moderating!). We moved away from a chat on Twitter itself because of the regular issues faced with Twitter being down, search options not updating, and many finding too much other fun stuff on Twitter to talk about and dropping out of the chat. So, what do you think? Want to have the chats on Twitter, on a tool like CoverItLive, or something else entirely?

Volunteers

I’m happy to continue moderating and wrangling as a lone wolf, but I would really love to have a pack of volunteers working together. If we move to a weekly chat, perhaps we could split of up the month and have a different person leading the chat each week to distribute the work load. I also recognize that there are MANY people far more knowledgable and experienced than myself who would be great moderators and instigators on this topic. Please let me know if you’d like to be part of the team making #CommBuild a living chat again!

Anything else? What other ideas or suggestions do you have for the chat? Would love to hear from you! And, as always, thanks for all your feedback and participation both over the last year of chats and going forward!

Get the full archive here!

Some of the highlights discussed for engaging your community included:

• In terms of participation from community, we welcome posts and mentions with positive affirmations. Thank you’s and encouragement.
• It is also important to not the difference between goals and norms of participating. The trick is in trying to keep them synced up.
• @FNHC is doing it with their hub initiates, in my opinion anyways. Its messier and more time consuming but worth in in end
• I find that its critical to step back and help the community let itself emerge. Even the language used to enage has to be carefully crafted to avoid priming and group think
• I think that every community needs goals. Yes, think about the Starbucks communities. You know they want to sell coffee at the end of the day but they do much more than that.

Read the full transcript from the June event, and check out previous CommBuild Chats – hope to have you participate and share next month!

Join the next #CommBuild chat:

• Date: Thursday, July 21st
• 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 July!

Get the full archive here!

Some of the tools discussed include:

• Hootsuite
• Bit.ly
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Owly and htly
• Tweetdeck
• TweetWhen
• and so many more!

Read the full transcript from the April event, and check out previous CommBuild Chats – hope to have you participate and share next month!

Join the next #CommBuild chat:

• Date: Thursday, May 19th
• 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!

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!

Read the full transcript here!

Laura Norvig shared the guidelines used for their email listserv:

E-mail discussion lists hosted by the Resource Center are not moderated. Anyone who subscribes may post messages. The lists are supported with federal funding; therefore, messages that appear to be political in nature, partisan, lobbying, or in any way perceived as in violation of the law or against relevant government policy are prohibited. Other inappropriate postings include, but are not limited to, advertising of fee-based services or products, chain letters, jokes, petitions, resumes, and messages from individuals seeking employment. Job announcements are permitted only for positions at AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve America, and Senior Corps programs; at state commissions; with training and technical assistance providers; and at the Corporation. Announcements of member openings are also permitted. All other job announcements are to be posted elsewhere. Although the e-mail lists are not moderated, they are monitored. Subscribers who post inappropriate messages will be contacted and may be removed from the list if violations continue.

And Claire Sale shared the British Red Cross guidelines:

The British Red Cross values comments both complimentary and critical. However, we will not tolerate the following: aggressive or personal criticism of the blogger, breach of copyright, obscene, defamatory, profane, sexually oriented, racially offensive or likewise objectionable comments.

Check out the full transcript as we also shared a lot of ideas around moderating and engaging with negative commenters. What are your best practices or great examples?

Join the January Chat!

For details of the January 20th chat and for full archives of previous chats, visit the CommBuild chat page.

Review the full chat transcript!

Questions in the November chat:

1. Is it important to discern/clarify what a community expects to get from their participation in the community? Or is it OK if everyone is in it for different reasons? (From Laura Norvig)
2. What are examples of, best practices for, or learnings from engaging community members around various kinds of media, like videos and pictures instead of text? (From Mazarine Tryez)
3. What are online communities good for?

Community accountability:

Something I am really interested in is the way that we can support each other in growing and improving by being open about what we want to do and holding each other accountable as a community to be better all the time. At the end of today’s chat, I asked participants what they will share or do because of the chat and I’m sharing those highlights here:

• Laura Norvig: Storing up some ideas in my toolbox for future launch of online discussion boards. Posting more video to Facebook.
• Shalena Broadnax: Echoing Green is operating in a relatively new space for us—deepening our online community engagement. Setting expectations with our community will be key in the development of our new platform.
• Bonnie Koenig: The need to make discussions about technology to all members of the community.
• Ash Shepherd: I really liked the discussion around intentionally building flexibility into community expectations.

And as for me? I’m hoping to be more intentional and thoughtful in planning, promoting and executing the chats to build on the successful and rich conversations so far to make these community activities as positive as can be! I hope you’ll help me

Join the December Chat!

For details of the December 16th chat and for full archives of previous chats, visit the CommBuild chat page.

Recap: October

Get the October Chat archive.

Some of the examples and recommendations from this month’s chat included:

• UN Food&Ag Org (FAO) has done a great job with their Share Fairs – sharing the discussions and training on and offline. You can look at #sfaddis to see what they did recently from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia
• TechSoup Global has an upcoming Digital Story Telling contest, getting orgs to put together 60 second vid’s about what they do/who they are. We’re leading up to it providing webinars and chats, but will be hosting an awards mixed reality event in February. Second Life and IRL at TechSoup HQ in SF.
• The Community Organizers Handbook available as a public resource, you can certainly refer there for information/feedback/best practices on offline organizing: http://organizershandbook.wikispaces.com
• Video is such an inclusive medium. I personally love how it presents the opportunity to be involved in a community, sometimes in a real-time format, from a distance.
• The League of Women Voters of SF has found that making 1-3 minute (no longer than 5 min) videos gets much better pick-up online
• The Alliance for Climate Education makes presentations about climate change to high schools around the US. At the end of every presentation, they put up a slide where students can either 1) join their cause on Facebook or 2) text them to sign up. It works really well
• I recently watched Bioneers and some TEDx’s being streamed from a satellite location with local people – becoming my preferred way to participate. Smaller setting, still get the information, lower cost. Here’s a writeup on the talk Charles Baker from Meetup.com did last week @ TechSoup, might be helpful – http://blog.techsoup.org/node/1483
• I have also found that giving people specific roles is successful – empowering for them
• After meet ups online communication generally takes precedence and thats why its so important that both communities are connected
• I also think the immediacy of that communication is key, as well as presenting opportunities to get involved. I usually note the names of specific people who had interest or were good leadership candidates.
• and much more!

If you missed the chat or want to revisit it, access the full chat archive here.

Upcoming: November

The next chat will be in November. If you have a question or topic you’d like to discuss, be sure to leave a comment here so we can ensure it’s covered. The chat is just an hour long so be sure to submit your questions in advance!

Details:

• Date: Thursday, November 18th
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Topic: Community Building, of course!
• Location: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

About the Community Builder Chat

These monthly chats part 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 next time!

• Date: October 28th (I’ll be presenting at the Blackbaud Conference on the 21st so will move it to the 4th Thursday of the month)
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Chat: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

About the Community Builder Chat

These monthly chats part 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 next time

(Photo credit: ToastyKen)