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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)

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).

• Report Release: The 2010 Nonprofit IT Staffing and Spending … – "Nearly 1,200 nonprofit professionals filled out the latest annual survey, sponsored by NTEN and The NonProfit Times, providing us with another year of benchmarks and data concerning: salaries, outsourcing, recruiting, organizational structure, and other aspects of Information Technology practices in the nonprofit sector. One of the findings that stood out to us: Only 40% of respondents reported that their organization has some type of formal technology plan. And much less than that (22%) reported that their organization had ever evaluated Return on Investment (ROI) of technology projects or programs."
• World Bank’s Mapping for Results launched – Check out this deployment of the Ushahidi platform for digital storytelling and reporting: "This weekend at the World Bank annual meetings the World Bank launched their new Mapping for Results platform. The initiative visualizes the location of World Bank projects to better monitor project and impact on people; to enhance transparency and social accountability; and to enable citizens and other stakeholders to provide direct feedback. All 79 IDA countries, the lowest income nations, are included with the geographic locations of projects, financing, and sector identification such as water, transportation, governance, etc. There are also indicator data including maternal health, infant mortality, malnutrition, poverty, and population. The tool is meant to openly share and visualize the operations of World Bank financed activities down to as local a level as possible and compare these with actual need and monitor the effects over time."
• Conversation is the New Attention – "This article is adapted from their SXSW 2011 talk, Toss the Projector: Redefining the Speaker/Audience Dynamic. In the talk, Tim and Chris unveiled Donahue, a new experimental tool designed and built by Arc90 and Behavior Design which tears down the wall between audience and presenter, allowing the audience to interact directly with the presenter’s ideas to begin a conversation."
• 2011: The Year the Check-in Died – "Early last year, "checking in" was the cool new craze. No visit to your favorite tech news site could be had without getting buried in a tsunami of articles about Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, BriteKite or a myriad other startups. The big guys quickly followed suit: Yelp introduced "Check-Ins" while Facebook launched "Places" and most recently, Google Latitude updated to incorporate check-ins and check-outs. But here's the thing: the trends aren't actually that good."
• Hey, Let’s Fix The Internet – What do you think – can we change? Change the internet? Change the way we associated with others on and offline? This post has me thinking about many different perspectives on community organizing and community engagement and I'd love to hear what it triggers for you!

Get the chat archive!

The conversation in this month’s chat focused on these questions:

1. What are the best mechanisms for connecting online & offline communities? from @BonnieKoenig
2. How much communication with your online community is too much? from @ehon
3. our community has a handful of active posters creating most of the content – how do we encourage quieter members to contribute? from @anotheremma

Some of the highlights for me during our chat were the great, real examples shared of conversation starters and how to encourage new community members to engage. Are you looking for some new ideas to get conversation started with your community? Here are just a few of the ideas shared on the chat yesterday:

Kristy Graves @kg: Great one on Matador Travel’s facebook page, madlibs style: People should do more ____ and less _____.

@sueontheweb: Example of conversation starter: I shared one of my thanksgiving traditions with my cmty and asked members to share their traditions.

Claire Sale: I’ve seen some really great conversation starters by my local animal shelter – when the weather is good they ask “how do you get your pet to go out in the rain” and when the weather is good they ask “what is your favorite local place to take your pet out on a long walk” they also don’t hesitate to ask the same question twice (on two rainy days for instance)… not sure I’ve seen that before.

Get the chat archive!

Join the next #CommBuild chat:

• Date: Thursday, February 24th
• Time: 4 pm EST (1 hour)
• Topic: Community Building, of course!
• Location: Launch the chat here (not live until the chat starts)

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It’s not a surprise to any of us that social media is changing the way our organizations work, not just communicate. The lessons in social media are especially important for organizations working with the public, whether it’s public service or opinion. The Hatcher Group, a Maryland-based public affairs and communications firm, released a great report this past Fall called New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach Their Goals (PDF). Despite the generic title, this is a report chock full of examples, best practices and data about the effects of joining the conversation online.

The 30 participating organizations in the report are members of the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative, a group of independent, nonprofits with a shared commitment to responsible budget and tax policies. As such, it’s easy to identify some of the goals these organizations have for using social media, including: engaging with and even influencing the general [voting] public, influencing news, engaging with and influencing politicians and legislation, and sharing data, information or viewpoints. Social media is a prominent social gathering place where these goals can definitely be met. Joining the conversation is incredibly important if these organizations expect to change policy and change minds.

Joining the conversation really means conversations.

It’s not just a phrase or some insider lingo, when I recommend organizations join the conversation, I mean just that! People are talking online and the best way to influence what they are saying or how they are thinking about issues is to talk with them. The survey found that blogging and blog outreach was the most popular social media choice.

• 83 percent currently reach out to bloggers and the remaining 17 percent plan to in the future
• more than 93 percent now monitor citations of their organization in the blogosphere

Many groups included in the report maintained blogs (either on their own site or elsewhere), but what the numbers above (and the effects listed below) indicate is that you don’t necessarily have to create your own blog to join the conversation. It’s already happening, so go there!

Being an active member of the conversation pays off.

• 88 per-cent of the organizations said they had been cited in blogs as a result of their outreach efforts
• 64 percent felt that they had successfully affected blog coverage of an issue.
• 16 percent of the organizations were subsequently invited to submit guest-posts

Real-time is just as important.

Over half of the organizations surveyed reported that they do not use Twitter and do not intend to, with only 24% reporting use of the tool. This is a huge missed opportunity to influence public opinion, participate in the conversation, attract attention from journalists and policy makers, and more. Twitter is part of the real-time Web, meaning it enables people to communicate, share information, spread news, and distribute links in “real-time” as it happens. As more and more people join the micro-blogging platform Twitter, it becomes an even more relevant tool for organizations working on impacting legislation and connecting with voters. It’s true that with blogs, there’s a bit more time for responses to be prepared (and even approved internally) before posting. But, that should not stop organizations joining Twitter and empowering staff to leverage organizational talking points, resources and research to better information the conversations there.

One organization had particular success using Twitter to facilitate its state policy work. As the legislative session in the group’s state was winding down, things began moving at such a rapid pace that daily newspaper updates were not sufficient to inform and pro- mote its advocacy efforts.The organization found that following Twitter updates posted by reporters and advocates from the state- house was the fastest and easiest way to track legislative develop- ments.The group’s representatives were also able to update their Twitter profile to provide rapid-response statements.These short and timely statements sent out on Twitter caught the attention of local reporters, who then contacted the organization to solicit quotes for stories.

What do you think?

How has your organization joined the conversation online? Are there any tools or techniques in particular that have helped you find or contribute to the conversations taking place across the web?

(Download the full report in PDF: New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach Their Goals)

How can you create a strategy for your messages and campaigns in social media that respect this fact?  Here’s how!

This process is great to do as a team or as an organization.  If you have a room where everyone can sit, and an hour or two to bring everyone together, I really recommend you use this topic as an opportunity to hear what each department identifies and shares when working through the process below as the conversations that come up can be another chance to break down silos inside your organization!

On a flip chart or whiteboard (or if you are working through this by yourself, just use a piece of paper or a spread sheet on your computer) draw 4 vertical lines, creating 5 columns.  You may want to turn the flip chart sideways or use separate sheets for each column.

#1: Who are “They”

This column is for identifying all of your audiences.  Be sure to really consider this as there are probably many different groups, supporters, collaborators, or other audiences that you may not list right away!  It’s a great opportunity to bring different departments together to create a complete view of the organization’s audiences.

#2: What we Want

This is where you can list actions, knowledge, messages or anything else you want to give to your audience or have them do.  List these next to each audience group from the first column.  Remember that there could be more than one What we Want item per audience.

#3: How it Happens

In column 3, list how you deliver these messages or requests.  Are they online: in email, website, social media platforms (which ones?), etc.  Are they offline: at events, in your office, elsewhere?

#4: What they Want

Now it’s time to list what your different audience groups want from you!  Do they want information, support, value or recognition; maybe they want to be included, give feedback, share their stories or campaign on your behalf.  Again, there can be more than one What they Want per audience group.

#5: How it Happens

Just like in column 3, this column lists how these requests or exchanges can happen.

Stand back!

You’ve just created a map of all your audiences and how you and all of them can be sharing, conversing and campaigning in an aligned way!  The two “How it Happens” columns are great opportunities for evaluating which social media tools you are using for different audiences, something I’ve talked about on this blog before.  You can also easily see which messages and audiences naturally go together and which are separate.  And, if you did it as a team or full organization you can feel like you are all on the same page (or at least closer to it) by working through the process together!

What do you think?

How have you mapped your conversations and messages at your organization? Do you have any tips or suggestions you can share?  I’d love to hear how you’ve done it!

Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. I love comments on this blog. Why? Because every single one of them took thought, asks questions or adds to the conversation, and provides an opportunity for me to connect directly with all the smart people who read this blog.  I always (okay, 99.9% of the time) respond to comments via email and really value the exchanges that follow (whether they are on the blog or just in email).  I love this touch and go conversation so much that I want to take it to the next level!

2. I know you are smarter than I am. Why? Because I’m in a position by blogging away as I do to start conversations or serve as a convener for people looking to share ideas via the comments after blog posts but I’m not the one with all the answers or examples or tips.  We get all the good stuff when we come together and share.  So I want to do even more to create opportunities for that sharing and smartness to shine!

3. I’m ready to commit to this relationship. How? I’ve been blogging, facilitating, training, and collaborating with other amazing people in this space – technology and social change – for a while now and it’s no secret that this is my thing.  I’m not going anywhere.  I’m excited at the prospect of dedicating some consistent time to creating better dialogue for my readers and all of our colleagues!

Here the proposal:

Live weekly discussions hosted on this blog.

Who: You, me, and anyone else interested in listening or joining in.

Date: I am thinking Wednesdays because it is the day of the week I almost always am available without meetings or anything else.  I could be swayed by good argument for another day though.

Time: In order to get as many people as possible participating from the West Coast of the US all the way to Australia, well, I’m just not sure.  If it is 7 am in Australia, it’s 10 pm in London, and 2 pm in US Pacific.  That means we could all be awake, but 10 pm for me is not ideal for a mentally stimulating conversation!  What do others think?

Topic: I am open to just hosting, seeing who shows up, and having conversations as they develop organically.  Or, equally, having topics or even doing short presentations and then having conversation.  Or a mix.  What would you prefer? What would be most valuable to you?

We can start in September and give it a go for a while, evaluate together and continue iterating to co-create a valuable weekly conversation for all of us – that’s what community is all about, right?!

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts, ideas, and answers to the above questions to get some shape to the weekly discussion plan!