MDS11 helps to extend the concepts and ideas discovered in the annual Millennial Donors Survey conducted by JGA and Achieve. The summit is an opportunity to build a pool of knowledge for millennial engagement. By bringing thought leaders together for a day of knowledge and inspiration, the summit is the first step for organizations to build a new millennial engagement program and to begin a new shift in constituent involvement in their organization. Download the report by clicking here and visit millennialdonors.com for more information.

Participate in MDS11 and you’ll learn:
• Why engaging Millennials matters
• How to engage Millennials in your cause
• Implications of the latest nonprofit and consumer research on Millennials
• Employing social media to engage Millennials
• Leveraging the online experience with Millennials
• Incorporating the latest trends in mobile technology for engaging and giving
• Success stories and best practices from organizations that excel in engaging Millennials
• Explore real life implications of generational differences in engaging and giving

Check out the full agenda, get the Millennial Donor Study report, and register today!

I’m part of the blogging team who will be posting coverage of the sessions – notes, commentary, and reflections – throughout the day of the event. Be sure to check back on June 22nd to get content as it happens!

Vote today!

Here’s what the NTEN team said about voting:

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

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

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

• Communications
• Fundraising
• IT Staff
• Leadership
• Program

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

My sessions

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

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

Presentation:

Resource links:

• https://amysampleward.org/2010/05/07/guest-post-on-online-community-report-sustainable-community-building/
• https://amysampleward.org/2009/08/06/online-community-building-gardening-vs-landscaping/
• http://netsquared.org/camps
• http://350.org
• http://connectipedia.org
• http://socialbysocial.com

Game:

To play the game with your organization, team or community group, use the documents below to share the grid and other pages to print and cut out the playing cards. The Grid is used as follows:

1. Who is your community? Share everything you can think of!
2. What’s the sweet spot? This is the intersection or overlap of the community’s goals and your organization’s goals. What are you going to work on together?
3. What tools could help? This is where you’ll use the tool cards. Use 10 as the limit when you add up the numbers on the cards – those correspond to the equivalent capacity needed to support the use of the tool.
4. What roles are needed? This is where you’ll use the role cards. Remember that these are only some of the roles that may be appropriate for your project.

If you want to build a strong online community, getting the right platform in place is only half the battle, and it’s the easy half. In this peer-led discussion, we’ll share our experiences of online community building and build lists of best practices around recruiting new members and retaining them, increasing participation and moderating your community.

About Nonprofit 2.0

It’s a next generation conference in format. Ever attend a conference, for a keynote, and find the rest of the content to be wanting? NonProfit 2.0 delivers the best of both worlds, offering great keynote sessions led by Amanda Rose, Founder of Twestival,  but in an unconference way with no PowerPoint, 15 minute leads, and open questions and dialogue for fantastic conversations. Then from midmorning forward, NonProfit 2.0 shifts into a full-on Unconference.

Who is invited?
Are you working in the nonprofit community? Are you a an online advocacy guru, a fundraiser, or grassroots organizer? Perhaps you manage a communications team and want to dive into social media but you’re a little old school. This event is for you! We invite nonprofit staff and do-gooder consultants from a diverse array of fields to come join us at NonProfit 2.0. This includes people who work in:

• Online Advocacy and Outreach
• Grassroots Organizing
• Social Media
• Fundraising
• Communications
• Nonprofit Technology
• Nonprofit Consulting
• Public Affairs
• Programming
• and more.

What is an Unconference?

Following the keynote sessions – at 10:30 AM we start with a blank wall and, in less than an hour, with a facilitator guiding the process attendees create a full day, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone in the room. All are welcome to put forward presentations or propose conversations that you would like to have with others and:

• questions you want answered
• information you want to share/present
• a project you would like help on

As people register we will be posting proposed topics on our wiki.

What happens During Sessions?*
As sessions happen people volunteer to document the outcomes on a wiki (The notes of what was said is even better). Photos of any whiteboards are also important along with any slides that were presented.

End of the Day
At the end of the day everyone gathers in one place to share highlights of the day.

Register for Nonprofit 2.0 today!

The game will be similar in form to those you’ll find here: we’ll invent a place, break into groups around some social challenges or themes, then use sets of cards to plan how to engage people, choose social media tools, and work out how to fund the package. However, although the format is pretty standard, I’m sure the ideas will be highly creative. The cards and other props are there to stimulate conversation – and that always works.

We’ve tweaked the cards from the last play, as you can see below. Each card has an image (so they don’t all look the same), a description, and budget points from 1-3. The green budget points are for engagement cards, yellow for tools, red for funding. We’ll set a budget for green and yellow, that has to be matched by red.

I wanted to get this preview up so we can do a little promotion of the workshop, and also have an immediate link for anyone who asks where they can get the cards on the day. We’ll shoot some video and report back later.

The official Twitter stream is cr_event, and you should be able to follow tweets tagged #cr09 through a search here. Follow us, too! @socialbysocial

Social by Social game cards for Chain Reaction

1. A Gift Economy Event

This is how the myPublicServices conference team explains their ideas about the gift economy:

The web has already transformed the way we book a holiday, buy a camera, and share the snaps. Whole sectors – media, music, finance, publishing – are being turned upside down. But where is the impact on our public services? Why (with a few notable exceptions) are they still so top-down, so inflexible, so hard-to-reach? In sum, so last century?

This conference is about how that can – and already is – changing. It is about how the traditional public sector values of fairness, solidarity and equality are meeting the new networked values of participation, transparency and usability to create new services or add to old ones.

The web has created a new digital gift economy in which everyone can be a contributor and new kinds of public service are becoming possible.

It won’t all be top-down any more (and neither will this conference). We won’t be defined any longer just by what we need from the services we rely on, but also by what we have to give, and how we each can contribute to making our public services better.

This conference is about all that and more. There will be plenty of new ideas – but also plenty of practical examples of how people are already using the extraordinary gift of the web to improve, extend or challenge our public services to be the best they can be.

I think this is a really interesting perspective to build into a conference, especially one about public sector and social services.  I’ll be curious (and will report back after the event) about the kinds of gifts others bring to the event, whether they are workshops, skills, etc.

2. Social Reporting

I’ll be at the conference and my gift is some social reporting!  Along with my Social by Social colleague David Wilcox, we’ll be helping coordinate a team of folks doing video, live-blogging, interviews, tweets, and more!  David and I are really looking forward to it and have already started talking to some interested social reporters.  Visit the myPublicServices blog for more information and to get in touch!

What do you think?

Have you participated in an event that leveraged the gift economy like this? What was your experience – did it work? If you haven’t, what do you think we should watch for, what questions do you have?

What is Mobile Tech 4 Social Change?

Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Barcamps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.

Each event includes

• interactive discussions
• hands-on-demos
• collaborations about ways to use, deploy, develop and promote mobile technology in health, advocacy, economic development, environment, human rights, citizen media, to name a few areas.

Participants for Mobile Tech 4 Social Change barcamps include nonprofits, mobile app developers, researchers, donors, intermediary organizations, and mobile operators.

In short, Mobile Tech 4 Social Change camp is:

• A one-day event in London on May 23, 2009 at Vodafone
• An exploration of mobile technology to advance social development and social change goals
• Participatory and interactive
• Is open to anyone with passion and interest in the topic

Planners

• Daniel Applequist, Vodafone and Mobile Monday London
• Katrin Verclas, MobileActive.org

Participants

• YOU – register today!

Sponsors

• MobileActive.org
  

• Vodafone

• When: May 12, 2009. Panels run from 11AM EDT to 6PM EDT.
• Where: Everywhere via phone and web
• Fee: $10

Check out these awesome panels and sign up today. When you sign up for one panel, feel free to register for a couple more complementary – that’s right, it’s on us.

•    Social Media ROI
•    Women and Open Source
•    Tools Galore in Online Communications
•    Transparency and Government 2.0
•    Video Activism
•    Launching Your Own Startup
•    Breaking Through the Digital Ceiling
•    Tech Marketing in a Recession
•    Social Networks and Diversity Barriers
•    Innovation and Tech Career Reinvention
•    What Shirky Didn’t Tell Us
•    Feminine Mystique

Here are a few of the rockin’ women who will be joining us this year: Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Allison Fine of Personal Democracy Forum, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Charelene Li, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Holly Ross of NTEN, Rebecca Moore of Google Earth Outreach and so much more.

Don’t miss this year’s telesummitt. It’s a wonderful opportunity for our community to share our collective wisdom with inspiring stories and practical tools that help women professionally and personally and of course, change the world. Click here view the full panel descriptions and register now!

And, like last year we’re going to celebrate with a PARTY afterwards. Come out and hang out with Women Who Tech.  You’ll find us in Washington, DC, NYC, San Francisco, Atlanta, and London so save the date and come get your tech on with us. More details on the after parties soon.

Our sponsors help make this event possible.  A big thank you goes out to them.

FreePress, Democracy In Action, Rad Campaign, Convio, Care2, NTEN, Massey Media and Network Solutions.

Questions, comments? Email Allyson anytime at Allyson@womenwhotech.com. You can also reach out on twitter @womenwhotech or our Facebook group.

LONDON AFTER PARTY!

The WWT After Party in London is combined with the May Silicon Stilettos event – more ladies, more talk, and more fun!  To join us for the after party, you can RSVP here!  See you on Wednesday, May 13th at 7 pm!