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).

• Mattel to manufacture bald Barbie doll – HealthPop – CBS News – "Big news for the campaign for a bald Barbie: Mattel has agreed to manufacture a hairless doll. Mattel company spokesman Alan Hilowitz told HealthPop that the company will produce a friend of Barbie that will have wigs, hats, scarves and other accessories to give children "a traditional fashion play experience." The kids will have the option to remove the wigs and head coverings. The company stated that they will not be selling the dolls at stores, but instead will donate them to children's hospitals and other hospitals, as well as the National Alopecia Areata Foundation."
• Care2 Impact Prize | NTEN – A group of inspiring, talented people! Please help us select a winner for the Care2 Impact Prize! "We invite you to cast your vote to help pick this year's winner of the second annual Care2 Impact Prize, which recognizes individuals in the nonprofit sector who have made an outstanding impact on the field of online advocacy, online fundraising or both. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,000, plus $1,000 to donate to their favorite charity. The prize will be awarded on Thursday, April 5th at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, during the awards luncheon. The deadline to vote is noon (Pacific Time) on Monday, April 2nd. Any member of the NTEN community is welcome to vote, but only one vote per person, per IP address will be counted."
• Sharing photos online – a decision matrix for non-profit organizations : Social Media 4 Good – "Many non-profits, NGOs and International Organizations are of two minds when it comes to sharing photos on the internet. On the one hand, they want their material to be shared as widely as possible, on the other hand they want to have total control. The decision matrix in below will help you decide which photos to share and how."
• 2012 Top 100 Best NGOs by The Global Journal | The Global Journal – "The Global Journal is proud to announce the release of its inaugural ‘Top 100 Best NGOs’ list. The first international ranking of its kind, this exclusive in-depth feature will no doubt stimulate debate, while providing academics, diplomats, policymakers, international organizations and the private sector an insight into the ever changing dynamics and innovative approaches of the non-profit world and its 100 leading actors. Recognizing the significant role of NGOs as influential agents of change on a global scale, The Global Journal has sought to move beyond outdated clichés and narrow conceptions about what an NGO is and does. From humanitarian relief to the environment, public health to education, microfinance to intellectual property, NGOs are increasingly at the forefront of developments shaping the lives of millions of people around the world."
• UNICEF Uses Social Media Monitoring for Annual Flagship Report « Radian6 – Social media monitoring tools, social media engagement software and social CRM and marketing from the industry leader in social analytics. – "UNICEF dedicated the 2012 edition of its flagship report, The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World, to the situation of children growing up in urban settings. Almost half the world’s children now live in urban areas; the report calls for greater emphasis on identifying and meeting their needs. The goal of the communication strategy was to raise general awareness of the issue and offer information and facts for grassroots advocacy. Social media has become an integral part of UNICEF’s outreach strategy for main publications and campaigns."
• Simple Nonprofit Donor & Volunteer CRM & Email Marketing | Wishery – "Running a non-profit is hard work. With good tools and techniques, however, you can greatly magnify your impact – this post describes how to combine two great tools into a powerful yet easy-to-use donor and volunteer management system. While there are a variety of purpose-built donor and volunteer management systems available, they tend to either cost a lot of money, be complicated to implement and use, or both! The set-up described below is nearly free and refreshingly simple."

Introducing the Global Scale wiki!

Bonnie Koenig and I have had some great conversations about how we have seen and how we have tackled scale in our work.  In those conversations, we realized that we probably had some good examples to share and case studies to provide; but we also realized that there were many, many more people we wanted to be having the conversation with! That’s what led us to start the Global Scale wiki, and we hope that you’ll join us…

With this wiki, we are aiming to create a resource for NGO practitioners where guidelines, lessons learned, tips, links and other help for ‘scaling up’ effective programs can be found.

Today, we’re hoping that by sharing this invitation via the blogosphere (and the corresponding tweets and emails) that you’ll share your ideas and enthusiasm with us – and join us on the wiki. Check out Bonnie’s announcement, too!

Join & Contribute

This wiki is a community learning space, where we recognize that we are all still learning, testing, and experimenting; and where we are all in a position to share and learn.  We hope you’ll take this as an open invitation to jump right in with your own case studies, lessons or best practices and also comment if there are questions you hope others can address.

Visit the Global Scale wiki to dive in today: http://globalscale.wikispaces.com

Looking forward to sharing with you there!

—–

I truly believe that in all communications, information sharing, marketing and even community building there is a natural balancing between more-and-more-global and more-and-more-local. Social media may connect people around the world but it can also connect them locally.  Just as our tools get more interesting and dynamic for global collaboration and impact, so do they for locally-focused work, campaigns, and communities.

According to the Pew Neighbors Online study recently released, 27% of American adult Internet users (or 20% of adults overall) use “digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues.

The power of social media in a global context is two-fold: There’s huge potential with these news tools for real movement building, bringing organizations, campaigns and people together behind a movement and not just one brand or one call to action.  Global use of social media is also a great way to amplify voices, ideas, and stories.

The power of using social media in a local context focuses most directly on just those things that make “local” different: being “here,” connecting online and offline, taking action collectively and delivering services.

The opportunities for organizations to leverage hyper local tools include:

• Catalyze your community – be the catalyst behind community growth and collaboration.
• Fuel efforts or campaigns – target energy and capacity to promote and drive local impact.
• Build buzz and spread news – be the hub and resource for news and information.
• Get connected – be part of the community yourself by connecting with other organizations, community leaders, and individuals.

FourSquare

Estrella Rosenburg shares her case study using FourSquared in the 100×100 campaign on the Community Organizers 2.0 blog.  The Brooklyn Museum has done a lot with FourSquare, like sharing promotions and building visible community; check out the write up on the FourSquare blog or on the Museum’s site.

Meetup Everywhere

Meetup Everywhere is “an open and free internet platform for sparking Meetups everywhere about something. It’s only been out for a couple months and I think it has a bit more to go to be as dynamic and interesting as it really could be, but it’s a great way to see how easy it can be to inspire local action and interaction with your community. Check out the Meetup Everywhere site to see examples of how organizations and causes, like the Gulf Coast Benefit for Fisherman and Wildlife, are taking off.

Search

There are various tools for hyperlocal searching, and one I’m looking at recently is called Sency for Cities.  I think there’s a lot of potential for hyper local search and the power that comes with geo-tags/data. Creating a map or other aggregate of local resources, conversations, news and so on (even if it was done in a dashboard) could help your community and help position your organization as the hub.

Don’t forget the global context!

As you leverage tools for local impact, don’t forget the power they hold for going global. Continue to offer ways people who can’t be in your local community can contribute or spread the word, and even work on your behalf wherever they are.

What do you think?

What examples do you have to share? Is your organization thinking about using social media in a local context – if so, what are you working on and what questions do you have? Does your organization or local area have a case study to share? I’d love to hear it!

Note on platform: During last week’s Twitter chat, not unlike previous chats, we dealt with some major issues around lag and load time.  What makes a Twitter chat different than a blog post, for example, is that the conversation is 1. real time, and 2. co-created.  A blog post has, like this, one person writing it and sharing it at the end for comments.  That’s not to say that conversation can’t be incredible – but even then it is probably still not real time. I’m a huge proponent of blogs (obviously) but didn’t want to give up on the chat when Twitter was misbehaving. So, I turned to CoverItLive as it was a tool I’d used before and knew I could launch quickly. I hope that in the future we don’t have to turn to a back up/alternative, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about the use of CoverItLive this time!

What’s the point in using “global” tools (social media) for local organizing?

From @amoration: I find we’re always both global & local, so many of us travel frequently that virtual organizing tools are essential even for “local” endeavors

From @cosechajusta: I think part of it is just getting a message out there in as many formats as possible, so you reach as broad an audience as possible. Plus, sending emails, mass texts, etc is much quicker than doorknocking or cold calling folks.

From @rootwork: Well, I think it’s about going where people/supporters/potential supporters are. And in each local place, people are on different types of social media, some of which are global in scope. But that doesn’t mean you appeal to everyone on the planet every time you post on Facebook — you target your use of social media.

From @winwinapps: The fact that social media is forming networks and connections allows local to have more global influence.  But for now local is still something I use a map and a tank of gas to determine the limits of.

Best Practices:

From @davidahood: Still strongly believe that there has to be an element of face to face/on the ground connection to any successful engagement and mobilisation of any community. At the very least the key central organisers need to have close ties to local organisers so that there is a robust and well understood vision and objectives.

From @neddotcom: one strategy: ease of participation, make it easy.

From @davidahood: agree with @neddotcom. People want to take action on things that they care about – whether it impacts them directly or not. Our “job” is to facilitate that action and make it easier for them to participate. Inspire, empower and facilitate to take action. Social media makes that much easier.

From @rootwork: Social media is inclined toward leadership development — it’s built around people posting, blogging, photographing, videoing, etc. — so it’s good to play to that advantage. Figure out how to bring enthusiastic social media participants into the “inner circle” of planning & organizing.

From @winwinapps: Make it fun. Make the goal easily quantifiable.

From @pelleaardema: I do believe you could draw an ‘engagement pyramid’ for social media too. Not everybody needs to stick with the easy actions, some volunteers may be interested to set up ‘their own’ soc med campaign for your cause

From @neddotom: recap 1. easy 2. fun 3. overall goal 4. action oriented 5. decentralized/open

Tools:

From @rootwork: Facebook has been pretty effective at creating a place for discussion/strategy between events or meetings. Like I mentioned earlier, we use Twitter for live updates from events, and that’s been very successful — lots of positive feedback that people can follow along even if they’re not there. It works really well for a) hearings (legislative or municipal) and b) rallies or direct action. We haven’t used it as much at social events because it’s less clear what to “report” on.

From @pelleaardema: we use twitter, facebook to share what’s happening in the online forums, post announcements, invitations, etc.

Metrics:

From @rootwork: We’re a pretty small organization, with a small staff and budget, so I admit to not doing as much measurement as we should because of lack of time and staff resources. Mostly we measure it in whether we get positive feedback from our supporters and whether they seem engaged (commenting on stuff on Facebook, Retweeting, etc.). However I just found this great how-to on integrating Google Analytics on a Facebook Page, and hope to do that soon. http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/google-analytics-for-facebook-fan-pages/

From @pelleaardema: # followers, # retweets, # clickthroughs (bit.ly). also measuring the number of clickthroughs from these sources to the main site (via Google Analytics).

From @neddotcom: WRT measurement, developed term CPA (with friend Andy Bourland (RIP) at first Interactive Advertising conference Monterey 1997. Cost per action. Action = money, sale, clickthrough, unique visitor, download, lead generation, email address, form fill out, questionnaire, etc. Working with Seth Godin at Yoyodyne, we defined measurement as 1) email participants then 2) continued/ongoing engagement

From @davidahood: We tend to track email opening and click through rates, what percentage of people take action from click through and growth in numbers of fans/followers/members. Personally still have a lot to learn about analytics and starting to use more – mostly google. But not everything is measureable….   mostly talking about level/quality of engagement via social media and feedback. will tend to summarise and record most common responses and also a few key ones that might be unexpected for assessment at end of a campaign or activity. if you couldn’t tell already, I’m big on conversation. So I value the interaction I have with people which isn’t always measureable but is undoubtedly invaluable in terms of engagement – expected or otherwise. The most engaged people will sometimes come up with the most amazing and creative ways to take action or influence. A great campaign is one in which people are so engaged it just takes a life of its own. That’s why its important to be clear on vision, objectives and values.

Roles:

From @amyrsward: think in organizing and community building there are always some roles, even if they vary from group to group in how they operate: guides/navigators, campaigners, day-to-day folks, content creators, share-ers etc

From @jonasthanatos: Can communicate effectively.. is persuasive, convincing, has charisma. I think all roles in community organizing have a bit of “willing to try to change the world” in them.

From @pelleaardema: thinking out loud: content creators/organizers, a positive spirit (definitely needed), guide/leader…. and i guess some positive criticism can help as well. Usually generates a lot of energy

From @davidahood: I’d say you need someone who knows the issue inside and out (campaigner), someone who is a media and communications specialist, someone great with web, social media and other technology and someone to organise events and coordinate volunteers and engage directly with members of the community one on one (community organiser?). also helps to have someone who can focus on fundraising. of course, in smaller organisations, this may have to be only two or three people

Successful and Unsuccessful Examples:

From @davidahood: Greenpeace internationally had great success recently with the Nestle campaign getting Nestle to end deforestation in Indonesia for palm oil. The campaign was active online and on the ground in over 22 countries – all with a focus on Nestle’s head office in Switzerland. Social media used to engage local supporters to act globally.

From @pelleaardema: Looking at the local communities I know: a lot of NABUUR communities use twitter to reach out, keep their supporters updated. HAve a look at @arrowwebhosp for example: a slum hospital in Nairobi

From @pelleaardema: we’ve tried to set up a twitter chat to answer concrete questions from local communities in a short timespan. That was not particularly successful. A lot of effort to get pple into the chat, then a lot of confusion, hard to manage the discussion and no concrete outcomes

From @rootwork: We tried to do some end-of-year fundraising through Facebook and Twitter. I think we got $20 But we didn’t plan it out very well, so I think it was more a failure of thinking through an effective strategy than an inability for those tools to enable such a thing.

From @pelleaardema: some NABUUR volunteers recently tried to fundraise for 400 malaria nets, via Twitter and betterplace.org. I think the lack of background on blog etc lead to them raising about 1/3 of the budget. Support info is very important. and good timing indeed

From @rootwork: The Media Mobilizing Project has done a lot here in Philly connecting community organizing to social media and especially video — community media trainings, organizing people to interview each other, etc. http://mediamobilizing.org/ VozMob is another great example of this, organizing immigrant communities in Los Angeles, using mobile phones, photos and video http://vozmob.net/en/about

From @neddotcom: Thomas Kriese as community manager of the now closed Omidyar.net was a great example of quite, decentralized leadership style helping guide a community to make real things happen in the world. Dozens and dozens of community lead projects happened around the world during the networks 3 years.

From @davidahood: San Francisco Zoo has done a wonderful job and engaging and supporting their community. http://www.sfzoo.org/openrosters/view_homepage.asp?orgkey=1859 It all started with one guy at the zoo (his name escapes me) who wanted to connect more meaningfully to all the people coming to see the animals. People now share videos and pics and are great ambassadors/advocates for the zoo and it’s program.

From @pelleaardema: A very small, local initiative: 3 community projects in Uganda, trying to conquer malaria http://twitter.com/TweetANet

Follow #4Change on Twitter or check out the #4Change blog to join the monthly conversations.

This new white paper captures just a few of the stories and the qualities that make up the special place where we all come together. Whether it’s small communities coming together offline to train and share knowledge about using technology or it’s innovation projects competing in the same contest working together instead – we hope you’ll find this short paper compelling and share it with your networks. We hope you’ll add your story to the mix, too!

You can download the paper directly here.

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).

• URGENT: Facebook Pages are changing | facebook | social-advice- Advice for charities – More information about changes coming to Facebook – this time it's more changes in the way Fan Pages function. A great read if you have a fan page for your organization as these changes are said to go into effect in early 2010.
• Debating the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference – "Over 1,000 young people from 100 different countries will gather online to debate climate change. This is the largest single ongoing panel of discussions outside of the conference itself and the range of young people involved gives it an unmatched reach. This unique project will allow young people from vastly different countries to get involved in probably the single greatest challenge the world faces. Israelis will get together with Iranians, Americans with Afghanis, Sudanese with Singaporeans and they'll discuss what to do about climate change."
• Click For a Cause | Conduit – Conduit's Gives 2010 project offers $3.6 Million for 100 Nonprofit Organizations! "Since 2005, hundreds of thousands of web publishers have used the free Conduit Platform to increase engagement, grow web traffic, and drive revenue. We are now putting that experience to work with Click for a Cause to help struggling non-profits to engage and energize their communities in order to increase participation and ignite fundraising efforts during this difficult economic time."
• Social Media Today | If the Army Can Put Its Doctrine Up On a Wiki, You've Got No Excuse – "A few weeks ago I had the privilege of watching an astounding event – a room full of Soldiers typing Army doctrine onto a wiki so that Soldiers in the field could make changes as they were discovering new and better tactics in the midst of fighting a war." This is a great case study for anyone looking for support in those hard buy-in conversations…
• George Weiner: Will You Marry Me? What Not-For-Profits get Wrong on the Web – "The "Will you marry me?" (WYMM) syndrome turns every online messaging opportunity into a nail begging to be hit with the donation hammer. I can point to dozens of orgs that create sites that are essentially fundraising brochures with donation buttons and paragraphs about the history of the organization. There are also not-for-profits that take the WYMM mistake beyond web sites and into their social media strategies, advertising opportunities, newsletters and partnerships."
• Women, Social Media and Influence (cont’d) « A. Fine Blog – If you haven't seen the two recent posts from Allison Fine about women and social media, you should join in the conversation! She's posed some very interesting questions and shared some of her ideas – but most importantly there are lots of comments that are just as critical, thought-provoking and interesting! Do join in!