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Whether it’s political or personal, global or local, funded or a grassroots effort, organizations and communities are campaigning for change in many ways, all of the time. Unfortunately, there are times when we lose focus on our ultimate goals for change and instead fixate on the campaign itself or let a concept for engagement overshadow our real calls to action. When we do that, we can compromise the relationship we have with our supporters and donors, and limit our capacity for building momentum towards action and a movement for our cause. But, it doesn’t have to be that way!

Start with Metrics

When building a campaign and exploring your options for the structure, actions and engagement pieces, look first at your organizational metrics. What do you measure every day, week, month, year? What do you point to when funders, donors, board members and the community ask if you are making a difference? How do you evaluate your programs and services? Those metrics and goals are the best resources for identifying the focus and the calls to action for your campaign.

For example, if you are an organization working on public education policy changes, you probably recognize teachers as a core demographic to your work – both in supporting the changes you propose as well as helping identify the changes that can and should be made. Maybe you want to run a campaign for awareness around one of your proposals and want to showcase teachers in the process. Asking supporters to take an apple to their teacher may sound like a fun call to action – it engages students and parents in any grade level, is a simple and straightforward ask, and has teachers at the center. But how does it help you move closer to your goal?

Instead, what if you asked students to finish the sentence “My teacher deserves an apple because…” Whether people respond with pictures, video, or text you have engaged them at the same degree as you would have with the apple, but you also have all of those responses that you can aggregate and share back in real time, bubbling up the energy of all those participating and following along. You also have media of various kinds that you can use in messaging, calls to action, and in the advocacy for your work in front of teachers, administrators and ultimately policymakers.

Revisit your Story

What’s your organization’s story? You have one. It’s the story you tell in a grant application, on your website, in an elevator, and to a room of volunteers getting ready to help you with a project or event. As much as your goals and metrics will help you identify the actions your campaign can focus on, your story helps you identify where the campaign fits in your work and how to position it to the community and the world at large. How are you using your story to engage people around the campaign specifically and your work as a whole?

For example, using that same organization from the example above, perhaps our story is that the community has all the resources teachers and schools need to be successful, if only there was more coordination and access to those resources when they were needed. As such, a campaign that reinforces that story by asking for people to register resources in their business, home, or local community instead of just donate.

Campaigns in Action

I want to use two real campaigns to reinforce these two points. First, is the Kiss Malaria Goodbye campaign:

Metrics – It’s easy to see what the ask is. But it’s hard to see from the perspective of someone coming across the campaign website how responding to that call to action will make a difference. And ultimately, we take action to be part of something as we already have plenty of opportunities to take and share video, photo and messages with our friends or the world at large. The action of sharing a kiss doesn’t seem to align with the actions needed to get rid of Malaria.

Story – The action is aligned with the story of “kiss Malaria goodbye” but that is, ultimately, just a slogan. The story here is of how 1 child dies of Malaria in Africa every 45 seconds. Perhaps the campaign could have been anchored in that fact and asked people to make a 45 second or less video to get involved.

The next example, is 350.org and their Days of Action:

Metrics – The campaigns 350 runs are centered on numbers: both the number 350 (ppm) as well as the sheer scale of participants that can be involved in a collective action. Both are powerful. They reinforce the call for legislative action to bring the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere back down to 350 ppm in everything they do by encouraging participants to use the number in their messages and to take/post images and videos of the actions organized in major cities and tiny villages around the world.

Story – 350.org’s story is that our changing climate and toxic levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are affecting everyone on earth. As such, their messages and calls to action are geared at showcasing diversity and participation from all corners of the planet.

Your Opportunity

Your supporters take action because they share your vision – or at least a piece of it – and want to join you in making change. Don’t let your call to action diminish the potential you and your community have for changing the world!

Photo credit: Flickr leehaywood

Last month, Joe Solomon shared on the NetSquared Blog what he hopes is our reflection on 2011 a year from now, focused on a year full of empowering and harnessing organizers. I wanted to take a few minutes today to share my 3 Goals for 2011 – I’d love to hear what others you’d add to the list!

How can we build a better sector? 3 Goals for 2011

For me, for you, for all of our organizations; and for the sake of this world we are trying to improve!

Please note, and this is key, that these are goals for the people operating in this space. As much as we love technology, it isn’t anything without people creating it, using it, changing it, and evolving it.

Find and talk to others using the same tools

We can learn a whole lot from each other. Seriously.

Coming together to talk about tools with others who use them can also mean a louder, more unified voice in requesting changes to those tools. When one organization says they want the software or platform to work differently, it’s a nice feautre request email that may even get a “thank you for the input” message in response. But when hundreds or more organizations can all say they want a change, the message is so much louder!

Share failure and success

This isn’t a new idea. Many people have talked about how we need to, and many have even shared how they have failed, and how they’ve succeeded. But I hope we can go deeper both in what we share and how we listen. When we are talking to others about our work, our projects, campaigns or tools, what if we shared more of the “why we did it” and “how we made it happen” instead of which tools, and which messages? What if we moved from sharing which tools, tactics or campaigns were “fails” or success to a focus on sharing which strategies worked or didn’t work.

Put questions before answers

Instead of leading with answers, let’s start focusing on the questions we can ask each other, ask of funders, ask of our communities, ask of ourselves. There’s great opportunity to learn and collaborate when we approach conversations with the lens of discovering what really worked, what is really possible, and where our impact is needed. And then if we keep a mission-critical focus, wow: Big things are possible!

What do you think about those goals? What are the goals you have for funneling your frustrations into real action?

My Focus for 2010

Collaboration: This year will, as they always seem to do, build on some of the major developments last year.  In my view, that specifically means I’ll be focusing even more on the opportunities for, technologies that support, and issues involved in collaboration (across organizations, across sectors, across geographies).  There are some great examples out there that need to be highlighted and examined.  There are also many technologies, whether they are tools or approaches or actual platforms, that are working to enable collaboration and I’d like to do more to highlight those with interviews and reviews.  Lastly, I want to create some open spaces for people to not just cheer for collaboration but also examine and explain some of the issues and barriers that organizations, individuals, campaigners or community members face when trying to approach collaboration.

Community:  As much as I see collaboration as the key to success, I also community as the core of every sector, every campaign, and every movement.  This year will, I think, provide some great opportunities to compare, contrast, explore and analyze the differences and nuances of communities defined as:

• communities of practice
• communities of focus
• communities of cause
• communities of geography

Through continued work on Social by Social (expanding it to be even more useful as an out-of-the-box resource and toolkit), speaking and participating at conferences, and the conversations on this blog I think we will have some very interesting ideas to explore about community!

Your Focus for 2010

Now it’s your turn!  Writing a blog can be a lonely adventure but I’m so very thankful that you as the community of readers and commenters and conversationalists have kept me from ever feeling like I was alone in the conversation.  And I want to keep it that way!  So, let me know what you’re focusing on in 2010 so that I can have your ideas and highlights on my radar, too.

• What are you focusing on at work that’s new?
• What are you focusing on at work that isn’t new but you wish was?
• What are you focusing on that you wish you had more resources about?
• What tools, strategies or issues do you want to discuss?

I’m really looking forward to all that unfolds in 2010 and to all that we can explore together.  Thanks for all your contributions!

I’m always weary of posts that claim to pronounce the 10 Best Things You Can Ever Do, or 7 Steps to Success, or any other lofty achievement wrapped up in just a number of items.  But, that doesn’t stop me from doing it myself!  Though, in these 5 steps, you’ll see there is a lot more to do, think about, and work on – no quick tick-off on this list!

Social media, as many have said time and again, is only part of your campaigning, part of your fundraising, and part of your communications.  It isn’t something that lives in its own department, nor does it have staff that are separate from the rest of the organization.  Just as the content distributed and conversations participated in are integrated into many different aspects of your organization’s work, so should the knowledge, access and responsibility to participate be integrated across your staff.

With all that being said, let’s dive in!

These 5 Steps are intended to help you create a successful social media strategy, but as you will see, they focus on your organization’s overall strategy!

1. Goals & Objectives

Evaluate your goals and objectives, as an organization.  You will not be able to identify tools and engagement methods for your organization online without knowing the bigger picture and without knowing it in concrete goals that will let you build and work towards them.  Hildy Gottlieb’s Pollyanna Principles are a great place to start if you want to learn more about how you can evaluate and identify your organizational goals (and larger view) in a way to successfully design projects, programs and even partnerships for real impact.

For more resources on goals & objectives:

• The Pollyanna Principles
• My review of The Pollyanna Principles

2. Capacity

Before sitting down to work on your social media strategy, evaluate what kind of capacity you already have in your network.  Things to consider include: staff knowledge and experience with different tools as well as other internal knowledge or previous work experience.  It’s also a good idea to evaluate the capacity (especially if you think collaboration or partnership is an opportunity) of related organizations.  Lastly, consider what other organizations, companies or campaigns in your sector have already done!

For more resources on capacity evaluation:

• Social by Social’s How-To archive
• How-To “Find out what’s already been done”

3. Strategy

Now it’s time to focus in on the meat of this post, the actual “social media strategy” part—apologies for making you wait this long!   But, there’s a catch: it’s another 5 steps!

1. Identify the audience or community you want to engage.
   This includes thinking about who you are already communicating with and how, as well as what groups you want to start communicating with who you currently aren’t including.  Who you want to talk to, listen to, and create a community with is the foundation for everything else you do with social media tools because it is what ultimately decides the success or failure of your other decisions—if you base your timing, tools, and process around those you want to be a part of your work, then you’ll be a lot more successful than if you pick tools you like when it’s convenient for you without considering the community you want to use them.
2. Identify the resources currently available within your organization. Resources include staff knowledge and comfort with different tools, experience levels of staff working with supports, volunteers, and the public, staff with time available, staff with appropriate job duties to include social media, available budget for training or workshops, etc.  Often, we forget that because the actual application/software/tool may be free, really using it is not.  What we put into our social media engagement is what we get out of it, like everything else in life.  If you only have an hour a week to post to a blog, then it is unreasonable to expect a lively conversation and community emerging from it, at least not very quickly.  By evaluating what resources you already have on hand in the organization, you are much more prepared to fully examine your options.  And remember, sometimes you assumptions about social media use and your staff can be way off!  There is something out there for all of us, and more and more people around the world are engaging online, so don’t assume that it’s only your college intern who knows how to use these tools!
3. Identify what success will look like. This is really helpful in order to evaluate the appropriate tools for your work.  If you want to create a space for volunteers and potential volunteers to share their knowledge and experiences with each other you are going to need very different tools than if you want to create a space for volunteers and potential volunteers to share that information with you.  It’s also important to remember that social media is a changing space, with tools and applications, even functionality, evolving every day.  So, your definition of success has to be flexible to the changing times and the changing needs of your audience.
4. Identify what technologies are most appropriate. Now that you know who you want to communicate with, who and what you have to work with in your organization, and where you want to go with the relationships, you can identify some tools to start exploring.  There are lots of blogs, directories, and lists available online to help you get started picking tools that match your goals.  One great way to help guide you in the process of identifying and selecting the most appropriate technologies is to ask your community!  What are they using now?  How would they like to engage with your organization?  Explain what success looks like to you and ask how they would go about getting there!
5. Identify what measures of success can be used. You know who and what, and you identified where you want to go, but before you dive in you also need to establish how you can measure and monitor activity from day 1 onward.  This includes things you are probably looking at already like the number of visitors to your website and subscribers of your emails; but, it also includes metrics based on the funcationality of the tools you choose and how you identified success.  If you are using a forum, then measuring the number of replies to post (or, if your forum allows voting, then the positive feedback on posts) could be appropriate, as well as the ratio of people signed up vs posting vs replying, etc.  It’s incredibly important for the success of your work to evaluate how things are going throughout.  If something isn’t working to the degree you had hoped, it’s okay!  Identify that issue, and correct it with either an alteration to the current tool or set up, or by shifting the group to a different, more appropriate tool.  Just be sure to openly communicate your evaluations, ask for feedback (”Do you see what we see?”), and explain any changes well ahead of time.

For more on building your social media strategy:

• Read the full post with the 5 Steps from above
• Review the POST Method
• Review the Social by Social Handbook (read for free online, or buy)

4. Feedback

Be sure that you create mechanisms for feedback and input throughout your process and throughout whatever you “build” or use (whether it’s a social networking space, a website, a blog or anything else).  You need to provide opportunities for your community, as well as your staff and any others participating on the “administrative” end of the operations to share ideas.  The best way to approach this is to create feedback opportunities that are “evergreen” or always available, like a contact form or address, a public forum, or commenting; and opportunities that are “seasonal” or based specifically on an event, idea, opportunity, etc. (like a blog post about possible functionality that could be added to the site, asking for feedback and ideas or even voting on the options).  Remember, though, that there is no point to asking for feedback and letting your community suggest their ideas if you aren’t going to listen.  More often than not, the community knows what it wants much more than you do, so listening is key!

For more on feedback and listening:

• WeAreMedia’s Listening Toolbox
• Social by Social’s How-Tos

5. Evaluate

Just as part of the social media strategy process in step 3 above calls for evaluation, so does the overall process.  Evaluation in this step is focused on the higher level:  how have your networks grown or changed? are there new opportunities for partnerships or collaborations? are there new opportunities for empowering your community either in different roles within the social media/online space or in other areas of your organization?  do you have stories of volunteers, staff, community members, or those you serve that could be sharing their stories in new or different ways to highlight your impact? And more!

For more on evaluation:

• Social by Social How-Tos
• WeAreMedia’s ROI Toolbox
• Liveblogging notes from Beth Kanter’s NTC session on “Mapping your social media strategy to metrics”

Then…repeat!

As with most everything else, it’s all a cycle.  You will always be revisiting your goals, your community needs, the options for tools and how to evaluate your work.  Continuing to keep the cyclical process moving, though, means that you will ensure that you give your organization all the opportunities to possible to improve it’s work and further it’s impact.  This is one self-perpetuating cycle that’s good for you!

What do you think? What lessons have you learned from designing social media strategies in your organization? What did I miss?  Looking forward to your conversation!

My presentation concentrated on a few case studies where certain technologies were the appropriate tools for engagement and aided work to connect, empower, and educate youth communities.

There are really just so many great examples for this topic.  If you are looking for more examples about social media and communications technologies applied to youth empowerment, here are some additional links/groups to check out:

• http://bom411.com (social media used as outreach about teen dating violence)
  
• “huge forum success via virtual worlds (e.g. Habbo’s InfoBus re: curbing violence against gay teens; developing understanding via the Matthew Shepard Foundation visiting ‘in-world’ or the War Child Int’l foundation partnership to focus in-world on kids impacted by violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda etc. (they hosted a cool “virtual Global Peace” gathering inside their world to coincide w/last fall’s UN discussion of same: http://tinyurl.com/ngzfxm)” – from Amy at Shaping Youth
• http://www.myspace.com/invisiblechildren
• http://www.myspace.com/oxjam
• http://geturvoiceheard.co.uk
• http://engage.wesharestuff.org/
• www.publicmattersgroup.com/about.htm
• www.marketmakeovers.org
• www.vimeo.com/publicmatters
• headspace: The National Youth Mental Health Foundation in Australia

After the case studies, I focused in on two aspects of the strategy building that are most important:

The Audience – if you do your research (even if you are “sure” you already know), you can identify your audience, those you already talk to and those you don’t. You can figure out how best to communicate, and how (both the medium and the words).  You can see more about this in the slides above.

The Goals – yes, we all want to, in this case, fight knife crime; but that’s not our goal.  Take the time to identify your goals focused on living in and inviting youth to co-create a community without knife crime.  There is more about goals in the slides above.

If you would like to view the presentation above with the speaker notes included, click here.

What do you think? Has your organization tackled issues in the youth community and used new technologies to support your work? Share your story – we’d love to hear it!

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Hildy Gottlieb’s new book The Pollyanna Principles is a handbook for starting a revolution in social benefit organization design and practice, but it isn’t the revolution. What’s the catch? Well, it is going to take everyone, whether you are part of an organization or receive services from one, whether you are a philanthropist or a volunteer, whether you work for a for-profit business or are a community member. For social benefit organizations to truly “work” we all need to be part of the design, the process, the success.

“When we assume we are separate, we build systems that reinforce that separateness.  When we assume we are interconnected and interdependent, we build systems that reinforce those connections.

The Six Pollyanna Principles

There are six core statements that represent The Pollyanna Principles and they include:

1. We accomplish what we hold ourselves accountable for.
2. Each and everyone of us is creating the future, every day, whether we do so consciously or not.
3. Everyone and everything is interconnected and interdependent, whether we acknowledge that or not.
4. “Being the change we want to see” means walking the talk of our values.
5. Strength build upon our stengths, not our weaknesses.
6. Individuals will go where systems lead them.

The Pollyanna Principles boil down to a similar premise I have blogged about before: we are creating organizations that

1. are vested in the social issues they work towards ending in such a way that they require those issue to persist
2. are built in a bubble
3. are consistently missing opportunities to succeed by operating like a business (with competition) instead of as a living part of the community.

You can find previous blog posts (with great conversations in the comments) here, here and here.

Why I’m excited about The Pollyanna Principles

We have a huge opportunity before us to remodel our social benefit organization structure. There is so much talk both online and offline, from inside organizations and from outside, that “nonprofits are broken.” We’ve done step 1: admitted that we have a problem. Now, what?  Well, as Hildy explains, we need to start driving our work with our vision of how we want the world to be, instead of what the problems are before us. What does that mean? Well, imagine that your organization said you wanted to have a public education system in your state that provided opportunities for all students to learn, fair pay for both teachers and staff, opportunities for growth for students, teachers and staff, and an entry point for all students to enter the “real world” prepared. You can imagine that by operating under that vision (instead of focusing on drop-out rates, teacher pay scales, or job skill training) that partnerships with the community, new opportunities for learning exchanges and career paths, and much more start to take shape organically, naturally.

Collaboration is a huge focus of mine: Finding ways for organizations working in the same sector to share calls to action to amplify the impact, helping organizaitons understand where their work aligns to cross pollinate across their networks, and so forth. Reading the Pollyanna Principles was like finding a twin I had been separated from at birth!  But, that isn’t to say it’s the complete conversation. This is truly a great starting place from which we can all move the conversation forward.

There are still many questions I have and that I imagine all organizations, boards, volunteers, community members will have when they read the book. But I want to, am ready to, ask those questions and answer them as a community. Questions like:

• How do we truly create community planning opportunities as funders that include all members of the community when the “community” of interested people is often limited to the grantee pool?
• How do we begin to change the cultural view of nonprofits in society/by the community so that the public, those who use the services or are otherwise affected by nonprofits’ work can have a stake in the responsibility to create organizations making real change and all of the community is shaping its future?
• How do we help organizations redefine their “community” to understand the entire ecosystem in which they operate?
• And many more…

What’s Next
The Pollyanna Principles is about social benefit organizations, but it’s really about community. Community is the most important thing to me, and I truly believe that we can’t create any amount of change, any amount of real world impact, or any lasting effects without participation, ownership, and shared responsibility by community members in the work these organizations do. This means we have to have community members represented in building and implementing an organization’s work, as well as building grant programs from funders. We need to have those receiving the services and those delivering them in constant collaboration.  We need people in the community to expect organizations to succeed and take a stake in making sure they do.

So, what’s stopping us from doing this? Hildy says it’s the Culture of Can’t that we are all accustomed to operating within that holds us back.  Can we move to the Culture of Can? Are we ready? What are the Can’ts holding you or your organization back?

I’m ready to start: to start asking questions and coming up with answer, to think and share collaboratively, and to really focus on the vision we share for a better world and work towards that goal instead of focusing only on the problems – are you?  I’d love to hear your ideas!

You can learn more about The Pollyanna Principles at: http://pollyannaprinciples.org

Visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog to join the conversation there, too!