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).

• Global Entrepreneurship Week – This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week! Find out how you can take part from wherever you are around the world! "Global Entrepreneurship Week takes place from 16 – 22 November 2009. It’s a worldwide movement of entrepreneurial people, with millions unleashing their enterprising talents and turning their ideas into reality."
• http://idealist.org/ICA/root/en/Static/TheVision/default – Idealist has shared a vision and a call to action: Imagine, Connect, Act. Saying that "It's time fo rthe world's idealists to work together (seriously)." I couldn't agree more! Check it out: "What if by looking at the world from a different point of view we can quickly build a network of people and organizations that will allow us to make the most of what each of us has to offer, online and in person? What you'll find here is a vision for this network, a path and a timeline to get there, and an invitation to be part of this movement from the very start."
• JPMorgan Chase: Chase and Facebook Launch Innovative Giving Program for Small and Local Charities – "For the first time ever, Facebook®: users will be able to choose from more than 500,000 small and local charities to decide which community organizations they want to receive donations totaling millions of dollars from a corporate philanthropy fund. Chase and Facebook today announced the launch of Chase Community Giving: You Decide What Matters, a grassroots campaign to inspire a new way of corporate philanthropy."
• Nonprofit Tagline Report: Getting Attention Blog – The updated guide shows nonprofits top tagline approaches for stronger messaging, and features a directory of over 2,500 nonprofit tagline examples for organizations to use in creating strong messages. "The 2009 Report provides everything an organization needs to jump start its tagline development process: Why a Nonprofit’s Name Isn’t Enough; How a Strong Tagline Benefits Your Organization – Useful for developing support among colleagues and leadership; The 10 Have-Tos for Successful Taglines; Using Words that Work; The 7 Deadly Sins, 9 Snores and 5 Best Ways to Antagonize Your Audience – What not to do; Research, Create, Revise, Test, Repeat – The right steps to take to craft a potent tagline." Download the report!
• Beth Asked a Question « A. Fine Blog – "Beth asked a question on her blog the other day: Do we have examples of using nonprofits using social media for: Volunteer or board recruitment strategy; Outreach or educational program delivery; Crowdsourcing ideas for program development; Professional development; Integrated in other areas? The answer is that there are a growing number of examples of organizations, and individuals, using social media as part of their programs not just part of fundraising and communications efforts."

—–

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!

This video brought tears to my eyes.  Okay, stop laughing at me, hear me out:

One guy can start a dance party.  One person can change the world.

What did this guy do right?  Lots of things that we can replicate in other areas of our work (though, I’d recommend following his lead with dancing, too!):

• Bring your heart: Your community will know if you aren’t creating opportunities for action or support that are from the heart of your mission.  Had this guy just been “going through the motions” then none of those others would have been inspired to join him.  We all get burnt out, whether we are dancing, canvassing, emailing or speaking for the changes we want to see happen.  If you feel like you need a new jolt of energy to be inspiring others from the heart of your mission, then reconnect with those you are serving, listen to their stories, share their stories, and in the process you’ll be inspired, too.
• Stay focused:  We all create goals and benchmarks and metrics.  But when we get down in the weeds of our projects and campaigns it is easy to take our eyes off the mission and direction we are headed.  Had this dancer been happy to recruit one or even a handful of other dancers, he may have turned around, talked with them, and maybe even stopped dancing to go hang out with these new friends.  But his eyes were on the mission at hand: dance.  He continued dancing with the same spirit and mission when he had no one with him, when he had one and a handful of others, and when he had a crowd.  Obviously measuring success and evaluating our programs along the way is crucial to reaching our goals, but staying focused on the mission is incredibly important so that we don’t get caught up in thinking we’ve reached the goal when we get a few others to dance with us.
• Empower the community:  We can’t change the world completely alone.  It will take the collaboration, support, and hard work of many people who will never be listed on your website, included on your payroll, or even meet you in person.  It’s important that your mission, your work, your message be something others can pick up and carry with you to help stretch your reach.  This dancer provided an opportunity for others to join him and in turn inspire others from their networks to join the cause, too.
• Choose your moments:  Timeliness is important, so is strategy and planning.  But when you nail something, when you give the community what they need, when they need it, you’re going to be successful.  How do you know what they need and when they need it? You listen, you participate, you join the community instead of watching it or trying to manage it.  We’ve all seen folks strike up a dance on a street corner and have witnessed that those people rarely inspire others to join them. Why? Because it isn’t what the passerbys really need or when they need it.  At this concert, out in the sun in a beautiful location (I miss the Pacific Northwest!), some heartfelt dancing is exactly what the community needed and right when they needed it, too.

Dancing my be contagious, but so is social change – go out there and dance with all your heart!

I big, heartfelt thanks to @EngageJoe for sharing the video

1. What ethical standards should nonprofits have when using new media tools, like blogs?

Amy also says that, “many nonprofits have the self-identified standard of working for the good and not for the man,” which can be applied to focus on the answer. As a nonprofit, working for the good, what elements of new media tools stand taller than the rest for ethical standards? How about: Raising community awareness and involvement. To do so would mean that your nonprofit’s website, blog, even videos are shared in a way that is available to the public and include features for commenting and connecting with you and others interested in your organization. Providing a safe environment for people seeking out information and services from your organization. This would require that your organization decides what kind of language and content is allowed in comments and other user generated content areas of your website, blog, etc. If you are an organization that deals with children, your guidelines for appropriate content could much more strict than an organization dealing with single adults. The limits are fine, wherever they fall, so long as they meet the goal of creating a quality environment for community.

2. Is the community you’re serving proud of the way it is represented online?

Terrific question! How best do you identify if you are serving your community well or not: Ask them, of course! There is a plethora of free surveying tools online that your organization could use to build a survey to send to your volunteers, clients, funders, etc. You can ask questions to identify if people know about your website, blog, forums, videos, online fundraising, or any other new media tool currently at use; ask about the current state of those tools and the frequency that the users reads or participates; most importantly, ask what can be done to improve services and community online both by improving the tools already in use and implementing new needed tools. Investigate what other organizations in your field are doing online. There are many organization working toward the same end; find an organization in another part of the state, the country, or even the world and talk about how it is using new media tools to connect and represent the service community online. You should also talk to organizations in your local physical community about how to better represent and serve the groups online, maybe even by connecting the organizations’ tools online. If an organization is having trouble successfully representing its service community online, getting the support of other area organizations can help bring its standards and tools up to a more appropriate level to garner more support and quality for its users.

These were two great questions, but I’m sure there are many more. What do you think?

Should bloggers align with journalists and the standards they (are supposed to) adhere to in order to gain the reputation that journalists have in the media and news realm? I think it can be a slippery slope in trying to answer questions like this one definitely for bloggers because the sphere covers such dynamic areas and niches that can’t be grouped together.

One of the greatest features of blogs is the ability for citizens to be journalists, organizations to have a voice, and people interested in similar things to connect. Blogging has opened up the communications avenues for nonprofits, especially small grassroots organizations, to garner supporters that are outside of the physical service area or who can help the organization grow and succeed who may have never found the group.

All right, so let’s really get to the nonprofit issue here: what standards should nonprofits have when using new media tools, like blogs?

Many nonprofits have the self-identified standard of working for the good and not for the man. The answer to the standards/ethics questions is pretty much summed up in that. Nonprofits, in blog posts, videos, and social networking profiles should always keep the community they are serving in mind. Is that community proud to be served by your organization by the way it is represented online? Are the issues you raise in posts, news you write about, and stories you relate to the world at large representative of the mission of the community and the community served (and often featured in that material)?

When creating your new media plan for your nonprofit organization, answers to those questions are important to consider. AND, if you are ever scrounging for material for a blog entry or video story for compelling new funders and supporters, staying true to your mission is an easy and ethical source for material!