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I recently had the opportunity to present a webinar for the National Center for Media Engagement, focused on community-driven engagement, and present a session at the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, talking about building a social media strategy. Both of these presentations had participants primarily from the public media sector. There were some similarities and differences in both the questions and perceptions around engagement and community. I normally separate my post-presentation blog posts and slides but think it will be valuable to group them together this time.

Defining Community

One of the biggest barriers to sharing our experience and knowledge, and learning as organizations is the belief that we are all so different we can’t actually share or learn from each other. A great example of this is when we talk about working with our communities. To talk about what community means, it’s often helpful to also talk about what community is not: You’ll notice that none of the words on the graphic above say “audience” or “service area”; that’s because all three sections – the community, network, and crowd – are part of your station’s service area, or your organization’s audience. We are not actually engaging with every member of our service area, we don’t know who they all are or what they all do. The people who donate, listen in, connect with our programs by calling in, reading or commenting online, and coming to our offline events are our community. Their friends, colleagues, coworkers and family are the network – the people we reach through our community. The network knows about us but isn’t yet directly connected – maybe their friend told them about a story or a news segment they heard on our station, or they have family members that attend an annual concert. And the crowd is everyone else; yes, they are part of your service area or your “audience” but you haven’t reached them yet. Just because everyone in New York, the US and the world can subscribe to the New York Times, does not mean that the world is the community.

Engaging Community

My NCME webinar focused on community-driven engagement. Using the definition above, the point of the webinar and discussion was to talk about ways that organizations (of any kind) can create opportunities for the community to decide, organize, orchestrate or otherwise fuel engagement. Some of the questions raised in the webinar chat focused on the role of public media organizations as content creators and how community-driven engagement fits in the work they do. I was pleased to see that the responses I gave on the webinar were echoed at the PMDMC conference by the Friday keynote presentation from American Public Media’s Jon McTaggart. The questions he raised include:

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is our community directly informing the services we provide?
• is our whole community involved with our station?
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are we providing something unique and distinctly valuable to our community?
• what other organizations have a vested interest in the success of our station?
• what do we do that has the whole community talking?

Let’s focus on that first question for a moment: is our community directly informing the services we provide? How is your station creating ways for the community to actually inform the services or programs or content you provide and create? What options do you provide to your community to have share responsibility or ownership for a service, program, or event? How does the community see their impact and influence on your station?

Using Social Media

Many public media organizations are looking to use social media as a way to have conversations directly with community members. Some are using tools like Twitter or Facebook to invite listeners to a post-segment conversation with reporters, moving them from a passive action (listening) up the ladder of engagement to an active action of commenting and discussion. While many organizations of all kinds face the struggle of convincing staff or leaders that social media is worthwhile, many stations are tackling the opposite end of that spectrum, with widespread adoption without any strategy or plan.

The PMDMC conference had a 4-part social media track. My presentation was the first in the series, setting the foundation for using social media. In the presentations section of this post you can follow how to set up a community map, content map, and basic tracking documents; and templates for all of those are in the resources section below. Once you’ve decided you are ready to start exploring how social media can benefit your station, even if you only have 30 minutes a day, here are a few steps to guide you:

1. Start Listening

You can’t know where you want to be or what topics are of interest to the segments of your community using social media unless you start by listening. You can use RSS to subscribe to searches on Twitter even without an account, set up Google Alerts to receive notifications via RSS or email when your station, reporters, segments or programs are mentioned online, and track the blogosphere for people talking about your content.

2. Start Joining

Once you have a feel for who’s talking about what, where, start joining them by leaving comments on the blogs, pointing to content or discussions from your station’s website or blog, and so on. Don’t feel like you have to think of something to say, simply use what you’re hearing in your listening online to reply and join the conversation.

3. Start Creating

After you’ve listened and started joining in, you can now start creating profiles that have a goal and strategic use to compliment the rest of your communications and engagement work. Remember, even once you get to this stage, you never stop listening or joining. Just because you have your own profiles now, doesn’t mean you can stop listening to the community or replying and commenting. The 2-way engagement of social media is especially important to honor for public media organizations looking to create and sustain supporters.

Here’s a quick video interview I did with Annie Shreffler:

Presentations

Resources

Templates:

• Community Map Template
• Content Map Template
• Metrics Template

Books & Collections:

• We Are Media
• Social by Social
• #SOCIALMEDIA NONPROFIT tweet Book01
• Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission

Blog posts:

• How to: Create a Listening Dashboard
• 5 Step Social Media Strategy
• Google Analytics for Facebook Pages
• Google Analytics for your Wiki
• List of Social Media Management Systems
• DIY Community Engagement Metrics
• Crowdsourcing vs Community-Sourcing
• Slacktivism: Turning a Like Into Action

Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday’s most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular – is this what the future of education is going to look like? In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.

Marshall even quoted me, as I described just one example from my experience as a student of new media in college.  There are many comments over on the article, go check it out and weigh in on the conversation!

How do you learn new media?  Do you think it can be taught/learned in a ‘classroom’ or do you lean towards personal investigation and experimentation?

Her list includes:

1) What Do Other People Think About This Group?

Answer with Testimonials. When someone is learning about you for the first time, they’ll be curious what other people think about your organization, your staff and your effectiveness. You can talk about how great you are, but that’s not nearly as convincing as testimonials from other people who aren’t on your payroll (or even on your board).

2) Are People Here Like Me?

Answer with Profiles. When someone donates time or money to your organization, they are joining a virtual community of people who believe in the same cause. If someone is not quite sure if your nonprofit is a good fit for them, showing them that they fit in with other supporters can help overcome that barrier.

3) Does This Work?

Answer with Success Stories. Do you get the job done? Are you going to make a difference with the money I give you? Success stories show donors (and potential new donors) exactly what it is you do and how you do it.

4) What Difference Can a Single Person Make?

Answer with Personalized Giving Options. Big problems are overwhelming. If you swamp people with the enormity of the need, they are likely to tune you out and move on to something that feels more manageable. 

5) Can I Come Along?

Answer with Personal Chronicles. For your supporters to fully engage with your nonprofit, you have to be willing to share what’s really going on. A small but important segment of your donor base won’t be happy with the level of detail they get in your newsletters. They’ll want more and you should give it to them.

To read the rest of the details and examples, click here.

The one question I think is missing, is: Who are you?

It is important to remember that your organization is made up of humans who do all have lives outside of the office and have passions that have brought them to the same organization for a reason.  It is important to showcase your wonderful changemakers, both to recognize them as complete people, and to show your audience/community/supporters/members that they can identify with individuals in the organization and not just the mission.

How do you do this? With blogs, videos, pictures, etc.  There are many ways to show that your organization is made of great people.  Take pictures at your next staff meeting and have everyone make their own nametag with paper and crayons to hold up for the photo.  Let everyone create a short 10-30 second video about how they discovered the organization and wanted to start working there.  Start a blog on the website for staff to contribute to about things other than specific press releases, project announcements, etc.

How are you using storytelling in your organization?  What is another question that you would add to this list that could be answered with stories?

This past Friday was our third event in the series Communicating in the Age of New Media and focused on social media tools. It was a wonderful success, at least in my opinion, and took place at IRCO (Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization) offering us a chance to have applicable conversations and applications of our small group scenarios, many of which focused on immigrant and refugee or other special needs populations. My standard review process includes noting three positives and one negative, so, here’s my take on the event:

Rose: Facilitator
We were very honored and thrilled to have come out to provide us with an overview of social media and the tools nonprofits are and can be using and then walk us through the day’s workshop. She provided great insight and helped the groups every step of the way with suggestions, ideas, and thought-provoking questions. You can even read Beth’s reflections on the event on her blog!

Rose: Participants
Beth was terrific, but our participants really made the day for me! They were positive about the new media tools and ready to learn. People were jumping right in to the workshop scenarios and energetic in creating strategies using social media to help nonprofits best do their work. When faced with this much new information, people can get scared and overwhelmed, or excited and motivated. I was thrilled to see that our participants were the latter.

Rose: Conversation
At every table around the room, conversations were taking place that proved how energetic and enthused the participants and the leaders were about the topic—what is not to be excited about? After all, some nonprofits are ahead of corporations in adopting social web tools! One great tool that my group touched on was the utility of wikis for organizations and their members. What better place to collaborate and build community through participation and contribution than in a wiki? We even set up a wiki for the event so that the notes, ideas, questions, and great conversation could be recorded and continued.

Thorn: Time
With such a motivated group of participants and a guru facilitator, it was hard to call it a day. We could have easily worked on the scenarios in small groups, had conversations and answered questions together for many more hours. Even this thorn has a rose: Check out the wiki for the event and we can keep discussing and collaborating!

I hope all of you who had the opportunity to be with us on Friday enjoyed it and learned something you can put to use at your organization. To those who could not join us, we hope to put on similar events in the future and I will continue to post here on ideas, issues, news, and information to help you use social media tools in your organization.

One tool that I felt was getting talked about and asked about quite a bit, was the wiki. How would we use it? What is so great about it? What is it to begin with?

We weren’t shy about showing our support of wikis, as the event had a wiki of its own for participants to share notes, questions, and resources. Using a tool for collaboration and shared learning is a terrific place for nonprofits to enter the new media world. There is plenty of free wiki software out there so you can start using it in your office or home to get the feel of it, which kind you are comfortable with, and how you want to use it at work.

After all the conversations I had about wikis at the event, and all the ways I was suggesting people could use a wiki in their organization or with their members, I’m curious how you are already or planning to use them. Does your organization use a wiki internally or externally? What was the biggest hurdle in getting non-new media users on board? I’d love to hear your stories!

Also, a good friend and colleague helped us faciliate our event and has a wealth of knowledge about wikis: Brandon at AboutUs.

You can read about and download the report here.

One of the things that I found most interesting is the low response for familiarity with and usage of wikis. Wikis are a terrific way to collaborate, connect event or training participants before, during and after workshops, and organize collective learning spaces for a department, organization, or community. Is your organization utilizing a wiki to share knowledge or work on projects together?

I was happy to see that “charities are blogging at a higher rate than any group of businesses studied to date.” It is encouraging that organizations are recognizing the power and ease which blogs offer to provide information quickly to donors, supporters, reporters, and the community. Most organizations’ communications staff are the ones maintaining and writing the blogs. Is this the same at your organization? How do people in organizations and outside of organizations view blogs from the executive director/ceo?

Check out the report and poll your own organization to gauge your internal familiarity and usage—you could be surprised!

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?

Is this the same concept at work in the nonprofit sector with new media?  Yes, there are terrific examples out there of nonprofits making videos to tell their stories for them, enabling their websites to become go-to news and information portals, producing messages/causes that get picked up by individuals all around the world to fundraise for them.  BUT, many of the nonprofits that I work with are still struggling with the idea that a website is not a parking lot of information that only needs updating maybe once a year.

Is the struggle facing the nonprofit tech community the one of getting everyone up to a certain competency, or to move as fast as the most gifted and see where we can go?

Maybe it’s the day job calling, but I feel a lot of responsibility to get down to basics with those that will more rapidly be left behind, than push the limits with the few straight A kids in the class.

What do you think?