Matthew Taylor has a post up

According to the RSA website:

For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.

And, as he explains,

Back to the RSA. Yesterday, we had an all staff session on branding. Over the last year we have been trying increasingly to align the RSA’s activities around a core mission. We have not yet found the pithiest way to express this mission but in essence it is ‘developing citizens for tomorrow’, in other words the RSA is about understanding and advancing human capability so that people can thrive in the future.

Matthew then shares additional branding ideas and opens the floor for discussion.  Quite a few comments concentrate on the process of creating the new branding, stressing the involvement of the RSA Fellows.

I am not a member of the RSA.  I tried to add to the conversation on Matthew’s blog but the post never appeared, whether it didn’t get through the submission queue or moderation or what have you.  So, I’m writing this post instead!

I was invited to become an RSA Fellow and was very honored at the invitation, especially after such a short time here and hopefully only the very start of the impact I’d like to make and change I’d like to support.  I have also been incredibly pleased and honored at the invitation and subsequent participation at a few RSA events.  I am not, however, at least for the time being, planning to accept the RSA Fellowship invitation, and this is why:

Branding.

The RSA, like many other organizations, suffers because of a lack of the most powerful aspect of its branding.  I do not plan to accept the Fellowship invitation because I have not, whether online or in person, from the invtation materials or conversations I’ve had with others, gained a clear understanding of what being a Fellow even means.  Furthermore, and most importantly to me, I have not been shown how a Fellowship will help me in my work at changing my community and the world.

Yes, slogans and colors, font and everything else are all important parts of the branding.  It’s true. But the RSA is missing the most important part, at least in bringing me on board: proving to me that being a Fellow will help ME and not just that my membership will help THEM.

As folks mention in the comments on Matthew’s piece, I don’t need to build my resume (for better or worse, I’m fine with it as it is).  But I am completely open to any and all, whether organization or individual, ready to help me make our local communities and the global community as great as possible.

So, RSA, “do you get it?”

(Just for clarification, I am hoping to get those answers and hoping the branding advances to answer them not just to me but to everyone, so that we can all start really collaborating for change!  I mean it, RSA, I’m with you when you’re ready.)

The “Swine Flu” scare was fun, wasn’t it?  No, it really wasn’t; but it did give most of the world a chance to react in real-time to what could have been much worse. In a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, David Brooks compared the global response vs localized response to the outbreak. I think this comparison, and context, is a great example of why local (read: non-global) organizations are still key in social change work, and why we need to be building stronger networks for data and information sharing.

Power to the People
Brooks shows that if the world had a global approach to outbreaks like Swine Flu, then the decision-making and directive power would be in a really bumped up World Health Organization-like group. This umbrella organization would require time for consideration and input from its members and wouldn’t necessarily be in-tune with the communities or cultures actually touched by the issues.

Let’s consider this example in comparison to a generic sector, focusing on a global issue, like the environmental & climate sector working on climate change. Creating a huge umbrella organization is just not going to happen realistically for any sector, at least one with the governing and implementing power suggested above. Instead, we want to keep the power to address issues in the hands of organizations spread around the world. It is impossible for one organization to know the stories, issues, culture and decision-making information of all locations. It’s hard enough to master one geography!

Speak the Local Language
As Brooks points out, people like to look to someone like them, especially in times of crisis. Local organizations provide this local face. We can speak the local language, understand the local culture.

In the climate change example, this means that we can brand, communicate, and distribute information, calls to action, and important opportunities for engagement in a way that encourages response locally. The missing link, though, is that the underlying opportunity (whether it is a petition to sign, an online or offline event, or anything else) needs to be networked across all the organization. The effect of having all organizations gather signatures on the same petition versus hundreds creating and distributing their own petitions for the same issue is huge.

Innovate and Reiterate
Lastly, one enormous organization could only respond to the Swine Flu outbreak or something similar with safe, tested protocols. But those are often not efficient or necessary. With distributed power through local organizations, medical teams, and governments, the response to the Swine Flu outbreak was something involving much more innovation and experimentation.

This, again, holds true for organizations working on social change issues. New messages, campaigns, and strategies can be tested, deployed, and analyzed in separate groups. What makes this more powerful? Leveraging a networked system so that when a new campaign works, or better yet – doesn’t work, that information can be shared in real time with all of the other organizations. This means the “what works” can get implemented faster in other places and the “what doesn’t” can be cut out of the loop without more wasted capacity.

Great, Now What?
So, what do we need to make this happen? There are tools like Zanby that allow organizations to link together to share calls to action across networks. This is a great start. But, we also need to be building out collaboration platforms that allow for organizations to link in with each other, share data and calls to action, but also feedback lessons learned—a way to combine experiential and hard data across the whole network.

What do you think?  What kind of tools would we need to accomplish this? What push backs or culture shocks to working in this way would need to be overcome?  Where would you start?

Visit the SSIR opinion blog here.

I’ve been thinking about words lately and finding that there are far too many that we use that either are too vague they don’t really mean anything or are so frequently used that they no longer mean anything.  That doesn’t help us communicate very well!

The word most in question: “organization”

Let’s use this beautiful picture of fruit as an example.  Now, we have 4 fruits pictured:

1. Strawberries
2. Raspberries
3. Blackberries
4. Blueberries

When applying the idea of the traditional understandings of the word “organization” to this bunch, we could say:

1. Strawberries = the organization (staff)
2. Raspberries = the contractors or consultants
3. Blackberries = the volunteers
4. Blueberries = the members/supporters/community

BUT, they are all berries meaning they are all focused on the same mission.  Plus, they are all fruit, or sharing a similar enough vision to work congruently.

Why, then, is the “organization” considered to be one part of the whole at some times and considered as the whole at other times?

The Strawberries are important, it’s true (especially with vegan cream cheese & rice mallow, try it!) — but they aren’t the only important, integral even, part of the mix.  How important would an organization be if it was only staff and a board, without anyone supporting it or anything using the services?  How important would volunteers be without any organization or community to support?  The point is that none of the parts would be important without the rest.  So, how we start thinking about organizations as entities larger than the staff?

How do we shift the definition of “organization” to include everything that is vital to a cause?

What do you think?  Is it possible?  What’s necessary to make the change?

More and more people and organizations are using Twitter, the micro-blogging tool that lets users answer the question, “what are you doing?” with short 140-character sized posts to the world.  Even more people and organizations are talking about Twitter.  I’m sure you’ve heard buzz, whether you meant to or not, and whether you are a Twitter-er or not.

Darren Rowse’s post today on TwiTip focused on the question, “What value are you creating for your followers on Twitter? What’s in it for them?” I think this is a great question for individuals AND organization to consider and here’s how…

Quality Twitter-ing from Organizations

No one wants to be friends with a building, a billboard, or a fundraising flier. They want to be friends with people.  Even though your Twitter account (or you Facebook group, or anything else for that matter) is representing the organization, people still expect real people to be behind the messages.

Keeping your organization’s Twitter feed from feeling too impersonal is easy:

• Have a conversation (using the @ feature on Twitter to reply to others’ messages)
• Show some personality (comment, don’t just advertise)
• Show some emotion (don’t fear the emoticon or web laugh hahaha )
• Be real (your organization probably doesn’t have an answer to everything, share links that aren’t just from your website)
• Be helpful (use search tools like TweetScan or Twitter Search to find people talking about subjects you can help with and send them a link or info)

Recently, I looked at The Womens Museum’s Twitter feed for a slide I contributed at the NFPTweetup.  I examined the messages that appeared on the main page of The Womens Museum’s Twitter feed (the most recent 20 or so) at the time I visited – I was looking to see how balanced the messages were so created some categories and tallied the messages where they fit:

Self Promotion with Links: 6
Self Promotion without Links: 6

Questions with Links: 4
Questions without Links: 3

Fundraising with Links: 1
Fundraising without Links: 0

Affinity Promo with Links: 4
Affinity Promo without Links: 0

Information with Links: 0
Information without Links: 3

I think the numbers are pretty balanced!  The messages are true to mission/vision of the museum by including retweets (or forwarding on the messages of others), links to websites other than their own, compliments, transparency, and inclusion.
If you use Twitter for your organization, try measuring the messages with the above categories and see how balanced your messages are!  Or create new categories and see how the numbers work out.

Quality Twitter-ing from Individuals

Of course it’s always hard to lay yourself on the line by putting forth strategy, guidelines, or even tips.  Because, hey, look at me – oh wait, I’m not perfect either

Dan Bowsher, of Newbury, UK, nails the value of Twitter, I think, in his comment on The Evening Standard’s piece about Twitter (emphasis:

Twitter is not something you can gain any value from if you dip into it for a couple of hours. Twitter is about engaging with and building a community of people and allows you to tap into information, trends and opinions far quicker than traditional media. To that end, I find it invaluable. The fact that Twitter also enables developers to create applications that allow users to capitalise on its functionality, is also a major benefit.

Quality content on an individual user’s perspective is really rooted in engagement. Days when I feel like I’m disconnected, Twitter and email are too quiet, or I’m out of the loop with news and conversation, it’s becuase I haven’t connect with anyone.  Replies on Twitter are made using the @ and someone’s user name, like @amyrsward if you wanted to talk to me.  All I need to do is start listening, by browsing recent posts, and then responding to individuals using the @ to jump into the conversation, ask questions, or provide responses.  And as quickly as that, I’m back in.

It’s definitely a good idea to measure or gauge the balance of your individual Twitter stream as well, but it isn’t as easy as examining the organizational stream.  Here, because of the above point that conversation and engagement is key, it’s more important to measure between @ messages and standard messages.

Remember:

• You are, every day, building that personal-brand, but that doesn’t mean you get to be blowhorn
• Potential clients, bosses, friends, or significant others could be reading what you say
• People are ultimately good and have come together on free community tools like Twitter to share information, you should too
• You get out what you put in; don’t be disappointed with the tool if you don’t have the time to set it up or use it

Ultimately, the Golden Rule of Twitter: Provide the links, information, conversation and content that you would like to find in everyone else’s stream, too.

Happy Twitter-ing, all!

Twitter is a service for people to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of short (140 character) messages. This micro-blogging tool has seen growing use over the last two years from individuals, activists, organizations and even news companies. (Click here for the Common Craft video on Twitter.)

Tu Diabetes is a great example of a group using Twitter to engage with communities online.  Tu Diabetes is an online community where members help each other out, educate themslves and share the steps taken every day to stay healthy while living with this very serious condition. Tu Diabetes employs a gamut of web tools in its process of reaching out to new community members, keeping the community informed, and educating the public.

I recently spoke with Manny Hernandez, Tu Diabetes community founder, to take a closer look at Tu Diabetes’ Twitter story.

I asked Manny if Tu Diabetes has a policy or strategy for building the followers/following lists.  He explained that, “every week or two, we do a search for the term “diabetes” on Twitter and selectively add certain people. We avoid adding people who are clearly using Twitter for SPAM or strictly commercial purposes. The Twitter search only looks in the people’s profiles, so we go a step further and use TweetScan to do a search in tweets containing the term “diabetes”. Then again, many of them are SPAM but a good number of them are legit and are made by people who could potentially be interested in what our community has to offer. We add those folks to our list of followed people. When you take a look at the product of our “adds” you see a very diabetes-centric timeline, which makes for a very interesting and inspiring reference. Also, we typically see people we add on Twitter joining the community. When people get a chance to see that you are for real, that the community is offering valuable information and support, people take the extra step and join. I don’t think this is something that works this way outside of nonprofit, but it is a model that I highly recommend for non-profits to try.”

I also asked what the specific strategy is for posting content via Twitter. Manny explained that, they “use Twitterfeed to automate the posting of a few of the RSS feeds that TuDiabetes has: forum topics, blog posts, etc. Depending on their volume we have Twitterrific posts to our Twitter account periodically (typically a few times per day) with relevant content (all our content is centered around diabetes). We also post manually periodically, every time there is a relevant topic or announcement that we want to make sure appears in our Twitter timeline.”

Twitter is a great avenue for cultivating and igniting conversations as well as getting your information out. I asked Manny if they had been part of some conversations within Twitter, and not just their online community space, and he confirmed that “occasionally other Twitter users contact us with questions. We’ve had a few media people contact us through Twitter too.”

I think Manny really nailed a great idea for organizations or online communities looking to explore Twitter’s use: “When people get a chance to see that you are for real, that the community is offering valuable information and support, people take the extra step and join. I don’t think this is something that works this way outside of nonprofit, but it is a model that I highly recommend for non-profits to try.”

Twitter, and other micro-blogging tools like Identi.ca and others, is another way organizations can be more open, transparent, and available in real-time to answer questions, provide information, and keep the community informed about both the work being done and ways to get involved. Here are some other organizational Twitter accounts you may want to check out:

• Nonprofits Assistance Fund – http://twitter.com/NAFund
• The Women’s Museum – http://twitter.com/TheWomensMuseum
• St. Jude Children’s Reasearch Hosptial – http://twitter.com/StJude
• Mara Triangle – http://twitter.com/maratriangle
• OneNW – http://twitter.com/onenw

Is your organization using Twitter, or are any of your staff members using it? What questions do you have for organizations adopting micro-blogging tools like Twitter?