Gem #1 – Put fundraising in your mission.

In this book, Larry starts at the beginning (that’s even how he describes it!) with the mission of the organization. You have to figure this out first! Your board has to know the mission, and keep it in mind in their role forming the strategic vision of the organization. Fundraising should have a clear role in helping you meet that mission. If it is something separate, your doomed. Larry very rightly points out: If you position fundraising as separate from meeting your mission, donors won’t see why their donations are creating the impact they are interest in.

Gem #2 – Work from the inside out.

This is a great concept and one I often see organization willing to internalize, but not for fundraising. I am often asked by organizations about how they can get their staff to adopt a new tool or platform. You have to start inside the organization. Treat your colleagues like the most important community segment. That means you give them direct training and support, show them how it helps the organization and their own work, etc. When the external community sees your staff using a community platform, a knowledge management resource, or another shared online space it says to them that the organization actually cares and is invested in both collaboration and the resource itself. And that is the best tone you can set! So why would it be any different with fundraising!

Gem #3 – I have an extra copy for you!

That’s right! Larry was kind enough to send me an extra copy that I could give away to a lucky commenter. Please share in the comments below either what your current struggle is or your latest lesson learned with fundraising for your organization. All comments will be entered to win and I’ll draw a name at random this Friday, May 11th, at 5 pm EST.

Looking forward to hearing what you’re working on!

A Thousand Words Without a Photo

We know the old saying that a photo is worth a thousand words. But, when it comes to Pinterest, a social bookmarking site exploding with attention lately, it doesn’t matter if you have a thousand words or not, without a photo, you can’t save your favorite sites and pages. For example, like many on Pinterest, I’m a female that has a board for fashion I like. Many of my favorite online stores have cute dresses I’d like to save to my board (obviously, that’s why they are my favorite stores); unfortunately, Pinterest isn’t able to identify the image when I provide the page URL. As such, I’m out of luck: I can’t pin the dress and share with my friends on Pinterest.

Alternatively, all I need on Delicious is the URL and I can save it. Not only can I save it privately or publicly (like Pinterest), I can also save it to any tags or keywords that I choose in addition or instead of saving it to a stack (the term used on the platform in the same way Pinterest uses “board”). And, whether or not the page even has an image I can still save the link and I can even add context or notes.

Sharing is Caring

On Pinterest, the sharing aspect of content hinges on repinning something to your own board, and, unless you create the board as one that allows contributors, you are creating content in your own silo. You can “like” and comment on pins, or automate your pinning to post to Facebook, for example, but that is the extent to the social capabilities of the network.

On Delicious, your stacks can be created by yourself or with contributors in a similar way, but even if they are closed to only you, others can still suggest links to be included, helping you crowdsource content without losing control, so to speak, of the content itself. You can also comment on individual bookmarks or on the stacks as a whole – something I am consistently wishing I could do on Pinterest. Because Delicious is built on a history of many years as a social bookmarking platform, it has great resources for the social sharing built in, including:

• View all other users who saved the same link and the comments or notes they left about it to their own accounts
• Find other users based on content tags or stacks
• Share specific bookmarks or stacks via Facebook or Twitter, or even email

Browsing is the new Reading

One criticism I’ve seen consistently from new Pinterest users is that it is visually overwhelming. You look at a board that is filled with wedding dress options, for example, and it’s hard for our minds to sort the maybes from the yes as there’s just so much going on.  I really appreciate the more streamlined user experience that Delicious offers as well. It even provides options to view the bookmarks that are multimedia or video separately, to view all bookmarks just as links and notes, or in the full view. Here is an example:

This is my Delicious stack for Nonprofit Technology Infographics:

And here is Beth Kanter’s Pinterest board for Nonprofit Technology Infographics:

And for one last example, here is a stack that isn’t image-centric, my stack for Nonprofit Technology Case Studies:

I do think Delicious could improve with custom URL options, for example, but overall I think it is a much better platform for the goals of content curation and social bookmarking. What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts!

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).

• Eric Lanke: Stop Calling It Strategic Planning – "So I'm working my way through Humanize, and like most everyone else, I'm really enjoying it. This will probably be the first of several posts describing the thoughts it provokes for how I am and should be running my association. But dare I start with the endlessly controversial subject of strategic planning? I've heard Jamie Notter (and others) decry this staple of association board meetings as a tool whose time has come and gone, but it wasn't until I read the treatment of it in Humanize that I really understood what he was talking about. And it's convinced me of one undisputable fact. I need to stop calling what my association does strategic planning."
• 2011 NTEN Champions Fundraising Campaign by the Numbers | NTEN – "The funny thing about being the Nonprofit Technology Network is that it can be really hard to practice what we preach. You may recall that the NTEN community recently helped us raise over $15,000 to host more local events throughout 2012. We learned so much while running that campaign, but we also made lots of mis-steps along the way. One of the things we wished for as we navigated the campaign: benchmarks. Besides average gift amount, what might we expect?"
• New Research Proves the Business Case for Product Giving : PitchEngine : Get the Word Out™ – "New research from Indiana University concludes that businesses can do well by doing good through product philanthropy.  Donating products to charities helps corporate bottom lines, reduces waste in landfills, and provides relief for people in need. With a record number of Americans living in poverty today, product donations allow people to use their limited resources to pay for food, health care, prescription drugs, utilities and other vital needs. The study, released today by Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), provides the first detailed examination of the return on investment for donating merchandise as opposed to liquidating or destroying it."
• Is email going out with 2011? | craigconnects – "I took a look at a few articles and studies, and according to ComScore's 2010 Digital Year in Review, email use dropped 59% among Internet users ages 12 to 17 in 2010. Users ages 18 to 54 have reportedly turned away from email, as well — many are instead communicating through social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. An increase in email use, however, was visible in the 55+ age group, who used web-email 15% more in 2010 than in 2009. The report also went into detail on what sites people spent their time on: it illustrated that time spent on webmail sites declined while social networking sites increased considerably." Would love to hear what your experience and perception of email use is! For me, I see the way I use email and treat email changing, but the importance and irreplaceability (is that a word?) of it staying the same. You?
• Multiple Constituent Groups, One Database: Case Studies | Idealware – A great collection of three case studies from very different organizations, including Fight Colorectal Cancer, Sarah's, and Earthjustice. How are you managing your data?

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For over a year now, I’ve been moderating and facilitating a monthly online discussion for people working as community builders and for those looking for feedback on community building efforts. It’s called the #CommBuild chat and was born out of a facilitated monthly Twitter chat called #4change. Often in these chats, participants discuss the online tools they are using and new platform functionality, all with the hope of finding ways to increase community engagement. For example, this month’s online chat, normally coordinated via the text chat platform CoverItLive, tried out a new platform, Google+ Hangout. This video chat application is part of Google+ and allows up to 10 video participants to come together—great for #CommBuild participants because they get real face time with each other.

So when Scoop.it, a new content curation platform, hit the web recently, the #CommBuild network seemed like the perfect place to try it out.

Whether you’re interested in community building, hot air ballooning, or the way robots work, you’re never going to be the only person talking about it online. In fact, the web is so full of information that many organizations are finding it useful to pull together topic-specific content on the web and make it available in one place. These can be useful internally and externally—you can share news with colleagues or create a dashboard of resources for your community. Scoop.it positions every user as a content curator. Unlike a blog, which positions us all as topic experts with a soapbox of our own, Scoop.it makes it possible to pull together media of all kinds—blogs, news, videos, etc.—from many different resources.

How it Works

Scoop.it has an impressively intuitive interface for just being in a beta launch. You pick your topic, add a description of the collection, then you can begin searching for relevant articles and other media to include. Scoop.it provides automated searches to match all the keywords you include on your topic—check out the image below to see automated searches on Digg, Twitter, and Youtube.

You can “scoop” content (add it to your topic page) from the Scoop.it dashboard. You can also browse the web and “scoop” up content about your topic using a bookmark (when you join, you can follow steps to add the Scoop.it button to your bookmarks bar). Once you’ve added information to your topic, you’ll want to share it. Every time you add a piece of content to your page, you have the option of sharing the link to your page via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

For the CommBuild topic, I used Scoop.it’s built-in search feature to add news articles and blog posts to my page—they show up as suggested content, and you can click to dismiss or add to your page. Once I put a handful of items on my page, I clicked Share and tweeted that I’d created the topic to my network. Just like that, it was out there. I then opened Tweetdeck, a desktop application for managing Twitter and other social platforms, and watched the stream of content from Twitter flowing by. As I saw links of interest—especially ones shared by the #CommBuild community, I added them to the Scoop.it page by clicking on the bookmark/browser extension and scooping (saving) it! Almost immediately, people replied with links to related resources, creating a place where the #CommBuild chat could go to stay on top of news and posts related to community building.

Why Scoop.it is Worth a Try

We interact with articles and other media all day long, so pulling it together under a central topic should fit into that flow. Scoop.it makes it easy to collect and share the things you’re reading, talking about, and interested in without the feeling that you’re adding a whole new platform to your daily work. I’m excited to see organizations diving in to Scoop.it to organize news and information about their cause, neighborhood, or organization. One word of caution: A topic name (in my case, “CommBuild”) can only be used once, and your name may already be taken, just like unique URLs on Facebook and user names on Twitter. I think Scoop.it could become a very interesting space for real time data in situations of natural disaster and crisis communications. I would love to see Scoop.it allow for group use so that multiple people can collaborate to maintain a single space.

What do you think? How do you collect and share content now? How would you use a tool like this in your organization or work?

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I’m really excited by tools that enable digital or transmedia storytelling. I think there’s huge potential for organizations to use multiple mediums, content, and locations to help document and advocate for the change they want in their communities and around the world. I recently attended the US launch event for Historypin is a new (and free) application for Android, iPhone, or the web that arranges photos, videos, and text in the context of time and location (leveraging the Google Maps API). I was so energized by the tool—both its current functionality and its potential for future application—that I downloaded the mobile (Android) version and started testing it on the spot. It’s been a few weeks now; I’ve used it to share photos from a work trip to Portland, Maine, and to explore my neighborhood in New York.

In the most basic terms, I see Historypin as the interface between people (you can be in the exact spot you’re looking at on the map, or around the world), places (the geography, the buildings), and things (the events, small and large, that change those people and places over time). It’s a way of interacting with other people, other places, and other times from anywhere you are. So how can social good organizations take advantage of an innovative tool like this? Here are some ideas:

Share Community History – Non-organizational community groups and nonprofits that focus on a specific locality can create hyperlocal community engagement through pictures and documentation. Do you have a hyperlocal online network/space? Encourage volunteers, program officers, donors, or other community members to become social reporters and document events in their neighborhood.

Promote Campaigns – Pull together information, data, and multimedia power (maps, photos, videos) to create a compelling, interactive campaign story for your nonprofit organization. Encourage community members to join, follow, or share their own related media, giving them a way to participate in and connect with the campaign.

Create Digital Classrooms – Education programs—schools, after-school programs, and youth-focused nonprofit—can work with established collections in the classroom; and students can document the area around their school to create their own collections, and potentially trade collections with other schools.

Create a Custom “Tour” – Your organization can arrange pieces of media and information so that they unfold in order—great for telling a story, or walking people through highlights or history of an area or place. People can follow along via the mobile application or the website. Museums, tour groups, and history societies could all make use of Historypin for sharing tours and routes, complete with images and stories. Nonprofits: What if you created a digital annual report that walked viewers through your service area, giving them a tour of your work and impact?

Go explore the map: Use the time slider and address search to wander around the world and check out the 51,000-plus photos already uploaded.

What other ways do you think this tool could be used to support the social sector? I’d love to hear your ideas.

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Have you thought about running a contest or crowdsourcing ideas for your organization or community group? If you have, you certainly aren’t alone. In a previous job, I had the opportunity to help run crowdsourcing contests for new and innovative technologies that help nonprofits and the world. One of the biggest lessons from my experience running contests and watching the crowdsourcing phenomenon expand online is that if you don’t have access to a tipping point of people, you won’t get the responses or participation you’re after. There’s a new platform hoping to help you do just that: iStart.

The Value of Crowdsourcing

There are many ways you could approach crowdsourcing, but the value of such a tactic usually focuses on these three components:

1. Expose your organization, campaign, program, etc. to people in the crowd (as in, expand beyond your community)
2. Recruit new volunteers, donors, or activists that are excited to continue working with you
3. Receive ideas, products, services, or support for free/cheap (keeping in mind that your time is still a cost)

Whether you’re holding a logo competition or looking for a mobile application that supports rural medical workers, crowdsourcing can play a valuable role by accomplishing that goal, and expanding your organization’s reach in the process.

iStart and options for nonprofits

I’ve been poking around on the newly relaunched iStart platform lately and want to share some of my reflections (and hopefully get some of yours, too!).

The ins and outs

After a start as a business plan competition tool, iStart is now open for many kinds of crowdsourcing contests organizations want to run. Much like the NetSquared Challenges platform, it offers users the option of entering contests and searching through submissions across contests to find ideas. It also gives you options for saving searches and getting alerts when there are new proposals that match your criteria. Most exciting for organizations is the option to administer your own contest on the platform!

The platform requires that participants in your contest submit an abstract, but what is included in that submission is up to you. They also support a range of files so your contest could be a logo redesign or a social media policy, a video clip or a conference session proposal.

It isn’t free – and that’s okay!

Running a contest on iStart isn’t free, even for nonprofits, but I think that’s okay. Crowdsourcing is still something that many organizations think is “easy” and when we think something is easy we don’t put many resources into it. That’s a major reason why many times organizations don’t feel like their crowdsourcing efforts really “work” – they didn’t fully plan for all the effort it takes in recruiting and facilitating a contest.

The fact that nonprofits do have to pay to use the platform (but will save themselves the headache of moderating submissions on their own website, through emails or comments, or however else) means that there will [hopefully] be some strategic planning ahead of launching the contest to identify if it’s really the best tactic to deploy.

Making it work for you

Go check it out and see what you think! Jump right to the FAQ for information about the pricing and getting started process. But, if you think you want to dive in to the crowdsourcing world, here are a few things to keep in mind to make it work for your organization:

• Have a plan – know why crowdsourcing is right for what you’re doing, and how you will engage participants after the contest is over
• Communicate – be sure your email list, your Facebook page, your Twitter followers, and all your partners know you’re running this contest before you launch it so they can get ready to participate and to spread the word for you
• Have rules – make your rules for participation clear and public
• Give it time – don’t hold a contest for 1 day; people need a couple weeks at least to see the contest has launched, think about or work on their idea and then submit
• Stick to your word – if you say you’re going to pick a winner then you probably should, if you say there will be 3 finalists then there should be 3 (or more if there’s a tie); but if you don’t get the kind of submissions you’re after be sure to stick to your word and pick the winner (and work with them to develop it further or include in the rules that winning doesn’t necessarily mean your logo will be used for example)

Have you run a crowdsourcing contest before? How did it go and what did you learn? Are you thinking of diving in – what questions do you have about the process or strategy? Looking forward to your questions and discussion!

Google+, the latest iteration on social networking from Google, is here.

There are bound to be many, many versions of this blog post as people from around the world start investigating the tool and sharing their impressions. As always, when it’s just the first trickling of people joining up, the way the tool is used, the depth of some functionality, and the technical issues are all a bit out of proportion. With all of that as a grain of salt to this post, I want to share a few reflections focused on security and control – the items touted ahead of launch as the elements positioning Google+ on the other side of Facebook.

Privacy

It may seem strange to users who are new to Google tools, but the Google+ privacy settings are tied in to all of your Google account privacy settings. (Check your settings now if you want!) In some ways, this could be confusing to people who’ve become accustomed to Facebook’s approach which has layers of settings and changes those layers, options, and controls all of the time. Now, your sharing and connecting settings apply to much more of the web than just your social networking profile.

When joining, the presence of ad-recommending data was very clear. Check out the invite screen shot below:

But for all the talk about “owning our data” that Facebook has really been instrumental in igniting, Google’s response is “data liberation.” Making the options for backing up and downloading your content and data explicit.

Privacy within the platform can be on a content by content basis. When you post a message, upload a photo or video, or share, you are given the option to select which of your “circles” are able to view it. Circles are how you organize your contacts. You can share with all of your circles, any specific one/s, or with the world, every time you post. You are also given the option to disable comments on something and/or disable the option for others to share/reshare what you post. This last bit of privacy/security flexibility will, I think, help people feel better about participating that were previously worried about sharing on Facebook for fear that people would push it across the network without them knowing.

Google+ links for my account and my notifications appear in any of my Google account windows. But, the notifications are terrific in their streamlined functionality. You can click through to the actions and content without changing the page you are on – just flipping through the popup notification window itself. Though, you’ll see in these images (just like on Facebook), that when you comment or interact with a friend’s post, you can then be interacting with people who aren’t in your circles. (Note: I am connected directly with Debra, but not with Andy)

My Google+ profile automatically includes a Google Buzz tab to see the stream from that space. Google integration across all of the Google-owned spaces is pretty seamless, naturally. But, the social media landscape has changed over the years and people expect more flexibility, allowing social profiles on the web to interact. For example, people are talking about viewing their Google+ circles in Tweetdeck or Hootsuite where they can already view Twitter and Facebook. There’s also the integration for multimedia like YouTube (though, that’s Google property so maybe more hopeful there), Flickr, and things like Twitter and Twitpic.

Google+ and Facebook in Early Days

Whether this dates me in a good or bad way, or not: I was in college when Facebook first appeared. We could only see people at our university. But it allowed for some really organic networking across the platform with functionality that Facebook later dissolved. For example, because it was already limited to your school, the course lists were populated each semester into the platform – this let you select which classes you were in and then see the other students in your class, even if you weren’t friends directly. You could then share messages, notes, talk about class, etc. You were also able to see a more general flow of data on the platform.

In the early days of Twitter, the public stream contributed dramatically to users finding each other and people of interest to follow or just to communicate with.

The “incoming” stream on Google+ is it’s version of this wider stream, allowing users to surf across the platform to people they may not know but that are sharing content or updates publicly. I think that it is an important part of the platform at this early stage, but I think there will need to be more add-on functionality once we are past Day 1 of the trial period and the numbers of users skyrocket; the content will be too difficult to follow with too much happening. A Google+ equivalent for hashtags or other metadata filtering could make a public timeline something useful even with a huge number of participants.

Personal vs Professional

Because your contacts and the sharing are based on your “circles” I can see how Google+ could allow for more streamlined integration of a personal and professional profile. You can have everyone connected to you, without trying to say “I only have real friends on this social network” and limit which content goes to which circle. But, at least right now, you can still only have that one profile.

My work email address is managed by Google as we use Google Apps. I tried setting up an account on Google+ with that email but I was given an error message that said they do not support the additional domains yet. I am sure this is something they are building out though – both for the professional users and so that it expands who can use the platform since it requires a Gmail email address right now.

Options for Nonprofits

I haven’t found any organizations using Google+ yet with an organizational profile. And as I said above, the professional vs personal differentiation is yet to be defined by the platform. Without knowing just where Google is planning to go with these kinds of options or profiles, I can see a few options just built into the functionality:

Using “circles” for volunteers, donors, general supporters, etc. to more directly target content, asks, and engagement efforts

Having nonprofit organizations manage a Spark (the interest area aggregators):

Use the “hangouts” functionality, which allows for up to 10 users to group chat with video, for building trust and relationships with your community members. Imagine having a daily hangout with your organization’s leadership shared publicly through the network so anyone could join in, ask a question, etc – especially during a campaign or election cycle!

Resources

Here are a few resource links I’ve found helpful so far in the Google+ exploration process:

• How to import your Facebook friends to Google+
• Facebook friend export extension for Chrome
• Google+ Review on TechCrunch
• Google+ on Android

Have more resource links or blog posts to share? What are your concerns or reflections with Google+? Looking forward to hearing how your experience goes!

—– UPDATE

I’ve come across an organizational profile on Google+ now, my friends at BullyingUK – they are always on the edge of early adoption and I’m interested to see what they think of the new platform. So, far, it doesn’t show any posts from them but you can see how their profile looks and that their Buzz feed comes into the profile.

That’s the question I asked this morning on Qriously, a new application that measures public sentiment, in real time. It works by replacing ads with questions in smartphone and tablet apps. The application is currently in a closed beta, and I was lucky enough to get access to start playing around with it. It’s so easy to use, and has so much potential for the nonprofit sector, that I couldn’t wait any longer to show it to you!

Qriously is super easy to use: you pick the type of question (two answer, slider, or star/rating), write your question and possible answers, select the location (global, regional or local – if you get a trial account, you are limited to global questions), and then how many answers you want to gather. That’s it!

I’ve run three questions so far, and here’s some of the insights to the process:

What influences your charitable giving?

The first question I asked on Qriously was: “What influences your charitable giving?” and provided the two possible responses of “friends” or “data” – I used the question style where respondents had to pick one answer or the other exclusively. As soon as the question is live, you start seeing the impressions and the responses, aggregated in real time. It’s incredible! You’ll also notice that you can see the impressions, as well as the responses.

And once all 100 responses were gathered, I took a look at all the data.

First, overall:

And when you click on “What does this chart mean?” it actually tells you, with much richer context:

I personally love data-map mashups and Qriously uses them brilliantly! The data on these maps shows the number of responses as well as the direction of response, where orange = “data” and blue = “friends”.

You can start out with a global view:

And drill town to see the data, and let it speak for itself.

What I think is really exciting about this view of the data, is when you can look across a global region and extrapolate on the cultural influences and beyond. Imagine if you were a nonprofit organization, creating a global campaign; you could use a tool like this to test messages and sentiments for various areas around the world to better design and craft the campaign as well as the communications. For example, thinking about the question of what influences giving, look at this section of the map – with exclusive data responses vs friend responses:

And looking at the US, you can see the changes in response across the states, too:

Which would you rather give?

The next question I asked was “which would you rather give?” with the answers being “time” and “money” but this time I used the slider question option, meaning respondents have a slider on the screen that they can drag anywhere along the line between the two answers. I thought this would be a good question type to use for this topic because it would let us see not just if one had more “answers” than the other, but if it was an extreme or subtle inclination towards either direction. Here’s the response:

Personally, I agree! I respect and understand the arguement that time is money, but I am able to give more of my time than my money to things that aren’t discrete. I’m happy to share my thoughts, feedback, ideas, and “expertise” and love to help others learn something that they can then do on their own (without me next time). And I often feel that organizations don’t provide a way for me to give, in a way that I think could be valuable, unless it’s financial.

Do you think you can change the world?

That’s right. I asked mobile users around the globe “do you think you can change the world?” and I chose the two-response question type, so they could only answer “yes” or “no”.

And the results? Yes!

Qriously for Nonprofits

I think there are so many potential applications for Qriously in the nonprofit sector!

Marketing

As I noted at the start, the stats provide both impressions as well as responses. So, although you may only have 100 people give you an answer, if your question said, for example, “Have you heard of NTEN?” you have far more people that aren’t responding that still saw your organization’s name.

Listening

Organizations are looking for ways to learn about their community and those they want to reach but haven’t yet. Listening is a big part of social technologies as you can tap into and follow all kinds of conversations. But Qriously offers a way of listening and learning that cuts out the middleman – go straight to the people you want! I’m using a trial account, but full accounts provide the option to target your geography and more.

Targeting

Beyond listening, maybe your organization or campaign needs to identify just who it is that actually is interested! Qriously could be used to test different messages and groups to measure where responses are strongest.

Campaigning

You don’t just have to do market research with Qriously. What if you used the tool as a way of campaigning? The questions could actually be calls to action! For example: “Have you changed to energy efficient light bulbs?” with answers of “I will” and “I did”.

And more!

There are so many ways the social impact sector could put something like Qriously to use – and not just as another shiny toy, but as a tool to meeting our missions.

If you want to check it out for yourself, use this form to apply for Qriously access. Please note that trial accounts only let you ask global questions.

What do you think? I have another question I can ask on the trial account, so please share your suggestions! If you have questions about the application, I’m happy to respond with my experience, or message the Qriously team to weigh in with more information!

Getting Started

Let’s start at the beginning: what is a “networked nonprofit” anyway? As Beth and Allison explain:

Networked Nonprofits are simple and transparent organizations. They are easy for outsiders to get in and insiders to get out. They engage people in shaping and sharing their work in order to raise awareness of social issues, organize com- munities to provide services, or advocate for legislation. In the long run, they are helping to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place to live.

Networked Nonprofits don’t work harder or longer than other organizations, they work differently. They engage in conversations with people beyond their walls—lots of conversations—to build relationships that spread their work through the network.

Some of What I Like

Something that I think is incredibly important to talk about (because once we are talking about it, the next step is to DO it) is the opportunity we have now to truly focus work on movement building. Our campaigns, services, programs, and even visions can and should be opening up for other collaborators – whether they are individual, free agent supporters or other organizations – to make the biggest, lasting change possible.  As Beth and Allison say,  “But while social media power Networked Nonprofits, they aren’t the only reason nonprofit organizations need to shift their focus from their individual organizations to their networks.” There’s huge potential to be tapped by bringing together free agents and organizations working to build change through a movement.

One thing I always associate with both Beth and Allison is the term “resource.” They both have lots to share and are always looking for ways to contribute back to the community.  As such, I knew that their book would be a great resource and part of what makes it so is the inclusion of reflection questions for every chapter. If you’re reading the book, or if your whole team or organization is reading it, you have great questions to depart from for critical thinking and strategic planning.

One question I liked in particular reminded me of the presentations I’ve done recently focused on Community-Driven Social Impact:

Are there internal processes or conversations that would be appropriate to share for feedback at an earlier stage than you are sharing now?

This reflection questions comes at the end of Chapter 6: Building Trust Through Transparency. Something I discuss in my workshops is that you can’t simply “start” being community-driven, or communicating and expecting a two-way conversation to happen without having in a place the trust and transparency that if the community voices ideas, concerns or passions that they will be met by an organization prepared to respond and possibly act.

Plus lots more – I’m really looking forward to continuing conversations that emerge from the above topics and from The Networked Nonprofit!

Learn More

Review the slides below for an overview and introduction to The Networked Nonprofit. (Hint: remember to click on the “Notes” tab below the slides on SlideShare so you can see the speaker notes that go with each slide!)

You can learn more about the book on Beth’s blog or Allison’s blog – or visit the book listing on Amazon.com to read reviews, leave a review, and order the book today!

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I’m always honored and humbled to call Beth and Allison both friends and colleagues – it’s my pleasure to share a bit about this great resource they’ve contributed and hope you’ll share your ideas, questions, feedback and thoughts, too!