I presented about the possibilities for social media and how it was changing the way we play – as well as the way we act as citizens and witnesses. Since my presentation consisted only of screen shots, I airily told everyone not to worry or take notes, that the links for everything I was talking about would go up on my blog. I made it sound like this would happen within about five minutes, might even be up by the time they got home.

And a geologic age later, here it is! So let’s talk about serious games, and how it could make us better citizens. Thanks to everyone at the conference who was kind enough to chat about this in person.

Plague: You can check out and report to Ushahidi’s H1N1 (swine flu) map, a crowdsourced way to track unverified citizen reports of the pandemic. In British Columbia, the provincial health authority is using Twitter to try to push out information about H1N1 to a confused public.

Hurricanes: Ning is a customizable social networking site highly recommended for non-profits suffering Facebook fatigue, and The Hurricane Information Centre and associated wiki are a great case study of how flexible Ning can be as a platform for moving info out about your cause. These pages are entirely volunteer informed, and a fantastic source of local information on where to get information such as where evacuations are happening, and hurricane preparedness.

Earthquakes: A mash-up is when data from two web pages are combined into one place – among their many uses, they’re a great to visualise large amounts of data.  For example, in this mashup real time data about earthquakes from around the world is visualized on a map so that it’s easier for users to see where earthquakes are happening and how big they are.  If seeing this sort of thing makes you nervous, why not get inspired for the big one by practicing with The Great California Shake Out? In the largest virtual earthquake drill ever, nearly 7 million Californians participated on and offline in October 2009. Using information from the site, they all practiced preparedness by reacting on the appointed day exactly as if an earthquake had hit their state (local media helped with the drama by broadcasting realistic updates over the website) Afterwards, they posted their photos and stories about the experience – you can check them out here.

Snowstorms: As winter gets underway in the Northern Hemisphere, expect to see more snowstorm reporting tools. Snowbird, a project from a group of University of Waterloo students, uses Twiter and Google Earth to visualize snow fall reports around the world. Though it’s meant more as a way for people interested in snowfall measurements to quickly broadcast information to the web using Twitter, it’s easy to see the implications of creating sites where people can update information about their climate – sounds like a powerful tool for raising awareness about climate change if we ever heard one.

Have you got better sites to add to this list? Please leave your links in the comments or email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org.

Now, I have two reasons for wanting to get you interested in this. The first reason is: I’m animating this campaign, and I’m excited to take you on the journey with me for an inside look at social media and fundraising. I’m going to post updates so you can see that it’s not a magic trick that only charismatic American presidents can pull off – this is a strategic way to fundraise by building a story with your donors. My second reason is simple: I know a 4 year old who had heart surgery at the Children’s recently. (He’s fine now.) So I have a very keen sense that these are the people who heal our kids, and they need our help.

As time goes by on the campaign I’ll talk a bit about how we came up with the concepts behind it, how the pick-up is going, and what we’re learning. To watch us in action, Fan the Facebook Page I’m animating, or follow @bcchf on Twitter. While this widget is the way Social Signal found to do online micro-fundraising, we know it’s going to take a real community posting photos, stories and videos about their heroes to make this campaign fly. I would love to work with you, gentle reader, so please participate by tagging your mentions of this campaign (by which I mean pictures of yourself in a blanket cape a la my example) with bcchf (or on Twitter you can use the hashtag #bcchf)

How You Can Help:

-  Put the widget on your Facebook profile or donate (do! I designed this special thank you video that will knock your socks off…)

- If you aren’t in British Columbia, spread the word to the people you know in BC by sending them the video. If you’re a blogger, grab the widget and/or write about it. Gillian Shaw from the Vancouver Sun broke the story and posted her widget here.

- And finally, cheer us on! Please fan BCCHF on Facebook, Twitter to us @bcchf, post to our wall or… …take a photo of yourself jumping  with that red blanket cape and tag it bcchf (I’m starting a League of Extraordinary Blanket Capes) or with the hashtag #bcchf if you mention it on Twitter. By donating, you’re  a hero to the children who are patients at BC Kids. So tie on that red blanket cape! Up up and awaaay!

don't forget to tag your blanket cape photo with bcchf or #bcchf so that i can show the children's hospital what upstanding heroes support them. Excelsior!

Original Photo: Flickr user eirickso (CC 2.0) license

A new draft curriculum for primary schools in England gives teachers more freedom to decide what’s interesting for their pupils … and brings YouTube and Twitter to schools. The question is: who will be the teacher?

British newspaper The Guardian just had a first look at drafts for an upcoming reform of English primary schools’ curriculum and they’re saying that the proposed curriculum would “mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade”. Why? Well, for one thing, it slackens the reins of obligatory subjects to offer teachers greater freedom in what they teach – that’s already a revolution in education. But the real stunner is the introduction of modern media and web-based skills into the curriculum.
British students are to study the use of the internet, in particular social media. When they leave primary school they should – according to the draft – be “familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication.” The not-so-secret added value — apart from watching music videos online — is that the kids will also be learning to use social media for networking and research purposes. There’ll also be less entertaining aspects, such as spell checking 101 or learning to use spread sheets to manage budgets.

Entertaining or not, what I wonder is exactly who is going to teach the children how to use Wikis, to build blogs, find interesting podcasts and make the best out of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? Many teachers are not exactly embracing new educational methods, let alone new technologies. Although half of teachers (in the UK) believe in the merits of such tools, one fifth don’t feel competent to teach children in Web 2.0 applications, while a quarter of them are worried (and rightly so) about kids revealing personal info on social media sites. In the end, only one fifth of teachers use Wikipedia and only five percent YouTube as a resource in their classrooms.

At the other end, children are younger and younger when they start using the internet. And they learn fast and intuitively. When I went to programming classes in tenth grade or so, about half of my fellow students knew twice as much as our teacher about it. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.) The question is: does this mean that we should just leave social media out of classrooms, because teachers are unable or unwilling to teach them and the kids will learn them anyway themselves?

I’d say no, because what usually will fall short outside of school and in the anonymous sphere of the internet are things like the respect of personal rights, children’s safety, scrutinizing the reliability of information. There’s also a balance to find between using the internet for more than entertainment and for more than mere passive consumption on the one hand and one-way self-expression on the other. So the task I see for teachers is not so much the technical aspects, but some underlying principles for the use of the internet, about which not only children but everybody might still have to learn a bit.
What is your opinion? Will teachers be able to catch up with the internet and social media? Do you know any teachers who embrace new technologies and use them in class? What do teachers need to communicate if they teach their pupils in the use of new media applications?

Original Photo courtesy of Flickr user wallyg (CC Licensed)

Have you ever experienced that dreamy, hungry look on the face of non-profit organizations’ staff when you say: “I have experience in fundraising”? No matter whom you speak to, be it directors or campaigners, the chances are good that you’ll grab their attention. Better yet, if you offer to help their fundraising efforts as a volunteer, they will veer between the wish to hug you and the attempt not to seem too enthusiastic. But once you go into detail, talking about fundraising strategies, possible financial sources and so forth, this lovely atmosphere might be replaced by misunderstanding. There are certainly various ways to raise funds in Europe; and depending on where you want to get your money from, “experience in fundraising” translates into very different skills.

Issue No. One: Grants vs. Individual Donors

My experience in Europe is that fundraising is usually understood as grant writing. By contrast, the idea of developing a strategy to obtain and enlarge a basis of individual donors is met with scepticism. Instead, organizations prefer to put this effort into creating a project proposal from scratch within a few days.

In her book Fundraising for Social Change, Kim Klein breaks the myth that most of a non-profit’s funding should come from foundations or corporations. Instead, 75,6% of contributions  to successful non-profits stem from individuals. Many people in the US and Canada will already know these stats. But then again, the book is written from a American perspective, where community fundraising is a traditional, successful tool  for various reasons – one being a historial lack of social services provided by the state. So what about Europe?

With the welfare state in place and the European Union and many foundations offering grants, individual charity might be much less important. NGOs – particularly small NGOs – often focus their fundraising activities almost exclusively on project grants. This holds especially true in new EU Member States, where European Structural and Cohesion Funds are available (see also a Wikipedia article on these funds). This results in a focus on constant “project work” with no possibility to develop longer-term strategies.  It also sets up a  culture of looking down on fundraising as an “Anglo-Saxon” approach, one which does not work in Europe. Because of this, organizations are increasingly lacking funds for overhead costs. This has been affirmed by Blackbaud’s survey on the European State of the Not-for-Profit Industry 2008. The survey among 466 non-profits in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands shows that 54% of respondents in the UK and 48% in Germany respectively (but only 13% in the Netherlands) are having trouble getting funds for general operating purposes.

I contacted Kim Klein to ask how she would handle this situation. When confronted with this European perspective, she suggested a little more reflection: “Do people in European communities support a church or other faith based institution? Do you ever see people give money to someone who is homeless? Is generosity considered a virtue?” (For the record: the answer to all three questions is “Yes”.)

And she continued: “Usually these questions cause people to realize that money is being raised and money is being given away, even if it is not as common as it would be here in the USA. When I have travelled and gotten these objections, I have reminded people that the history of grassroots fundraising in America is full of these objections: in the 1940’s, many people said ‘Americans will never respond to mail appeals. They are invasive and it is un-American.’ By the 1980’s, most donations were made by mail. In the mid 1990’s, many people said, ‘The internet will never work for fundraising.’ Today on-line fundraising is the fastest growing area of fundraising.”

Issue #2: The Internet

One would expect internet fundraising to be met with the same scepticism as fundraising in general, because after all it also asks for individual giving. But on the contrary, online fundraising  in Europe is up and coming. The survey mentioned above shows that about 50% of organizations already use online fundraising and that this is expected to grow further. Donation buttons seem to have become a standard feature on non-profit websites, and during the last week, I spoke with people from three different  European organizations who were psyched about creating their first Facebook presences, welcoming social media and its possibilities.

I wondered where this seeming contradiction comes from. On the one hand, it could simply be that the young employees and volunteers of these organizations personally like using Facebook and the internet. But on the other hand, today’s patterns of involvement in charity could make online fundraising the appropriate reaction to a more sporadic civic engagement and a reluctance to become actively involved. Clicking a button is easy and the effect of giving money for charity seems to be the same. (Actually, I’m convinced it is not the same – but that’s a story for another blog post… )

In any case, solutions for an effective use of the internet for communications and fundraising are still desperately sought after by many European non-profits, with only about a third of the Blackbaud’s survey respondents considering their websites effective.  The possibilities of online communications channels to the general public are only vaguely recognized. Usually, Facebook presence or other online activities are managed as an afterthought to other duties, or by volunteers.

I’m guessing that you’ve all already thought about these two fundraising issues. So what is your advice to the Europeans? Does individual fundraising make sense in (Central & Eastern) Europe? Are there alternatives to grant writing? Do you know of good examples which can serve as models for European online fundraising efforts? (As far as I know, fundraising via Facebook is not possible for Europe. Yet.)

Please let us know through your comments.

The New York Times asked 200 people in an unofficial poll what their hopes were for the Obama administration. But it’s how they represented that information that’s really fun: they combined cloud tags, ‘liking’, podcasting and their original poll into ‘I hope so too.’ To use it, click on any of the speech bubbles (tags) hanging over the group – you’ll hear the voices of the people who responded to the poll. If you agree with them, you can click ‘I hope so too’. You can also regroup the speech bubble tags by using the tabs to get an idea of which are the most popular.

This is a really appealing and pretty way to combine several types of media into a tool that makes you want to linger. It made me wonder what would happen if a platform was kicking around to make this kind of feedback or participation ubiquitous. What if your organization could poll its community about the issues it works on or the mission it’s working on, and receive multilayered feedback? Hope something like this is out there? I hope so too.

Meanwhile, I’m interacting with Obama in a slightly different way this week: I’m headed to the New Media Conference in Warsaw this week, hosted by the US Embassy in Poland. Joe Rospar (the director of New Media for Obama’s campaign) is going to be speaking there, and I want to hear from you before this Friday about any questions you have for him – I’ll try to ask him for you!

Email us at editor@netfornonprofits.org, or simply leave a comment at the bottom of this post.

Still – have you heard of “social media visualization?” This a rapidly growing subset of network visualization and modeling – that is, trying to make sense of the mountains of social tracks we’re all leaving on the internet.

There’s a great article in the magazine Seed this month – which, by the way, is another terrific recent find – which discusses how social researchers have never had access to “live” data on how people interact.

Want to see how people are move around a city when a disaster strikes? Plot their Twitters and track their cellphones. Want to see how disease spreads? Look for people typing “flu” into Google, and plot their locations on a map.

A small-scale, but beautiful, example of this can be seen in the software of Christopher Baker. He created a killer app to map every email he’s ever sent – it’s a little obsessive-compulsive, but also fascinating.

And if you’re really serious, check out the 3rd International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. It’s not all visualization stuff, but pretty amazing ideas. The full papers aren’t posted, just enough to give you a taste.

So, what does this have to do with your nonprofit? Imagine being able to map and track how your donors interact with your organisation, and with eachother, in real time. I’m actually working on a tiny version of this: taking our donation data and placing it on a map, so that we get a sense of what effect locality has on our membership. But what if we took it further – what if, like Christopher Baker, and mapped all the emails between staff, donors and volunteers? We could see where the nodes are, the connectors and hubs who hold our social network together. At the very least, like Nolan, we could create some great art. What do you think? Have you come across any great social media visualization tools?

“…Creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for clients, partners, and society at large.”*

Surprise: the secret word for your job is marketing. Why is it a secret? When you work as a fundraiser, “marketing” is a bit of a dirty word – it sounds corporate, and insincere. But good marketing isn’t about lying to people or tricking them into your product – it’s about connecting with the people whose values line up with yours.  And a  little cross-pollination is all it takes to save you reinventing the wheel when it comes to, well, getting on with the job of marketing your non-profit.

Where can you access online marketing advice that applies to non-profits?

Some excellent (and amusing) tips are available in the form of The Age of Persuasion, a CBC radio show about advertising. Hosted by Terry O’Reilly, it’s not available in podcast format, but it is available for streaming. While O’Reilly is specifically talking about advertising, truths about considering your target group and doing your homework are made awfully vivid by stealable examples from the corporate world.

Katya Andresen’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog calls this “Robin Hood Marketing”, that is “the concept of stealing corporate savvy to sell just causes”  and offers clear-cut breakdowns of marketing essentials, such as going to where the attention is. Nedra Weinreich’s excellently-written blog Spare Change focuses on social marketing and how it applies to non-profits.

No matter what, though, you cannot do better than getting an expert into your non-profit. Offline, see if your local university has opportunities for marketing students to intern with you and take their knowledge seriously – an intern who helps you learn the ropes of Robin Hood marketing could be a fantastic board member in the making.

Guess where the term "marketing" originated? Original Photo: Flickr user lumierefi (CC license 2.0)

*quoting the American Marketing Association’s definition – you can see the whole definition on Wikipedia.

Launched yesterday, the non-profit IntraHealth International has partnered with Youssou N’Dour, Senegalese/World Music superstar.  They have released a new charity EP titled OPEN Remix, to support a project that to enables health workers in Africa to access open-source technologies.  As the CEO of IntraHealth says, “With growing connectivity and mobile phone use, Africa can take advantage of cutting edge technologies.”  Note that mobile phone use is increasing across Africa at twice the global rate.  This opens the door to implementing mobile e-health solutions, and open source technology is ideally suited for the project: it’s inexpensive, flexible and collaborative. Check out the full video introduction to the project.

Plus, the project allows you to rock.  Youssou’s song, “Wake Up” is available on the EP, but he’s also put it out there under a open-source license.  And a bunch of big names, like Nas and Peter Buck of R.E.M., have already been busy tweaking it up.  You can download the remixes - or make your own remix - and make a donation.  How much money Intrahealth International will make, I’m not sure – but they certainly will get some attention from the Boing Boing crowd.

ps. Check out the music blog, Culture of Me, who tipped me off to this one.

You clearly need to enjoy the benefits of going analog. Here are 3 tips we use all the time to get our projects done.

Original Photo by flickr user Dave77459

Kitchen Timers:

We’re serious. We like to set the timer for half hour or hour long sprints to help us focus on a task. It ticks, it dings, you’re done.  The timer works well for three reasons – the ticking makes a white noise that keeps you on task,  estimating how much time a task will take you helps you to manage it, and timing yourself means that you’re allowed to take breaks. In fact, breaks are enforced, because you have to take your hands off the keyboard to reset the thing.

Task Breaks:

A friend told me recently about a study that showed that humans are evolving to aggregate information better, courtesy of using computers. Unfortunately, we’re the unevolved ones – this generation of humans aggregates poorly. The answer? Take breaks and let yourself process.

The only rules for a break are: you cannot input on a break (so, you can’t read your book, you can’t listen to music) and you cannot output on a break (don’t make notes, don’t go on Facebook, don’t answer your emails).  The best breaks, the ones that will bring you back to your desk with your work processed, are the ones that get you moving. (And this makes sense when you consider that our brains evolved partly from being able to walk.)

However you do it, banish yourself from input/output tasks for ten minutes, and you’ll find yourself sifting through information and coming back to your work with better focus.

Sticky Note Questions

Make your own content filter. Pick three (max) questions that help you define your goals, write them on a sticky note, and keep it where you can see it. This lets you check if you’re spending your time on the right priorities. For example, a funding developer might have this on her sticky note:

a) Will this bring in money?

b) Will this bring in new donor prospects?

This keeps her from going too far off onto websites that probably won’t support either goal.

If you’re interested in doing further reading about productivity (and you’re not on a task break right now) Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com is the site for you. Among other great posts, you’ll find this one on the benefits of using paper (yes, he invented The Hipster PDA). You’ll also find a great digital tool for keeping yourself from wandering off-task; if you’re not a kitchen timer kind of person, you might be a Brain Dad kind of person.  Kim Klein has also written a bit about analog efficiency – the sticky note idea is featured in her book Fundraising for Social Change (2001, Chardon Press) and it’s good advice.