I recently attended a training session for ArtsLab, an amazing capacity building project by Arts Midwest. I’m honored to be on the curriculum team. At the board leadership session we referenced a powerful white paper by Sam Pettway with five questions …
Continue readingA recent NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) post asked readers to think about a world where computers had been outlawed. The post starts like this:
“Effective immediately, PCs and computers will no longer be manufactured, nor supported worldwide. I re…
Guest Post by Lisa Negstad, Negstad Consulting, LLC
This week I’m pleased to have a post by Lisa Negstad giving good advice about working with your employees. Lisa was the featured guest at last month’s Ignited Online Fundraising Community …
For years I’ve been telling you that THE most powerful way to connect people to your mission is by sharing a story. By telling a real-life example about how your work affects one man, woman, or child you cause listeners to feel something and to take ac…
Continue readingWhile at the AFP 2013 International Conference in San Diego, I got to meet Marc Koenig and the team from Nonprofithub. They invited me to talk with them about what I see as one of the biggest challenges facing nonprofits. Take a look at my respon…
Continue readingLast week I attended the NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis. It’s a fun and “techy” conference for nonprofit professionals. As part of the conference I delivered a breakout session with Lars Leafblad founder of Pollen, Jamie Millard founder of Paper Darts, and Dana Nelson, Executive Director of GiveMN.
From left to right: Lars Leafblad, Dana Nelson, me,
and Jamie Millard
A week or so before the conference NTEN blog ran a guest post from Jamie and I about our topic Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Rebooting Your Digital Community Building.
Here’s some of what we had to say:
When it comes to building community and increasing brand awareness, some organizations hire communications, marketing, and engagement staff to handle these activities. And that makes sense — someone needs to be charged with keeping a close eye on the organization’s community growth.
But building awareness for your important work in an increasingly cluttered space can’t be the responsibility of just one person or even a department. When an organization embraces the culture of creating and empowering all staff to become “brand ambassadors,” authentic and exponential growth starts to happen.
This isn’t a new concept. Most organizations incorporate messaging training as part of the new hire process and encourage employees to “represent” when they are out and about at professional networking events.
However, when it comes to building communities online, often the first place an organization starts is with social networking accounts — creating organizational Twitter and Facebook accounts. And while yes, these are terrific tools, are they really the most authentic and engaging way to build communities behind the facade of an unknown institutional logo?
Read the rest of the post here, on the NTEN blog
Our breakout session generated some terrific discussion about taking a new look at building online communities. You can read some of the tweets that were generated during our session here:
At the session we discussed five key best practices for building or re-building your digital community:
Scalability – Make it easy for others to participate & share your messages. Use templates, sample language for social media, even share your logos.
Creativity – Create a buzz by grabbing attention with fun or unique ways of sharing your messages.
Urgency – Create a sense of urgency by having a specific “window of time” to be engaged, forward on your message, make a contribution, sign up for something.
Leadership Engagement – Get the whole team involved. Even your Executive Director or your non-techy board members. But have a plan and provide metrics about the benefits of becoming more social media savvy, and provide training and then more training to get people comfortable with using new tools.
Amplification effect – Explain and show the difference between just one voice using your organization’s logo to a whole team of voices talking about your great work, events and inviting others to participate.
Here is the SlideShare link to the slides from our session:
Guest Post by Bill Breon
Note from Lori: I invited my colleague and friend, Bill Breon, to submit the Withism’s post this week because he has a terrific story to tell about building teams, engaging the community, and running a successful “campaign.” While his post is about his work on an issue that is still controversial for many people I believe the story of “how he did it” is worth telling. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, I hope you’ll read Bill’s story and identify the best practices that will work to help your “campaign” be successful this year.
In 2012 Minnesota voted against a constitutional amendment that would have added language prohibiting same-sex marriage into our state constitution. As a staff person for Minnesotans United (Vote NO) I was an organizer in the suburban/rural area between St. Paul and the Wisconsin border.
From the beginning Minnesotans United supported us with terrific training and leadership.
The idea was simple: encourage thousands of conversations among people and track those conversations so we could see how our campaign was doing.
We had weekly goals that started small (30 conversations a week by April) and grew increasingly daunting (nearly 1,000 weekly conversations by November). While a single person can easily complete thirty conversations a week, the mammoth summer/fall goals required a massive grassroots effort. To achieve this long-term goal, I had to ignore the short-term goal and set out to build teams. It was a risk, but it worked!
By late June we were hitting our conversation goals, and by the end of July we were doubling them. Hundreds of people volunteered their time, and hundreds more donated. On Election Day, 54.5% of the voters in our area voted no. We exceeded the campaign’s goals by almost 2000 votes.
Here’s how we did it.
Bring people together
I believed the strategy I needed to reach the early modest goals wouldn’t guarantee success later on. Instead of starting phone banks, I personally met with people individually and introduced them to their neighbors in small, town-level meetings. I sought out people who were passionate, and found many who had never volunteered on a campaign before. My goal was to form teams to help reach the goals of 1000 conversations per week.
Stay Organized
We formed two types of teams: a county-wide team and community-level teams. The county team met monthly to review how things were going across the whole area, and we met every two weeks in town teams to discuss what was going on locally. Team members worked to recruit friends, lead trainings, host fundraisers, call their neighbors, and write letters to the editor.
Set Clear Expectations
Early on we developed clear expectations and responsibilities for everyone who got involved, from sporadic volunteers to full-time interns. People knew what to expect from themselves and one another. A regular meeting structure ensured we knew when we would see each other next and encouraged us to hold each other accountable.
Build authentic relationships
We made story sharing a central part of every gathering. People found the space to share about themselves and their loved ones in a way that built trust and cemented a common vision from the start. Team members baked cookies, hosted people in their homes, and stayed after events to clean up; all the while talking, sharing, and building the community that would sustain our work through November.
It was difficult to willfully ignore my goals those first few weeks. There wasn’t any guarantee that it would be successful, but the time spent investing in people and building teams paid off more than I could have imagined.
I believe Lori invited me to tell my story because the same principles I applied to reach mammoth goals in my community organizing effort are what it takes to be successful with any campaign, political or nonprofit fundraising. Good luck with your campaign, what ever it may be!
Bill Breon is a community activist and connector. He is passionate about people, conversations, and social change. He is a vocal advocate for urban agriculture, affordable homes, public transit, and youth development. Bill lives in Saint Paul with his fiancé, Erin, and their cat, Pio.
The 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study was released late last week and it is full of fascinating information we can all use to make our 2013 communications bolder, stronger, and more impactful than ever.
Click the cover to download the whole report…
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The most important conversation we have BEFORE I share my checklist of 7 must do steps is to work…
TED Talk video featuring Dan Pallotta, fundraiser and activist
Before I tell you about game-changing activist and fundraiser Dan Palotta, I wanted to let you know that he’s going to be the opening keynote speaker at this year’s 2013 NTC confer…