Raised Eyebrow Blog

Two years ago, Emira & I went to South by Southwest (AKA SXSW) for the first time, and presented a panel called “Boss Lady” that featured tips for online business owners from several of the savviest women entrepreneurs we know: Vickie Howell, Jenny Hart & Alex Beauchamp, all of whom appear in the pages of our book, The Boss of You. We had such a good time that we knew we wanted to go back as soon as humanly possible, though last year we were too busy getting our book out the door to attend the conference.

But this year we’re back, this time with a panel that we hope will prove helpful to geeks of both the design and techie varieties – both camps are in full force at SXSW’s Interactive conference, which is a pure, 24/7, all-out geekfest – who are looking to bring their values into their paid work, whether it’s by learning to work with clients in the nonprofit sector, creating apps that help mission-driven organizations work more effectively, or infusing some environmental or social-justice savvy into their workplaces. The panel’s called “Socially Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doin’ Good”, and it takes place Saturday, March 13^th.

The topic was inspired by a topic our friend Noah Scalin (of Skull-A-Day and Another Limited Rebellion fame) spoke about at the 2009 HOW Conference. His focus was more on graphic design, since that’s his area of expertise, but when I asked him about riffing on his ideas for an interactive design audience, he shared his materials with me with typical generosity. (This is a guy who lives and breathes a DIY, share-and-share-alike mentality that a lot of designers could learn from. But that’s a topic for another day.)

This time I’ll be attending the conference solo, while Emira spends some time with her new baby; my co-facilitator for the session is Leif Utne, a friend and colleague who works for Zanby, a software company that specializes in supporting online social communities for change. Leif’s background includes a stint as the publisher of Worldchanging.org, and lots of experience building online communities; he’s also a journalist, activist and social entrepreneur.  Zanby is used to support The UpTake, a web video community that among other things was heavily involved in documenting the RNC and DNC prior to the 2008 election, and was also engaged in citizen vote monitoring during the election. He brings both amazing facilitation skills as well as a solid understanding of how businesses and nonprofits can work together in mutually beneficial ways.

We’ll be conducting our session in a highly interactive, inclusive format called a Core Conversation: Leif and I will be kick-starting the discussion and planting some seeds, but the idea is that whoever shows up will have a chance to step forward and contribute questions and ideas – so I’m really excited to see how it develops.

We’re hoping to address questions like:

• What is a socially conscious geek?
• How can I specialize in socially conscious work and earn a living wage?
• What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges of specializing in socially conscious work?
• What is the difference between non-profit and no-profit clients?
• How do I make the transition from corporate work to working with non-profit and/or mission-driven clients?
• What is the “triple bottom line” approach to business?
• What are some examples of alternative business models that are emerging among socially conscious geeks?
• How is socially conscious work different than “green” work?
• What are some examples of clients I might be able to work with as a socially conscious geek?
• How should I market myself to values-driven clients? Is it different from marketing to corporate clients?

Ultimately, though, the decisions about what we cover will rest with whoever shows up. So please help us spread the word – and if you’ll be at SXSW, we’d love to see you there!

Is there a better term for “nonprofit”? A recent article by Dan Pallotta at Harvard Business blogs begins, “Anyone who has thought about it for more than a nanosecond agrees that ‘nonprofit’ is about the worst possible summary we could give of ourselves and our work.” He goes on to argue that the nonprofit sector could stand to define itself in terms of what it is, rather than what it is not. (It’s a great post, and well worth reading, as are the unusually thoughtful comments that accompany it.) Pallotta’s suggestion is we move to using the term “Humanity Sector.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across the idea of renaming the nonprofit sector. Tom Suddes makes a compelling case in favour of using “for impact” instead — though personally, I’m not sure that distinguishes this sector from the business & government sectors in any useful way. Surely we all want to make an impact? (That being said, if you ever get to hear him talk about fundraising, do yourself a favour and go — he has some amazing insights and a great deal of charm.)

I’m also not convinced of the “humanity” moniker, because the nonprofit sector includes a lot of organizations that really don’t focus on humanity — there are astronomy educators and environmental justice warriors and all kinds of other groups for whom “humanity” isn’t the emphasis. I’ve heard “third sector” (which feels awkward & low-priority), “non-governmental” (okay, but uninspiring), “community profit” (can’t the community profit from corporate & governmental work as well?), and “public benefit” (see “community profit”) — but none of those work for me either.

Although I love the idea of moving away from “nonprofit,” I’d really like us to find an option that is both broadly inclusive of the wide variety of organizations within the sector, and clearly distinct from the focus of for-profit and governmental actors. Because the key differences that mark nonprofits are legal in nature, perhaps “nonprofit” is the simplest option.

But there is one other suggestion I quite like, with a couple of reservations: “the delta sector,” as proposed by Robert K. Ross in The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Yes, it sounds a bit like a Star Trek reference. But here’s his pitch:

Robert K. Ross, president of the California Endowment, a health foundation in Los Angeles, says he’s got just the word: “delta,” the Greek letter that signifies change. So, no more talk about the “nonprofit sector,” he said at the closing session of the National Conference on Volunteering and Service.

It’s now the “delta sector.”

“We need to be more intentionally about change and transformation,” he said. “Business as usual is leaving too many families broken and too many families and folks with hopelessness and despair.”

I’m not a hundred percent sold on “delta sector” — I’m not sure it works for arts organizations (or many conservative groups that actively resist change), and I’m also not convinced that change is a worthwhile motive in and of itself — but I like the sentiment behind it, and indeed behind all these ideas. It warms my former-English-major heart that so many good people are putting so much brain power towards thinking about the importance of language, and I’d love to see the nonprofit / for impact / humanity / delta sector wrestle with this some more and see if we can’t come up with a better name.

We are very proud to unveil a project we’ve been working on for several months now: a redesign of policyalternatives.ca, the online home of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Canada’s leading progressive research institute, the CCPA is a prolific publisher of reports and studies, books, articles, commentary and fact sheets on issues ranging from income equality to environmental policy, privatization of public services, and beyond.

They are highly respected, but like many organizations working towards policy change, they don’t always reach as broad an audience as they might hope; not many people have the time and inclination to read an in-depth research report, so in recent years they have been creating more bite-sized, easy-to-digest content in both written and multimedia formats. As the range of content has grown, though, so has the need to cross-reference related materials — so the CCPA’s website needed to both invite visitors to browse through an extensive library in an intuitive and approachable way, but also allow people seeking more in-depth content to locate related materials quickly and easily. (One of our developers describes the complex interrelationships between the CCPA’s publications as “like Facebook for documents.”)

Their five year-old website, although rich in content and highly trafficked, didn’t offer visitors any way to easily share the CCPA’s content with their social networks, whether through Facebook or Twitter, or even through their own publications, blogs or presentations. Exchange of ideas is the CCPA’s raison d’etre, so it stands to reason that above and beyond extending the website’s “share this” features, the organization would benefit from encouraging online visitors to use and share its content — and they do, using a Creative Commons license.

This project was a complex one on several fronts, as we wrestled with improving navigation through the site (both via menus and site links as well as with improved search tools); updating the site’s look and feel; and migrating the extensive site content (along with the aforementioned relationships between content items) from a commercial CMS platform into Drupal.

Oh, and we also set up a shopping cart (for books, memberships, donations and journal subscriptions).

There’s a real sense of accomplishment here at Raised Eyebrow when we look at the final result, but of course on the web, there’s no such thing as a final edit. Our best hope, in fact, is that we’ve helped to create a solid platform upon which the CCPA can continue to build and extend over the coming years. So while right now we are celebrating the grand opening, the real fun in some ways is still to come. I’m sure we’ll see the CCPA continue to play a leadership role when it comes to presenting research online in accessible and innovative ways.

I’ve written before about the cost of websites, which is really hard thing to nail down. Like building a house, it depends how big/how fancy that house/website needs to be before a price tag can be attached. That said, we’ve been doing this a long time now, and recently we’ve been talking about rethinking our development model at Raised Eyebrow, which has some ramifications for our pricing and would allow us to answer the “what does a website cost anyway?” question a bit more directly.

On the development model side, we’re moving towards more of an Agile Development framework, which aligns really nicely with our company approach and philosophy quite nicely. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Agile development I do recommend following that link, but in a nutshell I can tell you that it means a more nimble process, more responsive to needs (in our case our clients’ needs), and generally means slower growth over time all of which fits really nicely with our vision of the web, community building and organizational/business sustainability.

I’ve written before, and waxed poetic over many a cocktail about new shiny features in the world of the interwebs taking priority over actual use value. Often we have clients coming to us, enticed by the latest cool new web tricks, and wanting to implement them — an understandable impulse. Often, we talk our clients down a notch when we know that they don’t have the internal resources to support said cool trick, or that their (let’s face it often limited) funds could be better spent elsewhere. In an Agile development model we’d be helping our clients focus on a smaller and defined set of features, rolling those out initially and then working with them to monitor the value and strategic impact of those features before we undertake further development. We already pride ourselves on having long term relationships with our clients where we’re happy to act as their trusted advisors when it comes to all things web, so tying that consulting relationship to a plan for a phased feature rollout is not a big new step to take. The new part, is the scaling back of initial specifications.

You may ask, why would a business (that is looking to make some money afterall) want to scale back specifications and features off the top? For us, it’s about doing our best work and supporting our clients to do their best work. It’s about making sure that clients are spending funds wisely so that they have something left over for features and consulting they’ll want in the future. Websites are fantastic in their ability to evolve and change, making sure our clients approach the work we do with them as a starting ground for a longer conversation, rather than a race to the finish line is one way that we feel we can better serve our clients and the non-profit sector we work in.

So what does a website cost under this model anyway?

For the first time ever we feel like we really truly have an answer to this question. In our case $15,000 (plus GST if you’re in Canada). And what do you get for that?

• You get a website. Not just any old website though. A website designed and birthed by a team of experts with many, many years of experience in this field.
• You do get an original design process.
• You get a rock solid Content Management System (Drupal), with an integrated search, that can be extended to add all kinds of cool features in the future.
• You get a site that is optimized for SEO both in its overall structure and its technical framework.
• You also get Information Architecture/Interaction Design consulting and ongoing strategic advice throughout the project.

You also get two features, things like:

• A basic events calendar, kind of like the one you see here at the Chan Centre.
• A standard publications/resources catalogue like this one at Pivot Legal.
• A news listing like this one for the Ending Violence Association of BC.
• A customized blog.
• An image gallery.
• A video carousel like the one on CaroleJames.ca.
• Something else that your organization needs specifically (that can be defined within a basic scope) like the integrated custom Job Applications form we did for Covenant House.

Why only two features? Well two features fits within our budget limit of $15,000 (obviously if you have more budget, we can expand the features), and two features is a great place to start. With two features up and running on a website we can work with you to make sure that they’re actually being used by the organization and users (through statistics monitoring), and we can then create a roadmap for building out new features or further customizing the existing ones to do even more for you.

The idea is, that we start with $15,000, get you an excellent and useful website that helps to meet your short term needs and helps you build on your long term communications goals. And then, ideally, we set up a retainer contract with you to have regular check-ins (quarterly, bi-annually, etc whatever works for you), and we help you plan out future feature roll-outs, strategies for enhancing the website and your online communications in general. We play an ongoing role in your communications strategy by regularly monitoring your website statistics and usage patterns, and we help make sure your budgets are being wisely spent over time.

But what about Social Media, is that a feature?

Yes, and no. Adding a link to your Twitter profile or integrating your latest Twitter posts into the website is easily done, and would be included in the project price. Ditto for adding Facebook links or integrating an RSS feed from the site into your Facebook Page/Group/Profile. By default (where applicable) we can include a Social Bookmarking widget that allows people to bookmark, repost, or email your site to a friend/social networks. Ditto for adding an existing email list signup box. Actual online strategic planning is another story. If you need help with creating a strategy for online communications, we’ll do that with you as well, but that would be a separate project.

Last week I blogged about Vancouver arts groups who are using Twitter to deepen their relationships with new and existing audiences, and I’d like to point to a couple more intriguing examples of social media tools finding new and wildly creative uses in the hands of arts organizations.

The first is an iPhone application I discovered recently, called The Extraordinaries. The Extraordinaries is a micro-volunteering application that enables iPhone users like myself to spend a couple of minutes here and there (I use it when I’m waiting at bus stops, or standing in line at the sandwich shop) tagging images for art galleries and libraries. (The current list of organizations who are benefiting from the service includes the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as groups from New Zealand, France, Portugal, Australia and Holland.)

Tagging — which is all I’ve been able to do via the app so far — is actually only the tip of the iceberg. The Extraordinaries’ website lists the following possibilities for future development:

• Translating a nonprofit’s Website into a foreign language
• Recording the GPS location of potholes and city infrastructure issues for municipalities
• Identifying birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Tagging images for the Smithsonian
• Transcribing ancient texts for ReCaptcha
• Reviewing congressional bills for hidden pork
• Fact checking for reporters

I’m really excited about where this could go. I encourage my fellow iPhone users to check it out — and if your organization could benefit from this kind of micro-volunteering, why not apply to be a pilot partner?

The second story I want to share may already be familiar to those of you in the classical music community, but for the rest of you: Did you know there’s an opera being composed on Twitter?

Yes, you read that right. So far there are 7 acts, and the entire libretto has been written in 140-character bursts by Twitter users. From what I can make out, the plot is rather serpentine, but holy heck is this a fun project! Talk about crowdsourcing your content! Anyone can tweet a line of the opera by using the hashtag #youropera, or sending their tweet to @youropera.

The whole thing is a project of the Royal Opera House in London, rather a grande dame of the classical scene, known as a fancy-pants venue for ballet & opera. The Twitter opera is part of their Deloitte Ignite series, a 3-day festival that’s a smidge more avant-garde than the Opera House’s usual fare — but still, I have to give them props for going out on a limb. A Twitter opera might seem a risky venture for far smaller, edgier companies, and I applaud the ROH for stepping up and giving it a shot.

And you know, even if your company isn’t ready to let your Twitter followers write your next show, you can always follow the example of Next to Normal, the Broadway musical whose rise to success seems to have been at least partially fuelled by its clever use of Twitter.

What’s next? All I know is that the arts community is sure to keep uncovering innovative ways to use social media to create, connect and inspire. More news as it happens…

Between my personal background in — and passion for — music, and the fact that many of our nonprofit clients hail from the arts sector, I try to keep an eye on how arts groups are using social media to achieve their missions. In particular, lately I’ve been looking around on Twitter to see which Vancouver arts groups are doing interesting things in the Twitterverse. I’m excited to see how many organizations are reaching out to new and existing audiences via Twitter, and I thought it might be of interest to some readers to hear about some Vancouver arts organizations who are doing a lot with 140 characters.

My focus tends to skew towards music, and classical music in particular, so you’ll definitely notice that bias here. I’ve also tried to limit the list to groups who are twittering actively, and conversing rather than simply broadcasting one-way announcements.

• Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC*: Rachel Lowry at the Chan is doing a fantastic job of highlighting all kinds of interesting arts news, as well as sharing information about their upcoming events.
• Many of the big performing arts groups in town are making good use of Twitter, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and The Arts Club. But the leader of the pack may be Ling Chan at Vancouver Opera, who has been doing a bang-up job of extending the opera company’s reach beyond the usual classical-music suspects. The opera’s Twitter feed features fun & interesting opera news, as well as exclusive offers for Vancouver Opera fans. In related social media news, the organization has been reaching out to bloggers as well, through their innovative Blogger Night at the Opera.
• World-renowned men’s choir Chor Leoni* has a great feed, which I believed is managed by arts marketer extraordinaire Bruce Hoffman. My favourite recent tweet from them pointed to a video of Bobby McFerrin leading the World Science Festival audience through a fascinating musical exercise.
  
• Pacific Cinematheque offers a delightful twist on the self-promotional announcement: each time they mention a film they’re screening, they include a quote from the script. (A recent example: “‘You’re wearing the wrong shade of lipstick, Mister.’ THE BLUE DAHLIA 9:20pm”.)
• Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, the CBC’s weekly opera show hosted by Bill Richardson (one of my all-time favourite Vancouverites), is relatively new to Twitter, but already making a splash with their contests to summarize opera plots in 140 characters.
• musica intima*, the a cappella (and conductorless) vocal ensemble with whom I used to sing, has a lively Twitter feed (though it seems to be on summer hiatus) written by two staff members and one of the group’s twelve singers. I particularly enjoyed the updates they posted while the group was on tour.
• The Dance Centre’s Twitter feed covers all things dance-related. I love that they write about everything from serious dance news to the latest episode of So You Think You Can Dance.
• For a couple of great examples of how festivals (whose “seasons” are short-lived by nature), check out the Vancouver Folk Fest, Vancouver Jazz Fest, and DOXA feeds.
• Pacific Baroque Orchestra is another Twitter newbie, but they’re posting actively about baroque & classical-era music and joining in the conversation.
• Finally, one of my favourite Twitter feeds comes from the Vancouver Public Library. They keep me up to date on everything from special collections I may not have heard about, to author readings, to branch closures. And they’re fun and funny.

Who have I missed? I’d love to hear of other examples. Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

(* = Raised Eyebrow clients)

One of our wonderful client-friends (we have a lot of those, which is part of what makes our work here so much fun) sent me an email this week with the curiosity-piquing subject line, “Where’s the lettuce?” — it contained a link to this article about the “missing ingredient” in a lot of email marketing.

We spend a lot of time talking about the beef of email marketing: perfectly clean copy, clear calls-to-action, highly scannable designs, solid coding, and the right offer. But there’s more to a great burger than a great patty.

A recent Crate & Barrel email included in our Email Design Look Book provides the answer to the missing ingredient. The May 1 email promoted knives with a minimalistic design that used silhouette photography of the knives and simple blocks of product information. The design is nice and clean, but what makes it exceptional is the ribbon of lettuce used as the bottom border of the primary message block. Smith-Harmon designer Ellen Bolotin, who brought the email to our attention, says that “the lettuce on the bottom just makes me laugh.”

That’s what so many emails are missing — a little, cool crunch-a-little lettuce. Most emails are all business, all beef. While effective, there’s something a little boring and joyless about them.

Many people view their inboxes as stressful places, so delivering a little unexpected delight is well worth the effort — and likely to make opening your email feel less like a chore.

I couldn’t agree more. I spend a lot of my time reading emails, tweets, Facebook status messages, website copy, and fundraising letters — and the ones I remember definitely include content that is not strictly necessary, but that adds enormous flavour, personality and charm. When you take an all-business approach to copywriting (and design, for that matter), you miss an opportunity to connect with your community through humour, delight, and serendipity.

Here are just a few of my personal favourite lettuce-delivery vehicles online:

• John Richards, the morning DJ at KEXP.org (the Seattle-based radio station that keeps me at least somewhat in the loop, musically), sends out a daily email to his listeners with his playlist, upcoming live shows in the Seattle area, and several extras ranging from a Link of the Day to a news story filed under the heading, “The End is Near”. (Here’s a recent entry in the latter category: “Andrew Mizsak, clean your room! Father calls cops on adult son, member of the Bedford school board, for refusing his chores.”)
• BC Business magazine has made an intriguing shift in the past year or two, and here’s one sign of why I care much more about them than ever before: Digital editor John Buchner kicks off the publication’s Twitter feed every morning with a daily haiku. Like this one: “June’s last slanted sun / And sharp air, she breathes, and her / heels click on the road. [Good Monday morning.]“
• Years ago, SF Gate columnist Mark Morford crafted a daily email newsletter called “The Morning Fix,” which was a favourite of mine. It included a rotating series of delightful diversions, such as the daily Mullet Haiku (contributed by readers) and a word-of-the-day feature that was notable mostly for its hysterically funny usage examples, most of which were send-ups of then-VPOTUS Dick Cheney.
• BUST magazine used to have a fun feature in their e-newsletters — sadly, it’s gone now — called “Shebonics”, where they’d insert a quote from a famous woman, usually on the subject of feminism or female empowerment. (Sample: “I used to think Hollywood was a very disorganized place run by very evil people. Now I think it’s a really disorganized place run by a lot of evil people and a few really great ones who somehow found their way in there. I still would never live there.” Sarah Polley in Interview)

Quirky, personal, funny, or just odd — so long as it’s not competing with the “beef” part of your message (or perhaps “protein” would be more inclusive?), I recommend spicing up your writing with an extra or two. In a medium that struggles to avoid being impersonal, your copywriting is one of the things that can really help you stand out from the crowd and connect with your readers at a gut, emotional level. It seems to me the key is to give yourself permission to share something unusual about yourself; obviously it needs to be something you’re comfortable sharing, but you need to push past the inner voice telling you that nobody cares (or that people will think you’re weird), and remember that your quirks just make you more lovable. And don’t we all just want to be loved?

In preparing an upcoming presentation for a client I found myself leafing through notes and google searches to get an exhaustive list of the different between Facebook Pages and Groups (I know the general difference, but wanted to make sure I was 100% prepared to answer all the ins outs of each, and always like to check in on the latest happenings at evolving beast that is Facebook). Here are two great posts that outline the differences between the two, if you’ve found yourself wondering which is best for you organization/cause/business:

• Search Engine Journal’s post includes a comparison table that is handy dandy. I would point out, however, that while it is true you can “message all members” with both as they say, there is a notable difference between messaging your Page’s fans vs. your Group members. With the former, the message goes out in the form of an “update” which can be easily ignored by users (if I’m any indication, they can in fact be routinely ignored). The latter, offers direct inbox sending options, though only for groups under 1,200 members (or perhaps 5,000 I’ve found conflicting info on that number).
• Advergirl’s post lists out the pros and cons of each, playing champion and devil’s advocate for both options.

The summary seems to be that for a long standing, more engaged approach with a community you want a Page, not a Group, but check out the comparisons and decide for yourself.

(As a side note, you can turn an existing Facebook Group into a Page, but you need to be the admin contact for the original group, and you need to contact Facebook directly to do it. No sense of what the ETA on turn around time for that is).

Vertical Response is free for 501(c)(3) equivalent organizations, which is pretty amazing deal in the world of newsletter software.  Apply by emailing proof of your 501(c)(3) equivalency to nonprofits@verticalresponse.com and you will start getting 10,000 credits applied to your account per month.

We work with a bunch of different newsletter software providers, including Constant Contact, Emma, MailChimp and Vertical Response.  More and more, newsletter software providers are allowing us to create custom templates—where we design a beautiful html newsletter and upload it to a client’s newsletter software.  Then, areas of the templates are editable by the client, allowing clients to produce eye-catching newsletters without having to know HTML.  Vertical Response doesn’t have a custom template function, but recently we discovered a work-around:

1.    Design a template in Dreamweaver and copy the HTML code
2.    Create an “Email Canvas” newsletter in Vertical Response
3.    Once inside the WYWIWYG, click on the second tab, Edit Source
4.    Delete the existing HTML and replace it with the HTML code for your template
5.    Click back on the “Edit Graphical” tab

Et voila! Vertical Response provides a graphical representation of the template that can be edited.  For the client, the user experience has its quirks.  Unlike MailChimp, where you can configure styles that can be applied to text via a drop-down menu, you’ll have to copy styles from existing text. Also, we found that sometimes deleting two characters would inadvertently delete a whole column.  But if you remember to have your fingers poised on control + z and save frequently, this was just a small nuisance. Idiosyncrasies aside, this implementation of Vertical Response allows a non-profit client to set up and start sending really great newsletters for only the cost of creating a template.

I’ve been thinking a lot about resistance to social media at the institutional level — and I use the term “social media” very broadly here, to include any web-based tools that facilitate participation by your constituents (AKA “users,” though I have a love/hate relationship with that word) — especially as it relates to our clients in the nonprofit world. We hear a lot of fears about incorporating social media tools, some of which include:

• We’ll lose control of our messaging.
• We’ll lose control of our content.
• We’ll get too much negative / problematic feedback.
• There’s no way to measure the results we’ll get.
• We can’t afford to allocate budget, time, and/or staff resources to this stuff.

I’m planning to write a series of blog posts addressing these fears one by one, but I want to start with the first one: the fear that by opening your organization up with Web 2.0 tools, your message will become diluted or distorted. This fear reflects an assumption that many of us in the communications & marketing industries (at least, those of us over the age of 25) grew up with — namely, that your message is something you can control in a top-down, across-the-board fashion.

Now, I like a set of good branding guidelines as well as the next designer, but one of the things that made me fall in love with the web was its remix culture. This is a medium where everyone has a voice, and wants to use it — where the paradox of our deeply human desire to simultaneously experience both a sense of perfect uniqueness and of belonging to a community is playing out in some very interesting ways.

Let’s take, for example, the personal blog. Someone carves out a space to talk about whatever subjects strike their fancy, and posts written, photographic, audio, or video content to a website, in a journal format. It is of course technically possible to write a blog that contains no links to other websites, or even that is closed to the public — but that’s the exception rather than the rule, and most blogs balance personal expression with community-building, via links within posts, blogrolls, and so on. Bloggers reference the stuff that inspires them, linking to other blogs, websites, books, you name it. And in doing so, they create a sort of hybrid web space that is both entirely personal, and which connects them up to the various people, organizations, and sites with which they feel an affinity.

Bloggers may be writing about your organization already. (Let’s hope so!) And if they are, you can be sure that there is already conversation out there in the world that you have lost control over. But the question you should be asking yourself is not, “How can we gain control of our messaging?” but rather, “How can we participate in this conversation?”

Slide by David Wilcox

[Above slide from David Wilcox's excellent blog post "We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either".]

There’s a pretty deep shift in terms of frameworks there, especially for organizations with roots that reach back before the Web as we know it was born. So how to we explain the concept to those fearful of change?

Here’s one idea. Something clicked for me when I saw this fabulous line from a slidecast from Steve Bridger:

As supporters increasingly want to mix giving their time, money, activism & influence… the time has come for charities to re-structure to reflect this.

The key word for me in that sentence is “influence.” Time, money & activism are the contributions the nonprofit sector has relied upon, historically. Influence, though, is new territory. There are debates raging everywhere about how to measure it, for starters. And there’s still a lot of resistance among organizations to opening up to multidimensional conversation with constituents, rather than communicating via the broadcast-media approach they’ve used for decades (distributing newsletters, sending direct mail, and so on).

There is, of course, a wide range of things nonprofits can work on to allow supporters to assert their influence more easily. One that Bridger touches upon is facilitating conversations that are scalable — for example, if your organization is mounting a campaign, spend some time crafting messages that can be passed on to the recipient’s network and still make sense when they’re coming from an intermediary — and explain to your supporters how spreading the word will help. Avaaz does a great job of this; they even include a dynamic calculator on all their petitions that tells prospective signers how many signatures have been provided so far, and how many remain to reach the target number.

Help people meet their individual needs through your work. People like to feel special, and they also like to feel part of something bigger than themselves; help them experience both by giving them ways to contribute their unique voices to your campaign. If it’s a letter-writing campaign, give them point-form notes and invite them to write their own emails; or follow the example of some of the big health charities and allow people to create their own fundraising web pages they can send around to their networks.

The risk, yes, is that you lose control over your message. But that control has been eroding for decades, anyway. So let’s focus on the opportunity, which Bridger sums up succinctly as follows:

Real engagements = when people do things for the cause you didn’t ask them to do.

Related links:

• We Are Media wiki entry for Dealing with Resistance
• Top 5 Fears About Social Media (and the 5 “counter-fears”)
• David Wilcox: “We can’t do that – and they mustn’t do it either”