Some new commentary on the evolving nature of women’s work, as a follow-up to comments on gender-driven compensation in social work:
….as the social media world becomes more and more female-driven (after all, social media power users tend to be female) will it become “demoted” in the tech industry, seen as a “soft” profession with lower comparative salaries and less room for professional advancement/leadership? Has that already happened?
via Rebecca
Visualizing the demand curve is left as an exercise for the reader.
I was asked by a colleague how to increase the size of their organization’s Facebook Fan page—not that I would consider any page I manage to be an overwhelming success.
Googling around, I could only find technical advice (“install these apps”) and crappy nonexistent-advice (“You need to have a strategy.” duh, tell me what that strategy would be). So here’s the stream of consciousness around what I do:
Please secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.
A nonprofit can’t help others unless it helps itself. Some organizations don’t even realize they can’t breath.
The following quote from Here Comes Everybody is interesting in that it exposes dewy-eyed optimism surrounding equal participation (rather than equal access or equal ability) as untenable:
…imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer that two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors, no effort is made to even out their contributions. The spontaneous division of effort driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it. Though the word “ecosystem” is overused as a way to make simple situations seem more complex, it is merited here, because large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behavior of some nonexistent “average” user.
This follows discussion of power-law distributions (in contrast to bell-curves) and the 80-20 rule.
I was really excited about this year’s Grassroot’s Use of Technology Conference because I had submitted and had accepted a great proposal entitled “Facebook to Phone Trees: Multi-Generational Outreach Strategies” that was to be co-presented with Angela Kelly of Mass Peace Action and Daniel Karp of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Unfortunately I was forced to call-off the session because I’ve been worked to the bone at my daytime job and ended up running out of preparation time.
So, despite the session’s ultimate non-existance, I thought it might be valuable to post my notes for it here.
The impetus for the sessions came from some of my frustration with many technology initiatives that seek to tap into social networks like MySpace and Facebook. I often hear these initiatives couched in terms of “keeping up with the joneses” (or just tech-fetishism) rather than a measured communications strategy. Sometimes tried-and-true tools are overlooked or even forgotten. The goal of the session was to move people from thinking of the newness of a tool, to thinking of their audience (i.e. constitutents, donors or members) and what tools would most effectively reach them. We were really hoping to get an age diverse audience who would remember what things were like before the internet.
One of the strengths of the session a dialogue format in which, once the frame was set by a personal case study from Daniel, a group discussion facilitated by Angela would take place about different tools that were successfully (or not) used for specific audiences and situations, and then move into some small-groups to map out some personal strategies.
Of course, the dialogue didn’t happen, but Daniel’s case study was a quite interesting story of how (and how not) to go about integrating new social networking tools into a communications plan. To set the stage, the IPPNW is a large, distinguished (they received the Nobel Prize) and successful international organizing and advocacy organizing organization. The leadership had become concerned that a gap was developing between older members of the organization and younger medical students and new doctors who they wished to recruit and involve. Basically, the organization worried that they seemed too old and stuffy with their dead-tree newsletters and symposiums. To reach-out to these younger potential members, they instituted a large online social network campaign: MySpace, FaceBook, the whole-nine yards. And it was incredibly successful—they were recruiting hundreds of young people into the organization and creating a thriving online space. But then they had a problem….
The youthful online community was huge, but it wasn’t happy: they felt like they were being relegated to the sidelines. The online community felt that they had joined this legitimate and eminent organization, but they didn’t feel like they were really participating in it since they were only interacting with themselves in the walled-off online community. The older generation was still going about its activities offline—and it’s completely unrealistic to think you can get everyone online (says someone who works with people who print off their email). The online community hadn’t been integrated into the full scope of activities like submitting articles for the dead-tree newsletters or being invited to the symposiums. The wisdom, eminence and legitimacy of the organization still lay offline, and the online crowd hadn’t been invited.
From that experience and many others, we came up with the following advice:
The original session submission (for posterity’s sake; I love the last line)—though in discussion the scope was narrowed:
Participants will bring their own knowledge and experiences to this open discussion of targeted communications strategies. How do generational differences affect the effectiveness of your messages, opportunities and appeals? We’ll discuss everything from Facebook to Phone Trees and PayPal to to Planned Giving.
Last week I attended NTEN’s 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.
I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.
The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below.
Community building talent is the single most important resource in the modern world.
A Communications framework for thinking about how organizational objectives are met through interaction. The correlating Development framework is in parenthesis.
I shot this video with a Casio EX-S600, which shoots full-frame (640 x 480) MPEG-4 video. With a two gigabyte SD Card it can shoot approximately an hour and a half of video at medium quality before its battery dies. The Casio’s AVI wrapper is incompatible with iMovie (or any Quicktime decoder), so I first used VisualHub to repackage the video as an MP4 before importing into iMovie to add titles. I exported from iMovie as DV and then converted that with VisualHub into MPEG-4. Compressed and at quarter-frame (320 x 240) the entire video was 105 MB. This time I uploaded to Google Video since Blip.tv stalled out.
I just got back from some extended travel in California where I met with some fellow AmeriCorps*VISTAs and, among other things, discussed how we could get our AmeriCorps social networking website growing even faster. Right now the site has over 300 registered users, which is pretty good for a six month old baby.
Most importantly, we’re working on stepping up our outreach. Unlike what some of the hype may tell you, social networking website don’t build themselves. If you build it, they won’t come, at least not if you don’t tell anyone about.
Outreach is key, and unfortunately it usually means a change of strategy. We’re building our networks online because it’s cheap real estate, but on the internet you can’t shout very far and most people are deaf. If you’re trying to get in front of someone’s face (or next to their ear), putting something on the internet is probably the worst way to go about it.
Physical objects are best
, so I’m in the process of designing a postcard to mail out to AmeriCorps host organizations.
Also, because MeetAmeriCorps.com already has so many members across the country, we can have them lend a hand too in outreach activities. That’s always a benefit of working with AmeriCorps: we love to help.
My pet project, MeetAmeriCorps.com has finally passed that development milestone that marks a “social network”: Buddylists. To be a little more haute, we’ve decided to call them “contact lists”, but the concept is the same: you can demarcate people who you like/know/want-to-be-on-your-contact-list.
Since I haven’t really been advertising it too heavily, Meet AmeriCorps was a directory–now it’s a “social network”–of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers who are either currently serving or alumni. It’s pretty neat stuff, doesn’t look to shabby and, disclosing I am the lead developer on the project, actually kind’ve useful.
We put together MeetAmeriCorps.com to fill what I see as a sorely lacking need. AmeriCorps and VISTA are essentially-governmental, national-service programs that mostly places full-time, stipended volunteers with community organizations. AmeriCorps speaks of itself as a “network” that is creating a “national service movement”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the capacity to truly achieve this because, in my opinion and experience, AmeriCorps and VISTA members generally do not:
AmeriCorps and VISTA currently provide some tools and resources to achieve #3, but I believe that #3 cannot be achieved with volunteers being able to effectively communicate and identify themselves as AmeriCorps both to each other and the outside world.
Meet AmeriCorps seeks to provide an easy-to-use tool for AmeriCorps members to meaningfully interact with one another both within service, and outside of it. I hope this will improve the experience of being an AmeriCorps or VISTA volunteer and contribute towards creating a true network and movement.
These screenshots were made with the OSX app Paparazzi!
I don’t know if it’s my empathy for the myriad of people I know stymied in technology quagmires for good causes or a desire to combine my love of good food with my job, but this is the result.
Download a printable PDF perfect for tacking to your wall or the wall of whomever makes technology decisions at your organization.
Update: The sandwich is on Unmediated.org
Update: The sandwich is on LOLnptech.org
Ben Sheldon is an author, thinker, facilitator, automator, mapper, artist, human and more
Email me at ben@island94.org
