New links from the holiday break

Written by Noah Flower on Thursday, January 8th, 2009
Filed under Network technology, Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News

Thanks for your patience over the holidays. To make up for the break in content, here’s an extensive list of worthwhile links from the past few weeks, broken up by category: collaborative practices, serious tweeting, and technology/tools:

COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES

FORGE Closes Funding Gap – The FORGE fundraising saga is complete, and it has a happy ending: enough donors stepped up to the plate that FORGE was able to close its funding gap and win the $20,000 matching grant that had been offered earlier by a foundation. Having demonstrated that radical transparency can be a successful strategy, director Kjerstin Erickson can now turn her attention to rebuilding the organization.

Making Nonprofit Collaboration a Foundation Strategy: The Lodestar Foundation – Collaboration happens too infrequently among nonprofits, so the Lodestar Foundation has dedicated significant effort (including a prize) to promoting nonprofit collaboration and documenting its best practices. This short interview with Lodestar’s president has the details.

Let’s Talk | Case Foundation – The Case Foundation has a brand-new blog, which naturally addresses social media and today’s new kinds of tech-enabled giving.

Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Govt White Paper – The Obama administration has promised revolutionary openness, and in response the thirty top web managers of the federal government have just released this lengthy document describing exactly how they’re going to update the Federal web to match that vision. And if the government can do it, everyone else not only can but really should.

Wall Street Journal Evaluates Charity Evaluators – Tactical Philanthropy quotes the Journal’s critique of Charity Navigator and other evaluators. The recommended response to the problem of poor evaluation: do it yourself, and be honest. “Donors may do best by looking for charities that set specific numerical goals for themselves, and admit when they’ve fallen short. The American Cancer Society, for instance, gave itself a thumbs down last year for insufficiently reducing cancer mortality. In its Strategic Plan Progress Report, it admitted it was unlikely to meet its own goals for reducing mortality by 50% by 2015, since mortality wasn’t dropping fast enough from 1991 to 2004.”

David Plouffe: The Obama Campaign Used Grassroots Data and Computer Modeling to Allocate Resources in Real Time – techPresident has some very interesting excerpts here from David Plouffe about how the Obama campaign used large amounts of volunteer-gathered data to rapidly adjust its campaign tactics. There are direct parallels here to politically-oriented causes, and also a broader lesson about the power that gain be gained from using modern tools for data analytics.

The Case Foundation: Change Begins With Me – This new campaign from the Case Foundation epitomizes one of the core principles of working wikily: set up a way for individuals to take on your goal as their personal cause. The cause in this case is broad: becoming part of the change that Obama has promised to bring about in America. Their method: offer a free trip to Inauguration as the incentive to provide an eloquent description answering, “How will YOU commit to bringing about change in your neighborhood, your community or your nation?”

Wikipedia fundraiser surpasses $6 million – Chalk up one more example of the power of small donations: the fundraiser to save Wikipedia turned out to be a smashing success, raising more than its goal of $6 million from over 125,000 individual donors. The last $2 million arrived after a personal appeal by the site’s founder Jimmy Wales sparked 50,000 contributions in eight days. The average donation size: just under $50.

SERIOUS TWEETING

NPR: Help NPR Plan Our Social Media Activities for the Inauguration - Building on the success of the Twitter VoteReport project, NPR is engaged in an all-hands-on-deck effort to enable citizen journalism, “mobcasting,” tagged Twittering, and dynamic maps of all the content. If they can pull it off, the event could be a great example of best practices in using social media to make public events truly participatory.

Israel Holds a Twitter News Conference on Gaza – NYTimes.com – The Israeli consulate’s use of Twitter was reported in the New York Times. Flip to the bottom of the article to witness their remarkably authentic use of Tweet-speak to address serious questions about the war.

State of the Twittersphere: What It Means For Nonprofit Best Practices on Twitter – Beth offers a very useful synthesis of both the vital stats of the Twitter userbase (key points: recently-arrived, growing quickly, and mostly connected to small networks) and also advice to nonprofits on how to use Twitter effectively without making the gaffes typical of institutions (key points: listen before talking, show personality, be responsive).

Micro Fundraising on Twitter: Red Kettle Campaign, Wellwishes cracks $2,000 mark – Beth describes three successful new micro-fundraising campaigns on Twitter, showing that the trend is gaining steam.

Gaza Attacks: Two Related Reactions, in Second Life and Twitter - Israel’s current offensive against Hamas has provoked outrage among many around the world, and the reaction is being expressed online in many interesting ways. Two that stand out: an online protest held by activists in Second Life, exemplifying a new mode of organizing, and a Twitter-based “press conference” held by the Israeli consulate in New York to respond to questions from the public, exemplifying a new level of responsiveness from government.

TECHNOLOGY/TOOLS

New Listening Tool: Who Is Talking About You? - Listening is a big part of engaging with social media, but how do you keep track of what others are saying with so many platforms? WhosTalkin.com is a free new search tool that scans most of them: blogs, micro media, news, forums, social bookmarking sites, and social networking sites. Hat tip to Beth for this one and also the Radian6 commercial service she uses for similar purposes.

Glassdoor.com – Where greatnonprofits.org lets the public rate nonprofits from the outside, GlassDoor lets employees of any company rate it from the inside. Users enter their salary, position, and a few other pieces of information into the database in exchange for the ability to anonymously comment on the quality of the management and other aspects of their organization. The lesson: even “internal” decisions can now be public. Very few of the choices made by a company remain hidden from inquisitive eyes.

New Web site a network for nonprofits – The new website www.greatnonprofits.org now offers the same blessing and curse to nonprofits that Yelp offers to restaurants and retailers: a “yellow pages” directory that lets users rate the nonprofits where they volunteer, work, donate, or receive services. If this takes off, nonprofits will face the same challenge as all the other retail services who know that news about them will spread like wildfire among their potential customers, whether good or bad, without going through the usual channels of professional critics. As elsewhere, those that will fare best will be those who realize their clothes have been stolen and decide to become fit enough to look good in the nude.

Extraordinary mobile volunteering - A new service called The Extraordinaries takes crowdsourcing micro: they match nonprofits who need help with volunteers who are willing to give 20 minutes of their time, finding helpful work that those volunteers can complete from anywhere via their mobile phone. It might seem daunting to find a way to use that kind of work, but what if it meant you could have an army of 20-minute phone-based helpers?

Social Media Predictions for 2009 - Filtering through the glut of predictions about what 2009 will hold for the development of social media, Max Gladwell offers his top ten predictions and additional commentary. Here’s a summary of those with particular relevance to the social sector: brands developing a persona that represents the company’s core values, using Twitter for marketing, using social media’s cheapness to save advertising money, and producing valuable ideas as gifts to the public.

Pew Internet and American Life Project: Future of the Internet - There’s a new report out from Pew on the future of the Internet. A few key points, all of which back up the general argument for working wikily:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.