He was so friendly! And did he connect me with resources? I should say so! And now I will give you the hookup.

Here are some events you should check out, if you are in Austin this summer.

Item!
The 501 Tech Club!
Meets 3rd Mondays in Austin!
Date: Monday, June 21st, 2010
Time: 5:30pm – 7:00pm
Location: Austin Free-Net in the DeWitty Ctr
2209 Rosewood Ave Austin, TX 78702

Item!
Nonprofit Bar Camp on August 21st!
If you don’t know what a Bar Camp is, it’s a free camp where you just come and present on a topic and if people want to attend they’ll sign up. So you know I’m going to be there presenting on fundraising and nonprofit management and nonprofit communication!

Item!
Austin Social Media Club!
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
@Bazaarvoice US/Corporate Headquarters
3900 N. Capital of TX Hwy. Suite 300 Austin, TX 78746

Their latest twitter post: “Time to check in for June 15th Meeting on Location-based Social with @IncSlinger & @Gowalla RSVP @ http://smcaustinjune2010.eventbrite.com/”

Item!
Nonprofit Film Fest!
July 29th to August 2nd!

Also, he’s going to come and speak at the Nonprofit Job Club on what it’s like to be a Founder and ED of a nonprofit, so stay tuned for details!

Follow me on Twitter! Because you like getting relevant updates about fundraising, marketing, and making a difference!

I want to know what you want. Because your opinions are important to me.
Please tell me. Takes 5 mins. Tops.

What’s next on the horizon for nonprofits fundraising online?

There’s a lot going on focused around the individuals or “free agents” in your community that want to fundraise or create campaigns that benefit your organization, but aren’t created by or carried out by your staff. Various platforms and services offer ways that people can fundraise for organizations in all kinds of ways (among the new tools are JustGiving’s new facebook application).

Mobile donations are always getting far more use and publicity after their use by American Red Cross and others in disaster response efforts.

These are two very different directions: the first requires organizations to prepare for communities to lead; the second is a more traditional approach to fundraising, but using a different mechanism to capture donations. I would encourage all organizations to explore the best ways to provide for free agent fundraisers that may emerge from the community. Mobile fundraising though is not necessarily right for every organization or every campaign as it depends on the capacity, purpose and larger effort that it fits into.

What is one quick thing that a nonprofit development office could do in the last ten minutes of their day, just to get started?

Setting up a listening dashboard is a great way to start finding conversations and news as well as identifying who’s talking about your sector, issues, and programs. For a development team, this can mean finding potential funders and partners, as well as getting a finger on the pulse of what’s going on online. Netvibes is a free and easy tool to use and I’ve put up a step by step guide to building a listening dashboard too. (You can also check out my public RSS reader on nonprofit technology at http://netvibes.com/amysampleward.org – and let me know if there are blogs or feeds I should add!)

Once you have your dashboard set up, you can start your day and end your day with a quick 10 minute review of the latest content, comments, and stories.

What do you think of Corporate Social Responsibility and Web 2.0? How is it changing? Is it becoming more “authentic” (allowing real people to blog for companies and talk about their impact) or more “corporate” (anonymous postings)?

What I think you are asking is how CSR departments are using social media; I’d argue that a communication tool wouldn’t make the specific CSR efforts/funds more authentic or more corporate.

I think that, like everyone else, CSR department staff are using social media to tell the story of their work and impact—as they should. The struggle that I see is similar to that in nonprofit organizations: do you tell the story from the perspective of “hey, funders, look at our impact” or do you let those you have served and supported say “hey, world, this is my story.”

Whether it is a company’s CSR program or a nonprofit organization, using social media to join in the conversations that are already happening is crucial. People are talking about you, and you are talking about yourself – best to bring those into one conversation where both sides can learn, new programs/policies/services can emerge, and real exchange can happen. The “authenticity” of messages is much easier to achieve with social media because you have a profile (with a name and a picture) or a video with people talking, etc. You can be a person, and not a brand or a name or an organization – and that is where the real power lies.

Thank you Amy, for a very informative interview!

What questions do you have after reading this? What would you like to know more about?

Please leave a comment.

Thank you!

This is Part 1 of an interview with Amy Sample Ward. I <3 Amy for many reasons and also because she really helped me get into social media back in 2007, invited me to Net Tuesday meet-ups in Portland, shared a cup of tea with me, and she introduced me to my sweetheart, as well! She's an incredible human being who has had a tremendous impact on my life. All of this doesn't really come across in the interview, but I just wanted to say, Amy ROCKS!

Amy Sample Ward is dedicated to supporting and educating nonprofits and the progressive social change sector about evolving technologies that cultivate and engage communities. Her passion is in connecting nonprofits with new media technologies, watching the field of NPTech evolve, and having conversations about where we can go next while still getting everyone on board with what we have already. She has worked for nonprofits and foundations, and is now the Community Builder of NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoup.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been asking Amy Sample Ward some questions on what nonprofits can do with social media.

What’s Web 2.0, in a nutshell?

I think “web 2.0″ as a term has become ubiquitous, people using to define most anything they do online. In a way, that is true. I define “web 2.0″ as the Internet tools, platforms, widgets and functionality that rely on and enable community (whether it is peer-to-peer or community wide) interaction, sharing, and collaborating. There’s also the Wikipedia definition.

What is the real-time web, in a slightly larger nutshell?

To me, the Real-Time Web is as much about the functionality and tools that enable sharing, subscribing, and monitoring of content online as it happens, as it is about the way people are driving and responding to those tools. There’s always the Wikipedia definition, too.

How can nonprofits use Web 2.0 most effectively for fundraising, in your opinion? Who is doing it right? Who could do better?

This is a really big question. It’s like saying how can nonprofits use events most effectively for fundraising.

The hot debate right now is around fundraising competitions – like those sponsored by Chase, Case Foundation, Pepsi and others.

The best way to approach fundraising online is to start with your community and the goal of your work. You may find that using social media tools to fundraise is a great match for your community and your work; and you may not. But you can’t force it – so evaluating your community’s use of social media first and the tools or platforms that match your mission and approach are key.

For some case studies of organizations fundraising online, check out the reports from NTEN on the eNonprofit Benchmarking Reports.

Have the full fundraising potentials of this been tapped? If not, what are we getting wrong? What could we do better as a sector?

Tools are emerging and developing every day. So, there’s always potential as far as the infrastructure. But, with fundraising, so many of the same tactics, best practices, and methods apply online as they do offline. In that way, unless human nature changes, we are dealing with the same questions about what works and what doesn’t but using online tools or names instead of offline ones.

Most online fundraising success stories are those that involve the community, create ways for people to personalize their actions or involvement, and leverage storytelling in the ask and the overall campaign.

What questions do you have after reading this? What would you like to know more about?

Watch out for Part 2 tomorrow!

Thank you!

The Wing Asian Museum, Seattle

I am about to fly out the window with delight! Lend an ear to Alison Fine’s quick 15 minute interview with Nina K. Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, and Rob Stein, chief information officer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which covers innovations for how arts groups and museums can engage with visitors and donors online.

Example One: The Wing Museum, in Seattle, A COMMUNITY MUSEUM
The Wing Museum is a participatory community based museum, which means that community members create each exhibit, become board members, docents, and volunteers. There is a very strong community network around the museum, which the museum facilitates, and in turn the community nourishes the museum. I love this! This is how nonprofit should be. Woven into the fabric of the community, and led by the community, not just sucked dry for money.

I think Seattle has to be one of the top cities for museum innovation in America. When I was there in 2009, there was an African exhibit on the top floor of the Seattle Art Museum, and they had some ritual instruments from an African tribe. The tribe actually participated in the creation of the exhibit, explaining what the instruments did, and how to arrange them in the exhibit. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this happen, and I hope that this leads to greater curation collaboration between Indian tribes in North America and museums.

Example Two: TOTAL TRANSPARENCY from The Indianapolis Museum! Scary, and Good!

You are not going to believe this. The Indianapolis Museum Put a magnifying glass onto their website which shows how the museum operates! Behold.

Total transparency! Scary and Good!

They show how they achieve their goals, and they are extremely open with it. They not only show how many visitors, but their energy conservation efforts. They even show the total size of the endowment.
Further, it’s not a flat page, but a user can see the trends over time. And they even have a development page. Check it out!

Development Transparency

They’ve only had 56 new memberships so far this year. That’s not so hot. But they’re OPEN about it. That makes me trust them. The reason this makes me tapdance is because so many nonprofits don’t understand the need for transparency, or don’t think they have the resources to do it, when in reality, with the age of nonprofit scandals rising, transparency is going to distinguish the nonprofits who want to engage with their communities versus the ones that want to remain closed, hierarchical, and silent.

Top Tips: Experiments have to extend from online to onsite. They need to be equally friendly and open in person. And be willing to admit your mistakes.

If you want to learn more, Nina Simon’s Got a book
And you can read it free.

Conclusion: This interview makes me happy for several reasons.

1. It shows that Museums can stop lamenting the lack of visitors and the downfall of society and understand that they need to engage the community in new ways. And there’s a whole book you can read about it on how to do it. For free.

2. This method of engaging the community to create exhibits and to show exactly what’s going on, good or bad, makes me feel that we are entering a more “participatory democracy” kind of phase for museums, instead of a top down hierarchical phase that we’ve had in the past. And that’s a good thing.

Why not make it the center of the community, and let it be a useful gathering place, instead of just having the museum be shunted off to the side for special occasions? Doesn’t that sound more sustainable than having a birthday party at a Children’s museum, or an extra arts school tacked on as an afterthought? Engage children in creating exhibits! And engage community members in something they have authority with. Give people a reason to talk about your museum, to gather at your museum, to volunteer and donate there. This will make sustaining the museum itself so much easier.

And if you’re not in an arts organization, can you take these lessons and apply them to your own nonprofit? What transparency could you implement right now on your website? What measures could you take to get the word out about your next open house?

So this morning I got up early, plunked down on the couch with a cup of tea and started reading Social by Social, a giant orange book. It was written in wiki format, so there are lots of ways you can go through the book. Here are some highlights you can use for your organization.

If you’ve ever said, What the heck, social media is so full of jargon, I don’t even know what to do, well, they’ve thought of that! Here’s a link to their jargon page.

The How-Tos part was incredibly useful.

It includes:
How to become a digital activist
How to find out what’s already been done by others
How to create a blog strategy
How to find and join conversations that are already happening
How to turn a film into a campaign
10 Search Engine Optimization tips
How to subscribe to an RSS feed
How to use Delicious.com
How to choose tags for your organization
How to use blogging to improve your search engine position
How to make and publish quick videos for the web
10 Search Engine Marketing Tips
How to make the most out of Google Adsense
How to publish a book
How to design a homepage
How to set up a virtual office
and more!

This book/wiki/resource is incredibly useful and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in broadening and deepening their knowledge of social media, or raising more money for their organization, or learning how to create a strategy to engage donors online.

Favorite quotes so far:

“The message is not about the charity, but about why the messenger cares.” -Katya Anderson

“Don’t tell me, show me.”

“A public sector that does not create platforms for its citizens to create solutions for themselves, together, will soon start to seem old, outdated and tired. It will also be far less productive and effective in creating public goods. The future of public services rests on their becoming platforms for participation and collaborations, mobilizing citizens as player-developers in creating public goods.” -Charles Leadbeater, author, We-Think.

There were also a couple of good sites that I enjoyed, such as The Nag. As I’ve heard fundraisers being described as professional nags, this appealed to me. They just redesigned their website, but they HAD an adorable interface, you can still see a screenshot if you go to the link above. This new one is simple and okay… Their tagline is still my favorite: “Changing the world one lazy-assed mouse click at a time.”

The book is available, in its entirety, FOR FREE, online, at http://socialbysocial.com.

Last week I attended the RISE Austin conference. One session I attended was with Manuel Zarate, President and Founder of HBMGinc.com. Mr. Zarate is a serial entrepreneur who also has a foundation, and the title of his talk was Act Short, Think Long.

He started out by asking us what country we lived in. I said, the USA. So did nearly everyone there. He challenged us to understand that we were not living in the USA. We were living in a country whose borders were defined by technology. He encouraged us to think globally. So… um.. my country is the internet?

We are redefining our civilization. Borders are defined by technology. We are living in a symbiotic society. Social Media and Social Entrepreneurship are coming to the forefront of nonprofit technology. We live in an Age of Ubiquitous Communication, but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. To see a fascinating interactive graph on how internet use has increased over the past 12 years, go here.

He said, look, half of the jobs out there today didn’t exist 10 years ago. And in 10 years we’re going to need more people who need to know how to do different things. You need to train in complementary competencies, not core competencies. That means you need to look beyond the traditional value chain.

So here’s how you can apply this to development. Today you learn a program like Raiser’s Edge. So what? Can you learn Donorperfect? Can you learn Salesforce? Can you learn the next big database that we’ll all be using in the next 10 years? Can you help shape new technologies with your feedback today that will give us a better database, an even better way to run reports?

In my opinion, your complementary competencies are

1. To have a good tolerance for ambiguity. We just don’t know what the next big technology is going to be. But what if it’s gaming? Perhaps this industry that is driven by creativity and causing a cultural shift will provide a new revenue stream for your nonprofit. Maybe you can’t see it today, but consider it.

2. Learn new technologies quickly. Whether it’s mobile giving or using an RSS feed on your nonprofit website or blog, you need to be constantly creating more value for your nonprofit and your position.

3. To always be able and ready and willing to learn from anyone. This means looking at stories in the news, seeing how other nonprofits are successfully fundraising, and copying that. This means asking your volunteer, your intern, your SCORE mentor, or even fundraising blogs questions.

Are you defined by passion and effort or effort and risk?
What this means is passion is why you got into this field in the first place. Maybe you volunteered and wanted to have a bigger impact by becoming a fundraiser. Maybe you were on the program side and decided that your skills were more suited to fundraising. Maybe you’re a reluctant fundraiser, but just need to be reminded of your passion to know why you do this. Remember your passion. Remember the stories that you have are almost as important as asking. Your stories will keep both your team and your donors going.

When you are only thinking about effort and risk, you’re not passionate about your mission. Risk is necessary. Especially now, when the models are breaking down, and when the very structure of our system is breaking down. We need to collaborate, redefine, together, what will make nonprofits succeed in the 21st century.

Don’t forget to enjoy yourself in pursuit of a goal. Can you meet with a nonprofit mentor or fellow struggler in your cause this week for coffee? Renew yourself. Reinvent yourself. Get nimble.

Want more free advice on fundraising? Follow me on twitter @wildwomanfund

There is a lot of stigma around abortions. Angie is the mother of one special needs child, and even though she used protection, this pregnancy happened. On her blog, she talks about other people she met in the waiting room, what the chemical abortion feels like, and her thoughts on religion. Not one to shy away from controversial topics, Angie has taken a stand by livetweeting her abortion, to show that she is not ashamed of what she needs to do.

People livetweet their races for the cause, tweet their volunteer days, and tweet about their special events. Now Angie is tweeting about abortion.

What do you think of Angie’s version of cause marketing? Could this be an opportunity for Planned Parenthood to make her their spokesperson? Do you think that some things should remain private? Or do you think this is something that more people should do, to break the stigma and fear around abortions?

What do you think of this way to promote reproductive freedom?

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