I found out about this campaign a little late, but not too late to join in. eBay, PayPal and Miller Lite are all c0ntributing $.01 for every blog post, Facebook update, and tweet with the #beatcancer hash tag. You can find out more about it at the Beat Cancer Everywhere site.
I have also adopted the hash tag for the Blame Cancer campaign, which started as #blamdrewscancer. For my brother, David, who is currently fighting (and winning) cancer, when I have a bad day, I #blamedavidscancer.
More and more people are impacted by cancer. Either they get it or someone close to them does. And all of us could get it in some form or another.
For that reason I feel compelled to join the social media campaign to help raise money, and encourage others to do so as well.
Musings on being a “professional homosexual”
Since delving into the world of social networking, I have observed people separate their accounts into personal, professional, or political. I have been a little self conscious about my choice of keeping my accounts somewhat integrated. I worry that I’m posting things that my online community won’t be interested in, won’t agree with, or will find inappropriate. Personally, I like to see people in three dimensions, and I prefer to represent myself in that light too.
This weekend, as I was watching the coverage of the National Equality March in Washington DC, I was inspired by the speeches and tweeting my favorite quotes as I watched. For those who follow me because of our professional connection, I wonder if I am perceived as crossing a boundary that they might think is at best a little annoying, and at worst offensive.
My wife and I were were the second couple to be married in 2004 in the Winter of Love. For a while we were quite literally poster children for marriage equality. A very romantic photo of us by the Golden Gate Bridge was blown up and plastered on bus stop billboards across San Francisco that year. We often joked that year that we were “professional homosexuals,” representing the movement for marriage equality.
While we were caught up in an extraordinary historical moment five years ago, my wife and I are very ordinary people. We struggle to make ends meet and face life’s challenges like any other couple. We love each other and we are privileged to have what many other couples take for granted; a family who loves and embraces us, an employer who respects my relationship with my wife, and a life of relative safety and stability.
There are many same-sex couples who do not have such privilege, so I see it as a personal responsibility to be as out as I possibly can in order to help foster the social change to make the world a safe, nurturing, respectful place for everyone. I may push the boundaries of my professional relationships a bit by putting my whole self out there, but that is the purpose of Coming Out Day.
Moments like this are opportunities for those of us working for equality and civil rights to challenge people in every facet of our lives to recognize the very real ways that we are impacted by discrimination. While I respect some people’s need to draw boundaries between the personal and the professional, I hope that others respect my choice to integrate all of my selves and be entirely me.
I’m thrilled, I tell you, thrilled! My favorite social bookmarking site is back! After a catastrophic data corruption last year, like a phoenix rising from the flames, Ma.gnolia has relaunched to much fan fare. At least by me.
Okay, perhaps that is a little melodramatic, however, I don’t feel that I can understate just how cool this site is. Ma.gnolia was the equivalent of my gateway drug, if you will, into the world of social networking. I made my earliest connections with, at the time, complete strangers, people who I have kept up with on Twitter and Facebook in places like Florida, Texas, New York, Vancouver and Australia. It all started for me on Ma.gnolia.
Oversharer that I am, life just hasn’t been the same since Ma.gnolia died. I missed the efficient information sharing, the groups where people with shared interests could jointly create a useful reference point. I have already uploaded all of my old bookmarks that I have been tracking in Delicious, connected with a few of my old followers there, and joined some groups that are underway there. I was pleased to see that someone already had created a group for Chicago links.
Interesting thing now is that there is an opportunity to keep the spammers out more efficiently. In order to join, you must jump through a few more hoops to prove that you’re human. Hopefully, this will keep the quality and caliber of the users high. It bodes well.
Ma.gnolia is useful, facilitates new relationships, and is pleasing to the eye. I have high hopes that the vibrant community will rebuild again.
Well done, Larry!
I just completed my fourth week on the job as the director of philanthropy operations at Feeding America. This is a new job for the organization, so, while they have clearly defined the parameters of my role there, I have a wonderful operation to build something new.
As an information professional in fundraising, I have always been clear about how my work supports the front line for greater success. I find and track information about relationships between the organization and it’s donors. This information and knowledge management provides a history and context for current relationship cultivation. I always thought that my the focus of my job was content and technology to manage it.
My perspective on knowledge management in the context of nonprofit organizations has been evolving, and I have come to understand that it is not about information and technology, but how people interact with technology, and how they use technology to interact with each other.
Whether it is relationships between individuals within the organization, between donors and executives, or between people and technology, my job is to help people use tools and procedures to have better overall organizational success. What I do helps information flow through the proper channels and get to the right people and get recorded in the right way for posterity’s sake.
I often refer to my job being helping the left hand to know what the right is doing, and that is still pretty apt. But when I thought about it in terms of relationships and institutional success, it contextualized knowledge management in a whole new way for me.
#mmc2009
I had a fantastic day volunteering at the Making Media Connections conference. Chicago is the epicenter of civically engaged journalists, techies, and media activists. The world of journalism is experiencing tectonic shifts, being impacted by the recession and trends in technology and social media, and the presentations at the conference was all about how this professional community is responding to those shifts. It is truly at a crisis moment. I have heard that the Japanese word for crisis also means opportunity, which in this case is a very apt translation.
One of the exciting things that came out of this conference was the intersection of different professional worlds coming together that had never had the occasion to do so before. Particularly, I am excited about the non-profit and media community coming together. It makes sense that in this time of crisis and opportunity the worlds of philanthropy, advocacy, and media would connect. Out of this intersection, a creative response is growing in terms of the creation of new tools and innovative ways to use them to create social change.
There is no doubt that social media tools have the potential of being co-opted by corporate conglomerates, and to a certain degree we can only expect that to happen. The panel on media policy that I attended emphasized that we still need to focus on accessibility issues for existing and established technologies (public TV, radio, and print media), and make sure that the public maintains the ability to produce their own content and keep access to a variety of information resources.
However, there was so much optimism about the potential to use social media tools to do good and not evil, it is easy to believe that out of this convergence of activists, community organizers, policy wonks, non-profit leaders, journalists, bloggers, and many others that something really exciting and good is being born. People were able to share their challenges and successes, building collaborative solutions to complex problems.
Community activists of all persuasions need to be vigilant in participating in the process of developing media policy. The issues of net neutrality, low power FM radio, and public access TV should be in sharp focus for all of us.
These are indeed exciting times. Darkness certainly looms as people are being laid off and companies are going into bankruptcy. But hope and inspiration abound as people build their own companies, become consultants, or create innovative jobs in response to the shifting economy. I was thrilled to meet so many optimistic activists and learn about the incredible work they are all doing.
(#net2chi #mmc2009)
Last night NetSquared Chicago had a special Net Tuesday event to kick off the Making Media Connections conference hosted by Community Media Workshop. This should be a great event that addresses the incredible and fast-moving changes in the world of journalism. While this event has obvious appeal to people in the field of journalism and media communications, every citizen who is interested in journalism’s role deomcratic process will be interested in the contet of this event.
At the Net Tuesday kick-off, we had a preview of a new report that Community Media Workshop is unveiling: The New News: journalism we want and need. This thorough report compiles the results of a survey of news organizations in the Chicago area that are using social media and new technology tools to reach their audience. I believe this report is the first of it’s kind, and no doubt the list will continue to grow.
Tomorrow I will be liveblogging two panels at the conference. You can follow along here. Also follow the hash tag #mmc2009 on Twitter.
The Human Component in Fundraising Information Systems
My spouse and I went to see “Terminator: Salvation” last weekend, and it got me thinking about the merging of people and technology in fundraising knowledge management systems. When we create systems to manage the daily onslaught of information that we all face, our tendency is to focus solely on the technology and resist acknowledging that people are an integral part of the system. Information management systems are like cyborgs in that the human component is necessary for the technology to work efficiently.
Too often we think of technology as being totally evil, like when in the first Terminator, when the cyborg goes back in time to kill Sarah Connor, or totally good, like in Terminator 2: Judgment Day when the good Arnold Schwarzenegger comes back to protect her. Either way, we give technology too much power; it will either entangle data in an irretrievable mess, or it will be the magic bullet that will meet all of our information needs and be our salvation. While some tools are better than others, they are not going to solve our problems for us.
In order to save the world, we need the Terminator, but we also need Sarah Connor. It is the same with information technology tools; we need the hardware to house the data, but it is the human component that turns that data into knowledge.
Since people don’t yet have the ability to install a USB plug into our brains and do a data dump into the network, people need give shape to their organization’s knowledge management system. Whatever the role, fundraising professionals are responsible to and dependent on each other. Front line fundraisers enter their contact reports, prospect researchers enter ratings and biographical information, gift processors make sure that gift data is entered accurately, and events managers enter the latest activity. Over time, these data points become an organization’s institutional memory.
Like the cyborg, knowledge management systems are more than just hardware; the also have a human component. While than the database, hard files, and email are significant, how people communicate and facilitate relationships is equally, if not more important. It is easy to forget that the knowledge in peoples’ heads or that is shared in a conversation are also information assets. Policies and guidelines formalize relationships and how information exchanged and captured. The regular prospect meetings and formal liaison assignments within organizations are critical aspects of managing your information assets.
The knowledge management system as like a cyborg: the technical and the human are integral parts of the whole, and they don’t work well without each other. Your individual and collective success depends on it. Resistance is futile.
How Social Media Activists are Changing the World
I have seen and heard a lot of nay-saying lately in the media about social networking tools, to which I feel compelled to respond. Within the last week I’ve encountered at least three different critiques about tools the likes of Twitter and Facebook, accusing thier users of ”slacktivism,” like this opinion piece by John Ridley, who says that People who use Twitter are hypocrites, or the piece in Foreign Policy which claims that the tools foster “feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact.”
To this I say “pshaw!” I can say first hand that these tools have real impact, especially when it comes to community organizing and raising awareness of issues. I work in the nonprofit world, where social benefit organizations are exploring the exploding number of communication tools available to see how they can be used to motivate people into action, whether it is getting out news, inviting people to an event, informing people of volunteer service opportunities, or encouraging folks to make charitable contributions. Getting people engaged with these tools is the whole reason they are so successful.
Last winter, I went to a rally at the Center on Halsted when Fred Phelps and his clan were in town ready to hurl their anti-gay hatred at this wonderful Chicago institution. One of the primary ways the organizers were able to get the word out was through Facebook and Twitter. Over 200 people showed up, and we successfully delivered the message to Phleps & Co that hate is not welcome here.
Right now, marriage equality activists are organizing and communicating with each other about local actions when the Supreme Court decision in California that is announced on Tuesday, May 26th. Through online tools, we are getting the word out and as a result people are going to hit the streets all over the country on Tuesday night.
Next week in San Jose, CA, people from all over the world are gathering for the NetSquared conference, which is all about the use of social technologies for progressive social change. People representing all types of nonprofit organizations that are working for environmental justice, human rights, and world peace are coming together to learn from each other and collaborate. The projects they work on include Handheld Human Rights, which uses technology tools to document human rights abuses in Burma, and PublicStuff.org, a mobile application that enables citizens to make meaningful connections with their local government leaders and hold them accountable to meet needs in their communities.
There’s also the example of the Sunlight Foundation which promotes the creation and use of online tools to improve access to government information. The Sunlight Foundation promotes tools like Filibusted, which allows users to keep track of which senators have used the filibuster to stall debate, and Know Thy Congressman, a widget that convenietly provides very useful information about any congressperson, including their voting record.
Social media is more than just Twitter and Facebook, and though those are wonderful community organizing tools, too, there are so many more under development. Activists all over the world have used and created these tools to raise visibility for their issues. These are not perfect mediums, and they are only as good as the people who use them.
Finally, as I was writing this post, I learned via Twitter that the prolific nonprofit blogger Beth Kanter wrote a post for Mashable about how social media is changing the nonprofit landscape. Her examples further illustrate the point I am making.
Nay-sayers be darned! Social media tools are helping activists change the world.
Forbes recently published an article positing the question of whether or not the age of “conspicuous philanthropy” was coming to an end. Citing a trend in anonymous giving, author Judith Dobrzynski asks whether having a donor’s name in lights with a big naming gift may be a thing of the past.
Some people are motivated to give by the promise of having their name up in lights, naming a building or a scholarship in their honor, that would remain for generations. From the institution’s point of view, naming opportunities is good stewardship. It gives the donor the chance to see concretely how their dollars make a difference in the community, as well as honoring the donor’s generosity.
In my view, philanthropy is a responsibility, like the concept of tithing, and people should give as much as they are able to the causes they believe in. Even so, in our culture philanthropy is a choice, and those of in the business offundraising know that the gift has to give something to the donor. If making the gift doesn’t generate positive feelings, then there’s no motivation for the donor.
Philanthropy is always motivated by emotions and what is going to make us feel better about ourselves. Whether it is shame, love, jealousy, or good old-fashioned egotism, I think that deep down people understand that public philanthropy (call it conspicuous if you like) is simply modeling good behavior.
One of my former employers, a large, presigious university, organized a series of fundraising dinners at the homes of volunteers. These were initimate gatherings of classmates, no more than ten couples, where the host would give a presentation about the campaign. At the end of the talk, they disclose to their friends the gift they were pleding, and what influenced their decision.
At that point, the friends around the table felt compelled to also pledge, wheter it was out of competition, love for the school, or responsibility. The actions of the donors and volunteers were able to personally tap into the emotions that influenced further philanthropy from their social circle. This model had tremendous success during that campaign, cultivating new donors and volunteers for the institution.
While the age of the mega-gifts may be coming to an end, or at least a significant slow-down, I hope that anonymous giving is not a trend that will take hold. Especially in these exceptional times, philanthropists should lead by example and continue to give generously and conspicuously.
At the very moment I am writing these words, the 2009 NTEN conference is getting underway in San Francisco. While I am very jealous of all of my friends who are there, I will be attending virtually from Chicago.
NTEN is a wonderful resource for nonprofit professionals, and the conference (though I have never been) is a great networking and learning opportunity. Luckily for those of us who can’t be there, we can network from here, connecting to people via Twitter and others who are liveblogging.
There are a number of ways to follow the conference sessions, which can be found here. Even if you can’t tune in live for the podcasts and vidcasts, some of the sessions will be available after the conference.
I heard recently that when you are seeking professional development opportunities that you should connect with people who are not like you, who have different strengths, perspectives and skill sets. This seems like good advice whether it’s personal or professional growth that you seek. I’m grateful to NTEN for helping to make this possible through technology tools. It’s an incredible resource and opportunity for cross pollination of ideas.
